sign in sign up
<<
Home , Alain Badiou, Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Deleuze book), Plane of immanence, Reterritorialization, The Logic of Sense

Anti-Oedipus – thirty years on

Éric Alliez

I, for my own part, made a sort of move into politics around May 1968… , Negotiations This title was suggested to me some months ago by my But we are indeed ʻThirty Years Onʼ and a kind of best enemy – or my best fiend, to paraphrase Werner fallout from a version of the contemporary ʻmade in Herzog – who also happens to be a very good friend: Austriaʼ (but not only, since it was also a question of . It was originally intended for a lecture the postmodern dictatorship of the curator), leading to I was to deliver under the auspices of the Centre for my eviction from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna the Study of which Badiou (where I had taught since 1997), forced me to decline recently set up at the École Normale Supérieure. The Badiouʼs generous invitation. idea was to use the occasion to pursue our dispute – or Badiouʼs invitation could not but engender a stark chicane, to use a favourite expression of Badiouʼs – a and cutting quarrel. As you know, in his book Badiou dispute instigated by the publication in 1997 of his erects an image of Deleuze as a metaphysician of book Deleuze: The Clamor of . the One, whose essential monotony – in itself indif- Let it be noted in passing, since I have been invited ferent to differences, subtracted as it is from the here under the sign of a ,* that ʻinexhaustible variety of the concreteʼ and from the this dispute prolo nged a problematic which I had anarchic confusion of the world – can and indeed previously addressed in an intervention entitled Of the must lead us to dismiss the works coauthored with Impossibility of Phenomenology: On Contemporary Félix Guattari, beginning with Anti-Oedipus. It is only French Philosophy, first published in 1994.1 That inter- after having carried out this operation that it will be vention was directed at the institutional partition of the possible, according to Badiou, to re-establish the philosophical world into two blocs, phenomenological of Deleuze-Thought against its ambient image, the and analytic, and also sought to counter the reper- image of Deleuze as the advocate of a liberation of cussions of this division within France. In the book I the anarchic multiplicity of desires. But it is also, and showed that, ever since Husserl, this partition has been inevitably, only once Deleuze has been reduced to the governed by an of complementarity between the monotony of the One that one will be able to oppose ʻphenomenologyʼ of the failure of logical formalism this ʻtruthʼ to the Nouvelle Alliance Deleuze–Guattari, and the ʻanalysisʼ of the collapse of intentionality, to paraphrase the original French title of Prigogine and in its theological reality as well as its philosophical Stengersʼs Order Out of Chaos.2 impossibility. On this basis, let me suggest that a Badiouʼs operation cannot but pose a serious philosophical field with a grip on the present – in problem, on two levels whose is entirely words, contemporary philosophy as an relative. of the present – could be and must be thought start- First, at the level of Deleuzeʼs trajectory, given that ing from the idea of a maximal ontological tension Deleuze himself presents his encounter with Guattari between Deleuze and Badiou. In my view, Deleuze – in a horizon of life and thought opened up by May and Badiou constitute the extreme polarities of the ʼ68, what he called ʻan irruption, of a becoming in its contemporary domain of French philosophy, as the pure stateʼ3 – as the reality condition for the constitu- latter articulates its materialist necessity into singu- tion of his own philosophy. (Hence the necessity of larities and multiplicities. returning to what happens between Logic of Sense

* This paper was written for and delivered at the Radical Philosophy conference held at Birkbeck College, London, 29 November 2003.

