Abstract
The importance of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari's development of ‘encounter’ is brought into sharp relief as key to the notion of ‘athleticism’. Here, each is developed as indispensable to the other, forming an a-radical/ana-material groundless ground to power, politics, literary sensibility, indeed sense itself. This nuanced encounter produces an acephaletic knowledge, a body-knowledge, without the Ego-I. In an age of massifying systems, drone warfare and horrific migrations, where corporate tentacles bend the rules akimbo, one finds that this turn to a Deleuzian athleticism offers a different kind of political analysis, a radical difference, which, despite the odds, enables a politics of hope and indeed, of a ‘becoming-human’.