Deleuze, Marx and Politics Nicholas Thoburn

Deleuze, Marx and Politics Nicholas Th oburn (Routledge, 2003) 1. Introduction: Th e Grandeur of Marx For the race summoned forth by art or philosophy is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 109) one does not belong to communism, and communism does not let itself be designated by what it names. (Blanchot 1997: 295) Gilles Deleuze’s (1995a: 51) comment that his last book, uncompleted before his death, was to be called Th e Grandeur of Marx leaves a fi tting openness to his corpus and an intriguing question. How was this philosopher of diff erence and complexity “” for whom resonance rather than explication was the basis of philosophical engagement “” to compose the ‘greatness’ of Marx?1 What kind of relations would Deleuze construct between himself and Marx, and what new lines of force would emerge? Engaging with this question and showing its importance, Ã‰ric Alliez (1997: 81) suggests that ‘all of Deleuze’s philosophy . comes under the heading “Capitalism and Schizophrenia’”. Since the proper name of such a concern with the ‘demented’ confi guration of capitalism2 is of course Marx, Alliez continues: ‘It can be realized therefore just how regrettable it is that Deleuze was not able to write the work he planned as his last, which he wanted to entitle Grandeur de Marx.’ But this is not an unproduc- tive regret. For, as Alliez proposes, the missing book can mobilize new relations with Deleuze’s work. Its very absence can induce an engagement with the ‘virtual Marx’ which traverses Deleuze’s texts: we can take comfort from the possibility of thinking that this virtual Marx, this philosophically clean-shaven Marx that Deleuze alludes to in the opening pages of Diff erence and Repetition . can be mobilized in the form of an empty square3 allowing us to move around the Deleuzian corpus on fresh legs. (Alliez 1997: 81) As even a cursory reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s two-volume work Capitalism and Schizophrenia (AÅ’, ATP) shows, a Deleuze””Marx resonance would, indeed, not have been wholly new.4 Th e importance of Marx in Deleuze’s thought has been noted, certainly since Anti-Oedipus (cf. Donzelot 1977; Lyotard 1977), and Deleuze himself more than once proposed that he and Guattari were Marxists (N: 171; Deleuze 1995a: 51). Yet Deleuze’s relation with Marx has remained a relatively unexplored dynamic. A recent essay on Deleuze’s ‘many materialisms’, for example, only mentions Marxism once, and then rather disparagingly to suggest that the use of the term ‘production’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is ‘no doubt ... a lingering infl uence of orthodox Marxian thought’ (Mullarkey 1997: 451). An interest in Deleuze’s relation to Marx has, however, been developing in recent years (cf. Hardt 1995; Holland 1997, 1998, 1999; Massumi 1992; Surin 1994, 1997). In these works the focus has tended to be placed on the centrality of an analysis of capitalist dynamics in Deleuze’s system. Th is is rightly so, for Deleuze places the question of capital “” the ways that the capitalist social machine, or ‘socius’, engineers the fl ows of life - at the centre of his project, and declares himself a Marxist in these terms: Felix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two diff erent ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed. What we . fi nd most interesting in Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that’s constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is capital itself.5 (N: 171) For Deleuze, following Marx, the capitalist socius is premised not on identity “” like previous social formations “” but on a continuous process of production “” ‘production for production’s sake’ “” which entails a kind of permanent reconfi guration and intensifi cation of relations in a process of setting, and overcoming, limits. In this sense, diff erence and becoming “” or a certain form of becoming “” is primary. Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that the ‘line of fl ight’ is primary in, and functional to, capitalist assemblages echoes Marx’s famous description of capital as a state of being where ‘All that is solid melts into air’ and where relations ‘become antiquated before they can ossify’ (Marx and Engels 1973: 37). But there is another aspect to Marx that has been less often taken up in critical work on Deleuze’s relations with Marx: politics. If we are interested in maximizing the potential of a productive resonance between Deleuze and Marx, the question of politics must be central, for one can only do justice to Marx’s thought if his analysis of capital is considered through this lens. One gets the sense that the foregrounding of Marxian concerns through an emphasis on capitalism has emerged to suit a time of political