Eduardo Pellejero, Minor Marxism (in. Deleuze Studies, nº3, artigo).pdf

December 12, 2009 Time: 11:35am dls073.tex

Minor Marxism: An Approach to aNew Political Praxis

Eduardo Pellejero Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Translated by Pauly Ellen Bothe and Davide Scarso

Abstract

In 1990, Antonio Negri pointed out some problems with Deleuze’spolitical philosophy. Substituting infra-structures for life or desire, asconstitutive dimensions of power formations, did not imply giving upon Marx, but it certainly did imply a change in the table of conceptualanalysis and a profound renovation of the questions that pertain tomilitant praxis. Taking this into account, we intend to explore the senseof a rare fidelity to Marx, and a certain idea of intellectual commitmentthat, reframing its objects and its instruments, pretends to renew politicalthinking in order to confront the unforeseeable of new knowledge, newtechniques and new political facts.

Keywords: Minor-dialectic, becoming-revolutionary, creation ofassemblages, de-totalisation, ethics of struggle

In 1990, in an interview conducted by Toni Negri for the magazineFutur antérieur, Deleuze defended his fidelity to Marxism, that is, theidea that political philosophy finds its fate in the analysis and criticismof capitalism as an immanent system that constantly moves its limitsand constantly re-establishes them on an expanded scale (Capital beingitself the very limit). Furthermore, he also defended a re-evaluation ofits objects and its instruments along the lines of a differential typologyof macro and micro-assemblages as determinants of social life (Deleuze1990: 229–39).

Substituting infra-structures for life or desire, as constitutivedimensions of power formations, did not imply giving up on Marx, if,as Derrida suggests, Marx had already alerted us to the historicity andthe possible aging of his work; that is, to the necessity of transforminghis own thesis to confront the unpredictability of new knowledge, new


Minor Marxism: An Approach to a New Political Praxis 103

techniques, new political data (Derrida 1993: 35). On the other hand,it did imply the problem of the type of struggle that such a shift inthe theory could produce at the level of praxis. Lines of flight (ratherthan social contradictions), minorities (instead of classes), and warmachines (against the State apparatus) did not entail a change in theconceptual framework of the analysis without requiring, at the sametime, a profound renewal of the issues that shape militant praxis.

And that renovation was imperative once we recognise that theanalysis of society in terms of assemblages of desire – the concept thatDeleuze prefers over Foucault’s concept of dispositifs (deploymentsor devices) of power – implied a break with any logic of progress orlibertarian teleology. In fact, from sovereign societies to disciplinarysocieties, and from disciplinary societies to control societies, theadjustment of collective assemblages is the expression of a change, butnot necessarily a change for the better:

It is possible that the hardest confinements may come to seem part of a happybenevolent past, taking into account the forms of control in open spaces thatemerge . . . liberations as submissions have to be confronted one by one in itsown way. . . . There is no place for fear, neither for hope, it is just a matter offinding [creating] new weapons. (Deleuze 1990: 241–2)1

The awareness of the impossibility of any totalisation of reality bymeans of representation – i.e., the assumption of the local value of ourtheoretical instruments – as well as the renunciation of any kind of‘structural messianism’ (Derrida 1993: 102) – i.e., the desertion of anypromise of emancipation – embodies the demand for a thought capableof confronting the biopolitical mutations of capital, nonetheless, at thesame time it leads struggle to a dispersion without precedent.

The ‘minor’ understood as a line of flight or a war machine did notestablish the basis of a revolutionary political programme,2 it actuallydeveloped in the very opposite direction, that of the organisation logicsof traditional political movements (in this sense, Guattari reminds usthat ‘the search for a big unification of resistance forces would just makethe work of the semiotisation of capital easier’,3 and Deleuze says thatthere is no such thing as a left-wing government – there are governmentsmore or less receptive to the claims of the left, but the left has nothingto do with the form of the State or the logics of government).

Taking this into account, we should not be surprised when,confronted with the political dimension of Deleuze’s work, Tony Negrispeaks from the paradoxical place of the militant who finds in thisphilosophy a powerful inspiration to re-think the movement, but in


104 Eduardo Pellejero

another sense, does not understand how it could be institutionalised:‘How could minor-becoming be effective? How could resistance becomeinsurrection? Reading your writings, I always doubt the way thesequestions can be answered, even if I find in your works an impulse thatforces me to reformulate them theoretically and pragmatically’ (Deleuze1990: 234). Negri celebrates the publishing of Mille Plateaux, which heconsiders a remarkable work of political philosophy, but regrets a tragicnote in its excessive theoretical will, which leaves every problem openand does not determine where it can lead us.4

Here I pose the problem from a revolutionary perspective, butthe questions raised by Negri could certainly also be raised from aprogressive perspective; as is the case with Mengue, when he writes:

If Deleuze offers us productive tools to emancipate us from the past andencourage us to commit the matricide of History, matrix of modernity, he justliberates us from it to throw us into an-historic becomings, but disconnectedfrom any social or political effectuation . . . the marriage between thespontaneist anarchism of the untimely and the long-term work of inscribingit on things and institutions is impossible . . . they have opposite politicaldirections . . . The untimely does not lead to any form of institution . . . Thatis, the guerrilla has deserted the political field closing itself on an unassailablebut just ethical position. (Mengue 2003: 17, 155, 157)

In other words, the new instruments of analysis of capitalism, developedby Deleuze and Guattari, challenge – for Negri – the historical senseof struggle. If the de-totalisation, locality and dispersion of strugglecome together with the renouncement to any historical possibility ofrevolution, why go on fighting? What are these lines of flight, subversionprocesses or forms of resistance worth, if revolution is, by definition,condemned?

