Anti-Oedipus – thirty years on

Anti-Oedipus – thirty years on

Éric alliez

I, for my own part, made a sort of move into politics around May 1968…Gilles Deleuze, NegotiationsThis title was suggested to me some months ago by my best enemy – or my best fiend, to paraphrase Werner Herzog – who also happens to be a very good friend: Alain Badiou. It was originally intended for a lecture I was to deliver under the auspices of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Philosophy which Badiou recently set up at the École Normale Supérieure. The idea was to use the occasion to pursue our dispute – or chicane, to use a favourite expression of Badiouʼs – a dispute instigated by the publication in 1997 of his book Deleuze: The Clamor of Being.

Let it be noted in passing, since I have been invited here under the sign of a Radical Philosophy,* that this dispute prolo nged a problematic which I had previously addressed in an intervention entitled Of the Impossibility of Phenomenology: On Contemporary French Philosophy, first published in 1994.1 That intervention was directed at the institutional partition of the philosophical world into two blocs, phenomenological and analytic, and also sought to counter the repercussions of this division within France. In the book I showed that, ever since Husserl, this partition has been governed by an axiom of complementarity between the ʻphenomenologyʼ of the failure of logical formalism and the ʻanalysisʼ of the collapse of intentionality, in its theological reality as well as its philosophical impossibility. On this basis, let me suggest that a philosophical field with a grip on the present – in other words, contemporary philosophy as an ontology of the present – could be and must be thought starting from the idea of a maximal ontological tension between Deleuze and Badiou. In my view, Deleuze and Badiou constitute the extreme polarities of the contemporary domain of French philosophy, as the latter articulates its materialist necessity into singularities and multiplicities.

But we are indeed ʻThirty Years Onʼ and a kind of fallout from a version of the contemporary ʻmade in Austriaʼ (but not only, since it was also a question of the postmodern dictatorship of the curator), leading to my eviction from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (where I had taught since 1997), forced me to decline Badiouʼs generous invitation.

Badiouʼs invitation could not but engender a stark and cutting quarrel. As you know, in his book Badiou erects an image of Deleuze as a metaphysician of the One, whose essential monotonyin itself indifferent to differences, subtracted as it is from the ʻinexhaustible variety of the concreteʼ and from the anarchic confusion of the world – can and indeed must lead us to dismiss the works coauthored with Félix Guattari, beginning with Anti-Oedipus. It is only after having carried out this operation that it will be possible, according to Badiou, to re-establish the truth of Deleuze-Thought against its ambient image, the image of Deleuze as the advocate of a liberation of the anarchic multiplicity of desires. But it is also, and inevitably, only once Deleuze has been reduced to the monotony of the One that one will be able to oppose this ʻtruthʼ to the Nouvelle Alliance Deleuze–Guattari, to paraphrase the original French title of Prigogine and Stengersʼs Order Out of Chaos. [2]

Badiouʼs operation cannot but pose a serious problem, on two levels whose difference is entirely relative.

First, at the level of Deleuzeʼs trajectory, given that Deleuze himself presents his encounter with Guattari – in a horizon of life and thought opened up by May ʼ68, what he called ʻan irruption, of a becoming in its pure stateʼ [3] – as the reality condition for the constitution of his own philosophy. (Hence the necessity of 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.(1969) and Anti-Oedipus (1972) – which is what I will do all too briefly at the end of this article.)Second, at the strictly speaking political level, whose essential ambiguity in Deleuze is condemned by Badiou. In Badiouʼs eyes, this ambiguity is corroborated by the fact that politics as such is not endowed by Deleuze with any kind of theoretical autonomy, thereby leading to the permanent threat of a spontaneous deviation or drift (dérive), embodied by what he dubs the ʻanarcho-désirantsʼ: what Lenin long ago branded with the name of ʻleftismʼ and which tends to reduce Deleuzeʼs declared vitalism to the last incarnation of Romanticism – in other words, into a natural mysticism of the vitalist expression of the world, as Badiou asserted in his review of The Fold from 1989.4 But, in this case, it is the very unity of Deleuzean thought that finds itself gravely compromised after Anti-Oedipus, precisely to the extent that the latter was, as Deleuze remarked, ʻfrom beginning to end a book of political philosophyʼ. [5]