6 Radical Philosophy 124 (March/April 2004) (1969) and Anti-Oedipus (1972) – which is what I will in Deleuze–Guattari following Anti-Oedipus. Having do all too briefly at the end of this article.) said that, it is imperative to remark straightaway that Second, at the strictly speaking political level, what Badiouʼs Paulinian allegiance rejects is precisely whose essential ambiguity in Deleuze is condemned the anti-Oedipal affirmation of desiring production by Badiou. In Badiouʼs eyes, this ambiguity is corrobo- as the social power of difference within a becoming- rated by the fact that politics as such is not endowed minoritarian, as well as the manner in which this by Deleuze with any kind of theoretical autonomy, desiring production refuses, de jure and de facto, the thereby leading to the permanent threat of a spontane- principle of a separate sphere for politics. No wonder, ous deviation or drift (dérive), embodied by what he then, that Badiouʼs Saint Paul advocates ʻloveʼ as that dubs the ʻanarcho-désirantsʼ: what Lenin long ago which militant faith is capable of, when the latter seeks branded with the name of ʻleftismʼ and which tends to to extricate itself from the ʻliving autonomy of desireʼ. reduce Deleuzeʼs declared vitalism to the last incarna- By the same token, the theorem of the militant amounts tion of – in other words, into a natural to a subjective fidelity to the of separation from mysticism of the vitalist expression of the world, as the world, sustained by the universal communication Badiou asserted in his review of The Fold from 1989.4 of a subtractive foundation which can conceive of But, in this case, it is the very unity of Deleuzean desire only as a Lack of the Law, in order to impose thought that finds itself gravely compromised after upon the , by way of a process of subjectiva- Anti-Oedipus, precisely to the extent that the latter tion, the universal grace of Signifier. Let us recall, in was, as Deleuze remarked, ʻfrom beginning to end a this regard, Saint Paulʼs famous pronouncement, from book of political philosophyʼ.5 Romans 7 (7–23): ʻI have known sin only through What is more, it is hard to fathom how the bio- the Law.ʼ Whence the following theorem: Lacanian machinic conception of desire in Anti-Oedipus – which is the symptom of the refoundation depicts desire as coextensive with the lines of flight of universalism, when philosophy puts itself under of the social domain – could ever translate anti- the metapolitical condition of creating the event of humanism into, as Badiou writes, ʻthe infinite and Nothing addressed to All. inhuman resource of the Oneʼ, in which ʻeverything What is of greatest importance here is less the is always “already-there”ʼ.6 Unless, of course, we wish predictable and stringent alternative vis-à-vis Deleuze to argue that Deleuzean leftism was nothing but a and Deleuzo–Guattarianism (immediately collapsed pure opportunism and that ʻMitterrandismʼ revealed into one another, as is only right, within the dispute) the underlying truth of this ʻsoft rebellionʼ – to speak than the prescriptive character of this universalism of like Guy Lardreau in his anti-Deleuzean pamphlet,7 the Subject-of-Truth declared by Badiou for all, and a text inspired through and through by Badiouʼs for everyone who seeks the elimination of the leftism decisionism. of the party of desire (to speak like Guy Lardreau, In an article replying to some objections that his who is wholly faithful to the other party, the party, I book did not fail to provoke, Badiou makes the fol- quote, ʻof lack, of the One, of knowledge, of warʼ9). I lowing remark: ʻHow is it that politics, for Deleuze, say ʻprescriptiveʼ because the universal is as such the is not an autonomous form of thought, a singular truth of the subject who declares the void of being section of chaos, unlike art, science and philosophy? – from which Badiou knows how to draw immanently This point alone testifies to our divergence, and every- all the necessary consequences. After his Deleuze, it is thing could be seen to follow from it.ʼ8 In light of no surprise that the militant objective of Badiouʼs Saint this remark, it might be interesting briefly to return Paul is to unfold the logic of the break vis-à-vis the to the dispute, taking our cue from the way it was movement of vitalist affirmation by demonstrating the prolonged by Badiou in the two books of politics that inconsistency of becoming with respect to the excess of follow his Deleuze, books in which what is at stake the Real over reality. This can only be grasped via a is investing singularity qua operator of universal- Lacan who posits the Real in the predication of the no ism; in other words, addressing the question: ʻWhat (non) and of the name (nom) as subject-intervention. precisely is a universal singularity that is valid for As the founder of the figure of the militant, ʻPaulʼs everyone?ʼ These two books are Saint Paul: The unprecedented gesture is to subtract truth from the Foundation of Universalism and On Metapolitics – a clutches of communitarianismʼ. How extraordinarily metapolitics of the dethronement of difference which contemporary! By involving the for all, the break of is to be opposed to the micropolitical principle that universal singularity with regard to the identitarian presides over the question of ʻbecoming-revolutionaryʼ singularity of a closed subset is bereft of an alterna-

