Deleuze and cosmopolitanism
John Sellars

The status of the political within the work of Gilles Deleuze has recently become a topic of contention.1 Two recent books argue the case for two extremes among a range of possible interpretations. At one end of the spectrum, Peter Hallward has argued that Deleuze’s personal ethic of deterritorialization and self-destruction is so disengaged with the actuality of social relations that it is unable to offer any serious political philosophy.2 At the other end of the spectrum, Manuel De Landa outlines in his most recent book an entire social and political theory modelled upon Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of machinic assemblages.3 In what follows I offer a contribution to this literature on Deleuze’s political philosophy.4 To be more precise I should say Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy, for Deleuze’s most explicit comments on politics appear in the co-authored Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. If Anti-Oedipus is the critical and destructive polemic, then A Thousand Plateaus is the creative and constructive manifesto, and so my focus shall be on the latter. In particular I shall focus upon the ‘plateau’ entitled ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine’, but I shall also draw upon material from Deleuze’s solo work Difference and Repetition that prefigures the central theme of that section. I shall argue that the political philosophy developed by Deleuze and Guattari shares much in common with, and should be seen as part of, the cosmopolitan tradition within political thinking. This broad tradition holds that all human beings belong to a single global community and that this universal community is more fundamental than the local political states into which individuals are born. As we shall see, this tradition has its origins with the ancient Cynics and Stoics.

The claim that Deleuze stands within a cosmopolitan tradition stretching back to the Stoics is a striking one, especially when one bears in mind Deleuze’s explicit interest in Stoicism in The Logic of Sense, where he engages with it on a number of fronts. Drawing upon the Stoic theory of incorporeals, Deleuze outlines an ontological surface populated by bodies on one side and incorporeal effects or events on the other. He also draws upon what he calls the Stoic theory of aiôn and chronos, a dual reading of time each part of which corresponds to one of the two sides of his ontological surface (the extended present of chronos is the time of bodies, while the durationless limit of aiôn separating past and future is the time of the incorporeal transformation or event). As it happens, none of this bears much relation to what we know about the ancient Stoics’ ontology and theory of time, and in the latter case Deleuze’s confusion reflects that of his source.5 His briefer remarks about Stoic ethics come closer to what we find in ancient Stoicism – especially the later Stoics – and the very positive tone suggests that he felt a real affinity with the ancient Stoa.6 It is in the light of his claim that Stoic ethics offers us the only meaningful form of ethics left, namely ‘not to be unworthy of what happens to us’,7 that I argue here that Deleuze also proposes a Stoic politics, even if he never explicitly conceived it as such.

Before turning to Deleuze and Guattari directly, I shall begin by introducing ancient cosmopolitanism. I shall then focus in on one particularly important ancient text relating to the Republic of Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, analysing it alongside an equally important passage from Difference and Repetition. Then I shall turn to A Thousand Plateaus, and suggest the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy may be read as a contemporary version of ancient Stoic cosmopolitanism.

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