Nevertheless, an idea of militant praxis is not that strange to Deleuze,who is looking for concepts that may bring us to an an-historical senseof struggle. Such a pragmatics could be put in terms of a series ofimpossibilities (as Deleuze would say): 1) the impossibility of a successfultotalisation of life by power (thus, the impossibility of the fulfilment ofHistory in the present); 2) the impossibility of any lasting subtraction oflife from power (thus, the impossibility of the fulfilment of History in thefuture); and 3) the impossibility of the acceptance of the state of things,of the actual stratifications of life by power (thus, the impossibility ofthe recognition of History in the past).

What we have, therefore, is a notion of a militant praxis that, withoutgiving in to the demands of power, but at the same time without aspiring



to power, embraces – beyond government and opposition – the vocationof resistance.5 Thus:

1) Deleuze affirms, against all strategies of totalisation of life bypower, against discipline or modulation of life by its dispositifs, thatresistance comes first; i.e., that there is an essential contingency workingout the inner nature of the social. Society is not a given totality: itis a puzzle of heterogeneous pieces, which do not always fit together(‘here lies the problem of the world that globalisation wanted toreshape: pieces do not fit’, says Marcos, in Siete piezas sueltas delrompecabezas mundial6 [Subcomandante Marcos 1997]). Consequently,power formations are inhabited by an essential powerlessness. Thesocial field is not composed by isolated and immutable formations: onlystratifications of knowledge and power may give some stability to it,but in itself it is unstable, agitated, changing, as if depending on a‘paradoxical apriori’, on a ‘micro-agitation’ (Deleuze 1986: 91).7 Thereis no dispositif that, besides the points that it connects, does not implyrelatively free or liberated points: points of creativity, points of mutation,points of resistance. The social field leaks everywhere. Lines of flight arethe primary determinations, they are objective lines that pass through asociety.

2) Deleuze does not ignore the historical failure of modernrevolutionary projects. The way revolutionary groups betray their taskis well known, but does not scare Deleuze (Deleuze 2002: 278; Deleuze1995: ‘G comme Gauche’). And if he admits that we will never assistagain to a clear major break, opening a new kind of society, he alsoclaims that revolutions – historically failing – produce effects immanently(incalculable effects) in that very history within which they fail. In thissense, in a 1988 interview, Deleuze said that ‘there is a whole dimensionof revolution that history does not catch: its becoming (anotherlanguage, another subject, another object)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1991:96–7), so, ‘when it is said that revolutions have an infamous future,nothing has really been said yet about the revolutionary-becoming ofpeople’ (Deleuze 1990: 209).

3) So, Deleuze does not defend the ideals of a historical future, wherea collective and lasting expression of liberated or egalitarian life couldcome to be true, nonetheless he wagers on the freedom effects of pureexplosions of desire:

even when revolutions failed, that did not prevent people from becomingrevolutionary . . . If someone says to me: ‘You will see when they succeed,when they win . . . It will not be good.’ But then problems will not be the



same, a new situation will be created and new becomings will break out.In situations of tyranny, of oppression, men have to become-revolutionary,because there is no other thing to do. (Deleuze 1995: ‘G comme Gauche’)

Briefly stated, Deleuze passes from REVOLUTION as the end ofhistory, to revolution as a line of transformation, that is, to theaffirmation of resistance, at the expense of revolution conceived as theradical and irreversible advent of a society finally totalised, not divided,reconciled.

A logics of the ephemeral, unpredictable, neutral event, substitutes forthe global, determinist and teleological dialectic of advent.

This is the first positive principle (although in-voluntaristic) ofDeleuze’s militant praxis: ‘becoming-revolutionary, without a futureof revolution’, ‘a bifurcation, a divergence from the law, an unstablestate that opens a new field of the possible’, and which ‘can becontradicted, repressed, recuperated, betrayed, but always entailssomething insurmountable’ (Deleuze 1995: ‘G comme Gauche’8;Deleuze 2003: 216). It is a matter of life, that takes place insideindividuals as in the exteriority of society, creating new relations withthe body, time, sexuality, culture, work; changes that ‘do not waitfor revolution, neither prefigure it, even if they are revolutionaries ontheir own: they have within themselves the power of resistance properof poetic life’ (Deleuze 2002: 200–1) (that is, displacing desire orreorganising life, make useless the dispositifs of knowledge and powerthat used to channel them).