7 tive, given its description of the present state of the women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs!ʼ10 Recall ʻcommunitarianizationʼ of a public space fragmented that Deleuze and Guattariʼs question is that of a politi- into closed identities delivering so many new ter- cal ontology of (ʻalmost imperceptibleʼ) becomings ritories over to the market. Moreover, Badiou cannot which never cease to undo the sedimentation of identi- write these lines without also inviting Deleuze to ties (ʻthe primacy of lines of flightʼ) and to produce this wedding between capitalist logic and identitar- ʻstrikesʼ, sudden variations that every system ian logic, a wedding whose stakes are precisely to by not allowing it to become homogeneous, variations refuse emancipatory reality to any kind of becoming- as unpredictable to the sociologist as they are to the minoritarian, as Deleuze remarked – ʻexactlyʼ, Badiou militant. Thus, as Deleuze remarks in , there says, ʻcapitalist needs a constant also exists ʻa revolutionary-becoming which is not the reterritorializationʼ. The exactitude to which Badiou same as the future of the , and which does refers is entirely nominal, and ultimately represents not necessarily happen through militantsʼ.11 This is a complete misunderstanding of Deleuze, since the because the constructions of the militant tend to cut of capitalism is no longer practised themselves off from the ʻsocio-culturalʼ expressions of upon this absolute form of deterritorialization without the world and from the propagation of the molecular any assignable limit, whether external or internal, a becomings of real multiplicities. Or again: Badiou form of deterritorialization that capitalism can only put contra Deleuze is Durkheim contra Tarde. Except that to work by subjecting it to the expanded reproduction the times have clearly changed, and the Deleuze resists of its own immanent limits. better today than the Tarde did yesterday.12 Furthermore, becoming is no longer related to flows Everything Iʼve said up to now is intended less of desire that flee, flows that cause the process of as an (excessively prolix) introduction to this article capitalist valorization itself to flee – for Badiou becom- placed under the sign of a Radical Philosophy, than ing turns out to be purely and simply the occasion for as a first response to the question: What has become the ʻmercantile investmentsʼ to which it gives rise. of Anti-Oedipus today, thirty years after that ʻfurious This ultimately leads Badiou to accept the point of articleʼ published in the aftermath of ʼ68 by Badiou, view of Capital, fully aware that desire reduced to the under the combative title: ʻThe Flow and the Partyʼ primitive accumulation of identitarian reterritorializa- (ʻLe flux et le partiʼ)?13 In terms of the concerns it tions under the name of ʻcommunitarianismʼ is no mobilizes on the intra-philosophical plane as well as longer Capitalism and Schizophrenia – itʼs Capitalism on the non-philosophical one – with regard to the real and Paranoia. The minoritarian is frozen into the multiplicities of the anti-capitalist movement and its identitarian. As Badiou writes: ʻWhat inexhaustible collective assemblages (in their difference from politi- potential [devenir] for mercantile investments in this cal ʻorganizationsʼ, not least Badiouʼs own Organisa- upsurge – taking the form of communities demanding tion politique) – everything points to the conclusion recognition and so-called cultural singularities – of that Anti-Oedipus has never stopped resisting, feeding

8 on the very repression which it has never ceased to structed with all the fabrications of the plane of provoke. This is true on both levels, intra-philosophical immanenceʼ (in other words, the irrelevance of the and non-philosophical; two levels which are ultimately nature/artifice distinction undermines this naturalist one, if the principle that presides over the writing of expressionism).16 this book-flow is the one which was perfectly summed 2. The ʻre-accentuated Platonismʼ into which Badiou up by Michel in the Preface to the American wishes to dissolve Deleuze by registering the pro- edition, in a formula that bears a stunning affinity to duction of differences under the heading of simu- the sensibility of Félix Guattari: ʻUse political practice lacra (in other words, a constructivism deprived of as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier ontological reality). of the forms and domains for the intervention of politi- Yet