Deterritorialization (French: déterritorialisation) is a concept created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972). The term "deterritorialization" first occurs in French psychoanalytic theory to refer, broadly, to the fluid, dissipated and schizophrenic nature of human subjectivity in contemporary capitalist cultures (Deleuze & Guatarri 1972). Its most common use, however, has been in relation to the process of cultural globalization. Though there are different inflections involved, the general implication that globalization needs to be understood in cultural-spatial terms as much as in institutional or political-economic ones is common to all accounts. In this broad sense, deterritorialization has affinities with the idea of the “disembedding” of social relations in, for example, Anthony Giddens's (1990) analysis of the globalizing properties of modernity.
A Thousand Plateaus (1980) distinguishes between and an deterritorialization. Relative deterritorialization is always accompanied by reterritorialization, while positive absolute deterritorialization is more alike to the construction of a "plane of immanence", akin to Spinoza's ontological constitution of the world. There is also a negative sort of absolute deterritorialization, for example in the subjectivation process (the face).
The function of deterritorialization is defined as "the movement by which one leaves a territory", also known as a "line of flight". Still, deterritorialization “constitutes and extends” the territory itself.