What is more, it is hard to fathom how the biomachinic conception of desire in Anti-Oedipus – which depicts desire as coextensive with the lines of flight of the social domain – could ever translate antihumanism into, as Badiou writes, ʻthe infinite and inhuman resource of the Oneʼ, in which ʻeverything is always “already-there”ʼ. [6] Unless, of course, we wish to argue that Deleuzean leftism was nothing but a pure opportunism and that ʻMitterrandismʼ revealed the underlying truth of this ʻsoft rebellionʼ – to speak like Guy Lardreau in his anti-Deleuzean pamphlet, [7] a text inspired through and through by Badiouʼs decisionism.

In an article replying to some objections that his book did not fail to provoke, Badiou makes the following remark: ʻHow is it that politics, for Deleuze, is not an autonomous form of thought, a singular section of chaos, unlike art, science and philosophy? This point alone testifies to our divergence, and everything could be seen to follow from it.ʼ [8] In light of this remark, it might be interesting briefly to return to the dispute, taking our cue from the way it was prolonged by Badiou in the two books of politics that follow his Deleuze, books in which what is at stake is investing singularity qua operator of universalism; in other words, addressing the question: ʻWhat precisely is a universal singularity that is valid for everyone?ʼ These two books are Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and On Metapolitics – a metapolitics of the dethronement of difference which is to be opposed to the micropolitical principle that presides over the question of ʻbecoming-revolutionaryʼ in Deleuze–Guattari following Anti-Oedipus. Having said that, it is imperative to remark straightaway that what Badiouʼs Paulinian allegiance rejects is precisely the anti-Oedipal affirmation of desiring production as the social power of difference within a becomingminoritarian, as well as the manner in which this desiring production refuses, de jure and de facto, the principle of a separate sphere for politics. No wonder, then, that Badiouʼs Saint Paul advocates ʻloveʼ as that which militant faith is capable of, when the latter seeks to extricate itself from the ʻliving autonomy of desireʼ. By the same token, the theorem of the militant amounts to a subjective fidelity to the event of separation from the world, sustained by the universal communication of a subtractive foundation which can conceive of desire only as a Lack of the Law, in order to impose upon the subject, by way of a process of subjectivation, the universal grace of Signifier. Let us recall, in this regard, Saint Paulʼs famous pronouncement, from Romans 7 (7–23): ʻI have known sin only through the Law.ʼ Whence the following theorem: Lacanian psychoanalysis is the symptom of the refoundation of universalism, when philosophy puts itself under the metapolitical condition of creating the event of Nothing addressed to All.

What is of greatest importance here is less the predictable and stringent alternative vis-à-vis Deleuze and Deleuzo–Guattarianism (immediately collapsed into one another, as is only right, within the dispute) than the prescriptive character of this universalism of the Subject-of-Truth declared by Badiou for all, and for everyone who seeks the elimination of the leftism of the party of desire (to speak like Guy Lardreau, who is wholly faithful to the other party, the party, I quote, ʻof lack, of the One, of knowledge, of warʼ [9] ). I say ʻprescriptiveʼ because the universal is as such the truth of the subject who declares the void of being – from which Badiou knows how to draw immanently all the necessary consequences. After his Deleuze, it is no surprise that the militant objective of Badiouʼs Saint Paul is to unfold the logic of the break vis-à-vis the movement of vitalist affirmation by demonstrating the inconsistency of becoming with respect to the excess of the Real over reality. This can only be grasped via a Lacan who posits the Real in the predication of the no (non) and of the name (nom) as subject-intervention.

