Marxismo Minoritario-Pellejero, Ellen Bothe, Scarso, Deleuze Studies

Minor Marxism: An Approach to a New Political Praxis
Author(s): Eduardo Pellejero, Pauly Ellen Bothe and Davide Scarso

Source: Deleuze Studies, Vol. 3, supplement: Special Issue on Deleuze and Marx (2009), pp.
102-118
Published by: Edinburgh University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45331391
Accessed: 03-01-2022 14:28 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Deleuze Studies
This content downloaded from 201.239.88.147 on Mon, 03 Jan 2022 14:28:43 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Minor Marxism: An Approach to a
New Political Praxis
Eduardo Pellejero Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Translated by Pauly Ellen Bothe and Davide Scarso
Abstract
In 1990, Antonio Negri pointed out some problems with Deleuze's

political philosophy. Substituting infra-structures for life or desire, as
constitutive dimensions of power formations, did not imply giving up
on Marx, but it certainly did imply a change in the table of conceptual
analysis and a profound renovation of the questions that pertain to
militant praxis. Taking this into account, we intend to explore the sense
of a rare fidelity to Marx, and a certain idea of intellectual commitment
that, reframing its objects and its instruments, pretends to renew political
thinking in order to confront the unforeseeable of new knowledge, new
techniques and new political facts.
Keywords: Minor-dialectic, becoming-revolutionary, creation of

assemblages, de-totalisation, ethics of struggle
In 1990, in an interview conducted by Toni Negri for the magazine

Futur antérieur , Deleuze defended his fidelity to Marxism, that is, the
idea that political philosophy finds its fate in the analysis and criticism
of capitalism as an immanent system that constantly moves its limits
and constantly re-establishes them on an expanded scale (Capital being
itself the very limit). Furthermore, he also defended a re-evaluation of
its objects and its instruments along the lines of a differential typology
of macro and micro-assemblages as determinants of social life (Deleuze
1990: 229-39).
Substituting infra-structures for life or desire, as constitutive
dimensions of power formations, did not imply giving up on Marx, if,
as Derrida suggests, Marx had already alerted us to the historicity and
the possible aging of his work; that is, to the necessity of transforming
his own thesis to confront the unpredictability of new knowledge, new
Minor Marxism: An Approach to a New Political Praxis 103
techniques, new political data (Derrida 1993: 35). On the other hand,
it did imply the problem of the type of struggle that such a shift in
the theory could produce at the level of praxis. Lines of flight (rather
than social contradictions), minorities (instead of classes), and war
machines (against the State apparatus) did not entail a change in the
conceptual framework of the analysis without requiring, at the same
time, a profound renewal of the issues that shape militant praxis.
And that renovation was imperative once we recognise that the
analysis of society in terms of assemblages of desire -the concept that
Deleuze prefers over Foucaulťs concept of dispositifs (deployments
or devices) of power -implied a break with any logic of progress or
libertarian teleology. In fact, from sovereign societies to disciplinary
societies, and from disciplinary societies to control societies, the
adjustment of collective assemblages is the expression of a change, but
not necessarily a change for the better:
It is possible that the hardest confinements may come to seem part of a happy
benevolent past, taking into account the forms of control in open spaces that
emerge . . . liberations as submissions have to be confronted one by one in its
own way
finding [creating] new weapons. (Deleuze 1990: 24 1-2 ļ1
The awareness of the impossibility of any totalisation of reality by

means of representation -i.e., the assumption of the local value of our
theoretical instruments- as well as the renunciation of any kind of
'structural messianism' (Derrida 1993: 102) -i.e., the desertion of any
promise of emancipation -embodies the demand for a thought capable
of confronting the biopolitical mutations of capital, nonetheless, at the
same time it leads struggle to a dispersion without precedent.
The 'minor' understood as a line of flight or a war machine did not
establish the basis of a revolutionary political programme,2 it actually
developed in the very opposite direction, that of the organisation logics
of traditional political movements (in this sense, Guattari reminds us
that 'the search for a big unification of resistance forces would just make
the work of the semiotisation of capital easier',3 and Deleuze says that
there is no such thing as a left-wing government -there are governments
more or less receptive to the claims of the left, but the left has nothing
to do with the form of the State or the logics of government).
Taking this into account, we should not be surprised when,
confronted with the political dimension of Deleuze's work, Tony Negri
speaks from the paradoxical place of the militant who finds in this
philosophy a powerful inspiration to re-think the movement, but in
1 04 Eduardo Pellejero
another sense, does not understand how it could be institutionalised:

