ABSTRACTS
ISSUE 68: AUTUMN 2009

DELEUZIAN POLITICS?

Editorial Jeremy Gilbert
DOWNLOAD PDF

Deleuzian Politics? A Survey and Some Suggestions

Jeremy Gilbert

This article surveys and evaluates the broad field of Deleuzian political theory with particular reference to its novel implications for anglophone cultural theory. It opens by discussing Mengue's and Hallward's recent critical studies of Deleuze and the wider problem of evaluating the normative and descriptive function of key Deleuzian concepts. It goes on to consider the specificity of Deleuzian approaches to the key notion of 'essentialism' with reference to a comparison between the ideas of Manuel Delanda and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, before moving into a consideration of recent appropriations of Deleuzian philosophy for the theorisation of gender and race. From there it goes on to consider various Marxist and post-Marxist uses of Deleuzian thought for the theorisation of capital, labour and the state in the work of writers such as Thoburn, Read and Lazaratto, following this with a consideration of recent debates over the status of democracy in Deleuze's political thought, arguing against any liberal interpretations thereof that would minimise the anti-individualism of this ideas or collapse its advocacy of 'rhizomatic' relations into an argument for the universal desirability of market logics. It moves on from here to argue for the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari's thought to green politics, and to the importance of understanding 'affect' as an irreducibly social, multi-directional and polyvalent phenomenon in recent cultural theory.
KEYWORDS: Deleuze; Guattari; anti-essentialism; democracy; Laclau; Delanda; Mengue; liberalism; rhizome; market; feminism
DOWNLOAD PDF

Politics as the Orientation of Every Assemblage

Veronique Bergen

This essay is concerned with the question of where politics, as Deleuze understands it, resides. Vitalism dictates an understanding of politics as, in fact, the correlate of every assemblage (of thought or desire, individual or collective), and affiliates it to the ethical question of an affirmation of the powers of life. Every assemblage is ipso facto political in that it manifests a particular orientation to life, enriching it or mutilating it: it being understood that the consistency to be given to it is perpetually under construction, without any a priori guarantees. The article shows the ways in which the task of politics is cartographic, pragmatic -charting the composition of lines, and their consequences -and not hermeneutic. In the first section, we unpack the conceptual operators which Deleuze and Guattari make use of to develop their understanding of the political (the types of lines and the molar/molecular schema); in the second section we consider their triple impact (politics understood as an index of the bearing a body, situating itself in the paradox of a passive volition and shattering the distinction between the resignation of the beautiful soul and voluntaristic engagement). We conclude with an analysis of Bartleby as singular figure of an ethical-political orientation. KEYWORDS: Deleuze; Guattari; vitalism; cartography; orientation; Bartleby
DOWNLOAD PDF

On Putting the Active Back into Activism

Rosi Braidotti

This paper addresses a paradox: how to engage in affirmative politics, which entails the production of social horizons of hope, while at the same time doing critical theory, which means resisting the present. Drawing on the neo-vitalism of Deleuze, with reference to Nietzsche and Spinoza, the article argues in favour of an affirmative ethics: defined as a radical ethics of transformation. This new framework for re-thinking ethics moves away from the moral protocols of Kantian universalism, while also shifting its focus from unitary, rationality-driven consciousness to an understanding of subjectivity as processual in nature, propelled by affects and relations. Such a new framework disengages the emergence of the subject from the logic of negation and attaches subjectivity to affirmative otherness. Hence the self-other relation is reconceived in terms of reciprocity as creation and not as the recognition of Sameness. Taking critical distance from modern conceptions of self-centred individualism and the negative production of hierarchically inferior others which it assumes, an affirmative ethics for a non-unitary subject as proposed here aims at offering an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or 'earth' others, following and enhancing the tradition of a bio-centred egalitarianism (Ansell-Pearson, 1999) that posits a nature-culture continuum (Haraway, 1997). Moreover by putting the emphasis on the positivity of affirmative ethics - conceived in a depsychologised sense similar to that of Nietzsche and Spinoza - the article suggests an ethics of sustainability: one that provides the subject with a frame for interaction and change, growth and movement; an ethics that affirms life as difference-at-work.
KEYWORDS: affirmative ethics; vitalism; biopolitics; immanence; becoming; futurity; Deleuze; Nietzsche; Spinoza
DOWNLOAD PDF

A Tragic Note: On Negri and Deleuze in the Light of the 'Argentinazo'

Jorge Camacho

In a conversation between Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze, translated under the title 'Control and Becoming', the former philosopher denounced the problematic status of the latter's work - specifically A Thousand Plateaus, co-authored with Félix Guattari - in the context of political philosophy. For Negri, as we gather from his comments, inasmuch as Deleuze's framework is essential for thinking about the contemporary world, it remains a catalogue of unresolved problems on the all-important topic of politics. One of the central points of divergence is related to Negri's optimistic and teleological philosophical orientation vis-à-vis Deleuze's decidedly non-teleological ontology and philosophy of history. Negri famously hears a 'tragic note' in Deleuze's open-ended account. This article explores and evaluates this divergence, philosophically and politically, in the light of the period of revolts and radical political experimentation that broke out in Argentina after 2001. Siding with Deleuze, philosophically and politically, it concludes that the positive outcome of such a 'tragic' perspective is a constant concern for launching and re-launching instances of concrete political experimentation with a regard for just this open-endedness of the historical horizon.
KEYWORDS: Deleuze; Negri; Argentina; politics; teleology; ontology; multitude; biopolitics; multiplicity; experience
DOWNLOAD PDF

