Around the Kantian island the vessel drifts, uncertain amidst the swirling flows that carry it along in all directions upon the smooth surface of the water. It is drawn to a new land that a restless fog extracts from its sombre abode. Here, the sun dives into its crystalline limit and disperses its rays of copper hues, in a way that resembles the flashes of a ceramic vessel bent in a big fire. All colour stands out, as Gauguin would say, in a blaze radiating before the dazed eyes of the mariner. At the horizon, Zarathustra rises and, in his pot, brings to a boil all that is aleatory, while he fires up the massive oven that will reunite all the fragments of chance in a broken diagrammatic mixture, with traces of red and purple, to which the violence of the sky becomes juxtaposed. Only such a cooking of chance can make thought shudder.

This torrid voyage in the limitrophe borders of insular representation is carried out under the name of Anti-Oedipus, as a joyous and light experiment of sorts, infused with humour and power. Anti-Oedipus is the site of a prodigious synthesis that Michel Foucault correctly regards as a test where ars erotica, ars theoretica and ars politica entertain relations of vicinity as befits multiplicities: ‘I would say that Anti-Oedipus … is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time…’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: xiii).