In other words, those processes find their value in the fact that, bythe time they take place, they escape from constituted knowledge anddominant powers, even if later they are continued in new dispositifsof knowledge and power.9 The object of struggle, in this sense, is nomore the fulfilment of a possibility, becoming essential divergence andmultiplication of perspectives.10 Zouravichbili reminds us that in TheGerman Ideology Marx and Engels defined communism exactly this way(in opposition to utopian socialism): ‘Communism is . . . neither a statethat has to be created, nor an ideal for the ruling of society. We callcommunism the real movement that abolishes the actual state’ (Marxand Engels 1976: 33).

Anyway, for these openings of the possible to be something otherthan a vision, for this new sensibility to be asserted, it is necessaryto create proper assemblages. That creation is, after all, the task thatgives consistency to this new militant praxis (therefore it is its secondprinciple): the elaboration of new assemblages and the struggle for the



associated rights:

When a social mutation takes place, it is not enough to think of theconsequences or effects following lines of economical or political causality.It is necessary that the society creates collective assemblages, associated tothe new subjectivity, in order to mature the mutation . . . There is no solutionunless it is creative. Only creative reconversions will contribute to resolvingthe actual crisis. (Deleuze 2003: 216–17)

This creation of assemblages covers the distance between becoming-revolutionary and ‘left-wing civism’ (according to the sharp formulaof Claire Parnet). On account of the fact that, if events overcomeany committed will (that is, events do not depend on objectiveor subjective possibility), to embrace or to ignore them defines anessential difference, that allows Deleuze to distinguish pragmaticallyleft from right.11 In this sense, the left-wing is defined by the searchfor assemblages in order to extend the movements triggered byevents (and then, by the invention of rights from the new materialconditions generated by mutations of desire). While the right-wingdefines itself by the denial of movement and the opposition to anyform of redistribution, the left-wing ‘is a passion for procedures . . . thecollective catch of dynamics for the de-stratification of structures and re-arrangement of life and society following different forms of equilibrium’(Guattari 1984: 4).12

Nevertheless, if, according to Deleuze, May ’68 is enough for thepurpose of illustrating what he understands by revolutionary-becoming,it is not enough to illustrate the subjective reconversions.13 Evencreative and innovative answers to the objective and subjective demandsof the mutations unchained by the event – the American New Deal,the Japanese take-off, and Iranian Muslim fundamentalism – imply allkinds of ambiguities and reactionary structures. May ’68, on theother hand, was quickly recoded by the French government (with thehelp of the PCF). That is, even at the level of objectivity andthe conscious and unconscious subjectivity of individuals and socialgroups, there are mutations of unpredictable consequences; power showsgreat shrewdness and a huge capacity for adaptation to the new formsof sensibility and new types of human relations resulting from thedifferent ‘mutations’ (commercial recovery of marginal ‘inventions’;relative tolerance in relation to zones of laissez faire, etc.). In otherwords, a semi-tolerated, semi-stimulated dissent is part of the system(and is instrumentally recovered by it).14



Creative articulation of the lines of flight in assemblages that allowthem to mature is not just possible and desirable, but constitutesthe constructivist vector of this new militant praxis. In La révolutionmoléculaire Guattari will make this the cornerstone of his politicalphilosophy. The revolutionary character of the lines of flight that crossthrough a given society depends on their articulation, on the convergenceof the subjective lines of flight with the objective lines of decoding ofthe system in suitable assemblages, creating an irreversible aspiration tonew spaces of freedom. And Guattari offers us a minor example, onewhich is much less ambiguous than the examples given by Deleuze – Iam referring to the case of free radio in the 1980s: an assemblagewhere the technological evolution (in particular, the miniaturisation oftransmitters, and the fact that they could be ‘assembled’ by amateurs),‘concurred’ with the collective aspiration for new media of expression.Another example of these objective and subjective mutations are thecommunities that appeared everywhere in the 1960s and ’70s, inconsonance with new musical genres, from rock to punk – with allthe technical innovations that they presupposed, from amplifiers andsynthesizers to acids, as well as the changes in subjective and objectiveconditions: the baby-boom, the welfare state, etc. Another example weknow better is the internet. (From another point of view, maybe wecould also inscribe all these minor examples into a major Marxist line,if, as Raya Dunayevskaya suggests, Marx set out, as a fundamentalaxis of his conception, the daily creation of new forms of struggleand new human relations between workers, between workers and theproduction infrastructures, etc. Dunayevskaya relates this conceptionof Marxism, more concerned with the fulfilment of freedom that withthe conquest of institutions, to the creative acts performed by theParis Commune, or, even, during the Russian revolution, to thoseactions that, in the auto-emancipating moment of birth, gave wayto totally new forms of labour assemblages – such as the Soviets[Dunayevskaya 2004: 208]).15

Obviously, lines of flight are not necessarily revolutionary; a lineof migration (sub-Saharan or Cuban) can end in death (at sea), or inmuch harder dispositifs than those which it left behind (slavery). And,obviously, these micro-revolutions do not lead automatically to a socialrevolution, to a new society, an economy or a culture liberated fromcapitalism.

