Deleuze and Political Activism

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Contents
Special Issue on Deleuze and Political Activism
Editor’s Acknowledgements v
Introduction: Beyond the Royal Science of Politics 1

Marcelo Svirsky
Articles
Desire, Apathy and Activism 7
Simone Bignall
‘To Believe In This World, As It Is’: Immanence and the Quest

for Political Activism 28
Kathrin Thiele
The Common as Body Without Organs 46

Vidar Thorsteinsson
Activist Materialism 64
Dimitris Papadopoulos
Activism, Philosophy and Actuality in Deleuze and Foucault 84

Paul Patton
Politics in the Middle: For a Political Interpretation of the

Dualisms in Deleuze and Guattari 104
Rodrigo Nunes
November 22, 2010 Time: 08:58am dls107.tex
iv Contents
The Greek Gloom and the December 2008 Uprising 127

Ioulia Mermigka
Life Resistance: Towards a Different Concept

of the Political 142
Brad Evans
Defining Activism 163

Marcelo Svirsky
Editor’s Acknowledgments
I would like to express my profound gratitude to Ian Buchanan, first
for encouraging and helping me to organise the international conference
‘Deleuze and Activism’, held at Cardiff University in November 2009,
and for suggesting that I edit this Special Issue of Deleuze Studies, but
also, and mainly, for always giving me reasons to believe in my work.
My appreciation also goes to all the anonymous reviewers of the
articles published here – they definitely helped to improve each one of
them. Finally I would like to thank the contributors themselves, for their
patience and collaboration.
Deleuze Studies Volume 4: 2010 supplement: v

DOI: 10.3366/E175022411000108X
© Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/dls
Introduction: Beyond the Royal Science
of Politics
Marcelo Svirsky Cardiff University
Anxieties over democracy in the post-war era, reinvigorated by

philosophical nostalgia for the modern icons of civic engagement –
including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and James
Madison – resulted in a flourishing industry of academic writing on
political participation, especially in the English-speaking world and
particularly in the field of political science. Almond and Verba’s
legendary The Civic Culture (1963) and Carole Pateman’s Participation
and Democratic Theory (1970), together with Robert Dahl’s and Seymor
Martin Lipset’s works on democratic theory, are just a few of the most
prominent names and different works that have become the pillars of
a very influential clergy, which has helped circumscribe contemporary
understandings of politics. The paradigm introduced by such thinkers
(and supported more effervescently by republicans than by liberals) did
not seek to replace or challenge the privileged political form that is
‘representative democracy’; rather, it assumed that ‘mass participation
is the lifeblood of representative democracy’ (Norris 2002: 5), and
identified elitism as that which impedes the reinvigoration of democratic
regimes (see Schumpeter 1950).
As a sequel to this colossal effort, researchers on political activism
have anchored the concept firmly within official politics through the
invention of a statistical science of voting fluctuations, participation in
party politics and other formal indicators; only lately has this school of
thought devoted any critical attention to the evident limits and barriers
of formal political participation (see Norris 2002). Other trends in
political theory have derided the efficacy of activism by forcing the
concept into a reductive alignment with merely habitual social habits,
thereby making the future of political life dependent on banalities such
Deleuze Studies Volume 4: 2010 supplement: 1–6

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110001091
2 Marcelo Svirsky
as ‘bowling together’ (cf. Putnam 2000). By default, such developments

in political theory tend to categorise the informal protests of the citizenry
as the most radical of activist practices. Ultimately, the tides and modes
of civic engagement (or disengagement) are seen as symptomatic of either
the flourishing or the declining state of an existent ‘democratic spirit’,
which is invariably celebrated per se, leaving no room for significant
criticism of the nature of the ‘democracy’ supposedly animating that
‘spirit’.
As Deleuze and Guattari have explained, this characteristic ‘royal’
science of politics ‘continually appropriates the contents of vague
or nomad science’ – those forms of political investigation looking ‘to
understand both the repression it encounters and the interaction
‘ “containing” it’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367–8). One major task
of new activist war machines is, then, to escape entrapment within the
black hole of the majoritarian discourse on civil society, captured and
defined by pervasive notions of ‘representative participation’. Although
the ‘NGOisation’ of the public sphere since the 1980s (see Yacobi 2007),
together with other forms of political proliferation, have broadened
the visible political field, the potential of non-institutional forms of
action has been weakened ideologically by a whole state apparatus
comprised of research centres and budgets, instrumental teaching, and
a parliamentary politics that has incorporated the discourse of civil
society – all of which have effected a sectorisation of society and political
life. The epistemological aspirations of the three ‘ideal circles’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 367) of the state, economy and civil society are
commonly used to categorise political eruptions as forms of participation
in the official, representative state politics. It is in this light that we
must interpret the failure of academia to come to terms with the
division of labour lately being imposed by the transversal relations
between intellectual investigation and political situatedness embodied in
militant research. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, ‘we know of the
problems States have always had with journey-men’s associations or
compagnonnages, the nomadic or itinerant bodies . . . ’ (368).
It is clear that a Jamesonian ‘strategy of containment’ is at work
in the narrative tradition of royal political science. It is in the notion
of ‘representative participation’ that a function of formal unity or a
strategy of containment has been founded, which, as Jameson puts it,
‘allows what can be thought to seem internally coherent in its own terms,
while repressing the unthinkable . . . which lies beyond its boundaries’
(Jameson 1981: 38). By tying official politics together with every form
of political participation it can ensnare, what royal political science does
is ‘radically impoverish . . . the data of one narrative line’ – namely, that

of the new activisms – ‘by their rewriting according to the paradigm
of another narrative . . . ’ – namely, that of representative participatory
politics (Jameson 1981: 22). The subversive power of political potentia is
thus contained by this reductive strategy; civil society becomes the main
territory of this imprisonment, assisted by a false equation of official
participation with challenging politics.
Rather than problematising the political, this royal understanding
of activism uses its ‘metric power’ to axiomatise politics, while
simultaneously repressing activist experiences that refuse simply to align
with ‘the given’ of formal politics. An example of this can be seen in the
hostility of western states towards organisations such as ‘Wikileaks’ or
the ‘Animal rights movement’, each of which are immersed in creative
acts of citizenship that actualise ruptures. Such new scenes and acts are
constantly at risk of being appropriated by this royal science of politics,
which imposes upon them a model that channels civic participation
according to established rules and concepts. Activisms that seek only
to guarantee the workings of representative democracy are essentially
slave activisms; they dwell in safety and their impact and potential is
expected to be absorbed without drawing the system into new structures
of resonance.
The assumption that ‘mass participation is the lifeblood of
representative democracy’ not only imposes a particular model of
the political, it also reinforces a pejorative way to conceive activism.
By positing representative democracy (or any other regime) as the
reified model of political process, theory necessarily idealises certain
forms of involvement over others. For example, classical participatory
theory is often blind to the creative significance of the activist
energies being unfolded in such events as critical teaching in schools,
revolutionary philosophical writing, the deconstructive effect of a critical
assemblage that confronts patriarchal power, or of civic homosexuality
which disrupts heterosexism. In fact, the assumptions underlying
‘representative’ participation are troublesome for at least two reasons.
Firstly, participation in the formal political process of ‘representative
democracy’ does not in itself necessarily implicate a critical attitude
or action, seeking a less repressive and more creative life. To evidence
this, it is enough to keep in mind some fearful recent examples of
mass political support for ‘representative’ state violence, as occurred
last May when thousands of Israelis marched in Tel Aviv and the
streets of Jerusalem to back the killing by the Israeli Defence Forces
of nine activists from the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and
4 Marcelo Svirsky
Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, as they boarded the Mavi Marmara

ship sailing to Gaza as part of a humanitarian flotilla. Similarly, we
might remain mindful of other, no less electrifying, cases of popular
support for wars and genocides in South America, Asia, Eastern Europe
and Africa, or of events such as the Holocaust. In these instances,
mass participation more accurately falls within the Reichian analysis
of a popular ‘desire for fascism’ – which lies worlds away from a
participatory liberalism that idealises the commitment of the public
to activist citizenship (see Isin 2009) and to the tolerant ‘good life’
that western democracy claims to represent. Secondly, passivity is not
necessarily a sign of political anaemia, but may be a cultural expression
that requires local explanation. Here, research at times confuses the
visible with the political: absence of visible mass participation might be
a sign of unconscious and pre-conscious compliance with ongoing forms
of oppression, and can impact more energetically on the perpetuation
of a regime than can tangible acts of the body – these modes of active
abandonment produce the reign of daily microfascisms.
After Deleuze and Guattari, political activism may be approached
in a fundamentally different way: without an image, without a form.
As Deleuze and Guattari make clear, the interaction between royal
and nomad science produces a ‘constantly shifting borderline’, meaning
that there is always some element that escapes containment by the
‘iron collars’ of representation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367; see
also Deleuze 1994). This occurs when the plane of consistency is
passionately thrown against the plane of organisation, when a nomad
element inserts itself in political struggles in which, for instance, the
boundaries of citizenship are challenged and reopened (as occurred
in the struggle associated with the sans-papiers movement, see Isin
2009), or barriers of ethnic segregation are challenged by new forms
of interculturalism (as occurs with bilingual forms of education). It is
through these ‘smallest deviations’ that smooth types of political activity
dwell within the striated forms of state politics (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 371). Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophies
have created some of the conceptual tools which may be put to
innovative use in activism that seeks to break with repressive traditions.
Their alien relation to the standards set by the royal science of politics
(see Patton 2000) – an alienation laid out in the philosophical resources
they draw on, in the issues and concepts that characterise their work and,
principally, in the incessant movement of their thought – points towards
a richer philosophical weaponry with which to confront and possibly
overcome political inhibitions, in both knowledge and practice.
In truth, Deleuze and Guattari do not provide ready-made blueprints

for revolution – neither recipes nor rules – but they do certainly describe
a minor art of thinking/doing, one which allows activists to target stable
forms of life wherever they impede creation, wherever they are mystified
by representation. Activists couldn’t hope for more powerful tools to
assist their diverse struggles to overcome oppression, where this is a
phenomenon understood comprehensively as a reactive style of power
manifested in techniques of conceptual and material capture. Indeed,
the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia are slowly but surely
beginning to share some of the glory that volume one of Karl Marx’s
Capital occupied for more than a century; henceforth, we are faced with
the urgency of thinking anew the nature of social struggles, and how to
engage them successfully.
Exchanging conservative for ‘radical’ ideologies, proving the guilt
of the majoritarian group, celebrating recognition of identity, seeking
political representation, instigating litigation and arousing strikes,
marches and protests – all these conventionally privileged resources for
transformative action are now seen as conforming to a certain model
of activism. As Buchanan warns, ‘from conformity it is but a short
step to complicity’ (Buchanan 2000: 75), because activism that treads
established paths of dissent is always in danger of being besieged and
contained by the organism of the State. A new horizon stretches out:
by engaging more forcefully with the celerity of the ‘itinerant’ activist,
a coextensive plane between the conceptual apparatus of politics and
the more radical activist practices of rupture and creation may be
constructed beyond the royal science of politics, while remaining prudent
with respect to the ‘gravitational field’ of representative participation
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 372). This is where a new science of
activism is to be found:
Whenever ambulant procedure and process are returned to their own model,
the points regain their position as singularities that exclude all biunivocal
relations, the flow regains its curvilinear and vertical motion that excludes
any parallelism between vectors, and smooth space reconquers the properties
of contact that prevent it from remaining homogeneous and striated. (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 373)
The task undertaken by the contributors to this special issue is to launch

a preliminary experimentation with the conceptual tools appropriate for
a new science of activism, each exploring different dimensions of the
‘Deleuzian horizon’ outlined here. The issue is the result of a conference
held at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University,
6 Marcelo Svirsky
in November 2009. Here the participants gathered to discuss the idea

that Deleuze offers activism a new kind of freedom from capture by the
state-forms of representative politics; indeed, the speakers described how
Deleuzian frameworks often engage with the smooth spaces that radical
activism simultaneously practice and seek to create.
References
Almond, Gabriel and Sidney Verba (1963) The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and
Democracy in Five Nations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Buchanan, Ian (2000) Deleuzism – A Metacommentary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus – Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Isin, Engin (2009) ‘Citizenship in Flux: the Figure of the Activist Citizen’,
Subjectivity, 29, pp. 367–88.
Jameson, Fredric (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Social Symbolic
Act, London: Routledge.
Norris, Pipa (2002) Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pateman, Carol (1970) Participation and Democratic Theory, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Patton, Paul (2000) Deleuze and the Political, London: Routledge.
Putnam, Robert (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American
Community, New York: Simon & Schuster.
Schumpeter, Joseph (1950) Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, New York:
Harper and Row.
Yacobi, Haim (2007) ‘The NGOization of Space: Dilemmas of Social Change,
Planning Policy and the Israeli Public Sphere’, Environment and Planning D, 25:4,
pp. 745–58.
Desire, Apathy and Activism
Simone Bignall University of New South Wales
Abstract
This paper explores the themes of apathy and activism by contrasting
the conventionally negative concept of motivational desire-lack with
Deleuze and Guattari’s positive concept of ‘desiring-production’. I
suggest that apathy and activism are both problematically tied to the
same motivational force: the conventional negativity of desire, which
results in a ‘split subject’ always already ‘undone’ by difference. The
philosophy of positive desiring-production provides alternative concepts
of motivation and selfhood, not characterised by generative lack or
alienation. On the contrary, this alternative ontology describes an
identity that is not primarily ‘undone’ by difference, but ‘done’ or
‘made’ through the complex and piecemeal relations it forges with
various aspects of the bodies it encounters. Understood as a complex
multiplicity, the self or community accordingly has a primary, immediate
and active interest in the quality of its multifaceted relations with others.
Finally, I argue that some contemporary forms of activism can be read as
practices aimed at creating and safeguarding the social conditions that
foster the complex relational composition of selves and communities.
Keywords: activism, apathy, identity, Deleuze, desire, ontology,

negativity, politics
While global society flounders in economic crisis and political violence,

middle-class white westerners comprise a political strata apparently
characterised by ‘motivational deficit’ (Critchley 2007; Bernstein 2001).
The rituals of liberal democracy produce a politics that palls with the
immensity and complexity of global injustices and the tasks of redress

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110001108
8 Simone Bignall
that are called for. In modern thought, apathy is often associated with
negativity – it signifies incapacity, immobility, absence of direction, or
existential emptiness. In fact, the prevalence and constancy of apathy
as an indicator of dissatisfaction in everyday life may correlate, at
least in part, to the emphasis modern western philosophy places upon
critical negativity and negation. I begin by arguing that this persistent
emphasis on negativity is a residual effect of the negativity of desire
which is conventionally understood to be the grounding condition
of action. However, while this generative negativity is celebrated
within modernism and many strains of ‘postmodernism’, neither style
of thinking is capable of conceptualising a mode of transformative
action that is not problematically fettered to the negativity that such
action paradoxically aims to oppose. I then suggest that Deleuze and
Guattari’s absolutely positive concept of desire – and their corresponding
ontology of the complex relational self – offers an alternative way of
understanding political motivation, potentially enabling a path of flight
from the pervasive problem of political disengagement.
I. Apathy
The amorphous phenomena of ‘boredom’ and ‘apathy’ define a chara-
cteristic modern negativity (Spacks 1995; Svendsen 2005). Modernism
‘posits an isolated subject existing in a secularised, fragmented world
marked by lost or precarious traditions: a paradigmatic situation for
boredom’ (Spacks 1995: 219). While alienation is associated with a
sense of subjective disconnection and paralysis, modern apathy extends
across the entire social field as an effect of ‘profound’ boredom that
has no focus and no relief (Heidegger 1993: 99). Profound apathy is
then socially indicated by a systemic loss of interest and attachment, a
turning away and closing off from others, and an associated failure of
responsibility and care in comportment towards others (Hammer 2004;
Emad 1985). One ceases to be attentive to others when afflicted by
apathy: ‘boredom, unlike engagement, implies no respect for the identity
of the other’ (Spacks 1995: 231). The typically modern (and western)
stance of foppish or cultivated disinterest in others may also serve a
related socio-cultural function; in contriving to be bored, the subject
rejects the possibility of intimacy and so ‘repudiates attempts to establish
a mode of equality’ (199).
One’s relation to oneself is also called into question by the experience
of boredom. Conceptualised as a project of development, the modern
self is constituted through reflexive acts of desire and by the recognition
these acts solicit. The process of self-determination is effectively halted

by boredom, since ‘almost always it suggests disruptions of desire: the
inability to desire or to have desire fulfilled’ (Spacks 1995: x). For the self
defined by desire, such disruption corresponds with a loss of motivation,
direction and satisfaction. The negativity of profound boredom collapses
the self into an existential crisis: one suffers a hiatus in one’s project
of self-directed desire and the material transformations associated with
one’s project.
However, negativity paradoxically plays a privileged role in modern
critical philosophy and underlies modern conceptions of agency (see
Coole 2000). Boredom is not simply disabling and disruptive, but is
also understood as the putative ground for the emergence of reflexive
selfhood: ‘boredom reveals beings as a whole’ (Heidegger 1993: 99).
Boredom reveals an ontological void, an open emptiness which is a
primary and defining negativity, but which is also constitutive and
transformative because it defines one’s fundamental attitude of being-in-
the-world as unfinished and striving. In turn, this striving plays a causal
role in projects of self-directed becoming. In this capacity, ‘boredom
aids the fulfilment of desire’ (Spacks 1995: 242). On the one hand,
then, boredom is an existential negativity that indicates an absence of
desire or interest, a state of alienation and loss of affective capacity, and
a moment of existential crisis experienced as a painful suspension of
the passage of developmental time. In this sense, the primary cultural
function of boredom is to serve as a critical indicator of subjective
or social dissatisfaction. On the other hand, boredom is a generative
negativity: a causal absence felt as alienation and emptiness, which
prompts an active desire for alleviation of the uncomfortable experience
of negativity. Such negativity constitutes a subject-in-process and causes
the production and transformation of being. In this sense, a second
overarching cultural function of boredom is the provocative role it plays
as a causal or motivating force of constructive processes.
This ambivalence, I suggest, sits at the heart of the problem of
apathy. While action seeks to ‘negate the negative’, negativity is always
necessarily preserved because it is not only critical but also constitutive.
This is often celebrated in terms of the resilience of ‘difference’ as
the power of critical opposition or destabilisation within dialectical
and deconstructive politics, but it also means that the causal or
constitutive force of negativity has no final relief (see Coole 2000).
Consequently, subjectivity is condemned to oscillate anxiously between
tenuous existence and the void of subjective emptiness: ‘every human life
is thrown back and forth between pain and boredom’ (Schopenhauer,
10 Simone Bignall
cited in Svendsen 2005: 131). Apathy takes hold because negativity is

always preserved as a necessary, constitutive force of subjective life.
Critical theory thus often adopts an attitude of resignation towards
the phenomenon of negativity. It seems ‘there is no solution to the
problem of boredom’ (Svendsen 2005: 133), and with this resignation
comes apathy. Alternatively, critical thought seizes upon the generative
aspects of ontological negativity in order to reinvigorate a sense of
democratic purpose and commitment to activity. Indeed, in grappling
with the material reality of global conflict, post-imperialism, strife,
terror, poverty, ecological devastation and global displacement, a
significant strain of contemporary political philosophy takes ontological
negativity as a given point of departure. Often drawing on Lacan’s
concept of the divided and self-alienated subject, this kind of project
is exemplified by the post-Marxist political thought of Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe, or of Slavoj Žižek.
Another recent response, also starting from a Lacanian-influenced
theory of split subjectivity (the ‘dividual’), is given in Simon Critchley’s
work on ethics and commitment. Critchley begins with the idea that
philosophy responds to the generative negativity that is the failure and
disappointment thrown up by the ‘present time defined by the state
of war’ in which global humanity finds itself (Critchley 2007: 8). In
this morass of contemporary conflict, we suffer a ‘motivational deficit’
and a ‘moral deficit’, each connected to the ‘felt inadequacy’ that
evidences ‘the lack at the heart of democratic life’. Existing structures
of liberal democracy have apparently failed to provide an alternative
to the passive nihilism of apathy and the active nihilism of terrorism;
they seem unable to stop us from plunging into ‘violent injustice’,
and cannot alleviate the threatening suspicion that social participation
is meaningless (6, 8). Critchley seeks a solution to this situation by
reinvigorating the possibility of subjective conscience and commitment
to ethical action. To this end, he connects Badiou’s notion of ‘fidelity’ to
Levinas’ notion of the subjective ‘trauma’ prompted by the experience
of the ‘unfulfillable demand’ of the alienated other in relation to
the self. The unfulfillable demand is the source of splitting and felt
inadequacy within the subject. Critchley argues that this experience of
subjective trauma in the face of the other’s demand – the experience of
internal splitting and division – is itself the experience of ‘conscience’.
The affect of internalised trauma accordingly becomes the ground
for ethical and political action. On Critchley’s view, accepting the
ontological negativity of the divided self as a ground for political
action logically tends towards a deepening of democratic engagement.
Politics cannot be confined to order and consensus when the ethical

subject is ‘defined by commitment or fidelity to an unfulfillable demand’.
Rather, politics involves the ‘manifestation of dissensus, the cultivation
of an anarchic multiplicity’ that involves a ‘continual questioning from
below of any attempt to impose order from above’ (13). While I am
sympathetic to the ‘responsible anarchism’ and to the political outcome
of reinvigorated democracy that Critchley arrives at, I worry that taking
a starting point of given negativity – disappointment, strife, conflict,
lack, inadequacy – maintains a problematic connection of negativity with
motivation and action.
The key problem for activism is that both desire/action and
apathy/inaction are prompted by constitutive negativity. Generative
negativity has the potential to motivate action and transformation,
but worldly evidence suggests that the response mostly tends towards
apathy and inaction. In my view, this problem arises because apathy and
activism are both tied to the same motivational force: the ambivalent
negativity of desire. Desire/lack produces the model of the split self
as the seat of motivation; the split subject is motivated to negate the
negativity that divides it, but must paradoxically preserve this negativity
that not only divides, but also constitutes its being. One way out of
this difficulty is suggested by the alternative process of transformation
or becoming described by Deleuze. This unconventional ontological
process is not driven by lack or absence felt as emptiness, dissatisfaction
or loss accompanied by a consequent longing for fulfilment. Nor does it
rest upon an acknowledgement that the self is always already ‘undone’
by alterity and is moved to conscionable action for the other as a result.
On the contrary, Deleuze’s alternative theory of ontology describes an
unambiguously generative process of association caused by a purely
positive and productive force of desire. Desiring-production results in
a process in which the self is not ‘undone’, but ‘done’ or ‘made’
through difference. The following section considers this alternative
understanding of ontology, in order to re-assess the critical privilege
currently attracted by the modern concept of negativity.
II. Desiring-Production and the Complex Self

The conceptualisation of desire as associational or ‘machinic’ appears
as a persistent theme throughout Deleuze’s work (Deleuze 1990, 1991,
1997; Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987). Unlike the conventionally
negative concept of desire/lack, which undermines the unified self and
results in the ‘split’ subject, desiring-production is a positive causal force
12 Simone Bignall
that generates a ‘complex’ individual. Like the ‘dividual’, a ‘complex’

self is also decentred and uncertain, but not in the same way as the
Lacanian subject is. Deleuze’s alternative theory of ontology emerges
from his quite particular and innovative reading of Spinoza (Deleuze
1990). As part of an assemblage also combining (and at times creatively
transforming) aspects of Bergsonian, Humean and Nietzschean thought,
Deleuze’s Spinozism enables a model of selfhood that constantly flees
or escapes its own limits by forging increasingly complex and active
relations with other bodies.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, individuals are complex forms of
order that develop consistency over time. Bodies are ‘assemblages’ that
arise via the causal force of desire, which brings about the process of
association and connection joining constituting elements (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 1–9, 283–96). Desire results in emergent complex bodies
when the elemental relations that compose the body take on enduring
habits of association. The individual is thus a complex and shifting
unity of ‘movement and rest, speed and slowness grouping together an
infinity of parts’ into a set of resonating relations (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 256). On this view, any consistent form of complex organisation
constitutes an individual body, which therefore might not be material
in a physical sense. Selves, communities, languages, philosophies: all are
‘bodies’ existing as relatively consistent forms of actual or ordered being,
rather than formless virtual states of quickly morphing force relations
that combine in transient unities and then fragment and dissolve.
Furthermore, as forms of enduring order comprised of semi-stable
relationships between parts, bodies exist across varying levels of
complexity. I am a body composed of elemental relations. Some of
these are internal relations, for example between my biological cells or
between the thoughts that lend order to my comprehension of things.
Others are external relations I have forged with other bodies in my
world, for example with colleagues, with locations, or with Deleuzian
philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 260, 254). These internal and
external relations that engage me with varying kinds of consistency
on various levels of order and in various circumstances of engagement
collectively constitute and define me. Thus, bodies are complex forms
of individuation defined by the stability or consistency of their internal
and external relationships and the complex and multi-leveled affective
capacities these produce.
However, while individuals are here constituted by their relations
with others, these are not simply one-on-one encounters between
entire entities. Revising Kleinian object-relations theory, Deleuze and
Guattari insist that an individual emerges with the forging of part

relations, for example by incorporating ‘a breast into his mouth, the
sun into his asshole’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 4). Accordingly,
individuation involves the establishment and perpetuation of the
complex part relationships that collectively define a particular bodily
entity. Our interrelationships, our desires, describe the complex
‘piecemeal insertions’ we make into each other’s lives (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 504). Complex bodies are thus affected not wholly or
in entirety, but by a vast number of internal and external relations at
any one time, which impact upon and transform them in partial and
selective ways according to the nature of the elemental connections
and disjunctions (261ff). Some of these partial affections are fairly
constant forces in a life, giving individuals a certain consistency across
time and environments; others are transient relations that affect bodies
momentarily, though sometimes significantly enough to introduce a
radical and lasting alteration to their character. Shifts in connective
relations at the elemental level cause the kinds of continuity and change
that simultaneously define the consistency of a character and evidence
its transformation over time.
The rest of this paper will be devoted to expanding some rationale
for argument about the superior affinity for activism of the complex
relational subject. Deleuze’s concept of causal desire as a generative
positivity that produces and transforms complex bodies points to a way
out of the difficulty described in the first half of this paper. Unlike ‘split’
subjectivity, the ‘complex’ subject is constructed through the creative
force of desiring-production, which is unconnected with ontological
lack, and thus neither depends upon nor multiplies negativity when it
diversifies the desiring self. But it is not yet apparent how Deleuze’s
affirmative and relational bodily ontology and the causal positivity of
desiring-production relates to the activism of the subject. It seems that
bodies are complexly constituted by difference and desire – a body is a
form that emerges or emanates via the force of desire, but apparently as
a passive effect of the encounters and affective relations that define its
character. In fact, for the Spinozist (and Nietzschean) Deleuze, there are
active and passive forms of bodily constitution. The normative aim of a
body is to increase its affective capacities by increasing its active powers
of engagement and sociability (Deleuze 1988: 97–104). This idea, taken
from Spinoza, is expressed in various places throughout Deleuze’s own
oeuvre. In the second chapter of Difference and Repetition, for example,
he describes the becoming of being as a process involving an increasing
activity of constitution, in terms of a kind of non-linear ‘progression’
14 Simone Bignall
through the moments described as the ‘three syntheses of time’ (Deleuze

1994: 70–91). This process is not so much a temporal progression
of successive stages of bodily development occurring through time,
as it is a description of the qualitative shifting of the nature of a
body’s constitution throughout its existence. A body takes shape with
the initially passive or chance combination of simple elements into
a complex order; but it may gradually develop a more active and
directed process of self-formation, if it exercises a capacity to selectively
choose the part-relations that will come to comprise the character of the
emergent body.
The ‘first synthesis’ describes how the time of the present is constituted
through the repetition of ‘cases’ across successive instants (Deleuze 1994:
70–2). For example, I am a materiality or a ‘case’ that ‘repeats’ from
instant to instant in a form that is perceived to be consistent. In fact,
with respect to my presence, the thing that is repeating from moment
to moment is the perceived consistency of the internal and external
relationships that define me. Of course, I am really undergoing constant
transformation – as I write, millions of my cells are dying and being
replaced; my brain waves are shifting in intricate patterns of excitation,
and so forth – but I imagine myself to persist as a formal consistency
in time, just as others similarly imagine me. Deleuze explains that this
‘contractile power’ of the imagination produces the lived experience of
the actual present because the imagination fuses successive instances
of actuality and the reality of bodily modifications into a continuity
and consistency of perception (Deleuze 1994: 70; Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 281); but with this power of the imagination and the ‘fusion of
repetition’ it produces comes a propensity for the contemplating mind to
slip into habit (Deleuze 1994: 73–5). We habitually perceive the actual
world of the present time consistently, as a repetition of the same from
moment to moment.
The first synthesis of time is then a ‘passive synthesis’ in two respects:
the actual present we inhabit from moment to moment takes form
through a passive process of emergence, as chance relations between
elements cohere into consistent relations to form actual bodies and
worldly structures; furthermore, when imagination renders this actual
present consistent we can slip into the passive acceptance of the
‘givenness’ of the actual world. Accordingly, Deleuze insists that the
proper ‘role of the imagination, or the mind which contemplates,
is to draw something new from repetition, to draw difference from
it’ (Deleuze 1994: 76). With this ‘drawing of difference’ from the
apparently repetitive relations that constitute the time of the present,
the mind becomes capable of acting on and reconstituting the relations

that comprise the present: ‘underneath the self which acts are little
selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and
the active subject’ (75). The first synthesis of time is associated with
the passive emergence of the actual present through the consolidation
of constitutive relations; it accordingly tends towards the problem of
habit. The second and third syntheses then describe the steps involved as
the mind engages in ‘becoming-active’ and breaks with habit. With the
passage from the first to the third syntheses of time, the contemplating
mind develops active ways to modify the actual present. It does this by
seeking virtual differences within and between actual repetitions in the
present (76).
If the passive synthesis of habit constitutes the living present, the
passive synthesis of memory involves the ‘pure past’ and this constitutes
the second synthesis of time (81). The first synthesis comes ‘first’ since
it provides the foundation of time; this is because we can only think of
the process of time and of transformation on the basis of that which
we have already become; we can only think at all in terms of the
consistency the actual present allows us to experience. But the second
synthesis that involves ‘memory’ then gives us awareness of the ground
beneath or prior to this foundation. From the position of coherency
described by our actual embodiment in a given circumstance, we can
‘remember’ the idea of this ground: we can become mindful of the
virtual chaos that becomes actual order, ‘the moving soil occupied by
the passing present’ (79). By ‘memory’, Deleuze does not mean simply
the reminiscence of the former presents that we have previously lived,
but rather the more profound memory of the virtual past which never
was actually present. This is the ‘unrepresentable’ past in its pure form,
which is the ‘synthesis of all time in which the present and the future
are only dimensions’ (82). The memory of this ‘pure past’ involves the
awareness that the relations comprising bodies – relations that repeat
in the present to constitute actual lived experience – could always have
been differently produced in different circumstances of emergence. It
also reminds us that the ‘cases’ that repeat are comprised of differential
relations between elements, and that these relations in fact constantly
shift and recombine in complex associations. While the first synthesis
concerns the habitual repetition of the same and the similar, the second
synthesis concerns the retrospective repetition that is memory. With the
second synthesis of time, the contemplating mind ‘remembers’ difference
is the ground for the emergence of that actual consistency which repeats
as the present. With this awareness of grounding difference comes the
16 Simone Bignall
unsettling of the givenness of the actual, and the possibility of a ‘third’,

active synthesis of time.
The third synthesis of time involves an active force of desire. The third,
active synthesis is a rare event, which does not inevitably follow from the
first two in a logical linear progression; it is the ‘final’ synthesis in the
progression because it requires the groundwork of the first two to have
already taken place. The third synthesis of time involves the thought
of time as ‘untimely’; it institutes a ‘caesura’ in the time of the present
(Deleuze 1994: 88–9), with respect to the pure past that grounds it, in
order to imagine a future which has not yet come to pass, and which
imaginatively ‘draws a difference’ from the present. The mind engaged
in contemplating the future-oriented third synthesis of time thinks the
totality of all the actual presents (meaning not only ‘the now’, but
also the history of the former presents that have been) – together with
the virtuality of the ‘pure past’ which has never been (89). The third
synthesis of time thereby involves thinking the actual lived present in
terms of its repetitions and its habitual consistencies through time, and
asking whether, if the part-relations that comprise actual complex bodies
(the ‘little selves’ that exist ‘underneath’ the ‘self that acts’) were returned
back to the virtual chaos from whence they came, they would be worthy
of returning in the same form, reconstituting the same complex body
(89). For example, I could ask of myself: is my habitual form partly
comprised of some associations that I would be better off without (a
draining colleague, an odious relative)? Are there certain elements within
me (say, an interest in Deleuze scholarship) that could be differently
combined with compatible others with the effect of producing a new and
more complex body (say, a reading group) that joins all the participating
bodies at their sites of affective involvement? Can this involvement
add to my own existing level of complexity to produce a ‘better’
or more adequate self, one more complexly compatible or receptive
to engagement with others? I might also ask which of the existing
part associations I enjoy with others bring me particular satisfaction,
and so might benefit from some reinforcement or development? For
Deleuze, these decisions constitute the operations of the ‘little selves’
that comprise the complex and shifting subject:
There is a self wherever a furtive contemplation has been established,

whenever a contracting machine capable of drawing a difference from
repetition functions somewhere. The self does not undergo modifications, it
is itself a modification, the term designating precisely the difference drawn.
(Deleuze 1994: 79)
While some bodies will only ever be the passive result of their formation
through external forces, certain other bodies – those invested with the
powers of imagination and reason – are capable of increasing their
active powers of engagement, sociability and self-constitution. The three
syntheses of time trace a ‘progression’ through passivity to activity: from
habitual constitutions formed through passive associations, which can
be transformed through the resource of ‘pure memory’, to result in active
forces of desire. For Deleuze this active quality of desire is, properly
speaking, the active force of material composition and transformation.
The ‘progression’ is, however, non-linear because desiring-production
is involved from ‘the start’ as the causal force that assembles complex
bodies. But desire is initially passive and non-directed, and the passage
towards active desire and the active synthesis of worldly being begins
with the memory of virtual difference in the second synthesis of time,
and emerges properly in the third (Deleuze 1994: 85, 90). Accordingly, it
is possible to think that emergent complex bodies are not only produced
through desire, but are also sometimes involved in acts of desire and
directed assemblage.
But here arises a second problem: how is desiring-production invested
with direction? With ontological negativity – the view that reality is
produced and transformed by the compulsion to plug an original
lack – the negative is the focus of desire’s direction. Even while it seeks
to preserve the negative (which is the condition of its existence as such),
transformative desire actively opposes the negative. Desire transforms
dissatisfaction into action, imperfection into ideal form, inequality into
equity, alienation into unity. But what guides desire in the absence of
negativity? Why might a body seek to desire in an active and self-
transformative way, rather than a passive and habitual, safe and self-
secure way?
A Deleuzian answer to this question is likely to be found in the
Spinozist concepts of ‘joy’ and ‘conatus’, which together describe a
normative principle of ethical association. Joy expresses the sensation a
body experiences with the enhancement of its powers of affectivity and
complexity. This is achieved when aspects of its own body are combined
with those of another, to form a more complex emergent unity that
is more affectively potential and expresses each individual in terms of
those aspects they share in common (Deleuze 1988: 49–51). Properly
conceived, joy is the basis for an ethical attitude of desire because it is
necessarily mutual (Deleuze 1990: 281–2). Bodies sometimes experience
a fortuitous, unplanned joy, but joy can be actively forged between
bodies that understand they have something in common. This shared
18 Simone Bignall
common element can form the basis of a more complex combination that
can enhance them both. Joy is mutual because both bodies are enhanced
by the emergent complexity that results from a compatible encounter.
If bodies meet and only one body benefits or is enhanced, the resulting
affect won’t be joyful, it will be something else – pleasure or power – but
not joy, which is strictly mutual.
‘Conatus’ refers to the desire of a body to persevere in its being, where
being is defined in terms of affective capacity. Conatus entails that bodies
will strive in ‘an effort to augment the power of acting or to experience
joyful passions’ by actively organising their encounters. This allows them
to form agreeable associations that enable them to mutually maximise
their affective potentialities (Deleuze 1988: 101). However, bodily
encounters do not involve the meeting of whole entities, but rather take
place ‘bit by bit’ at the multifarious sites of elemental combination that
bring individuals into part-relations (Deleuze 1990: 237). My striving
for joy involves me in an effort to foster an adequate understanding
of myself and others with respect to the ways in which we share some
common constituting elements. This understanding provides me with
the basis of an appropriate comportment towards another, assisting the
better ‘organising’ of our encounter. Developing a mutual understanding
of the elements we share helps us to actively and selectively build joyful
combinations at suitable sites of affective compatibility and also to avoid
disagreeable combinations that force incompatible associations between
conflicting aspects of our personalities. Joy results from the active desire
and the active forms of understanding that are necessarily involved
when complex bodies engage in contrived acts of partial and selective
relationship that produce preferred emergent forms (261). There will
always be some elements of passive constitution involved in processes
of individuation, since a body always partly results from passive
encounters with other bodies it does not know and does not adequately
understand. Indeed because of the complexity of material reality, one’s
knowledge of oneself, others and the world is never complete and
transparent. However, equipped with a developing personal history of
joyful encounters, an individual invested with the powers of imagination
and understanding can strive to develop a more acute awareness of its
constitution through multifaceted relations with others, informed by the
experience of these part-connections as sympathetic or antipathetic. Such
self–other awareness potentially enables a discerning and active desire
to operate in the deliberate creation of new compatible associations:
joining with another in ways that celebrate those aspects in which
we agree while acknowledging that there are various ways in which
aspects of our characters disagree and cannot happily combine. So,

it is possible to think that emergent complex bodies are produced
through desire, but that they are also involved in the laborious process
of deliberately contriving some part-relations with other bodies. The
‘bit by bit’ partiality of bodily encounters transforms relational bodies
in piecemeal and selective ways: some aspects of bodily constitution
will always remain untouched by the engagement with the other. The
promise of mutual joy potentially guides bodies in actively directing
their affective relations. Active desire can discerningly develop certain
elemental associations while avoiding others, thus providing scope for
personal adaptation, mutual accommodation and complex relational
development while simultaneously preserving the consistency or relative
identity of the multiple subject.
I have argued that a complex subject is a ‘producing/product
identity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 7), which may be simultaneously
constituted by desire and actively involved in the constitution of relations
through desire. The active desire of a complex subject will be guided by
experience and the promise of joy. Complex bodies benefit from being
actively involved in the constitutive process, even when this process
transforms the self, because such activity leads to an increased affective
potentiality and to finding joy with others. However, a third problem
persists in Deleuze’s positive ontology of desiring-production: how does
a purely positive causal desire account for the existence of negativity?
When desire is purely affirmative, how can one desire the refusal of the
negativities that predominantly characterise the contemporary world?
One possible answer lies in Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between
the different orders or qualities of desire that come to define the kinds of
interactions a body is disposed to forming (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:
277–96). While everything emanates from the force of association that
is desiring-production, the relations between elements comprising bodies
may not develop into active organisations of desire, but alternatively
may take form as reactive organisations. In Anti-Oedipus, this is
discussed in terms of the difference between the ‘subjected-group’
and the ‘group subject’ – a distinction which recalls Sartre’s critical
comparison of the different styles of political organisation embodied by
the ‘serialised group’ and the ‘group-in-fusion’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1983: 64, 256, 277ff; see also Sartre 1976; Guattari 1995; Genosko
2000: 123–33). The way desire is organised in a material form influences
the subsequent openness of that body to forming new associations
and increased levels of complexity. Bodies that welcome new part-
associations with neighbouring bodies (because these are the key to
20 Simone Bignall
self-transformation and increased joyful complexity) are defined by an

active organisation of desire; such bodies enjoy a shifting consistency
organised around a core set of characteristics, but are generally open to
modification and brave the risks of instability. These bodies determine
their constitution through immediate and open practices of relation
(rather than by establishing rules concerning membership that limit and
protect self consistency). They remain open to the primary creative force
of desiring-production.
By contrast, a body that seeks to preserve its established identity
will prevent its own transformation by resisting the formation of new
associations with other bodies. This kind of body is a reactive body,
which is restricted by the rules it enforces to protect its given identity.
It ‘wards off’ the transformative force of desiring-production (Deleuze
and Guattari 1983: 120). Reactive bodies are characterised by fixed
constitutive relations and institutionalised habits of association. Reactive
bodies resist the free flow of the primary force of desiring-production;
this blockage can result in serial or systemic relations of inequality,
when the associations comprising the body take on regular hierarchical
forms. That is, a relation becomes unjust when it is cemented into a
regular pattern of dominance and subordination; this fixture of relations
introduces negativity into the positive flow of desiring-production. For
Deleuze and Guattari, problems of injustice, alienation and other kinds
of negativity are not already given. They are produced through concrete
forms of reactive desire, for example an ‘Oedipal’ or ‘imperial’ coding
which defines desire in relation to lack, longing and appropriative
satisfaction (28; see also Bignall 2010). Constructed social negativities
must accordingly be addressed and transformed at the level of desire.
The distinction Deleuze and Guattari make between open/active and
blocked/reactive organisations of desire suggest a basis for critique.
Hierarchical and fixed relations that have become blocked and resistant
to transformation, resulting in closed bodies that seek to preserve the
givenness of their identities and their political relationships, can be
criticised on the basis of the primary force of free-flowing desiring-
production. The apparent givenness of entrenched orders is an illusion
that is maintained by techniques of political coercion used by bodies
with an interest in preserving such existing orders. Despotic bodies and
the constructed negativity of economic scarcity or social alienation can
each be criticised on this basis.
I have been arguing that desiring-production results in complex
subjects formed through multifaceted relations with others; such subjects
have an immediate interest in the quality of their social milieu and in
making their relations ever more joyfully complex and actively directed.
Accordingly, Deleuze’s positive conceptualisation of desire offers a more
appropriate ground for active subjectivity and political engagement
than the conventional negativity that problematically grounds the ‘split’
subject. I have sketched three responses to the main criticisms of
(Deleuze’s) ontological positivism: that desiring-production produces
subjects as passive effects of a constitutive process (the problem of
agency); that desiring-production is not normatively directed towards
the generation of preferred complex forms (the problem of intention or
direction); and that desiring-production cannot account for the existence
of negativity and does not allow for critical negation (the problem of
critique). While more can be said about these problems, I hope to have
gestured towards some possible bases for reply. The following section
considers some of the political implications flowing from the idea that
complex bodies emerge from an associative force of desiring-production.
III. Positive Politics and Activism

