The Tree of Non-Being: Where Abdelkader and Ibn Arabi Respond to Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux

How should we respond to those who suspect the tree of being the image of an ascent to the heavens and the figure of the monarchical powers of a diseased transcendence?1 What kind of resentment underwrites the suspicion of trees while the extractive powers of empire and capital destroy, day after day, hectares of land and vegetation across the globe? The reader may have understood that I am addressing these questions to a now-classic text: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Mille Plateaux.2 This book contains a famous critique of the figure of the tree which is a crucial moment in contemporary philosophy. Polemicizing against what they consider as the remnants of God in metaphysics, Deleuze and Guattari urge us to think of the tree as a typical figure of the One’s undue preeminence over the Multiple (9-14). They famously contrast the tree with the rhizome. The reason for the philosophers’ mistrust of trees lies in a properly metaphysical decision that allows the vegetal to be split into the two antithetical figures of the tree and the rhizome. If the tree represents the vertical preeminence of the One over the Multiple, the rhizome is the name of everything that opposes Oneness: horizontality, multiplicities, the absence of hierarchy; in a word, everything that foments the death of all possible figures of the One. The tree is the One, the rhizome is the many.