In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari claim that a general theory of society must be a generalised theory of flows. This is hardly a straightforward claim, and this paper attempts to examine the grounds for it. Why should socio-political theory be based on a theory of flows rather than, say, a theory of the social contract, or a theory of the State, or the questions of legitimation or revolution, or numerous other possible candidates? The concept of flow (and the related notions (...) of code and stock), I argue, is derived from contemporary economic theory, and most notably John Maynard Keynes. Deleuze and Guattari remained Marxists, not only because they held that contemporary political philosophy must inevitably be centred on the analysis of capitalism, but also because they held, following Marx himself, that the Marxist analysis of capital must constantly be transformed and adapted to new conditions. Thus, while certain aspects of Marx's analysis disappear from Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they are supplemented by the addition of new concepts adequate to the contemporary state of capitalism. The paper concludes, then, with an analysis of the role played by the concepts of flow, code and stock in Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy. (shrink)

Straipsnyje bandoma atsakyti į klausimą, kaip Gilles’o Deleuze’o ir Felixo Guattari geismo samprata atsispindi jų politinėje filosofijoje. Tyrinėjama geismo mašinų ir jų gamybos koncepcija, jų santykis su sociumo struktūra ir kapitalo logika. Savo veikaluose šie du autoriai teigia, kad geismo mašinos kuria materialią revoliucinę energiją, kuri nuolat konfrontuoja tiek su sociumo normomis, tiek su kapitalistine priespauda. Tačiau, pasak jų, tokią energiją sociumas mėgina represuoti, paversti revoliucinį geismą fašistiniu „tvirtos rankos“ geismu, o kapitalas fetišizuoja, suprekina ir pritaiko savo tikslams. Šiame tekste, (...) remiantis tiek Deleuze’o ir Guattari, tiek jų sekėjų tekstais, daroma prielaida, kad geismo mašinos sociumo represijoms ir kapitalistiniam suprekinimui gali priešintis pasirinkdamos atstumtųjų terpėje gimstančias kūrybingas ir radikalias mažosios politikos strategijas. Pagrindiniai žodžiai: geismas, geismo mašinos, sociumas, reakcija, kapitalas, suprekinimas, revoliucija, mažoji politika. Desire and Liberation in Political Philosophy of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari Kasparas Pocius Summary The article analyzes Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of desire and desiring-machines, their origins and workings in the organized structure of socius and in the capitalist regime as well as the revolutionary strategies and milieus that these desiring-machines engender. Contemporary social critique often distorts the notion of desire while linking it exclusively with capital that forces people to consume identities and commodities. Meanwhile, in the conception of Deleuze and Guattari desire is a material revolutionary energy which constantly aims to confront the norms of both socius and capitalist repressions. Unfortunately, this energy is continually under the threat of being appropriated and inactivated by socius, and it also undergoes the risk of being fetishized and commodified by capital, which makes desire serve its aims of seeking profit and extracting surplus value. Desiring-machines attempt to break through to the other side of socius and capital, the former of which is decoded and deterritorialized, whereas the latter is too limited to deal with desire as an absolute limit of socius. Capital is unable to commodify potential revolutionary energy or to absorb it in another way. However, in the structure of socius active and creative desire may be reversed into reactionary fascist desire of hierarchy, exploitation, humiliation, slavery and death. The molar order of socius is distinguished by a clear structure and hierarchy where individuals have fixed identities. However, capital tries to demolish those structures and deterritorialize socius by following the desiring-machines. The discipline, laws and norms are substituted by the flexible axiomatic of capitalism, which can adjust itself to the demands of desire or regenerate to the former repressive forms of command. Such milieu gives rise to a single monolithic molar class. Therefore, today the conflict lies not between the capitalist class and the working class but between the class and those who are outside the class – minor people, creating minor politics in molecular milieu. There is a paradox in the conception of minor politics by Deleuze and Guattari. Although this kind of politics originates in the space that is oppressed by socius and capital, however such space can become highly active, creative and radical. Desire as a material basis for creativity becomes a powerful revolutionary potential. Minor politics is based not on identification or representation of somebody’s interests, but on permanent creativity. This politics emerges within the milieu of mutual communication and intellect as well as uncommodified affectivity and sexuality and it embodies revolutionary desire in everyday practices of self-valorization. Keywords: desire, desiring-machines, socius, reaction, capital, commodification, revolution, minor politics. (shrink)