Deleuze’s Spinozist ontology provides a conceptualisation of subjectivity
entirely constituted by relations with others. This kind of reliance upon
alterity is quite different from the sort of subject-constitution endured
by the ‘split’ subject that is ‘undone’ by alterity. Because they meet in
partial and selective ways, complex individuals are not always already
reduced or compromised by their one-on-one encounters with others and
potentially moved to action on the basis of the conscionable trauma this
provokes. Rather, complex individuals are intricate, shifting unities of
the multipartite relations that immediately and qualitatively compose
them. This means that the complex self has an immediate interest
in activating and cultivating its relational being. More significantly,
complex selves have a positive interest in forming increasingly complex
interactions with the other – in fostering and not repudiating, managing
or simply enduring their engagements with others. By developing
multipart relations with multiple others, the individual develops an
increasingly complex constitution that is more affectively potential and
so is more joyful. This in turn implies that the ‘complex’ self has a direct
interest in fostering a diverse and rich social milieu that ensures exposure
to a wide variety of ‘piecemeal encounters’ with others, such that they
may maximally find areas of mutual sympathy and enhanced affective
capacity in their multifarious social relations.
While the activism of the ‘split subject’ is mediated by the experience
of negativity which propels actions of redress, the rewarding experience
22 Simone Bignall
of joyful mutuality means that the ‘complex subject’ has an immediate

interest in the quality of associations and in making desire active. Such
activism is not mediated by a negativity such as a ‘disadvantage’ that the
activist community must simultaneously embody and struggle against;
rather, it is motivated by the possibility of finding mutually beneficial
relations with others, since these lead to the joy of increased complexity
through community (see Bignall 2010). An important difference between
the ‘split’ subject and the ‘complex’ subject thus concerns the different
motivational starting points they figure. The split subject is motivated by
the ontological negativity that it simultaneously embodies and struggles
against, yet never finally overcomes; the complex relational subject is
motivated by the principle of joyful mutuality, which corresponds with
increased affective potentiality. The rewarding experience of joy means
that the complex subject has an immediate and natural interest in desire
and in making desire active. It is in the active selection of chosen
affections that one forges compatible forms of relationship, increasing
one’s own powers of affectivity and capacity for affection and in turn
finding increased possibilities for experiencing joy.
Deleuzian ontology encourages one to think of oneself as a ‘complex’
self, with a direct interest in activism that aims to create enabling
social conditions of diversity, equity, liberty and radical democracy since
these are the conditions that permit open exchange and interaction
in communities of practice. As a ‘complex’ self, one also has an
unmediated interest in activism that seeks to safeguard the wider
ecological conditions that protect other forms of (non-human) diversity
as part of a broad existential milieu. Part-connections with non-human
others permit the privileged kinds of becoming (-animal, -molecular,
and so forth) that Deleuze and Guattari associate with the radical
diversification and enhanced complexity of established forms (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 232–309). Arguably, a directed and constructive
Deleuzian politics develops from a cultivated understanding that the
complex social benefits of diversity and equality of opportunity act
as the material scaffolding for the constitution of the complex self.
A Deleuzian ethics develops from the notion that a conscientious effort
must be made towards fostering the adequate understandings of self
and other that could enable happy part-combinations, together with the
practised commitment to refrain from imposing upon others in ways
that diminish them. Both of these principles of ethical relationship are
normatively guided by the promise of joy that flows from mutuality,
where mutual compatibility leads bodies to join in more complex levels
of community. The politically important thing about joy is therefore its
function as a principle of mutuality. Active bodies will seek to maximise

the mutual sympathy of their combinations; but this does not entail
that they should strive to meet bodies they perceive as wholly similar,
resulting in a politics of community based on identity and sameness.
Rather, conceptualised as complex, bodies will strive to meet in
active and joyful ways with sympathetic elements or parts of various
other bodies they encounter. This means that quite radically different
communities can combine successfully, when they seek to interact in
ways in which they are compatible and do not force an unhappy
combination at those sites of character where they conflict.
The activist tactics of some contemporary anarchist groups may
be read as a subversive politics of joyful practice. Pink Bloc, Ya
Basta!, Billionaires for Bush, and the Rebel Clown Army employ comic
performance art, absurd costumes and high camp glamour in acts of
non-violent disturbance against the world’s macropolitical governing
elite. In Simon Critchley’s words, such activism works to
exemplify the effective forging of horizontal chains of equivalence or

collective will formation across diverse and otherwise conflicting protest
groups . . . Deploying a politics of subversion, contemporary anarchist
practice exercises a satirical pressure on the state in order to show that other
forms of life are possible. (Critchley 2007: 124)
Like Critchley, I find this ‘new language of civil disobedience’ utterly

compelling and often hilarious. However, ‘it is the exposed, self-
ridiculing and self-undermining character of these forms of protest’ that
Critchley ‘finds most compelling’, since he sees them as an exercise in
political humour or ‘tactical frivolity’ expressing a ‘powerless power that
uses its position of weakness to expose those in power through forms of
self-aware ridicule’ (Critchley 2007: 124). By contrast, I think it is more
useful to believe that something much more positive and constructive
might be going on here than the critical deconstruction of the state
through a conscientious political practice of ridiculous self-effacement.
In my view, the protesters add an extra dimension of complexity and
potentiality, a virtual difference, into the mix of the protest situation.
They perform difference by embodying it, clad in imaginative fancy-dress
costume more ‘appropriately’ worn in festive situations or in fantastical
other-worlds; they inject virtual difference into the actual-world space
of civil and political engagement. Their bizarre presence compels the
state forces to attend to the diversity they make manifestly visible,
or else renders the guard ridiculous when it returns a blank stare of
non-acknowledgement, and thereby implicitly critiques and destabilises
24 Simone Bignall
the reactive body of the state that tries to ward off transformation
as it denies and repels difference. This critique is, however, positive
in conduct, designed not simply to destroy the self-composure of the
state but also to evidence that ‘other forms of life are possible’ and, if
possible, to seduce the state forces into a becoming-otherwise. Although
their actions are underwritten by a serious political intent, the protesters
engage playfully with the state forces, tickling them, affecting them
with a sense of fun and hilarity, inventing new forms of ‘combat’ and
‘weaponry’: water balloons, feather dusters and wadding armour. They
aim to combine opposing bodies in new assemblages of relation, not
through violence and the polar separation of conflicting opposites, but
more positively through the shared experience of fun, humour and
festivity that potentially draws even the most disparate bodies together,
allowing them to combine – not entirely, but at particular sites of
affectivity – in micropolitical instances of joyful community. Beyond wry
self-effacement and critical deconstruction, such acts might therefore
best be thought of as positive and productive, aiming to create novel
forms of engagement tactically invented through the manifestation of
virtual differences in actual social relations. These potentially indicate
ways of being-otherwise that broaden the habitual horizons of existing
social and political conventions and encourage the becoming-minor of
majoritarian forms. This positive ambition and achievement appears to
me as the most significant aspect of these new forms of anarchist protest.
The principle of joyful interaction is clearly not an essentialist, stand-
alone or cover-all principle for political society. Starting with the
positive and abstract principle of mutuality does not mean that concrete
institutions of common practice (such as those fostering democracy) and
emergent principles of political protection (such as rights) are not needed
to safeguard bodies from destruction by bodies who care less about
cultivating mutual joy than they do about maximising their own pleasure
or power. But starting with the notion of affirmative mutuality as a basis
for thinking about active processes of self and social formation does
avoid the problem that constitutive negativity leads to political inactivity
as much as it does to activism. It also places a different primary emphasis
on political society – away from a politics of restraint stemming from
a subterranean ontological conflict, and towards a politics of complex
recognition and sympathy. Here, mutuality is presented as a preferred
(but not ‘given’) norm of political conduct and critical conflict becomes
necessary when efforts to find mutual consensus fail, or when joyful
practice is routinely crushed by forms of political domination. Similarly,
the negativities of hostility, shame and boredom are not ontologically
given, but more like errors of practice to be avoided and guarded

against.
The notion that complex bodies can agree to meet ‘bit by bit’ in
sympathetic ways and to avoid meeting in ways that diminish them
suggests that Deleuzian philosophy offers some scope for a politics
of consensus, supplementing the anarchic dissensus that Critchley
privileges. However, consensus will never be final and complete,
but is emergent, contextual and temporary, institutionally limited to
recognised sites of part-commonality that enable complex bodies to form
the sympathetic engagements leading to increased complexity and joy
(cf. Tully 1995; Connolly 2008). Here, acknowledgement of dissent is
intrinsic to the development of consensual group activity. Sympathetic
disagreement involves understanding those aspects of complex bodily
interaction that cannot currently combine well, and resisting the attempt
to impose upon and homogenise disparate bodies under a coercive
unity that betrays the differences between them. Formally identifying
and recognising standard areas of disagreement is therefore also an
important task of political society. Indeed, we might fruitfully rethink
negative ‘rights’ in this way: not as eternal and inalienable principles
of sovereign integrity flowing from fixed human characteristics, but
as a meta-stable discourse about principles of political restraint that
regulate human interaction. Such discourse would be constructed with
respect to current understandings about the difference and dissensus
that evidences the limits of consensual engagement. Even so, although
limited and partial, finding productive consensus should be the primary
aim of interacting orders, because (genuine) consensus is joyful and so
is normatively preferred. Although this is an undeveloped aspect of his
own work, Deleuze’s philosophy arguably provides us with an attractive
basis for rethinking rights and democratic engagement in a milieu of
multicultural difference (see Patton 2010; Lefebvre 2008).
A starting point of given negativity – strife, conflict, lack – prompts
the model of the divided self that has held such persuasive sway in
modern critical thought and persists in many strains of postmodern
thought, but which to me seems likely to compromise the quality of the
social engagement that is possible. I have argued against the negative
as a motivational force. A more effective starting point for activism
is found by looking for examples of positive mutuality in encounters.
This approach does not deny that most societies are predominantly
characterised by conflict, inequality, war, trauma, alienation and
exploitation. However, within this majoritarian state of violence and
hostility, there also exist minor modes of positive social engagement,
26 Simone Bignall
acts of respectful recognition, and exemplary practices of genuine care

that join participating orders in the experience of mutual understanding
and appreciation at particular sites of their relationship. Starting
with these moments of ‘felt adequacy’ assists political communities in
understanding how they can combine well in partial and selective ways;
from the positive experience of mutual accord, they can start to identify
new sites of combination that work well as the location of new forms of
complex political union. This developing understanding is rewarded by
the gradual emergence of an active understanding about ‘good’ forms of
engagement, which may then guide the institutionalisation of preferred
forms of complex national and international community. Starting with
the experience of shared joy, rather than lack and division, provides
selves with an unmediated interest in the quality of their relations with
others, and, by extension, an interest in fostering the kinds of political
community that are able to support diverse encounters, leading to forms
of increased commonality and complexity. When desire is not mediated
by negativity, we might even speculate that, severed from the conditions
of its generation, profound apathy could cease to emerge and take hold
as a systemic problem of political disenchantment.
Note
I am grateful to Marcelo Svirsky, Ian Buchanan and the participants in the ‘Deleuze
and Activism’ conference held in Cardiff, November 2009. Paul Patton and others at
UNSW also offered useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I appreciate
the thoughtful reading and criticism offered by reviewers. Thanks also to Tony
Fletcher, Ben Sellar and Sam Sellar for helpful discussion of the ‘three syntheses’.
References
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Resistance, London and New York: Verso.
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of Human Nature, trans. Constantin Boundas, New York: Columbia University
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
‘To Believe In This World, As It Is’:
Immanence and the Quest for
Political Activism
Kathrin Thiele Utrecht University
Abstract
In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari make the claim that
‘[i]t may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most
difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on
our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion.’ What
are we to make of such a calling? The paper explicates why and in what
sense this statement is of exemplary significance both for an appropriate
understanding of Deleuze’s political thought and for a most timely
conceptualisation of politics in a world so clearly defined by immanence,
and nothing but immanence. I argue that Deleuze’s rigorously construc-
tive approach to the world is not beyond politics, as some recent
readings have declared (e.g. those of Badiou and Hallward). Rather, we
have to appreciate that in Deleuze and Guattari’s demand for a ‘belief
in this world’ the political intersects with the dimension of the ethical
in such a way that our understanding of both is transformed. Only after
this ‘empiricist conversion’ can we truly think of a Deleuzian politics
that does justice to a plane of immanence ‘immanent only to itself’.
Keywords: immanence, ethics, politics, transcendental empiricism,
Badiou, Foucault, Spinoza
I. Deleuze and the Political

Writing on Deleuze and the question of politics does not really entail
venturing into terra incognita. Given that so many founding thinkers
DOI: 10.3366/E175022411000111X
’To Believe In This World, As It Is’ 29
in the Deleuzian legacy have already engaged with this theme, the
indebtedness of one’s argument and thought to others is inevitably
unending.1 However, looking at the many recent publications in what is
called ‘theory’ in general, and in the vicinity of a Deleuzian philosophical
horizon in particular, the question of politics stands out again and calls
for renewed attention. Regarding Deleuzian scholarship in particular,
the question is how things stand with Deleuze and politics now – after a
first global round of philosophical reception of his philosophy. Can we
really envision and concretise a Deleuzian political activism, a becoming-
active so badly needed in relation to today’s political state of affairs? Is
there really a ‘Deleuzian Politics’, and if so, what does it look like?
When so many are calling for new political solutions, the question
concerning the becoming-active of philosophical thought is not just
one question amongst others. Rather, in times like these it becomes a
question touching on the very legitimacy of a philosophical thought
as such, that is, it becomes the criterion for measuring how and in
what ways it relates to the world we are currently living in, and – most
of all – to the world ‘we are about to change’. So when, in 2006,
Peter Hallward concluded his book on Deleuze, Out of This World:
Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, with the statement that ‘[f]ew
philosophers have been as inspiring as Deleuze. But those of us who
still seek to change our world and to empower its inhabitants will need
to look for our inspirations elsewhere’ (Hallward 2006: 164), he was
expressing only what our current situation seems so utterly determined
by: change – at whatever cost.
This slightly ironical remark – which, I hope, will serve its purpose
in this article – should, however, not give the impression that I disagree
with Hallward’s urge to relate thought and life. The times really are what
they are, and Deleuzian trajectories are both needed and asked for.2 In
considering how to respond to the question as to what kind of politics
the Deleuzian universe suggests, there is at least one answer that can be
ruled out immediately: if what is meant by politics involves an axiomatic
of categorical prescriptions, then no, there is no ‘Deleuzian Politics’;
there is in Deleuze’s thought neither a set programme nor recourse to
prescription. While this may not seem to be such big news given the well-
known turn towards micropolitics in Deleuze and Guattari, one has to
put emphasis on this moment of saying ‘no’. Right at the beginning of
the argument to be presented here it is important to stress that what is
truly political in Deleuze and Guattari has less to do with what they
stood up for than with how they managed to turn away from, and
thus radically expose, the ways in which the question of politics itself
30 Kathrin Thiele
is usually phrased.3 In Deleuze and Guattari, politics is not discussed

according to the kind of frameworks we are normally used to: neither
normative or moral principles, nor a concern for justice, equality and
freedom, nor any attempt to choose between or attempt to harmonise
these conflicting categories, represents the frame in which they conceive
of politics. Instead, in accordance with a very Spinozan realism,4 the
function of the term ‘politics’ in Deleuze and Guattari is, first of all,
to stand in for the ‘all there is’ as such: politics – first of all – is nothing
but the name of the force-relations, the milieu, and strata of everything
that exists, the always already yet never once and for all territorialised
regime,5 the actualised plane of immanence which, however manifold in
the virtual, only ever comes politically distributed. This is why Deleuze
and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, declare that ‘politics precedes
being’, but also that, ‘[i]n short, everything is political, but every politics
is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 203, 213). From the affective structure of individual
bodies to the structure of state-formations and beyond, everything is
political in the sense that what ‘there is’ is a result of struggles between
divergent forces, a result that shows greater or lesser stability and that
can never definitively be fixed once and for all.6
This attitude towards politics comes very close to that of Michel Fou-
cault, whose portrait as a political thinker likewise remains a contested
one, and who also exemplifies this different approach, in particular in
his lecture on ‘Security, Territory, Population’ at the Collège de France
in 1978 (the famous course on biopolitics). There, Foucault explicitly
presents his investigation as a philosophical inquiry, but that is an
inquiry into ‘the politics of truth’, for, as he says, ‘ I do not see many
other definitions of the word “philosophy” apart from this’. Since this is
how he wants his undertaking to be understood, he rejects every sort of
imperative discourse ‘that consists in saying “love this, hate that, this is
good, that is bad, be for this, beware for that”’, and he most poignantly
ends his enumeration with the following statement: ‘So in all of this
I will therefore propose only one imperative, but it will be categorical
and unconditional: Never [do politics]’ (Foucault 2009: 3–4).7
In framing my argument, however, with reference to this statement of
Foucault’s, am I not merely confirming Hallward’s criticism of Deleuze,
a criticism shared also by Alain Badiou who in his second opus magnum,
Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, states that ‘Deleuze . . . came to
tolerate the fact that most of his concepts were sucked up . . . by the
doxa of the body, desire, affect, networks, the multitude, nomadism
and enjoyment into which a whole contemporary “politics” sinks, as
if into a poor man’s Spinozism’ (Badiou 2009: 35)? Is it not true then
that Deleuze’s philosophical gesture, rather than helping ‘to change
our world’, simply leads ‘out of this world’? Of course, this is not
the conclusion to be drawn here, and what I hope to achieve in what
follows will involve elaborating and unfolding the above mentioned
alternative approach to political thinking in Deleuze: a becoming-active
of philosophy which, in its concern for practice, requires a becoming-
active in this world.
II. ‘To Believe In This World, As It Is’: Deleuze’s Practical

Philosophy of Immanence
In the face of heightened political expectations in many of today’s
philosophical discourses, it is important to take a step back and inves-
tigate the concepts themselves, to identify where they are located in the
thought at stake, and how they function within this thought. In making
use of one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most central statements – the
ethico-political demand for ‘a belief in this world’ – I would like to
explicate how their thought intervenes into this world beyond any
oppositional staging of the political concern that, as it seems right now,
too many theoretical debates believe to be the only truthful one.8 In
developing such a reading of politics, it is important to operate on
different levels: First, we have to adequately understand the rigorous
philosophical demand for an immanence immanent only to itself that
is so fundamental to Deleuze’s thought. His strong commitment to
immanence and nothing but immanence already turns every ontological
endeavour into a practical one, and that is into an endeavour driven
by an ethico-political impetus. It is only when we have reached this
Spinozan cross-over of ontology and ethics that we can move further
and inquire into more concrete political directions.
First Formula of Immanence: >
In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari give us a first version
of the statement of ‘belief in this world’: ‘It may be that believing in
this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of
a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence
today. This is the empiricist conversion’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:
75). If we take the demand for a ‘belief in this world’ as Deleuze’s
formula for addressing the question of immanence in its full ethico-
political potential, then we have to understand that this thought is
32 Kathrin Thiele
first of all announced as a ‘task’, even a ‘most difficult task’. It is

phrased as a radical shift, a turn away from what we are used to think,
and think thought to be, and it is this that they call the ‘empiricist
conversion’ – conversio, a turning, with a long philosophical heritage
from St Augustine to the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.9
Earlier in What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari also say that
‘the entire history of philosophy [can] be presented from the viewpoint
of the instituting of a plane of immanence’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 44). Yet, they continue, even today ‘[i]mmanence can be said
to be the burning issue of all philosophy’ (45). And this is so because
immanence ‘takes on all the dangers that philosophy must confront, all
the condemnations, persecutions, and repudiations that it undergoes’
(45). This difficult heritage – we have to remember that Spinoza, their
‘prince of philosophy’ when it comes to immanence, was accused of
the severest heresy – produces confusions, and instead of being thought
in itself, i.e. as an immanence immanent only to itself, immanence in
most of philosophy’s history is related to something else that contains
it: ‘[R]ather than this substance of Being or this image of thought being
constituted by the plane of immanence itself, immanence will be related
to something like a “dative,” Matter or Mind’ (44). Immanence is
handed over to a transcendent frame, and the movement, the infinite
movement that only a thought of pure immanence (‘the empiricist
conversion’) enables the world to become, is stopped again. Movement
and tendencies (to use a Bergsonian concept), or longitudes and latitudes
(the Spinozan equivalent), in short ‘the world’ conceptualised imma-
nently, is again brought to a halt and the dynamic plane of immanence
is referred back to static verticality. Hence the claim: ‘Whenever there is
transcendence, vertical Being, imperial State in the sky or on earth, there
is religion; and there is Philosophy whenever there is immanence’ (43).
If immanence is the true business of philosophy – of a philosophy
worthy of its name, finally ‘mature enough’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 48) – and as such entails a truly difficult task, it would be wrong
to assume that thinking immanence merely means substituting new
terms, while the image of thought – that which thinking is believed to
be – remains untouched. Most of the time, the transcendent – from its
most commonsensical version as ‘what everybody knows’ to its most
abstract a priori structure as universal law – is re-introduced into our
ways of thinking. It is re-introduced both on the level of what is thought
and on the level of what thought itself ‘is’. What is not taken into
account is that thinking immanence as immanent only to itself not only
changes the linguistic registers of thought, but does something to the act
of thinking such thought itself. This is the essential ‘active’ dimension

of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s claim ‘to create’ and ‘to invent’ concepts.
Everything is affected in this turn, because ‘[i]mmanence is immanent
only to itself and consequently captures everything, absorbs All-One,
and leaves nothing remaining to which it could be immanent’ (45).
It is necessary to dwell a little further on this. In order to grasp this
change of register for thought itself – a change in both its terminological
and its practical dimensions – the notion of empiricism as linked to the
Deleuzian concept of ‘belief’ needs further explication. Here it is fruitful
to come back to the specific ‘American’ atmosphere of Deleuze’s thinking
and in particular to William James’ early description of pragmatism as a
radical empiricism in which, as Deleuze writes in his essay on ‘Bartleby,
or the Formula’, it ‘was also necessary for the knowing subject, the sole
proprietor, to give way to a community of explorers, the brothers of the
archipelago, who replace knowledge with belief’ (Deleuze 1997: 87). It
is via such superior empiricism – to read James alongside Bergson – that
the demand for a ‘belief in this world’, as a ‘most difficult task’ that
also implies a different practice of thinking itself, is best captured.10
Thinking the world differently, when ‘belief in’ replaces ‘knowledge of’
the world, turns the world from something given into something to
be explored, always to be constructed and created, and this again not
according to the measure of ‘what is’ but according to the measure of
‘what this world is capable of’.11 What such a thought implies – at the
very heart of it – is an ethos, an active and affirmative attitude towards
the world (how to construct otherwise?); and Deleuze, in the context of
discussing American pragmatism, also names its ingredients: truth and
trust, hope and confidence – ‘not belief in another world, but confidence
in this one, in man as much as in God’ (Deleuze 1997: 87). Relating the
ethico-political dimension thus to the ontological undertaking is what a
rigorous thought of immanence generates and where – one could say in
a most Emersonian way – it truly turns away and averts itself from the
conventions of thought, so that not only what is thought (the world)
becomes something else, but thought itself becomes . . . a world.
Second Formula of Immanence: ‘A Belief In This World, As It Is’

Let us turn to a second version of Deleuze’s demand for a belief in this
world. This time the expression is taken from Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The
Time-Image, and it is brought forth in the following way:
The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must
become an object of belief . . . Whether we are Christians or atheists, in our
34 Kathrin Thiele
universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world. It is a whole

transformation of belief . . . to replace the model of knowledge with belief. But
belief replaces knowledge only when it becomes belief in this world, as it is.
(Deleuze 2000: 172)
In following my argument so far, a misunderstanding could sneak in

that is important to avoid, and that – reading this version of the ‘belief’
statement closely – is addressed explicitly by Deleuze. While his notion
of ‘belief’ can only ever be understood appropriately by linking it to a
‘pragmatics’12 such as I have shown above, Deleuze of course also sees
the orienting framework of divine providence within this otherwise so
worldly American tradition: a latent religiosity which, in the face of
writers like Melville, Emerson and Thoreau, surely deserves an appro-
priate investigation in itself,13 but which does not sufficiently transform
the concept of belief in order to express what Deleuze is looking for,
and thus cannot be taken as the endpoint of the discussion of belief.
Turning to the context of the discussion of ‘belief in this world’ in
Cinema 2, we notice that Deleuze – although in a totally different the-
matic context – treats the problem of re-inscription of the transcendent
into worldliness more thoroughly. The cited passage is taken from a
discussion of the cinematographic significance of Roberto Rossellini
and Jean-Luc Godard. Addressing again the turn from knowledge to
belief, and in precisely the same manner as we saw in the first statement,
Deleuze claims that Rossellini ‘undoubtedly still retains the ideal of
knowledge, he will never abandon this Socratic ideal’. For, ‘[w]hat made
Joan of Arc at the Stake a misunderstood work? The fact that Joan of
Arc needs to be in the sky to believe in the tatters of this world. It is
from the height of eternity that she can believe in this world’ (Deleuze
2000: 172). In contrast to any such transcendent height that safeguards
the belief in this world, Godard’s work stands alone in enduring an
immanence immanent only to itself:
In Godard the ideal of knowledge, the Socratic ideal which is still present in
Rossellini, collapses: the ‘good’ discourse, of the militant, the revolutionary,
the feminist, the philosopher, the film-maker, etc., gets no better treatment
than the bad. Because the point is to discover and restore belief in the world,
before or beyond words. (Deleuze 2000: 172)
The question of belief – of faith, hope and confidence – is, therefore, not
as straightforward as it seems at first. We have already established
that a rigorous thought of immanence captures everything and leaves
nothing to which it could be immanent. Any undemanding belief in
this world as harbinger of a better one – at which Deleuze hints with
his reference to ‘the “good” discourse, of the militant, revolutionary,

feminist, philosopher’, in which the divisions between good and evil,
right or wrong, have already been decided on – is not at all what is
required. His claim of restoring ‘belief in the world, before and beyond
words’ indicates that this notion of belief precisely does not mean an
already established ‘belief in’. Belief in the Deleuzian sense must be
understood as a continuing motor, an activity for keeping the movement
which creates . . . a world . . . becoming-other: no freezing and blocking
but endless transformation. Only in this way is the doubling of belief
in this second version, according to which ‘belief replaces knowledge
only when it becomes belief in this world, as it is’, fully understandable.
The addition to the formula of belief in this version – the ‘as it is’ – thus
makes all the difference. It is not an expression of resignation or an
ultimate acceptance of the most visible limits that determine this world,
but the paradoxical formulation of the only movement that might lead
to real transformation: Active affirmation of ‘what is’ in order to become
inscribed in a dynamic process and thus re-acquire the potential to create
something new!
As if the demand for a belief in this world is not already a difficult
and ambivalent enough task, Deleuze asks for more. What is needed
is a practice that in a most Nietzschean sense ‘wills everything all over
again’ – a belief in this world, as it is. There is to be no other sphere,
no better world, providing this one with a saving horizon – such would
only set limits to this world (in regard to what it is capable of) and allow
for an escape from the bloody here and now. But also no conceptual
movement that misunderstands the ‘all over again’ as ‘every time a
new beginning’.14 Rather, in this kind of belief, what is fundamental
is the endless task of repeating and thereby deepening the condition of
immanence: We cannot turn back the wheel and will always have to
carry on and work from what has already happened.
The task thus always gets more difficult, and Deleuze shows his
heritage as a Spinozan realist nowhere better than here: ‘To believe in
this world, as it is’, as a thought of pure immanence, does not mean
producing an affirmation of the world according to the ideality of ‘what
should be’ – measuring the possible via the criterion of ‘what is’, and
thus limiting this world from the very start. No, what is truly required
is to produce an active affirmation in the face of every single result
the world ever takes. Only this way is the becoming-active in and for
this world truly never ending; only this way is it an infinite task,15 in
which mere affirmation of chance becomes active affirmation, and belief
in this world – still harbouring the comfort of the transcendent (divine
36 Kathrin Thiele
providence, revolutionary axiomatic or a saving messianism) – becomes

a ‘belief in this world, as it is’. It is this most demanding realist
undertaking that alone leaves open ‘what the world is capable of’.16
However, given that this is such a difficult thought, and one so easily
misread in political terms, it may be helpful to consider yet another
context in which Deleuze emphasises the very same realist point. This
is Foucault’s thought of the outside, as it is treated in Deleuze’s study
Foucault, where, in reading the latter as a thinker of force-relations,
not purely of the rigours of discourse analysis but most significantly of
resistances too, Deleuze addresses the specific demand of immanence
that concerns us here. When he discusses Foucault’s early encounter
with the Blanchotian ‘thought from outside’,17 the seemingly all too
promising notion of the outside is not to be understood as an outside
beyond this world, a realm above or below which grounds it, thereby
re-introducing transcendence. On the contrary, the outside is nothing
but the other side, the literal outside of the formed strata: ‘[T]here is
nothing lying beneath, above, or even outside the strata. The relations
between forces, which are mobile, faint and diffuse, do not lie outside
the strata but form the outside of strata’ (Deleuze 1988: 84, my empha-
sis). Counter-intuitive at first but nonetheless most central, Deleuze and
Foucault turn the thought of the outside from harbouring a promise of
the advent of a better world – separated from the here and now – into the
very adventurous process of the here and now itself, utterly immanent
and this-worldly. No ticket to another world then, but only negotiations
within this world, in the very middle of it, enable openings and niches
which – at their best – escape and resist control.
Third Formula of Immanence: Negotiations

‘The belief in this world, as it is’ encapsulates the entirety of the complex
thought of immanence which Deleuze pursues in all of his philosophical
endeavours. His thought-universe is permeated structurally by this
ethico-political dimension engaging with this world, and understanding
itself as intervening therein. To demonstrate conceptually how the
thought of an immanence immanent only to itself, rather than merely
contemplating the world, constructs it in every move and gesture
it makes, is to refute the argument according to which Deleuze’s
philosophy only leads us out of this world, with which it ultimately
cannot be bothered. However, it would be a mistake to believe that this
constitutes an effective response to those voices doubting the legitimacy
of Deleuzian (and Foucauldian) thought for our world today. For much
more is at stake – and here we have to return to our initial starting point
and discuss the ‘critical arrow’ Alain Badiou has fired at Deleuze.
It could be argued that Badiou and Deleuze share extraordinary
similarities in terms of their urge to practise philosophy as a form of
intervention into this world. In what follows, however, a third version
of the Deleuzian belief in this world will be introduced and juxtaposed to
a statement by Badiou, in a way that reveals just how far such similarities
ultimately turn out to mark deep differences. What will be argued here is
that rather than there being a myriad of similarities between Badiou and
‘Badiouians’ on the one hand and Deleuze and ‘Deleuzians’ on the other,
there is in fact – certain parallels notwithstanding – a major rift between
the two thought-universes, a rift that concerns precisely the claim of
immanence, which as a starting point for philosophy proper seems to be
shared by both thinkers. Likewise, contrary to what is normally claimed
on the Badiouian side – that it is Deleuze’s thought of immanence which
harbours a ‘latent religiosity’ (Badiou 2008: 387) because of its supposed
misconception of the ‘event’ as ‘the fate of the One’ (385) – in my view
precisely the opposite must be argued. It is Badiou’s misconceiving of the
thought of multiplicity as a thought of the One, and thus his reification
of the virtual into a One, that leads to his opting for the supposedly pure
immanence of the multiples, which in turn, however, instead of allowing
for a thinking of immanence immanent only to itself, hands it over to a
second order, to something that only ever contains immanence.18
But we have to move slowly and explain in detail what is at stake
here. For the purposes of the present comparison with Badiou, it is
best to consider at first only the beginning of Deleuze’s third version
of the demand for a ‘belief in this world’. This is found at the end of a
conversation with Antonio Negri in 1990, where Deleuze repeats again
what he believes the modern relation to the world to be: ‘What we most
lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken
from us’ (Deleuze 1995: 176). If we now turn to look at the epigraph
to Badiou’s Logics of Worlds, we encounter the exact same diagnosis
in regard to the worldly state of affairs. The epigraph – taken from
André Malraux’s Antimémoires – reads as follows: ‘France’s agony was
not born of the flagging reasons to believe in her – defeat, demography,
industry, etc. – but of the incapacity to believe in anything at all.’ (Badiou
2008: 1).
The same beginning, then – but what follows? Let us turn to Deleuze
and see how he proceeds. After having stated that ‘[w]hat we most lack
is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken from
us’, he continues: ‘If you believe in the world you precipitate events,
38 Kathrin Thiele
however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-

times, however small their surface or volume . . . Our ability to resist
control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our
every move’ (Deleuze 1995: 176). As we can see, in Deleuze’s ‘belief’
there is no new collective imaginary (a One) from where and towards
which our becoming-active is and ever will be legitimised; rather, the
political impetus expressed here is no more, but also no less, than a most
singular movement ‘assessed at the level of our every move’. Only in
this way is immanence not impeded, the world not blocked, such that
everything becomes-transformed. Such active belief is apparently also
nothing particularly grand. Most of the time – as the explications in this
passage show – it is a very ‘inconspicuous’ and ‘small’ undertaking. It is
thus to affirm and to become-active, but in a most moderate and indeed
negotiable way. It is, as Gregg Lambert once described it:
the affirmative principle . . . [that] can be understood as the most sobering

response to this predicament: to believe in this world, as it is, neither in a
transformed world, nor in another world, and to provide an image of thought
that thoroughly belongs to this world which is ruled by the powers of the
false; moreover to raise falsehood to a positive principle in the service of
those who choose to live in this world and not in another. . . Restoring our
connection to the world, but also assuming a constant vigilance over clichés
and ready-made linkages. (Lambert 2002: 131)
A political horizon based on falsehood, negotiations and singular

movements cannot but stand in opposition to Alain Badiou’s rigid and
truthful political vision. In Badiou’s eyes it is precisely such ‘contem-
porary doxa’ (Badiou 2008: 2) that reduces the world to the political
fallacies and lethargies of the majoritarian ‘democratic materialism’ in
which ‘the logic of the One’ and, following from there, ‘this sovereignty
of the Two (bodies and languages)’, rules, and to which he so strongly
opposes a ‘materialist dialectic’ in whose formula the category of
truth – although pluralised – reappears: ‘There are only bodies and
languages, except that there are truths’ (4).19
While it cannot but remain a matter of ongoing debate just how
a Deleuzian point of view in regard to political action differs in
kind from a Badiouian one,20 one fact seems unambiguous: Badiou’s
claim to a renewed ‘Politics of Truths’, but also his harsh critique of
all non-universal political formations from which he delimits a ‘new
universalism’, underline the categorical differences at stake here.21 While
at first it seems to be a merely political dispute over the best or most
appropriate strategy to adopt, what we are facing here is in fact more
fundamental, revealing a principal difference in regard to the question

of how thought and practice are interrelated. To unfold this categorical
difference will form the last step of the present argument.
III. Spinoza’s Heritage

What has been shown so far is that according to Deleuze’s philosophy
thought is always already thought as practice. It is a practice of actual
construction, whose significance shows itself in every instance. The
‘ability to resist control’ (inasmuch as the ‘submission to it’) is to
be ‘assessed at the level of our every move’. The construction and
practice of this world is everything, for the world ‘is’ nothing but
politics. In staging the political problem thus, giving practice preference
over truths, Deleuze, rather than weakening his thought into ‘a poor
man’s Spinozism’, rigorously continues what a thought of immanence
immanent only to itself ever demands.
To envision politics again as ‘knowing’, as a prescriptive ‘Politics of
Truths’ striving for axiomatic principles (and thereby clearly opposing
what Foucault meant when he defined philosophy as a ‘politics of
truth’), is both conceptually undermining of the thought of immanence
and practically counter-productive. What cannot be avoided in this
rectification of politics is the re-introduction of transcendent principles
(universals, truths) that pre-determine the political terrain and thus stop
movement, freeze the world, and become yet another variation of the
kind of politics of which Foucault was so weary, that (political) business
as usual which he rejects by postulating: ‘Never do Politics!’
Instead, in a truly immanent thought, one that pursues this demand
also into practice, the political question itself must change. Rather than
a credo that is to be ‘followed’ it must become first a question of
analysis (of that which ‘is’ the world – in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze
and Guattari call this an a-signifying semiotics) and second, on a more
affective level, a carrying forward of the movement of immanence, that is
‘a belief in this world, as it is’ as the only condition for a different future.
A becoming-active as political activism cannot be based on the – however
rigorous – renewal and restoration of categories such as universalism
and truth, which are to be followed with the same categorical fidelity
that any knowing ‘believing in’ has always prescribed. To the contrary,
‘belief in the world, as it is’, according to Deleuze, must remain a fully
immanent process of experimentation – an open-ended process that only
ever constitutes itself parallel to what it experiences; an experimentation,
however, that is to be understood in a most sober sense, a negotiating
40 Kathrin Thiele
from within. His epigraph to Pourparlers clarifies this:

Philosophy isn’t a Power. Religions, states, capitalism, science, the law, public
opinion, and television are powers, but not philosophy. Philosophy may have
its great internal battles (between idealism and realism, and so on), but they’re
mock battles. Not being a power, philosophy can’t battle with the powers
that be, but it fights a war without battles, a guerrilla campaign against them.
And it can’t converse with them, it’s got nothing to tell them, nothing to com-
municate, and can only negotiate. Since the powers aren’t just external things,
but permeate each of us, philosophy throws us all into constant negotiations
with, and a guerrilla campaign against, ourselves. (Deleuze 1995: epigraph)
If we let immanence capture everything, then every philosophical endea-

vour will be just as much entangled with politics in so far as the
ethico-political is always already present in even the purest ontological
undertaking. Rather than presupposing a descriptive ontological axio-
matic from which a prescriptive politics follows, Deleuze claims that we
have to endure entanglements if we are to claim to follow through a
thought of immanence immanent only to itself. The political question to-
day will not find an effective response without changing what it is that is
being questioned. Foucault saw this in one of his interviews from 1984,
when asked by Paul Rabinow what his own stand towards politics was:
I have never tried to analyze anything whatsoever from the point of view of
politics, but always to ask politics what it had to say about the problems with
which it was confronted. I question it about the positions it takes and the
reasons it gives for this; I don’t ask it to determine the theory of what I do. I
am neither an adversary nor a partisan of Marxism; I question it about what
it has to say about experiences that ask questions of it. (Foucault 1997a: 115)
While Deleuze’s thought puts more emphasis on potential resistances,

the openings of lines of flight and of escapes,22 he nonetheless follows
this cautious Foucauldian line whenever he speaks of politics in the
concrete, that is, in its actuality. The non-unifiable concept of the ‘body
without organs’ illustrates this just as much as the deterritorialising series
of ‘becomings’ developed in A Thousand Plateaus. Rather than judging
such caution as revealing a weak approach to political actuality, it is
up to us finally to learn that this indirect approach is precisely not an
escape from the world but a rigorous transformation of the question of
politics according to the practice of a thought that affirms its absolute
immanence. Whoever we are, we need reasons to believe in this world.
It is, however, important to realise fully the inexistence of any dative
whatsoever that could contain this immanence. Instead of again referring
to nameable truths, we have to learn to turn the question, and with it the
apparent political vacuum, into a practice that – at its best – confirms a

belief in this world, as it is, wherein our ability to resist will be assessed
on the level of our every move.
It is here that one last time we come up against the significant heritage
of Spinoza. The Spinoza who not only is the prince of philosophy when
it comes to the question of immanence but who is also the principal point
of reference when it comes to both entangling and disentangling the
questions of ontology, ethics and politics. And while both Badiou and
Deleuze share this heritage, Spinoza at the same time represents the line
of delimitation that must be drawn between them. For, whereas Deleuze
values Spinoza’s affective realism as fundamental to an understanding
of the latter’s metaphysical and political system, it is Spinoza’s rigour
in the mathematisation of the world that Badiou clearly favours (and
where he ultimately also sees his limits). While it is much too early
to jump to the conclusion that it is precisely because of these two
different Spinozas that we find such different political agendas in the
two philosophers – one prescriptive and the other, as I have called it,
realistic – what can definitely be concluded at this moment is that it is
because of Badiou’s negligence of Spinoza’s theory of affects that he
must ultimately criticise and reject Spinoza as a metaphysical thinker
who forecloses ‘the void’ – which, according to Badiou, alone represents
the possibility ‘of thinking multiplicity, on the one hand, and novelty, on
the other’ (Gillespie 2001: 63). The debate over the relation between the
philosophical claim of immanence and the quest for political activism
here reaches another level of sophistication that will require further
analysis. My aim in this article was to reach this point. Right now, the
quest to link immanence and politics unfolds in two diverging directions:
either formalisation (Badiou) or actualisation (Deleuze); that is, radical
fidelity to the axioms of truths and universality on the one hand and
active experimentation with resistances and negotiations on the other.
Notes
1. I am especially indebted to Deleuzian scholars such as Braidotti, Grosz, Marrati
and Patton who in regard to the question of politics not only illuminate Deleuze’s
thought but also push his thinking in fruitful new directions.
2. I have also developed this demand of philosophical thought as ‘active thought’
in my book The Thought of Becoming: Gilles Deleuze’s Poetics of Life (Thiele
2008).
3. Interview with Catherine Clément, ‘Entretien 1980’, L’Arc, 49, cited in Patton
1984.
4. The reference to a ‘Spinozan realism’ will recur in this article. It is most
clearly articulated in the famous beginning of Spinoza’s Tractatus Politicus
42 Kathrin Thiele
(1677) in which the philosophical temptation to approach the subject matter in

question (in Spinoza’s case ‘men’) ‘not as they are, but as they [the philosophers]
themselves would like them to be’ is rejected and a realist approach to ‘what
is’ – ‘not what is new and unheard of, but only such things as agree best
with practice’ – is taken as the only valid method for an effective conceptual
investigation (Spinoza 1956: Introduction).
5. While the formula ‘always already yet never once and for all’ cannot rid itself
completely from the Heideggerian ‘always already’ as it determines Heidegger’s
definition of Dasein as ‘always already ahead of itself’, here it rather stands
for the attempt to bring to language the logic of repetition in difference that
is the beginning (without beginning) of Deleuze’s thought-practice as such: ‘the
repetition of an internal difference which it incorporates in each of its moments,
and carries from one distinctive point to another’ (Deleuze 1994: 20).
6. Cf. also Paul Patton: ‘Nomadology certainly does not offer any political
program, any more than did schizoanalysis. Nor does it offer any
straightforward political morality, in the sense of imperatives addressed to
subjects . . . the question is never simply one of good or bad, but of the specificity
of each case . . . It is a matter of assessing the qualities present in a given situation
or the true nature of a given process: is it a creative or a destructive line?’ (Patton
1984: 79–80).
7. The French version says: ‘Je ne proposerai donc en tout ceci qu’un seul impératif,
mais celui-là sera catégorique et inconditionnel: ne faire jamais de politique’
(Foucault 2004: 6). In the English edition of the lectures, the expression ‘ne faire
jamais de politique’ is, however, translated as ‘never engage in polemics’ (cf.
Foucault 2009: 4). While, considering the actual context, the translation seems
possible, Foucault’s having meant ‘politics’ is, of course, much more provocative
than if he had merely stated – in a real philosophical manner – that one should
not engage in polemics. Since for my purposes it is important to push Deleuze
and Foucault as far as possible on this, I take the French ‘politique’ to translate
as ‘politics’, no matter that, for example, in the interview ‘Polemics, Politics,
and Problematization’ from 1984, the first question Paul Rabinow asks is the
following: ‘Why is it that you don’t engage in polemics?’ – an apparent repetition
of Foucault’s 1978 ‘categorical imperative’. See Foucault 1997a.
8. This ‘beyond’ must of course not be read in a Levinasian sense, in which it
signifies a gesture towards (necessary) transcendence – absolute Otherness.
9. ‘The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion’, says
Emerson in one of his most important essays (Emerson 1983: 261). Given
Deleuze’s many references to the Anglo-American tradition, its ‘superiority’ in
what concerns literature (cf. Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 36–76), and the pervasive
re-turn to an empiricist line of thought originating in William James’ radical
empiricism (cf. e.g. Deleuze 1997: 68–90, esp. pp. 88ff), reading the ‘empiricist
conversion’ in such an ‘American way’ is not too far fetched.
10. For both the central notion of belief in James and his radical empiricism, cf. his
famous essay ‘The Will to Believe’ (James 1956: 1–31), and his Essays in Radical
Empiricism (James 2003).
11. ‘What the world is capable of’ is not merely another phrasing of the usual
moral of ‘what should be’, as it can be found in most (post-Kantian) practical
philosophy. The latter refers the ‘what is’ to something else – ‘a dative’ as Deleuze
and Guattari say – and thus reintroduces the transcendent, while ‘what the world
is capable of’ enacts the Spinozan credo of a logic of pure force-relations.
12. Deleuze and Guattari use this term to name their politico-philosophical
undertaking in A Thousand Plateaus.
13. Cf. Branka Arsić’s work on the American literary and philosophical tradition
(Arsić 2007, 2010).
14. Such as, for example, Hannah Arendt would have it in a Augustinian heritage.
Cf. her dissertation on St Augustine from 1929 (Arendt 1998).
15. For the characterisation of philosophical thought as an ‘infinite task’, cf. Gasché
2007, in which he also discusses Deleuze as ‘Thinking Within Thought’. Cf. also
his most recent study on Europe, or The Infinite Task (Gasché 2009).
16. Again, it is important to refer here directly to Spinoza’s Tractatus Politicus
which, read in conjunction with his Ethics, effectuates precisely such a
construction: a most rigorous affirmation of ‘what is’, based on the premise that
‘what is’ is a measure of power and not essence, for ‘no one has so far determined
what the body can do’. For Spinoza’s discussion of natural right in the Political
Treatise cf. Spinoza 1956: ch. II; and with regard to his central statement from
The Ethics see Spinoza 2000: EIIIP2 S.
17. On the thought of the outside, cf. Foucault 1997b.
18. For a more detailed discussion of the diverging lines of thought of Badiou and
Deleuze in regard to ‘immanence’ and ‘ontology’, leading into a discussion of
how to understand the different/ciation of virtual/actual in Deleuze, cf. Thiele
2008: especially part V, 164ff.
19. While in the argument developed here the categorical concept of ‘truths’ –
reintroduced into the domain of both philosophy and politics by Badiou – is
contested because of its conceptual shortcomings in the face of a political
thought based on immanence, Badiou’s extrapolation of the problem alongside
Descartes’ early ‘intuition of the same order regarding the ontological status
of truths’ (Badiou 2008: 5) is a most fruitful discussion of how the concept of
truth/s could be torn away from a far too reductive positivist category, to be
thought as ‘generic multiplicities’ (6).
20. One of the clearest discussions of the differences between Badiou and Deleuze
can be found in Sam Gillespie’s Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist
Metaphysics (Gillespie 2008). For the same cluster of questions, this time also in
respect to their readings of Spinoza, cf. Gillespie 2001.
21. For Badiou’s well-elaborated political thought in which the categories of
truth(s) and universality play a most significant role, see especially Badiou 2003
and 2005.
22. This is what especially the feminist legacy in Deleuzian scholarship (Braidotti,
David-Ménard, Grosz, Marrati, to name just a few) has most poignantly shown
by engaging with the Deleuzian concepts of difference, immanence, nomadology
and bodies. Instead of painting yet another grand picture of thought beyond
different/ciation, theirs is the task of furthering and carrying forward this
condition for a different future. To give just one example (from Elizabeth Grosz):
‘[F]eminist politics should, I believe, now consider the affirmation of a politics
of imperceptibility, leaving its traces and effects everywhere but never being able
to be identified with a person, group, or organization. It is not a politics of
visibility, or recognition and of self-validation, but a process of self-marking
that constitutes oneself in the very model of that which oppresses and opposes
the subject’ (Grosz 2005: 194).
References
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Judith Chelius Stark, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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CA: Stanford University Press.
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Arsić, Branka (2010) On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.
Badiou, Alain (2005) Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker, London and New York:
Verso.
Badiou, Alain (2007) Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray
Brassier, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Badiou, Alain (2009) Logic of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano,
New York and London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York:
Deleuze, Gilles (1997) Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel Smith and Michael
Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (2000) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, London: Athlone Press.
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Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (2006) ‘On the Superiority of Anglo-American
Literature’, in Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam,
New York and London: Continuum, pp. 27–56.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1983) ‘Self-Reliance’, in Essays and Lectures: First and
Second Series, New York: The Library of America, pp. 259–82.
Foucault, Michel (1997a) ‘Polemics, Politics and Problematization’, in Ethics:
Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 1, New York: The New
Press, pp. 111–20.
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Blanchot: The Thought from Outside and Michel Foucault As I Imagine Him,
Foucault, Michel (2004) Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Cours au Collège de
France, 1977–1978, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil.
Foucault, Michel (2009) Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de
France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gasché, Rodolphe (2007) The Honor of Thinking: Criticism, Theory, Philosophy,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gasché, Rodolphe (2009) Europe, or the Infinite Task, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Gillespie, Sam (2001) ‘Placing the Void. Badiou on Spinoza’, Angelaki, 6:3,
pp. 63–77.
Gillespie, Sam (2008) Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist Metaphysics,
Melbourne: re.press.
Grosz, Elizabeth (2005) Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
Hallward, Peter (2006) Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation,
London and New York: Verso.
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London: Continuum.
Patton, Paul (1984) ‘Conceptual Politics and the War-Machine in Mille Plateaux’,
SubStance, 13:44–5, pp. 60–81.
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Oxford University Press.
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Berlin/Zürich: Diaphanes Verlag.
The Common as Body Without Organs
Vidar Thorsteinsson Ohio State University
Abstract
The paper explores the relation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s
work to that of Deleuze and Guattari. The main focus is on Hardt and
Negri’s concept of ‘the common’ as developed in their most recent book
Commonwealth. It is argued that the common can complement what
Nicholas Thoburn terms the ‘minor’ characteristics of Deleuze’s political
thinking while also surpassing certain limitations posed by Hardt and
Negri’s own previous emphasis on ‘autonomy-in-production’. With
reference to Marx’s notion of real subsumption and early workerism’s
social-factory thesis, the discussion circles around showing how a
distinction between capital and the common can provide a basis for
what Alberto Toscano calls ‘antagonistic separation’ from capital in a
more effective way than can the classical capital–labour distinction. To
this end, it is demonstrated how the common might benefit from being
understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual apparatus, with
reference primarily to the ‘body without organs’ of Anti-Oedipus. It
is argued that the common as body without organs, now understood
as constituting its own ‘social production’ separate from the BwO of
capital, can provide a new basis for antagonistic separation from capital.
Of fundamental importance is how the common potentially invents a
novel regime of qualitative valorisation, distinct from capital’s limitation
to quantity and scarcity.
Keywords: the common, body without organs, biopolitical production,
Marxism, communism, value theory
It is well known that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work owes
much to the thought of Gilles Deleuze. Negri co-operated with Deleuze
and Guattari during his exile in Paris; he wrote texts with Guattari and