As the founder of the figure of the militant, ʻPaulʼs unprecedented gesture is to subtract truth from the clutches of communitarianismʼ. How extraordinarily contemporary! By involving the for all, the break of universal singularity with regard to the identitarian singularity of a closed subset is bereft of an alterna-tive, given its description of the present state of the ʻcommunitarianizationʼ of a public space fragmented into closed identities delivering so many new territories over to the market. Moreover, Badiou cannot write these lines without also inviting Deleuze to this wedding between capitalist logic and identitarian logic, a wedding whose stakes are precisely to refuse emancipatory reality to any kind of becomingminoritarian, as Deleuze remarked – ʻexactlyʼ, Badiou says, ʻcapitalist deterritorialization needs a constant reterritorializationʼ. The exactitude to which Badiou refers is entirely nominal, and ultimately represents a complete misunderstanding of Deleuze, since the reterritorialization of capitalism is no longer practised upon this absolute form of deterritorialization without any assignable limit, whether external or internal, a form of deterritorialization that capitalism can only put to work by subjecting it to the expanded reproduction of its own immanent limits.

Furthermore, becoming is no longer related to flows of desire that flee, flows that cause the process of capitalist valorization itself to flee – for Badiou becoming turns out to be purely and simply the occasion for the ʻmercantile investmentsʼ to which it gives rise. This ultimately leads Badiou to accept the point of view of Capital, fully aware that desire reduced to the primitive accumulation of identitarian reterritorializations under the name of ʻcommunitarianismʼ is no longer Capitalism and Schizophrenia – itʼs Capitalism and Paranoia. The minoritarian is frozen into the identitarian. As Badiou writes: ʻWhat inexhaustible potential [devenir] for mercantile investments in this upsurge – taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so-called cultural singularities – of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs!ʼ [10] Recall that Deleuze and Guattariʼs question is that of a political ontology of (ʻalmost imperceptibleʼ) becomings which never cease to undo the sedimentation of identities (ʻthe primacy of lines of flightʼ) and to produce ʻstrikesʼ, sudden variations that affect every system by not allowing it to become homogeneous, variations as unpredictable to the sociologist as they are to the militant. Thus, as Deleuze remarks in Dialogues, there also exists ʻa revolutionary-becoming which is not the same as the future of the revolution, and which does not necessarily happen through militantsʼ. [11] This is because the constructions of the militant tend to cut themselves off from the ʻsocio-culturalʼ expressions of the world and from the propagation of the molecular becomings of real multiplicities. Or again: Badiou contra Deleuze is Durkheim contra Tarde. Except that the times have clearly changed, and the Deleuze resists better today than the Tarde did yesterday. [12]

Everything Iʼve said up to now is intended less as an (excessively prolix) introduction to this article placed under the sign of a Radical Philosophy, than as a first response to the question: What has become of Anti-Oedipus today, thirty years after that ʻfurious articleʼ published in the aftermath of ʼ68 by Badiou, under the combative title: ʻThe Flow and the Partyʼ (ʻLe flux et le partiʼ)? [13] In terms of the concerns it mobilizes on the intra-philosophical plane as well as on the non-philosophical one – with regard to the real multiplicities of the anti-capitalist movement and its collective assemblages (in their difference from political ʻorganizationsʼ, not least Badiouʼs own Organisation politique) – everything points to the conclusion that Anti-Oedipus has never stopped resisting, feeding on the very repression which it has never ceased to provoke. This is true on both levels, intra-philosophical and non-philosophical; two levels which are ultimately one, if the principle that presides over the writing of this book-flow is the one which was perfectly summed up by Michel Foucault in the Preface to the American edition, in a formula that bears a stunning affinity to the sensibility of Félix Guattari: ʻUse political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political actionʼ, in the desire that the ʻprocess of overturning the established orderʼ may deploy itself within political practice in an ever more intense way. [14]