Finally, there is no way to compare, according to a progressive set ofvalues, which regimes are more harsh or more bearable (I mean, it ispossible to do so retrospectively, but not at the moment of adopting a



line of action); the power of resistance or, on the contrary, submissionto control, is decided in the course of each attempt. What matters isthat, suddenly, we do not feel condemned in the same old way anymore;a problem which nobody could see a way out of, a problem in whicheverybody was trapped, suddenly ceases to exist, and we ask ourselveswhat we were talking about. Suddenly we are in another world, as Péguysaid, the same problems do not arise anymore – though there will bemany more, of course (Péguy 1957: 300–1).

Such is the scope and the limits of this new militant praxis that in acertain way responds to the demands of what Jean-Luc Nancy named‘literary communism’ (Nancy 1983). As we saw at the beginning, in1990, Negri could not help feeling a certain reluctance when confrontedwith it. Ten years later, however, with the publication of Empire, Negrioffered us a free re-appropriation of Deleuze’s thesis.

Deleuze and Guattari – after Foucault – appear then as the foundingfathers of a new form of criticism, redefining the space of politicaland social struggles in relation to ‘classic’ Marxism: creation of spacesof freedom, strategies of torsion of power, conquest of individual andcollective forms of subjectivity, invention of new forms of life, came toconstitute the new subversive grammar.

Negri also seems to embrace the idea of an an-historical sense ofstruggle, at least if we read in a Deleuzian way the epigraph by WilliamMorris that opens the book (‘Men fight and lose the battle, and the thingthat they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and then it turnsout not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what theymeant under another name’ (Negri and Hardt 2000).

But we do not need to read much more to understand that thispost-structural comprehension of biopower that renews materialistthought remains still unsatisfactory for Negri, because it just (and only)provides the elements for a superficial and ephemeral resistance (politicalwork, for Negri, is not simply resistance, but an alternative politicalorganisation, the institution of a new constituent power beyond theEmpire).

For the wilful militancy of Empire, Deleuzian praxis is not enough.Attached to a classic Marxism, Negri renews once more the commitmentto a dialectics in which we had no more faith (‘We claim that Empireis better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is betterthan the forms of society and ways of production that came beforeit. . . . In the same way today we can see that Empire does away withthe cruel regimes of modern power and also increases the potential forliberation’16 [Negri and Hardt 2000: 43–4]), even if he denies its more



oppressive historicist elements (‘This approach breaks methodologicallywith every philosophy of history in so far as it refuses any deterministicconception of historical development and any “rational” celebration ofthe result’ [Negri and Hardt 2000: 66]). In this sense, the problem forNegri is still the problem of a new materialist teleology (in the line ofSpinoza and the Theological-Political Treatise,17 but maybe, as well, inthe line of Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the Dialectic, that is: there isno sense of History but an elimination of non-sense).

The problem lies elsewhere for Deleuze. There is no doubt that we donot possess, neither in fact nor by right, any reliable means to free and,a fortiori, to preserve the becomings that undermine the dispositifs ofknowledge and power in which we are compromised: ‘What condemnsus to an everlasting “restlessness” . . . We do not know how such agroup can change, how it can fall back in history . . . We do not disposeof the image of a proletariat which just needs to gain consciousness’(Deleuze 1990: 209). But this uncertainty does not imply any imperativeof demobilisation.

Lacking the geopolitical options known decades ago, when it was stillpossible to chose between first and second worlds – thus, exposed eitherto inscription in the first world or sinking into the third – the strugglegoes on. Lacking every form of social utopia – thus open to the dispersionof its local objectives – the struggle goes on. Deprived of any progressiveproject, of the idea that if we do everything possible things will improve,will change for the better – thus, aware of its tragic destiny – the strugglegoes on.

Deleuze stakes the whole of his political thought on the effectuationand contra-effectuation of the untimely as the irruption or inscriptionof events in history, but at the same time he transvalues the essence ofthe event, which ceases to constitute the sense of History, becoming theagent of a redistribution of affects, relationships and singularities: thevery revolutionary potential of events lies in their novelty or discrepancyin relation to a specific situation (objective modification of a state ofthings, but also the subjective assemblages of resistances and lines offlight):18 ‘Against apocalyptic history, there is a sense of history thatmatches with the possible, with the multiplicity of the possible, with theprofusion of the possible in every moment’ (Deleuze 2003: 183–4).

Deleuze and Guattari are not philosophers of liberation; the chancesof transformation of the material organisation of life and desire, thepossibility of molecular re-distributions of power and knowledge, donot imply for them the abolition of molar organisation as such. Whichdoes not mean that revolution



is just a dream, something that is never achieved, or that is achieved betrayingit. On the contrary, it means to posit revolution as a plane of immanenceor infinite movement, as long as these features are connected with thestruggle against capitalism, here and now, and propel new struggles everytime previous struggles are betrayed. (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 97)

What is to be done? The old Leninist question still hangs over us, withan irresistible weight, even if we are convinced that there is no answerbut a creative one (but ‘to create’ is not a satisfactory answer for thequestion).

The question would lie, today, before and beyond any programme ofaction: How to embrace such politics, a politics that proposes struggle,not as revolution, but just as resistance? How to embrace it when weare fully aware of the local, strategic and non-totalisable value of thechanges we can aspire to?

We gave up utopias. Perhaps we will never grow up, as Kant wished.Philosophy relinquishes, in this sense, the possession of power (by right)and the (factual) property of knowledge.