It is well-known that Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari) are critical of the notion of ideology. However, it is not very clear why they seem to be so dismissive of it. In what follows, I will begin my discussion by showing what Deleuze means by ideology and reconstructing why Deleuze thinks that ideology is a misused concept and that the misuse of the concept warrants its dismissal. In Anti-Oedipus, the insufficiency or inadequacy of the concept of ideology can be understood (...) in light of the opposition between production and representation. Next, I will show that—in A Thousand Plateaus—this very opposition between production and representation is relaxed in favor of the notion of assemblage. By looking at Althusser’s theory of ideology, I will argue that ideology is not merely a cognitive representation in the sense that it can be considered as having its own material existence. If so, the concept of ideology does not have to be too narrowly conceived. Rather, I propose that Deleuze and Guattari offer a different kind of ideology critique through noology and the critical analysis of microfascism. Finally, I will conclude by arguing that Deleuze is still enacting a novel form of ideology critique despite his dismissal of the very terminology. (shrink)

As an intellectual, economic, political and legal project, neoliberalism is not directed towards the rolling back of the state as an aim in itself. While its deregulatory tendencies, its commodification of public services and the undermining of systems of social welfare superficially suggest a generalised reduction in state power, it has been clear from the early 1980s that one of neoliberalism’s primary concerns has been the authoritarian reshaping of state power to engineer particular social outcomes, whether in criminal justice, the (...) disciplining of organised labour, the militarisation of national territory and migration, or the extension and deepening of regimes of austerity. This article introduces the recent work of Maurizio Lazzarato, who has argued that the asymmetrical creditor-debtor relationship is now the archetype of contemporary, neoliberal social relations. Ultimately, Lazzarato’s perspective tends to exaggerate the totalising powers of finance capital and leads him to endorse a form of political voluntarism, which fails to address the role of the neoliberal state as a site for forms of authoritarianism which are not solely generated by the debt relation. As a response, it will be suggested that aspects of Nicos Poulantzas’s concept of ‘authoritarian statism’ can be used to both strengthen our understanding of the authoritarian characteristics of the neoliberal state, and to imagine possibilities for resisting its expressions of power. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The meeting of Deleuze and Guattari in 1969 is generally used to explain how the former's thought became politicised under the influence of the latter. This narrative, however useful it might be in explaining Deleuze's move away from the domain of academic philosophy following the upheavals of May 1968, has had the effect of de-emphasising the conceptual development which occurred between Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus. Worst of all, it has had the effect of reducing the role of Marx's philosophy (...) to the superficial level of political alibi, impoverishing our understanding of its importance with respect to the conceptual assemblage of Anti-Oedipus. This paper attempts to restore Marx's relevance to Deleuze and Guattari's project by understanding Anti-Oedipus through the Marxian categories of production, distribution, surplus-value and consumption, and argues for a conception of schizoanalysis which does not relegate the name of Marx to the garbage heap of poststructuralist intellectual strategy. (shrink)

Against those who wish to marginalise Deleuze's political relevance, this paper argues that his work – including and especially that produced before his collaborations with Guattari – is not only fundamentally political but also profoundly engaged with Marx. The paper begins by focusing on different possible strategies for contesting the claim that Deleuze is apolitical, attempting to debunk this claim by briefly considering Deleuze's work with Guattari. The bulk of the paper is concerned with a close examination of the appearance (...) of Marx in both Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, establishing that the ‘pre-Guattari’ Deleuze was fully engaged with both politics and Marx and demonstrating that the concepts and arguments of the Marxist politics of the Deleuze–Guattari books can be traced back to Deleuze's own work. It is argued that an analysis of Deleuze's work on Marx is significant not only for deepening our understanding of Marx, but also for understanding the possibilities for Deleuzian politics. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925–November 4, 1995) was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts, and he characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician.” In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition , he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science—a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility. Deleuze (...) was also well-known for a number of important monographs he published in the history of philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, and Leibniz), as well as for his writings on the various arts, which include a two- volume study of the cinema, books on Proust and Sacher-Masoch, a monograph on the painter Francis Bacon, and a collection of essays on literature. Deleuze considered these latter works as pure philosophy, and not criticism, since he sought to create the concepts that correspond to the artistic practices of painters, filmmakers, and writers. In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a political activist and radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia , comprised of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Their final collaboration was What is Philosophy? (1991). (shrink)

This paper critically examines the materialism that Gilles Deleuze espouses in his oeuvre to the benefit of educational theory. In Difference and Repetition, he presented transcendental empiricism by underwriting Kant with realism (Deleuze, 1994). Later, in Capitalism & Schizophrenia I & II that were co-written with Félix Guattari (1984, 1988) and that they named Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze's philosophical approach is realigned into what I term here as transcendental materialism, and latterly as immanent materialism; that I claim effectively (...) eliminate phenomenology as perceptual input. This essay takes this transformation seriously as a way of understanding educational data, research and practices. The proposition that is central to this paper is that transcendental and immanent materialism give us a means of dealing with educational phenomena without the interference of perception or a stable category of experience, by connecting data with theory and circumventing subjectification. It is argued that this proposition has important consequences for educational research, and the construction of educational arguments that will be illustrated in this essay. Deleuze's debt to French Marxism and in particular to the work of Louis Althusser are also recognised through this writing. (shrink)

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. (shrink)