Déterritorialisation absolue
In Deleuze and Guattari, absolute deterritorialization is not a higher degree of relative deterritorialization: it is another regime of movement. The relative leaves one territory only to regain another—it remains caught in strata and their compensations. The absolute is qualitatively distinct, not quantitatively: independent of any speed, it connects lines of flight to one another and traces the *plane of consistency*. It is even primary: the relative is merely its stratification.
Voilà donc ce que veut dire « absolu » : l’absolu n’exprime rien de transcendant ni d’indifférencié ; il n’exprime même pas une quantité qui dépasserait toute quantité donnée (relative). Il exprime seulement un type de mouvement qui se distingue qualitativement du mouvement relatif.
Relative deterritorialization is the ordinary movement of assemblages: you leave one territory, but the line of flight is immediately overlaid by a reterritorialization that compensates for it—new land, new code, new home. This movement still belongs to the strata; it moves from segment to segment, from assemblage to assemblage, and remains measurable, comparable, negotiable.
The absolute is not a matter of faster or vaster movement. In the plateau on the geology of morals, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly reject the image of the giant accelerator: a deterritorialization is absolute or not regardless of its speed, and one can reach the absolute through slowness and delays. What defines it is its nature: instead of proceeding by articulated segments, it leaps from singularity to singularity along an indivisible line, connects lines of flight to one another, and traces the plane of consistency—the body without organs, “the Earth, the absolutely-deterritorialized.” Hence a reversal: the absolute comes first, and the relative is merely its stratification; strata are residues, not the other way around.
A different regime does not mean a safe one. Absolute deterritorialization can remain negative: it can spiral into a black hole, into pure abolition, unraveling strata without composing anything. It is only positive when it effectively constructs, piece by piece, a plane where heterogeneities hold together. The caution the authors demand elsewhere applies here most of all: if destratification happens too quickly, the plane of consistency flips into a plane of abolition.
Absolute deterritorialization ≠ transcendence: the absolute, they say, expresses nothing transcendent or undifferentiated—it remains immanent to the relative it works from within. And ≠ flight from the world: lines of flight “never consist in fleeing the world, but rather in making it flee, like bursting a pipe.” The phrase they adopt—“I may be fleeing, but all along my flight, I’m searching for a weapon”—says it exactly: the absolute is not some elsewhere; it is a way of shifting the entire world onto the line.