'How could minor-becoming be effective? How could resistance become
insurrection? Reading your writings, I always doubt the way these
questions can be answered, even if I find in your works an impulse that
forces me to reformulate them theoretically and pragmatically' (Deleuze
1990: 234). Negri celebrates the publishing of Mille Plateaux , which he
considers a remarkable work of political philosophy, but regrets a tragic
note in its excessive theoretical will, which leaves every problem open
and does not determine where it can lead us.4
Here I pose the problem from a revolutionary perspective, but
the questions raised by Negri could certainly also be raised from a
progressive perspective; as is the case with Mengue, when he writes:
If Deleuze offers us productive tools to emancipate us from the past and

encourage us to commit the matricide of History, matrix of modernity, he just
liberates us from it to throw us into an-historic becomings, but disconnected
from any social or political effectuation . . . the marriage between the
spontaneist anarchism of the untimely and the long-term work of inscribing
it on things and institutions is impossible . . . they have opposite political
directions . . . The untimely does not lead to any form of institution . . . That
is, the guerrilla has deserted the political field closing itself on an unassailable
but just ethical position. (Mengue 2003: 17, 155, 157)
In other words, the new instruments of analysis of capitalism, developed

by Deleuze and Guattari, challenge - for Negri -the historical sense
of struggle. If the de-totalisation, locality and dispersion of struggle
come together with the renouncement to any historical possibility of
revolution, why go on fighting? What are these lines of flight, subversion
processes or forms of resistance worth, if revolution is, by definition,
condemned?
Nevertheless, an idea of militant praxis is not that strange to Deleuze,
who is looking for concepts that may bring us to an art-historical sense
of struggle. Such a pragmatics could be put in terms of a series of
impossibilities (as Deleuze would say): 1) the impossibility of a successful
totalisation of life by power (thus, the impossibility of the fulfilment of
History in the present); 2) the impossibility of any lasting subtraction of
life from power (thus, the impossibility of the fulfilment of History in the
future); and 3) the impossibility of the acceptance of the state of things,
of the actual stratifications of life by power (thus, the impossibility of
the recognition of History in the past).
What we have, therefore, is a notion of a militant praxis that, without
giving in to the demands of power, but at the same time without aspiring
to power, embraces -beyond government and opposition -the vocation

of resistance.5 Thus:
1) Deleuze affirms, against all strategies of totalisation of life by
power, against discipline or modulation of life by its dispositifs , that
resistance comes first; i.e., that there is an essential contingency working
out the inner nature of the social. Society is not a given totality: it
is a puzzle of heterogeneous pieces, which do not always fit together
('here lies the problem of the world that globalisation wanted to
reshape: pieces do not fit', says Marcos, in Siete piezas sueltas del
rompecabezas mundial6 [Subcomandante Marcos 1997]). Consequently,
power formations are inhabited by an essential powerlessness. The
social field is not composed by isolated and immutable formations: only
stratifications of knowledge and power may give some stability to it,
but in itself it is unstable, agitated, changing, as if depending on a
'paradoxical apriori', on a 'micro-agitation' (Deleuze 1986: 91).7 There
is no dispositif that, besides the points that it connects, does not imply
relatively free or liberated points: points of creativity, points of mutation,
points of resistance. The social field leaks everywhere. Lines of flight are
the primary determinations, they are objective lines that pass through a
society.
2) Deleuze does not ignore the historical failure of modern
revolutionary projects. The way revolutionary groups betray their task
is well known, but does not scare Deleuze (Deleuze 2002: 278; Deleuze
1995: 'G comme Gauche'). And if he admits that we will never assist
again to a clear major break, opening a new kind of society, he also
claims that revolutions -historically failing -produce effects immanently
(incalculable effects) in that very history within which they fail. In this
sense, in a 1988 interview, Deleuze said that 'there is a whole dimension
of revolution that history does not catch: its becoming (another
language, another subject, another object)' (Deleuze and Guattari 1991:
96-7), so, 'when it is said that revolutions have an infamous future,
nothing has really been said yet about the revolutionary-becoming of
people' (Deleuze 1990: 209).
3) So, Deleuze does not defend the ideals of a historical future, where
a collective and lasting expression of liberated or egalitarian life could
come to be true, nonetheless he wagers on the freedom effects of pure
explosions of desire:
even when revolutions failed, that did not prevent people from becoming
revolutionary... If someone says to me: 'You will see when they succeed,
when they win ... It will not be good.' But then problems will not be the
same, a new situation will be created and new becomings will break out.
In situations of tyranny, of oppression, men have to become-revolutionary,
because there is no other thing to do. (Deleuze 1995: 'G comme Gauche')
Briefly stated, Deleuze passes from REVOLUTION as the end of

