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What interruption is revolutionary? The mold was set by Marx, who proposed expropriating the expropriators (Capital, chapter 32). Direct action at the point of production would intervene in the apparatus of capture where the earth, activity, and objects are first coded by the state as territory, work, and money or deco... |
Substance: Political Anthropology, Not Technoscience |
Science does not think, Heidegger sensationally claims in his 1952 lecture What Is Called Thinking? A year later, Gaston Bachelard makes an opposing scandalous assertion in Le Matérialisme Rationnel that science does not get the philosophy it deserves (20). What science needs, Bachelard says, is a science that produces... |
Deleuze and Guattaris autopsy of Oedipus demonstrated the need for anthropology. Their method was analytically clear: dissect him with an internal critique of psychoanalysis and then an external of anthropology. From the first, all they could determine was Oedipuss illegitimate birth, which was already a public secret.... |
Why not a structuralist political anthropology? Viveiros de Castro says that the opening move would be to shatter anthropology as the mirror of society, which is to say, to shift the crosshairs from psychoanalysis to anthropology to write an Anti-Narcissus (Cannibal Metaphysics, 40–45). There are a few Deleuzian anthro... |
Nomadism: Barbarian, Not Pastoral |
At first blush, nomadism appears pastoral. Deleuzes works constitute one great horse opera, as the animals appear in more than half of his published work. One question motivates his obsession: what can a horse do? This is an affective inquiry into their capacities and not their meaning: |
take the horse, the apocalyptic beast, as an example: the horse that laughs, in Lawrence; the horse that sticks his head through the window and looks at you, in Kafka; the horse that is the sun, in Artaud; or even the ass that says Yea?Yuh, in Nietzsche—these are all figures that constitute so many symbols through the ... |
Deleuze chastises Freud for making Little Hanss fear of horses into an image of the father, when it is really a desire to escape to the street (ECC, 64). Horses appear as the first weapons, whose speed is essential to establishing the asymmetrical relation between nomads and the state (TP, 396). When combined with inve... |
The nomads that will dissolve capitalism are not cowboys but barbarians. Not self-attributed but a smear, the term barbarian was invented by Hellenistic Greeks as onomatopoeia for the blabber of those who could not speak their language (Padgen, Fall of Natural Man, 16). Lacking the capacity for reason, barbarian is use... |
The Call of the Outside |
Distribution: The Outside, Not Nomos |
Cows offer the clearest picture of crowned anarchy, also called nomadic distribution (DR, 41; TP, 158). When set out to pasture, they practice auto-nomy by following a self-regulated nomos, the customary distribution in open space (in general an unlimited space; it can be a forest, meadows beside rivers, a mountain slo... |
Marxs son-in-law Paul Lafargue demonstrates in his Social and Philosophical Studies how nomos was turned against the barbarians. Land first distributed by lot, with the aid of pebbles, is set under the watch of Nemesis, the goddess of just distribution (125; Laroche, Histoire, 89–106). Nomos continues to affirm its gro... |
There are two outsides to the state: one a worldwide union, the other a fragmented resistance (TP, 381). To Deleuze and Guattari, this exteriority demonstrates the irreducibility of the nomos to the law. If there is anything to this notion, it is not found in a form of exteriority but in the fact of the outside—that th... |
The outside appears like Frankensteins monster, with a crack of lightning late into the dreary night while the atomists rain patters away from the outside. Its darkness does not come from void worship or an existentialist reckoning with nothingness. Flashing brilliantly as a shock to thought, it appears as the bearer o... |
Politics: Cataclysmic, Not Molecular |
The revolutionary was molecular, and so was the counter-revolution, Tiqqun prophetically declares (Introduction to Civil War, 200). Yet the molecular revolution actually begins with Proust, who writes in Sodom and Gomorrah of three levels of sexuality: straights, gays, and queers. The first two types connect molar line... |
The cataclysm is not an end but a new beginning, the cataclysm of a temporary hell, itself the effect of an elementary injustice that sweeps in and out, rather than being an abysmal lake of sulfur where souls burn forever (ECC, 46). It is the apocalypse before its decadent transformation into the system of Judgment (39... |
Cinema: The Powers of the False, Not the Forces of Bodies |
Bodies are a well-composed image of power. The body of God (the Sacrament of Jesus). The body of a saint (the pierced corpse of the martyr). The body of the sovereign (the Kings two bodies). The body of the tyrant (Big Brothers face). The social body (the body politic). A body of evidence (the states case). The idea of... |
The body is not really the enemy, the organism is. Some would have bodies appear through their opposites, locked in eternal combat—as the sinner and their Eternal Savior, the regicide and the King, the criminal and the Law (TP, 108). But as an organism, the body is put to use for extracting useful labor, either as a pr... |
Against the states body of evidence: The ‘true world does not exist, and even if it did, it would be inaccessible, impossible to describe, and, if it could be described, would be useless, superfluous (C2, 137). The conspiracy against this world begins with time, which puts truth in crisis (130). This is the fundamental... |
Cinema takes up the problem of truth and attempts to resolve it through purely cinematic means (Lambert, Non-philosophy, 93). There are films that go beyond metaphor and analogy, operating instead through a realism of the false. This is not the epic cinema of Brecht or Lang, whose dissimulation and relativism ultimatel... |
The Sensible: Indiscernibility, Not Experience |
The senses think when the boundary between the imaginary and the real collapses. This is what happens whenever the suspension of disbelief continues outside the frame (C2, 169). But the suspension carries on only as long as it is not whittled down to a narrow proposition through infinite specification (DR, 306). It exp... |
Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting, says Foucault (Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 88). Neither is sense. The best sense is a sensation, a provocation, that introduces insufficiency (L, 50–58). So instead of adequate conceptions, we spread insufficient sensations. This insufficiency does not... |
Conclusion |
As a prolegomena to any future negativity in Deleuze, this book risks being too condensed. The moves I make are quick, and many will appear perverse to friends of the Joyous Deleuze. For justification: the force of thought is a matter of style and not the specification of concepts, or to use proper names, Nietzsche con... |
The end of this world is the third in a succession of deaths—the Death of God, the Death of Man, and now the Death of this World. This is not a call to physically destroy the world. The Death of God did not call for the assault of priests or the burning of churches, and the Death of Man did not propose genocide or the ... |
Contemporary Deleuze scholarship tends to be connectivist and productivist. Connectivism is the world-building integration into an expanding web of things. As an organizational logic, it is the promiscuous inclusion of seemingly unrelated elements into a single body to expand its capacities. Academics are not alone in ... |
The greatest crime of joyousness is tolerance. While mentioning tolerance may have marked one as a radical in Deleuzes time, Wendy Brown argues in Regulating Aversion that liberal tolerance is now essential to the grammar of empires domestic discourse of ethnic, racial, and sexual regulation, on the one hand, and as an... |
Darkness advances the secret as an alternative to the liberal obsession with transparency. Foucault smartly identifies transparencys role in the science of the police, which is used in the task of maintaining order through the collusion between the state and capital from liberalisms beginnings in the German notion of t... |
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