inversely, as well as reciprocally, and this time cal actionʼ, in the desire that the ʻprocess of overturn- against the grain of the mathematical ontology of ing the established orderʼ may deploy itself within Badiou, which declares the indifference of truth to 14 political practice in an ever more intense way. the flow of the world, Construction without Expres- vis-à-vis Deleuze Now, in the constant advocated sion is void of any real becoming, of any real-desire by Badiou as the defining trait of his metapolitics, whatsoever. So that if ʻthe objective being of desire we clearly witness a return of the repressed – to wit, is the Real in and of itselfʼ, ʻdesiring production is Anti-Oedipus the return of the , a text which he never one and the same thing as social productionʼ17 – by stops countering with his own politics of Being and virtue of the biopolitical identity between Expression Event, after having purged politics from Deleuzean and Construction, an identity which gives body to the ʻphilosophyʼ. But we also observe, inextricably, a total theory of machinic desire and the affirmation of a disavowal of the Deleuzo-Guattarian thesis concerning universal contingency, according to which: ʻIn desiring desire only exists when assem- desire, the thesis that ʻ machines everything functions at the same time, but bled or machined machiné [ ]ʼ and that one cannot amid hiatuses and ruptures, breakdowns and failures, ʻgrasp or conceive of a desire outside a determinate stalling and short circuits, distances and fragmenta- , on a plane which is not preexistent but tions, within a sum that never succeeds in bringing its which must itself be constructedʼ, in a process of various parts together so as to form a whole.ʼ18 which never unifies parts into a WHOLE liberation . This explains why Anti-Oedipus adamantly affirms Here we must quote the lines with which Deleuze that ʻwe cannot accept the idealist category of “expres- introduces this statement. He writes: ʻit is objected sion”ʼ.19 After all, production as process overflows its that by releasing desire from lack and law, the only notion by relating to desire qua immanent principle thing we have left to refer to is a state of nature, a – not the principle of a given/giver of flows which it desire which would be natural and spontaneous reality. would naturally or spontaneously express, but rather of desire only exists when We say quite the opposite: a flow-cut system that desire engineers, in such a way assembled or machined .ʼ Whence the conclusion that that the cut implies what it cuts, as a universal con- is constructivist, not at all spontaneist desire ʻ ʼ, and tinuity expressed from an artificial ʻNatureʼ towards the following question: ʻHow can the assemblage be schizophrenic productivity. Lacking this continuum, 15 refused the name it deserves, “desire”?ʼ (Allow me this real implication of the world singularized and to recall that the concept of ʻdesiring machinesʼ will machinically engineered in each of its cuts–flows, the turn into that of ʻassemblagesʼ pure and simple after cut would count as a section (découpe), which is to Kafka the book, which can be regarded as a bridge say a separation (from ʻcommonʼ reality),20 in accord- Anti-Oedipus A Thousand Plateaus between and ). This ance with the principle of a post-existential decision Anti-Oedipus is the key thesis of , according to which (decidere: to separate) constantly put forward by the there can be no Expression (of the play of the world) Lacanizing philosopher (the Real as the indifference of without the Construction of assemblages of desire or the pure event). As write, ʻIt is processual ʻdesiring machinesʼ, which free Life in the not at all a question of the cut considered as a separa- (and non-totalizing) identity between production and tion from realityʼ. With Anti-Oedipus, the ontological product. This identity is precisely opposed to: monism of Deleuzean biophilosophy becomes the bio- 1. The ʻnatural mysticismʼ initially denounced by political fact of the machinic system of cuts and flows, Badiou under the name of Deleuze, ignoring which relates the univocal plane of the living to desire the fact that Deleuze himself will only evoke a as a ʻuniversalʼ process of production. We thereby ʻplane of Natureʼ to convey better the point that move from biophilosophical expressionism – such as we are dealing with ʻa nature which must be con- it implies (after Spinoza) production qua affective