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110001121
he shares with Deleuze a passion for Spinoza. Furthermore, Michael

Hardt is the author of an introductory book on Deleuze’s philosophical
writings from the 1960s (Hardt 1993), and Hardt and Negri mention A
Thousand Plateaus as one of the two ‘models’ for their book Empire (the
other being Marx’s Capital) (Hardt and Negri 2000: 415). While it is
necessary to understand the relationship between these authors through
their shared appreciation of philosophies of materialism and immanence,
for example those of Marx and Spinoza, they also share to a large degree
an understanding of certain developments in contemporary capitalism.
Interesting comparisons can be made between Deleuze and Guattari’s
later, more explicitly social theory, as put forth in the Capitalism
and Schizophrenia volumes, and Hardt and Negri’s trilogy Empire,
Multitude and Commonwealth. Here we will explore how Hardt and
Negri’s relatively newly developed concept of the common complements
Deleuze and Guattari’s political thought, while also demonstrating how
it might benefit from being understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s
terminology, and in particular their concept of the ‘body without organs’
(BwO), as it appears in Anti-Oedipus.1
Hardt and Negri claim to rely heavily on ‘the excellent commentaries
of Gilles Deleuze’ on the passage from disciplinary society to the society
of control in Foucault’s work (cf. Hardt and Negri 2000: 22–3, 419).
Deleuze interpreted Foucault as having implicitly analysed the arrival
of post-industrial societies of control, where the disciplinary capitalism
of the factory is replaced by more fluid forms of control characterised
by a regulation of space that is open, and dependent on internally
motivated cooperation of its subjects (Deleuze 1992). This corresponds
in many ways to Hardt and Negri’s description of advanced capitalistic
societies where older, Fordist modes of production have been replaced
by more flexible, immaterial and ‘feminised’ ones (Hardt and Negri
2009: 131–5). Hardt and Negri maintain that since the 1970s a new
technical composition of labour has begun to dominate in what they
term ‘biopolitical production’. Simultaneously, Foucauldian biopower
completes a process in which the inner, subjective life of the worker has
been fully subsumed under capital, turning the worker into both the
subject and object of work.
Michael Hardt, however, ‘both adopts and inverts Michel Foucault’s
usage’ of the term biopower, in a manner that emphasises not only
its oppressive aspect but also its liberating potentials (see Hardt 1999:
90, 98–9). In this, Hardt and Negri build upon similar approaches
already developed to some extent by the Italian workerists’ thesis of the
‘social factory’. This thesis is based on passages in Marx’s Grundrisse
48 Vidar Thorsteinsson
and Capital relating to ‘real subsumption’ and the ‘general intellect’.2

Marx’s notion of the general intellect indicates ‘to what degree general
social knowledge has become a direct force of production’ (Marx
1973: 706), general social knowledge here referring to, for example,
the level of education, technical skills and other immaterial assets that
are required for workers and machines to fulfil their function. Real
subsumption refers to the stage in capitalist development when capital
has increased ‘the value of its operations to the point where it assumes
social dimensions’, in which ‘the immediate purpose of production is to
produce as much surplus value as possible’ (Marx 1976: 1035, 1037).
That is, all of society’s productive powers have in actuality been directed
towards maximisation of surplus value and capitalist social relations
entirely subsume and transform the labour process.
The social-factory thesis, of which Negri was one of the main
proponents in 1970s Italy, consequently argues that class composition
has to be understood not solely in terms of factory-workers versus
capital owners, but as a more extensive system containing also unwaged
labour, women’s work inside the household, students, the unemployed,
etc. Surplus-producing labour, then, comes to be seen as not confined
to the interior of the factory, but as dispersed throughout society as a
whole.3
I. Dilemmas of Autonomy
What these descriptions of the developments of contemporary capitalism
have in common – regardless of whether we call them societies of
control, the social factory, biopolitical production, or the capitalism
of real subsumption – is a notion of the immanence of capitalist
productive relations to all of social life. Capitalism is no longer an
objective structure to which subjects can oppose themselves, because
even subjectivity is already moulded and produced by capital: labour
and capital – defined by Marx as ‘variable’ and ‘fixed’ capital (Marx
1976: 317) – tend to become one. The emphasis on this aspect of
Marxism in workerist thought is well explained by Nicholas Thoburn
in his discussion of Raniero Panzieri. Panzieri argued that capitalistic
productive relations (that is, the social structure of capitalism) could
not be distinguished from capitalistic productive forces (that is, labour
and its subjective and social composition): ‘The forces of production
thus had capitalist relations immanent to them in a “unity of ‘technical’
and ‘despotic’ moments” ’ (Thoburn 2003: 77, quoting Panzieri).
This resonates perfectly with Foucault and Deleuze’s poststructuralist
account of power as immanently constitutive of social structures rather

than as neutral to them, and even more so with Deleuze and Guattari’s
schizoanalysis where there is no distinction in nature between desiring-
production and social-production but only in regime (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 31). Hence, it is difficult to imagine an ‘outside’ to
productive relations, and it becomes hard to see what physical or mental
activity is not already social or immaterial labour. Hardt and Negri
phrase it thus:
the capitalist market is one machine that has always run counter to any
division between inside and outside. It is thwarted by barriers and exclusions;
it thrives instead by including always more within its sphere. . . . In its ideal
form there is no outside to the world market: the entire globe is its domain.
(Hardt and Negri 2000: 190, see also 413)
In real subsumption, there is no outside to neither capital nor market;

‘work is always already capital’ (Thoburn 2003: 109), and labour
loses its autonomy as it emerges structured by capital. Despite the
problematic created by labour and capital becoming increasingly
indistinguishable, Hardt and Negri have remained remarkably faithful
to Italian workerism’s ‘reversal of perspective’. Mindful of how the
operaismo and autonomia movements of the Italian 1960s and ’70s were
able to reverse the dominant perspective on labour towards viewing
it as the site of political energy and resistance, Hardt and Negri see
biopolitical production as not only exploitative and oppressive. In work,
there remains the potential for autonomous productive organisation that
could serve the needs of workers in a supposedly communist manner –
even if work has undergone significant transformations with the decline
of Fordism. Simultaneously, they have continued to emphasise resistance
as ontologically prior to the powers of state and capital (Hardt and Negri
2005: 64). In fact, they maintain that the global emergence of Empire is
not only the result of capital’s own dynamics of expansion but a reaction
to working-class struggles in the occident, national liberation struggles
in the global south, and state socialism (Negri and Dufourmantelle 2004:
60). Hardt and Negri emphasise that any separation from or refusal of
capital must – paradoxically, as it were – be socially and economically
grounded in capitalistic productive relations and in fact they state that
any ‘theoretical effort in this context to pose the autonomy of the
political, separate from the social and the economic, no longer makes
any sense’ (Hardt and Negri 2005: 78).
The major theme of Hardt and Negri’s research, at least since the
publication of Empire, has been to grapple with the challenge of how
it would be possible to radically oppose capital while not introducing

any ideological separation from it that would entail betraying the
tenets of a materialist philosophy of immanence; an opposition that
would make sense despite the pervasiveness of social and biopolitical
production. This attempt can be traced further back to the workerist
notion of the operaio sociale or ‘socialised worker’, originally developed
by Negri (Wright 2002: 171–5). An attempt to formulate the socialised
worker’s opposition to capital is contained in the notion of ‘autonomy-
in-production’, which tries to formulate an antagonistic autonomy from
capital.4 This autonomy is not gained by negating an increasingly
cognitive and subjectively internalised labour-process, but by affirmation
of workers’ power and productivity along the militant lines of a
workerist reversal of perspective.
Some critics, however, have argued that Hardt and Negri’s notion
of autonomy-in-production is untenable. Thoburn is one such critic,
agreeing in his book Deleuze, Marx and Politics that certain ‘[n]ew
aspects of social productivity might escape for a little while’ (Thoburn
2003: 98) and could indeed become the ‘driving force of production’, but
nevertheless insisting that such a situation could really only develop in
‘disciplinary space’, not in contemporary spaces of biopolitical control.
Thoburn phrases his argument thus:
Indeed the capitalist socius has many little lines of flight, even autonomous
zones where creation is allowed to operate outside of capitalist relations of
productivity . . . before they are generalized as a new productive activity; but
such spaces (or lines of flight) enrich rather than contradict capital. (Thoburn
2003: 98)
Thoburn goes on to point out that Negri’s image of the autonomous,

socialised worker of the Italian 1970s – which later mutates into the
multitude of Hardt and Negri’s eponymous book – has a tendency to
exceed Deleuze and Guattari’s political horizon, especially in terms of
what Thoburn calls the latter’s ‘minor’ characteristics. Thoburn quotes
Guattari as claiming that even though there are interesting ways in
which new productive forces contain liberating potentials, ‘capital still
operates as the universal plane’ of these forces (Thoburn 2003: 98).
And Deleuze, we should recall, gives a similar kind of warning in his
‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, speaking of how the new and
seemingly more flexible spaces of late capitalism ‘could at first express
new freedom, but . . . could participate as well in mechanisms of control
that are equal to the harshest of confinements’ (Deleuze 1992: 4). For
Deleuze and Guattari, this position will only offer modest opportunities
for resistance, which Thoburn designates with the terms ‘cramped’ and
‘minor’, implying that radical politics must be ‘premised on cramped,
impossible, minority positions where social forces constrain movements’
(Thoburn 2003: 90). If this is the case, then it seems indeed like Hardt
and Negri’s notion of autonomy-in-production as an effective strategy
against and beyond capital is mistaken, or worse, a self-delusion. This
dilemma is well put by Alberto Toscano in a recent essay:
The challenge today is to think an antagonism that would not be
entirely detached from the conditions of production and reproduction of
contemporary capitalism. The mere positing of duality, say between Empire
and multitude, without the conflictual composition that can provide this
duality with a certain degree of determinateness, can arguably be seen to
generate a seemingly heroic, but ultimately ineffectual horizon for theoretical
analysis and political militancy. (Toscano 2009: 127)
What a truly radical autonomy from capital requires, again in Toscano’s

words, is the ‘twin affirmation of an integral immanence of capitalist
relations to the social (of a thoroughgoing socialisation of production)
and of the radicalisation of the antagonism between capital and
labour’ (Toscano 2009: 111). Such an antagonism would amount to
perceiving ‘communism as separation’ (110) from the social fabric that
simultaneously sustains its immanent foundation.
II. Bodies of Disjunction

Taking the cue from Toscano’s twofold challenge, I think it may be
convincingly argued that Hardt and Negri’s notion of autonomy-in-
production already fulfils the demand of being sufficiently rooted in
the production and reproduction of capital – in fact, most of Hardt and
Negri’s critics maintain that their theory is too immersed in these; too
immanent, as it were.5 Therefore, it seems like the question of whether
‘autonomy-in-production’ entails sufficient antagonism between capital
and labour is the more pertinent one.
Hardt and Negri’s latest work, Commonwealth, is perhaps their
most innovative attempt at the formulation of just such an immanent
antagonism. However, it does not consist of an antagonism between
capital and labour in the classical sense. What Hardt and Negri
are proposing is an antagonism of a new kind: the antagonism
between capital and the common. This juxtaposition, I argue, is Hardt
and Negri’s attempt at giving autonomy-in-production the necessary
foundations to overcome a ‘seemingly heroic’ posture eventually
generalised by the plane of capital, but also at resolving the dilemmas

that the social-factory thesis inevitably creates by its fusing of labour
and capital. This could, then, also allow Hardt and Negri to exceed
the cramped and impossible space of Deleuze and Guattari’s minor
politics in a more successful way than before, when simple autonomy-
in-production was lacking the notion of the common. In fact, Negri
has stated that the common is his main point of divergence from
Deleuze and Guattari. In a recent volume, Negri puts it clearly:
‘the common constitutes indeed the crucial element differentiating my
theorization . . . from Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization’ (Negri and
Casarino 2008: 118).
What is the common then, and how does it attain antagonistic
autonomy while being at the same time grounded in the productive
relations of actually existing capitalism? How does it remain faithful to
Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of immanence while also subverting
capital in an antagonistic manner? What kind of phenomenon is it?
In answering these questions I take advantage of the fact that the
exact ontological status of the common still remains fairly fluid and
open in Hardt and Negri’s writings. Even though Negri grants that
‘the common in the end is that which differentiates most [his] thought
from Deleuze and Guattari’s thought’ (Negri and Casarino 2008: 120),
I would like to suggest an interpretation of the common which relies
heavily on a key concept from Deleuze and Guattari’s work. I will try to
demonstrate that the common is in fact a ‘body without organs’, albeit
of a kind that is not anticipated in concrete terms in the two volumes
of Capitalism and Schizophrenia where the concept is developed. This
will demonstrate that while Hardt and Negri develop a ‘major’ politics
as opposed to Deleuze and Guattari’s minor politics, their thinking
continues to be lucidly interpretable in light of a Deleuzo-Guattarian
conceptual apparatus.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s presentation, different bodies without
organs (BwOs) pertain to different regimes or relations of production,
different ‘abstract machines’ corresponding to the productive machinery
and organisation characterising a particular mode of production.
This applies to production in the universal sense developed in Anti-
Oedipus, regardless of the split between desiring-production and social-
production characteristic of capitalism. In Anti-Oedipus, the BwO is
most prominent in Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of psychoanalysis
and desiring-production, and less so in their treatment of capitalism
and social-production, where the ‘full body’ of the socius comes to the
fore. Hence it might seem more appropriate to discuss a given social
regime – despotism, capitalism or, as I will attempt, the common – as a

socius or full body. The benefit of sticking with the conceptual tool of
the BwO, however, is that it provides us with a level of abstraction that is
suitable for the discussion of an as-yet unrealised social formation. This
is in no way an illegitimate use of the concept, for the difference between
social-production and desiring-production is not a difference in nature
but only in regime, as already noted (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 31).
According to the description in Anti-Oedipus, the BwO is linked to ‘a
full body that functions as a socius’ but is distinct from the historically
separate social formations designated by different sociuses as its more
general, universal condition. This socius may be the ‘body of the earth’
(savagery), the body of the tyrant (despotism), or the body of capital
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 10). Deleuze and Guattari claim that
the ‘body without organs belongs to the realm of antiproduction’ and
that it ‘couples production with . . . an element of antiproduction’ (8).
This antiproductive element of organisation and selection is required
for a specific desiring-machine to sustain its production; this is its
BwO. Its function is, specifically, to add the disjunctive synthesis of
recording, selection and differentiation to what would otherwise remain
a directionless and accumulative desiring-production invested through
the connective synthesis.6 With some degree of simplification, we can
say that the disjunctive synthesis of selection and recording performed
by the BwO corresponds to Marx’s relations of production, while the
more primal connective synthesis of undifferentiated accumulation is
characteristic of the forces of production.
Despite the abstractness of the concept of the BwO, we can now
see how it underlies the relations that define actual social regimes.
The BwO of capital has certain characteristics that serve to distinguish
the socius of capital from the other social bodies. Speaking of older
social forms, Deleuze and Guattari write that ‘[t]he prime function
incumbent upon the socius has always been to codify the flows of
desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists
that is not properly dammed up, channelled, regulated’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 33). This description would, presumably, apply to rigid
social structures such as despotism. But ‘the capitalist machine . . . finds
itself in a totally new situation: it is faced with the task of decoding
and deterritorializing the flows’ (33). Capitalist relations of production,
then, rely on a particular kind of BwO that manages or subsumes
desiring-production without directly controlling it, that is, it functions
by decoding and releasing flows on its surface rather than restraining
them. The encounter of decoded flows of money-capital and the decoded
flows of labour, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is essentially what

gives rise to capitalism, meaning that the task of the capitalist BwO
is not to code or recode but to decode: ‘Capitalism is in fact born of
the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows of production
in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labor in the
form of the “free worker” ’ (33). This decoding is the essential, defining
feature of capital – its ‘very fabric of existence’– and the role of the
surface of its BwO is primarily to ‘register’ these flows by the means
of axiomatisation. And in the case of capital, this axiomatisation takes
the simple form of money rather than the semiotic code characteristic of
savagery and despotism: ‘unlike previous social machines, the capitalist
machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of
the social field. By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it
has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities’ (33). Money, according
to Marx, is the ‘universal or social equivalent’ forming an ‘independent
presence of exchange value’ (Marx 1976: 183, 235) which under real
subsumption is capable of investing the whole social field.
This axiomatic, of course, is Marx’s general formula for capital of
M-C-M (Marx 1976: 247–57). One important consequence of this
axiomatic of the capitalist BwO is that it moves ‘further and further
in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 33) – that is, to be able to create surplus value (the
difference between M and M ), the axiomatic demands a constant cycle
of investment and reinvestment which knows no limits and will for
that reason ultimately pose problems for capital. ‘Value therefore now
becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital’ (Marx
1976: 256), capital which is bound to an everlasting search for surplus
value and will stop at nothing. Deleuze and Guattari phrase it thus:
‘Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the
socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows
of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1983: 33).
Deleuze and Guattari go on to describe how the BwO of capital serves
to continuously repress and destroy the socius, while simultaneously
injecting it with its vast productive energies. In this manner, capitalism
is always acting against limits that are its own creation: ‘capitalism
constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this inherent tendency while
at the same time allowing it free rein; it continually seeks to avoid
reaching its limit while simultaneously tending toward that limit’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 34, see also 303, 320). So, on the one
hand, there is an abstract socius which serves as capital’s ‘fundamental
raw material’ which capital ‘does not confront . . . from the outside’
(33) but immanently, and on the other hand, the BwO of capital
which is in charge of registering the flows on its surface, that is, the
exchange of commodities and labour – thereby forming the basis of the
quantitative axiomatic of value that expresses the ultimate productive
relation of capital, Marx’s M-C-M . Hence the BwO of capital expresses
the characteristics of capital in a twofold way as a relation of production
and also as a corresponding mode of valorisation, requiring a special
kind of value-theory as will be discussed in more detail below.
III. Social-production of the Common

Let us briefly observe how Hardt and Negri define the common in
Commonwealth:
By ‘the common’ we mean, first of all, the common wealth of the material
world – the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty . . . We
consider the common also and more significantly those results of social
production that are necessary for social interaction and further production,
such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth.
(Hardt and Negri 2009: viii; emphasis added)
This emphasis on the common as social production and reproduction

suggests that for Hardt and Negri the common indeed designates a
social relation, a relation of production. Hardt and Negri – even before
Commonwealth – have repeatedly emphasised the social nature of what
is produced in biopolitical production, making frequent use of the
term social production. In Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri claim
that the arrival of biopolitical production poses ‘significant challenges
to traditional concepts and methods of political economy in large
part because biopolitical production shifts the economic center of
gravity from the production of material commodities to that of social
relations, confusing, as we said, the division between production and
reproduction’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 135). They thus echo Deleuze
and Guattari’s use of the term ‘social production’, which is a major
constitutive element in how Deleuze and Guattari see productive and
social relations as being immanently ‘produced’ themselves, that is, the
BwO of a certain socius is a product of a particular kind. The BwO,
in other words, is the product of social production whereas the flows
it registers are the products of desiring-production. Hardt and Negri
speak of the ‘biopolitical economic growth’ of the common as ‘a process
of social composition’ (284), that is, as a production of the socius.
The fundamental difference between Hardt and Negri’s social pro-

duction in relation to the BwO of capital, and Deleuze and Guattari’s, is
that for the latter this social production is not pictured otherwise than as
the social production of that same body of capital. Desiring-production
on the BwO of capital may seek and create lines of flights, but social
production is always exclusively an extension of capital’s BwO.7 Hence,
even though Deleuze and Guattari picture BwOs as corresponding to
modes of production (savagery, despotism and capitalism, respectively),
they articulate neither how one such BwO comes to succeed another nor
how the BwO of capital could be transformed.
For Hardt and Negri, conversely, the social production taking place
in capitalism does not exclusively contribute to the perpetuation of
capital’s own BwO: it is producing a new social body, the body of
the common. The common, as Hardt and Negri state clearly, is a new
mode of production, socially produced by the existing body of capital:
‘Every mode of production, capital included, at first powerfully expands
productive forces but eventually holds them back, thereby generating
the foundations of the next mode of production’ (Hardt and Negri
2009: 298), that ‘next mode’ clearly involving the common. Hence,
the ‘counteracted tendencies’ of contemporary biopolitical capital are
not merely internal to it, but are constituted by the presence of
two heterogeneous and conflicting social elements: capital and the
common.
A useful way of distinguishing between the biopolitical production
of capital and the biopolitical production of the common, then, is to
view capital and the common as separate bodies, even though the latter
emerges from the former by means of immanent social production.
‘[T]he biopolitical process’, Hardt and Negri write, ‘is not limited to
the reproduction of capital as a social relation’ – that is, it is not
entirely limited to the social production or reproduction of the BwO
of capital as it seems to be on Deleuze and Guattari’s account – ‘but
also presents the potential for an autonomous process that could destroy
capital and create something entirely new’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 136).
Biopolitical, social (re)production begins to introduce its own, separate,
BwO, the BwO of the common.
The common thus attempts to give new foundations to ‘autonomy’
under real subsumption: it is an economic regime that radically subverts
and distinguishes itself from capital’s BwO while simultaneously
remaining ‘immanent’ to it. Capital is increasingly dependent on the
common as its source of wealth, and hence the common is ‘immanent’ to
biopolitical production in capital even as these are two distinct bodies.
IV. Opposed Regimes of Value

There are many ways to picture the juxtaposition of the common with
capital and how it might successfully replace the conceptually and
practically untenable distinction between capital and labour. I argue
that its most explosive aspect, however, is contained in the incompatible
modes of valorisation intrinsic to the respective bodies of the common
and capital. The actual relationship between the two bodies as they
currently exist, in Hardt and Negri’s description, is such that while
the common forms the body of autonomously organised biopolitical
production, capital forms the exploitative body which hovers over
it – having to invent novel ways of extracting surplus value from
it. These ways of exploitation are part new and part old. They are
old in the sense that they involve a recourse to what Marx termed
‘primitive accumulation’: ‘And insofar as today’s neoliberal economy
increasingly favors accumulation through expropriation of the common,
the concept of primitive accumulation becomes an even more central
analytical tool’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 138). But they are new in
the sense that they account for the growing hegemony of the most
advanced form of capital, finance capital: ‘The key for finance is that
it remains external to the production process. It does not attempt to
organize social labor-power or dictate how it is to cooperate. It grants
biopolitical production its autonomy and manages nonetheless to extract
wealth from it at a distance’ (289). Postmodern, financialised capital,
then, depends on and exploits the common in a way that is different
from Fordist capitalist management. We have already seen how the
exploiter (capital) and the exploited (the common) have acquired two
distinct BwOs, which form essentially different productive regimes. This
means that exploitation – the extraction of surplus value – has to adapt
itself to this reality with a fitting mode of valorisation. The BwO of
capital that Deleuze and Guattari describe in Anti-Oedipus involves
some characteristics that can be directly related to the new mode of
valorisation that is a fundamental and novel part of Hardt and Negri’s
theory of the common. Deleuze and Guattari write that the BwO of
capital
will give to the sterility of money the form whereby money produces money.
It produces surplus value . . . It makes the machine responsible for producing
a relative surplus value, while embodying itself in the machine as fixed capital
[i.e. machinery]. Machines and agents cling so closely to capital that their
very functioning appears to be miraculated by it. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:
10–11)
Here, Deleuze and Guattari are of course dealing with the riddle of how
money seems able to generate more money – a capacity for limitless
multiplication that the common and finance capital actually seem to
share. Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari seem inclined to solve this
riddle by referring to the classical Marxist distinction between labour
and capital, quoting Marx’s discussion in the third volume of Capital
of how the ‘productive powers and the social interrelations of labour
time . . . seem transferred from labour to capital’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1983: 11). Deleuze and Guattari seem content to describe capitalist
valorisation as completely explainable by the labour–capital distinction,
speaking of the ‘apparent objective moment’ (11) of money begetting
more money as ‘fetishistic’ and ‘miraculated’ – always requiring the
input of abstract labour, the cornerstone of Marx’s theory of value.
At other points, however – and much more in line with the real
subsumption thesis, whereby labour becomes increasingly indistinguish-
able from capital and hence unable to account on its own for the
creation of value – Deleuze and Guattari seem to be advancing a more
complex theory of how surplus value would actually be created on the
BwO of capital. Indeed, as Thoburn points out, Deleuze and Guattari
maintain that capitalism depends less on the quantitative extraction
of surplus value via exploitation of labour and more on a ‘complex
qualitative process’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 543), although this
process remains largely unexplained. This kind of surplus value cannot
be accounted for by hypothetical allocation of socially necessary labour
time and would require a whole new theory of value. Such a theory,
Thoburn argues with reference to Guattari’s work, would have to
conceptualise what Guattari calls machinic surplus value as ‘based
on qualitative intensity and variation of work’ (Thoburn 2003: 97).
However, Deleuze and Guattari’s emergent value-theory of qualities
remains ambiguous as to how machinic surplus value is really created,
and does not detach itself fully from the classical Marxist notion that
such an ‘abstract-machinic’ or ‘social’ surplus value would have to be
understood as somehow untenable, fetishistic or miraculated.
A theory of qualitative value, however, is unequivocally demanded
by Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth. They seem to argue that such
a new theory of value could not truthfully apply to capital, which
on their thesis is always and inevitably ‘constrained by the logic of
scarcity’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 283). The biopolitical cycle, on the
other hand, has ‘to be understood now in relation to the qualities of the
common’ (284). These qualities are not translatable onto the surface of
the BwO of capital and this incommensurability is demonstrated by the
fact that ‘when capital accumulates the common and makes it private,
its productivity is blocked or lessened’ (288). Here we see an emerging
juxtaposition of two modes of valorisation, corresponding to the two
different modes of production: the quantitative logic of scarcity that is
a by-product of capital, and the qualitative logic of excess and growth
that belongs to the common.
On the body without organs of the common, the apparatuses of
capture of the capitalist BwO appear as fetters and limitations to
productivity, perhaps akin to the elements that ‘botch’ the BwO as
described in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 166).
Hardt and Negri give an outline of a new theory of value that could
account for these problems:
The critique of political economy, too, including the Marxist tradition, has
generally focused on measurement and quantitative methods to understand
surplus value and exploitation. Biopolitical products, however, tend to exceed
all quantitative measurement and take common form, which are easily shared
and difficult to corral as private property. (Hardt and Negri 2009: 135–6)
Subsequently, Hardt and Negri draw a comparison with the standard
numerical columns of debit and credit in conventional quantitative
economy, and move on to pose the question thus: ‘How can one
create an economic table filled with qualities?’ (Hardt and Negri 2009:
287). Although this question remains an open one in Commonwealth,
I suggest that we interpret it as opening towards a solution of Deleuze
and Guattari’s problematic notion of machinic surplus value. It seems
that the BwO of capital is actually not capable of any valorisation
other than of the quantitative kind. This, then, would be a description
commensurable with both Marx’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of
capital as a quantitative axiomatic in which exchange value (quantitative
by nature) fully dominates. The features that seem to contradict this –
that is, abstract-machinic surplus value, qualitative social production,
the production of subjectivities and so forth – can now be understood
as part of biopolitical production, not properly belonging to the BwO
of capital, but to the BwO of the common. This machinic surplus value
might of course still appear as ‘miraculated’ on the BwO of capital, but
only if we fail to perceive that it is in fact created (not miraculated) on
another BwO: the BwO of the common.
V. A Common Program
Let us now readdress Toscano’s challenge: to ‘think an antagonism’
closely related to ‘the conditions of production and reproduction of
contemporary capitalism’ while holding ‘a certain degree of deter-

minateness’ (Toscano 2009: 127). What the common brings together
and clarifies are two aspects of biopolitical production: First, social
production, which is now understood as the social production of the
common as a new relation of production, or a new BwO. Thus, social
forces do not necessarily constrain the movements of the multitude, as
Thoburn argues with reference to Deleuze and Guattari (Thoburn 2003:
90); rather, the multitude produces its own socius because the ‘surplus’
of social production under biopolitical capitalism is, of course, also
social in nature: it is the common. Second, the common seems to provide
us with a new kind of BwO on which it would be possible to theoretically
account for the creation of qualitative machinic surplus value – social in
nature, which could be called ‘abstract-machinic surplus value’. On the
BwO of the common, such a social surplus value would neither have
to be seen as ‘miraculated’ or fetishised as Deleuze and Guattari would
have it, nor as requiring a recourse to a pre-biopolitical labour-theory of
value which makes an untenable distinction between labour and capital.8
Eugene W. Holland writes that considerations of the ‘different
relations of production’ that could potentially free difference (meaning
surplus value) from capitalist axiomatisation – such as the productive
relations here ascribed to the common – ‘already point well beyond any
capitalist horizons, about which Deleuze and Guattari are not inclined
to say very much at all’ (Holland 1997: 531). The common certainly
points beyond these horizons, and, primarily because of the novel ways
in which value can be created by and within the common, arguably
does so better than Hardt and Negri’s previous concept of autonomy-
in-production. The merit, hence, of introducing what I am here calling
the BwO of the common is that it links the notion of the common
to Deleuze and Guattari’s insightful analysis of capitalist valorisation
and social production, while also transcending their silent or ‘minor’
horizon. It articulates a dimension of conflict with capital that reaches a
truly ‘social’ level; immanent to the social field, yet extending beyond the
cramped and minor position Deleuze and Guattari limit themselves to.
It falls outside the scope of this essay to describe what concrete
forms the antagonism between capital and the common might take
in future social struggles. Let it suffice to mention two practical
advantages offered by insisting on the capital–common distinction:
First, the common is a very apt tool for analysis of the evolving and
complex dynamics of post-Fordist capitalism, especially as they relate to
immaterial labour and production, direct exploitation, financialisation,
and debates over intellectual property. Thus, the common contributes
significantly to a Jamesonian ‘cognitive mapping’ of the apparent

mysteries of postmodern capitalism. Second, the common offers a
framework for political activism that is grounded in the economic
contradictions of the current social order. Such a framework does
not limit itself to, say, minor lines of flight, voluntarism, racial and
gender identity politics, communicative action or antagonism within
social discourse, to name only a few examples of the modest terrains
marked out by leftist theory over the last decades. The common offers
an opportunity to revisit the old Marxist insistence on the social
embeddedness of any radical ideology; communism not only as an idea
but also as a movement springing from within the social body.
Perhaps unexpectedly for a consistent critic of Hardt, Negri and
poststructuralist tendencies within Marxism in general, Slavoj Žižek
has in fact emphasised the importance of Hardt and Negri’s concept
of the common for the first three of what he calls the four
‘possible antagonisms’ contained in contemporary capitalism: ecological
catastrophe, intellectual property, biogenetics and social exclusion
(Žižek 2009: 53). Even though Žižek implies mistakenly that the
fourth antagonism does not fall within the domain of the common,
his acceptance of the common as a designator for the revolutionary
challenges of the near future indicates that the common–capital
distinction could become the basis of a communist programme extending
well beyond the scope of Hardt and Negri’s current readership.9
Notes
1. It falls outside the scope of this paper to fully examine the variations of the
concept of the BwO through Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense and his and Guattari’s
A Thousand Plateaus. See, however, note 7.
2. Marx discusses real subsumption (as opposed to formal subsumption) in his
appendix to Capital Volume I (Marx 1976: 1034–38). A helpful analysis of
the social-factory thesis and its relation to readings of Marx can be found
in Thoburn 2003, especially Chapters 4 and 5, ‘The Social Factory’ and ‘The
Refusal of Work’, as well as in Chapter 6 of Wright 2002. See also Read 2004,
Chapter 3, for a thorough discussion of formal and real subsumption.
3. Mariarosa Dalla Costa was ‘the first of the workerists to advance a coherent
case for the claim that the extraction of surplus value could occur outside the
sphere Marx had designated as the direct process of production’ (Wright 2002:
134–5).
4. I imitate Thoburn’s use of the phrase ‘autonomy-in-production’. Negri and
Hardt more often use the phrase ‘autonomous production’ (see e.g. Hardt and
Negri 2000: 276; 2009: 334, 364).
5. To name one example of such a critique, Slavoj Žižek equates Hardt and Negri’s
socio-political analysis with a ‘fascination’ for contemporary capitalism (Žižek
2007: 47). This is paralleled in Žižek’s critique of Deleuze, whom he views as
‘the ideologist of late capitalism’ given the aptness of his and Guattari’s analysis
in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes (Žižek 2004: 293).
6. For a concise analysis of the three syntheses (connective, disjunctive and
conjunctive) developed in Anti-Oedipus see Holland 1999: 26–35.
7. It should be noted, importantly, that in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and
Guattari begin to develop their understanding of the body without organs
in a direction that is somewhat more inimical to capitalist social production
than in Anti-Oedipus. However, it can be concluded that the productive
capacities of the BwO of A Thousand Plateaus are either directed solely towards
desiring-production (i.e. not social production), or towards extremely ‘cautious’
modes of social assemblage that would certainly conform to Thoburn’s ‘minor’
interpretation of Deleuzian politics. The BwO of A Thousand Plateaus is
described in terms of ‘disarticulation’, ‘experimentation’ and ‘nomadism’ and
stands opposed to ‘organisms’ of any kind. However, its separation from existing
structures – the organism, the sign and the subject – demands ‘[c]aution’ and
skilful negotiations with ‘the dominant reality’ so as not to bring it ‘back down
on us heavier than ever’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 176–8).
8. It is important to keep in mind that Hardt and Negri are not offering a full-
fledged value-theory of common qualities and their surplus. Cesare Casarino
indicates the extent of ontological research required for such a theory, which
would account for the ‘two radically different modalities of surplus’ constituted
by capital and by the common (Negri and Casarino 2008: 30). Perhaps the most
exciting challenge for a new theory of value would be to address the question
of money, thus posed by Hardt and Negri: ‘Might the power of money (and
the finance world in general) to represent the social field of production be,
in the hands of the multitude, an instrument of freedom, with the capacity
to overthrow misery and poverty? . . . We cannot answer these questions
satisfactorily yet, but it seems to us that efforts to reappropriate money in this
way point in the direction of revolutionary activity today’ (Hardt and Negri
2009: 295).
9. This essay is based on a paper of the same name delivered at the conference
‘Deleuze and Activism’ at the University of Cardiff on 13 November 2009.
References
Deleuze, Gilles (1992) ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, trans. Martin Joughin,
October, 59 (Winter), pp. 3–7.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus, trans. Helen R. Lane,
Robert Hurley and Robert Seem, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Massumi, London: Continuum.
Hardt, Michael (1993) Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hardt, Michael (1999) ‘Affective Labor’, boundary 2, 26:2, pp. 89–100.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2005) Multitude, London: Penguin Books.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2009) Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Holland, Eugene W. (1997) ‘Marx and Poststructuralist Philosophies of Difference’,
South Atlantic Quarterly, 96:3, pp. 525–42.
Holland, Eugene W. (1999) Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, London and

New York: Routledge.
Marx, Karl (1973) Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy,
trans. Martin Nicolaus, New York: Vintage Books.
Marx, Karl (1976) Capital Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Books.
Negri, Antonio and Anne Dufourmantelle (2004) Negri on Negri: Antonio Negri
in Conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, New York:
Routledge.
Negri, Antonio and Cesare Casarino (2008) In Praise of the Common: A
Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Read, Jason (2004) The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the
Present, Albany: State University of New York Press.
Thoburn, Nicholas (2003) Deleuze, Marx and Politics, London: Routledge.
Toscano, Alberto (2009) ‘Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri and the Subject
of Antagonism’, in A. Toscano and L. Chiesa (eds.), The Italian Difference:
Between Nihilism and Biopolitics, Melbourne, re.press, pp. 109–28.
Wright, Steve (2002) Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian
Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto Press.
Žižek, Slavoj (2004) ‘The Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution’, Critical Inquiry, 75 (Winter),
pp. 292–323.
Žižek, Slavoj (2007) ‘Multitude, Surplus, and Envy’, Rethinking Marxism, 19:1,
pp. 46–58.
Žižek, Slavoj (2009) ‘How to Begin From the Beginning’, New Left Review, 57
(May–June), pp. 43–55.
Activist Materialism
Dimitris Papadopoulos University of Leicester
Abstract
This paper explores a form of activism that operates with and within
matter. For more than 150 years materialism has informed activist
practice through materialist conceptions of history and modes of
production. The paper discusses the ambivalences of these previous
configurations of activism and materialism and explores possibilities for
enacting activist interventions in conditions where politics is not only
performed as a politics of history but as the fundamental capacity to
remake and transform processes of matter and life. What is activism
when politics is increasingly performed as a politics of matter? What is
activism when it comes to a materialist understanding of matter itself?
Keywords: activism, materialism, matter, Marx, minor science,
technoscience
I. 1844
The real unity of the world consists in its materiality. . .
(Engels 1987 [1878])
The recent resurgence of materialism poses questions about its

implications and relevance for politics. Rather than addressing
institutional or representational politics I am interested here in tracing
the connections of materialism to the transformative politics of social
movements: collective direct activism on the immediate level of social
and material life. In each particular historical chronotope there is a
distinctive set of social movements which become capable of initiating
social change. How is materialism related to these transformative

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110001133
forces? And what kind of political activism do today’s novel forms of

materialism promote?
The articulation between materialism and activism is unstable, full of
discontinuities and breaks. It is in Marx and the early rebellions that
took place in the ‘New World’, and in the Communes and uprisings
across Europe, that materialism first becomes directly linked to political
activism: activist materialism. Since then materialism has been the target
of interrogation not only from idealist positions and various dualist
ontologies but also more recently from within the very political forces
of the western post-1960s Left which were embracing materialism in
one form or another. Critiques from the Left did not position themselves
outside the materialist movement, they were not first and foremost an
opposition; rather, it was an immanent movement enunciated from the
very core of materialism itself that lasted up until the 1980s and 1990s
and finally ushered a new version of materialism to the fore. Deleuze
and Guattari’s work exercised an important influence on the movements
that attempted to rework materialism. During the long history of the
encounter between materialism and activism both of them changed
meanings, and each new formation of the one influenced the meaning
of the other, producing new configurations of social practice.
Marx’s work is probably the first attempt to connect activism and
materialism on the level of everyday political practice. The Theses on
Feuerbach exemplifies the articulation between materialism and activism
in a remarkable and equally unexpected way. Thought objects and
abstract contemplation are what Marx tries to defy, that is, idealism.
The movement which changes society is the movement which opposes
idealism. It is real, objective, that is, material, says Marx. Marx’s
materialism is conceived as sensuous everyday practical activity which
has the capacity to change the material conditions of existence. The
moment of transformation is the moment when, to use Marx’s term,
civil society collapses and a new social material order emerges. This very
modern understanding of materialism was epitomised in The German
Ideology: here communism is not ‘an ideal to which reality have to adjust
itself’; it is ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’
(Marx and Engels 1846: 48).
It is in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) that
Marx introduces a new definition of materialism grounded on inserting
political activism into the understanding of materiality. Here he uses the
concept of ‘species-being’ to describe human activity as the process of
the self-making of the human species in a direct practical and organic
relation to other species and the whole of the natural world. Despite
66 Dimitris Papadopoulos
its essentialist connotations, ‘species-being’ is as close as one can get to a

radical understanding of a form of self-instituted collective emancipation
in which cooperation and interaction among humans as well as between
humans and the material world is crucial (Dyer-Witheford 2006). For
Marx the question is to uncover both what impedes this process, i.e. how
capitalist labour alienates ‘species-being’, and how collective material
self-transformation is possible. Who controls the process of material
transformation, who participates and in which position, are questions
which drive Marx’s activist reading of materialism. This materialism is
activist because it is a ‘life activity’, in the literal sense: ‘life engendering
life’. There is no social transformation outside of the material realm.
Marx’s early materialism avoids the pitfall of epistemology: the
attempt to distinguish between a strong materialist perspective which
gives absolute primacy to matter (all that exists is matter) and a weak
materialist perspective that puts the emphasis on how we conceive
matter (all that exists is dependent on matter). Such an epistemological
definition of materialism wouldn’t be sufficient to distinguish it from
idealism because at the end what we define as matter would involve
an idealist move. From an epistemological viewpoint both positions,
the materialist as well as the idealist one, are in principle tenable. But
Marx’s early materialism is ontological through and through: there
is no transformative activity which is non-material. Since activity is
inherently material, matter itself cannot be conceived as an outside or
as an object of human practice: matter is humanity’s body. ‘Species-
being’ is the collective metabolic transformation of matter: activist
materialism. There is a monist understanding of matter here that
resonates with today’s neo-materialism (for a superb example of the
new materialism see Bennett 2010), so much influenced by Deleuze and
Guattari’s work which will be discussed extensively later in the paper.
For now we can say that both Marx’s early materialism and today’s
neo-materialism share a strong emphasis on matter as a vital force:
inorganic matter as well as biological and social life are movements
of matter itself. Nevertheless, in terms of Marx’s early definition of
materialism, merely highlighting the importance of materiality as an
assemblage of heterogeneous forces is not enough to account for
the kind of transformative political engagement that was his main
concern. Marx’s monist ontological materialism is infused with an
activist dimension which takes place on the actual everyday life of
‘species-being’: the collective capacity to affect material change. Marx’s
ontological reading of materialism is one that focuses on practice, but
a form of practice which is not solely in the hands of people but also
depends on non-human forces (‘nature’). Practice and matter cannot be

thought independently. And the reason for this is not epistemological
but political: activist materialism is a response to capital’s breaking
up of the ‘species-being’ into classes and races. Materialism without
activism is not transformative, in fact it is impossible. This is the
quintessence of Marx’s early account of a practical ontology and an
activist materialism. What happens to this configuration of materialism
34 years before the bicentenary anniversary of the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts?
Marx’s and in particular Engels’ late work contains a second reading
of the activist materialism developed in their early writings: dialectical
materialism. ‘Diamat’ consolidated the absolute emphasis on matter but
introduced a different conception of its role which had tremendous
impact on theorists of the Second International and the emerging
Marxist social movements. ‘Diamat’ foregrounded activist materialism
as a rather dogmatic epistemological doctrine that gradually removed the
practical ontological concern with matter and subsequently transformed
the meaning of activism. Already in the early writings there are
numerous instances where, instead of the practical ontology described in
the previous paragraphs, we find a relation to nature dominated by the
ideal of progressivism and the total human mastery of nature’s laws. This
understanding also changed the meaning of activism. In Anti-Dühring
(1878) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1886) Engels set out a materialist
cosmology that served to define activism as a political practice which
is mono-causally determined by a set of laws extracted from nature:
historical materialism. This is characterised by both a bifurcated dualist
ontology – with objective material reality and its inherent laws on the
one hand and social practice on the other – and also by a reduction
of materiality to human social institutions and structures. Activism
was reduced to the efficacy of changing social structures. Historical
materialism announces the erasure of the activist materialism to be found
in the early works of Marx and Engels.
II. 1908
Moscow! Moscow! Moscow! (Irina in Chekhov 1900)
In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism Lenin follows this line and

conceives materialism exclusively as a theory of knowledge. He writes:
‘For the sole “property” of matter with whose recognition philosophical
materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of
existing outside our mind’ (Lenin 1908: 260). Materialism here starts
from the assumption of an ontological duality, two separate entities:

matter on the one hand, mind on the other. Lenin reduces materialism
to gnosiological realism, while the activist materialism of the early Marx
was one which asserted a monist ontology: mind is matter, the unity
of the world is sustained by its materiality and the immanent action of
matter and mind alike. Lenin’s approach is a radical departure from a
position which is concerned with bringing together practice and matter.
Rather, his concern was to develop a conceptual instrument which splits
ideas in two opposite camps. While Marx and Engels’ early activist
materialism was concerned with how matter is changing and can be
changed, Lenin’s materialism was developed as a strategic tool for the
selection of the social and political forces of his time which might
potentially transform into a revolutionary historical subject.
Lenin was building a war machine. He was trying to develop a
philosophical conception of materialism which had no other target
than to reveal the functioning of a deep social dichotomy between the
working class and capital (for an extended analysis of these issues see
Jordan 1967). His only goal was to submit theory to the everyday
requirements of his revolutionary practice. This was truly phenomenal
and unparalleled (albeit fatal). With his philosophical work Lenin
developed a tool to extend the social division as far it could go, to
the far end of mind and the history of ideas. In the unsurpassable
What Is To Be Done? (1902) Lenin claims that social conflict penetrates
every corner of society, every social relation, every idea. Nothing is
untouchable by class antagonism, it takes a partisan organisation and a
revolution to change it. This is partisan philosophy and partisan practice.
And it is a truly activist move; however this particular move enacts a
different materialism. It is carried out in the name of materialism but it
is not an activist monist materialism. It is one which subsumes matter
and dominates nature in the name of historical progress. If Marx’s
early materialism was of a kind which proclaimed the irresistibility of
revolution on the grounds of a unified monist movement of matter
and activism, Lenin’s materialism is dualist, elevating irresistibility to
something completely different: the will for action.
‘Materialism must be a form of idealism, since it’s wrong – too’
(Sahlins 2002: 6). Marshall Sahlins’ aphorism concentrates the post-
Second World War predicament with the configuration of an activist
materialism à la Lenin. Lenin’s reduction of monist materialism
to gnosiological realism had far-reaching consequences for the
philosophical scaffolding of the social forces which found themselves
entangled in the Marxist enterprise and in the emerging working-class
movements from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the