Now, in the constant vis-à-vis Deleuze advocated by Badiou as the defining trait of his metapolitics, we clearly witness a return of the repressed – to wit, the return of the Anti-Oedipus, a text which he never stops countering with his own politics of Being and Event, after having purged politics from Deleuzean ʻphilosophyʼ. But we also observe, inextricably, a total disavowal of the Deleuzo-Guattarian thesis concerning desire, the thesis that ʻdesire only exists when assembled or machined [machiné]ʼ and that one cannot ʻgrasp or conceive of a desire outside a determinate assemblage, on a plane which is not preexistent but which must itself be constructedʼ, in a process of liberation which never unifies parts into a WHOLE. Here we must quote the lines with which Deleuze introduces this statement. He writes: ʻit is objected that by releasing desire from lack and law, the only thing we have left to refer to is a state of nature, a desire which would be natural and spontaneous reality. We say quite the opposite: desire only exists when assembled or machined.ʼ Whence the conclusion that desire ʻis constructivist, not at all spontaneistʼ, and the following question: ʻHow can the assemblage be refused the name it deserves, “desire”?ʼ [15] (Allow me to recall that the concept of ʻdesiring machinesʼ will turn into that of ʻassemblagesʼ pure and simple after the Kafka book, which can be regarded as a bridge between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus). This is the key thesis of Anti-Oedipus, according to which there can be no Expression (of the play of the world) without the Construction of assemblages of desire or ʻdesiring machinesʼ, which free Life in the processual (and non-totalizing) identity between production and product. This identity is precisely opposed to:

1. ^ The ʻnatural mysticismʼ initially denounced by Badiou under the name of Deleuze, ignoring the fact that Deleuze himself will only evoke a ʻplane of Natureʼ to convey better the point that we are dealing with ʻa nature which must be constructed with all the fabrications of the plane of immanenceʼ (in other words, the irrelevance of the nature/artifice distinction undermines this naturalist expressionism). [16] 2. The ʻre-accentuated Platonismʼ into which Badiou wishes to dissolve Deleuze by registering the production of differences under the heading of simulacra (in other words, a constructivism deprived of ontological reality). Yet inversely, as well as reciprocally, and this time against the grain of the mathematical ontology of Badiou, which declares the indifference of truth to the flow of the world, Construction without Expression is void of any real becoming, of any real-desire whatsoever. So that if ʻthe objective being of desire is the Real in and of itselfʼ, ʻdesiring production is one and the same thing as social productionʼ [17] – by virtue of the biopolitical identity between Expression and Construction, an identity which gives body to the theory of machinic desire and the affirmation of a universal contingency, according to which: ʻIn desiring machines everything functions at the same time, but amid hiatuses and ruptures, breakdowns and failures, stalling and short circuits, distances and fragmentations, within a sum that never succeeds in bringing its various parts together so as to form a whole.ʼ [18]

This explains why Anti-Oedipus adamantly affirms that ʻwe cannot accept the idealist category of “expression”ʼ. [19] After all, production as process overflows its notion by relating to desire qua immanent principle – not the principle of a given/giver of flows which it would naturally or spontaneously express, but rather of a flow-cut system that desire engineers, in such a way that the cut implies what it cuts, as a universal continuity expressed from an artificial ʻNatureʼ towards schizophrenic productivity. Lacking this continuum, this real implication of the world singularized and machinically engineered in each of its cuts–flows, the cut would count as a section (découpe), which is to say a separation (from ʻcommonʼ reality), [20] in accordance with the principle of a post-existential decision (decidere: to separate) constantly put forward by the Lacanizing philosopher (the Real as the indifference of the pure event). As Deleuze and Guattari write, ʻIt is not at all a question of the cut considered as a separation from realityʼ. With Anti-Oedipus, the ontological monism of Deleuzean biophilosophy becomes the biopolitical fact of the machinic system of cuts and flows, which relates the univocal plane of the living to desire as a ʻuniversalʼ process of production. We thereby move from biophilosophical expressionism – such as it implies (after Spinoza) production qua affective affirmation in immanence, and (with Bergson) the creative affirmation of the full differentiating reality of the virtual – to biopolitical constructivism, which allows one in the present to invest the created from the point of view of creation. It is this passage which makes it possible to understand Deleuzeʼs assertion, in the interview on Anti-Oedipus (reprinted in Negotiations), according to which up to that point he had worked ʻsolely with concepts, rather timidly in fact. Félix had talked to me about what he was already calling “desiring machines”.… So I myself thought heʼd gone further than I had [cʼétait lui qui était en avance sur moi].ʼ21 In this phrase the advance of Anti-Oedipus is played out, the advance of a machinic ontology over the transcendental, as the latter is developed into a structuralism (of the kind that makes its appearance in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense). [22] The machine will be defined on the basis of the cut–flow system which introduces production into desire by guaranteeing its real (and non-ʻsymbolicʼ) primacy qua immanent constitutive process.

