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Critical Legal Thinking

— Law and the Political —

Deleuze and the Accelerationsists

by Jose Rosales • 10 December 2014

It is the development of an immanent set of criteria along with an

immanent political project, which accelerationism claims as its
starting point, that allows us to see the guiding thread between
Deleuze’s use of Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari’s political project
in Anti-Oedipus, and the current Left accelerationists.
We are expected, in the name of Deleuzoguattarian anti-fascism, to
embrace capitalism as nihilist machine that has no ‘purpose’, because
‘purpose’=fascism, while forgetting that neoliberalism appeared in
Germany as the form of governmentality that would immunize us
against fascism by trading the political for the economic.

—Benjamin Noys, ‘The Grammar of Neoliberalism’

Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the

process’, as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t
seen anything yet.

—Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

With the recent publication of the Accelerationist reader1 there has been a
revived interest in the relationship between the work of Deleuze and
Guattari and a particular reading of Marx that emphasizes both Marx’s own
dissatisfaction with the inherently exploitative and violent nature of
Capital, while remaining convinced that the socially beneficial aspects
produced by capitalism serve as productive grounds for Capital’s future
dissolution. Within this recent line of thought we are prone to hear
repeatedly the oft cited quote from Anti-Oedipus, “Not to withdraw from
the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’, as Nietzsche put it:
in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.”2 In this essay
I want to mainly focus on the criticisms that have been made regarding the
potential of Deleuze and Guattari’s work for any substantive Leftist
accelerationism as well as underscore the particular influence Nietzsche
exercises over Deleuze and Guattari via Deleuze’s Nietzsche and
Philosophy. To begin this discussion it is important to understand the
merits of such critiques made by people such as Benjamin Noys who, in my
estimation, provides a persuasive argument against accelerationism,
including its Leftist variant. Afterwards, I want to provide the essential
arguments in Deleuze’s treatment of Nietzsche’s concept of the will to
power that will allow us to revisit the question of the limits and virtues of
accelerationism as Noys has laid out. Lastly, and to summarize, I want to
draw our attention to what is missed in any analysis and critique of
accelerationism if we forego any understanding of the relationship between
Deleuze and Guattari’s deployment of both Nietzsche and Marx in their
own work. By interrogating the seemingly off handed invocation of
Nietzsche in the popular accelerationist passage, we can begin to
understand the nuances at work within accelerationism itself.

Accelerationism and its Critics

To briefly define what is understood by the term ‘accelerationism:’

accelerationism is the idea that any substantive leftist political project
should begin from capitalism in its current organization and aim to, in the
words of Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, unleash the ‘latent productive
forces’ within capitalism itself. Within this simple definition other
premises, such as the real subsumption of society and therefore the idea
that there is no outside to capital, are contained and taken to be the basis
for rethinking politics today. That is to say, accelerationism proposes a
vision of politics that looks for the tools of capital’s dissolution within the
present situation of capital itself. Taking this definition as our starting
point, perhaps the most salient critique of both a left and right
accelerationism has been offered by Benjamin Noys.

In his essay ‘The Grammar of Neoliberalism,’ Noys’ wager is that

unbeknownst to the accelerationists, their vision of political struggle will
reproduce the very conditions of capitalism instead of its overcoming.
Thus, this lack of analysis regarding the formation and function of
neoliberalism marks a fundamental blind spot in the accelerationist
position. Noys turns to Foucault’s account of the rise of neoliberalism to
highlight that neoliberalism does not function, does not direct its
purposiveness, toward the commodity itself. Rather, and I’m in agreement
with Noys here, neoliberalism’s power is exerted at the structural level of
the laws and constraints that are the conditions for any markets
functioning. As Noys writes, “it seems to me accelerationism, and the
critical and theoretical resources it draws upon, fundamentally
misunderstands neoliberalism, as a particular form of capitalist
governmentality, and capitalism itself, as a social form, and so reproduces
them (or their own idealized image).”3 Here it is useful to contrast Noys’
criticisms with Zizek’s criticism of Deleuze and Guattari in his text Bodies
without Organs. Unlike Zizek, whose argument equates Deleuze and
Guattari’s concept of becoming with the commodity4, Noys’ critique
operates at a more fundamental level. The essential point for Noys is that
the project inaugurated by Deleuze and Guattari instructs us “ to embrace
capitalism as nihilist machine that has no ‘purpose’, because
‘purpose’=fascism, while forgetting that neoliberalism appeared in
Germany as the form of governmentality that would immunize us against
fascism by trading the political for the economic.”5 This rather tenuous
claim rests on the prior assumption that Deleuze and Guattari do in fact
equate emancipatory politics with an aimless politics, and understand the
concepts of affirmation and becoming as good in-themselves. Thus we are
forced to ask, is it the case that what is shared between Nietzsche and
Deleuze and Guattari on the one hand, and accelerationists of all stripes on
the other, is the conflation between a concept of ‘the good’ and a concept of
becoming/immanence?