1970s and 1980s. The most important consequence was that gradually
materialism failed to contribute to an ethical and political programme
for the everyday enactment of activist practice. Activist materialism
became everything but activist, quickly turning into an ideology of
state socialism and an abstract philosophical system. In the post-Second
World War period, materialism gradually lost its strength as an ethical
project for revolutionising everyday practice.
III. 1977
Always historicize! (Jameson 1981)
The end of the 1970s probably saw a peak in the process of an immanent
critique of materialism which rendered visible its contradictions as
inherited from the Leninist period. The following quote from Raymond
Williams displays the state of thought and mood among politically
committed left intellectuals at the time:
It took me thirty years, in a very complex process, to move from that received
Marxist theory (which in its most general form I began by accepting) through
various transitional forms of theory and inquiry, to the position I now hold,
which I define as ‘cultural materialism’. The emphases of the transition – on
the production (rather than only the reproduction) of meanings and values by
specific social formations, on the centrality of language and communication
as formative social forces, and on the complex interaction both of institutions
and forms and of social relationships and formal conventions – may be
defined, if any one wishes, as ‘culturalism’, and even the crude old (positivist)
idealism/materialism dichotomy may be applied if it helps anyone. What I
would now claim to have reached, but necessarily by this route, is a theory of
culture as a (social and material) productive process and of specific practices,
of ‘arts’, as social uses of material means of production. (Williams 1980: 243)
During the period of the crisis of materialism which unfolded in the

decades between 1950 and 1990 the notion of culture reordered the
existing meanings of materialism and fuelled the development of a new
constellation of concepts and activities into the heart of the social conflict
of the post-war period. Of course, not all of the various movements and
critiques of materialism embraced the notion of culture. The point here is
not to unify these extremely diverse movements and traditions under one
overarching rubric. Rather, what is of importance is that the insurgency
against the previous materialism evolved in proximity to new everyday
activities whose many faces and actions pertain to changing cultural
power (see Gilbert 2008; Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos 2008).
This turn to culture thoroughly changed the way political activism is

performed, moving the target away from the state itself towards power’s
pervasive materialisation in the whole societal nexus: in terms of gender
relations, racialisation processes, social institutions, social and civil
rights, the political representation of excluded groups, and so on. Many
societies, many cultures, many socialisms, Raymond Williams would
have said. This remaking of materialism corresponds with the practices
of new social forces that found themselves outside the traditional
organisational forms of the working-class movement which appeared as
the inheritor of the materialist politics of the previous periods. The new
politics of cultural counterinsurgency, not least as exemplified in the new
youth cultures of the 1960s and the variously globalised events of 1968,
spread across the globe with a velocity far beyond the wildest utopian
dreams that Soviet propaganda bureaucrats and western communist
parties ever imagined for their own materialist politics (see Connery
2005).
But where exactly was the materialism in this activism which
propelled itself through cultural politics? The most likely answer is that
there was very little materialism in this ‘cultural materialist’ politics, at
least not in the sense of an activist and practical ontology concerned
with a monist understanding of matter (as in Marx’s early version).
Nor was there much of the materialism of the late Marx/Lenin period
with its strong focus on gnosiological dualism and the efficacy of social
structures. Cultural politics questioned both versions of materialism
and developed along many disparate and diverse paths: all of which
were, however, occupied with the centrality of representation and its
critiques. ‘Discourse’ seems to have been one of the paths that helped
this move. Ironically, the discursive turn and the turn to language set
in motion an activist politics which followed the activist materialism
of the previous decades. Umberto Eco’s The Open Work (Eco 1989)
and James Clifford’s collection Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus
1986), as well as the broader linguistic turn (Rorty 1967) and the
interest in hermeneutics (Gadamer 1989), are just some examples of
intellectual engagements that marked the path to the undiscovered
continent of representation. It was through the changing of meanings
and the challenging of representations that the very process of social
activism was now being performed.
Another important path for the revision of materialism that developed
during this period came from an interest in social space as a key
battlefield for social antagonisms. How is space regulated, appropriated
and re-appropriated by marginalised social groups? Marxist inspired
readings of everyday space (Lefebvre 1991), the situationist movement

(Debord 1981), and cultural geographers (Harvey 1990) all turned to
kaleidoscopic remakings of space in order to articulate an everyday,
mainly urban, activism that made radical interventions in the politics of
post-war Europe and North America possible. The attention to space as
lived experience is closely related to body politics. The body becomes
an open substratum for the inscription and re-inscription of social
signification. In this sense signification moves from the mind itself to
the body and emerges in a process of subjective embodiment through
a social context (cf. Csordas 1994; Harré 1996; Overton 1998) or
through cultural-political constellations (cf. Bourdieu 1987; Braidotti
2002; Fausto-Sterling 2000).
But actually what the activism of the post-war period was mainly
preoccupied with was subjectivity and difference (Blackman et al. 2008).
As cultural studies has so vividly shown, subjectivity is always in the
making because it entails a non-expressed otherness, a non-discursified
and imagined possibility of social relations (Hall 1990; Papadopoulos
2006). Such a theoretical move was particularly important in a period
where identity politics occupied a central place in the political life
of the societies of the Global North (Clifford 2000). Already in the
1970s and 1980s, cultural studies, feminist politics, anti-racism and
gender studies identified the limitations of an activist materialism
qua Lenin which saw social consciousness either as committed to
working-class change or as wrong and ideological. In resonance with
Althusser’s take on ideology (Althusser 2001), new social movements
focused on the emergence of multiple political subjectivities that
defy straightforward classification as wrong (false consciousness) or
right (revolutionary) according to previous conceptions of activist
materialism. Crucial for this attempt was the process of articulation
(Clifford 2001; Hall 1986a; Slack 1996). Activism here is conceived as
a movement of articulation which by rethinking Gramscian hegemony
attempts to contest domination through ‘rendering the symbolic
increasingly dynamic, that is, by considering the conditions and
limits of representation and representability as open to significant
rearticulations and transformations under the pressure of social practices
of various kinds’ (Butler 1997: 23; see also: Hall 1986b; Laclau
and Mouffe 1985). This understanding of political subjectivity as
subjectification and the result of articulation is what essentially
captured activist practices in this period, positioning subjectivity in the
tension between coercion by institutional mechanisms and articulation
through them.
Cultural politics challenged previous versions of materialism on the

grounds of an increasing diversification of social strata and classes.
It is this diversification that brought a new form of activism which,
rather than focusing on materialism was concerned with the fight for
representation. In this struggle, discourse, space, body and subjectivity
are approached as constitutive of an oppositional politics of difference.
Cultural studies, women’s studies, postcolonial studies and queer politics
have all participated in and critiqued this fight for representation (see
Hall and Jefferson 1976; Clifford 1986; Sedgwick 1990; Spivak 1999;
Warner 1999; Butler, Laclau and Žižek 2000; Mouffe 2000). The
importance of representation comes from the dissolution of social class
as the central actor and political force in society. The political order
of transnational neoliberal societies is an order which is supposed to
be occupied by multiple players working to foster alliances between
themselves and to establish new relations of power. And it is precisely
this form of relationality which triggers the imperative for representation
(Stephenson and Papadopoulos 2006). Representation enters the realm
of politics as the attempt to give voice and operative agency to social
groups who have been excluded by the politics of the traditional versions
of activist materialism. We can trace the singular trajectories of these
emergent oppositional subjectivities of new diverse social groups in civil
rights movements, in the events of 1968, in feminist movements, anti-
work movements and new forms of social cooperation, in the 1960s
cultural rebellions and in the fight against colonialism and racism.
IV. 1987
The only enemy is two. (Deleuze 2001)
However deep the break between Leninist activist materialism and the
cultural materialism of the post-war period might be, there remains
nevertheless a peculiar form of continuity. Lenin’s materialism reduced
activism to the radical intentionality of a subject determined to reflect
the antagonistic conditions of existence. Cultural materialism retained
this reduction but introduced a differentiation with respect to the subject
itself. Instead of a unified self-identical subject we now have a plethora of
subjectivities and of possible contexts in which they are constituted. This
break implied a deep change in the way political activism was conceived:
Leninist activism subsumed every activity under a single social conflict
between labour and capital, while the activism of cultural politics
multiplies the fronts on which social antagonisms are encountered and
fought. Nevertheless, despite this radical break, both positions retain

a strange commitment to epistemological dualism. Representation and
ideas are the battleground on which the conceptualisation of activism
thrives. It is about negotiating and transforming the conditions of
thinking and feeling that make activism possible. In a peculiar way
cultural materialism followed Lenin’s path in focusing on how we
represent reality. What cultural materialism introduced was a new
conceptualisation of the main determinants of representation. It is no
longer the class structure of society but rather the endless variability
of social contexts that allows different configurations of representation.
In this sense the question for cultural activism becomes one of how
reality is constructed in the subject itself, or ‘social constructionism’.
In both positions, however, practice and matter are subsequent to ideas;
and despite their pervasive critiques of dualism, both retained a dualist
ontology. Here is Deleuze and Guattari’s well-known diagnosis of this
situation:
We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We employ a

dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all
models. Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms
we had no wish to construct but through which we pass. Arrive at the
magic formula we all seek – PLURALISM = MONISM – via all the dualisms
that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever
rearranging. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 20)
In much of their work, and most centrally in A Thousand Plateaus,

Deleuze and Guattari introduce a monist materialism which attempts to
rehabilitate matter from its enslavement in representation. Their move
is co-extensive with the (re-)appearance of a form of materialism that
puts the primacy of matter on the agenda of political practice and
theory after the 1990s and creates the possibility for the emergence of
a novel configuration of activist materialism. Strangely enough it was
the poststructuralist faction of the cultural activism of the previous
decades that prepared the way for this move – in particular feminist
materialism, the attention to the body, as described earlier, and the
persistent but evasive attempts to put materialism back on the agenda
(one need only recall Althusser’s (2006) subterranean movements).
But even more crucial to the reinvigoration of activist materialism is
the increasing impact of scientific knowledge on everyday life and on
the structures of production in the Global North that posit matter
as an active, self-ordering, emergent player in a radically post-human
world (see Papadopoulos 2010). Matter is before thinking, matter is in
thinking, matter is everywhere. For Deleuze and Guattari there is no

empty space, there is always matter and matter is always differentiated.
Representations are a particular form of differentiation in their own
right, they do not exist prior to or vis-à-vis matter. Representations
are movements of matter as much as genetic mutations or geological
movements are. Deleuze and Guattari’s point is not to eliminate the
distinctive importance of representations and ideas, rather, their claim
is that when representations are considered as separated from matter
they become strategic tools for ordering material reality. Representations
are closures and reterritorialisations that are used as powers to organise
matter in a particular way.
The materialism emerging gradually after the 1990s focuses on the
question of monism instead of concentrating on the binary opposition
between materialism and idealism. It is this very dichotomy that
undermines monist materialism. It is not about which position you
take in this thinking, it is about the very act of taking a position.
For Deleuze and Guattari the real enemy of materialist thinking is not
idealism, it is dualism. ‘The only enemy is two’ (Deleuze 2001: 95).
Materialism after the 1990s is an anti-dualism that gradually transforms
the relation between activism and materialism that informed most of
social movements during the Leninist period and after: matter and
mind, activism and materialism start to fuse again into one process.
The practice itself, the site of action and its thinking, gradually became
equally important for the activism of the 1990s. It is not a coincidence
that many of the social movements of this period and since focus
on the question of reclaiming. The activism of reclaiming attempts
to re-appropriate the immediate spaces of existence by simultaneously
transforming them through everyday actions: reclaim the streets, reclaim
the city, earth activism and the permaculture movement, the remaking
of transnational spaces through migration movements, radical queer
activism and the building of new social relationalities and communities,
cyberactivism, the alter-globalisation movement, the production of the
commons. In all of them we encounter an emphasis on reclaiming
material spaces and relations vital for developing new alternative social
and material projects (for an extended discussion see Papadopoulos
et al. 2008; Chesters and Welsh 2006). This was, of course, also a central
characteristic of previous forms of political activism, in particular of
feminism. But the primary difference here is that either the question of
reclaiming social and material spaces was not conceptualised as such or
else was considered secondary with regards to the ‘real’ and ‘primary’
struggle, which was supposed to focus on radical demands addressed to
the state and its institutions in respect of recognition and representation.

In contrast, the activism emerging after the 1990s, and in particular since
the Zapatista movement, is less concerned with the state’s mediation;
instead it consciously attempts to force existing institutions to change by
creating alternative materialities and forms of life.
Deleuze and Guattari’s monist materialism captures a key moment of
this form of activism that reconnects us with the activist materialism
of the early Marx described at the beginning of this paper. It is the
question of how to change matter and create new forms through
collective practices. Deleuze and Guattari’s materialism questions how
the very moment of morphing matter comes into being. The emergence
of form is neither the transcendent imposition of a preconceived plan on
matter – forget the architect and the bee – nor is it simply a movement
of self-organised matter that becomes represented in the mind of the
subject – forget autopoietic systems. Neither external plan, nor internal
self-organisation. In this sense, it is neither idealism nor materialism (as
conceived until now). The position Deleuze and Guattari try to develop
is that it is the movement of matter itself that makes both a materialist
as well as an idealist stance possible. Both the capacity to create form
and the capacity to understand the emergence of form are immanent
to existence. There is no monism if there is a dualist option; ‘there is
nothing that is one, there is nothing that is multiple’ (Deleuze 2001:
99). Deleuze and Guattari tried to avoid thinking along the either-or
of materialism and idealism/dualism. The very possibility of thought is
immanent to matter’s movements.
Morphogenesis in Deleuze and Guattari is neither a property of self-
ordering material systems nor the result of a vitalist force that initiates
material change; nor of course is it the ability of the subject’s mind
to form matter according to a preconceived plan. There is something
not immediately present in the actuality of material flows – something
virtual – that makes matter congeal into stratified stable forms. In each
particular setting there is a virtual ordering principle (an abstract
machine in Deleuze and Guattari’s words) that links and connects flows
and properties of matter. An often utilised example in A Thousand
Plateaus is the organism. When does an aggregate of various bodily
processes and functions become a thing which can be called an
organism? An organism is ordered matter – the moment when matter in
flux, in movement, in variation becomes a discernible thing amenable to
intervention, management, manipulation (through medical practice for
example, or in the course of ontogenetic development). Embryology and
biology, medicine and psychology, play an equal role with ontogenetic
change, gene activity, epigenetic interactions and the environment to

produce a coherent story of what an organism is in a particular
historical chronotope. Out of the movement of unformed matter and
non-formalised processes of the body without organs (BwO), as Deleuze
and Guattari call the non-organismic body, we encounter the formed
and stratified form of the organism:
The organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather, it is a stratum on
the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and
sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes
upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations,
organized transcendences. The strata are bonds, pincers. ‘Tie me up if you
wish.’ We are continually stratified. But who is this we that is not me, for
the subject no less than the organism belongs to and depends on a stratum?
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 159)
In this understanding of monist materialism, matter becomes the horizon

and the substratum on which an alternative to the previous versions
of materialism can emerge. Matter becomes (once more) the way to
reconnect activism and materialism. The crucial move for materialism
since the 1990s is to seek in matter an escape from a situation
where the demise of the everyday transformative activist aspect of
materialism became so pervasive. Deleuze and Guattari’s move to a
monist materialism is not a theoretical choice; it is the result of a
political diagnosis according to which any desire for change has been
vampirised by the institutions of the state. Even more than that, in
the previous decades desire itself has been transformed into a capitalist
institution (cf. Holland 2005). Every social struggle is reinserted as a
rejuvenating feature of capitalist production, every social innovation is
made productive. The story of the twentieth century is not a history of
revolutions; it is rather a history of counter-revolutions (Müller 2000)
where every desire has been appropriated, regurgitated and effaced
by capitalism. The bottom line for Deleuze and Guattari’s take on
materialism, as a monist materialism based on a renewed attention to
matter, is the attempt to reactivate the transformative force of desire.
Deleuze and Guattari try to do this by breaking the link between ‘desire’
and ‘desire for’. Every ‘desire for’ is a closure: desire for revolution,
desire for mastering nature, desire for recognition, desire for an identity,
desire for not having an identity, desire for desire. This is the political
move Deleuze and Guattari reinsert into the new materialism: to disrupt
the view that the creativity of people, animals and matter can be viewed
as a desire which can always be folded back into capitalist domination
and valorisation. Every ‘desire for’ is already captured and appropriated.

This is the spell capitalism casts upon life.
The key political ingredient of monist materialism is that desire needs
to be disarticulated from its essential function as something which has
a target and object. The diagnosis: ‘desire for’ is the way capitalism
revolutionises itself. The radical political key to monist materialism is
that it allows desire to be engendered in a way that can move beyond
its recoding into the political closures of the counter-revolutions of
the twentieth century. The prominent role of matter in Deleuze and
Guattari is a small gesture of rebellion against the capture of earlier
materialisms within a docile machine for constantly revolutionising
capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari perform this small gesture of freedom
by inserting indeterminacy into the way desire operates; and they do so
by turning to the underlying indeterminacy of matter: matter is primarily
unformed and in continuous variation, an oscillation between various
intensities, closures and openings. Matter is a political exit. Matter is
escape. The making of a life. Matter can break the capitalist spell.
The turn to matter becomes political when it is articulated in relation
to this understanding of desire. That is why, despite the various attempts
to read Deleuze and Guattari’s materialism in a scientistic way – that
is, as a cosmology attentive to science (see for example De Landa
1997) – what Deleuze and Guattari propose is a rather minor move, one
which attempts to interrupt the appropriation of desire by grounding
it in the indeterminate movements of matter. Deleuze and Guattari
refer to this move also as a science but crucially a minor science (or
a nomad, ambulant, itinerant science). In Proposition III of the War
Machine chapter in A Thousand Plateaus they describe this as a practice
which follows matter’s immanent traits, confronts problems instead
of applying theorems, pushes matter to the next threshold, connects
practical effects and affects of practice. Against a science of matter or
a technology to control it, Deleuze and Guattari emphasise practice as
the key dimension of a minor science that knows how to surrender to
matter. Minor science is a practice which is essentially experimental;
rigorous but not systematic, it directly links activity with matter. It is
here that the neo-materialism of the 1990s and after can once again
become activist, with minor, nomad science on the one hand and the big,
royal, imperial science of the state on the other: ‘What we have . . . are
two formally different conceptions of science, and, ontologically, a single
field of interaction in which royal science continually appropriates the
contents of vague or nomad science while nomad science continually cuts
the contents of royal science loose’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 367). If
there is to be an activism of neo-materialism it will be developed in the

decades to come from the practices of the nomad scientist, the artisan
who operates within the constraints of matter, who follows singular
material possibilities, and who thereby escapes state striation.
V. 2027
Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then – our
friends are not able to finish their stories. (Woolf 1992)
Minor science is embedded in a reality primarily defined by the

centrality of scientific knowledge for the making of a polity in the
societies of the Global North. Politics are increasingly performed
through science itself (cf. Papadopoulos, forthcoming 2011). Physical,
biological, chemical bodies can be thought as political in their own right
(Protevi 2001). Minor science can respond to this tight articulation of
politics and scientific knowledge. Simultaneously scientific knowledge is
a constitutive element of a transformation traversing the societies of the
Global North by becoming increasingly distributed in society (the so-
called ‘knowledge society’). The figure of the ‘socialised worker’ (Negri
2005) captures this move to a mode of production and circulation based
on the valorisation of the totality of life and the intellectual creativity of
the individual worker. In this context, scientific knowledge on the one
hand becomes explicitly political and, on the other, permeates a wider
range of social strata than ever before in the Global North.
Minor science is part of the social material conditions prevailing
today; it operates below and outside state science and yet, as discussed
in the previous section, it is continuously under pressure to be absorbed
into the big science of the state.
The fact is that the two kinds of science have different modes of formalization,
and State science continually imposes its form of sovereignty on the inventions
of nomad science. State science retains of nomad science only what it can
appropriate; it turns the rest into a set of strictly limited formulas without
any real scientific status, or else simply represses and bans it. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 362)
Even the very idea of minor science itself can be buried under the
desire for the new grand theory which can be assimilated into state
science. The minor science of matter can be deployed to support a new
grand system of thought; a grand theory that uses all the fashionable
and marketable concepts and ideas circulating today – complexity,
event, affect, multiplicity, networks, assemblages, etc. – to create a new
meta-framework with which to approach the world. Cosmopolitical

assembling as a new cosmology. A new abstract theory. Producing
a new grand theory is one possible trap for today’s minor science.
A Deleuzian century? This would be the end of every inspiring and
transformative potential of today’s neo-materialism. The unfinished
story of contemporary minor science is that it can so easily become
absorbed into the workings of state science, that is, become a ‘desire
for’ a grand system, a philosophical materialism devoid of its activist
element. This kind of philosophical materialism will then become
nothing but a form of governance of things and events. Latour the
governor, Badiou the priest, Žižek the buffoon: actors in the imperial
court in which state science feeds on the practices of minor science to
produce a new cosmology that shapes technoreality.
Minor science and state science are inextricably bound together. In
fact, minor science exists in the very core of state science. Pamela
Smith has shown how artisan production – probably the most vital
aspect of minor science – was crucial for the emergence of the rationalist
objectivist scientific world-view which came to dominate the western
world increasingly after the sixteenth century. It was the artisans’
work, an intellectual revolution from bottom up, that ‘transformed
the contemplative discipline of natural philosophy into an active one’
(Smith 2006: 239). Artisan science was later codified and appropriated
into a new disembodied epistemology of experimental science. But
experimental science never abandoned artisanal production. In fact
experimental science and imperial science always rely on artisanal
production and the minor science of matter. It was thanks to the
purported modesty of meticulous artisanal efforts that Boyle’s bottom-
up experimental laboratory science won out over Hobbes’ top-down
geometric science (Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Haraway 1997).
This is even more the case today. In experimental science, the
‘discovery’ of ‘natural facts’ and ‘realities of matter’ was a distinct
procedure that preceded possible technological applications. With the
rise of technoscience, such applications become the very drive behind
basic research. Discovery is fabrication. Science is not about observation
but about modification. This situation creates an even more intense
pressure for maintaining minor science, making it part of the fast-moving
world of technoscientific research. In other words, one of the main
characteristics of minor science – its interventionist, direct, ambulant
quality – is now a dominant feature of technoscience itself. Propelled by
the post-Second World War rise of big science, the later proliferation
of the assembly-line industrial scientist (see Shapin 2008), the spread
of an entrepreneurial scientific culture, the neoliberalisation of research

culture and the precarisation of intellectual and affective labour, science
and its applications increasingly fold into each other. Minor science fuels
the everyday workings of contemporary technoscience.
Scientific practices and objects are as much the result of artisanal work
as they are of the precarised labour of industrial scientists and of the
entrepreneurial investments of corporate and state science. The problem
is not so much that minor science and state science meet and collide – an
image which Deleuze and Guattari have pictured in their all too typical
masculinist reading of science as an agonistic field in A Thousand
Plateaus. Rather, minor science and state science co-constitute what
Donna Haraway calls zones of implosion where the boundaries between
human and non-human, nature and artificiality, are meaningless:
‘the chip, gene, bomb, fetus, seed, brain, ecosystem, database’. Such
imploded technoscientific objects make up the conditions of our actual
material presence in the world, they are ‘wormholes that dump contem-
porary travelers out into contemporary worlds’ (Haraway 1997: 43).
The entanglement of minor and state science is the very reality in
which our material existence unfolds. In these conditions the crucial
challenge for minor science is to engage with radical activism again.
Among the questions this activism is facing today are the following: How
can minor science contribute to the immediate making of liveable words
(Haraway 2007; Puig de la Bellacasa 2010; in press)? How can justice be
inscribed in relation to our technological objects, our cells and organs,
the water, the air, the soil? And how can material justice be instigated in
a non-dualistic manner?
As minor science implodes into big state science and itself tends
towards a grand system of thought, rather than theorise this implosion,
it may be we need to fabulate. Thriving in communities which will only
selectively make use of big state science the new activisms that will
emerge in the decades to come will be truly operating on the level of
matter. They will mobilise radical political interventions through intra-
acting with and within matter. The remaking of matter engenders radical
liberation projects. And thus perhaps our almost 200-year-old tale of
emancipation will happily become a reality.
Note
I am grateful to Marcelo Svirsky for his insightful suggestions and
encouragement. Special thanks go to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Hywel
Bishop and Jan L. Harris for their critical engagement with the text.
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Activism, Philosophy and Actuality
in Deleuze and Foucault
Paul Patton University of New South Wales
Abstract
Deleuze and Foucault shared a period of political activism and both drew
connections between their activism and their respective approaches to
philosophy. However, despite their shared political commitments and
praise of each other’s work, there remained important philosophical
differences between them which became more and more apparent over
time. This article identifies some of the political issues over which
they disagreed and shows how they relate to some of their underlying
philosophical differences. It focuses on their respective approaches to
the state, to ‘actuality’ and to the analysis of the present.
Keywords: Deleuze, Foucault, activism, state, actuality, history
But the thought is one thing, the deed is another, and another
yet is the image of the deed. The wheel of grounds does
not roll between them.
(Nietzsche 2005: First Part: ‘The Pale Criminal’)
Much of Deleuze’s career as a political activist involved common
causes with Foucault during the early to mid 1970s. These included
his participation in the Prisoner’s Information Group established by
Foucault, Daniel Defert and others at the beginning of 1971, along with
his role in the campaign later that year in support of immigrant workers
and against racism that was sparked by the shooting of a young Algerian
in the Paris neighbourhood known as the Goutte d’Or (Dosse 2010:
309–13).1 Defert and Donzelot describe the interaction with the prison
environment in and around the experience of the Prisoner’s Information
Group as a pivotal moment in the history of the forms of political

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110001145
activism that emerged in the aftermath of May ’68, suggesting that

it represented ‘a transformation of political intelligence’ (Defert and
Donzelot 1976: 33). Elements of this transformation found expression in
the efforts by Deleuze and Parnet to characterise a new politics and a new
relationship between political and intellectual activism. The final chapter
of Dialogues, published in 1977, develops the idea of radical politics as
experimentation defined in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the
different kinds of line or segments that make up a social field, but also
in terms of the state as agent of realisation of the ‘abstract machines’
that overcode a given society. They invoke a ‘becoming-revolutionary of
people, at every level, in every place, instead of the Marxian concept of a
revolution that changes everything by the capture of state power and the
establishment of new social relations of production’ (Deleuze and Parnet
2002: 147).
Foucault’s work followed a different political trajectory. His 1975–6
lectures at the Collège de France, under the title ‘Society Must Be
Defended’ (Foucault 2003), undertook a critical genealogy of the
discourse of war and domination that had provided the language of
much of his thinking about power. After a sabbatical in the United
States in 1976–7, he embarked on a genealogy of the forms of exercise
of sovereign power that led him to explore elements of liberal and
neoliberal governmentality (Foucault 2007, 2008). From 1980, his focus
shifted away from the exercise of power over others and towards forms
of self-government as theorised by the ancient Greeks.
Both Deleuze and Foucault repeatedly drew connections between their
own social and political activism and their respective approaches to
philosophy. However, despite their shared political commitments and
praise of each other’s work, there remained important philosophical
differences between them which became more and more apparent over
time. Their political collaboration came to an end around the time of
the campaign against the extradition of the Baader-Meinhof lawyer
Klaus Croissant in 1977. In Foucault’s case, as I will show, the political
differences that emerged in 1977 carried over into his 1978 lectures
on neoliberal governmentality. In Deleuze’s case, the precise nature
of their philosophical and political differences is partly obscured by
the highly idiosyncratic account he gives of Foucault’s approach to
philosophy in interviews and in his Foucault, published in 1986 two
years after Foucault’s death.2 The lesson to be drawn is that we should
be wary of taking their views of the relationship between their respective
approaches to philosophy and politics at face value. As Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra reminds us in the passage quoted above, the thinking that
86 Paul Patton
motivates human actions is one thing, the actions another, and neither
of these are identical with the rationalisations or retrospective accounts
given by the actors themselves.
The high point of their common political and theoretical engagement
was undoubtedly the ‘Intellectuals and Power’ interview, conducted in
March 1972 and published in the issue of L’Arc devoted to Deleuze later
that year.3 Together they outline a new conception of the relationship
between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ according to which practice is not the
application of theory, any more than it is the source or inspiration of
theory to come. They reject the idea that there is a single ‘totalising’
relation between theory and practice in favour of a more local and frag-
mentary conception. Theory is neither the expression nor the translation
of a practice, but is itself a local and regional practice that operates
as a series of relays from one practice to another, while practices are
relays from one theoretical point to the next. It is in the course of this
discussion that Deleuze advances the much quoted formula that epito-
mises the pragmatism of their approach: theory should be considered a
tool-box, or a pair of spectacles that may or may not provide a useful
view of the world. If a theory does not help in a given situation, the
theorist-practitioner should make another (Deleuze 2004: 208).
This conception of the theory-practice relation as a series of relays
within a multiplicity of elements at once theoretical and practical implies
a novel conception of the nature and political task of the intellectual as
a multiplicity that connects with other social forces rather than a subject
who represents a class or a group. He or she is, to use Guattari’s term,
a ‘groupuscule’. Deleuze attributes to Foucault the important lesson of
the ‘indignity’ of speaking for others, as exemplified in the practice of
the Prisoner’s Information Group which sought to bring to the public
at large the voice of those imprisoned. In turn, Foucault suggests that it
was one of the lessons of the upsurge of direct political action at the end
of the 1960s in France that the masses have no need of enlightened con-
sciousnesses in order to have knowledge of their situation. The problem
is rather that their own forms of knowledge are blocked or invalidated.
The role of the intellectual therefore does not consist of bringing
knowledge to or from the people but of working within and against the
order of discourse within which the forms of knowledge appear or fail
to appear. More generally, it consists of struggling against the forms of
power of which he or she is both the object and the instrument.
Deleuze endorses the rejection of the distinction between reform and
revolution that we find elsewhere in Foucault,4 along with the idea
that power itself forms a system that is inherently fragile and liable to
unravel at any point. The continuity in the forms of exercise of power, its
cynicism as well as its puerility, is manifest in the similarities between the
treatment of prisoners, schoolchildren and factory workers that Foucault
has demonstrated through his historical account of disciplinary power.
Moreover, the then present (1972) political situation shows how the
different kinds of repression directed at immigrants, workers, students
and young people generally are readily totalised from the point of view
of power. The political conclusion he draws is that it is not for those
struggling against this process and this future to totalise or to work
through existing representative institutions such as unions or political
parties: the task is rather to establish ‘lateral connections, a system of
networks and popular bases’ as well as different mechanisms for the
circulation of information (Deleuze 2004: 210).
Foucault makes the connection between the problem of finding
adequate forms of struggle and the present ignorance of the nature of
power. It took until the nineteenth century to arrive at knowledge of
exploitation, but we remain largely ignorant of the nature of power:
certainly the existing theories of the state and state apparatuses are
inadequate to understand the nature of power and the forms of its
exercise, as is the theory of class power associated with Marxism.
Foucault credits Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, as well as his work
with Guattari, for advancing the manner in which this problem is posed
(Anti-Oedipus was published in March 1972). He implicitly refers to
his earlier comments about working within the order of discourse and
knowledge in suggesting that identifying and speaking publicly about the
centres of power within society is already a first step in turning power
back on itself: ‘If discourses such as those of prisoners or prison doctors
are struggles it is because they confiscate at least for a moment the power
to speak of the prison that is currently held by prison administrators
and reformers alone’ (Deleuze 2004: 211). Perhaps alluding to a lesson
learned from their experience with prisons, he adds that it is not the
unconscious that is challenged by such discourses of struggle but the
secrecy that is all too often the condition of the exercise of power:
‘The discourse of struggle is not opposed to the unconscious but to the
secret . . . The secret is perhaps more difficult to bring to light than the
unconscious’ (211–12).
Deleuze’s response obliquely illustrates their differing attitudes
towards psychoanalysis. He takes up Foucault’s point about relative
ignorance of the workings of power by outlining a summary version of
the thesis developed in Anti-Oedipus concerning the difference between
individual or group interests and desiring-investments: it is the nature
88 Paul Patton
of the desiring-investments in a social body that explains why people

can act against their interests. Foucault agrees that there is a complex
interplay between relations of power, desire and interest and that
people can desire the exercise of power by those who act against
their interests and even their lives, as occurred in the case of fascism
(Deleuze 2004: 212).
Finally, Deleuze returns to the question: how to conceive of the
necessary networks and transversal connections between the different
sites of struggle against power, whether from one country to another
(Vietnam-France) or within a given country? Foucault responds by
describing the current revolutionary struggle as one against power rather
than against exploitation and, as such, one in which the proletariat may
be involved but not necessarily in a leading or pre-eminent role: the
struggles of women, prisoners, conscripts, homosexuals and others also
form part of the revolutionary movement. Their commonality derives
not from a theoretical totalisation but from the system of power itself,
which in countries like France is exercised in a way that maintains
capitalist relations of exploitation. For this reason, Deleuze comments,
‘Every partial revolutionary attack or defense in this way connects up
with the struggle of the working class’ (Deleuze 2004: 213).
Many of the points made in this landmark interview continued to
reverberate through the work of Deleuze and Foucault in the years that
followed, albeit in different guises. Much of Foucault’s work during
the latter part of the 1970s sought to develop new conceptual tools
for understanding power and its relation to knowledge or theory. His
1982 text ‘The Subject and Power’ offers much the same analysis of
the totalisation of micro-powers by a dominant or ruling power that he
gave a decade earlier (Foucault 2000: 326–48). The first lecture of his
1976 course at the Collège de France takes up the question implicitly
posed by his 1972 remarks about the relative lack of understanding of
the nature of power and sets out a series of heuristic principles designed
to reorient the study of power away from the juridical, political and
ideological apparatuses of the state and towards the material operations
of domination and subjectification throughout society, along with the
formations of knowledge that accompany them. At the outset of this
lecture, he returns to the inhibiting effects of global theories in relation
to ‘subjugated knowledges’, defining his genealogical approach as one
that targets ‘a combination of erudite knowledge and what people
know’ – the technical knowledge of the practitioners of particular forms
of power and the disqualified knowledge of those subject to them – and
suggesting that this would not have been possible were it not for ‘the
removal of the tyranny of overall discourses, with their hierarchies and

all the privileges enjoyed by theoretical vanguards’ (Foucault 2003: 8).
The ideas canvassed in the 1972 discussion between Deleuze and
Foucault continue to influence many of those concerned to develop
mutually productive relations between political activism and academic
theorising.5 But this text also shows points of mutual incomprehension
between them. At one point, for example, Deleuze endorses and at-
tributes to Foucault the idea that theory is ‘by nature opposed to power’,
even though Foucault has just suggested that theory always takes place
within an order of discourse and knowledge that is governed by forms
of power (Deleuze 2004: 208). Deleuze appears to understand ‘theory’
to mean something like the conception of philosophy as the creation of
concepts that he later described as ‘in itself’ calling for ‘a new earth and
a people that do not yet exist’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 108). How-
ever, this conception of theory continues to rely on the repressive con-
ception of power that Foucault soon came to challenge. Deleuze refers
here to the radical fragility of the system of power and its ‘global force
of repression’ (Deleuze 2002: 291; 2004: 208; translation modified).
Philosophically, there were always differences between them. Some
of these differences become apparent after the publication of Foucault’s
History of Sexuality Volume 1 in 1976. A letter that Deleuze wrote to
him in 1977, subsequently published as ‘Desire and Pleasure’, sets out
a number of disagreements over the nature of power and its relation to
desire, the relative primacy of desire in relation to power, along with
Deleuze’s reservations about Foucault’s attachment to concepts of truth
and pleasure (Deleuze 2007: 122–34). Some of these differences were
restated several years later in a footnote in A Thousand Plateaus that
reaffirmed the priority of desire over power and the primacy of lines
of flight or deterritorialisation in any given assemblage (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 530–1).
In retrospect, it is not surprising that these differences should have
emerged around 1977. That year was a turning point in the history of
the French left, when the adherence to Marxism on the part of many
who had participated in the forms of activism that flourished after
1968 began to crumble. The reasons for this were complex, but they
coalesced around the issue of Soviet dissidence and the Gulag, along
with the contemporaneous and brief popularity of the so-called ‘New
Philosophers’. For the most part, these were former students of the École
Normale Supérieur who had been taught by Althusser and who had been
engaged in the post-’68 Maoist left: Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jean-Marie
Benoist, Michel Géurin, Christian Jambert and Guy Lardreau. Others
90 Paul Patton
such as André Glucksmann were also associated with this movement.