Unparalleled, except perhaps by the first chapter of Matter and Memory, it is the masterful opening chapter of Anti-Oedipus which links the philosophy of multiplicity – employed as a vital substantive that ʻgoes beyond the multiple just as much as the oneʼ (contrary to the kind of reading which will be offered by Badiou) – to the politics of desiring production, a politics that can be understood as the anoedipal reality condition of philosophy, between capitalism and schizophrenia. This all comes down to ʻschizophrenizingʼ philosophy by treating writing as the machinic expression of constitutive desire, an expression that carries the real to the point at which it is effectively produced in bodies that are both biological and collective, and imply the constitution of a field of immanence or ʻbody without organsʼ (BwO) defined by zones of intensity, thresholds, gradients, flows and so on. (The BwO is to be considered as the very body of desire, as its purest Expression, so absolutely inseparate from what it can do that it relates back to an unliveable power, a power which is as such the pre-condition of every real experience of desire, driven by the necessity of Constructions that cuts the BwO in itself.) Whence the ʻgenerationalʼ effect of this immense provocation – which no longer dissociates ontological production from the being of the micropolitical expression–construction of singularities – upon the way of thinking of a lifestyle from which the intellectual Left and the political Left and extreme Left have yet to recover.

The project laid out in Anti-Oedipus begins by subverting the Freudo-Marxism which was fashionable at the time, by confronting structuralism head on (lines of flight are primary qua process, contrary to structure conceived as the static genesis of the unconscious and the socius, and implying a complete determination of singular points), before moving on to criticize the philosophies of ʻresistanceʼ by establishing the biopolitical primacy of desire qua ʻconjugation and dissociation of flowsʼ against the Foucauldian thesis of a biopower whose dispositifs would in some sense be constitutive. (Coming first, as they do, ʻlines of flight … are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization [points de creation et de deterritorialisation]ʼ.23) Biopolitics is thereby affirmed as the infinite tension that affects a process of constitution which is launched against all the strata of organization that block becomings, which cause them to fall back on an anti-production that functions from the inside out (the psychoanalytic Oedipus, a State which turns into the Entrepreneurial State of the society of control) – and all this, not in the name of any kind of spontaneism or marginalism, but, on the contrary, by virtue of the dynamic of real multiplicities, as it is determined by the plane of immanence of desire qua social and intellectual power of production–creation. In this respect, and in accordance with the principle of a universal history revisited in ʻSavages, Barbarians, Civilized Menʼ (the longest chapter in Anti-Oedipus), it is legitimate ʻto understand retrospectively all history in the light of capitalismʼ;24 a capitalism which does not put to work the decoded and deterritorialized flows it organizes and axiomatizes without, by the same token, liberating the forces of desire animating it, forces it must counteract by reintroducing the most merciless transcendence into the immanence of a person who has been rendered ʻprivateʼ (which is to say ʻdeprivedʼ) in order to keep these forces in a bound state.