Maybe this is why, unlike Marx’s, Deleuze’s work does not constitutethe insurmountable philosophy of our time. But in its imperativeprecariousness, in its radical minority, it still shows a unique criticalpower, and outlines maps on the desert of the real (in a desert full ofmirages). In its joyful proclamation of a thought of immanence, beyondany reliance on moral or messianic structures, it still gives us reasons forresistance, to go on thinking, when it comes impossible to go on seeingcertain things without doing nothing, or go on living as we do. (Neitherdreams nor hopes, not even fidelity to old utopias;19 it is just a questionof perception, of sensibility, and, immediately, a problem of creation.20)

The production and administration of inequality, of injustice, ofmisery, are still a pervasive reality in our societies. The attempts ofthe most different formations of power to control life collide, and willkeep colliding, with the shocking fact that the pieces do not fit. Powerclaims to deal with this fact just as a spare, as junk. But included inthat spare are thousands, millions of people convicted every day (peoplewho die from diseases that a simple pill could cure, victims of collateraldamage from anti-terrorist operations, but also students educated forunemployment, adolescents enclosed in urban ghettos or suburbs, elderlypeople without pensions or social security).

We do not have faith in the advent of a new happy world, but wecannot renounce to the exercise of a resistant thought, in the difficult,unpredictable and dangerous intersection of our powerlessness and our



ignorance. Without it, the various dystopias that may be glimpsed onthe horizon would see the space that distances them from their total ortotalitarian fulfilment surmounted.21

Thus, the new revolutionary praxis will be, in the first place, a workof de-totalisation of life (the creation of a world in which many worldscould fit, in which all possible worlds could fit). And it will be, also,an everlasting work, because power learns from its mistakes and knowshow to take advantage of its defeats. (But will we stop working for thatreason?) After all, as Deleuze and Guattari say:

the success of a struggle lies just in the very struggle, in the vibrations, in theembracing, in the openness that it gives to men at the moment it takes place,and that compounds in itself a monument, always in progress, as those graveswhere every new traveler adds a stone. The victory of a struggle is immanent,and consists in the new relations it sets up between men, even if they do notlast more than their material fusion, and they quickly give place to division,to betrayal. (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 167)

Thought is the monument of that struggle, always to start over againin the labyrinth of the mixed up battles in which we are compromisedevery day. A monument that does not commemorate anything, does nothonour anyone, but whispers at the ear of the future the feelings thatembody the everlasting suffering of men, and its recreated protest, itssustained fight.

In this sense, struggle without any future of revolution comes to trans-value the imperatives of compromise we inherited from past generations;it comes to give them sense, necessarily a new sense, in these winter yearsof every man for himself.

I think of the words Sartre raised so many times as a flag: ‘EverythingI do is probably destined to failure, but I still do it, against all odds,because it has to be done.’22

But I think also, as counterpoint, of the tough, excessive, desperateorder-word, in which – against the setbacks of our recent history – thesense of a remarkable event that goes by the name of Ernesto ‘Che’Guevara survives:

Hasta la victoria siempre!

Notes1. There is no hope of progress, no expectation of a complete vanishing of

problems, but that does not signify the absence of an immanent hope, that is,hope of getting out – through creative solutions – of the mousetraps (Sartre) inwhich we find ourselves caught. Each dispositif implies new submissions, butalso, certainly, new lines of flight: ‘Dans le capitalisme il y a donc un caractère



nouveau pris par les lignes de fuite, et aussi des potentialités révolutionnairesd’un type nouveau. Vous voyez, il y a de l’espoir’ (Deleuze 2002: 376).As a matter of fact, from this statement to the affirmation of Empire as abetter sociopolitical assemblage (in the same sense that Marx maintained thatcapitalism was better than the modes of production that preceded it) there is along way that won’t be surpassed by Deleuze.

2. Even if L’Anti-Oedipe ends with a ‘Program for desiring machines’,schizoanalysis ‘does not have a proper political program to propose’ (Deleuzeand Guattari 1973: 380). On the contrary, it raises a series of conceptualcontrasts that allow us to analyse social fields or processes, evaluating theassemblages at stake (see Patton 2000: 71).

3. ‘Well, I don’t think so because, once again, the molecular revolution is notsomething that will constitute a program. It’s something that develops preciselyin the direction of diversity, of a multiplicity of perspectives, of creating theconditions for the maximum impetus of processes of singularisation. It’s not aquestion of creating agreement; on the contrary, the less we agree, the more wecreate an area, a field of vitality in different branches of this phylum of molecularrevolution, and the more we reinforce this area. It’s a completely differentlogic from the organisational, arborescent logic that we know in politicalor union movements’ (Guattari and Stivale 1985). See also Anne Querrien,‘Esquizoanálisis, capitalismo y libertad. La larga marcha de los desafiliados’,in Guattari (2004: 28).

