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, both are developed as indispensable to each other, forming an a-radical/ana-material groundless ground to power, politics, literary sensibility, indeed sense itself – though all played in a minor key. It is a nuanced encounter which, at one and the same time, if working as encounter, produces an acephaletic knowledge, a body-knowledge, without the Ego-I. This, in itself would have been enough. But 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 Deleuzean athleticism offers a different kind of political analysis, a radical difference, which, despite (or because of) the odds, enables a politics of hope and indeed, of a ‘becoming-human’.