9 affirmation in , and (with Bergson) the able at the time, by confronting head creative affirmation of the full differentiating reality on (lines of flight are primary qua process, contrary of the virtual – to biopolitical constructivism, which to structure conceived as the static genesis of the allows one in the present to invest the created from unconscious and the socius, and implying a complete the point of view of creation. It is this passage which determination of singular points), before moving on to makes it possible to understand Deleuzeʼs assertion, criticize the philosophies of ʻresistanceʼ by establishing in the interview on Anti-Oedipus (reprinted in Nego- the biopolitical primacy of desire qua ʻconjugation and tiations), according to which up to that point he had dissociation of flowsʼ against the Foucauldian thesis worked ʻsolely with concepts, rather timidly in fact. of a biopower whose dispositifs would in some sense Félix had talked to me about what he was already be constitutive. (Coming first, as they do, ʻlines of calling “desiring machines”.… So I myself thought flight … are not phenomena of resistance or counter- heʼd gone further than I had [cʼétait lui qui était en attack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of crea- avance sur moi].ʼ21 In this phrase the advance of tion and deterritorialization [points de creation et de Anti-Oedipus is played out, the advance of a machinic deterritorialisation]ʼ.23) Biopolitics is thereby affirmed ontology over the transcendental, as the latter is devel- as the infinite tension that affects a process of constitu- oped into a structuralism (of the kind that makes its tion which is launched against all the strata of organi- appearance in Difference and Repetition and Logic of zation that block becomings, which cause them to fall Sense).22 The machine will be defined on the basis of back on an anti-production that functions from the the cut–flow system which introduces production into inside out (the psychoanalytic Oedipus, a State which desire by guaranteeing its real (and non-ʻsymbolicʼ) turns into the Entrepreneurial State of the of primacy qua immanent constitutive process. control) – and all this, not in the name of any kind Unparalleled, except perhaps by the first chapter of spontaneism or marginalism, but, on the contrary, of Matter and Memory, it is the masterful opening by virtue of the dynamic of real multiplicities, as it is chapter of Anti-Oedipus which links the philosophy of determined by the of desire qua multiplicity – employed as a vital substantive that ʻgoes social and intellectual power of production–creation. beyond the multiple just as much as the oneʼ (contrary In this respect, and in accordance with the principle of to the kind of reading which will be offered by Badiou) a universal history revisited in ʻSavages, Barbarians, – to the politics of desiring production, a politics that Civilized Menʼ (the longest chapter in Anti-Oedipus), it can be understood as the anoedipal reality condition is legitimate ʻto understand retrospectively all history of philosophy, between capitalism and schizophrenia. in the light of capitalismʼ;24 a capitalism which does not This all comes down to ʻschizophrenizingʼ philosophy put to work the decoded and deterritorialized flows it by treating writing as the machinic expression of organizes and axiomatizes without, by the same token, constitutive desire, an expression that carries the real liberating the forces of desire animating it, forces it to the point at which it is effectively produced in must counteract by reintroducing the most merciless bodies that are both biological and collective, and transcendence into the immanence of a person who has imply the constitution of a field of immanence or ʻbody been rendered ʻprivateʼ (which is to say ʻdeprivedʼ) in without organsʼ (BwO) defined by zones of intensity, order to keep these forces in a bound state. thresholds, gradients, flows and so on. (The BwO is to It follows that a fantastic death instinct always be considered as the very body of desire, as its purest threatens to transform the Oedipal triangle – which Expression, so absolutely inseparate from what it can invests the social reterritorialization of ʻdemocraticʼ do that it relates back to an unliveable power, a power capitalism into an ʻintimateʼ territoriality of the para- which is as such the pre-condition of every real experi- noiac type – into a ʻmicro-fascismʼ. Whereas the ence of desire, driven by the necessity of Constructions investment of ʻthe transverse multiplicities that convey that cuts the BwO in itself.) Whence the ʻgenerationalʼ desire as a molecular phenomenonʼ,25 a phenomenon effect of this immense provocation – which no longer which constitutes the subjective-machinic essence of dissociates ontological production from the being of production, is affirmed in the flight and secession the micropolitical expression–construction of singu- from the order of representation, which organizes larities – upon the way of thinking of a lifestyle from representation into an exterior and an interior (into which the intellectual Left and the political Left and social reproduction and political representation, on the extreme Left have yet to recover. one hand, and infinite subjective representation, on the The project laid out in Anti-Oedipus begins by other). ʻLeaving, fleeing, but by causing more flightsʼ26 subverting the Freudo- which was fashion- through a pragmatics of collective assemblages which