His book La Cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes (Glucksmann 1975)
was one of the first to combine Foucauldian theses about the ‘Great
confinement’ with evidence derived from Solzhenitsyn and others about
the Soviet camps. Levy’s La Barbarie à visage humaine (Levy 1977) also
drew parallels between Foucault’s account of confinement in Histoire
de la folie and what happened in the USSR. He invoked Foucault by
describing his own book as ‘an archaeology of the present’ and by
drawing on the theory of disciplinary power outlined in Surveiller et
punir to frame his account of modern totalitarianism. In this manner,
David Macey comments, Foucault became ‘part of the new philosophy’s
vulgate’ (Macey 1994: 386).
Foucault’s own engagement with the New Philosophers was more
circumspect. Macey describes a three-page review of Glucksmann’s
Les Maîtres penseurs, published in Le Nouvel Observateur in May 1977,
as his ‘most significant gesture of support for the new philosophers’
(Macey 1994: 387).6 Foucault praised the book for tracing the horrors
of the Soviet Gulag to the manner in which nineteenth-century German
philosophy – Hegel in particular – linked the state and the revolution
such that revolution promised a true and benign state while the state in
turn promised the serene accomplishment of revolution. By contrast, one
month later, Deleuze published a denunciation of the New Philosophers
in which he expressed his disgust at their martyrology of the victims
of the Gulag and of history more generally. He also accused them of
trafficking in big empty concepts such as The Law, The Power, The
Master and so on.7 Macey suggests that the reference to power contained
an implicit rebuke of Foucault and that their differing attitudes towards
the New Philosophers contributed to their ‘increasing estrangement’
(388). Whether or not this was intended, it is true that Foucault and
Deleuze tended to drift apart from the mid ’70s, sometimes taking
different positions on issues of the day. In what follows I focus on
two moments at which important conceptual and political differences
emerged between them. The first turns around the Klaus Croissant
affair at the end of 1977 and their respective conceptions of the state.
The second relates to the respective conceptions held by Deleuze and
Foucault of ‘the present’ (actualité).
I. Genealogy and the State

The extradition of Klaus Croissant in November 1977 was a key episode
that is often cited as a turning point in their relationship, especially by
some of Foucault’s biographers. François Dosse – following a written

response by Deleuze to James Miller some years later, in which he insists
that there was no single cause of their estrangement but a number of
contributing factors – lists the Croissant affair as one among a series of
political disagreements, alongside their different attitudes towards the
New Philosophers and their deep divergence over Israel-Palestine (Dosse
2010: 314). Croissant had been one of the defence lawyers in the trial
of members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in 1975. After having been
charged with supporting a criminal organisation and jailed on more than
one occasion, he fled to France in the summer of 1977 and applied
for political asylum. In response to his arrest by French authorities in
September 1977, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari were among those who
joined a Committee established to oppose his extradition and agitate for
his release from prison. Their activities were to no avail as Croissant
was finally extradited on 16 November, shortly after the suicide of three
leading members of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-
Carl Raspe, in Stannheim and then the killing of abducted businessman
Hanns-Martin Schleyer on 19 October. Foucault and Deleuze were
among the small crowd of protesters outside La Santé prison when
Croissant was removed. However, they took different positions in the
public campaign in his favour. Foucault published several pieces against
the extradition of Croissant, but he refused to sign a petition circulated
by Guattari and signed by Deleuze among others. He considered it too
lenient towards the RAF and preferred to restrict his support to the
lawyer and to the right of accused parties to legal representation.8 Macey
claims that what Foucault found unacceptable in the petition was a
characterisation of the West German state as ‘fascist’: ‘In other words,
Foucault was prepared to fight for Croissant’s right to asylum, but he
would not lend his name to any statement which lent support to a thesis
associated with the Red Army Faction itself’ (Macey 1994: 394). Eribon
offers a slightly milder version of the unacceptable petition, describing
it as presenting West Germany as drifting towards ‘police dictatorship’
(Eribon 1991: 260).
Foucault’s reticence towards any support for the opinions much less
the actions of the RAF has since been taken to imply that Deleuze
and Guattari themselves supported terrorism. The editor of Foucault’s
lectures, Michel Senellart, describes Deleuze and Guattari’s opinion
piece in Le Monde on 2 November 1977 (‘Le pire moyen de faire
l’Europe’9 ) as one that ‘gave backing to terrorist action’ (Foucault
2007: 393 n. 26). It is difficult to reconcile this claim with the text
of the article. The passage cited by Senellart follows comments on the
92 Paul Patton
characterisation of Baader and other members of the RAF by the press

in Germany and France that sought to portray them as Nazis or the
children of Nazis. Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘Leaving aside the search
for filiations, it is simpler to recall that the question of violence, and
even of terrorism, as a response to imperialist violence, has constantly
troubled the revolutionary and worker’s movement since the last century
in very diverse forms’ (Deleuze 2007: 150). There is no evidence to
suggest that Deleuze or Guattari ever condoned the violent actions of
the RAF. There is evidence to suggest that Guattari in particular did
not.10 Both were well aware that the temptation to resort to violence was
real among members of the post-’68 left across Europe and the passage
from their article cited above simply acknowledges this fact. Deleuze and
Guattari’s text presents the issue of Croissant’s extradition as raising
questions about the role of Germany in the emerging European Union.
They suggest that it has acquired a position of strength in relation to
other European governments such that it is able to export its judicial,
police and ‘informational’ model and to become the central organiser of
repression in other countries such as France: a decision by the French
court to allow extradition would in effect favour ‘the importation of the
German state and judicial model’ (149).
Foucault’s increasing distance from the views of his former friends
is apparent in his own comments on ‘the German model’ in lectures
delivered in the first half of the following year (Foucault 2008).
These lectures were the only ones that Foucault devoted to issues
arising directly from contemporary politics.11 They make it clear that
the role of ‘the German model’ in the immediate political context
is part of the reason for undertaking these historical analyses of
neoliberal governmentality, even as they develop an account of this
model very different from that put forward by Deleuze and Guattari:
‘The German model which is being diffused, debated and forms part
of our actuality, structuring it and carving out its real shape, is the
model of a possible neo-liberal governmentality’ (Foucault 2008: 192).
An immediate concern in these lectures is to show that policy shifts
underway in France during this period, such as the abandonment of
a social security system based on the wartime principle of national
solidarity in favour of a system that would provide assistance to
those unable to participate in the economic game without imposing
additional constraints on the market, represent the radicalisation of
themes found in German neoliberal social policy elaborated from the
1930s and adopted after 1945. Foucault’s broader aim is to show that
‘political actuality’ is more complex than is recognised by many of the
proponents of state theory. He points out that the work presented in

these lectures was undertaken partly for what he calls ‘a reason of critical
morality’ that amounts to a direct challenge to the ‘state phobia’ that
was widespread in twentieth-century political thought and particularly
amongst the French extra-parliamentary left during the 1970s. By ‘state
phobia’ he means, firstly, the idea that the state possesses its own
intrinsic tendency to expand, ‘an endogenous imperialism constantly
pushing it to spread its surface and increase in extent, depth and subtlety
to the point that it will come to take over entirely that which is at the
same time its other, its outside, its target and its object, namely: civil
society’ (187). Secondly, state phobia involves the idea that sovereign
power is a phenomenon with its own essential characteristics. At the
heart of this attitude is an essentialist conception of the state such
that administrative, welfare, bureaucratic, fascist and totalitarian forms
of state may all be regarded as expressions of the same underlying
form: ‘there is a kinship, a sort of genetic continuity or evolutionary
implication between different forms of state’ (187).
Elements of this approach can be found among a variety of
Marxist theories of the state as instrument of class domination, or
among anarcho-Nietzschean theories of the state as ‘the coldest of
all cold monsters’ (Nietzsche 2005: 43).12 The concept of the state
outlined in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980) also
retains elements of state phobia. They propose an abstract definition
of the state-form as an apparatus of capture that exists whenever
two fundamental conditions are met: the constitution of a milieu of
interiority and the establishment of a standard or centre of comparison
on the basis of which a surplus can be extracted (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 444). As such, they suggest, there is a ‘unity of composition’
among different kinds of state that is not found in the diverse forms of
nomadic war machine (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 427). Deleuze and
Guattari’s conception of the state is by no means ahistorical: there is an
evolution of forms of state and, even in the present, there are significant
differences between totalitarian, fascist, social democratic and neoliberal
states. Yet these different ‘axiomatisations’ also involve an isomorphism
to the extent that all nation states are particular ‘domains of realisation’
of the underlying capitalist axiomatic (464).
Foucault objects to the essentialism of the state phobic conception that
it licenses the ‘interchangeability of analyses and a loss of specificity’
(Foucault 2008: 188). His aim, by contrast, it to maximise specificity,
for example by showing that the welfare state has neither the same form
nor the same origin as ‘the Nazi, fascist or Stalinist state’ (190).13 Second,
94 Paul Patton
the inbuilt dynamism of the state ensures that, whatever the context and
whatever political process is under discussion, it can always be criticised
by reference to the worse that will inevitably follow: ‘something like a
kinship or danger, something like the great fantasy of the paranoiac and
devouring state can always be found’ (188). As such, the state phobic
conception allows its protagonists to deduce political analyses from first
principles and avoid altogether the need for empirical and historical
knowledge of contemporary reality. In this sense, Foucault argues that
it sustains a critical discourse the value of which is artificially inflated
since it enables its supporters to ‘avoid paying the price of reality and
actuality’ (188; emphasis added). Foucault’s analysis of governmentality
seeks to disqualify this essentialist conception of the state from the
outset. His approach does not seek to extract the essential nature of
the modern state but to question it from the outside by ‘undertaking
an investigation of the problem of the state on the basis of practices of
governmentality’ (78). From this perspective, the institutions and policies
of the state are nothing more than the residue or the effects of the ways
in which more or less centralised power has sought to govern territories,
populations, economic and social life: they are ‘the mobile effect of a
regime of multiple governmentalities’ (77).
Foucault’s final objection to state phobia points to its ignorance of
the widespread suspicion of the state from within twentieth-century
liberalism. His analysis of the origins and emergence of German
neoliberalism shows how this kind of critique of the state and its
‘intrinsic and irrepressible dynamism’ was already formulated during
the period from 1930 to 1945 in the context of efforts to criticise the
whole range of interventionist policies from Keynesianism to National
Socialism and Soviet state planning (Foucault 2008: 189). The influence
of anti-state liberalism in the post-war period meant that all those on the
left who participate in this state phobia are ‘following the direction of
the wind and that in fact, for years and years, an effective reduction of
the state has been on the way’ (191). A constant refrain of Foucault’s
criticism of state phobia is a plea for realism about the state and
its origins. By implication, it is the lack of realism on the part of
his former political companions that contributes to the emerging gulf
between them. His genealogical sketch of neoliberal governmentality is
one element of a broader methodological argument in these lectures
against the kind of political criticism that interprets the present by
reference to already given concepts of state and society. His aim is
quite different: to investigate the particular ways in which sovereign
power was conceived and exercised, in order to show the historical
specificity of government. In this manner, he proposes ‘to let knowledge

of the past work on the experience of the present’ (130). Deleuze and
Guattari’s treatment of the different forms of state past and present
shows that the issue is not simply whether or not the political theorist
takes history into account, but the precise means by which this is to be
achieved.
II. Philosophy, Politics and ‘Actuality’

The distance that separates the conceptions of ‘theory’ held by
Foucault and Deleuze becomes apparent when we compare the latter’s
characterisation of the former and his attempt to pursue what he
presents as a Foucauldian form of criticism of the present. For the
most part, Deleuze does not undertake the same kind of genealogical
interpretation of the present that we find in Foucault, even though
he regularly compares Nietzsche’s untimely and Foucault’s actuel with
the realm of becoming and pure eventness that is the object of his
own philosophy. One exception to this is the diagnosis outlined in his
‘Postscript on Control Societies’, and in his ‘Control and Becoming’
interview with Negri, where he describes the present as the initial stages
of a newly emerging ‘control society’.14 This diagnosis stands in stark
contrast to the account of the present given in his 1972 discussion
with Foucault, where Deleuze saw the political present as a period of
repression after the social upheavals of ’68 and its immediate aftermath:
not only as a response to what occurred in ’68 but as the concerted
preparation and organisation of the immediate future by reinforcing the
social structures of confinement. His diagnosis at this point effectively
anticipated the New Philosophers in describing the present period by
reference to Foucault’s discussion of ‘confinement’. In 1990, he offers a
diagnosis that draws upon Foucault’s discussion of political technology
in Discipline and Punish, suggesting that this moment is witness to the
birth of a society characterised by the predominance of a new type of
political technology.
Just as the modern society described by Foucault in Discipline and
Punish is characterised by a diagram of disciplinary power, so Deleuze
describes the new society emerging at the end of the twentieth century
as one characterised by a diagram of control. Control society comes
next in the series identified by Foucault, in which each kind of society
is defined by a particular diagram of power. Thus, sovereign societies
were succeeded by disciplinary societies and now ‘Control societies are
taking over from disciplinary societies’ (Deleuze 1995: 178). This raises
96 Paul Patton
the question: what is meant by ‘control’ in the context of this specific

diagram of power? How does it differ from disciplinary power? In the
first place, in so far as it is the name of a particular technique for the
exercise of political power, we can say in the light of Foucault’s later
clarification of his concept of power that it involves a certain kind
of action upon the action, or the field of possible actions, of others
(Foucault 2000: 326–48). Control power is different from disciplinary
power at the level of its primary material, its means, modalities and
ends. At the level of primary materials, control does not operate on
the individual but on ‘dividuals’, not on the mass of people but on
samples or data-banks. Unlike disciplinary societies, control societies do
not form individuals to fit certain moulds in order to produce docile
bodies, obedient subjects and so on. Rather, they extract dividuals where
these are not whole persons but a certain number of functional aspects,
each one defined in relation to particular ends. The dividual is a bundle
of aptitudes or capacities such as the financial means that ensure a
capacity to repay a bank loan or the scholarly aptitudes that guarantee
entry onto a given program of study. A multiplicity of dividuals do
not constitute a mass of people but rather a sample or a data-bank
that can be analysed and exploited for commercial, governmental or
other ends.
At the level of the means of its exercise, control makes use of
pass-words rather than order-words. Individuals are associated with
an increasingly long and potentially endless chain of pass-words,
including passwords for their computers, email servers, assorted bank
and credit card logins, online shopping, travel agencies, journal
subscriptions, professional associations and so on. In contrast to
disciplinary societies, control societies do not establish institutional
spaces of confinement but series of thresholds through which one
can only pass with the right password. They establish different
kinds of penalties as alternatives to imprisonment, such as fines,
community service, compulsory rehabilitation and so on. They establish
home medical care instead of hospitalisation, lifelong education and
training instead of schools and colleges, and enterprises of various
kinds instead of factories. Control operates in the open air rather
than in confined spaces, by means of various digital and electronic
technologies. To take an example that has emerged since Deleuze wrote
his ‘Postscript’, consider the manner in which GPS location has become
utilised in a whole series of devices, from personal direction-finders to
electronic bracelets and other tracking devices. In the words of one
commentator:
GPS represents the final stage of this evolution. Even the electronic bracelet
remains essentially disciplinary, transforming the home into a prison and
trapping the condemned as though in his apartment burrow. By contrast,
mobile technologies of surveillance in real time liberate the individual. They
liberate his energy and his desire so that he can work at his own always
ephemeral and perfectible integration. (Razac 2008: 61)
At the level of the modality of action, control mechanisms do not

impose particular moulds according to the nature of the institution in
which they are employed, producing a certain kind of subject, body
or relationships. Rather, they involve the continuous modulation of
behaviours or performances in and by means of their relations to
one another. In turn, this implies a series of replacements in different
domains of social life. For example, the replacement of apparent
acquittal by unlimited deferral of judgement in the judicial sphere;
the replacement of manufacture by the sale of services or immaterial
products in the economic sphere; the replacement of examinations by
continuous assessment in the educational sphere. In each case, it is a
question of abandoning disciplinary modalities in favour of other means
of acting upon the action of people. Razac is not the only one to suggest
that Foucault’s analyses of ‘security apparatuses’ in the course of his
1977–8 lectures, ‘Security, Territory, Population’, played a more or
less implicit role in Deleuze’s characterisation of control society. The
basis for this suggestion lies above all in the mode of regulation of a
given material that is common to Foucault’s security apparatuses and
Deleuze’s control societies: ‘continuous modulation and the treatment
of the object of power adapt in real time to what actually occurs’ (Razac
2008: 40). At the same time, however, Razac points to the historical
difficulty raised by this suggestion: Foucault situates the emergence of
techniques of security at the end of the eighteenth century, whereas
Deleuze situates the transition to control societies in the latter half of
the twentieth century after the Second World War.
In other respects, too, the reference to Foucault, which is fundamental
for Deleuze’s definition of control society, is more troublesome than it
first appears. Deleuze presents his diagnosis as though it corresponded
fully with Foucault’s method of undertaking an analysis or an
archaeology of the present. In fact, it corresponds more with the
manner in which Deleuze presents Foucault’s method than it does
with Foucault’s own work. Following Nietzsche’s way of writing a
genealogy of the present, Foucault reinterprets past practices, institutions
and forms of knowledge from the perspective of a hitherto unnoticed
distance. His genealogies describe the discursive and non-discursive
98 Paul Patton
formations (dispositifs) from which we are separated by hitherto

imperceptible fractures in the hermeneutical frameworks within which
we live and experience the historical present. In this manner, he shows up
the madness of incarcerating the insane, the arbitrariness and injustice of
imprisoning convicts, the irrationality of making our identity as subjects
depend upon our sexual behaviour. In the terms of his own retrospective
account of his genealogical method in ‘What is Enlightenment?’ these are
all examples of practices that were previously considered unproblematic
or unavoidable but that we can now perceive as contingent and open
to change (Foucault 1997: 315). Foucault describes the aim of his
genealogies as pursuing this break with the past in a manner that might
serve as a condition for further change.
Deleuze offers a different account in What is Philosophy? when he
explains how Foucault’s analysis of the present does not aim to capture
the form of society in which we live at any given moment but rather
the form of society that is emerging. He argues that, whereas he and
Guattari identify becoming as the source of change, Foucault writes from
the perspective of the actual (actuel). He does not mean actuel in the
ordinary French sense of this word, which refers to that which is current
or present, but rather something much closer to Nietzsche’s ‘untimely’.
It is in this sense, according to Deleuze, that we must understand
Foucault’s use of the term ‘actuality’. It is not a question of what already
exists or is present in a given historical moment, but of what is coming
about, of what is in the process of becoming.
Deleuze defends this reading of Foucault’s use of actuel with reference
to a passage in The Archaeology of Knowledge in which Foucault draws
a distinction between the present (notre actualité) and ‘the border of
time that surrounds our present, overhangs it and indicates it in its
otherness’ in order to suggest that Foucault writes from this border
between present and future (Foucault 1969: 172; 1972: 130). Even
though Foucault’s text does not describe it in this way, Deleuze suggests
that this border between the present and the future is what he means by
the actual. He offers a more extended commentary on this passage from
The Archaeology of Knowledge in ‘What is a Dispositif?’:
The novelty of a dispositif in relation to those that precede it is what we call

its actuality, our actuality. The new is the actuel. The actuel is not what we are
but rather what we are becoming, what we are in the process of becoming,
that is to say the Other, our becoming-other. In every dispositif we must
distinguish what we are (what we are already no longer) and what we are
becoming: the part of history and the part of the actual. (Deleuze 2007: 350)15
Deleuze employs the same form of words in What is Philosophy? in

spelling out the proximity of his own ‘becoming’, Nietzsche’s untimely
(l’inactuel or l’intempestif), and Foucault’s supposed actuel in suggesting
that all three terms refer to ‘that which is in the process of coming about’:
not what we presently are or recently were, but rather ‘what we are in
the process of becoming – that is to say, the Other, our becoming-other’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 112). The problem is that Foucault does
not use the term in the manner that Deleuze suggests. His text actually
contrasts this border region with ‘our actuality’ (Foucault 1969: 172;
1972: 130).
A second difficulty raised by Deleuze’s reference to Foucault in
elaborating his concept of control society emerges when, in his
‘Postscript’, he reminds us that Foucault himself was one of the first
to point out that we no longer live in an age of discipline: ‘we were no
longer in disciplinary societies, we were leaving them behind’ (Deleuze
1995: 178). According to this diagnosis of the present, disciplinary
society is already disappearing. The techniques of disciplinary power are
in crisis, and institutions such as the school, factory, hospital, army and
prison have more or less reached their use-by date: ‘It is simply a matter
of nursing them through their death throes and keeping people busy
until the new forces knocking at the door take over. Control societies
are taking over from disciplinary societies’ (Deleuze 1995: 178).
In other words, Foucault recognised the end of the relatively brief
historical reign of the disciplinary model of power that followed the
sovereign model and that had been progressively replaced by the control
model since the end of the Second World War. In the course of a
1977 interview, ‘The Eye of Power’, he noted that ‘disciplinary power
was in fact already in Bentham’s day being transcended by other
and much more subtle mechanisms for the regulation of phenomena
of population, controlling their fluctuations and compensating their
irregularities’ (Foucault 1980: 160).16 Moreover, the fact that he had
devoted Discipline and Punish to the detailed analysis of the disciplinary
model is difficult to reconcile with Deleuze’s thesis regarding the
meaning of ‘actuality’ for Foucault. In the terms of Deleuze’s hypothesis,
Discipline and Punish should have analysed what we are in the process
of becoming rather than confining itself to the disciplinary society that
we were. It is true that in his lectures in the years that followed the
publication of this book Foucault did focus on technologies of power
that succeeded the disciplinary model, such as mechanisms of security.
But this led him in an altogether different direction to that suggested
by Deleuze’s account of control society, namely towards the analysis
100 Paul Patton
of different forms of governmentality and a genealogy of liberal and

neoliberal government. This project led him in the direction of a more
and more refined study of the different means by which states sought
to act on the actions of people. In the terms of Foucault’s study of
different forms of governmentality, the idea that a society might be
defined by a single diagram of power in the manner that he had
suggested in Discipline and Punish no longer played a role. Deleuze’s
Foucault is based upon an earlier moment of Foucault’s thought but
also upon a philosophical conception of history that does not have the
same commitment to realism, or rather the same means of expressing
historical reality. For Deleuze, it is the philosophical concept rather
than historical knowledge of the past that is supposed to act upon our
experience of the present.17 In the end, they held very different views of
the relation between activism and philosophy.18
Notes
1. The Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP) grew out of efforts to support
Maoist militants imprisoned during the repression of leftist activity in 1970.
Its aim was to gather and publish information about conditions in French
prisons and it was organised as a decentralised series of groups around particular
prisons. For further information see Deleuze’s ‘Foucault and Prison’ (Deleuze
2007: 277–86) and Defert and Donzelot 1976.
2. As well as this book, a thorough treatment of their relationship would need to
take into account the interviews in Deleuze 1995 as well as the interviews and
other texts about Foucault in Deleuze 2007. The present article is well short of a
comprehensive discussion of the topic but one that I hope will stimulate further
investigation.
3. See Deleuze and Foucault 1972. This interview is reprinted in Foucault’s Dits et
écrits, tome III (Foucault 1994: 306–15). English translations appear in Foucault
1997: 205–17 and Deleuze 2004: 206–13. Page references are to the latter
version, although the translations are modified.
4. See ‘Powers and Strategies’, a 1977 interview with the editorial collective of Les
révoltes logiques, in Foucault 1980: 134–45.
5. See for example Chaloupka 2003 and Rowe and Dempsey 2004.
6. Foucault’s review ‘La grande colère des faits’ appeared in Le Nouvel
Observateur, 625, 9–15 May 1977, pp. 84–6. It is reprinted in Foucault 1994:
277–81.
7. Deleuze’s text, ‘A propos les nouveaux philosophes et d’un problème plus
général’, dated 5 June 1977, was first published as an interview in Le Monde,
19–20 June 1977. It was also printed as a supplement to the journal Minuit (no.
24, May 1977), and distributed free of charge in bookshops. It is included in
Two Regimes of Madness as ‘On the New Philosophers (Plus a More General
Problem)’ (Deleuze 2007: 139–47).
8. Eleanor Kaufman writes a propos their different attitudes towards the Croissant
issue: ‘Foucault’s support was on legal grounds, and he did not sign the
petition that expressed a more vehement condemnation of West Germany’s
totalitarianising tendencies. The clash between Foucault’s position and Deleuze’s
more extreme one seems to have been the principal ground for their falling-
out’ (Kaufmann 1998: 248). She cites Eribon 1991: 258–62, and Macey 1994:
392–7. See also Dosse 2010: 314.
9. Translated in Two Regimes of Madness as ‘Europe the Wrong Way’ (Deleuze
2007: 148–50). I have been unable to determine whether this article is identical
to the text of the petition circulated by Guattari. It contains no characterisation
of the West German State as fascist nor any suggestion that it was becoming a
police dictatorship. However, since Senellart refers explicitly to this text it is ap-
propriate to ask whether it might be read as implying support for terrorist action.
10. Dosse comments that Guattari’s refusal to publicly condemn the actions of
the RAF or the Italian Red Brigades in 1977–8 may perhaps be explained by
his own underground efforts to dissuade many of those tempted by terrorism
(Dosse 2010: 295). See also Guattari’s review of the film Germany in Autumn,
in which he comments that the only result of the RAF’s actions ‘will have been
to echo the collective melancholia that has present-day Germany in its grip’
(Guattari 1982: 108).
11. Michel Senellart comments in his essay contextualising the 1977–8 and 1978–9
lectures that the study of German neoliberalism and American anarcho-
liberalism ‘is Foucault’s sole incursion into the field of contemporary history
throughout his teaching at the Collège de France’ (Foucault 2007: 385).
Francesco Guala describes the lectures in 1979 as his one and only ‘diversion
into contemporary political philosophy’ (Guala 2006: 429).
12. In the section of Part One of Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled ‘On the New Idol’,
Nietzsche writes: ‘State is the name for the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly
it tells lies; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: “I, the state, am the people”’
(Nietzsche 2005: 43).
13. Deleuze and Guattari develop their own detailed and complex analyses
of fascism. A thorough comparison of their approach with Foucault’s
governmentality analysis would need to take this into account. See, for example,
Holland 2008 and Protevi 2000.
14. The interview with Negri first appeared in Futur antérieur, no. 1, Spring 1990.
The ‘Postscript’ first appeared in L’autre journal, May 1990. Both are reprinted
in Negotiations (Deleuze 1995: 169–76; 177–82). See also the comments in
‘What is an Act of Creation?’ (Deleuze 2008: 317–29).
15. The original text reads: ‘La nouveauté d’un dispositif par rapport aux
précédents, nous l’appelons son actualité, notre actualité. Le nouveau, c’est
l’actuel. L’actuel n’est pas ce que nous sommes, mais plutôt ce que nous
devenons, ce que nous sommes en train de devenir, c’est-à-dire l’Autre, notre
devenir-autre. Dans tout dispositif, il faut distinguer ce que nous sommes (ce
que nous ne sommes déjà plus), et ce que nous sommes en train de devenir: la
part de l’histoire, et la part de l’actuel’ (Deleuze 2003: 322).
16. Earlier in the same interview, he commented that ‘the procedures of power that
are at work in modern societies are much more numerous, diverse and rich’
(Foucault 1980: 148). See also Dits et écrits, tome III, ‘La société disciplinaire en
crise’ (Foucault 1994: 532).
17. Deleuze acknowledges the difference between his own and Foucault’s
commitment to history in commenting in an interview that he did not approach
things ‘through structure, or linguistics or psychoanalysis, through science or
even through history, because I think philosophy has its own raw material that
allows it to enter into more fundamental external relations with these other
disciplines’ (Deleuze 1995: 89).
18. I am grateful to Marcelo Svirsky and an anonymous reader for helpful comments
on an earlier draft of this paper.
102 Paul Patton
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Politics in the Middle: For a Political
Interpretation of the Dualisms in Deleuze
and Guattari
Rodrigo Nunes Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande

do Sul
Abstract
The paper identifies three recent lines of interpretation of the politics
that can be derived from Deleuze and Guattari, all of which share a
way of reading the dualisms in their work that can be traced back to
how they understand the actual/virtual partition, and to an alleged pre-
eminence of the virtual over the actual. It is argued that this reading
is not only inaccurate, but obscures the political dimension of Deleuze
and Guattari’s work. Clarifying the latter requires a reinterpretation of
the dualisms involved (as dyads rather than binaries), of the relation
between virtual and actual (as a formal distinction where one acts back
upon the other), and the drawing of a clear distinction between what
Deleuze calls a ‘transcendent exercise’ of thought and sensibility and
the properly metaphysical exercise that sets up the distinction between
virtual and actual. What then appears is an image of Deleuze’s and
Guattari’s thought that is far more concerned with practical questions
and with a situated political practice of intervention.
Keywords: dyad, immanence, univocity, virtual, actual, intervention
That dualisms play a major structural role in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s
work, both solo and collaborative, is a fact that will have escaped no
reader. One could, in effect, speak of three ways in which dualism
appears in it as a problem. At first, dualism itself is identified as the
problem, a target and mark of what to avoid in philosophy: ‘the only

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110001157
Politics in the Middle: Dualisms in Deleuze and Guattari 105
enemy is two’ (Deleuze 1973), ultimately the One/Multiple opposition

behind both monism and dualism. It is exactly the false choice between
these two pairs that the concept of ‘multiplicities’ is supposed to
disarm. But the alternative that follows is set up as an irreconcilable
opposition – in the end, ‘one can only think in either monist or pluralist
terms’ (Deleuze 1973). Inevitably, this will raise the recursive suspicion
that such a dichotomy is itself still mired in dualistic thinking. Finally,
this will in turn cast suspicions over all the other dualisms that run
through Deleuze and Guattari’s work. They acknowledge as much in
the introduction to a book whose dualistic nature is most obvious:
We make use of a dualism of models only so as to arrive at a process that

would refuse every model. . . . To arrive at the magical formula that we all
search for: PLURALISM = MONISM, going through all the dualisms that
are the enemy, but the absolutely necessary enemy, the furniture we are
constantly moving around. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 31)
It is obvious why they would find it necessary to exorcise such

suspicions: the threat they represent is nothing less than the ultimate
failure of some of the highest avowed goals of their philosophy. If
the point is to affirm the univocity of Being, then allowing any form
of dualism to creep in risks reintroducing a categorial distinction
within Being that returns it to its Aristotelian equivocity. If the point
is to affirm an absolute immanence ‘immanent to nothing but itself’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 49), then the danger is the re-institution
of a metaphysical supplement outside the plane of immanence, thereby
reintroducing the dative relation that is the sign of transcendence.
Alain Badiou is the most prominent commentator to have stressed
how these dualisms can be traced back to the crucial distinction between
actual and virtual: according to him, ‘the nominal pair virtual/actual
exhausts the deployment of univocal Being’ (Badiou 1997: 65). While
it is not, as I hope to show, a matter of simply reducing all other
oppositions to this one, or even of mapping them onto either side of the
line, Deleuze’s own final statement on his philosophical project would
seem to warrant such a conclusion. In his last published essay, the flag of
his early ‘transcendental empiricism’ is unfurled into the presentation of
a pure plane of immanence or transcendental field by which the given is
given to empirical representation, a field containing nothing but ‘virtuals
[which] become actualised in a state of affairs and a lived state’ (Deleuze
2003c: 363). If it plays such a central part in Deleuze and Guattari’s
thought, it is inevitable that the virtual/actual distinction should also
have a determinant role in interpretations of their work – and thus also
106 Rodrigo Nunes
in the assessments that have been made of its political consequences,

which is our specific concern here. Looking at recent examples of the
latter, I suggest there are three general lines along which they appear,
all of which can be traced back to a shared manner of reading the
virtual/actual dualism – which, in turn, affects their approach to other
dualisms more generally, and to politics specifically. My contention is
that the errors common to all three approaches obscure the ways in
which Deleuze and Guattari can be useful for thinking political practice.
Proposing an alternative reading – in which their dualisms appear as
dyads instead of binaries – coupled with an analysis of these errors, may
thus shed some new light on what an activist practice inspired by Deleuze
and Guattari can be, as well as aiding the negative task of pointing out
what (contra these three lines of interpretation) it is not.
I. Three Times Two Equals One

Let us start by identifying these three different ways of thinking the
relationship between Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and politics, the
first of which expresses a positive evaluation, the other two a negative
one. The first approach generally corresponds to a dominant strain in
the ‘revival’ enjoyed by the two thinkers since the 1990s (itself largely
due to their English-language reception), in various academic disciplines
as well as in some political and artistic circles. Here, Deleuze and
Guattari appear as proponents of a politics of ‘movement’. Not only
a politics of flux over stasis, but also one that pitches social movements
(in the broad sense) against institutions (state, parties, unions, etc.), and
values openness over identity, nomadic displacement over attachment,
the temporary, the mobile, the small-scale and the micropolitical over
larger, more permanent and cohesive forms whose horizon would be
macropolitical.
It is obvious that this approach finds much support not only in
explicit statements made by Deleuze and Guattari themselves, but
in many of their overt political commitments and practices.1 While
this interpretation runs diffusely through several texts and political or
aesthetic practices, it was arguably the publication of Hardt and Negri’s
Empire (2000) that provided it with a focal point, and the reasons for
its prevalence are to some extent tied in not only with that book’s
success, but with the conditions that enabled it: a worldwide tide of
political mobilisation, the protagonists of which by and large fell outside
more traditional organisational forms, and which, having first tasted the
subversive potential of new communication technologies, articulated a
politics that pointed beyond the limits of the nation state towards a
transnational space created by the consolidation of the global capitalist
market. It seemed natural that some of those taking part in this moment
would find resonances in Deleuze and Guattari’s politics. For its positive
take on their work, and for the importance this acquired in certain
political milieus, one could call this the activist line of interpretation.
The centrality suddenly achieved by two such eccentric (in every sense
of the word) thinkers has elicited a critical reaction in which we can
identify the two other main lines of interpretation. Here, Deleuze and
Guattari appear as either anti-political/depoliticising or else as political
despite themselves. In the first case, they are charged with retreating from
the site of politics itself into either a quasi-mystical contemplation of
the boundless power of creation, of which actuality is only a limitation,
or into the purity of a utopianism lacking any footing in the concrete
constraints of practice. From this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari
are ultimately indifferent ‘to any notion of change, time or history
that is mediated by actuality’ and to the relations and ‘politics of this
world’ (Hallward 2006: 162), caught up in the aristocratic askesis of
a thought that reaches beyond the actual towards a reunification with
an all-productive One-All (Badiou 1997: 22–3); or else are incapable of
understanding the most fundamental insight of Marxism-Leninism, for
which the question of strategy lies precisely at the point where necessity
and liberty cease to be opposed in absolute terms and become related in
the situatedness of political action (Badiou 1977: 37–8). In the second
case, the equation of resistance with an affirmative desire as power to
differ turns Deleuze and Guattari into the unwitting apologists of a
capitalism that works precisely through the modulation of desire and the
production of difference: here, in short, they become the ‘ideologist[s] of
late capitalism’ (Žižek 2004: 184). If “‘enjoy in your little corner”‘ is ‘the
maxim of rhizomatic multiplicities’ (Peyrol2 1977: 50), this can either
be read as a call away from political work proper into self-indulgent,
inconsequential distraction, or, worse, as the promise of an unfettered
expression of desire that may have appeared radical in the 1970s, but
which has since then been recuperated into the mechanisms of capitalist
accumulation and political legitimation. When resistance has become
effectively indistinguishable from capitalism, it can offer no answer to
the question: ‘how, then, to revolutionise an order whose very principle
is constant revolutionising?’ (Žižek 2004: 213).
From the point of view of the virtual/actual partition and the
other dualisms, it is immediately striking that the image of Deleuze
and Guattari’s thought that can be extracted from each alternative is
108 Rodrigo Nunes
ultimately quite similar. In fact, the first stands in an inverted relation to

the other two, so that what appears as positive on one side is negative on
the other, and vice versa. This inversion overdetermines the evaluation
of all the dualisms whose political sense is more immediately obvious:
major/minor, molar/molecular, dispositif/line of flight, state/nomad,
macro/micropolitics, re/deterritorialisation. . . In all three versions, the
series of first terms is placed on the side of the actual, while the series
of second terms falls on the side of the virtual. Not only do they take
the distinction as a starting point, they are also clearly premised on
a prevalence of the virtual side over the other: ‘we need two names
for the One in order to experience that it is from only one of them
that springs the ontological univocity designated by the nominal pair’
(Badiou 1997: 65; original emphasis). As a consequence, the image
of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought that emerges is one that ascribes
philosophical and political eminence to the second series to the detriment
of the first: a philosophy and a politics of the virtual, the minor, the
molecular, the micropolitical, nomadism, lines of flight, and (absolute)
deterritorialisation.
It is important to notice that, although both critics and advocates
share this doxa, each arrives at it in a different way. While the two
tomes of Capitalisme et schizophrénie tend to be enthusiasts’ main point
of reference, Badiou’s critique is mostly predicated on Deleuze’s solo
work, where political concerns are much less explicit, and gives little
attention to Guattari. Žižek, on the other hand, insists on a sharp break
and change of direction taken by the ‘original’, ‘good’ Deleuze – from
the sterile Sense-Event as the effect of bodily causes towards a notion
of becoming as the virtual production of the actual – under the “‘bad”
influence’ (Žižek 2004: 20) of the activist Guattari. Hallward is the only
one to grant the same weight to the collaborative works, which would
stand in continuity to the others in so far as they also subscribe to a logic
where the stress placed on the virtual empties the relations among actual
elements/bodies in favour of the direct relation of each actual thing to its
virtual ‘ground’.
This inverted relation explains the tone common to the three critiques
of Badiou, Žižek and Hallward: that of ‘revealing’ the true face of
a thought misread by its ‘disciples’. ‘Which Deleuze?’, Badiou starts
by asking; and the answer is quickly forthcoming: we must uncover,
behind the usual image of the affirmation of difference and multiplicitous
heterogeneity, a ‘metaphysics of the One’ (Badiou 1997: 20) in which the
impulse of thought, though singular each time, is always reconnected
to its source in the One-All. Against the same misconception, Hallward
offers a portrait of a philosophy in which what matters is ‘the redemptive

re-orientation of any particular creature towards its own dissolution’, a
‘spiritual, redemptive’ Deleuze who is unconcerned with matter, nature
or the world, an ‘extra-worldly’ thinker of ‘dis-embodiment and de-
materialisation’ (Hallward 2006: 3; original emphasis). Žižek’s position
is slightly different, as for him one must rescue the true Deleuze and his
politics from ‘the deadlock and impotence of the “popular” Deleuzian
politics’ and ‘the popular image . . . based on the reading of the books he
co-authored with Félix Guattari’ (Žižek 2004: xi–xii). While not spelled
out in Badiou, this political dimension also figures in Hallward, who
closes his book with the suggestion that ‘those of us who still seek to
change the world and to empower its inhabitants will need to look for
our inspiration elsewhere’ (Hallward 2006: 164).
At any rate, and whatever one makes of these critiques, it is clear
how they aim at the heart of Deleuze’s project, solo or with Guattari. In
Badiou’s and Hallward’s anti-political account, the weightiest charges
are at least three. First, that the professed immanentism is in fact a
philosophy of emanation; as such, Deleuze and Guattari fail to make
the ‘conversion’ by which ‘univocal Being is said of difference and, as
such, revolves around beings’ (Deleuze 2003a: 91) and instead make the
actual/creatural entirely dependent on the creative, self-differentiating
power of an extra-worldly One. Second, and consequently, that a
categorial distinction ultimately subsists between virtual and actual,
entailing a failure to sustain the univocity of Being and a slippage
between immanent and eminent or emanating cause.3 Third, that the
resulting thought of individuation is ultimately grounded in what
Deleuze calls the pre-critical ‘negative of limitation’ – and one should
recall here Deleuze’s entreaty that ‘every reduction of individuation
to a limit [i.e., as the finite that is said by limitation of the infinite]
or complication of differenciation compromises the whole of the
philosophy of difference’ (Deleuze 2003a: 318). The political despite
themselves version of the critique, on the other hand, returns to Hegel’s
critique of the tautology of Spinoza’s Substance and gives it a Marxian
twist: anything that affirms the world is inevitably too compromised by
it; genuine critique can only come from negating it; and so Deleuze
and Guattari can only capture their time in a mystified form, by
(re)producing its ideology.
Now, if all three interpretative lines – one positive, two negative – only
invert the values of a common basic understanding, a defence of the
political significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought will have to share
with the critiques a certain task of ‘demystification’. In other words, we
110 Rodrigo Nunes
may have to rescue Deleuze and Guattari from (some) friends as much
as from their foes. If that is the case, the best way to proceed is by
working back towards what the three alternatives share – an emphasis
on the virtual/actual distinction, and on the pre-eminence of the former
over the latter.
II. The Flux and the Party?

We could, in fact, start precisely with a situation in which Guattari
publicly disagrees with someone attempting to reclaim his thought. In
the early 1980s, Guattari travelled to Brazil on the invitation of fellow
psychoanalyst and cultural critic Suely Rolnik, where he took part in
various encounters and more or less formal debates with several groups
from the political milieu that, at that time, was consolidating itself into
the Workers’ Party (PT). Alongside other texts – including a dialogue
between Guattari and a then thirty-something Lula, fresh out of leading
the metalworkers’ strikes of the late 1970s and running for office for
the first time – these debates were collected by Rolnik in Molecular
Revolution in Brazil, a quietly influential book in Brazil that has only
recently appeared in English.
As we have seen with Žižek, Guattari can sometimes be
presented – especially by philosophers – as the ‘activist’ who drew
Deleuze away from his rigorous philosophical path. For pretty much
the same reason, he finds a warmer reception in the activist line of
interpretation. This makes it all the more remarkable to discover him
involved in the following exchange, in which his interlocutor begins by
praising ‘what I understand of what Guattari thinks’ – that there is a need
for ‘various molecular revolutions . . . a multiplicity of feminist, lesbian-
feminist, black, and other groups, questioning patriarchal or phallic
structures’ that should invest in constructing ‘new forms of performance,
assemblages that seek to question those power structures’ that, like the
party, reproduce ‘the patriarchal structure’ (Guattari and Rolnik 2008:
123–4). Guattari replies:
If the movement works like that, OK. But there might also be situations in
which it falls apart. I’ll give a historical example: all the different components
of the Autonomia movement in Italy broke down, and often because of
this kind of discourse. . . . They organized themselves in structures – very
interesting ones, actually, such as publishing houses and cooperatives – which
within a few months became completely depoliticized. . . . No doubt this
process would have appeared at some point in history, one way or another.
Nevertheless, a different script could have been written: the autonomization
of the feminist members operating as a factor to reinforce the effectiveness of

movements [instead of their] collapse into a black hole. Just imagine if all the
women in the PT . . . suddenly decided to say: ‘That’s it, we’ve had enough of
Lula and all that, we’re off.’
Comment: And then they’d organize themselves into women’s groups. I
think that would be great!
Guattari: Maybe. But to think it great that a movement like the PT should
disappear is debatable, to say the least. (Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 124–5)
This exchange is located at the intersection of two series: that of a

country (Brazil) reaching the end of a military dictatorship that had
prevented various micropolitical transformations brewing throughout
the 1970s, and whose main point of convergence in the 1980s would
become the PT, from entering into compositions that lent them
consistency and urgency; and that of a European (Guattari) processing
the sometimes tragic defeats of the previous decades, the double edge
of Mitterrand’s electoral victory, and the onset of the années d’hiver of
Integrated World Capitalism. The caution and nuance shown in Brazil
perhaps have something to do with this descendent curve. It is certainly
easy to follow a difference in tone in his collaborations with Deleuze,
from the post-1968 heat of L’Anti-Oedipe to the exhortations to restore
our faith in this world in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Had they lost
faith in movement, in micropolitics, in the molecular – in all those things
we recognise the activist Deleuze and Guattari for – and settled instead
for the reform that you could get, the change you could believe in? Or
was there never an a priori choice between micro- and macropolitics,
molecular and molar, minor and major in the first place?
We must take note that even L’Anti-Oedipe, an exalted book if there
ever was one, does not speak of a choice as such. In fact, the opposition
between molecular and molar is presented as a ‘theory of the two poles’
(cf. Deleuze and Guattari 2008: 406ff.). This is because
there is molar and molecular everywhere: their disjunction is a relation
of inclusive disjunction, which varies only according to the two senses
of subordination, depending on whether the molecular phenomena are
subordinated to the large ensembles, or subordinate them instead. (Deleuze
and Guattari 2008: 407; original emphasis)
How are we to conceive of a dualism that is not a choice? In speaking of

two ‘poles’, what may well have been in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s minds
is the Simondonian dyad. This Platonic notion, which interestingly does
not figure in Deleuze’s review of Simondon’s L’Individu et sa genèse
physico-biologique (Deleuze 2004b: 120–4), plays arguably as structural
112 Rodrigo Nunes
a role in Simondon’s thought of individuation as does the virtual/actual

pair for Deleuze; it is certainly through it that, ‘in Simondon’s dialectics,
the problematic replaces the negative’ (122). For a dyad is a relation
of inclusive disjunction between two indefinite terms in a dynamic
relation of tension that constitutes a field in which the terms themselves
become singularised. It is the mistake of the hylemorphic schema to
assume the extremes as already individuated givens; the primacy of
the pre-individual entails that there is only a polarised directionality
between two indefinite extremes, so that ‘every realised quality appears
as a measure in an indefinite dyad of absolute and opposed qualities’
(Simondon 2005: 163).
It seems perfectly clear that the overarching opposition of L’Anti-
Oedipe and Mille plateaux – capitalism and schizophrenia – is meant
not as a binary, but as a dyad. Between the two, neither is desirable:
‘we have only spoken of a schizoid pole in the libidinal investment
of the social field, to avoid as much as possible the confusion of a
schizophrenic process with the production of a schizophrenic’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 2008: 455). ‘One does not attain the BwO, or its plane
of consistency, by de-stratifying wildly’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a:
199). But this logic should be extended to the other dualisms: if we
understand the opposition between molar and molecular (major and
minor, macro and micropolitical etc.) as dyadic, there is no contradiction
between Guattari’s apparent support of the (seemingly) macro against
micropolitical forms in the quotation above. What he saw in that
moment of Brazilian history was the PT as the focus for a process of
convergence that intensified the heterogeneous desires and groups that
went into its constitution, while managing to stop their differences from
just being annulled; and Lula, the charismatic figure relayed by the
mass media, not as ‘ “the Father of Oppressed” or “the Father of the
Poor”’, but ‘the vehicle of an extremely important vector of dynamics in
the current situation’, for ‘nowadays one can’t consider the struggles
at all the levels without considering this factor of the production of
subjectivity by the media’ (Guattari and Rolnik 2008: 240). This is Lula
not (or hopefully not) as the mirror that would become the fixed other of
transference, but as a ‘transitional object’ that could be reappropriated
by those projecting themselves onto him.
We must indeed conclude that Deleuze and Guattari establish no
absolute opposition between, to borrow the title of Badiou’s (1977)
polemic, ‘the flux’ and ‘the party’. There is no a priori choice concerning
the forms in which the virtual may become actualised, since that would
be to assume these forms as self-identical givens, rather than to think
them as singular solutions within a problematic field defined by two

extremes. What matters is that ‘there be’ virtuality, deterritorialisation,
or potential each time – and that it be, as it were, ‘cultivated’. To be
sure, one can point out the greater arborescent tendency inherent in
the party-form, or the risks inherent in the growing identification of a
movement with a charismatic, mediatic leader (who then ceases to be
a transitional object and becomes the mirror of transference). But to
dismiss either outright on the grounds that they possess a ‘transcendent’
form is precisely to think in a transcendent way: separating the actual
from its virtual conditions, reducing it to an a priori form ‘filled’ each
time with content, rather than a singular being each time.
III. To Have Done With Dualisms

Yet does this not take us back to that point common to all three
approaches to Deleuze and Guattari’s politics: the preponderance of
the virtual over the actual? If the ‘real’ movement, even in the political
sense, is that of the virtual, does one not end up with precisely what
a philosophy of immanence was supposed to counter: a negation of
this world, its vicissitudes and the challenges it imposes on us, and a
search for comfort beyond it? Are the critics not correct in pointing out
a tendency towards pointless idealism, or the risk of celebrating all one
opposes by always discounting actual processes and effects in favour of
their potentials? Given practical application, does all this not effectively
tend towards an exclusive emphasis on the ‘small’ or the ‘local’,
and ultimately a refusal of any form of concerted action, scalability,
negotiation, institutionalisation, mediation. . . ? A stubborn refusal to
see the larger picture in which one may, after all, be complicit – or a
condemnation to self-satisfied subcultural irrelevance?
The crucial element here is the verb to tend. It is undeniable that
the various critiques play on tendencies found in Deleuze and Guattari;
the question is what we can gain from resisting their downplaying
of other tendencies, and what image of their thought emerges when
it is taken as a whole, rather than in half. To that end, we must
return to the philosophical questions concerning the virtual/actual
distinction. ‘In order to suppress the opposition between the One and
the Multiple’ – precisely the one in which Deleuze and Guattari would
be entangled – one must make ‘one and multiple cease to function as
adjectives in order to give place to a noun: there are only multiplicities’
(Deleuze 1973). The point is, precisely, that ‘there are two kinds
of multiplicities’ (Deleuze 2004a: 33), as per Bergson’s modification
114 Rodrigo Nunes
of Riemann. The one is characterised by ‘exteriority, simultaneity,

juxtaposition, order, quantitative differenciation, difference in degree,
a numerical multiplicity, discontinuous and actual’; the other is
‘internal, of succession, fusion, organisation, heterogeneity, qualitative
discrimination or difference in nature, a virtual and continuous
multiplicity that is irreducible to number’ (Deleuze 2004a: 30–1; original
emphasis). In the first case, there is only actuality, actual relations. In
the other, a ‘line that goes from the virtual to its actualisation’, an
indivisible line whose each division amounts to a change in nature,
that is, to an actualisation that happens ‘through differenciation, along
divergent lines’; the virtual ‘to the extent that it becomes actualised [en
tant qu’il s’actualise], in the process of becoming actualised [en train
de s’actualiser], inseparable from the movement of its actualisation’
(Deleuze 2004a: 36).
In this one finds the elements with which to dispel once and for all
the myth of a political ‘cult of the small’ in Deleuze and Guattari: if
the virtual is continuous, and thus foreign to number – if the operation
of counting belongs to the actual, and is therefore a way of bringing the
virtual into actualisation – then micro or molecular politics is not defined
by its opposition to large numbers or scalability. Through its focus on
the virtual, it is in fact entirely indifferent to scale, size, or measurement
itself, in the same way that the opposition between singularity and
totality (the latter being the category that would define dialectical, and
as such Marxist, thinking) does not entail the automatic conclusion that
‘small is beautiful’. If ‘small’ can only be said of discontinuous, actual
multiplicities, ‘micro’ and ‘molecular’ refer to the virtual, continuous
multiplicities that are implicated in any discrete multiplicity, big or
small. This is why there is no a priori choice that excludes any actual
existing party or leader, or the party-form and the leader-form as such.
It is clear, then, that the ‘cult of the small’, whether celebrated by
‘activists’ or countered by critics, is premised on a very elementary
confusion between the two kinds of multiplicity, when the whole point
is exactly not to oppose the Multiple to the One, ‘but on the contrary
to distinguish two kinds of multiplicity’ (Deleuze 2004a: 31; original
emphasis). The extensively ‘small’ is only ‘beautiful’ to the extent that
it envelops more intensive potential; it can otherwise be quite ugly,
turning in upon itself in a passive flight, a suicidal ‘black hole’, or
a reactionary reterritorialisation. It is, in fact, the same distinction at
work in the opposition between majoritarian (‘not a relatively greater
quantity, but the determination of a state or standard according to which
greater as well as smaller quantities will be said to be minoritarian’) and
minoritarian (‘one must not confuse “minoritarian” as a becoming or

process and “minority” as an ensemble or state’) (Deleuze and Guattari
2004a: 356).
It is important to notice that, unlike all the oppositions it founds,
the one between actual and virtual multiplicities is in itself not dyadic.
The crucial thing, however, is that the difference between them not be
taken as categorial, as that would mean that Being itself is irremediably
split, and is thus not said in one, but two senses. It is clear that, for
Deleuze, they are to be understood in the same way as he interprets
the attributes of extension and thought in Spinoza: as two formally
(qualitatively, quidditatively), not ontologically, distinct sides of the
real (cf. Deleuze 2002a: 30–1). Ontologically the same, they can be
distinguished in thought. This is why the heart of Différence et répétition
is a chapter on the ‘image of thought’, which almost 20 years later
Deleuze will describe as ‘the most concrete and necessary, and leading
onto the following books, up until the researches with Guattari, when
we invoke . . . a rhizomatic instead of an arborescent thought’ (Deleuze
2003b: 283): for the task of ‘transcendental empiricism’ is none other
than to institute a new image of thought.
Throughout Deleuze’s oeuvre, including the books with Guattari, it is
possible to discern two meanings of ‘thought’; two different levels that
one could roughly map onto Spinoza’s first two modes of knowledge.
First, there is thought as representation, which can be understood, with
Kant, as the subsumption of a (differential) manifold under conceptual
identity. It is never a case of ascribing a secondary reality to the actual,
disputing the rights of representation, or arguing that it does not give us
something true about the world – that it is a simulacrum or illusion that
hides from us the true, virtual realm of Being. On the contrary, Deleuze
(and Guattari) are, like Bergson, perfectly happy to acknowledge its
practical utility, or that of science: being able to recognise identities is
an evolutionary advantage to the extent that it imposes some degree
of predictability on the world. The illusion lies not in representation
itself, but in the hypostasis of the empirical/actual as the totality of
Being. This is why we need a second level of thought that allows
us to see the actual as the singular expression of virtual conditions.
Given the same phenomenon, this second level allows us to perceive
what appears as an identity for the first as being itself constituted by
differences that differ in time; the empirical is cracked open by what
undermines its self-identity and delivers it to new becomings. We can
thus say at once that what appears to us is always new, and that it is
only from the perspective of a higher, ‘transcendent exercise’ (Deleuze
116 Rodrigo Nunes
2003a: 258) that it can appear as new. Every thought in the first
sense appears as new, every repetition as productive of difference – every
arborescence traversed by the rhizomatic, every assemblage by lines of
flight, every majority by minoritarian becomings, every molarity by the
molecular, etc. – when the actual is conceived in relation to its virtual
potentials. The evolutionary advantage brought by representation must
thus be qualified: the transcendent exercise that uncovers the differential
conditions of existence of the empirical is above all a practical matter of
liberating the potentials given in the present, of seeing the given actual
as not necessary, but as open to transformation.
Clearly, however, if the transcendent exercise of thought relies on
an actual/virtual partition, it cannot found it in itself. It requires
a ‘third mode’ of knowledge, a properly metaphysical exercise of
thought, to provide it. This is why Deleuze – celebrated by Badiou
in this regard – remained entirely indifferent to the theme of the ‘end
of metaphysics’ (cf. Badiou 1997: 69). If the point is to advance a
new image of thought capable of connecting to what falls outside the
reduction of the real to the empirical, only a meta-physics will do.
Yet this metaphysics cannot be founded on the immanent movement of
history, nor in any apodictic way – since the new image defines thought
precisely as the problematic expression of virtual ideas. The key here is
the Kantian distinction between knowledge and thought. While we need
a metaphysics to think what this realm of virtuality may be, it is itself
premised on the possibility of a transcendent exercise: it is because there
is a transcendent exercise of sensibility that senses (but does not perceive)
virtual intensities, and a transcendent exercise of thought that expresses
(but does not experience) virtual ideas, that a metaphysical thought (and
not knowledge) is possible.
Once the possibility of a new image of thought has been
established – once the ‘transcendental’ moment has been dealt with – it
is no longer a matter of providing a philosophical account of how
problems are determined, but of determining them: of experimenting
(with) immanence, with what it means to live ‘in’ (or maybe ‘live out’)
immanence. ‘In my earlier books, I tried to describe a certain exercise of
thought; but describing it is not yet exercising thought in that way’, says
Deleuze; ‘proclaiming “Long live the multiple” is not yet doing it, one
must do the multiple’ (Deleuze 2006: 13).
This allows us to understand the importance acquired by concrete
ethico-political questions, in particular the dialogue with Marx and
the confrontation with the capitalistic plane of immanence, in the two
volumes of Capitalisme et shchizophrénie. But the goal of instituting
a new practical reason had been clear from the start: ‘none of this
would matter if it were not for the practical implications and the moral
presuppositions of [the representative] distortion’ – the ‘conservatism’
that turns us away ‘from the highest task – that of determining problems,
of applying to them our decisive and creative power’ (Deleuze 2003a:
344). That metaphysics is necessary for an ethics, but must be measured
by the latter’s effects: this, and not a direct rational (or mystical)
intuition of the One-All, is Deleuze at his most Spinozist.4
IV. ‘Do the Multiple’. . .

