While the first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1972), was a critique of contemporary uses of psychoanalysis and Marxism, A Thousand Plateaus was developed as an experimental work of philosophy covering a far wider range of topics, serving as a "positive exercise" in what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as rhizomatic thought.

[1] Like the first volume of Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus (1972), A Thousand Plateaus is politically and terminologically provocative and is intended as a work of schizoanalysis,[2] but focuses more on what could be considered systematic, environmental and spatial philosophy, often dealing with the natural world, popular culture, measurements and mathematics.

A Thousand Plateaus has been described as dealing with their ideas of the rhizome, as well as the body without organs, the plane of immanence, abstract machines, becoming, lines of flight, assemblages, smooth and striated space, state apparatuses, faciality, performativity in language, binary branching structures in language, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, arborescence, pragmatics, strata, stratification and destratification, the war machine, the signified, signifier and sign, and coding/recoding.

[3] In the plateaus (chapters) of the book, they discuss psychoanalysts (Freud, Jung, Lacan—who trained Guattari,[4]: x  and Melanie Klein), composers (Chopin, Debussy, Mozart, Pierre Boulez, and Olivier Messiaen), artists (Klee, Kandinsky, and Pollock), philosophers (Husserl, Foucault, Bergson, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Gilbert Simondon), historians (Ibn Khaldun, Georges Dumézil, and Fernand Braudel), and linguists (Chomsky, Labov, Benveniste, Guillaume, Austin, Hjelmslev, and Voloshinov).

"[4]: 587 Like Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari evaluate and criticize psychoanalysis: in the first two chapters, they discuss the work of Sigmund Freud, especially referring to the case histories of the Wolf Man and Little Hans.

[5]: 192–207  The works of Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Carlos Castaneda, H. P. Lovecraft, Herman Melville and Chrétien de Troyes are also discussed, often in conjunction with the rhizome, becoming, faciality, and the regimes of signs.

"[11] The sociologist Nikolas Rose writes that Deleuze and Guattari articulate "the most radical alternative to the conventional image of subjectivity as coherent, enduring, and individualized".

"[14] Similarly, in a 2015 interview, British philosopher Roger Scruton characterized A Thousand Plateaus as "[a] huge, totally unreadable tome by somebody who can't write French.

"[15][16] At the beginning of a short essay on postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard lists examples of what he describes as a desire "to put an end to experimentation", including a displeased reaction to A Thousand Plateaus that he had read in a weekly literary magazine, which said that readers of philosophy "expect [...] to be "gratified with a little sense".