10 overturns the apparatuses of blockage and control, takes place within the very time wherein one experi- imposing upon them schizzes that turn against capital- ences the constitutive character of desiring production ist anti-production and undermine the stateʼs forms of at the level of new social, intellectual and scientific sovereignty. The fact that this schizoid investment of forces, such as they define the machinic society of the the non-separated ensemble of the social field is tan- General Intellect (to return to the key expression of the tamount to a reopening of historicity in the production Grundrisse, in which is played out the ʻMarxismʼ that of new, common modes of life, points to the caesura Deleuze and Guattari lay claim to – as well as their vis-à-vis any utopian communitarian project, and high- convergence, on this point, with Negri). lights the difference between the ʻschizoʼ and ʻbecom- These are so many elements whose acute reso- ing-revolutionaryʼ: a difference between ʻthe one who nance with the new cooperative spaces created by the fleesʼ and ʻthe one who knows how to make what anti-war and alternative-globalization multitudes, with he is fleeing fleeʼ. For, as Deleuze–Guattari declare, becomings-minoritarian which proceed by ʻinclusive ʻthe schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic disjunctionsʼ without any resulting totality – leads process – in terms of which the schizo is merely the us to affirm that the actuality of this work of politi- interruption, or the continuation in the void – is the cal philosophy (and anti-philosophy), which refuses potential for revolution.ʼ27 This is a potential which is to propose any ʻpolitical programʼ29 whatsoever, is today given in and by the vitality and constructivist vitalism of the movement itself. What is at stake is the collective perception and evaluation which are in a certain sense implied by Deleuzeʼs ʻcooperationʼ with Guattari. Couldnʼt we say that Anti-Oedipus effectively seals the moment in which Deleuzean biophilosophy becomes biopolitics, by shifting onto the plane of immanence the relative deterritorialization of capital in order to render it absolute and attain the critical point of the liberation of immanence in the here and now? In so doing, Anti-Oedipus would effectuate the juncture with this ʻnew peopleʼ which poses in vivo the expressionist–constructivist revolution of desire as the infinite movement of Constitution in-the-making against a Capital whose limit draws ever nearer. To put it in other words, it is for and by these new genera- tions – to which Deleuze and Guattari never stopped referring in the interviews they gave at the time of the bookʼs publication – that Anti-Oedipus determines, on the basis of the thesis of a constitutive desire, the constitutive relationship of contemporary philosophy to non-philosophy. That is what thirty years on and most often – how could it be otherwise? – by a kind of negative determination,30 continues to be referred to as just as much anti-state as anti-party, as is obvious when the Pensée-68, 1968-thought: because it instigates the Anti-Oedipus ʻschizophrenizesʼ the Marx who was becoming-non-philosopher of the philosopher, whereby fascinated by the machinic economy of deterritorial- non-philosophy becomes in the present ʻthe earth and ized flows, when it overflows any ʻstructuralʼ form people of philosophyʼ;31 because it imposes becoming of Marxism in order to instigate the flight of capital- as the concept deploying itself through the power of a ist machinery on the basis of a rupture of causality ʻmilieuʼ, wrenching history away from itself in order which is also a passage to the limit, expressing the to create the new, rather than reproducing death on an ontological event of the desire-that-produces (in) a de- ever more expanded scale. individualizing subjective mutation. It is this reversal Here lies the greatness of Deleuze, when he indi- of power, tantamount to a reopening of the possible, cates the ʻturnʼ of Anti-Oedipus as the moment of the which is invariably accompanied by a ʻcollective exileʼ constitution of a philosophy – his own constitution, (ʻdesire is an exileʼ, Deleuze–Guattari write)28 that caught up and freed by the New Alliance with Guattari