Once the partition of virtual and actual has been attained, it can be
applied to the practical task of orienting oneself in the world. We
have seen that, for Simondon, orientation always presupposes a position
along an indefinite dyad (indefinitely cold/hot, high/low, etc.). A dyad,
in fact, is nothing other than a continuous multiplicity that changes in
nature (that is, differenciates into a discontinuous multiplicity) when
divided; thus, for example, it is along a continuum of indefinitely
more painful/pleasurable that sensations can be individualised into
perceptions of ‘pain’ or ‘pleasure’. Now, if what we could call Deleuze’s
and Guattari’s dualisms of orientation are such continua, it is necessary
to conclude that the oppositions they establish define two indefinite
virtual directions along which actualisations take place. This implies,
firstly, a relation of ‘more or less’ in any actualisation: an actuality
can be(come) more or less rhizomatic, molecular, minoritarian, smooth,
more or less arborescent, molar, majoritarian, striated. . . Secondly, it
affords two different registers by which to analyse one and the same
assemblage: according to the (virtual) ‘lines of segmentarity that stratify,
territorialise, organise, signify, attribute it’, or the (virtual) ‘lines of
deterritorialisation through which it flees incessantly’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004a: 16). Evidently, (re)territorialising potential will tend to
the stabilisation of some actual forms, which in turn act back upon
the virtual conditions of the assemblage as whole. This means that
the first register of analysis always necessarily includes actual forms
(state apparatus, institutions, binary molarities), though not simply as
opposed to and cut off from virtuality; thus, for instance, the concept of
totalitarian state ‘is only valid on a macropolitical scale’, but ‘fascism is
inseparable from molecular foyers that pullulate and go from one point
to another before they resonate all together in the national-socialist state’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 261).5
118 Rodrigo Nunes
In all such dualisms there is, strictly speaking, only the middle: if
they constitute virtual continua, it would be absurd to ascribe an actual
existence to either pole. Moreover, the formal distinction of actual and
virtual effectively forbids anything being actualised as, say, ‘purely’
molar or ‘purely’ molecular: a purely molar assemblage would be one
without any virtual potential (which, as we have seen, is only the way in
which actualities appear in representation), while pure virtual potential
is by definition not actual. To put it schematically, one could say that
the ‘less virtual’ pole has as its limit an actuality with a minimal degree
of virtuality above zero; while the limit for the ‘less actual’ pole is the
knowable and livable: the point beyond which there is only a chaos
where no actuality takes hold.
This designation of ‘less virtual’ and ‘less actual’ is evidently
inappropriate, since we are talking about two virtual directions along
which elements are actualised as more or less open to variation, as
possessing more or less virtual potential. But putting it in such terms can
help us understand why it cannot be a matter of choosing one extreme
over the other: the choice is simply impossible, as beyond each limit there
is only impossibility – an actuality without virtuality or chaos.
But what does it mean to speak of ‘limit’ here? There is a
common thread to the apolitical and other-worldly Deleuze and
Guattari, the political despite themselves apologists of a boundless
power of deterritorialisation that is ultimately capital’s own, but
also to a certain aestheticised activist celebration of tiny exceptions
and infinitesimal local subversions, and to Hardt and Negri’s
substantialisation/anthropomorphisation of absolute deterritorialising
power in the form of the multitude: all of them collapse metaphysical
and transcendent exercises of thought into one another, and
thus erase the crucial distinction between knowledge and thought.
For if metaphysics can pose a plane of immanence as absolute
deterritorialisation in thought, it does not deliver any empirical
knowledge of the plane as such. ‘Empirical knowledge of absolute
deterritorialisation’ is by definition a nonsensical formulation, since
absolute deterritorialisation, as pure chaotic virtuality, entails the
inexistence of any (actual) subject for whom it could appear as an
(actual) empirical object.
The ‘transcendent [exercise of a faculty] does not at all mean that it
addresses itself to objects outside of the world, but, on the contrary, that
it grasps in the world that which concerns it exclusively, and which gives
birth to it in the world’ (Deleuze 2003a: 186, emphasis added). This is
why the ‘highest task’ of ‘determining problems, of applying to them
our decisive and creative power’ is a concrete, practical question through

and through: the transcendent exercise that Deleuze invites us to engage
in consists in thinking the actual in relation to its virtual conditions so
as to liberate the potential for the new in the present – but precisely
not as a leap into unbounded potentiality. It is a matter of activating
the virtual of this actual, ‘to the extent that it becomes actualised [en
tant qu’il s’actualise], in the process of becoming actualised [en train
de s’actualiser], inseparable from the movement of its actualisation’
(Deleuze 2004: 36; emphasis added). We never experience virtual totality
in itself, but only virtuality in so far as it is mediated by an actual
encounter. If truth is ‘in every respect a matter of production, not
adequation’ (Deleuze 2003a: 200) – problematic and not apodictic – it
is because the transcendent exercise does not know the virtual, but
expresses it each time in a new, singular way.
Evidently, the idea of an actual ‘mediation’ must be said not only of
the actualisation of thought, but of actualisation in general. In fact, it is
only if we conceive of the actual as acting upon the virtual as much as the
other way round that the partition of the two can be shown to be formal,
not categorial or hierarchical (where one would be the other’s ground,
in a unidirectional relation).6 If Deleuze speaks of a ‘static genesis’ that
goes from virtual to actual, it is in order to provide an account of the
asymmetrical, novelty-producing character that necessarily falls away
if one remains at the mechanistic level of dynamic, actual causes – not
to eliminate them. ‘The event is of a different nature from the actions
and passions of the body. But it results from them: [it] is the effect
of corporal causes and their mixtures’ (Deleuze 2002b: 115; original
emphasis). But if there is a difference in nature between the two serial
causes, the relation between them cannot itself be causal. The event of an
actual encounter between two bodies, being determined by mechanical
causality, cannot create the new itself; but it determines new relations
among virtual conditions, effecting a virtual Event that produces a
new actualisation. A metaphysical exercise can think the virtual as a
continuous Whole of relations; but the intersection between the two
series that effects the Event (the object of a transcendent exercise) is
necessarily mediated by an actual event.
It is no surprise that all interpretations that posit a pre-eminence
of the virtual over the actual will tend to miss the proper place of
event, individuation and agency in Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) thought:
the intersection (and also re-commenced scission) between actual and
virtual series. This is evident in Hallward (2006), who faults Deleuze
for eliminating individuation and individuality in favour of a boundless
120 Rodrigo Nunes
creating power. But also in Badiou (1997), whose exposition of the

virtual as ground is by and large premised on the second synthesis
of time, thus erasing the ‘ungrounding’ that supervenes on it with
the third synthesis/Event. Žižek, on the other hand, does at one
point consider the possibility that the two different ontologies he
identifies – virtual as sterile event-effect of actual causes; virtual as
productive of the actual – could be the two sides of the same one; but
then, not uncharacteristically, decides that the model for such a two-
sided ontology can only be symbolic castration (Žižek 2004: 84–5).
V. . . . Then Do It Again
If Deleuze speaks of a ‘decisive and creative power’, it is because to view
the present as contingent and to liberate its potentials for becoming-
other necessarily involves an element of decision. Not the autonomous
act of an unfettered subjectivity or noumenal agent, since we are dealing
with conditions that we neither control nor can make exhaustively clear;
but a wager that extracts a new dice-throw not guaranteed by any
knowledge. Such is the case with politics, ‘not an apodictic science. It
proceeds by experimentation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 575).
What the dualisms of orientation offer us is a series of bipolar axes and
double registers with which to consider the potentials of the actual: both
to view it as a singular, contingent solution of different problematics,
and to guide our choices when acting on it. These choices concern
identifying the givens of present problems and producing new solutions
to them – not choosing one pole over the other, as if they could be treated
as actualities. To put it in a formula: no choice between the two poles,
because one can only ever choose in between them. Politics is where
life is, and ‘[t]hings do not begin to live except in the middle’ (Deleuze
2006: 41).
In his virtuosic treatment of Capitalisme et schizophrénie’s dualisms,
Jameson refers to them as a key part of the ‘fictive mapping’ that
organises its materials ‘into force fields’, but does not linger on the
implications of the metaphor: a force field is a dyad, an intensive
continuum defined by two or more attractors. He is absolutely right in
pointing out that the insistence of dualisms in those two books ‘always
tempts us to reinsert the good/evil axis . . . and to call for judgment
where none is appropriate’, so that ‘the reader feels perpetually solicited
to take sides with the Schizo against the Paranoid . . . and with the
Nomads against the State’ (Jameson 1997: 412) – but this is exactly
what is prevented if we read them dyadically. Famously, it was as an
ethics that Foucault suggested L’Anti-Oedipe should be read, listing

some ‘essential principles’ of its ‘art of living contrary to all forms
of fascism’: a series of general guidelines rather than a system of
moral judgements attributing good and evil (Foucault 2001: 134–5).
The first of these – liberating action from ‘every unitary and totalising
paranoia’ – should then be understood as having the same relation to
the others as the self-referential item (‘included in this classification’)
in Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia cited at the start of Les mots and les
choses. It is the in-built unsettling of the ensemble that pre-emptively
exposes as paranoid in itself any attempt to transform those ethical
principles into a morality.
If it is true that Deleuze and Guattari place a higher value on
deterritorialisation, this value is subordinated to the practical problem
of resisting the conservatism that reduces the real to the given and turns
the latter into necessity. That this error should be opposed in act entails
that it is never a matter of saying that everything is possible, which is
practically vacuous, but of saying that, in every here and now, there are
potentials that can be acted upon. If the political practice to be derived
from this attitude can be given a name, it is intervention.
For an authentic analysis (a schizoanalysis, a molecular analysis, what we call

it isn’t important) the first concern won’t be interpretation, but intervention.
What can we do to clear up a situation? . . . What’s the point of trying to
determine the role of the father, the mother, the national education system,
Knowledge, Power, the Economy, if we don’t offer to intervene in any way
and to work through these different components? (Guattari 2009: 52; original
emphasis)
An intervention singularises a situation as the contingent production

of certain conditions, decomposes it into different levels and registers
(macro- and micropolitical, molar and molecular, etc.), identifies the
potentials and the points that one can get a grip on, and tests its
present limits by liberating what may be latent in it. It is premised
on experimenting with the virtualities ‘of this actual’, and never
(pace Hallward) on an experience of the virtual Whole as such, in
dissolution of every actual tie. While the plane of immanence as
absolute deterritorialisation sub specie aeternitatis can be the object of a
metaphysical thought, a direct, unmediated experience of immanence is
tantamount to death, or psychosis. A philosophy of intervention is not
at all a ‘philosophy of death’ (Badiou 1997: 24), but a practical work of
removing the blockages that stop life.
122 Rodrigo Nunes
To unmake the organism was never to kill oneself, but to . . . install oneself
on a stratum, to experiment with the chances it offers us, to search for a
favourable place in it, eventual movements of deterritorialisation, possible
lines of flight, to experiment with them [les éprouver], to ensure conjunctions
of flows here and there. . . (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 198–9)
That death is one of the poles of the ‘master’ dualism,

deterritorialisation–reterritorialisation, shows us that in our experience
there are only ever relative deterritorialisations – and that this applies
even to the most molar, majoritarian, arborescent formations. To deny
that would amount to falling prey to representative thought. Here
Deleuze and Guattari’s methods must be applied back to them in order
to show that the sustained critique of revolutionary groups in a book
like L’Anti-Oedipe was a singular and local response to a certain style of
militancy that they saw around them at the time; it is neither a critique
of any form of organisation whatsoever, nor a principled hostility to
militancy as such. We can call the political practice they propose an
‘involuntarism’ (cf. Zourabichvili 1998; Thoburn 2010: 136), provided
we take every care to distinguish this from ‘inaction’, and see it as strictly
opposed to ‘voluntarism’. That is, while every action involves a wager
that can only be verified in practice, it will be more or less capable of
adequately expressing the problematic coordinates of the situation (and
thus of successfully intervening therein) to the extent that it is more
or less immanent to it, more or less connected to these coordinates.
The egoic investment of a group that isolates itself as the subject that
acts (the ‘activist’) is an obstacle to this ‘dissolution’ into the situation,
in so far as it locks the intervention into a duality that detaches an
‘active force’ from a ‘passive matter’ by obscuring the several levels
in which the two communicate. Deleuze and Guattari’s Blanchotian
paradox consists in saying: the more passivity is contracted, the more
powerful the action; the more one opens up to exteriority, the more one
can fold into an intimacy (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 59); the more one
affirms powerlessness, the greater the power that can be extracted from
it (Deleuze 2003a: 257–8).
This ‘dissolution’, however, does not in itself imply a negation
of organisation. On the contrary: in a situation such as community
organising, one can perfectly well imagine that it would take a good
degree of internal consistency for a group to be able to sustain an
intervention that ‘dissolves’ itself in the life of its constituency so as to
connect to all the flows that traverse it on various levels (the constitution
of space, memory, economic or interpersonal relations, etc.).
But how far do these dyads take us from a trivial aestheticisation of

infinitesimal change? If we are willing to go as far as accepting that in
every nomad there is a state and in every state there hides a nomad
(however little), what effect can this really have against an order that
survives by ‘revolutionising itself’? Deleuze and Guattari will be the
first to admit that there is no guarantee: ‘smooth spaces are not in
and of themselves liberating’, but only the place where ‘the struggle
changes, becomes displaced’: ‘Never believe that a smooth space will
suffice to save us’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 625). No guarantee;
only intervention. Lines of flight can turn out bad, either because they
find paranoid reterritorialisations, or because they become isolated and
turn in upon themselves, or because we are never far from finding out
that what we struggled for objectively led to the opposite of what it was
we desired. (The French free radio movement, in which Guattari was
very active, managed to open the airwaves to non-state actors, only to
see them colonised by commercial ones.)
Yet we have already seen how there is nothing in Deleuze and
Guattari that is contrary as such to the scalability, mass mobilisations
or forms of organisation that more radical transformations may
demand; the front is always both micro- and macropolitical. And if
there is some fairness in identifying in L’Anti-Oedipe an ‘apocalyptic
accelerationism’ (Noys 2010), this was never simply premised on
the idea that deterritorialisation in and of itself would suffice to
save us.7 To affirm deterritorialising power does not mean saying
yes to all deterritorialisations, but knowing how to select8 : hence
relative deterritorialisations are never separated from the problem of
constructing a plane of consistency that allows for mutually reinforcing
transversal connections – to the point, at times, of open antagonism.
‘[W]e cannot allow ourselves a dualism or dichotomy, even under the
rudimentary form of the good and the evil. . . . Good and evil can only
be the product of an active and temporary selection to be recommenced’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004a: 16; emphasis added). It is never just a
matter of fleeing, but of constructing an active flight:
Flights are everywhere, they are born again each time from the displaced
limits of capitalism. And undoubtedly revolutionary flight (the active
flight . . . ) is not the same thing as other kinds of flight, the schizo flight, or
the druggie [toxico] flight. But this is precisely the problem of marginalities:
to make all lines of flight connect on a revolutionary plane. (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004b: 376; emphasis added)
124 Rodrigo Nunes
To faithfully repeat Deleuze and Guattari today consists not in the

dogmatic assertion of an ortho-doxa, but in a renewed attempt
to identify the problems that determined their solutions so as to
ascertain to what extent they may still be our own, and in the
permanently recommenced search for ways of determining our problems
by individualising new solutions in the present. Solutions which, once
determined, cannot bypass the problem of producing consistency, nor
be satisfied with a vacuous celebration of the virtual, but must negotiate
paths between molecular and molar, micro- and macropolitics, de-
and reterritorialisation, the clinical and the critical. ‘Practice does not
come after terms and their relations have been established, but actively
participates in the tracing of lines, confronts the same dangers and
variations as them’; for ‘before Being, there is politics’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004a: 249).
Notes
1. It also downplays others: the non-ideological flexibility in dealing with parties
and governments (which characterised Guattari’s work at La Borde, with the
Centre d’études, des recherches et des formations institutionelles, in the free
radio movement, and his approximation to Communist, Socialist and Green
parties at different points); but also their stances, neither condemning nor
condoning, towards armed struggle in Europe and the Palestine Liberation
Organisation.
2. Pseudonym of Alain Badiou.
3. For Badiou, it is either this, or the two collapse into each other, in which case
the virtual is no more than ‘ignorantie asylum’ (Badiou 1997: 81).
4. ‘Spinoza does not call his book an Ontology . . . he calls it Ethics. Which is a way
of saying that, whatever the importance of my speculative propositions, you can
only judge them at the level of the ethics that they envelop or implicate’ (Deleuze
1981).
5. It must be noted that, despite the recurrent provisos that they are not opposed by
‘size, scale or dimension, but by the nature of the system of reference’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004a: 264), the sometimes equivocal use of those pairs that
suggest dimensions (molar/molecular, macro/micropolitics) can be a source of
confusion. Furthermore, there is one case where the poles are not virtual: in
‘double articulation’, molar and molecular are both actual and opposed in scale,
even if only relatively (the cell is molecular in relation to the organism, the
individual in relation to the species, etc.). In this case, the virtual ‘matter’ is
identified with ‘unstable flow-particles’ (cf. 55).
6. Among commentators, John Mullarkey (2006) has gone the farthest in
contesting the primacy of the virtual in Bergson/Deleuze, finding support in a
reading of the former to counteract the latter’s tendency of overstressing the
virtual to the point of placing the processual character of his metaphysics at
risk. To do so, Mullarkey argues that the virtual should be understood as the
infinite series of successive, actual Chronos indefinitely embedded in each other,
eliminating the need for an eternal Aion of pure, virtual events. He concurs,
nevertheless, that it is a matter of playing some tendencies in Deleuze’s thought
off against others – and provides an excellent discussion of why and how Deleuze
requires all of them, and their tension, to be simultaneously maintained.
7. I believe Noys’ coinage does capture a real tendency in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s
work, as well as in other strains of twentieth century and contemporary
thought, and that it raises important questions as to how we might strategically
conceptualise the relation between capitalism and resistance, especially in the
present conjuncture. It is certainly a relatively accurate description of some
authors who have appropriated Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, such as Hardt
and Negri, and (particularly) Nick Land. Where I would depart from Noys’
analysis is in what seems to be the almost ‘programmatic’ status that he
attributes to ‘accelerationism’ in Deleuze and Guattari, seemingly implying that
they espouse a linear teleology in which an intensification of deterritorialising
‘production’ (in the very broad, ontological sense) would, necessarily and in
and of itself, beat a path out of capitalism through its very acceleration.
There certainly are passages, in L’Anti-Oedipe above all, that could suggest
this reading. I would, however, argue that not only is it countered by many
other statements that can be found throughout their work, not least their
stringent remarks on neoliberalism from the 1980s on, but also by some
fundamental traits of their philosophy. An accelerationist ‘programme’ sits
uncomfortably with a radical ontological commitment to contingency and an
opposition to any teleologism. Furthermore, (absolute) deterritorialisation, as
a veritable ontological principle, is independent from and irreducible to its
historical embodiment in capitalism; it neither relies on the latter exclusively
in order to take place, nor would it fail to apply even in a putative ‘post-
capitalist’ world. Rather than a generalised goal or an invariable strategic
bet, the stress on deterritorialisation points to situated, tactical engagements
against structures and blockages that are given. In other words, to relative
deterritorialisations that are never entirely separated from the formation of new
assemblages: ‘the collective recapturing of those dynamics that can destratify the
moribund structures and reorganize life and society in accordance with other
forms of equilibrium, other worlds’ (Guattari 2002: 260).
8. As far back as Nietzsche et la philosophie, Deleuze already made it clear: ‘The
real as such is an ass’ idea. . . . Affirmation understood as . . . affirmation of what
is, as truthfulness of the true or positivity of the real, is a false affirmation. It is
the ass’ “yes”. . . . The Dyonisiac “yes”, on the other hand, is that which knows
how to say “no”. . . . To affirm is to create, not to carry, to bear, to take on’
(Deleuze 2001: 208–13).
References
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Badiou, Alain (1997) Deleuze: La clameur de l’être, Paris: Hachette.
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26/03/1973’; http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=166&groupe=Anti%
20Oedipe%20et%20Mille%20Plateaux&langue=1
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com/php/texte.php?cle=15&groupe=Spinoza&langue=1
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126 Rodrigo Nunes
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in Deux régimes de fous, Paris: Minuit, pp. 280–3.
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Barbara Habberjam, London: Continuum.
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Minuit.
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déserte, Paris: Minuit, pp. 365–80.
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Quarterly, 96:3, pp. 393–416.
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d’Yénan, 4, pp. 42–52.
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Political Passion’, New Formations, 68, pp. 123–40.
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politique)’, in Eric Alliez (ed.), Gilles Deleuze: une vie philosophique, Paris:
Synthélabo, pp. 142–58.
The Greek Gloom and the December
2008 Uprising
Ioulia Mermigka National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Abstract
This paper employs the notion of apparatus of capture in the context of
the historical formation and transformations of the Greek nation state.
The aim is to demystify the overcoding poles of political sovereignty as
they are expressed in different chronological periods and to sketch an
analysis of the appropriations of social living forms, social movements
and war machines into regimes of signs. The term war machine is
deployed as a key term for grasping the variables of content and the
variables of expression that are encountered in the different historical
circumstances. The order word modernisation illustrates not only the
machinic enslavement but also new social subjections within a society of
the spectacle and global capital. The account given here of the December
2008 uprising in Greece offers an insight into the political event and
attempts a pragmatic analysis of the December war machine.
Keywords: apparatus of capture, war machine, history, modernisation,
uprising, Greece
The following essay offers a student perspective on activism that
attempts to make sense of the chapter ‘7000 B.C.: Apparatus of
Capture’ from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and records
a fragmented trajectory of modern Greek history. The record outlined
here is chronological, moving from the early stages of the formation of
the Greek nation state to the series of modernisations that took place in
the closing decades of the twentieth century. The final section provides
an account of the December 2008 uprising and describes the political
activism that accompanied the events. The term war machine is used
DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110001169
128 Ioulia Mermigka
abstractly throughout for different expressions of war, violence and

resistance. The aim is to synchronise an outline of major Greek history
with Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of the state and minor politics.
The Greek historical climate is analysed in terms of vertical and
horizontal political significations, national suppressions and regimes of
resistance. Analysis of the Greek economy and the state is combined with
an account of semiotic transformations arising within the society of the
spectacle. The spectre of anarchy is tracked through the symbolic and
political transitions of recent decades and an account given of the social
violence erupting on the street and in the university.
Finally, I attempt to touch upon aspects of modernisation in terms
of Greekness, the proletariat, the middle class, the Left, the so-called
anarchist ‘space’, and resistance against authority and police repression.
Here the account is mainly concerned with outbreaks of street violence
and the principles of autonomous resistance.
I. 1821–96: The Double-Headed Eagle

The year 1821 marks the beginning of the Greek war of independence
against the Ottoman Empire. The struggle of the bandits becomes
an armed mobilisation essentially directed against the Ottoman state
(Vournas 1974: 31–4). The war machine is soon captured. A double-
headed eagle, a symbol of the revolution, looks in opposite directions,
one head to the east, the other to the west. In one of its variations the
eagle is crowned and holds a globe with a cross in its left foot, and a
lance in its right (Herzfeld 1989). The double-headed eagle suggests a
double articulation of political sovereignty.
The east-facing head implies both an overcoding pole, encapsulating
the Christian-orthodox and despotic signifiers, and a pole signifying the
supersession of those signifiers in the parliamentary function and the
processes of national subjection. Conspiracies are hatched and town
revolts erupt when the state’s overcoding itself provokes decoded flows:
whether the economic and social privileges of chieftains of the revolution
in regional towns or the constitutional or cultural demands of the
centralised political forces. The first governor of Greece, Kapodistrias,
is assassinated in 1831 and the Bavarian king Otto has to deal with
regional revolts during his reign until 1862 (Omada Enantia stin Lithi
1996: 359–400; Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 477–80). Moreover, despite
the church’s alignment with the state, the crown and the sultan, there are
flows of Christian irredentism that bring about crises over the Eastern
Question (Skopetea 1988: 251–71; Stathopoulou 1991: 166–204).
The west-facing head resonates with the glorifications of classicism

and rationalism in western thought. Archaeology has discovered among
the ancient Aegean civilisations highly evolved empires that had solved
the western problem of how to ‘take advantage of the oriental agricul-
tural stock without having to constitute one for themselves’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004: 497). Classicism and the Enlightenment entail not
just philosophy or aesthetics but an art of war, based on flows rather
than codes.
The Greek state born out of the revolutionary machine enters into a
series of financial pacts and military alliances with the quasi-imperialistic
European states. This western alignment effectuates the public parlia-
mentary function (with pro-French, pro-British and pro-Russian parties)
and determines the financial and diplomatic arrangements of the Greek
state while overcoding it with notions of Hellenistic and ancient Aegean
glory. In the vacillating poles of political sovereignty the capitalist
axiomatic of flows is introduced into a glorified archaeological demo-
cracy. In 1896 Athens mounts the revived Olympic Games.
The disjunction between the nationalists and the modernists after
1875 illustrates the knots at the western pole (Vournas 1974: 498–535):
The oriental solution of the nationalists and the resonances of Hellenist-
Christian irredentism on the one hand; the western solution of the
modernists aligned with the capitalist axiomatic for the territories that
would be annexed on the other. ‘It is as if two solutions were found
for the same problem, the oriental solution and then the western one,
which grafts itself upon the first, and brings it out of the impasse while
continuing to presuppose it’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 498).
II. 1914–22: The National Schism

In 1912, in the first Balkan War, the newly formed Christian states
of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro go to war against the
Ottomans. The Balkans claim autonomy for the Christian populations in
the Ottoman territories but the Ottomans ignore their ultimatum. The
outcome of the war falls in favour of the Balkan League. The Great
Powers consent to the annexation of some territories but raise objections
with regard to others, leading in 1913 to the second Balkan War. The
outbreak of the First World War the following year places the Greeks in
an ambivalent position. The liberal Prime Minister Venizelos joins forces
with the Allies, while the German-friendly king Constantinos holds to a
supposedly neutral position. In 1916 the Greek state is split between
two capitals: the pro-Venizelists in Thessaloniki and the royalists in
130 Ioulia Mermigka
Athens. When the French occupy Athens, battling with the royalists
and blocking all commercial flows, angry royalist supporters blame
the liberals as traitors. Venizelos is excommunicated by the Orthodox
Church, and in December 1916 thousands of people gather in Athens to
throw signed stones of anathema in protest at the ‘Satan-traitor’ (Delta
1988: 277–80).
In 1917, with support from the British and the French, Venizelos
returns to Athens and Greece enters the Great War. The outcomes are
positive for Greece and in 1919 Greek troops land in Asia Minor to
protect the Christian population. Venizelos wages a war of diplomacy,
and of gradual territorial annexation, so as to pursue the ‘Great Idea’
of a ‘Greece of five seas and two continents’. The romantic-nationalist
pole, however, wins the elections of 1920 and the Greek army marches
deeper into Turkey. The result is the ‘Asia Minor Catastrophe’ of 1922
and the first compulsory population exchange, involving approximately
2 million refugees.
The formation of the new Turkish state under Kemal Atatürk
coincides with the waning of the ‘Great Idea’, along with the definitive
collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Kemal’s war machine against the sultan
and the Greeks, and his pacts with the Allies, seeds the birth of the
Turkish state in the pattern of the Zeitgeist. The Great Powers have
to negotiate with another isomorphic albeit heterogeneous player. The
Greek–Turkish friendship from then on becomes a recurrent issue.
III. The Greek Language Question and the People’s Refrain

The Greek language question reveals not only the suppressive mecha-
nisms involved in the birth and coming of age of the nation state but also
how it was transformed by ‘nationalitarian’ phenomena (see Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 504). From 1830 to 1890 the major language of bureau-
cracy and the political elites is a purifying version that settles the tension
between archaic and modernist-colloquial varieties in favour of archaic
constants (especially ancient Athenian Greek). However, the demotic or
vernacular language gradually comes to affect the major language. From
1888 a linguistic radicalism in favour of the demotic language begins
to tip the balance towards modernist constants with socialist, romantic,
nationalistic, or even racist variations (see Fragkoudaki 2001).
Over the following years more literature is written in the demotic
language, but despite attempts at educational reforms the archaic
varieties continue to dominate. The indirect discourse they are based
upon entails a diachrony with ancient Greek and a synchrony with the
archaic religious language of Orthodoxy, and in general with the dogmas

of Hellenist-Christianity. After the collapse of the ‘Great Idea’ and the
relocating of the enemy from the external (the Turks) to the internal (the
communists), the demotic language also comes to be linked more closely
with the workers’ movement and the Left.
In an implementation of realpolitik, the liberal Venizelos passes a
series of educational reforms in favour of the demotic language, but
also in 1929 issues a legal order word, the idionymon, that penalises
insurrectional ideas and aims in particular to prosecute communists and
anarchists and to enforce repression against unionist mobilisations. With
the coming of the Great Depression, Venizelos is forced to default on
Greece’s national debt, built up from loans for industrial modernisation
and the housing of refugees from Asia Minor.
The refugees bring with them a sound of the east, a people’s refrain.
The bouzouki and other oriental instruments become orchestrated with
the Greek voice. The refugee songs, known as ‘Rebetika’, relate tales
of love couplings, dominations and subjections, either to authority or
to addictions. The Rebetika are censored by government, while the Left
passes moral judgement on their delinquent content. Nevertheless, they
are the seed that would transform a recurring Greek sound. Musical
matters of expression and the Greek voice merge at this particular period
into a Greek chromatic sound that will become popular from the 1950s
onwards.
IV. 1950–74: The Repressive Modernisation

During and after the Second World War the Greek milieu becomes pola-
rised between the eastern Soviet pole and the western Anglo-American
pole, both with their limits and thresholds. The Greek civil war lasts
from 1944 to 1949. The communist resistance attempts to prevent a
capitalistic state but it also anticipates it: radical socialist elements of
people’s power and gender equality coexist alongside property rights
and the operation of the state as coordinator of private relations (Hart
1996: 273). By the 1950s the Greek milieu will definitely belong to the
western neighbourhood of the capitalist megamachine (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 480).
The right-wing Greek state overcodes its national sovereignty by
means of a structural violence. The Communist Party is declared illegal
and the military and police issue an order word obliging citizens to
sign a certificate of national (anti-communist) beliefs. Many Leftists
are imprisoned or sent into exile on rocky islets. As Athens becomes
132 Ioulia Mermigka
rapidly populated by new proletarian flows from the countryside, urban

planning by army technocrats striate the city, ensuring that highway
constructions and administrative centres provide easy military access and
facilitate police control. This is a new technical machine. On the basis
of this urban rationale military groups seize Athens and usurp power in
1967 (Anonymous 2002: 55–80).
The modern social subjection also derives from the organisation of
housing policies, which aim at promoting private property in newly built
blocks of flats. In this way, people living in refugee slums and
working-class neighbourhoods lose their social networks and tend to be
assimilated into a new urbanised middle class. The state’s recognition
‘that workers work better when they have a decent house’ resonates
with the greed of the new class of building contractors (Anonymous
2002: 80–72; Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 1989: 499–505); the resulting
urbanisation of the period is described in Greek as a ‘construction
orgasm’.
The repressive modernisation of the period is also related to the rise
of a public sphere with a mixed semiotics. In 1952, women gain the
right to vote and be elected, but they still represent servants for the
reproduction of the nation and guardians of the family (Komninou 2003:
69). Through the spectacle and the culture industry, capitalism advances
its own limits of a libidinal economy. In the commercial Greek cinema
of the period there is an overloaded investment in a modern version of
a deviant femininity that decodes traditional gender relations, but the
recurrent narrative ending is either a happy orthodox marriage or a life
condemned in sin and shame (Athanasatou 2001: 342–6). The new task
of the state apparatus consists in ‘organizing conjunctions of decoded
flows as such’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 498); in the Greek case this
entails not only the participation of women in the labour market, in the
public sphere and in the spectacle, but also their social subjection to a
folded patriarchy. A modern house, a modern family and a night out at
the bouzoukia clubs smashing plates: these are some of the prerequisites
for the new social subjection.
There is also an international aspect to the national subjection. The
dominant patriotic regime resonates with the desire for the union of
mother Greece with Cyprus, but negotiates this revived irredentism with
NATO and the USA. On the other hand, there is also a patriotic counter-
signifying regime which turns away from the West to enunciate a
polemical anti-Americanism (Stefanidis 2008: 285–306). The escalating
left-wing mobilisations of the early 1960s share this patriotic passion,
but direct it towards the East and the Third World struggles of the times.
The strategy of the repressed Left is to wear the face of Greekness, but
provide another post-traumatic consciousness for it. In poetry and music
this is expressed in the glorification or relative deterritorialisation of both
the Greek topos and the victimised heroism of the people (Gavriilidis
2007). This radical patriotism integrates the war machine of the 1960s
into a mixed semiotic (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 131). In December
1960 it is the construction builders who first clash with the police and
initiate a cycle of violent protest. Unionist mobilisation then escalates,
making specific professional demands on the state, but also fighting
against the structural violence of the police (Lampropoulou 2008:
220–41). Over the next years, the workers’ and students’ demand for
democratisation of the state crystallises around the Left. From 1963 the
Left aspires to gain power and gradually bring about a socialist transfor-
mation. Until 1963 it encouraged the counter-violence of the movements
but from then on strives to pursue the struggle at the level of axioms. The
situation comes to a head with the political assassination of the pacifist
MP G. Lamprakis in 1963 and the killing of a student by police in the
summer of 1965, when for over 40 days thousands of people take collec-
tive action on the street and clash with police (Katsaros 1999: 49–70).
This war machine should not be identified with the Left. It is rather
what escapes from both the conjugation of capitalist flows of the
repressive state and from the hierarchical organisations of the Left.
If it is identified with the Left, it must be considered to have been
defeated, since in 1967 the colonels’ tanks march into the same streets
and take over the power. From 1974, after the fall of the junta, the
Left becomes assimilated into political games within social democracy.
The war machine is rather the unnameable revolutionised mass of
the period. It creates sheets of past that relate to the coexistence of a
proletarian consciousness and a flight from the plane of capital (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004: 521), and its peaks of present always involve its
zone of indiscernibility between the poles of political sovereignty.
Such a high point of the war machine is the Polytechneio uprising in
1973. It begins as a students’ revolt against the junta liberal reforms. The
revolutionised youth creates a snowball effect and thousands take on to
the streets. The spontaneity of the uprising and the heterogeneity of the
crowds inhibits any organisation from the Left in terms either of armed
revolt or public negotiations. The reformists accuse the revolutionary
Left of being inciting agents. Everybody anticipates the intervention of
the army that eventually suppresses the uprising. The consequences are
another coup in Greece and in Cyprus, which results in the Turkish
invasion and the division of the island.
134 Ioulia Mermigka
In 1974, Karamanlis, the engineer of the repressive state of the 1950s,

returns to secure national unity and consolidate democracy. He makes
the date of the Polytechneio uprising a national anniversary, legalises the
Communist Party and resolves the language question by establishing the
demotic as the official language. Moreover, the monarchy is abolished by
plebiscite. The right-wing government, despite the lure of neoliberalism,
added social welfare axioms in order to meet the requirements of the
European Community.
V. 1981–2004: The Populist Modernisation and the Spectre

of Anarchy
In 1979–80, without the consent of the organisations of the Left,
students occupy some of the universities and demonstrate against the
educational reforms planned by the right-wing government. The students
are labelled as anarchists. On the anniversary of the Polytechneio
Uprising in 1980 a 21-year-old worker and 26-year-old student are killed
by the police. Riots break out, because the government bans the rally
from accessing the American embassy.
The ultra-populist Papandreou, leader of the Panhellenic Socialist
Movement (PASOK), wins the election of 1981 under the slogan
‘change’. He had promised withdrawal from NATO and the then EC
and the closing down of the US military bases, but none of these are
actualised. In 1981 Greece is officially a member of the EC. Papandreou
adds more axioms signalling a shift in the style of government, but
not in substance. His reforms bring Greece out of the national closet:
civil marriage is introduced against stiff opposition from the church,
adultery is removed from the catalogue of criminal offences and the
dowry system is, legally at least, abolished. Papandreou also amends
the family law and adds axioms at practically all levels of social policy
(Clogg 1994: 183–4). He becomes so popular that Greeks refer to him
by his first name, Andreas.
PASOK’s decentralised socialism involves the nationalisation of
problematic companies already indebted to the largely state-controlled
banks. This, far from bringing with it any noticeable improvement in
productivity, merely provides an opportunity to continue the former
right-wing patronage by way of expanding the pay-roll. Via the leader’s
populism, the new policies regulate anti-production with social welfare
policies and bounteous financial opportunism (Clogg 1994: 188). The
slogan ‘change’ orders that capital will continue to produce surplus
value thanks to the government’s rescue of capitalists, and on the
other hand that the state will regulate public debt. The public sector
and bureaucracy grows gigantic; consent is secured by appointments
in the public sector based on clientist relations; alliance with the party
and favouritism for its members serves the interests of individuals and
families and masquerades as realising the socialist liberal desire for the
promised civil society. Andreas, despite his socialist polemic, ensures
social subjection within the wider capitalist axiomatic.
Andreas functions as a libidinal image that symbolically occupies a
limit but at the same time signals the displacement of capitalist desire.
It is striking how he obscurely fascinates the crowds when, in an
outspoken way, he dumps his feminist wife, a figure of some political
standing, for a much younger air hostess, and even more striking how,
when he is accused of being bribed by a capitalist, he still remains
adored as a political icon. An oedipal detail of the ‘dirty 89’, the year
a series of scandals breaks, is that the money is hidden in nappy boxes.
The same year, radio and TV broadcasting are deregulated and the
Adam Smith complex replaces the Oedipus complex. The resulting
so-called deregulation is related to the wider re-structuring of commu-
nication systems and the new forms of machinic enslavement and media
ecology.
In between, anarchists and autonomists with no clear outlines along
with intellectuals and artists and other members of what is generally
referred to as the underdog political culture, begin to settle in Exarchia,
a neighbourhood close to the Polytechneio. In 1984 the police pursue a
gentrification policy in the area, since the youth’s abstract politicisation
and radical culture can not be easily assimilated by the state apparatus.
On the anniversary of the Polytechneio uprising in 1985 a 15-year-
old student is shot by the police. The Polytechneio and the Chemistry
department nearby are occupied and violent protests take place. The
police invade the buildings, despite the university asylum which forbids
the police and the army from entering university premises. The state
demonstrates its capacity for ‘socialist’ structural violence. At the same
time a war machine against the monopoly of state violence forms. It is
rooted in an anarchist polemic which endangers it but also effectuates a
space of unlimited and vital political expression.
In 1990–1 there is a high-school student mobilisation and another
cycle of contention. The educational reforms introduced by the right-
wing government include anachronistic measures like compulsory school
uniforms, prayer and hoisting of the flag, and generally a tendency to
limit student rights in favour of an arbitrary school. Moreover they
increase competition for university entry and do not by any means
136 Ioulia Mermigka
resolve the issue of fee-paying crammer schools. Overall, education is

to be based more on memorisation than critical thinking.
The wave of high-school occupations sweeps the country. In Athens
the demonstrations are violently repressed by the police. It is during
this time that I first encounter political theories and become involved
in political activism. The period remains significant not so much for our
eventual victory in resisting the government’s measures but for the fact
that the seeds of a proletarian consciousness were sown, at a critical
distance from party and other groupuscules, in spite of the desire for
belonging.
The situation culminates in the events of 1991 when a left-wing
teacher is killed by far-right thugs and four civilians die when a building
is set alight during a demonstration the next day. The blame is placed on
the anarchists for their agitation against the social order, despite the fact
that the fire most probably resulted from the extensive use of tear gas
by the police. It is at the beginning of the ’90s that an anarchist ‘space’
becomes more articulated, in contrast with the vertical organisations of
the Left. From then on, arson becomes a virtuality haunting this ‘space’.
Not long after, in 1993, the government pursues the privatisation of
public transport and other conservative reforms. The bus drivers are
polarised and strikers clash with the police. However, a shift is marked
during this time, as the flow of Albanians and other immigrants from
around the globe become the new constant capital. Greek capitalists
exploit this development, while the state does little to secure the
immigrants’ civil integration and public-opinion gate-keepers cultivate
a climate of xenophobia. This racial class rupture will mark the atrophy
of the proletarian consciousness over the next few years.
The anarchist movement that gains momentum mainly among the
youth detaches itself from struggles at the level of axioms, since its
relation to labour is one of precariousness, of a proclaimed negation
of wage labour and of inertia in regard to capitalist relations. The figure
of the proletarian will be replaced in some anarchist factions with the
figure of the revolutionary, the scarlet slogan ‘revolt’ taken to justify
its avant-garde position. In 1995 at the anniversary of the Polytechneio
uprising, anarchists occupy the university. University asylum is again
violated when the building is burned and more than 500 are arrested and
filed as extremists. Some anarchists from then on tend to appropriate the
Polytechneio as their symbol of revolt. It is in this way that the ‘space’ is
striated in police files and in the area around Exarchia.
The rupture in proletarian consciousness will be even more obvious
in the next few years as the order word ‘modernisation’ takes on new
forms of circulation. The stock-market crash of 1999 involves lower-

and middle-class civilians, even in remote regions of Greece, who invest
their microcapital in so-called bubble stocks and lose their savings as a
result. Elsewhere, the events in Seattle and Genoa inspire a mobilisation
in Greece during the EU–Western Balkan Summit in Thessaloniki in
2003, where the Black Bloc attempt a more organised presence in terms
of social counter-violence within the anti-globalisation movement.
In 2004 Athens hosts the Olympic Games and national pride in the
cradle of democracy is revived. However, with foreign and public debt
escalating, the right-wing government proves to be iniquitous. A series of
public scandals break out, involving almost all levels of social authority:
judges, priests, bankers, MPs and ministers, civil servants, journalists. . .
The slogan now becomes ‘shed light’, but the gloom is thick. On the
one hand, the processes of subjectification have managed to cultivate
indifference, cynicism and atavistic consumerism; on the other hand,
the counter-signifying regime is either appropriated by the mainstream
Left or endangered by the sublimation of social war by the anarchists.
VI. The December 2008 Uprising

One further precursor of the December 2008 uprising is the student
movement of 2006–7. The state’s programmes for education reform
generally try to link the public university with the axioms of private
education. In response, student organisations on the Left, following
a logic of hegemony, try to dominate the students’ assemblies and
impose a parochial politics. In June 2006 and March 2007 proletariat
youth fight against police repression and the mobilisation turns into
an uprising. The situation is already complicated as the students – the
so-called ‘generation of 700 euro’ (the minimum wage), who somehow
have to invent a life within the new capitalist relations – merge on the
street with the anarchists and the lumpenproletariat.
This unnameable student proletariat affiliates more closely with the
conscientious labour objectors than it does with the myopic Left (cf.
Thoburn 2003). There is, however, a tendency to relate the student
mobilisations with labour issues and with new forms of activism, like
the blocking of public transport, occupations of radio stations, protests
in workers’ neighbourhoods and reclaim-the-streets parties. What has
remained from these mobilisations are the networks of social relations
that ensued from the occupations, a spirit of solidarity that grows
out of autonomous forms of organisation, and a student community
138 Ioulia Mermigka
that, even if it didn’t manage to intensify qualitatively the mobilisation,

nevertheless discovered new lines of flight.
In the summer of 2007, a series of forest fires break out across Greece
leaving the land scorched. Many mourn and others covet the ready-
to-be-built-upon land. The echoes of the financial crisis reach Greece.
In December 2008 in the area of Exarchia – a sanctuary for political
underdogs – a 15-year-old student is cold-bloodedly shot dead by the
police. The murder releases a flow of resistance and affect. A war
machine forms against state repression and the capitalist colonisation
of everyday life. The line of flight it traces is a line of fire, and one that is
not easily put out. Police repression meanwhile escalates; the city chokes
with tear gas and the mainstream media churn out legalistic nonsense,
promoting bad conscience and binary divisions between good and bad
demonstrators.
Even though it is the anarchists who trigger the line of fire, in
the demonstrations, behind the barricades, and in the assemblies the
war machine is formed by a multiplicity of crowds. Anarchist politics
germinates the seeds of the politics of the act, but the war machine
exceeds their political signals (see Day 2008). The social composition
of the uprising is not polarised between political or ideological milieus
but involves bevies of high school and university students, unnameable
proletarians, lumpenproletarians, refugees, immigrants and civilians
who have no prior fixed political allegiance but choose to participate in
the violent expression against the police, against chain stores as symbols
of the society of the spectacle, against the banks as symbols of financial
capital, and against public buildings as symbols of the state (Kalamaras
2009: 21).
Following the early days of ‘burning and looting’ a smoother urban
space is created: Universities in Athens and Thessaloniki are occupied by
political activists; high-schools and university departments by students;
the HQ of the Workers Confederation by insurgent workers; the HQ of
the News Editors Union by media activists, the National Opera House
by artists. From occupied municipal buildings and other public spaces in
many Greek cities there are calls for people’s assemblies; public TV and
radio stations are interrupted briefly by activists. The December uprising
is a feast of activism, a feast in the most original sense. This is because
the series of events are organised by the revolutionary assemblages
themselves and the duration of the uprising depends on their political
will and creativity and ability to overcome fatigue.
A pragmatics of the war machine deals with how it is appropriated.
The dominant raison d’être of the two major political parties wants
the Left to be undermining democracy by inciting social violence.