It follows that a fantastic death instinct always threatens to transform the Oedipal triangle – which invests the social reterritorialization of ʻdemocraticʼ capitalism into an ʻintimateʼ territoriality of the paranoiac type – into a ʻmicro-fascismʼ. Whereas the investment of ʻthe transverse multiplicities that convey desire as a molecular phenomenonʼ, [25] a phenomenon which constitutes the subjective-machinic essence of production, is affirmed in the flight and secession from the order of representation, which organizes representation into an exterior and an interior (into social reproduction and political representation, on the one hand, and infinite subjective representation, on the other). ʻLeaving, fleeing, but by causing more flightsʼ [26] through a pragmatics of collective assemblages which overturns the apparatuses of blockage and control, imposing upon them schizzes that turn against capitalist anti-production and undermine the stateʼs forms of sovereignty. The fact that this schizoid investment of the non-separated ensemble of the social field is tantamount to a reopening of historicity in the production of new, common modes of life, points to the caesura vis-à-vis any utopian communitarian project, and highlights the difference between the ʻschizoʼ and ʻbecoming-revolutionaryʼ: a difference between ʻthe one who fleesʼ and ʻthe one who knows how to make what he is fleeing fleeʼ. For, as Deleuze–Guattari declare, ʻthe schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process – in terms of which the schizo is merely the interruption, or the continuation in the void – is the potential for revolution.ʼ [27] This is a potential which is just as much anti-state as anti-party, as is obvious when Anti-Oedipus ʻschizophrenizesʼ the Marx who was fascinated by the machinic economy of deterritorialized flows, when it overflows any ʻstructuralʼ form of Marxism in order to instigate the flight of capitalist machinery on the basis of a rupture of causality which is also a passage to the limit, expressing the ontological event of the desire-that-produces (in) a deindividualizing subjective mutation. It is this reversal of power, tantamount to a reopening of the possible, which is invariably accompanied by a ʻcollective exileʼ (ʻdesire is an exileʼ, Deleuze–Guattari write) [28] that takes place within the very time wherein one experiences the constitutive character of desiring production at the level of new social, intellectual and scientific forces, such as they define the machinic society of the General Intellect (to return to the key expression of the Grundrisse, in which is played out the ʻMarxismʼ that Deleuze and Guattari lay claim to – as well as their convergence, on this point, with Negri).

These are so many elements whose acute resonance with the new cooperative spaces created by the anti-war and alternative-globalization multitudes, with becomings-minoritarian which proceed by ʻinclusive disjunctionsʼ without any resulting totality – leads us to affirm that the actuality of this work of political philosophy (and anti-philosophy), which refuses to propose any ʻpolitical programʼ [29] 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 generations – 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 the Pensée-68, 1968-thought: because it instigates the becoming-non-philosopher of the philosopher, whereby non-philosophy becomes in the present ʻthe earth and people of philosophyʼ;31 because it imposes becoming as the concept deploying itself through the power of a ʻmilieuʼ, wrenching history away from itself in order to create the new, rather than reproducing death on an ever more expanded scale.

Here lies the greatness of Deleuze, when he indicates the ʻturnʼ of Anti-Oedipus as the moment of the constitution of a philosophy – his own constitution, caught up and freed by the New Alliance with Guattari – which does not work through concepts alone, but moves beyond the pure form of the determinable ʻin thoughtʼ.

This is what the philosopher christened the ridiculousness of the abstract thinker in the Logic of Sense, when it was a matter of attaining ʻthis politics, this complete and utter guerillaʼ required by the schizoid irruption of the Body without Organs, which came to ʻtear the structuralist surfaceʼ of the ʻpsychoanalysis of senseʼ, thereby leading it to a ʻprogressive and creative disorganizationʼ inscribed ʻin the physical presence of bodiesʼ. [32]

That is what Anti-Oedipus tells us thirty years on: that we cannot oppose the Hyperstructuralism of a Badiou with any kind of ʻweakʼ (debole) Poststructuralism making room for a spontaneous democracy of desire and its pop-philosophical flights of fancy – but rather with a Biopolitics of Multitudes whose socially constitutive character is the ontological fact that sustains the constructivism of desire. The latter prohibits, in vivo, any projection of these questions into a ʻphilosophical eternityʼ or into a ʻpolitics of Graceʼ under the guidance of the militant.

Translated by alberto toscanonotes

1. ^ Éric Alliez, De lʼimpossibilié de la phenomenologie. Sur la philosophie française contemporaine, Vrin, Paris, 1994.

2. ^ I. Prigogine and I. Strenger, Order Out of Chaos: Manʼs New Dialogue with Nature, Bantam, Toronto, 1984.

3. ^ Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995, p. 171.

4. ^ Alain Badiou, ʻGilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroqueʼ, trans. T. Sowley, in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. C.V. Boundas and D.