4. Negri’s worry about the institutionalisation of Deleuzian political philosophywas not strange to Guattari, who regretted the difficulties that molecularrevolutions have creating links between singular achievements: ‘Will these micro-revolutions, these profound impugnations of social relationships, be put away torestricted spheres of the social field? Or will they be articulated in new “socialsegmentations” that won’t imply the restitution of hierarchy and segregation?In short, will all these micro-revolutions set up a new revolution? Will theybe capable of “assuming” not just the local problems, but the management ofbig economic sets? . . . How far could these molecular revolutions go? Aren’tthey condemned, at best, to vegetate in German style ghettos? Is the molecularsabotage of the dominant social subjectivity enough in itself? Should molecularrevolutions make alliances with social forces at the molar (global) level? . . . Howcan we imagine, then, revolutionary war machines of a new type that could graft,at the same time, into the manifest social contradictions and these molecularrevolutions?’ (Guattari 2004: 54). ‘We cannot be content with these analogiesand affinities; we must also try to construct a social practice, to construct newways of intervention, this time no longer in molecular, but molar relationships,in political and social power relations, in order to avoid watching the systematic,recurring defeat that we knew during the ’70s, particularly in Italy with theenormous rise of repression linked to an event, in itself repressive, which was therise of terrorism’ (Guattari and Stivale 1985). This very same problem concernsDeleuze. But the multiplicity of revolutionary focuses does not represent alack or a weakness for him, but a power (potentia) of resistance to power(potestas). Talking with Foucault, in fact, Deleuze said that ‘les réseaux, lesliaisons transversales entre ces points actifs discontinus, d’un pays à un autreou à l’intérieur d’un même pays’, even when imprecise, they imply ‘qu’on nepeut en rien toucher à un point quelconque d’application sans qu’on se trouveconfronté à cet ensemble diffus, que dès lors on est forcément amené à vouloirfaire sauter, à partir de la plus petite revendication qui soit. Toute défense ouattaque révolutionnaire partielle rejoint de cette façon la lutte ouvrière’ (Deleuze2002: 287–98).



5. Cf. Tomás Segovia’s ‘Alegatorio’, in Subcomandante Marcos (1997): ‘First, Ibeg you not to mix up Resistance with political opposition. Opposition does notoppose to power but to government, and its complete and successful form is theparty; on the other hand, Resistance, now by definition, can’t be a party: It isnot made for government, but to . . . resist.’

6. Cf. Alemán (2007: 91): ‘There is no reality, as consistent and hegemonic asit may appear, as, for example, actual capitalism, that could be considereddefinitive. . . . To be left-winged implies insisting on the contingent characterof the historic reality of Capitalism. Even when the way out or the passage toanother reality is defered, even if that transit has no guarantee and could stayunfinished, even if that other reality, different of Capitalism, could not be callSocialism.’

7. Every assemblage presents, on one hand, a stratification more or less hard (let ussay, the dispositifs of power; Deleuze says: ‘a concretion of power, of desire andterritoriality or reterritorialisation, ruled by the abstractions of a transcendentlaw’), but, on the other hand, implies points of deterritorialisation, lines of flightwhere it is disarticulated and transformed (‘where desire is liberated of all itsconcretions and abstractions’, says Deleuze).

8. ‘Par “nouveau champ de possibles”, il faut donc entendre autre chose: le motpossible a cessé de désigner la série des alternatives réelles et imaginaires (oubien. . . ou bien. . . ), l’ensemble des disjonctions exclusives caractéristiques d’uneépoque et d’une société données. Il concerne à présent l’émergence dynamiquede nouveau. C’est l’inspiration bergsonienne de la pensée politique de Deleuze’(Zourabichvili 1998: 339).

9. ‘[I]ls ont bien une spontanéité rebelle. . . . Ils se lèvent un instant, et c’est cemoment-là qui est important, c’est la chance qu’il faut saisir. . . . Croire aumonde, c’est ce qui nous manque le plus; nous avons tout à fait perdu lemonde, on nous en a dépossédé. Croire au monde, c’est aussi bien susciter desévénements même petits qui échappent au contrôle, ou faire naître de nouveauxespaces-temps, même de surface ou de volume réduits’ (Deleuze 1990: 238).

10. ‘L’événement n’ouvre pas un nouveau champ du réalisable, et le “champ depossibles” ne se confond pas avec la délimitation du réalisable dans une sociétédonnée (même s’il en indique ou en induit le redécoupage). L’ouverture depossible est-elle alors un but, le problème étant moins de construire l’avenirque d’entretenir des perspectives à son sujet. . . . On passe ici à un autre régimede possibilité, qui n’a plus rien à voir avec la disponibilité actuelle d’unprojet a réaliser, ou avec l’acception vulgaire du mot ‘utopie’ (l’image d’unenouvelle situation qu’on prétend substituer brutalement à l’actuelle, espérantrejoindre le réel à partir de l’imaginaire: opération sur le réel, plutôt que du réelmême). Le possible arrive par l’événement et non l’inverse; l’événement politiquepar excellence – la révolution – n’est pas la réalisation d’un possible, mais uneouverture de possible . . . Le possible est le virtuel : c’est lui que la droite nie, etque la gauche dénature en se le représentant comme projet’ (Zourabichvili 1998:345).