The Greek-style culture of violence, according to this regime of signs,
is a return of the repressed of the Left: the Left must suppress all
revolutionary ideas and practices in order to aspire to parliamentary
power. Left intellectuals in response implement a minimum abstraction
in relation to the uprising’s materialism, seeing it as a cultural event or
an expression of apolitical rage on the part of the youth. They proclaim
that the uprising lacked political articulation and that violence must
be condemned wherever it comes from. In this way the Left exorcises
its defeat in the civil war and the ghost of a Stalinist revolutionary
totalitarianism. It interprets its revolutionary peaks like the Polytechneio
uprising of 1973 as a legitimate resistance in a state of exception. Its
bad conscience and its subjection to the apparatus enforces the state of
exception of the legitimate state in violently repressing the uprising and
the rhizomes that spread in its aftermath. In general it confirms its verti-
cal hegemony in relation to social struggles by projecting its integration
within democratic institutions (see Flesh Machine 2010: 69–97).
The anarchist ‘space’ is outlined by its resistance against the monopoly
of state violence. From the 1990s on that principle of resistance has
transformed the ‘space’ into a counter-signifying regime that makes
critical statements on the functions of democracy and capitalism and
has been attracting a growing number of people. In the December event,
the right to social counter-violence as a matter of expression brings to
the foreground the potentiality of a war against the logos and the law
of the democratic state, and of a grounding of a people’s nomos. Other
features of the anarchist ‘space’ include an emphasis on the political
values of autonomy in the post-Fordist era, self-organisation amongst
craft unions, direct democracy in decision making, and horizontal
networks of free-spirited relations outside consumerist frameworks.
Some anarchist fractions, however, take war against the state as their
sole mission.
These fractions are composed by the lumpenproletariat (see Thoburn
2003). The affiliation of the anarchist ‘space’ with the lumpenproletariat
and with political activists outside or on the margins of the law is one of
the revolutionary connections that transform this ‘space’ into a counter-
signifying regime. Especially after December there is an urgent need to
conjugate the variables of content and the variables of expression of
the uprising so as to open up its assemblages to a patient and sober,
but revolutionary, line of flight (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 97). This
line of flight will have to entail the involution of the genealogy of
social violence in regard not only to the national context but also to
140 Ioulia Mermigka
the trans-national militarisation of the policing of protests. Through the

spectacle of violence and police repression the new conception of security
reconstitutes the war machine in conformity with the requirements of
the capitalist axiomatic, which promotes a special kind of secured peace
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 516).
As far as the circumstances of the current crisis in Greece are
concerned, the transformational work being done in relation to
autonomous craft-unionism, the unnameable proletariat and minorities,
refugees, immigrants, social centres and queer politics within the
anarchist ‘space’, is endangered by the post-subjectification of some
anarchists as the revolutionary avant-garde of the movement. On 5
May 2010, during a massive demonstration against austerity measures
imposed by the government, the IMF and the EU, three bank employees
and a foetus are killed during an arson attack on a bank. While this
event does not represent the anarchist ‘space’, it is a virtuality that haunts
that ‘space’ and becomes actual when the line of fire turns into a line of
abolition. More than ever there is a need for sober collective analysis
of the anarchist subjectifications and for new revolutionary connections
with the lumpenproletariat and with minorities.
The situation looks as though it has reached an impasse in regard
to the conjunctions of the capitalist axiomatic within the current crisis.
The gloom grows thicker. The hegemonic Left deepens the inertia of the
proletariat by proclaiming occasional strikes; some anarchist fractions
hold to their tight solidarity with anarchist prisoners, political criminals
and armed struggle terrorists; the decentred anarchist ‘space’ rallies
and tries to effectuate anew its abstract machine outside the strata, on
the strata and between the strata. It is from within the unnameable
proletariat, the unemployed and the minorities that new lines of flight
will be drawn and vital connections made against the automation of
the capitalist axiomatic and its bureaucratic programming (Deleuze and
Allow me to conclude with a slogan from the December uprising:
‘Freedom does not exist, all we have is choice.’
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Life Resistance: Towards a Different
Concept of the Political
Brad Evans University of Leeds
Abstract
In an attempt to reaffirm Deleuze’s Nietzschean affinities, this article
argues that it is possible to detect in his thought an alternative concept
of the political which gives ontological priority to difference. In order
to map this out, a Deleuzian reading of the Zapatista experience will
be provided, with particular attention given to the manner in which
power is re-conceptualised, resistance strategised, subjectivities recast,
and political solidarities formed anew. Once this has been established,
the paper will argue that not only does Deleuze provide us with a
meaningful basis for political action, he offers us possibilities for creating
new forms of political solidarity that no longer take Hegelian inspired
dialectical enmity or dangerous Kantian unfulfilment as their point of
theoretical departure.
Keywords: total war, resistance, concept of the political, difference,
the Other, politics of friendship
I. Deleuze’s Resistance
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s trilogy remains the most ambitious
attempt at making Deleuze relevant to today’s political climate (see
Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004, 2010). Foregrounding Deleuze as the
affirmative theorist of micropolitical nomadism, Hardt and Negri’s
project places him in direct confrontation with the two great modernist
thinkers who dominate contemporary political thought: Immanuel Kant
and George Wilhelm Hegel. ‘The leitmotif of Kantian philosophy’,

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110001170
Life Resistance 143
they suggest, is the ‘necessity of the transcendental, the impossibility

of every form of immediacy, the exorcism of every vital figure in the
apprehension and action of being’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 81). While
their anti-Hegelianism, contra Fanon, results in a scathing critique of the
dialectical method for the manner in which it re-produces the colonial
mind: ‘Colonialism constructs figures of alterity and manages their flows
in what unfolds as a complex dialectical structure . . . Reality is not
dialectical, colonialism is’ (124, 129). One could argue that these battles
are altogether Deleuzian. Deleuze did not hesitate to call Kant ‘the
enemy’ (Deleuze 1990: 6). Neither did he refrain from accusing Hegel of
‘inspiring every language of betrayal’ (Deleuze 2004: 144). While Kant
was singled out for his deceitful ‘politics of compromise’, which allows
us to question certain parameters of knowledge, truth and morality
while refusing to bring thought to bear on these terms in themselves
(Deleuze 2006: 83, 84), Hegel, caught in a double Kantian bind, stands
accused of infecting all political struggle with a ‘spirit of revenge’ so that
political triumphs always define the ‘weak as weak’, with the victory
of the slaves written into the world as their ‘victory as slaves’ (109).
What is being uncovered here is the process wherein a state of mind
becomes a ‘mind of state’: where Kant’s Cogitatio Universalis demands a
higher unity in order to tame the multiplicity of forces which potentially
troubles the unification of the faculties of reason (Deleuze and Guattari
2002: 367), Hegelian dialectics perpetuate this drama with greater inner
purpose by conceiving ‘power as the object of a recognition, the content
of a representation, the stake in a competition, and therefore mak[ing]
it depend, at the end of a fight, on a simple attribution of established
values’ (Deleuze 2006: 9–10). Either way, the political as a function of
difference is the problem to be solved.
Whatever problems one may have with Hardt and Negri’s wider
project they nevertheless pose a critical question about the relationship
between imperial ‘war machines’ and canonical ‘images of thought’.
Kant is a somewhat easy target. His universal disposition directly relates
the singular predilection for difference to the problem of war. This is no
small matter. Whereas Hobbes taught us that there can be no politics
without security, and no security without the State, Kant encourages
us to believe that there can be no security without universality, and
no universality without moral progress towards the unification of the
species. Hegel’s legacy is more complicated. If Kant inaugurated the
modern age, it was with Hegel that modernity became problematic in so
far as its inner workings became visible and self-consciously theorised
(see Habermas 1987). Hegel is therefore for many the founder of the
144 Brad Evans
modern theory of resistance. While Hardt and Negri recognise this,

they find this approach problematic on two distinct counts. Historically
speaking, since the dialectical method has been implicit in recreating the
master/slave dichotomy out of the ashes of liberation, inscribed into the
fabric of its counter-hegemonic discourse has been a profound distaste
for anything which differs from the orthodox Eurocentric schema. Now
that all social relations are underwritten by networked thinking, ideas
concerning linearity, teleology and limit conditions have been firmly
displaced by notions of complexity, contingency and emergence. As a
consequence, even if dialectics did once harbour the potential for polit-
ical transformation, it now has little or no relevance to the operation of
contemporary power which works at the level of pure strategy. From
this perspective then, while the Kantian attempt to realise the unification
of the species for the sake of its own protection arguably makes him the
imperial philosopher whose time has come, Hegel and his descendents
have no political relevance in the post-dialectical field of play.
Dialecticians have invariably fought back. John Holloway was among
the first to take critical aim at Hardt and Negri’s project. ‘Politically’,
he explains, while ‘the emphasis on the power of the working class
has an obvious appeal . . . the understanding of labour and capital in
terms of an external relationship leads to a . . . failure to explore the
internal nature of the relation between labour and capital leading the
autonomist analysts to underestimate the degree to which labour exists
within capitalist forms’ (Holloway 2002: 174). Dialectics then becomes
the only method capable of providing ‘the escape plan, the thinking-
against-the-prison, thinking-against-the-wrong-world, a thinking that
would no longer make sense if we were outside of the prison of the
wrong world’. Holloway thus calls upon us to ‘strengthen negativity’,
‘make the scream more strident’ and in the process negate in whatever
way we can the negativeness of our existence – the negation of the
‘untruth of the world’ (8). To his credit, Holloway is not blind to the
failures of the past, but he believes that since it is possible to move
away from the ‘logic of synthesis’ (which he takes to be the focus of
concern for Hardt and Negri) and on to the ‘movement of negation’,
it is possible to negate the present without colonising the future. Slavoj
Žižek has been less forgiving. Lamenting that ‘Deleuze more and more
serves as the theoretical foundation of today’s anti-global Left’ (Žižek
2004: xi), Žižek insists that in-vogue tendencies to invoke Deleuzian
notions such as becoming, multiplicity, nomadism, micropolitics, and
the power of the affirmative, make him at best a compliant apologist:
‘There are, effectively, features that justify calling Deleuze the ideologist
Life Resistance 145
of late capitalism’ (185). Since Deleuze lacks the negative power of

truth, Žižek effectively ascribes to him a truly nihilistic agenda which
claims the resistance of everything and yet, being ill-equipped to pose
the right questions, actually ends up creating nothing, offering only a
life of endless becoming which in the end shows an allegiance to ‘the
infinitely divisible, substanceless, void within a void’ (24).
Deleuzian scholars have responded to these critiques by suggesting
that Deleuze’s relationship with Kant and Hegel was actually more
complex than the literal Nietzschean reading ordinarily suggests. Paul
Patton’s response, for instance, has no problem reconciling Deleuze with
the constitutional tradition of political liberalism (see Patton 2008).
While Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr strike a now familiar note by
explaining that
Too many people are content to say Deleuze, like Nietzsche, was against
Hegel without ever asking why . . . But this critique is only meaningful to the
extent that it is read in terms of Deleuze’s conception of philosophy’s purpose,
which is precisely Marxian to the extent that, like Marx, they hold that the
point of philosophy is not to understand society, but to change it. (Buchanan
and Parr 2006: 1)
While these efforts to nuance Deleuze’s thought have their benefits, there
is a danger here that in re-acting to such criticisms Deleuzian Studies
either becomes the victim of a dialectical entrapment or attempts to
become all things to all people in a frantic search for acceptance. The
suggestion is not, of course, that Deleuze needs to be authenticated, still
less that we should refrain from using his concepts wherever appropriate.
But having said this, to argue in favour of a Deleuze who is open to
all forms of interpretation (affirmative/negative, creative/compromised,
micro/macro, singular/universal, nomadic/sedentary, non-Statist/Statist)
not only risks confirming what Žižek contends – that Deleuze is
an ultimately substanceless political philosopher whose arbitrary
positioning at best inspires an allegiance to the purely contingent – it
also invites those ‘bad readings or displacements’ derived from ‘arbitrary
selections’ of his works (not least the well-documented appropriation of
Deleuze’s ideas by various advocates within military academies) that he
was so keen to warn us against in the particular context of Nietzsche’s
fate (Deleuze 2004: 17).
For Deleuzian scholarship what is at stake here centres on his relation-
ship with Nietzsche. Should this be read in purely philosophical terms?
Or might it offer to us something more politically than do those attempts
to reconcile Deleuze with the best of the Enlightenment tradition? While
146 Brad Evans
the style of Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy does allow for some
distancing in the sense that it is written from the perspective of the
commentator exploring his target’s thought processes, it is undoubtedly
clear that this is done out of admiration rather than denunciation (unlike
in the study of Kant). Keith Ansell-Pearson (2004) is therefore correct to
insist that Deleuze’s political ‘battle cry’ should not be divorced from its
Nietzschean affinity. Such a severance would only undermine Deleuze’s
ontological commitment to the affirmation of difference, his belief in the
creative dimension to resistance, his distaste for dialectics, his preference
for the genealogical method, and his allegiance to Dionysian forces
(nomadic, singular, micro and multiple) over Apollonian forces (seden-
tary, total, macro and universal). Moving away from the proposition
that resistance is a creative process there is also a danger that Deleuze’s
contribution to our understanding of the political will simply be made
to reaffirm well-established antagonistic terms of engagement.
Moving beyond this impasse, this paper will argue that it is possible
to detect in Deleuze’s thought an alternative concept of the political
which gives ontological priority to difference. In order to gain a tangible
purchase on this, a Deleuzian reading of the Zapatista experience will
be presented, thereby countering the ludicrous assertion that Deleuze
is merely some ‘other-worldly’ philosopher who provides us with no
meaningful basis for normative political action.
II. Total War

When power takes life to be its object, resistance to power already puts
itself on the side of life and turns life against power: ‘life as a political
object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the
system bent on controlling it’ (Deleuze 1999: 76). Life in other words
not only ‘becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its
object, but invoking a special and particular “right to life”, when power
becomes bio-power, resistance becomes the power of life, a vital power
that cannot be confined within species, environment or the paths of a
particular diagram’ (77). With life therefore said to be already richer in
possibilities, the life which exceeds expectations becomes a life of resis-
tance. Inevitably, since life resistance combats the forms of confinement
(capture) and technical strategies (overcoding) so essential to forms
of species manipulation, it equally refuses to accept the dangerously
unfulfilled categorisation which power necessarily imposes in order to
control and transform existence. This is crucial to our understanding of
contemporary political struggles. Contemporary warfare is not simply
Life Resistance 147
about containing the problem. By-passing the classical concern with

sovereign integrities, it is fought over the modalities of life itself (see
Smith 2006). As Tony Blair reiterated on numerous occasions (e.g. Blair
2007), Westphalia aside, the battle today is for the global value space. It
is about bodies that matter. Somewhat ironically then, sanctioned in the
name of lasting human peace, this global will to war is also triumphed
to be an advance in Liberal reason (see Ignatieff 2003). It is the surest of
indicators that humanity can be brought together through the necessary
battles which are waged against unnecessary species endangerment.
War is no longer therefore simply fought in order to destroy those
terroristic elements which occupy an epistemic place of exteriority to
the normal order of things; rather, for the most part, it is now waged by
‘other means’ upon maladjusted insurgent populations which, although
dangerous, are open to remedy and demand lasting engagement (see
Bell and Evans 2010).
While counter-insurgency literatures present this as the latest strategic
thinking (see Kilcullen 2009), indigenous populations have been
mapping these biopolitical contours for some considerable time. Writing
some four years after the first uprising against the ‘New World Order’,
Subcomandante Marcos, a spokesperson for the indigenous Zapatistas
of Mexico, published a highly original article in Le Monde diplomatique
(Marcos 2002). Entitled ‘The Fourth World War’, this article offered
a remarkably concise genealogy of modern warfare which begins by
navigating through the three major wars which shaped the twentieth
century: the First and Second being the familiar Great Wars, the Third
synonymous with the Cold War. Marking a new departure, the Fourth
War thus refers to a post-Cold War condition which, although revealing
many commonalities, presents some distinct strategic turns:
Afterwards came the Fourth World War, which destroyed everything from
before, because the world is no longer the same, and the same strategy cannot
be applied. The concept of ‘Total war’ was developed further: it is not only
a war on all fronts; it is a war which can be anywhere, a total war in which
the entire world is at stake. ‘Total war’ means: at any moment, in any place,
under any circumstances. The idea of fighting for one place in particular no
longer exists. Now the fight can take place at any moment.
As Marcos sees it, ‘the problem’ begins to appear when one poses the
question ‘Who is the Enemy?’:
We are saying that humanity is now the enemy. The Fourth World War
is destroying humanity as globalization is universalizing the market, and
148 Brad Evans
everything human which opposes the logic of the market is an enemy and
must be destroyed. In this sense, we are all the enemy to be vanquished:
indigenous, non-indigenous, human rights observers, teachers, intellectuals,
artists. Anyone who believes themselves to be free and is not.
Hence, for Marcos, since ‘Total War’ implies that the entire planetary
biosphere is at stake: ‘There are no longer civilians and neutrals. The
entire world is part of the conflict . . . Everyone is a part, there are no
neutrals, you are either an ally or you are an enemy.’
This abandonment of political neutrality is not incidental. It is fully
indicative of the contemporary strategic landscape which has witnessed
the blurring of all conventional demarcations (see Dillon 2007; Dillon
and Reid 2009). One only has the think for instance of the notion
of Humanitarian War to give credence to this fact. This undoubtedly
raises some challenging political questions. Not least, what does it mean
to be politically active when activism itself is openly recruited into a
veritable state of war? The Zapatistas have undoubtedly been at the
forefront of these recombinant dynamics. Their insurgency has been
unique for a number of reasons: 1) The first movement to ever declare
outright war on an internationally recognised agreement [NAFTA], they
forced strategic analysts to begin conceptualising warfare beyond the
confines of the State (see Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1997). 2) Moving
beyond reified sovereign conceptions of power, i.e. US hegemony, what
the Zapatistas emphasised was the need to reconcile political power
with a more general economy of biopolitical production. 3) Since their
resistance reveals how life consciously struggles against all aspects of
biopolitical control, especially imposed forms of ‘good governance’, they
have become testament to the fact that the life which resists finds its
most potent (hence more problematic) expression through the political
affirmation of life’s differences. As Marcos writes: ‘when confronted
with the search for hegemony, “the first task” is to recognise that there
are “differences between us all” and that in light of this we aspire to a
politics of tolerance and inclusion. You cannot aspire to eliminate the
other, that which is different, and neither can you ignore it’ (cited in
Duran and Higgins 1999: 270).
Difference is not explained here dialectically. Difference already
registers in the affirmative:
We are ‘other’ and different . . . we are fighting in order to continue being

‘other’ and different . . . And what we are – far from wanting to impose its
being on the ‘other’ or different – seeks its own space, and, at the same time,
a space of meeting . . . that is why Power has its armies and police, to force
Life Resistance 149
those who are ‘other’ and different to be the same and identical. But the
‘other’ and different are not looking for everyone to be like they are . . . The
‘everyone doing his own thing’ is both an affirmation of difference, and it is
a respect for other difference. (Marcos 1999c)
While this commitment to ‘the Other’ has prevented the Zapatistas

from oedipalising their cause, hence remarkably making non-violence
a strategic option (see Evans 2009), there is a perhaps more important
point to be made here: When life becomes the principle object for
political struggles, one no longer ties political strategies or analysis
to conventional limit conditions. Conditioning the possible, modes of
active production instead define the biopolitical field of operations.
This is not of course to suggest that wretched conditions cannot
be defined as unjust or intolerable, but neither is it to play by the
pre-set rules of political engagement. This exposes the fundamental
difference between biopolitics and dialectics. Where a dialectical logic
presupposes contradictory elements within a realm that it ultimately
unifies, biopolitical logics presuppose connectable elements within a
field in which everything is recombinant. With complex forms of self-
organisation therefore replacing linearity, limit conditions are efficiently
seconded by a general economy of political production. That is to say,
once the strategic assumption that the universe is heterogeneous firmly
displaces the dialectical assumption that the universe is homogenised,
power struggles become a matter of pure strategy.
III. Fugitive Subjects

Compound life has become the ‘permanently temporary’ habitual
reality for many of the worlds sans-papiers (see Bauman 2002).
Even sovereignty itself, as Green Zones testify, has become nodal.
Nevertheless, while encamped life is undoubtedly wretched and de-
politicising, foregrounding the spatial figuration of the camp may lead
us to underestimate how contemporary wars have become wars of
movement (Virilio 2003). While Giorgio Agamben (1995, 2005) has
provided us with some insightful commentary on the de-politicising
nature of encamped life, his Camp as Nomos hypothesis remains tied
to the static sovereign view of the world. If however we accept that
biopolitical rule is in the ascendancy then the general ordering of the
earth becomes a Nomos of Circulation (Evans and Hardt 2010). It is
no coincidence then that some strategic analysts have been arguing that
success in contemporary theatres of war is dependent upon mastering
150 Brad Evans
the network form (see Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001). Not only do
they allow one to operate more effectively in today’s dynamic and
radically interconnected world, network forms also benefit those who
are pro-active in their strategic pursuits. It has thus all become a
planetary game of ‘GO’. Invariably, since the principal message here
is that nothing is strategically marginal – that is to say, emergency
is written into the fabric of all emergence – what potential there is
for terror is placed into the heart of all possible eventualities (see
Evans 2010). Knowing that we don’t know thus registers at one
and the same time as a wonderful condition of possibility and as
the source of all our anxieties. With this in mind, given that the
principal task for security practitioners is to pre-empt radical emergence,
any ontological form of nomadism (animate/inanimate, actual/virtual)
become ipso facto potentially dangerous (think illegal migration, shadow
economies, unknown viruses, so forth). To put it another way, since the
autonomous/emergent political subject cannot be left to chance, there is
a simple choice to be made: either conform to the liberal attempts at
making life live compliantly or become politically fugitive.
Here the Zapatistas are particularly instructive. While their de facto
autonomous process has rightly received considerable attention (see
in particular Burguete Cal y Mayor 2003; Mattiace 2003; Ross
2005, 2006; Sierra-Sierra 1995); the role movement plays in their
struggle is often overlooked. Indeed, not only are they forcing us to
re-conceptualise physical space, but, more profoundly, it is evident
that their revolution offers a distinct nomadic disposition which has
radicalised the intellectual political terrain. Since their uprising on
New Year’s Day 1994, the Zapatistas’ ability to traverse space has
been politically significant. This event in particular epitomised what
Nietzsche termed the ‘untimely’. A momentary appearance which truly
unsettled the natural political order of things, its success was testament
to the power of a revolutionary-becoming which, at the point of its
emergence, proves to be completely imperceptible within conventional
political registers. This tendency to move collectively en masse, while
subsequently evacuating those off-limit territories without a trace, has
repeatedly enabled the Zapatistas to display their autonomous power
by entering politically sensitive areas to which they would not Other-
wise belong. Such excursions have in numerous instances been political
dynamite. On 12 September 1997, for instance, the Zapatistas kept
their promise as a delegation of 1111 unarmed members travelled from
Chiapas to the Federal District of Mexico City. In 1999, 5000 Zapatistas
descended upon the republic for a referendum on the indigenous people’s
Life Resistance 151
right to define their own meaning of rights. In the spring of 2001 they
would join forces with the National Indigenous Congress (Congreso
Nacional Indigena) to march through 17 Mexican cities as the Zapatista
motorcade embarked on a two-week journey that would end with some
200,000 sympathisers filling the Zocalo in Mexico City infamously
chanting ‘Todos Somos Marcos’ (We are All Marcos).
Marcos has more recently toured the entire nation as part of the
‘Otra Campana’ (Other Campaign). While this tour witnessed some
remarkable acts of political theatre – e.g. Marcos actually gaining entry
into a maximum security prison – la Otra perhaps best illustrates how
movement has been placed at the heart of revolutionary thought and
practice. La Otra was first announced by the Zapatistas in their Sixth
Declaration from the Lacandon Selva on 6 June 2005. This declaration
was for many a significant moment, not least because many political
commentators had felt that the Zapatistas’ time had passed.1 Facing such
suggestions John Ross has noted that ‘La Sexta [the Sixth Declaration]
shows once again the Zapatistas at their most politically savvy, whenever
you expect them to be outspoken they respond with a barrage of silence,
and when they are assumed to be a thing of the past they show, with a
barrage of communiqués – they keep compounding us by being one step
ahead’.2 In a remarkable moment of self-criticism, the Zapatistas felt
that there was something missing from their project: namely, oppressed
constituencies which were not necessarily indigenous:
The first thing we saw was that our heart was not the same as before,
when we began our struggle. It was larger, because now we had touched
the hearts of many more good people. And we also saw that our heart was
more hurt; it was more wounded. It was not wounded by the deceit of
the bad governments, but because, when we touched the hearts of others,
we also touched their sorrows. It was as if we were seeing ourselves in a
mirror.3
The Zapatistas therefore recognised that they had reached a new

moment in their revolutionary process – ‘a point in which we could
possibly lose everything we have if we do not move forward’. This called
for a ‘new step forward in the indigenous struggle’ to ‘unite with other
social sectors that suffer’.
The Other Campaign sought to instigate another type of politics,
‘a different way of doing politics’ which fully recognises that genuine
autonomy cannot simply be achieved by remaining static. Reflecting the
dynamism of the world around, the Other Campaign therefore sought to
reconcile autonomy with a willingness to continuously create reciprocal
152 Brad Evans
adaptive networks, so that differences can be made to work together

to produce new and alternative spaces. Hernandez Navarro believes
this enables the Sixth Declaration to go well beyond the ‘indigenous
question’ and ‘announce a more far-reaching political initiative’ which
not only ‘predicts the collapse of the political class’ but seeks to depart
from the rigidness of the ‘traditional Left’ (cited in Marcos 2006a:
15). The real strength of this new initiative is ‘born of social energy
generated in the heat of mobilisation’. This has been reflected by Marcos
in what he termed the Other Geometry of the campaign. This calls for
the creation of ‘new realities which are already emerging, and which
will go on appearing further ahead, need another theoretical reflection,
another debate of ideas’ (Marcos 2006b). Given that autonomy must
therefore be receptive to political change in order for this project to
work, openness must be built in to the revolutionary struggle: ‘In our
dreams we have seen another world . . . This world is not a dream from
the past, it was not something that came to us from our ancestors. It
came from ahead, from the next steps we are going to take’ (Marcos
1994). Nomadic tendencies invariably come to the fore:
In our theoretical reflection we talk about what we see as tendencies, not

consummated or inevitable acts, they are theoretical reflections about the
‘way we move’, that is why we reject attempts at universality and eternity
in what we say or do – ‘what matters above all is the path, the direction, the
tendency’ – we are doing so not only in order to know what is happening and
to understand it, but also, and above all, in order to try and transform it.
(Marcos 2003b)
These tendencies provide us with a meaningful insight into what

Deleuze and Guattari termed the ‘Pure Idea of War’: ‘the distinction
between absolute war as Idea and real wars seems to us to be of great
importance . . . The pure Idea is not that of the abstract elimination of
the adversary but that of a war machine that does not have war as its
object and that only entertains a potential or supplementary synthetic
relation with war’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 420). Not having war
as its object, the war machine is a ‘pure Idea’ that is aphoristic and
imperceptible to conventional political registers. It is not predicated
on some original enmity; neither does it begin by negating the world.
This pure idea of war as a nomadic becoming only therefore appears
in the form of an antagonism directed against all forms of capture and
overcoding once appropriation has occurred. When the imperceptible
becomes perceptible! As such, what may appear to be an antagonistic
refusal to follow the imperial production of peaceful subjects already
Life Resistance 153
registers in the affirmative. As Deleuze writes, ‘the aim of war machines

isn’t war at all but a very special kind of space, smooth space, which they
establish, occupy, and extend. Nomadism is precisely this combination
of war machine and smooth space . . . War machines tend to be much
more revolutionary, or artistic, rather than military’ (Deleuze 1990: 33).
Revolutionary-becoming, in other words, is markedly different from
violent revolution. Nietzsche thus returns here with renewed force in
relation to the recasting of political solidarities:
the nomadic adventure begins when they seek to stay in the same place by
escaping the codes. As we know, the revolutionary problem today is to find
some unity in our various struggles without falling back on the despotic
and bureaucratic organisation of the party or State apparatus: we want a
war machine that would not recreate a State apparatus, a nomadic unity
in relation with the Outside, that would not recreate the despotic unity.
This is perhaps Nietzsche at his most profound, a measure of his break
with philosophy, as it appears in aphorism: to have made thought a war
machine, to have made thought a nomadic power. And even if the journey
goes nowhere, even if it takes place in the same place, imperceptible, unlooked
for, underground, we must ask: who are today’s nomads, who are today’s
Nietzscheans? (Deleuze 2004: 260)
IV. The Solidarity of Rights

Political activism cannot be divorced from the creation of solidarities
with those deemed to be at the raw end of power. The activist is
more often than not defined by the actions they undertake on behalf
of those disenfranchised populations existing on the global periphery.
From this perspective, while political realists have generally been lauded
for their self-serving agendas, liberal theorists and practitioners have
positioned themselves as the exemplars of political activism. Setting
aside concerns for sovereign integrities, their commitment to alleviating
unnecessary suffering is presented as the basis for a cosmopolitan ethic
that will bring a new world community together. However, despite
the self-declared humanitarianism this account offers, one question
tends to escape considered critical attention: How are political rights
actually realised? If one takes the well-established juridical approach to
liberal power then one locates the rightful act in the commitment to
uphold legal declarations. Exalting the best of the positive law tradition,
what is right then becomes synonymous with the legal protections
offered to distant others. This, however, is only part of the story.
Economic conditions have continually disrupted and transformed any
154 Brad Evans
static semblance of legal rights. Indeed, while some liberals continue

to tell an abstract juridical tale, at the level of policy it is now
widely accepted that in order to achieve genuine social cohesion a
commitment to political rights must be accompanied by a commitment
to dealing with the problems of maladjusted economic subjects. A mere
glance at the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights provides
us with sufficient evidence for this fact. While it pays due attention to
necessary protections from legal transgressions, it is the Declaration’s
Human Security guarantees (regarding access to resources essential
for survival, education, healthcare, shelter, clean drinking water, and
so on) which are seen as a triumph of the liberal conscience.4 As
Richard Falk suggests, thinking about security in human terms allows
us to envisage a political ‘community for the whole of humanity
which overcomes the most problematic aspects of the present world
scene . . . [and where] difference and uniformities across space and time
are subsumed beneath an overall commitment to world order values in
the provisional shape of peace, economic well-being, social and political
justice, and environmental sustainability’ (Falk 1995: 243).
While poststructuralist theorists are well aware of the limitations
associated with juridical approaches to freedom, rights and justice
(see Braidotti, Colebrook and Hanafin 2009), less attention is paid
to the way in which a biopolitical approach might offer a critical
perspective on the de-politicising nature of liberal humanitarianism in
practice.5 That is to say, while there is sufficient evidence of how
the commitment to sovereign forms of right necessarily leads to the
creation of abandoned lives reduced to ‘bare life’ through the sovereign
encounter (see Agamben 1995, 2005), insufficient attention has been
paid to the more positive power dynamics at play which, working
in the name of human development and progress, actually serve to
de-politicise alternative forms of political subjectivity within the remit
of humanitarian discourses and practices. This offers an important
corrective to Agamben. Whereas his concept of ‘bare life’ begins with
the de-politicisation of others in order to construct political and moral
registers, bare life in a biopolitical sense begins with the promotion of
others in order to facilitate the elimination of that which is seen to
be undesirable/regressive. Not then a form of bare life in the sense of
legally suspended or abandoned; rather the ‘bare activity’ of a species
life whose wretched conditions permit interventionist forces to act out of
necessity. When life as such is reduced to the level of a victim incapable
of providing even for the ‘bare essentials’, it is through the subsequent
alleviation of suffering that all life is reduced to mere technology.
Life Resistance 155
Deleuze and Guattari understood this all too well. Human rights,
they argued, were merely ‘axioms’. That is to say, what are presented
as inviolable universal rights can quite easily ‘exist on the market
with many other axioms’, or else can simply be suspended when the
‘determinate inequalities of development dictate’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1994: 106, 107). Human rights as such actually tell us ‘nothing about
the immanent modes of existence of people provided with rights’. The
Zapatistas have learned this well. Their non-juridical approach to rights
is well established (see Higgins 2004). Less attention, however, has been
given to their conscious refusal of the human security prescriptions,
which in the process of challenging imposed conditionality provides for
critical reflection on the practice of saving strangers. Marcos understood
early in the struggle that through the politicisation of aid warfare
was taking place by other means (Marcos 1999a). This would have
a profound impact upon the Zapatistas’ entire relationship with all
non-governmental organisations (see Marcos 2001, 2003a). While an
inevitable side-effect of this has been self-deprivation,6 it has nevertheless
led to the creation of entirely new forms of solidarity which have
redefined the benefactor/recipient relationship in a more reciprocal and
locally sensitive manner (see Earle and Simonelli 2005; Olesen 2000,
2005). Development projects still happen; but not in order to meet
statistical quotas set by technocrats in order to give a minimum valuation
on the stock of life; rather, to enrich the indigenous communities’ control
over their own political affairs. Inevitably, since this conscious decision
has effectively undermined the prevailing human security principle that
underdevelopment is dangerous, the Zapatistas have in the process of
exposing the de-politicising nature of biopolitical technologies forced
the political back into conflict analysis (Evans 2008). One cannot
propose scientifically deduced cause/effect remedies for a struggle which
does not agree with the underlying economising logic. Neither can one
deploy an army of technocratic ameliorators with a mandate for social
transformation into a political crisis zone when those within the zone do
not believe that they are the problem to be solved. A critical redefinition
of the political itself is needed, in order to move from tolerance to
genuine hospitality towards that which is different.
V. A Different Concept of the Political?

