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Amechanon, Vol. I / 2016-2018, ISSN: 2459-2846

some points on what Deleuze says about travel to make the right links: the pleasure issue
and the nomadic character of traveling.

Getting to Rhodes was a very large displacement taking in account that to cross an ocean
was, some time ago, the larger displacement one could make. Crossing the Atlantic some

centuries ago was not some kind of tourism, since what was waiting on the other side was
always the unknown. A jump towards the uncertain, a leap for the unpredictable, this

definition of a trip certainly seems more to be the kind of travel Deleuze would like;
nowadays we kind of know what is waiting for us on the other side – an airport, the

customs, waiting for your luggage, taking some pictures of some places. So we have to
look better to find the place of difference in travel. For a start, we do not commonly cross

the ocean by boat anymore.

The flight is a very special displacement, because for us humans it is unnatural, therefore
is always vertiginous. At this point we have to make an effort to make a relation: does

everything that is non-natural causes vertigo? Doesn’t seem to be like that. It’s more like

vertigo is caused, created or generated by difference. It is the feeling of something out of
its place, something that does not obey to our pre-established order of the world
manifesting in front of us, that forces us to think, like Foucault and Deleuze state.

«What violence must be exerted on thought for us to become capable of thinking; what
violence of an infinite movement that, at the same time, takes from us our power to say

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«I?» . In other words, what does thinking needs to think? Something that forces it, an
unpredictable encounter, some violent stroke that provoke strangeness. Which means

that in order to think philosophically, one must be on a vertigo, and for that, it is necessary
to be surprised, to be amazed, to meet with something unexpected, or in other terms, to

defy or deny or destroy some structure. And this encounter happens in the body. The
traveler's body is, therefore, a body in vertigo.

Maybe, and only maybe, this thing, event or strange object, although probably

uncomfortable, could be an object of pleasure. Actually, vertigo does not seem to have a

direct relation with pleasure or pain, but we have a tendency to – against all chances –
make the time of pleasure an immobile, stuck, stopped moment. We oppose pleasure to

155 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F., What is philosophy?, trans. by Tomlinson, H., Burchell, G., New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 55.

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