11. Anyway, Guattari considers that one of the tasks of political commitment couldconsist in the precipitation of events: it consists in the active research of thosedifferences that take place against the homogenising movement of integratedworld capitalism.

12. Deleuzian involuntarism collides with Gramscian concept of politicalcommitment: pessimism of reason, optimism of will. The left-wing, indeed,generally defined itself through voluntarism, that is, by means of the idea thatif we do all we have to do, that if we do everything we can (following theguidelines of a revolutionary project, in this case), things will necessarily change



for better. Deleuzian involuntarism implies a problematisation of this idea, butthis certainly does not mean a total alienation of the political by the pessimismof reason. In fact, what is put in question by Deleuze is the hope of a totalfulfilment of revolutionary projects, not the will of change. Then, the questionthat has to be raised is: what kind of action is possible without the hope ofits total fulfilment? Does the impugnation of any project’s fulfilment imply theimpugnation of the very notion of will? I would say that Deleuze probably meetsup here with the sense that Duns Scot or Schopenhauer used to give to theconcept of voluntarism, that is, the principle according to which will is the first ofhuman spiritual powers (previous, in that sense, to reason or intellect). Certainly,this will is not for Deleuze a subjective will, but an impersonal, event-by-productwill (but isn’t this the case with all doctrines of will?). Deep down, Deleuzianinvoluntarism states that a subjective mutation can’t be decided, that is, that asubjective mutation could never be the outcome of a dedicated fulfilment of anidea postulated by reason; it is, indeed, the impersonal will of the event whichdecides a new sharing out of the affects, a new circumscription of the intolerable(‘the event is the very revolutionary potential itself’ [Zourabichvili 1998: 354]);it is that impersonal will in relation to which we can react (oppose some kind ofresistance) or respond (the subjective mutation is real, but it must be prolongedby a rational assemblage of the new relations that it provokes or shows). In thissense, as suggested by François Zourabichvili (who has said the most interestingthings about this), change is not to come, but is inscribed as a tendency in thecontradictions of a situation in which we are compromised, that authorises us totalk about the future without having a relapse into fantasy; it can be decipheredin the very becoming of present (actuality), by opposition to the structure offulfilment that has the future as an image thanks to the dialectical apparatus.Between the act of deciphering the future at the level of the virtual, and itsassemblage at the level of the actual, there must exist an act of creation, andnot the mere fulfilment of a possible (system of alternatives): ‘le néant de volontéprocède à la destitution d’un faux problème: le système des alternatives. Sonenvers, ou la consistance positive de la politique, est l’élaboration expérimentalede nouveaux agencements concrets, est l’élaboration expérimentale de nouveauxagencements concrets, et la lutte pour l’affirmation des droits correspondants’(Zourabichvili 1998: 354). In short, even if it is not possible to talk abouthope in the context of this militant praxis, neither can we conclude a politicsof total despair. Deleuze writes: ‘ne pas savoir d’avance comment quelqu’un,éventuellement, se trouvera capable d’instaurer en lui et hors de lui un processusde rationalisation. Certes il y a tous les cas perdus, le désespoir. Mais s’il y aune chance, de quoi quelqu’un a-t-il besoin, comment procède-t-il pour sortirde ses démolitions? Tous peut-être, nous naissons sur un sol de démolition,mais nous ne gâcherons aucune chance. Il n’y a pas de Raison pure, ou derationalité par excellence. Il y a des processus de rationalisation, hétérogènes,très différents suivant les domaines, les époques, les groupes et les personnes.Ils ne cessent d’avorter, de glisser, d’aller dans des impasses, mais aussi de sereprendre ailleurs, avec de nouvelles mesures, de nouveaux rythmes, de nouvellesallures’ (Deleuze 1988: 14–15).

13. ‘[S]uivre les flux qui constituent autant de lignes de fuite dans la sociétécapitaliste, et opérer des ruptures, imposer des coupures au sein mêmedu déterminisme social et de la causalité historique; dégager les agentscollectifs d’énonciation capables de former les nouveaux énoncés de désir;constituer non pas une avant-garde, mais des groupes en adjacence avec lesprocessus sociaux, et qui s’emploient seulement à faire avancer une véritésur des chemins où elle ne s’engage jamais d’ordinaire; bref, une subjectivité



révolutionnaire par rapport à laquelle il n’y a plus lieu de se demander cequi est premier, des déterminations économiques, politiques, libidinales, etc.,puisqu’elle traverse les ordres traditionnellement séparés; saisir ce point derupture où, précisément, l’économie politique et l’économie libidinale ne fontplus qu’un. . . . Le mouvement du 22 Mars reste exemplaire à cet égard . . . sansprétention d’avant-garde ou d’hégémonie, simple support permettant le transfertet la levée des inhibitions’ (Deleuze 2002: 279). (The movement of March 22 wasan anti-establishment student movement that, headed by Daniel Cohn-Bendit,would be the revolutionary seed of May ’68.)