Jacques Derrida once said that the ‘the rapport of self-identity is
always a rapport of violence with the other; so that the notions of
property, appropriation and self-presence, so central to metaphysics,
156 Brad Evans
are essentially dependent on an oppositional relation with otherness’

(Derrida 1984: 117). The Zapatistas have seemingly taken note of this
modern truism. Centuries of indigenous persecution easily cultivates hate
and resentment. Once mobilised into a political force, these historical
animosities tend to re-cast old dialectical foes against one another in
a perpetual struggle for mastery. Had the Zapatistas follow this trend,
Marcos believes, they would have simply produced another brand of
‘fundamentalism, converting the Zapatista movement into a movement
against another race’ (El Kilombo 2007: 18). Importantly then, for
Marcos, since there are ‘historical arguments which back up the idea
that from there comes the pain’, in order for the Zapatistas to create
a ‘new horizon’ it is essential that from the outset one begins with a
‘respect for the Other who is different’. Only then can they ‘eliminate
from us the possibility of fundamentalism’. In light of this attempt to
proactively thwart fundamentalist tendencies, Deleuze’s call in his study
of Bergson to ‘think differences of nature, independent of all forms of
negation’ (Deleuze 1988: 41) reads than more than an expression of
admiration for a bygone philosopher. Intensifying the normative basis
for affirmative politics, the concept of the political itself is recast to give
ontological priority to difference. This represents a radical departure
from conventional political referents. The orthodox approach begins
with the political as a problem in the context of establishing the order
and demarcations of battle, but for those advocating lasting peace, the
political only gains meaningful currency when as the source of this
enmity it is foregrounded as the problem to be solved.
The idea that the political should be conceptualised through a
dialectical enmity is well established.7 Realists deploy it in order to
maintain their allegiance to epiphenomenal tensions. This enables them
to present a world of neat sovereign demarcations through which
it is possible to clearly identify other/self, them/us, outside/inside,
enemy/friend and so on. Liberals on the other hand have openly recruited
this Schmittean approach in order deploy it against itself. The politics of
exceptionalism thus becomes the principal rallying cry for those who
advocate a globally inclusive imaginary in order to rid the world of
unnatural spatio-determined divisions. There is a tragic irony to all this.
In order to save humanity from itself, liberals take the worst aspects
of Schmitt’s thought (i.e. ontologically prior enmity) in order to use it
against its resulting tensions. Furthermore, the idea of separate sovereign
orders is brought into question in order to re-establish a true planetary
basis for sovereign power. Schmitt’s nightmare vision of the fall of
jus publicum Europaeum is therefore recast as the liberal condition of
Life Resistance 157
possibility. Through selective appropriation of his ideas, Schmitt comes

to represent the diagnostician in chief along with the chief adversary to
be vanquished at all costs. If this renders Schmitt the bastard child of
Hegelian disdain, no recourse to Kant will provide us with the political
solution. The focus of concern here is not with the highly abstracted
and reified account of sovereign power which tends to underwrite
post-Kantian politics. Neither is it with the debilitating idealism of
Kantian universality. What concerns us lies beneath the surface of this
architecture. A shameful deceit, Kantian universality masks an altogether
more sinister biopolitical imperative which, casting suspicion over all
human life, means that all life is recruited into a perpetual state of
internal war without distinction.
To explain this it is necessary to point out the irresolvable dilemmas
upon which Kantian rule depends: Kant preaches universality but
accepts that the universal is beyond the realms of lived experience.
He preaches the international virtues of law but accepts that one’s
encounter with moral law has to be contingent. He demands that
all life strive towards the unification of the species yet acknowledges
that this is always going to be met with internal revolt and political
strife. He insists upon autonomy even though he starts his analysis by
offering an account of freedom in which man has fallen to the guilt
of his own unmaking. He promotes human progress yet puts forward
the thesis of infinite regress to highlight humankind’s imperfections.
And he claims that all life has an original predisposition to good
while at the same time a natural propensity to evil. Taken together,
while Kant therefore demands that life must be made to live for the
sake of its own protection; he knows full well that to live in this
Kantian way reveals how the capacity to be unnecessarily dangerous
is inherent to all species of life. As such, not only does he condemn
all life to a temporal purgatory, i.e. life is always guilty of the moral
deficiencies of the past, yet incapable in its own right of exorcising
them in the future. He also demands these imperfections in order for
life to prove its moral and political worth. Hence, although Kantianism
undeniably moves beyond the familiar geo-strategic epiphenomenal
tensions (friend/enemy, outside/inside, bios/zoe), what takes their place is
the biopolitical proposition that all life is always somehow dangerously
unfulfilled.
Marcos cuts to the chase when he argues that ‘the problem is respect
towards the Other . . . Whatever political relationship that is not based in
respect is manipulation. Well-intentioned or bad-intentioned, it doesn’t
matter, because it is manipulation . . . That’s why we said, starting
158 Brad Evans
there, we can construct respect or we can construct a relationship of

domination’ (El Kilombo 2007: 29, 30). How then does this respect
for the Other who is already different manifest itself politically? Gregg
Lambert (2008) and Charles Stivale (2008) have pointed us in the right
direction in their attempts to explore the meaning of the Deleuzian
notion of ‘friendship’. Lambert, for instance, detects in Deleuze’s later
work a desire to place the Other at the forefront of our philosophical
enquiry. This he believes forces an entire re-evaluation of the meaning
of friendship as a political and philosophical concept that appears
ontologically prior to the friend/enemy distinction: ‘that is prior to
any presupposition of a social commonality or relationship to identity,
before we can even begin to think of the possibilities of friendship again’
(Lambert 2008: 50). For Stivale, friendship cannot be divorced from
Deleuze’s political philosophy since it is intimately bound both to the
creation of philosophical concepts and to active engagement:
Deleuze’s understanding of friendship is not that of a common or ideal bond

and can hardly be encapsulated in a neat definition . . . However, Deleuze’s
myriad practices of friendship stand in sharp contrast to any ultimate
recognition of friendship as distress, for such a defeatist view would fail to
acknowledge that this distress constitutes but a complementary fold in the
active engagement of friendship. (Stivale 2008: xiii)
For Stivale then, the question is not ‘Who is the friend?’ but more
pertinently ‘What can friendship do?’ If we can say that that a Deleuzian
notion of friendship is intimately bound up with our becoming in
this world, forcing us indeed to find reasons to believe in this world,
perhaps we can therefore say that friendship is precisely what he had
in mind when he found in Nietzsche a philosophical ally who ‘break[s]
with philosophy, as it appears in the aphorism: to have made a war
machine of thought, to have made thought a nomadic power’ (Deleuze
2004: 260). It was Nietzsche after all who enabled Deleuze to move
away from the morally reductive concern with ‘how should we live?’
towards considering the ethical possibilities of ‘how might we live?’
(May 2005: 7).
This certainly takes us into some fertile conceptual territory. While
Derrida may provide us with obvious points of further connection,
Agamben also appears to have something in common. As he recently
stated: ‘I maintain, rather, that “friend” belongs to the class of terms
that linguists define as non-predicative; these are terms from which it is
not possible to establish a class that includes all the things to which the
predicative in question is attributed’ (Agamben 2009: 29). Friendship
Life Resistance 159
in other words is not a referent to be captured. It does not possess

some objective denomination through which one might expose some
transcendental essence. Friendship is a ‘pure experience’ of the world
(30). Politically speaking, it is irrevocably bound to the ‘pure fact of
being’: ‘Friends do not share something (birth, law, place, taste): they
are shared by the experience of friendship. Friendship is the con-division
that precedes every division, since what has to be shared is the very
fact of existence, life itself. And it is this sharing without an object, this
original consenting, that constitutes the political’ (26). Importantly, for
Agamben, since the concept of friendship is equipped with an intensity
that registers as political potential, he equally gestures towards a concept
of the political which no longer needs to be based on enmity or some
profound suspicion that political difference is the problem to be solved.
Providing a more thorough and meaningful basis for this is perhaps the
most difficult and yet most urgent task we face today.
Notes
1. For instance, in January 2005, Vincente Fox called the Zapatistas ‘practically a
thing of the past’ with the ‘people of Chiapas looking forward . . . with a new
face’. See W. Weissert, ‘Mexico’s Fox Calls Guerrilla Movement a Thing of the
Past’, Associated Press, 12 January 2005.
2. Interview conducted in Mexico City, 17 December 2005.
3. See the EZLN ‘Sixth Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle’.
4. Amongst an abundance of literature dedicated to this, see in particular Booth
1991, 2005; Buzan 1991; Buzan et al. 1998; and Wyn-Jones 1999.
5. A notable exception to this is the work of Mark Duffield (see in particular
Duffield 2007).
6. As June Nash observes ‘The resistance of the Zapatista communities is also
expressed in their rejection of government handouts in every form, be it
textbooks, medical supplies and interventions, immunization programs, and
other programs that might well benefit communities’ (cited in Earle and Simonelli
2005: xi).
7. In his Politische Theologie (1922), Carl Schmitt first made his now well-
established claim that sovereign power refers to ‘he who decides upon the state
of exception’ (Schmitt 2006: 21). This would be developed more fully into a
‘Concept of the Political’ in the volume bearing that name (Schmitt 1996).
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Defining Activism
Marcelo Svirsky Cardiff University
Abstract
Activism is defined in this paper as involving local instigations of new
series of elements intersecting the actual, generating new collective
enunciations, experimentations and investigations, which erode good
and common sense and cause structures to swing away from their
sedimented identities. By appealing to Spinozism, the paper describes
the microphysics of the activist encounter with stable structures and
the ways in which activism imposes new regimes of succession of
ideas and affective variations in the power of action. Rather than
understanding activism as supporting or leading social struggles, the
definition of activism pursued here conceives it as an open-ended process
and stresses the role of investigation in relation to practices within the
social situations to which activism addresses itself.
Keywords: activism, revolution, intervention, encounter, ideas, affects
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

Deny thy father and refuse thy name, . . .
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? . . .
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name . . .
(Romeo and Juliet, 2, 2, 33–47)

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224110001182
164 Marcelo Svirsky
The proper name, functioning as a colour-line in this dramatic work,

creates a dividing gulf – an obstacle that impedes a love – which, for
Juliet, can only be fulfilled in the after-life of the name, beyond the
violence of the couple’s actual subjectivities. Here, Juliet’s plea is not a
lament, nor a banal cry of grief. It is far more significant; it is a discovery,
or better, a rebellion in itself. Two moments are simultaneously involved
in it. First, Juliet reproaches the organising function of the name in
relation to the pre-personal body – ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy:
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.’ And second, in order for this
reproach to become an active challenge, Juliet urges Romeo to dissent,
to ‘doff thy name’ – to abandon it – demanding that he transcend his
own organisation and alter the logic imposed by his name, for the sake
of a bastard love. Her affect already recognises that the possibility of
a prohibition ‘would require both persons and names’ (Deleuze and
Juliet thus asks Romeo to detach his body from the subjective territory
of the Montague – ‘Deny thy father. . . ’ (Reynolds 2009: 50). The two
moments expressed here – the discovery of an organisation taking place
and the call for action – are united in a critical attitude towards that
which suffocates love, which, for the twosome, is really that which
suffocates life. However, we must notice that what turns this attitude
into an inflective relation to life lies in the relation between these two
moments. Juliet’s rejection of the organising function of the name in
relation to the body – ‘What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor
arm, nor face, nor any other part’ – is an invitation to each body part
to reclaim its autonomy, and to enter into the transversality of love.
Her inquiry makes clear that the opposition to, or negation of, the state
of things in the actual (‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy’) is to be
subordinated to an affirmation of life through the potentiality of new
assemblages to come, assemblages that halo the actual and are associated
with a particular state of things (‘without that title. . . ’). What comes
first, anyway, if we may speculate, is the positivity of the love running
between Juliet and Romeo throughout their encounter.
This is their first affective discovery, which draws them into a search
for alternatives. The negation is secondary due to the character of the
inquiry: it has the power to make the reader wonder the unthinkable
for the sake of performing the impossible love: does an arm, or a face,
have a name? What does it mean to change a name? Juliet’s inquiry
thus creates the idea of another rhythm in which the love might be
consummated. In this way her intervention joyfully affects the play,
shifting the reader from one degree of reality to another. Here Juliet is, in
a Deleuzian sense, fabulating, hallucinating ‘a couple to come’ (Deleuze

1995: 174). She incites Romeo to depart from the protective world of
his own familial fabulations, this time in the Bergsonian sense (cf. Bogue
2006: 202–23).1 Another idea of love starts to condense throughout the
scene, one indicative of an alternative image of the encounter of Juliet
and Romeo.
There are three interconnected practical qualities present in Juliet’s
radicalism:2 a confrontation with a stratifying organisation (the name
and its filiative association); a situational engagement (Juliet’s demand
for Romeo to engage actively and intervene in his circumstances to
produce another sociability, that is, another encounter which might
enable their love); and, lastly, an inquiring attitude towards the actual – a
militant investigation which eludes the pincers of royal science and
its representations (the place of the family in the city of Verona, the
tribal prohibitions, and so on). As a necessary step in the creation
of new conditions, Juliet interrogates the conditions she wishes to
leave. It is from the perspective of the third quality that we should
read her enigmatic call at the beginning of the scene, intended to
shake Romeo from his familial knot: ‘Wherefore art thou Romeo?’ – a
genealogical call asking for reasons, interrogating the processes by
which Romeo has come to own and still retains his name. Juliet directs
her question towards Romeo’s positioning in the world, interrogating
his commitment and obedience to the attachments and stratifications
now trapping him in immobility. From this perspective, ‘Wherefore art
thou?’ means: ‘What are your reasons for clinging to, in what ways
are you committed to, your particular name and your way of life?’ Or,
as Deleuze and Guattari might put it: ‘What are your microfascisms,
Romeo?’ In other words, Juliet’s speech suggests that we should abandon
the organised and patriarchal sense of the state of things (the name)
by way of problematising our relations with other bodies, ideas and
things in their actual state, not in general, but in an encounter within
the situation in which they dwell. This calls for a reconsideration of the
present composition of such relations. Indeed, ultimately, it is a call to
arms, a call for new and better encounters – an approach I shall call the
activist problematic.
I. Introduction
This brief detour through Shakespeare introduces us to the main focus
of this article: to try to develop a conceptualisation of activism, working
towards a definition. As we shall see, this will involve a return to the
166 Marcelo Svirsky
practical qualities we have just discerned in Juliet’s speech. The concept

of activism I envisage here is intended to open up what is analysed,
making possible further connections and intersections, and bolstering
activism itself. Only when we manage to create a productive relationship
between the material aspect of the assemblage (‘the intermingling of
bodies reacting to one another’ [Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 88]), on
the one hand, and its discursive aspect, on the other, is representation
eluded, allowing us to open the actual up to a more transparent relation
with the virtual. In other words, activism has to be also present in
the concept, stirring both thought and action. From this, we can see
why there is little interest here either in the investigation of individual
motives or in a normative framework. For instance, the psychological
and social mechanisms used in political psychology to explain activism
in terms of the structure of causality between the individual psyche
and the action itself – such as parental inculcation, principled education,
political morality, universal moral duty, social altruism, and so on (see,
for example, Gross 1997) – in fact explain very little concerning the
empirical relationships between bodies and things. Such mechanisms
do not account for the body of the activist, the field of action, the
assemblages involved, and the multitude affecting and being affected.
The tendency of such psychology to search for the origins of political
actions in terms of the theorisation of psycho-social motives appears
misplaced when we think of the world in terms of fluxes of incessant
creation.
Spinozism, as Deleuze contends, ‘confers on finite beings a power
of existence’ that is never exhausted, and which ‘bears with it a
corresponding and inseparable capacity to be affected, [which is] always
exercised’, in an infinity of ways (Deleuze 1992: 91, 93; emphasis
added). In other words, the power of acting is not something to be
found in a personality of this or that type, nor necessarily in one specific
environment rather than another. More simply,
We can know by reasoning that the power of action is the sole expression
of our essence, the sole affirmation of our power of being affected. But this
knowledge remains abstract. We don’t know what this power is, nor how we
may acquire or discover it. And we will certainly never know this, if we do
not concretely try to become active. (Deleuze 1992: 226; emphasis added)
Instead of theorising incentives, it is better to explore by experimentation

that which is already actively varying. Western normative ethics have
tried to impose a democratic framework that limits and contains
nomadic forms of resistance (the concept and practice of civil society
bear the hallmark of all forms of that containment). But merely by

creating distinctions between moral worlds, such normative ethics do
nothing to further the exploration and intensification of present activist
potentialities.
It is crucial for what follows that we examine the relationship between
activism and the concept of revolution. Deleuze and Guattari clarify
what revolution means: ‘schizophrenising the existing power structure,
making it vibrate to a new rhythm, making it change from within,
without at the same time becoming a schizophrenic’ (Buchanan 2008:
10; Deleuze and Guattari 1983). Therefore, revolution is given in the
passage of a structure from rhythm A to rhythm B (the structure
changing in the passage), where the structure can that of a social,
political or economic system, a system of friendship, an educational
system, a household, an individual person, a specific human-animal
system (for example bovine slaughter regulations, or practices of species
preservation), a field of art, or of any other stable natural or social
environment. However, it is important to stress that we are not
advocating here a sequential model of revolution, one determined by
a telos adopted in advance. As revolutionaries, we always exist in many
dimensions, in the midst of that from which we try to escape and struggle
against, interwoven with the material we start to experiment with. It is
the passage that is revolutionary, not the final arrival at a new rhythm.
And yet, activism is not itself that passage of rhythms; rather, it is a
temporary sub-rhythm of denunciation, wounding the first rhythm, from
which it carves out a becoming into new territories. As Raunig explains,
drawing on Holloway’s works on the Zapatista movement: ‘it is more
the first steps into seemingly new terrain, posited on the old terrain,
fighting against this old terrain and using it at the same time to transform
it into something different’ (Raunig 2007: 41–2).
Always starting as a wound of alterity within the habitual, activism
refers to that fleeting fraction of encounters and connections still not
engaged in the organisation of the second rhythm. If, following Guattari,
we conceive the machine as being in opposition to structure (Guattari
1984: 111–20), then we may conceive activism as machinic, that is
to say, plugging a movement of deterritorialisation into a territorial
assemblage, and thereby activating the territory for further connections
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 333). This causes the assemblage to
swing ‘between a territorial closure that tends to restratify [it] and a
deterritorialising movement that, on the contrary, connects [it] with the
Cosmos’ (337). When activism connects itself to a system, an established
relation of forces is distracted, and to some extent diverted into a
168 Marcelo Svirsky
far-from-equilibrium state. In other words, we learn from Deleuze that

the revolutionary passage occurs when a system is pushed beyond a
critical threshold, moving from a state of equilibrium into a state far
from equilibrium (see Bonta and Protevi 2004). As an assemblage of
encounters pushing the system towards new states, activism is one of
the causes bringing about evolution and re-creation within the system.
Nothing concerning the success or betrayal of the revolutionary passage
is relevant to us here; rather, the focus is on the assemblages of affects
agitating stable systems in order to tip them in non-linear directions.
As a sign of denunciation, activist practices trace out and map the
lines of a society at specific zones – its intensities and boundaries – with
a view to grafting an outside onto them. In this way, they become
indicative of those zones’ new potentialities. By installing themselves in
official territories, activist practices thus become the harbingers of a new
openness.
There is, however, no dissociative distinction between activism
and revolution; rather, activism infuses the concept and practice of
revolution with an incessant discomforting movement that helps to
protect new revolutionary forms of organisation from the dangers
of stratification and its oppressive side effects. In this perspective,
activism nurtures revolution, keeping it alive. Here, Raunig’s treatment
of the concept of the revolutionary machine, used to explore missed
concatenations between art and revolution during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, might help clarify the relationship between the
two concepts. Following Negri’s works from the 1970s, and Hardt
and Negri’s Empire (2000), Raunig adopts the ‘triad model of the
revolutionary machine’ as comprised simultaneously of insurrection,
resistance and constituent power (see Raunig 2007: 25–66). For
Raunig, insurrection is the mediating component that concatenates
the revolutionary screams of horror – the expression of resistance, and
hope – and the expression of constituent power (see 41–8). Immanently,
the three components are all present in activism, but the irruptive
character of insurrection – its ‘temporary flare’ (56), compared with the
more laborious character of resistance and constituent power – make
it a better basis for exploring the relationship between activism and
revolution. Contra Raunig, the division he proposes between a time of
duration of the permanent molecular revolution (expressed by resistance
and constituent power) and a time of rupture (expressed by the event of
insurrection) runs the risk of dispensing with the latter when the former
is actualised through processes that deepen the fascistic tendencies in the
new organisation. Incessant activist ruptures are vital to maintaining a
rhythm of infinite movement in a revolutionary machine. Activism, we

might say, is revolution’s conatus, its tendency or instinct to persevere
in its revolutionary power; thus we have a series of activist ruptures
within revolutionary processes – the power of creation as constituent
power remains faithful to the eternal return of difference, and draws
itself away from the entrapments of constituted power. Deleuze and
Guattari pointed to the coupling of resistance and constituent power in
their treatment of the war machine; opposition, resistance, can engage
in revolutionary action ‘only on the condition that they simultaneously
create something else’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 423).
Although Raunig, as did Hardt and Negri before him, portrays
insurrection as essentially spectacular (think the Paris Commune of
1871, the Russian Kolkhozes, or the Zapatistas), it is possible to
understand insurrection as a perceptible act of opposition to a ruling
power or habit, without tying it to a Hollywood-style image. For
instance, a Bartlebyan moment of refusal is an act of opposition which
might infect a state of affairs and develop into an activism,3 whether it
occurs in a scrivener’s office, in a call for a love, or at home through
the forces exerted by a change in posture of a woman’s body when a
patriarchal tradition is challenged. It is in the insolence and intensity
of the challenge posed against constituted power (whatever its form or
mode), and its associated way of life, that activism is located, and not
necessarily on the barricades or protest marches.
Activism’s logic is thus interventionist and operationally hyper-active.
First, it latches onto certain zones and injects external forces, causing
a differential change in the system. Second, it involves an emphatic
attention to life, similar to Bergson’s attentive recognition; that is to say,
it evaluates each object by causing it to pass through different planes in
order to gain a critical appreciation of it; at the same time it frees itself
from the distractions of habitual recognition that social systems impose
upon us (cf. Deleuze 1989: 44–68).
II. A Second Distinction

For Deleuze, life has an ever-changing problematic structure. Every
multiplicity changes its virtual structure by way of actualisations, that
is, by passing into temporary solutions (the virtual differentiates itself
and becomes different from itself in the process). This brings forth new
conditions for the creation of the new in the real (see Smith 2007).
Aided by various representational and mystifying machines, patterns and
forms hide these processes; further, stratified patterns have the power to
170 Marcelo Svirsky
create interests, which in turn force neurotic and paranoiac functions

onto desire (see Deleuze and Guattari 1983). As a result, there is a
backwash of narrowing our belief in the potentiality of virtual structures.
With little belief in the virtuality of life, always interwoven with social
obedience, a peaceful and wide zone of sedated individuals is secured.
Balibar’s Spinozism explains how this passivity is engendered:
When an individual is passive, it is because his soul has been subjugated by the
circulation of the affects and by the ‘general ideas’ that inhabit the collective
imagination . . . His body too will have been simultaneously subjugated by the
unrestrained influence of all the surrounding bodies. (Balibar 1998: 94–5)
From this passage it becomes clear why activist practices take it to

be part of their responsibility to recirculate affects away from the
‘general ideas’ of a society (or of smaller multiplicities). In so far as,
collectively, we vehemently stick to the dominant forms of life (practices
and discourses) without any critical intake, we deepen our complicity
with the burial of the virtual, as well as with the betrayal of the infinity
of life. Activism finds here its most basic function: the unfolding of a
Julietian critical engagement with dominant forms of life and their self-
reproductive representations – the ‘general ideas’. In this sense, activism
is that which diverts life from its tendency to eternalise and deepen itself
in its actual forms, that which pledges to ‘connect the roots or trees back
up with a rhizome’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 14).
A critical engagement can be deployed at least in two ways, following
a distinction between two conceptions of how to revolutionise the world
(Colectivo Situaciones 2001: 31). The first is characteristic of traditional
leftist politics, which base their political struggles on a yearning to
change the world. Here, activism is expressed in the encounter of forces,
bodies and things which furthers direct struggles against multiplicities,
and in which singularities are perceptibly isolated by agglomerations
of the ordinary. In this version, strategically, activism collides with the
stable structure, producing a sort of dialectical relation. Theatrically,
the subject in this drama is the resulting antagonism. Operationally, it
aims at a transformation of the state of things that may amount to a
combinatorial view of novelty: ‘only little more than the rearrangement
of matter in the universe into ever new forms’ (Smith 2007: 2).
In contrast, some contemporary forms of escape – those proliferating
alternative life-experiences – are not concerned with changing the world,
but rather would like ‘to produce it anew’ (Colectivo Situaciones
2001: 31). These activisms problematise the structure of the existence
of the actual form by contemplating and experimenting with the
changing conditions of the new – ‘testing . . . alternative forms of social

organisation’ (Raunig 2007: 60) – bringing about change not in a
combinatorial fashion, but in the nature of particular areas of life. By
embracing the whole of the real and not only the actual, new singular
points are created by changing the multiplicity in question. What is
most significant in these sorts of activisms is that resistance is thought
and operated not in a dialectical contraposition to constituted power
(potestas) in a reactive mode; rather, though an unavoidable relation
of conflict with constituted power comes into being, resistance here
unfolds as immanent difference which draws on the natural force of
creation (potentia).4 From this perspective, Raunig’s distinction between
resistance and constituent power appears redundant; the two are not just
linked but mutually implicated.
This version of activism multiplies new practices, and in doing
so bypasses existent stable practices and their manifestations of
oppression.5 The first mode of activism assumes that solidifications and
closures can be challenged. The second mode leans on the assumption
that oppression cannot take on everything; this mode always opens up
a reflexive distance that is absent in the first mode. As praxis, the first
mode of political activism is reactive, polemical, litigious, and engaged
in incessant argumentation. As examples we can think of pressure
groups for legislation change, High Court petitions, protests, persuasion
campaigns, and so on. The second mode is more quiet but ontologically
invasive. Examples include alternative modes of education, promoting
new ways of life, rethinking narratives, investigating the conditions of
oppression, and so on. Comparing the two versions, we should keep
in mind that there is a ‘feedback’ aspect in confrontational activism:
challenging a practice or an idea has a nurturing effect.
III. The Functions of Activism

Activism is not a secluded or hidden phenomenon. It is extroverted,
involved in the generation of public events. Most activisms I know
of take very seriously the repercussions of their actions within the
broader society, both locally or/and globally. Many activists publish
reports on their practices and experiences, have internet sites, or, more
traditionally, distribute printed material to the general public; indeed,
it is well known that they are anxious to encourage the public to
participate in and attend their discursive dramas.
Ill-advisedly, some forms of activism develop into missionary activity,
and sometimes wind-up as messianic. This carries the risk of destroying
172 Marcelo Svirsky
the very becoming characteristic of activism. Any presumption on the

part of activists to define life in moral terms – instead of understanding
their activity as promoting potentialities – functions to homogenise
activism and fill the plane of consistency with energy of just one
type. This excess then becomes equivalent to a drastic reduction in
the potential of bodies, hence the indices of heterogeneity and of
transversality are reduced as well. This version of activism, which is
unfortunately always present to some extent, generally takes the form
of a paranoid reaction to the world on the part of well-defined and
determined subjects – ‘the Stalins of the little groups’ (Deleuze and Parnet
2002: 139). The terror they impose, like that of the majoritarian society,
is one of reterritorialisation.
What is it that activism brings about? What occurs in the encounter
between activist practices (body A) and its spectators (body B)? What
can be said of that encounter? We are going to need to anchor off
Spinozist shores (Ethics, Books II and III). First we need to add to the
drama a necessary third body, C, which is that body of stable relations
(social, political, educational, cultural, and so on) into which activism
taps. We already know that, for most of us and for most parts of our
lives, a relation of commitment and obedience is what characterises our
relationship to C (B–C).
What activism does, when it acts, is introduce an initial movement
of deterritorialisation into the internal relations of body C, forcing a
variation in the latter’s relations to the spectators (body B), and in the
interim creating a new relation between activism and the spectators.
Let us take a simple example to see how the three main bodies may
encounter one another in a concrete situation. In Israel, a segregationist
educational system (body C) complements a broader structure of social
segregation between Jews and Palestinians, citizens of Israel. In 1998, a
group of parents (body A) set up an initiative to establish a bilingual,
Arabic–Hebrew School in the northern region of the Galilee. Sufficient
numbers within the local communities (body B) were enthusiastic
enough to join in, and, ultimately, the school named Galilee was
established and has operated ever since (see Svirsky et al. 2007; Svirsky
2010). In this example, reaching new operational rhythms was bound
up with the repressive operations of older rhythms (mainly rooted in an
obsession with collective identity).6
As the encounter begins to express itself, effects on the different bodies
start to circulate, caused by the intermingling of affections between
them (affections might include: one’s route home changes because of
a demonstration; police repress demonstrators; a class is cancelled by
the student union; humanitarian relief reaches a population under siege;

an alternative school building is found; and so on). Following Spinoza’s
epistemological parallelism, we may say that to every object or thing
there corresponds an idea (Deleuze 1992: 113–4). Following the activist
encounter then, at least two sorts of ideas are being affirmed on the
bodies: ideas that have friction, itself caused by activism as their object,
and ideas that have as their objects different aspects of the system of
relationships A–B–C. The affections caused by the activist encounter
arouse different spiritual and bodily sympathies and antipathies, which
are tantamount to the ideas of these affections (attesting to different
degrees of compossibility between the bodies in the encounter and
their different capacities for being affected). Correspondingly, the power
of acting of the bodies involved in the encounter either increases or
decreases. Whichever is the case, we are, according to the definition
of Spinozist affects, in the presence of a regime of the succession of
ideas, which is followed by a variation in the power of action or in
the force of existing. Deleuze explains that ‘this kind of melodic line
of continuous variation’ is defined by Spinoza as affect (Deleuze 1978:
3–4). It is not unlikely that the circulation of new passions will be one of
the effects of an activist initiative. When faced with the eruption of a new
activism, spectators may react with either enthusiasm or anger, or some
permutation of the two. But activism makes clear that there is no linear
correspondence between such passions and the variation in the power of
acting (increase or decrease), since the displeasure or rage triggered by a
certain activism may lead ultimately to counter-activism.
The key point here concerns the slide or passage between two different
states of ideas in the bodies involved, and, especially, the attitudes of the
bodies in respect of the ways they come to perceive the functioning of the
stable body C under the activist attack. These perceptions will depend
on the ways we understand the activist encounter in its relations both
with the social stable body under attack and with us, the spectators;
they depend on the kind of ideas we have of these relationships and
effects. Though ‘our ideas of affections do of course “involve” their own
cause, that is, the objective essence of the external body’, it is also true
that ‘as long as I remain in the perception of affection, I know nothing
of the [action]’. Thus, my idea of a particular demonstration, of a new
school, of a humanitarian aid project, and so on, is only partial, and of
the lowest kind in Spinoza’s terms, since they only ‘indicate a state of
our body’ (Deleuze 1992: 146–7; 1978: 6).
What this kind of knowledge creates is an image that only expresses
the objects (the activist encounter and the relationships between the
174 Marcelo Svirsky
bodies) by their effects on us. How bad are these inadequate ideas for
our analysis of activism? Practically speaking, what would it mean for
us, as spectators, to have a higher knowledge of causes – that is, to have
‘notion-ideas’ of the activist encounter and to become the cause of our
own affects, rather than having merely ‘affection-ideas’ of it? And how
might activism help us to move away, at least partially, from the passions
that the accidental pattern of the encounter affirms in us? All these
questions are important in so far as they contribute to the more general
question of how activism approximates the threshold of becoming a
project of alternative collective action.
A notion-idea, says Deleuze, ‘no longer concerns the effect of another
body on mine, it’s an idea which concerns and which has for its
object the agreement or disagreement of the characteristic relations
between two bodies’ (Deleuze 1978: 10).7 This notion of agreement
(and disagreement) between the encountering bodies needs to be seen
in light of Deleuze’s account of the Spinozist idea of ‘what a body
is capable of’: its significance depends on our efforts to know which
affections we and others are capable of, given our society, our culture,
our specific historical life, and so on. From the point of view of the
notion-idea, drawing up an ethological chart of the compositions of
relations seems to be essential for activism. Put simply, this means
developing a reasonable knowledge of ‘what a people can bear’ when
they are confronted with practices such as those introduced by activism
(contrary to what critics may think, this is not necessarily equivalent to
developing practices which are in harmony with the actual). What we
can bear politically is seen here as linked to what our bodies can do in
relation to a specific political issue. Reasonable knowledge leans on the
assumption that affecting others joyfully should not be considered a sin
for activists. For Spinoza, reason is, after all, a problem of becoming, and
self-righteous ‘anti-becoming’ attitudes abound among activists. This
question of reasonable knowledge takes us back to Juliet’s investigation
of the conditions for a new, more agreeable encounter with Romeo. And
the idea of investigation being part of activist practice leads us on to
what has been implemented lately by activists and researchers as militant
research (see Biddle et al. 2007; Malo de Molina 2004; Benasayag and
Sztulwark 2000). As defined in 2009 by the Collective ‘Precarias a
la Deriva’ (Madrid), militant research is a process of re-appropriating
our own capacity for world-making, which questions, problematises
and pushes the real through a series of concrete procedures. More
forcefully, for the Argentinean ‘Colectivo Situaciones’, activism is not
about leading or supporting struggles but about dwelling actively in
the situation – investigating it – with a view to the emergence of an

alternative sociability (Colectivo Situaciones 2001: 37). The first premise
of activist militant research is that there is no global knowledge on
how things should be; rather, activism entails an engagement in the
production of situational or local knowledge. This is why the activist-
machine is a paradigmatic case of learning in Deleuze’s sense – a constant
experimentation of the discordant exercise of the faculties disconnected
from every form of identity (cf. Deleuze 1994: 164–7).
In terms of how this might be done, organising protests on
behalf of the rights of weakened groups, or filming their experiences
to gain sympathy (or prizes), is not enough. What is needed is
the combination of activist research with populations experiencing
alternative sociabilities (Colectivo Situaciones 2001: 38).8 Here resides
one of the major differences between investigation-based activists and
classical civil society NGOs, which tend to adopt an a priori agenda
for change. It is not that regular acts of protest lack any significance;
rather, the claim here is that they cannot be seen as the focus of
revolutionary action. The situational production of knowledge should
be seen in direct relation to the difference between changing the world
and creating it anew, with revolutionary activism being committed to the
latter.
It is true that the activist-machine ‘kills the joy’ (Ahmed 2009) of
those fearing the effects of the activists’ revolutionary horizon on their
peaceful life and privileges. In so doing, activism necessarily undermines
solidarity. But producing unhappiness cannot be activism’s goal or sense.
Although sadness inevitably accompanies every activism – even those
supporting the action may feel ‘local sadness’ (Deleuze 1978: 9) – it is
hard to see the point to causing sad affects in others. We already know
one of the activist’s bad habits: to induce in us sadness and resentment
as the necessary preparation for forming a critical attitude which will
make us politically active.9 But there is no good reason to look for
such bad encounters as a matter of strategy (tactical bad encounters
might be considered circumstantially, assuming an awareness of their
destructive effect on all bodies involved). ‘[N]othing in sadness . . . can
induce you from within sadness to form a notion common to something
which would be common to the bodies which affect you with sadness
and to your own’ (11). At times, as activists, we feel the urge ‘to make
things clear’ to help people to understand a particular issue by engaging
in radical action, as if they are in need of a brighter light in their life. But
pure intensity does not necessarily lead to a good encounter: ‘a blue that
is too intense for my eyes will not make me say it’s beautiful’ (14).
176 Marcelo Svirsky
From a Spinozist ethical perspective then, working towards a level

of strategic knowledge concerning the ways bodies A, B and C can
be mutually affected goes hand in hand with the need to ‘organise
encounters’ as ‘the effort to form an association of men in relations
that can be combined’ (Deleuze 1992: 261). The incredible amount of
time activists spend on articulating ideologies will count for little if their
practices are separated from a strategy that includes, at least partially,
entering into joyous participation with others – meaning, pursuing
compossible relations with them. Activism’s role is not to secure that
compossibility, but to open up and remain open to its potentiality.
Let us move on to another of activism’s functions. The inadequate
idea brought forth by the affections between the bodies involved in
the activist encounter has two sides: ‘they “involve privation” of the
knowledge of their cause, but are at the same time effects that in some
way “involve” that cause’ (Deleuze 1992: 149). The second aspect,
explains Deleuze, contains something positive, indispensable for the
passage into adequate ideas, which is, in fact, the power of thinking,
or what is enabled in the first instance by the faculty of imagination
(149–50). This natural condition not only leads to the conceptualisation
of the passage into common notions, but also means that we might
have a multiplicity of several and different affection-ideas – inadequate
ideas. Reacting to an activist action, we might form a specifically fearful
image of a particular intervention as the result of becoming affected with
anger. But, in addition, the intermingling of affections in the activist
encounter also actualises the formal idea of the revolution. Whichever
of the affects it arouses, the variation of affection-ideas caused by
the activist encounter involve a sort of ‘background noise’ – a singular
range of frequencies of perceptions – involving an idea (inadequate as it
might be) of a ‘people to come’ hovering above and intersecting with
activist practices. In other words, given that ‘the ideas we have are
signs, indicative images impressed in us’ (147), we are claiming that the
disrupting action of activism imprints in us a hallucinating sign which
indicates the formal presence of a revolution. This is why we said before
that activism is not itself the revolutionary passage of rhythms in a
structure, but only announces that passage’s potential existence. It is
apparently to this feature of activism that Appadurai directs his words:
The imagination has become an organised field of social practices, a form of
work . . . and a form of negotiation between sites of agency . . . and globally
defined fields of possibility . . . The imagination is now central to all forms of
agency, is itself a social fact . . . [it] is today a staging ground for action, and
not only for escape. (Appadurai 1996: 31)
This function of activism stands in relation with the other, that of

striving for the formation of common notions. Though causing bad
encounters for many, for the ‘background noise’ not to become dead
noise and activism not to be washed away, activism needs to avoid
creating an excess of the unhappiness it inevitably causes. For example,
when activists clash with the institutional forces responsible for raising
separation walls (the Berlin Wall, the West Bank wall, and so on),
they still need not to overlook the idea or possibility of more agreeable
encounters taking place between the segregated bodies.
IV. Method
The life of an activist is marked by a sense of urgency, anxiety and
alertness to a life under attack. It involves both a type of discomfort
with the world, and a life-force seeking out the new; activism is therefore
in and of itself turbulent and restless. It threatens our neat and secure
life. It is the pure form of terror. This is perhaps why the drama
of activism can be so annoying for spectators, and so dangerous for
activists.
To describe activism’s machinations I turn to Deleuze’s theory of
the series, as formulated in The Logic of Sense (1990). The claim
here is that every activist-machine working in a particular zone of
social, cultural or political action comes into being through the creation
of a new series of interconnected elements as a result of alternative
connections with (a) given registers of the actualised world, and (b)
new imaginations. The new series engendered by the activist-machine
never isolates itself, but rather aims at producing a communication
of divergence with a specific official series within a particular zone of
thought and action. This is analogous to a situation in which, suddenly
and without warning, we introduce a new set of actors from among the
audience or the street, to become an integral part of a performance on
stage – or, if you prefer, we add an entirely new deck into the middle
of a card game, or bring on a third team during a football game. In
all of these instances a new game is created; by dissolving the former
rules we bring new connections to bear upon the large conjunctions to
which subjects and objects are currently in thrall, thereby changing the
structure of the game. Once such a connection between the series has
been established, a disjunctive and productive movement of distancing
between the old and the new series appears, certain modes of excess
start to circulate, and, finally, new products and flows come into
play.
178 Marcelo Svirsky
For example, when the State of Israel, its governments and its Jewish
majority insist upon referring to Israel as ‘The Jewish State’, they are
appealing to a certain associated series of elements in order to affix a
certain symbolic meaning to a structure that is ‘haunted by a desire
for eternity’ (Guattari 1995: 37): Jewish-State-the-Biblical-Land, Jewish-
State-Holocaust-European-debt, Jewish-State-the-few-against-the-many,
Jewish-State-agricultural-revolution, Jewish-State-stretching-out-its-
hand-in-peace, Jewish-State-the-only-democracy-in-the-Middle-East,
and so on. Conversely, when activist groups in Israel/Palestine articulate
the name of Israel with other elements that are ‘shaped by a desire
for abolition’ (37) – such as Israel-Nakba, Israel-segregation-apartheid,
Israel-Gaza-strip-blockade, Israel-the-West-Bank-the-Wall, Israel-
discrimination-Arab-minority, Israel-militarism, and so forth – they are
in fact appealing to an alternative series of real relations implicating
the state’s name. This second series attaches itself to the first series by
implanting a differential correspondence between the respective elements
of the series, thereby creating disequilibrium. As José Gil has pointed
out, the true machine of innovation in Deleuze’s thinking of the event is
the disjunction as the synthetic movement of divergent terms (Gil 2008:
18). There is an excess of one series over the other through their common
interface, in this case with the name of Israel functioning as the Empty
Square, and enabling ‘indirect interactions between elements devoid of
so-called natural affinity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 348).
Through the activist interlacement of a new series, a paradox is
introduced: ‘Paradox is initially that which destroys good sense as the
only direction, but it is also that which destroys common sense as the
assignation of fixed identities’ (Deleuze 1990: 3). This being the case,
we can understand why, today, both Zionists and their critics sense
a certain discomfort when appealing to the name of the Jewish state.
This forced encounter between the two series, instigated by activism,
redefines the trajectory of the name of Israel – approximating this name
to its problematic actualisations. From the activist-machine perspective,
a straightforward proposition such as: ‘It is the Jewish state that is
oppressing, segregating and committing war-crimes’ changes something
in the way the struggle is expanded upon, since new, real connections
and relations are being claimed.
The question, in the case of Israel and its name, becomes not
whether Israel must be recognised as a Jewish state, but what this
name expresses in terms of actual experiences and virtual potentials.
In this respect, Derrida’s treatment of the name of apartheid might
be worth quoting, interspersed with references to the Middle-Eastern

analogy:
Those in power in South Africa [Israel] have not managed to convince the
world, and first of all because, still today, they have refused to change
the real, effective, fundamental meaning of their watchword: apartheid [the
Jewish state]. A watchword is not just a name. . . is also a concept and a
reality. . . [They]. . . wanted to keep the concept and the reality, while effacing
the word, an evil word, their word. They have managed to do so in their
official discourse, but that’s all. Everywhere else in the world . . . people have
continued to think that the word was indissolubly – and legitimately – welded
to the concept and to the reality. (Derrida 1986: 163)
In the past, Derrida urged the world to call a thing by its name with
regard to South African apartheid. In contrast with Juliet’s plea, calling
Israel by its preferred name ‘will remain the “unique appellation” of
this monstrous, unique, and unambiguous thing’ (Derrida 1986: 159).
By calling the thing by its name, while imposing a contretemps upon
it, this part of the actual loses its grip on recent identifications. This
is where we face the polyphony of the naming-function. On the one
hand, in Romeo and Juliet, ‘the proper name, when assigned to people,
functions to consolidate . . . the subjective territories of individuals
within a given society, that is, within an official culture’ (Reynolds
2009: 48). On the other hand – as in the case of the names of the
apartheid and the Jewish state: ‘the naming-function provides a counter-
tactic by which to undermine societies’ mechanisms of control and
surveillance’ (280).
The connection between the two series of elements instigated by
activism forges a new space of relations and a new structure in which
a problematisation of social and political issues is brought to the
fore. The connection – or ligaçao in Gil’s terms – is what creates ‘a
critical distance between members of the same species’ by introducing
variation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 322). We are now in a
position to dare to offer an alternative reading to the famous ‘Lodge
yourself’ passage in A Thousand Plateaus (161): investigate; create an
alternative series of elements having new visual, audible and material
elements; investigate-experiment. Then, by making connections, this
series should intersect the dominant series at different points; investigate-
experiment. You will be overwhelmed by the apparition of new images
and affections, and, as a result, a reconsideration of life becomes
inevitable.
180 Marcelo Svirsky
Notes
1. As Bogue explains, for Bergson, fabulation is a protective shield (against social
dissolution) which ‘goes hand in hand with religion in creating the myths of
forces, myths, and deities that foster social cohesion and individual contentment’
(Bogue 2006: 205). In Shakespeare’s play, familialism takes the place of
religion.
2. I follow here the way the Argentinean Colectivo Situaciones (2001) explain
their perspective on Contrapoder (‘counter-power’). For Benasayag and
Sztulwark (2000), the contemporary Contrapoder is expressed by creative and
constructionist struggles that are not derived from sadness and do not rely on
models or seek central power. Rather, they produce an anti-systemic subjectivity
and are situational in their operation.
3. To appropriate Bartleby beyond this point will be futile, since Bartleby,
as Deleuze explains, ‘is too smooth for anyone to be able to hang any
particularity on him’ (Deleuze 1997: 74). As such, Žižek’s (2006) Bartlebyan
politics – premised upon an essential movement of subtraction from the
hegemonic system which both guarantees an outside and allows one to criticise
contemporary forms of what he defines as pseudo-resistance – as well as Hardt
and Negri’s (2000) take on Bartleby as the iconic anti-Empire work-refusnik – are
both excesses of interpretation (cf. Beverungen and Dunne 2007), desperate
formalisations of Bartleby.
4. As Raunig explains, in Foucault (2006), ‘Deleuze makes the point that a
social field offers resistance before it is organised according to strategies’
(Raunig 2007: 53). In Hardt and Negri’s register, ‘resistance is prior to
power’.
5. Oppression here is understood as the oppression of creative processes. Aiming
at the ontological conditions of creation, oppression is infinite stratification, i.e.
the accumulative spatialisation, homogenisation and quantification of duration.
Oppression is a natural tendency, the twin of creative processes. In its social
register, oppression mystifies stratification using the logic of representation. It
occurs everywhere, including throughout activist initiatives.
6. This means that the idea that a revolutionary initiative can construct itself in
isolation from the ‘general society’ in a separate territory is a short-term illusion.
I have explained elsewhere how Galilee, as an intercultural assemblage, is being
thrown back into the dichotomies of ethnicity just because it doesn’t confront
properly the fact that potestas can’t be ignored (see Svirsky 2010).
7. To clarify: the affection-idea is associated with the effects of the mixing
of bodies in the encounter, whereas the notion-idea is associated with the
degree of agreement or disagreement of the characteristic relations of the
bodies.
8. Since their appearance in the late 1990s, Colectivo Situaciones have made several
interventions-investigations with different groups, such as with ‘escraches-groups’
(actions aimed at unmasking mainly individuals involved in the last Argentinean
dictatorship), with Tupamaros (a revolutionary movement that emerged in
Uruguay during the 1960s), and with the ‘Movimiento de Trabajadores
Desocuapdos de Solano’ (a movement of the unemployed in the locality of
Solano). For an extensive list of their activities and their published literature see:
http://www.situaciones.org
9. Sometimes activists are not that different from Spinoza’s priest or despot, who
needs the sadness of his audience and their feelings of guilt in order to influence
them. But sadness can only diminish our power of acting.
References
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Deleuze and Political Activism

Book · January 2010

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Special Issue on Deleuze and Political Activism

Introduction: Beyond the Royal Science of Politics 1

‘To Believe In This World, As It Is’: Immanence and the Quest

The Common as Body Without Organs 46

Activism, Philosophy and Actuality in Deleuze and Foucault 84

Politics in the Middle: For a Political Interpretation of the

The Greek Gloom and the December 2008 Uprising 127

Life Resistance: Towards a Different Concept

Defining Activism 163

Deleuze Studies Volume 4: 2010 supplement: v

Marcelo Svirsky Cardiff University

Anxieties over democracy in the post-war era, reinvigorated by

Deleuze Studies Volume 4: 2010 supplement: 1–6

as ‘bowling together’ (cf. Putnam 2000). By default, such developments

is ‘radically impoverish . . . the data of one narrative line’ – namely, that

Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, as they boarded the Mavi Marmara

In truth, Deleuze and Guattari do not provide ready-made blueprints

The task undertaken by the contributors to this special issue is to launch

in November 2009. Here the participants gathered to discuss the idea

Simone Bignall University of New South Wales

Keywords: activism, apathy, identity, Deleuze, desire, ontology,

While global society flounders in economic crisis and political violence,

Deleuze Studies Volume 4: 2010 supplement: 7–27

these acts solicit. The process of self-determination is effectively halted

cited in Svendsen 2005: 131). Apathy takes hold because negativity is

Politics cannot be confined to order and consensus when the ethical

II. Desiring-Production and the Complex Self

that generates a ‘complex’ individual. Like the ‘dividual’, a ‘complex’

Guattari insist that an individual emerges with the forging of part

through the moments described as the ‘three syntheses of time’ (Deleuze

the mind becomes capable of acting on and reconstituting the relations

unsettling of the givenness of the actual, and the possibility of a ‘third’,

There is a self wherever a furtive contemplation has been established,

aspects of our characters disagree and cannot happily combine. So,

self-transformation and increased joyful complexity) are defined by an

III. Positive Politics and Activism

of joyful mutuality means that the ‘complex subject’ has an immediate

function as a principle of mutuality. Active bodies will seek to maximise

exemplify the effective forging of horizontal chains of equivalence or

Like Critchley, I find this ‘new language of civil disobedience’ utterly

given, but more like errors of practice to be avoided and guarded

acts of respectful recognition, and exemplary practices of genuine care

Deleuze, Gilles (1991) Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory

Kathrin Thiele Utrecht University

I. Deleuze and the Political

is usually phrased.3 In Deleuze and Guattari, politics is not discussed

II. ‘To Believe In This World, As It Is’: Deleuze’s Practical

first of all announced as a ‘task’, even a ‘most difficult task’. It is

of thinking such thought itself. This is the essential ‘active’ dimension

Second Formula of Immanence: ‘A Belief In This World, As It Is’

universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world. It is a whole

In following my argument so far, a misunderstanding could sneak in