impasse. It is as if after the deter- ritorializing joys of ‘68 (a time when Guattari (1998: 213) said he ‘had the impres- sion sometimes of walking on the ceiling’) and the early English-language reception of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, our more sombre times require a recognition of the increasing isomorphism of processes of complexity and diff erence to capitalist produc- Trotsky, L. (1961) Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky, Ann Arbor: University of tivity (cf. Holland 1998).6 Impasse is not an alien condition for Deleuze and Guattari, Michigan Press. and one should not assume that their ‘joyful’7 project, like the worst forms of leftism, Unwaged Fightback: A History of Islington Action Group of the Unwaged 1980””86 (1987), London: should circulate around a continual optimism. Indeed, as we will see, Beckett’s (1979: Campaign for Real Life. 382) proposition that it is the very impossibility of life that compels life “” ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ “” expresses a more appropriate tenor for the Deleuzian political than the Virno, P. (1980) ‘Dreamers of a successful life’, trans. J. Becker, Semiotext(e): Italy: Autonomia - Post- popular image of unlicensed desire. Nevertheless, it would not do justice to the poten- political Politics 3(3): 112-17. tial of a Deleuze””Marx resonance if Alliez’s call for a ‘fresh legs’ movement around -------(1996a) ‘Notes on the “general iintellect”’, trans. C. Casarino, in S. Makdisi, C. Casarino and Deleuze’s virtual Marx focused exclusively on aspects which show a closing-down of R. E. Karl (eds) Marxism beyond Marxism, London: Routledge. political possibility, as if Marx returned to sober up Deleuze. -------(1996b) ‘Th e ambivalence of disenchanntment’, trans. M. Turits in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds) Radical Th ought in Italy: A Potential Politics, London: University of Minnesota. With this in mind, I want to suggest that it is in our apparent impasse that Marx -------(1996c) ‘Do you remember counterrevollution?’, trans. M. Hardt, in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds) Radical Th ought in Italy: A Potential Politics, London: University of Minnesota. becomes even more important in exploring Deleuze’s politics. Th is is not because of -------(1996d) ‘Virtuosity and revolution: tthe political theory of exodus’, trans. E. Emory, in P. Virno the centrality of an analysis of capitalism per se (though the contemporary re-emer- and M. Hardt (eds) Radical Th ought in Italy: A Potential Politics, London: University of Minnesota. gence of interest in capitalist dynamics is certainly timely), but because Marx remains the pre-eminent thinker of the impossibility of any easy or given political escape from Virno, P. and Hardt, M. (eds) (1996) Radical Th ought in Italy: A Potential Politics, London: Univer- the infernal capitalist machine, whilst simultaneously positing such possibility and sity of Minnesota. potential on relations formed within and particular to capitalism itself. Th is condition is what Marx calls ‘communism’. To foreground Marx’s communism is not to Walters, W. (1994) ‘Th e discovery of “unemployment”: new forms for the government of poverty’, turn to a diff erent set of Marx’s texts (for example, the early works, as against Capital). Economy and Society 23(3): 265””90. For Marx, communism is the immanent potential that haunts, and emerges in and Wagenbach, K. (1984) Franz Kafka: Pictures of a Life, trans. A. S. Wensinger, New York: Pantheon. through, capitalism. It is thus a perspective for interpreting capitalism and developing politics, and is hence found throughout Marx’s works.8 Marx does present some Werckmeister, O. K. (1997) Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the general aspects of what a post-capitalist mode of life might involve “” as a milieu of Fall of Communism, London: University of Chicago Press. becoming which overcomes the strictures of identity, abolishes work, forms a non-fet- ishized relation with Nature or the world, and, if we are to follow Deleuze and Guat- Wheen, F. (1999) Karl Marx, London: Fourth Estate. tari’s reading, sets the desiring machines loose from their anthropomorphic sexuality.9 Generally, however, the communist perspective is not an elaboration of a diff erent Wright, S. J. (1988) ‘Forcing the Lock: Th e Problem of Class Composition in Italian Workerism’, un- ‘communist society’, and it is certainly not, to use Nietzschean terms, a reactive denial published Ph.D. dissertation, Monash University, Melbourne. of current life in a postponement for the beautiful tomorrow. It is, rather, a process of -------(2002) Storming Heaven: Class Compposition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto.

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