Déterritorialisation
Deterritorialization is the movement by which an assemblage leaves its territory—leaves what stabilized it, defined it, gave it its "home." This movement is inseparable from its correlate: reterritorialization, which covers the line of flight over new ground, real or imaginary. Deterritorialization is thus not a simple loss: it is the very engine of change, sometimes blocked and turned back into reterritorialization, sometimes pushed to the absolute.
D est le mouvement par lequel « on » quitte le territoire. C'est l'opération de la ligne de fuite.
Every territory carries within it the possibility of its own destabilization. What defines a space—a refrain, a code, a habit, an institution—can also open up, crack, let through something that no longer belongs to the territory. Deleuze and Guattari call this movement deterritorialization.
The term first appears in Anti-Oedipus (1972) to describe capitalism as a machine that decodes and deterritorializes all preexisting flows. In A Thousand Plateaus, it becomes a general concept: every assemblage has a double aspect—its territoriality on one side, its lines of flight on the other. Deterritorialization is the operation of these lines.
It can be negative: the line of flight is immediately recaptured by a compensatory reterritorialization. The state, for example, deterritorializes former seigneurial lands, only to reterritorialize them on property, labor, money. You leave one territory, you find another. The escape remains blocked. It can also be positive or absolute: the line of flight is not recaptured—it cuts across strata and reaches the plane of consistency, the body without organs, unformed matter.
Reterritorialization is not a simple return to the original territory. Anything can function as new ground: an object, a being, a book, a device. This is how the psychoanalyst reterritorializes the patient on the couch, how the state reterritorializes the nomad on the map.
≠ Uprooting. Uprooting refers to the loss of a concrete belonging—a soil, a community, a language. Deterritorialization is a movement that operates at all levels, including the molecular: it is not necessarily a violence endured, but sometimes the very condition of becoming, of creation. You do not deterritorialize to go nowhere; you deterritorialize to reterritorialize differently—or, in the limit case, to reach what the authors call the earth, not as territory but as the planet’s body without organs.