1 Chapter 15 Afterword: Defeated Taxonomies Jamie Brassett and Richard Reynolds Overture to a Defeated Taxonomy ‘On the Dominant Divide’, the closing part of Grand Pianola Music by John Adams (1981), is an eight-minute orchestral composition that relentlessly builds towards a series of climaxes 1 that do not deliver the expected closure, the ‘answers’ to the musical ‘questions’ that experience leads us to expect. Tonal music ends, usually, by moving from the tonic to the fifth and back to the tonic root of a particular key: a rise to fall to resolution. Adams’s composition rises to build again and again and . . . The effect is at first exhilarating, then disconcerting. The resolution to these crescendos is resisted by the penultimate step leading to another build up, another ladder to climb, another relentless climax. Our breath is held to the point of bursting. Excess is the currency of this piece. Closures are not. We will return to the post-credit ending-signalling-another-beginning and here highlight how this climbing not to reach an end but to find a place from which to start another journey, reminds us so much of the way that Gilles Deleuze – on his own and with psychoanalyst-activist Félix Guattari – articulates philosophy. ‘One never commences’, Deleuze writes (1988, p. 123), ‘one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms’. While these words are his explanation of the way that seventeenth-century philosopher Brassett, J. and Reynolds, R. (2022) 'Afterword: Defeated Taxonomies', in J. Brassett and R. Reynolds (eds.), Superheroes and Excess. A Philosophical Adventure. Routledge, pp. 248–274. pre-print do not quote