Power contra Nihilism

While Noys’ concerns ought to be taken into account since they are
essentially concerns about the prospect of reproducing even greater forms
of violence under the guise of liberation, it is precisely this task of
differentiating between kinds of becomings that Nietzsche, and Deleuze
after him, undertook. To say that Nietzsche and Deleuze fail to distinguish
between kinds of becoming amounts to saying, for instance, that what is
intended in the concept of the will to power is the idea of a will who wants
power. Every time there arises in the works of Nietzsche and Deleuze, a
concept or character type that expresses the desire for power there always
follows a negative assessment. As ‘Zarathoustra says: “The desire to
dominate: now who would call that a desire?”’6 Thus, while Nietzsche
acknowledges expressions of force and domination as expressions of the
will to power, he also acknowledges that not all expressions of force carry
the same merit. This is why, for instance, we can understand Nietzsche’s
fascination but ultimate disdain with the rise of Christianity and the ‘slave
revolt of morality;’ where his fascination stems from the success and spread
of Christian values and his disdain comes from his view that Luther marks
the Event of the internalization of man.

It is for this very reason that Deleuze will carry out his reading of the will to
power according to a tripartite distinction: 1). There is the will to power
understood as the process of vital and historical change (Pure
Becoming); 2). There is the will to power understood as the expression of
the subject (collective/individual) who tends toward their own self-
overcoming and hence a future (Joy); 3). And there is the will to power
understood to be the expression of the subject (collective/individual) who
not only desires power and the domination of others, but those who
redefine the very ideas of ‘growth’ and ‘change’ as something which
preserves, instead of abolishes, a decadent culture (Nihilism). In the first
instance, the will to power functions as a metaphysical principle; in the
second, the will to power is affirmation; and in the third, the will to power
becomes the will to nothingness, or nihilism.

Regarding the will to power as metaphysical principle Deleuze writes,

“[T]he will to power is, indeed, never separable from particular determined
forces, from their quantities, qualities and directions. It is never superior to
the ways that it determines a relation between forces, it is always plastic
and changing” (NP, 50).7 Important for us here, is the idea that the
metaphysical instantiation of the will to power not only denotes a sense of
change, but it also includes the idea of ‘productivity,’ the productivity which
is both a continuous destruction and creation of values. Thus, the will to
power is the strictly immanent principle of change as it is generated out of
the social and historical forces of society.

The main insight Deleuze extracts from the will to power understood
metaphysically is the formula of “willing=creating” (NP, 84). That is to say,
prior to any further determination as to what organization of society is
expressed through the process of production, the grounding principle for
any understanding of society is what and how it creates and produces both
forms of life and society itself. The moment of denial, the moment of
ressentiment, that comes to figure as the will to nothingness is the negative
quality of the ‘one who wills in the will.’ In other words, the will to
nothingness is also productive and creative. However, what is found to be
reprehensible in the existence of a will to nothingness, in the embodiment
of ressentiment, is that this kind of will finds its source of both hatred and
piety in a static totality – i.e., its creative deed is the repetition of sameness
and not difference. What is characteristic of any expression of the will to
nothingness is the creation of values which are grounded in particular
circumstances but made to serve as universal principles. Thus, we can say
that the concept of the will to nothingness diagnoses the feeble attempt to
understand the world and human relations according to ‘metaphors which
we have forgotten were metaphors’ and have ‘mistaken for truth.’