history, to revolution as a line of transformation, that is, to the
affirmation of resistance, at the expense of revolution conceived as the
radical and irreversible advent of a society finally totalised, not divided,
reconciled.
A logics of the ephemeral, unpredictable, neutral event , substitutes for
the global, determinisi and teleological dialectic of advent .
This is the first positive principle (although in-voluntaristic) of
Deleuze's militant praxis: 'becoming-revolutionary, without a future
of revolution', 'a bifurcation, a divergence from the law, an unstable
state that opens a new field of the possible', and which 'can be
contradicted, repressed, recuperated, betrayed, but always entails
something insurmountable' (Deleuze 1995: 'G comme Gauche'8;
Deleuze 2003: 216). It is a matter of life, that takes place inside
individuals as in the exteriority of society, creating new relations with
the body, time, sexuality, culture, work; changes that 'do not wait
for revolution, neither prefigure it, even if they are revolutionaries on
their own: they have within themselves the power of resistance proper
of poetic life' (Deleuze 2002: 200-1) (that is, displacing desire or
reorganising life, make useless the dispositifs of knowledge and power
that used to channel them).
In other words, those processes find their value in the fact that, by
the time they take place, they escape from constituted knowledge and
dominant powers, even if later they are continued in new dispositifs
of knowledge and power.9 The object of struggle, in this sense, is no
more the fulfilment of a possibility, becoming essential divergence and
multiplication of perspectives.10 Zouravichbili reminds us that in The
German Ideology Marx and Engels defined communism exactly this way
(in opposition to Utopian socialism): 'Communism is . . . neither a state
that has to be created, nor an ideal for the ruling of society. We call
communism the real movement that abolishes the actual state' (Marx
and Engels 1976: 33).
Anyway, for these openings of the possible to be something other
than a vision, for this new sensibility to be asserted, it is necessary
to create proper assemblages. That creation is, after all, the task that
gives consistency to this new militant praxis (therefore it is its second
principle): the elaboration of new assemblages and the struggle for the
associated rights:
When a social mutation takes place, it is not enough to think of the

consequences or effects following lines of economical or political causality.
It is necessary that the society creates collective assemblages, associated to
the new subjectivity, in order to mature the mutation . . . There is no solution
unless it is creative. Only creative reconversions will contribute to resolving
the actual crisis. (Deleuze 2003: 216-17)
This creation of assemblages covers the distance between becoming-

revolutionary and 'left-wing civism' (according to the sharp formula
of Claire Parnet). On account of the fact that, if events overcome
any committed will (that is, events do not depend on objective
or subjective possibility), to embrace or to ignore them defines an
essential difference, that allows Deleuze to distinguish pragmatically
left from right.11 In this sense, the left-wing is defined by the search
for assemblages in order to extend the movements triggered by
events (and then, by the invention of rights from the new material
conditions generated by mutations of desire). While the right-wing
defines itself by the denial of movement and the opposition to any
form of redistribution, the left-wing 'is a passion for procedures ... the
collective catch of dynamics for the de-stratification of structures and re-
arrangement of life and society following different forms of equilibrium'
(Guattari 1984: 4). 12
Nevertheless, if, according to Deleuze, May '68 is enough for the
purpose of illustrating what he understands by revolutionary-becoming,
it is not enough to illustrate the subjective reconversions.13 Even
creative and innovative answers to the objective and subjective demands
of the mutations unchained by the event -the American New Deal,
the Japanese take-off, and Iranian Muslim fundamentalism -imply all
kinds of ambiguities and reactionary structures. May '68, on the
other hand, was quickly recoded by the French government (with the
help of the PCF). That is, even at the level of objectivity and
the conscious and unconscious subjectivity of individuals and social
groups, there are mutations of unpredictable consequences; power shows
great shrewdness and a huge capacity for adaptation to the new forms
of sensibility and new types of human relations resulting from the
different 'mutations' (commercial recovery of marginal 'inventions';
relative tolerance in relation to zones of laissez faire , etc.). In other
words, a semi-tolerated, semi-stimulated dissent is part of the system
(and is instrumentally recovered by it).14
Creative articulation of the lines of flight in assemblages that allow