Olkowski, Routledge, London, 1994, pp. 51–69.

5. ^ Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 170.

6. ^ Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans.

L. Burchill, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 2000, p. 12.

7. ^ Guy Lardreau, Lʼexercice differé de la philosophie. A lʼoccasion de Deleuze, Verdier, Lagrasse, 1999.

8. ^ Alain Badiou, ʻUn, multiple, multiplicité(s)ʼ, multitudes 1, 2000, p. 196; translated as ʻOne, Multiple, Multiplicitiesʼ, in Theoretical Writings, ed. R. Brassier and A. Toscano, Continuum, London, 2004.

9. ^ Lardreau, Lʼexercice differé de la philosophie, p. 84.

10. ^ Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. R. Brassier, Stanford University Press,

Stanford CA, 2003, p. 10 (my emphasis).

11. ^ Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. H.

Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, Columbia University Press, New York, 1987, p. 2.

12. ^ See Éric Alliez, ʻTarde et le problème de la constitutionʼ, preface to Gabriel Tarde, Monadologie et sociologie, Synthélabo, Paris, 1999; as well as the special dossier in multitudes 7, 2001.

13. ^ In La Situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie, Cahiers Yenan No. 4, ed. A. Badiou and S. Lazarus,

Maspéro, Paris, 1977, pp. 24–41. See also the opening passages of Badiouʼs Deleuze: The Clamor of Being.

14. ^ Michel Foucault, ʻPrefaceʼ, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Viking, New York, 1977, pp. xiv, xii; French text in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. 3, Gallimard, Paris, 1994, pp. 134–5.

15. ^ Dialogues, pp. 96,

70. ^ See also p. 103: ʻDesire is always assembled and fabricated [machiné], on a plane of immanence or composition which must itself be constructed at the same time as desire assembles and fabricates.ʼ

16. ^ Dialogues, p. 98.

17. ^ Anti-Oedipus, pp. 26–7, 30.

18. ^ Ibid., p. 42.

19. ^ Ibid., p. 6.

20. ^ Deleuze and Guattari write unequivocally that ʻthese breaks should in no way be considered as a separation from realityʼ, ibid., p. 36.

21. ^ Negotiations, p. 13.

22. ^ See Gilles Deleuze, ʻHow Do We Recognize Structuralismʼ, written in 1967 and published in 1972, in which Deleuze writes: ʻStructuralism cannot be separated from a new transcendental philosophyʼ; in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, trans.

Michael Taormina, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles and New York, 2003, pp. 170–92.

23. ^ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Athlone, London, 1988, pp. 530–31, n39. See the letter that Deleuze sent to Foucault in 1977, published in 1994 under the title ʻDesire and Pleasureʼ (now reprinted in Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. A.I. Davidson,

University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997, pp. 187–8).

In this text he writes: ʻif dispositifs of power are in some way constitutive, there can only be phenomena of “resistance” against themʼ. Deleuze will oppose to this the primacy of lines of flight which ʻimply no return to nature, they are points of deterritorialization in agencements of desireʼ.

24. ^ Anti-Oedipus, p. 140.

25. ^ Ibid., p. 280.

26. ^ Ibid., p. 315 (translation modified).

27. ^ Ibid., p. 341 (translation modified).

28. ^ Ibid., p. 377.

29. ^ This is the conclusion of Anti-Oedipus, p. 380.

30. ^ Let us not forget that one of the coauthors of the book La Pensée 68 – Luc Ferry – is currently Franceʼs Minister of National Education.

31. ^ This theme is developed in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill, London, Verso, 1994, in the chapter entitled ʻGeophilosophyʼ.

32. ^ See Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, ed. C.V. Boundas, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990, series 13 and

22. ^ On the very singular status of Logic of Sense in Deleuzeʼs oeuvre, allow me to refer to my ʻThe Body without Organsʼ Condition, or, The Politics of Sensationʼ, in Biographie der Organlosen Körper, ed. É. Alliez and E. Samsonow,

Turia + Kant, Vienna, 2003.