Gilles Deleuze And the Apolitical Production of Being by Tim Paugh B.A., St. Francis Xavier University, 2005 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of Political Science © Tim Paugh, 2008 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. ii Gilles Deleuze and the Apolitical Production of Being By Tim Paugh, B.A., St. Francis Xavier University, 2005 Supervisory Committee Warren Magnusson (Department of Political Science) Supervisor Rob Walker (Department of Political Science) Departmental Member Luke Carson (Department of English) Outside Member iii Supervisory Committee Warren Magnusson (Department of Political Science) Supervisor Rob Walker (Department of Political Science) Departmental Member Luke Carson (Department of English) Outside Member Abstract Gilles Deleuze’s ontology is often understood to ground a kind of radical pluralism, the political defense of which is thought to be articulated most strongly in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia books. It is clear, however, that this “politics” is defined in a wholly negative way, and that the revolutionary dimension of these books is animated by a strictly ethical logic. In my view, if there is a politics in Deleuze it must be understood in relation to the central problem of his ontology: namely, the problem of understanding how being is produced. To grasp politics as a singularity, as a mode of ontological production, has a number of radical consequences – consequences, however, that Deleuze himself did not embrace. Ultimately, Deleuze’s conception of ontological production appears marked by an apolitics, in that any effective mobilization Being’s transformative potential requires that we stand posed to sacrifice anything of the integrity and organizational capacity of political existence that limits the expression of Being itself. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE………………………………………………………….ii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………….........iii TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………………………………………………iv INRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………….………..1 Overview of Deleuze’s Work and “Move into Politics”…………………………...8-13 Apolitics and the Thought and the One…………………………………………...13-17 Note on Deleuzian Terminology………………………………………………….17-19 CHAPTER 1: THE POLITICS OF CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA……..….…..20 A Micropolitics of Desire…………………………………………………………21-28 Non-Fascist Living: an Ethics………………………………………………….....29-44 A Political Logic?....................................................................................................44-47 CHAPTER 2: WHAT IS A POLITICAL SINGULARITY?………………………………..48 A Return to the Question of Being and Politics………………………………………49 I. Politics as a Singularity: A Prerogative of Collective Struggle……………..50-62 II. Multiplicity as the ‘Ground’ of Singular Instances of Politics……………..62-65 Subjectivity: or How to Think the Singularity of a Politics……………………….66-73 A Counter-Actualization……...…………………..……………………………….73-75 CHAPTER 3: THE HAZARDS OF APOLITICS……………………………………......…..76 Deleuze as Metaphysician of the One………………………………………….…78-89 The Subsumption of Politics……………………………………………………...90-97 What Remains of Politics…………………………………………………………98-99 CONCLUSION: A SINGULAR APOLITICS……………………..………………….100-104 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………105-109 INTRODUCTION We are well acquainted with the characteristics that have come to define Gilles Deleuze’s thought: a refusal to give heed to calls of “the end of philosophy”, as made evident by the near endless array of conceptual creations that populate his work; an approach that can only be called perverse given the success with which he was able to render canonical philosophers like Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant – along with many other writers, painters, filmmakers, and scientists – into the accomplices of the most contemporary experiments in art, science, and philosophy; and finally, a kind of desperate but utterly sober determination to prove that it was still possible in our world, as banal and over-determined as it had become, to engender something absolutely new. If these characteristics give us an appropriate portrait of Deleuzian thought, then it is little wonder that most readers have found him completely mystifying. What are we to make, after all, of a thinker whose erratic style and idiosyncratic references to experimental forms of thought seemed resolutely “anti-philosophical” but whose work, it must be acknowledged, is barely intelligible outside of the conceptual history of Continental philosophy? Faced with this disjunction, most readers in the Anglo-American context have tended to find in Deleuze’s writings a rigorous defense against all that is unifying in contemporary existence, a kind of “nomad thought”. Despite his insistence on the strictly philosophical nature of his work, Deleuze’s own intentions were thought to be aimed at nothing less than turning philosophy against itself, of making all that is sedentary in classical thought dissolve before the flux of contemporary being, of rendering all the instability of our “post-modern” world into something positive, and even 2 joyous.1 We need only consider the primacy granted by such readers to the figure of the rhizome: a figure that subverts all stable unity, identity and representation, endlessly connecting and reconnecting with other rhizomes, happy to abandon any and all existing relations to the world and immerse itself in the flux of life. The relevance of this figure seems obvious enough: our world has become, after all, utterly “flat” given both the ubiquity of the mediums of communication and the ease with which we move between territories. Perhaps the only real sin today is failing to connect. Insofar as we become rhizomatic we have learned how to turn the post-modern blurring of identities, and the angst surrounding the status of social and political representations, into virtues. Despite their attentiveness to the subtleties of his conceptual creations, this “anti- philosophical” reading of Deleuze has been abetted by many of the authors in the first wave of Deleuze studies in the Anglo-American academy. For most of these commentators, Deleuze’s work seemed to call less for philosophical evaluation and more for fidelity to the spirit of Deleuzianism, which, given the extent to which this fidelity consisted in a detailed mapping of his terms and concepts, tended also to be true to the letter. In as much as commentators were able to render him compatible with existing forms of cultural and political theory, particularly Anglo-American “post-structuralism”, Deleuze appeared increasingly as a kind of radical pluralist, for whom philosophy was simply a means of allowing us to liberate the plurality of social being from any and every encroachment by the aborescent, totalizing figures of old. For most, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a two-volume series of books that Deleuze wrote with the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari, represented the most radical formulation of a politics of plurality and flux, 1 See Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 8.9-9.0 for a good overview of this still common image of Deleuze. 3 a “micropolitics” that sought out the residue of all the old macropolitical unities so as to dispel (as Michel Foucault once wrote) “the slightest traces of fascism in the body”.2 Even a summary examination of this wave of commentary reveals, for all its diversity, a remarkable convergence on at least two fronts. First, that Deleuzianism is animated by the continual demonstration, in the face of all rigid and sedentary phenomena, that Being is grounded in an irreducible heterogeneity of fluctuating differences, becomings, desires, etc., a heterogeneity which, when subjected to the telos of dialectical representation and identity, is liable to be crushed in the gross machinery of negativity, opposition, and ressentiment. Second, that what at first appears strictly as a quarrel with the aborescent figures of the philosophical tradition (Platonism, Hegelianism, Kantianism, etc.) finds its ultimate fulfillment only in a politics, or a micropolitics, capable of exposing all the ways in which the old macropolitical figures (opposition, negativity, hierarchical forms of organization, and so on) are aligned with the mechanisms that repress Being more generally. We end up with a politics that wages the power of Being’s fundamental heterogeneity by means of a continuous experimentation with the transformative potential of existence, in recognition of the fact that the only liberatory project possible today must, in light of the failure of the old revolutionary models, hold rigorously to the defense of pluralism and embrace our contemporary, rhizomatic sociability. Thus, Paul Patton, who has probably written more than anyone on the relation between Deleuze’s philosophy and politics, acknowledges that “the function of mutation, metamorphosis and the creation of the new is ontologically primary” in Deleuze and 2 Michel Foucault, “Preface”, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xiii. 4 Guattari’s work.3 On this basis, he surmises that Deleuzian politics amounts to an effort to precipitate new micropolitical becomings, freeing social particularities (sex, race, or class-based differences)