them to mature is not just possible and desirable, but constitutes
the constructivist vector of this new militant praxis. In La révolution
moléculaire Guattari will make this the cornerstone of his political
philosophy. The revolutionary character of the lines of flight that cross
through a given society depends on their articulation, on the convergence
of the subjective lines of flight with the objective lines of decoding of
the system in suitable assemblages, creating an irreversible aspiration to
new spaces of freedom. And Guattari offers us a minor example, one
which is much less ambiguous than the examples given by Deleuze -I
am referring to the case of free radio in the 1980s: an assemblage
where the technological evolution (in particular, the miniaturisation of
transmitters, and the fact that they could be 'assembled' by amateurs),
'concurred' with the collective aspiration for new media of expression.
Another example of these objective and subjective mutations are the
communities that appeared everywhere in the 1960s and '70s, in
consonance with new musical genres, from rock to punk -with all
the technical innovations that they presupposed, from amplifiers and
synthesizers to acids, as well as the changes in subjective and objective
conditions: the baby-boom, the welfare state, etc. Another example we
know better is the internet. (From another point of view, maybe we
could also inscribe all these minor examples into a major Marxist line,
if, as Raya Dunayevskaya suggests, Marx set out, as a fundamental
axis of his conception, the daily creation of new forms of struggle
and new human relations between workers, between workers and the
production infrastructures, etc. Dunayevskaya relates this conception
of Marxism, more concerned with the fulfilment of freedom that with
the conquest of institutions, to the creative acts performed by the
Paris Commune, or, even, during the Russian revolution, to those
actions that, in the auto-emancipating moment of birth, gave way
to totally new forms of labour assemblages - such as the Soviets
[Dunayevskaya 2004: 208]). 15
Obviously, lines of flight are not necessarily revolutionary; a line
of migration (sub-Saharan or Cuban) can end in death (at sea), or in
much harder dispositifs than those which it left behind (slavery). And,
obviously, these micro-revolutions do not lead automatically to a social
revolution, to a new society, an economy or a culture liberated from
capitalism.
Finally, there is no way to compare, according to a progressive set of
values, which regimes are more harsh or more bearable (I mean, it is
possible to do so retrospectively, but not at the moment of adopting a
line of action); the power of resistance or, on the contrary, submission

to control, is decided in the course of each attempt. What matters is
that, suddenly, we do not feel condemned in the same old way anymore;
a problem which nobody could see a way out of, a problem in which
everybody was trapped, suddenly ceases to exist, and we ask ourselves
what we were talking about. Suddenly we are in another world, as Péguy
said, the same problems do not arise anymore -though there will be
many more, of course (Péguy 1957: 300-1).
Such is the scope and the limits of this new militant praxis that in a
certain way responds to the demands of what Jean-Luc Nancy named
'literary communism' (Nancy 1983). As we saw at the beginning, in
1990, Negri could not help feeling a certain reluctance when confronted
with it. Ten years later, however, with the publication of Empire , Negri
offered us a free re-appropriation of Deleuze's thesis.
Deleuze and Guattari - after Foucault -appear then as the founding
fathers of a new form of criticism, redefining the space of political
and social struggles in relation to 'classic' Marxism: creation of spaces
of freedom, strategies of torsion of power, conquest of individual and
collective forms of subjectivity, invention of new forms of life, came to
constitute the new subversive grammar.
Negri also seems to embrace the idea of an an-historical sense of
struggle, at least if we read in a Deleuzian way the epigraph by William
Morris that opens the book ('Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing
that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and then it turns
out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they
meant under another name' (Negri and Hardt 2000).
But we do not need to read much more to understand that this
post-structural comprehension of biopower that renews materialist
thought remains still unsatisfactory for Negri, because it just (and only)
provides the elements for a superficial and ephemeral resistance (political
work, for Negri, is not simply resistance, but an alternative political
organisation, the institution of a new constituent power beyond the
Empire).
For the wilful militancy of Empire , Deleuzian praxis is not enough.
Attached to a classic Marxism, Negri renews once more the commitment
to a dialectics in which we had no more faith ('We claim that Empire
is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better
than the forms of society and ways of production that came before
it
the cruel regimes of modern power and also increases the potential for
liberation'16 [Negri and Hardt 2000: 43-4]), even if he denies its more
1 1 0 Eduardo Pellejero
oppressive historicist elements (This approach breaks methodologically