Additionally, the will to nothingness serves as one antipode in Nietzsche’s

‘play of forces.’ If the will to power is expressive and productive, the will to
nothingness designates what Deleuze will call the betrayal of the will to
power as such. The will to nothingness cannot be confused with the will to
power even though the will to nothingness is a quality of the will to power
which expresses and signifies the nihilism of a social body (NP, 64). Thus,
writing against nihilism, Nietzsche’s disdain for and attempts to dispense
with the will to nothingness is founded on the idea of the will to power as
both process of creation and productive of the qualities of the relations of
force – where one possible quality of the will to power is nihilism itself.

For Deleuze, the will to nothingness as nihilism is expressive of

fundamental social relations: ‘the imputation of wrongs and
responsibilities, the bitter recrimination, the perpetual accusation, the
ressentiment’(NP, 21) which characterizes the organization of society.
Moreover – and this is what brings Nietzsche in close proximity with Marx
– nihilism isn’t simply a psychological phenomena. Nihilism, in its most
profound sense, refers to the “fundamental categories…of our way of
thinking and interpreting existence in general” (NP, 21). It is because
nihilism expresses this fundamental quality of social relations, and not
merely personal orientations in the world, that Deleuze and Guattari will
invoke Nietzsche’s principle of the will to power as a critique of Capital.

Thus, the gains made through the concept of the will to power are due to
the fact that the will to power is the abstraction necessary to grasp the full
weight of Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of capitalism’s
characterization as nihilistic. Not only does the will to nothingness err in
terms of misunderstanding the historical place of human beings (e.g.,
science, Christianity); it is through this error that the social manifestations
of nihilism are made actual.

Deleuze, Guattari & The Accelerationists

Given the preceding remarks on the difference between the will to power
and the will to nothingness (nihilism), the philosophical purchase made on
the part of Deleuze and Guattari by taking up a Nietzschean theme in Anti-
Oedipus must be understood through its conjunction with their reading of
Marx. If the concept of nihilism corresponds to fundamental categories of
experience grounded in social relations, Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of
Marx seeks to connect this idea with the concept of the relations of
production. As Marx himself writes in an often cited passage:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into

definite relations, which are independent of their will… The totality of these
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the
real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to
which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of
production of material life conditions the general process of social, political
and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines
their existence, but their social existence that determines their
consciousness (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

It is due to the conceptual link between the concepts of the will to power
and the will to nothingness on the one hand, and Marx’s understanding of
the relationship between social existence and the self-consciousness of
individuals on the other, that we can begin to see the necessary differences
between those who claim to be either ‘Left accelerationists,’ or ‘ultra-
Left/Right accelerationists.’ That is to say, if the task is to ‘accelerate the
process,’ the obviously critical question arises: which process exactly?

To start, what both the concept of the will to power and the ‘left
accelerationists’ affirm is the idea of the ontological indeterminacy of the
elements of society. For both Deleuze and Guattari, and Srnicek and
Williams, there is no a priori reason to disavow or maintain a skepticism
regarding the use of technology for Leftist politics since each set of thinkers
begins from the context of real subsumption. This stands perfectly in line
with Marx’s claim that “while capital gives itself its adequate form as use
value… only in the form of machinery and other material manifestations of
fixed capital… Machinery does not lose its use value as soon as it ceases to
be capital” (Grundrisse, 699, my emphasis).

While this ontological indeterminacy is affirmed by accelerationists, both

on the Right and the Left, the differences emerge when we consider what
exactly is affirmed, or thought to be the seat of radical change. For
someone like Nick Land, the locus of radical change lies in the inherent
character of capitalism’s innovative, productive, and deterritorializing
process. That is to say, for Land, emancipatory change and a political
project adequate for its realization ought to develop the currently existing
relations of production to their logical conclusion. On his account, this is
the meaning of Deleuze and Guattari’s statement that “the truth is that we
haven’t seen anything yet.” Alternatively, Srnicek and Williams begin their
accelerationist politics with a break from the Landian position:

However Landian neoliberalism confuses speed with acceleration. We

may be moving fast, but only within a strictly defined set of capitalist
parameters that themselves never waver. We experience only the
increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple brain-dead onrush rather
than an acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process
of discovery within a universal space of possibility (MAP).