14. Yet, everything comes to flee again, opposing to the biopolitical articulationof society a series of insurmountable becomings in the domain of libidinaleconomy: Daily relationships between women and men, homosexuals andheterosexuals, children, adults, etc., as well as production mutations, implycoefficients of freedom irretrievable to the dominant system (Guattari 2004:68–9): ‘J’ai beaucoup de mal à imaginer une petite communauté libérée quise maintiendrait au travers des flux de la société répressive, comme l’additiond’individus tour à tour affranchis. Si le désir constitue en revanche la texturemême de la société dans son ensemble, y compris dans ses mécanismes dereproduction, un mouvement de libération peut “cristalliser” dans l’ensemblede la société’ (Deleuze 2002: 370) (it is Guattari who speaks this way).

15. Cf. Kaufman (2007: 67): ‘A left-wing perspective would be a perspectiveinvolved with the antagonisms that structure the conditions of injustice, muchmore than with the institutional modalities that result from this concern.’

16. ‘Although Empire may have played a role in putting an end to colonialismand imperialism, it nonetheless constructs its own relationships of powerbased on exploitation that are in many respects more brutal than thoseit destroyed. . . . Despite recognizing all this, we insist on asserting that theconstruction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgiafor the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy thatinvolves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital. We claim that Empire is better in the sameway that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society andmodes of production that came before it’ (Negri and Hardt 2000: 61).

17. ‘In contrast, any postmodern liberation must be achieved within this world,on the plane of immanence, with no possibility of any even utopianoutside. . . . Perhaps we need to reinvent the notion of the materialist teleologythat Spinoza proclaimed at the dawn of modernity when he claimed that theprophet produces its own people’ (Negri and Hardt 2000: 83). ‘There is notfinally here any determinism or utopia: this is rather a radical counter-power,ontologically grounded not on any “vide pour le futur” but on the actual activityof the multitude, its creation, production, and power – a materialist teleology’(Negri and Hardt 2000: 66).

18. ‘La rupture des schèmes, ou la fuite hors des clichés, ne conduit certes pasà un état de résignation ou de révolte tout intérieure: résister se distingue deréagir. Résister est le propre d’une volonté dérivée de l’événement, qui s’alimenteà l’intolérable. L’événement est le “potentiel révolutionnaire” même, qui setarit lorsqu’il est rabattu sur des images toutes faites (clichés de la misère etla revendication)’ (Zourabichvili 1998: 354). ‘Un événement politique est dumême type: une nouvelle répartition des affects, une nouvelle circonscription del’intolérable’ (Zourabichvili 1998: 341).

19. ‘Pourquoi se révolter? En dehors de l’intérêt spécifique qui motive telle luttepour ceux qui sont directement concernés, quelle raison de s’engager au côtéde la subversion? Est-ce une question de morale ou d’éthique, de simple dignité



pour soi-même, comme on a envie de répondre, qui plus que toute autre chosenous obligerait à écouter la voix des insoumis, des victimes, des singularités quise dressent un moment, un instant se soulèvent? . . . Pourquoi se révolter? Parrêve, espoir, fidélité à l’utopie . . . Soit. Mais, du coup, le caractère de ce désirle rapproche dangereusement du désir freudien, dirait-on. Ce désir, en effet,à jamais insatisfait historiquement, comment peut-il se maintenir, et relancercontinûment dans l’histoire des actions toujours nouvelles sans sombrer dans ledécouragement, le désespoir? . . . Éthique et rébellion. Qui a pour mot d’ordre:On a toujours raison de se révolter. . . . La révolution comme promesse d’un justeétat social et politique, a disparu. Ce qu’il en reste donc, c’est, exactement, unmode de vie, un style d’existence, avec une forme particulière de rapport à soi etaux autres’ (Mengue 2003 : 146–57).

20. ‘On ne peut que répondre à l’événement, parce qu’on ne peut pas vivre dans unmonde qu’on ne supporte plus, en tant qu’on ne le supporte plus. Il y a là uneresponsabilité spéciale, étrangère à celle des gouvernements et des sujets majeurs,responsabilité proprement révolutionnaire. On n’est ici responsable de rien, ni depersonne; on ne représente ni un projet ni les intérêts d’une collectivité (puisqueces intérêts sont précisément en train de changer et qu’on ne sait pas bien encoredans quel sens). On est responsable devant l’événement’ (Zourabichvili 1998:347).

21. I think that the generic threat of totalisation is, nowadays, much more worryingthan eventual totalitarian threats. Capitalistic totalisation – under the forms ofcontrol societies (Deleuze), integrated world capitalism (Guattari), or empire(Negri-Hardt) – implies a vast number of forms that go much further thandictatorial (military or party based) totalitarianisms. Current capitalism, indeed,establishes in our societies a kind of symbolic totalitarianism, a totalisation thatoverdetermines reality by representation, and reaches zones which traditionallyare far away from power. Clumsy forms of totalitarianism are, from this pointof view, just a violent and voluntaristic reaction of states facing up to the failureof operational totalisations by worldwide legitimated dispositifs of knowledgeand power (and, in this sense, they represent a kind of step backwards in thedirection of archaic dispositifs: discipline, sovereignty, etc.).

22. Cf. Jeanson (1975: 286). I owe this reference to Ignacio Quepons (G. C.), faithfulfriend and tireless partner in this patient job of giving form to the impatience offreedom.

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DOI: 10.3366/E1750224109000737

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