Queer Vitalism

Claire Colebrook

Starting from Deleuze's and Guattari's distinction between passive and active vitalism as set out in their last book, What is Philosophy?, this article posits the possibility of a new conceptualisation of political bodies outside notions of individual will, intent and agency: mobilising forces of change from within in the act of encountering. Moving away from the active vitalism of resisting and overcoming - acts that always imply new normative images/representations of 'being otherwise', being thus aligned to what Deleuze and Guattari would call majoritarian politics - passive vitalism mobilises forces of change from within the act of encountering, understood as the emanation and interaction of potentials always already found in the forces, percepts and affects that constitute actual bodies. Contrary to an active vitalism that strives to overcome the imposed norms that would reduce an individual's autonomy, but that also takes into account the vitality of traditions, cultures and practices that constitute bodies as individuals and agents in the first place, a passive vitalism is one of re-singularisation or counter-actualisation: this means that it takes bodies as they are, with their identifying and determining features, and then asks how the potentials that enabled those features might be expanded. It is within this new suggested framework that the article revisits gender and sexual politics: in terms of potentials and the virtual, and in radical distance from politics of recognition and theories of subjection. It thus suggests a new post-human articulation of the 'I' as a second, belated perceiving, understood not as a transcendent grasping but as one affectuation among others.
KEYWORDS: vitalism; Leibnitz; immanence; minor politics; schizoanalysis; queer; feminism; Deleuze
DOWNLOAD PDF

Becoming Vulva: Flesh, Fold, Infinity

Patricia MacCormack

The relation between morphology and becoming-woman is a contentious one. Deleuze and Guattari have been critiqued by Irigaray as fetishising woman. However Irigaray, Deleuze and Guattari each posit a challenge to phallologocentric paradigms through real life becomings via reconfigurations -beyond metaphor or alternate subjectifiation -of the subject as enfleshed. Subjectivity is manifold and folds with other subjects, so the subject is never entirely present to the self and never extricated from the connexions it makes. Such multiplicity, fluidity and connectivity negotiate the singularity, stability and dividuation inherent to phallologic. Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of 'Becoming', and Irigaray's model of the two lips, directly respond to the symbol of the phallus. As an experiment in extending and exploring these concepts, while simultaneously attempting to create a fold between the theories, this article offers the idea of 'becoming-vulva'. The vulva, with all its symbolic and psychoanalytic associations, is itself both the blind spot and rupture of the phallic. As a folding and folded organ the vulva is temporally metamorphic and apprehended through aspect rather than totality. It constitutes a schema of organ and pleasure which resonates with the folded and folding structure of desire itself. In this article both the vulva and desire are grounded in the political and ethical contexts of this feminist project while also being an abstract territory that opens out and potentialises ways of thinking the flesh.
KEYWORDS: Deleuze; Guattari; feminism; The Fold; morphology; Irigaray; vulva; corporeality
DOWNLOAD PDF

Becoming-Woman by Breaking the Waves

Chrysanthi Nigianni

Begins from the argument that Deleuze's method of 'transcendental empiricism' requires a shift in the way we conceptualise both 'ethics' and 'politics'. This shift is examined in relation to the cinematic thinking of the film Breaking the Waves, since the latter problematises established ideas of what an ethics of (sexual) difference might be, as well as received political values tied to modern individualism such as freedom, autonomy, and reason. Moving through a filmosophical methodology, it is argued that the film manages to provide us with a post-theistic framework that resonates but also pushes further Deleuze's transcendentalism, opening new paths for a radicalisation of feminist materialist theories. Breaking the Waves provides us with a notion of (becoming-) woman in relation to Man that breaks away from the established discourses of difference, equality, reciprocity and respect that have traditionally informed the Self-Other relation, bringing in the themes of sacrifice, stupidity and belief. The latter constitute new political forces that actualise an-other politics: an affective activism and a vitalist pragmatism, that reinvent freedom on the level of non-representation.
KEYWORDS: transcendental empiricism; freedom; becoming-woman; ethics; post-theism; Breaking the Waves; Deleuze
DOWNLOAD PDF

Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion

Nicholas Thoburn

This paper is a critique of the political figure of the militant. In particular it seeks to understand the ways militancy effectuates processes of political passion and a certain unworking or deterritorialisation of the self in relation to political organisations and the wider social environment within which militants would enact change. To this end the paper traces a diagram or abstract machine of militancy, a diagram comprised of Guattari's cartography of Leninism and the model of struggle set out by the Russian nihilist Sergei Nechaev. Foregrounding specific techniques and affective and semiotic registers, the paper explores a particular animation of abstract militant functions in the Weatherman organisation in the United States at the turn of the 1970s. It then sketches the principle outlines of a counter figure - an 'a-militant diagram', or dispersive ecology of political composition -that draws together Marx's figure of the party, Jacques Camatte's critique of the political 'racket', and Deleuze and Guattari's approach to the problem of the group and its outside.
KEYWORDS: militant; Weather Underground; political semiotics; political affect; activism
DOWNLOAD PDF

Deleuzian Politics? A Roundtable Discussion

Eric Alliez, Claire Colebrook, Peter Hallward, Nicholas Thoburn

A discussion on Deleuze and politics with topics covered including: Deleuze's relationship to Marxism and capitalism; the political valency of the concept of deterritorialisation; the implications of Deleuzian thought for theorisations of collectivity and identity; its implications for thinking about revolution, universality and the party form; the problems of desire and the decision; issues of ecology and the implications of vitalism for them; problems of political strategy and organisation; the legacy of the invasion of Iraq.
KEYWORDS: Deleuze; Guattari; politics; Marxism; capitalism; deterritorialisation; collective will; passive vitalism; revolution; universality; desire
DOWNLOAD PDF

REVIEWS
DOWNLOAD PDF