Regarding the philosophical register of Land’s accelerationism, the error

and untenability of his project not only stems from the conflation of
capitalism as a process of deterritorialization, axiomatics, and creative
destruction on the one hand, and a more general process of becoming and
production underscored by Deleuze and Guattari. Land also
underestimates the very relationship between the absorption of
technological innovation into Capital and technological innovation itself as
it exists within specific domains of society (e.g., silicon valley, universities,
think tanks). On the relation between the innovation of technology and
capitalism Deleuze and Guattari themselves claim that “An innovation is
adopted only from the perspective of the rate of profit its investment will
offer by the lowering of production costs; without this prospect, the
capitalist will keep the existing equipment…”8 It is in this sense that there is
a break between Land’s accelerationism and the accelerationism proposed
by Williams and Srnicek. Thus, to confuse speed with acceleration means a
specific vision of an accelerationism that has not escaped the universal
axiom of capital (overall profitability of industry in relation to the market),
and insofar as Land bases his politics in the acceleration of the existing
relations of production, his thought can only conceptualize the
reproduction of greater crises and further displacements of capital as its
own limit.

In short, to valorize the kind of creativity realized by capital as such is to

perpetuate an understanding of creativity under the concept of the will to
nothingness. Without this distinction, accelerationism would fall back into,
as Marx wrote, “the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general
productive forces of the social brain” only for it to be “absorbed into capital,
as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital…in so far
as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper”
(G, 694).

The merits of the ‘left accelerationist’ approach, and their critique of Land,
is in their aim to make the conceptual distinction between productivity,
creativity, and innovation as it is absorbed into Capital and the potential for
the fruits of capital to benefit a politics which seeks to return these gains to
Labor. Hence the statement from the MAP: “Accelerationists want to
unleash latent productive forces…It needs to be repurposed towards
common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be
smashed, but a springboard to launch toward post-capitalism” (MAP,
03.5).

On Nihilism: Preliminary Conclusion

If we reconsider the concept of nihilism as developed by Noys and Deleuze
and Guattari, the tension regarding accelerationism comes into high relief.
The conceptual distinction between a will to power and a will to
nothingness gains importance in Deleuze and Guattari’s project of
diagnosing the organization of society under capital. In this way, we are not
told by Deleuze and Guattari to embrace capitalism as nihilism simply
because ‘purpose,’ or purposive social action is a priori reprehensible.
Rather, we are told to embrace capitalism as nihilism because nihilism
designates the way in which subjects are constituted as subjects under
capitalism, while simultaneously drawing our attention to the fact that the
processes of socialization/subjectification present under capitalism only
make possible forms of life which are nihilistic through and through.

Ultimately, the conjunction of Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari’s

‘accelerationist’ Marxism does not amount to a simple fusion, or collapse of
each into the other – as if Marx were to become a Nietzschean ubermensch
and Nietzsche becomes some type of communist poster child. The use of
Nietzsche alongside Marx, in my opinion, is much more subtle. It rests on
what (mainly) Deleuze pulls out of Nietzsche – the necessary criteria by
which we adjudicate and differentiate between different kinds of
becomings, which cannot be sought in any a priori condition. Rather, and
this is the upshot of Deleuze’s analysis of the concept of the will to power,
the criteria of differentiating between an ‘affirmative/active’ becoming and
a ‘negative/reactive’ becoming is found in the deeds, or the things
produced/effected by the very process under examination. It is at this point
that we begin to see the development of Deleuze’s emphasis on the role of
immanence throughout his work in general, and how it particularly is
articulated in respect to Nietzsche. If we take this conception of the
development of an immanent criteria of differentiation, along with one of
their other foundational ideas of the real subsumption of capital, then what
these conceptual distinctions between the will to power and nihilism offer
us is an immanent method of developing criteria for assessing the ‘creative
deeds’ of capital; for the assessment of the merits and shortcomings of any
political project on its own terms, and as it unfolds within a context. It is
the development of an immanent set of criteria (abstractions)9 along with
an immanent political project, which accelerationism claims as its starting
point, that allows us to see the guiding thread between Deleuze’s use of
Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari’s political project in Anti-Oedipus, and the
current Left accelerationists.