11 – which does not work through concepts alone, but Synthélabo, Paris, 1999; as well as the special dossier moves beyond the pure form of the determinable ʻin in multitudes 7, 2001. 13. In La Situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie, thoughtʼ. Cahiers Yenan No. 4, ed. A. Badiou and S. Lazarus, This is what the philosopher christened the ridicu- Maspéro, Paris, 1977, pp. 24–41. See also the opening lousness of the abstract thinker in , passages of Badiouʼs Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. when it was a matter of attaining ʻthis politics, this 14. , ʻPrefaceʼ, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, complete and utter guerillaʼ required by the schizoid Viking, New York, 1977, pp. xiv, xii; French text in irruption of the , which came to Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. 3, Gallimard, Paris, ʻtear the structuralist surfaceʼ of the ʻpsychoanalysis of 1994, pp. 134–5. 15. Dialogues, pp. 96, 70. See also p. 103: ʻDesire is al- senseʼ, thereby leading it to a ʻprogressive and creative ways assembled and fabricated [machiné], on a plane disorganizationʼ inscribed ʻin the physical presence of of immanence or composition which must itself be bodiesʼ.32 constructed at the same time as desire assembles and That is what Anti-Oedipus tells us thirty years fabricates.ʼ 16. Dialogues, p. 98. on: that we cannot oppose the Hyperstructuralism 17. Anti-Oedipus, pp. 26–7, 30. of a Badiou with any kind of ʻweakʼ (debole) Post- 18. Ibid., p. 42. structuralism making room for a spontaneous democ- 19. Ibid., p. 6. racy of desire and its pop-philosophical flights of fancy 20. Deleuze and Guattari write unequivocally that ʻthese breaks should in no way be considered as a separation – but rather with a Biopolitics of Multitudes whose from realityʼ, ibid., p. 36. socially constitutive character is the ontological fact 21. Negotiations, p. 13. that sustains the constructivism of desire. The latter 22. See Gilles Deleuze, ʻHow Do We Recognize Structural- ismʼ, written in 1967 and published in 1972, in which prohibits, in vivo, any projection of these questions into Deleuze writes: ʻStructuralism cannot be separated from a ʻphilosophical eternityʼ or into a ʻpolitics of Graceʼ a new transcendental philosophyʼ; in Gilles Deleuze, under the guidance of the militant. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles and New Translated by York, 2003, pp. 170–92. 23. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Notes Athlone, London, 1988, pp. 530–31, n39. See the let- ter that Deleuze sent to Foucault in 1977, published in 1. Éric Alliez, De lʼimpossibilié de la phenomenologie. 1994 under the title ʻDesire and Pleasureʼ (now reprinted Sur la philosophie française contemporaine, Vrin, Paris, in Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. A.I. Davidson, 1994. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997, pp. 187–8). 2. I. Prigogine and I. Strenger, Order Out of Chaos: Manʼs In this text he writes: ʻif dispositifs of power are in New Dialogue with Nature, Bantam, Toronto, 1984. some way constitutive, there can only be phenomena of 3. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin, Col- “resistance” against themʼ. Deleuze will oppose to this umbia University Press, New York, 1995, p. 171. the primacy of lines of flight which ʻimply no return to 4. Alain Badiou, ʻGilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and nature, they are points of deterritorialization in agence- the Baroqueʼ, trans. T. Sowley, in Gilles Deleuze and ments of desireʼ. the Theater of Philosophy, ed. C.V. Boundas and D. 24. Anti-Oedipus, p. 140. Olkowski, Routledge, London, 1994, pp. 51–69. 25. Ibid., p. 280. 5. Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 170. 26. Ibid., p. 315 (translation modified). 6. Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. 27. Ibid., p. 341 (translation modified). L. Burchill, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 28. Ibid., p. 377. 2000, p. 12. 29. This is the conclusion of Anti-Oedipus, p. 380. 7. Guy Lardreau, Lʼexercice differé de la philosophie. A 30. Let us not forget that one of the coauthors of the book La lʼoccasion de Deleuze, Verdier, Lagrasse, 1999. Pensée 68 – Luc Ferry – is currently Franceʼs Minister 8. Alain Badiou, ʻUn, multiple, multiplicité(s)ʼ, multitudes of National Education. 1, 2000, p. 196; translated as ʻOne, Multiple, Multi- 31. This theme is developed in Gilles Deleuze and Félix plicitiesʼ, in Theoretical Writings, ed. R. Brassier and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and A. Toscano, Continuum, London, 2004. G. Burchill, London, Verso, 1994, in the chapter entitled 9. Lardreau, Lʼexercice differé de la philosophie, p. 84. ʻGeophilosophyʼ. 10. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Uni- 32. See Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, ed. C.V. Boundas, versalism, trans. R. Brassier, Stanford University Press, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, Columbia University Stanford CA, 2003, p. 10 (my emphasis). Press, New York, 1990, series 13 and 22. On the very 11. Gilles Deleuze and , Dialogues, trans. H. singular status of Logic of Sense in Deleuzeʼs oeuvre, Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, Columbia University allow me to refer to my ʻThe Body without Organsʼ Press, New York, 1987, p. 2. Condition, or, The Politics of Sensationʼ, in Biographie 12. See Éric Alliez, ʻTarde et le problème de la constitutionʼ, der Organlosen Körper, ed. É. Alliez and E. Samsonow, preface to Gabriel Tarde, Monadologie et sociologie, Turia + Kant, Vienna, 2003.

12