First Plateau: Uprooting Schleiermacher's Crabgrass

This First Plateau deploys the crabgrass version of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome in order to explore a new reading of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “bad” “analogies” in his 1813 Academy address “On the Different Methods of Translating.” It is easy to show that his address is riddled with serious logical problems—but they only present as problems in the binary logic that Deleuze and Guattari call the “root-tree.” Understood rhizomatically, with eight or ten crabgrass nodes sending out shoots in all directions, some of them intersecting with others, others being uprooted and replaced with new, the famous Academy address loses some of its notorious binary rigidity.