Deleuze and Guattari are often quoted as condemning « debate » or « discussion » as incompatible with the creation of concepts.
This assertion by Deleuze and Guattari, and in other places by Deleuze in his own name, is a self-contradiction, they are debating debate, just as they critique critique.
I think it corresponds to a personal defect in Deleuze, who does not seem to have liked the confrontation with alternative viewpoints.
Of course, we all have memories of bad experiences of horrible debates that were sterile exercises in power relations between egos.However, debate is an intrinsic part of the art of creating and articulating concepts.
Deleuze reserves a way out of this impasse by definitional fiat. The « good » debates he calls « conversations » or « dialogues », and he sets out a description of how they operate.
In fact this description is also a prescription for the « good » way to discuss. As such, as a prescriptive method, it cannot be universally valid, but corresponds to only one type of experience of creativity, and perhaps does not adequately describe even it.
It also corresponds to a particular personality type, and even to a national stereotype, since Deleuze and Guattari ironise over Rorty’s and Habermas’s notion of an extended democratic conversation.
My own experience of blogging for ten years is that the world of Continental Philosophy in both English and French is unable to tolerate debate, discussion, critique, even when it is informed by a reading of the texts, by a deep consideration of the problematics, and is independent of personal career stakes.
Whatever it was meant to incite or to solve in Deleuze and Guattari’s use of it, this slogan has become the reverse. It has become an excuse for narcissistic self-obsession, mutual self-congratulatory dogmatism, and a barrier of exclusion of all those who do not think like the in-group who push their research programme, treating their ideas as sacred and inviolable.
From a Deleuzian point of view we cannot know in advance what is or is not, what will have been or not, part of the creative process. No one knows in advance how the creative process will proceed in order to stay creative.
Yes, debate can often sterilise creation, but it can also help it get out of its one-sidedness, blindness, or other impasses.
To eschew debate on principle is to shoot a hole in one of one’s creative feet, and to limp along proudly giving smug advice to others on how to become just as lame as oneself.
AGENT SWARM 
Terence, I like to read your blog. See here a different view on ‘discussions’.
“I think it corresponds to a personal defect in Deleuze, who does not seem to have liked the confrontation with alternative viewpoints.”
Yes, I think this is part of his Asperger’s. (Just like Spinoza, that’s why Deleuze likes the Dutch-Portugese.)
But, it is not an excuse for narcissistic self-obsession, more a knowledge that when we are not in the same affects that agree with us (Spinoza) – in other words, we are not talking in the same field of Sense (Deleuze) – discussion is boring. Thinking WITH and not AGAINST each other is the job.
To eschew debate on this principle is to open a whole world, one one’s creative feet!
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I think that Deleuze here is projecting, objectifying, and rationalising his own personal equation. However, I do not include Deleuze himself in the category of « narcissistic self-obsession ». Deleuze is very clear on how an innovative syntax (in this case his own) can be taken up and transformed into stereotypical repetition. Nonetheless, Deleuze was very selective, and I think overly so. Badiou describes this characteristic of Deleuze (and I am talking about his noetic character here) as a one-sided commitment to convergent dialogue, and the refusal (or perhaps incapacity) of divergent dialogue. I finally disagree with your idea that thinking with has primacy over thinking against. Deleuze very often thinks against, but denies it. Further, I think he has done his followers a disservice in his thinking against Hegel. No one who is at all interested in Hegel should read Deleuze’s explicit discussions of Hegel, which are a travesty. My argument is that the field of sense is constituted and opened by negation and incommensurability, and to deny this is to close down that field unduly. Deleuze in fact is in favour of debate, but only on his creative terms, and he rebaptises this « good » debate « conversation ». His criteria of demarcation between good and bad debate are not binding, and even less adequate today than they were inhis time.
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Ironically a disagreement has to be expressed regarding this. The irony is only apparent, has it will not be conductive to « debate », but rather I think that Deleuze did indeed try to liberate thought from debate and that there was a critical charge to his point that goes beyond a psychological reduction to character (even « noological character » – disregarding the perhaps crass attempt at a diagnostic…). In essence, and to put it in platonic terms, debate perhaps has to do with opinion – and « good debate » with ideas. Of course as any philosopher Deleuze presented himself as someone that had ideas and not opinions. I’m sure he did have those, but he didn’t care to express them and indeed, it seems like it was part of his practice not to. I would say that there is no assertion of individuation (or differences, « ideas ») through debate or the expression opinion in so far as it is too dependent on « common sense » (or good sense). In Adorno you’ll find a similar idea, agaisnt Habermas : that communication has no emancipatory potential, that essentially it presents a false kind of pluralism. I think you’re really ignoring a lot of Deleuze’s point about not discussing if problems are not well-defined to reach their full potential, so to avoid pointless discussion that cannot reach that depth of intensity. The more political difficulty to all this, I think, is whether or not problems can reach their full potential outside the academic sphere. Although, as you say, people in academia don’t necessarily know how to commonly define problems.
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I agree that more needs to be said on this point, and that one should not be satisfied with uncharitable readings or with psychological reductions. I have tried to elaborate on the problems posed by Deleuze having created no real concept of negation or critical discussion, See https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2022/05/24/rhizome-3-the-missing-paragraph-part-2-against-discussion/ and https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2022/05/24/rhizome-the-missing-paragraph-text-and-translation-ii/
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