with every philosophy of history in so far as it refuses any deterministic
conception of historical development and any "rational" celebration of
the result' [Negri and Hardt 2000: 66]). In this sense, the problem for
Negri is still the problem of a new materialist teleology (in the line of
Spinoza and the Theological-Political Treatise,17 but maybe, as well, in
the line of Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic , that is: there is
no sense of History but an elimination of non-sense).
The problem lies elsewhere for Deleuze. There is no doubt that we do
not possess, neither in fact nor by right, any reliable means to free and,
a fortiori , to preserve the becomings that undermine the dispositifs of
knowledge and power in which we are compromised: 'What condemns
us to an everlasting "restlessness" . . . We do not know how such a
group can change, how it can fall back in history . . . We do not dispose
of the image of a proletariat which just needs to gain consciousness'
(Deleuze 1990: 209). But this uncertainty does not imply any imperative
of demobilisation.
Lacking the geopolitical options known decades ago, when it was still
possible to chose between first and second worlds -thus, exposed either
to inscription in the first world or sinking into the third -the struggle
goes on. Lacking every form of social utopia -thus open to the dispersion
of its local objectives -the struggle goes on. Deprived of any progressive
project, of the idea that if we do everything possible things will improve,
will change for the better -thus, aware of its tragic destiny -the struggle
goes on.
Deleuze stakes the whole of his political thought on the effectuation
and contra-effectuation of the untimely as the irruption or inscription
of events in history, but at the same time he transvalues the essence of
the event, which ceases to constitute the sense of History, becoming the
agent of a redistribution of affects, relationships and singularities: the
very revolutionary potential of events lies in their novelty or discrepancy
in relation to a specific situation (objective modification of a state of
things, but also the subjective assemblages of resistances and lines of
flight):18 'Against apocalyptic history, there is a sense of history that
matches with the possible, with the multiplicity of the possible, with the
profusion of the possible in every moment' (Deleuze 2003: 183-4).
Deleuze and Guattari are not philosophers of liberation; the chances
of transformation of the material organisation of life and desire, the
possibility of molecular re-distributions of power and knowledge, do
not imply for them the abolition of molar organisation as such. Which
does not mean that revolution
Minor Marxism: An Approach to a New Political Praxis 1 1 1
is just a dream, something that is never achieved, or that is achieved betraying

it. On the contrary, it means to posit revolution as a plane of immanence
or infinite movement, as long as these features are connected with the
struggle against capitalism, here and now, and propel new struggles every
time previous struggles are betrayed. (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 97)
What is to be done? The old Leninist question still hangs over us, with
an irresistible weight, even if we are convinced that there is no answer
but a creative one (but 'to create' is not a satisfactory answer for the
question).
The question would lie, today, before and beyond any programme of
action: How to embrace such politics, a politics that proposes struggle,
not as revolution, but just as resistance? How to embrace it when we
are fully aware of the local, strategic and non-totalisable value of the
changes we can aspire to?
We gave up utopias. Perhaps we will never grow up, as Kant wished.
Philosophy relinquishes, in this sense, the possession of power (by right)
and the (factual) property of knowledge.
Maybe this is why, unlike Marx's, Deleuze's work does not constitute
the insurmountable philosophy of our time. But in its imperative
precariousness, in its radical minority, it still shows a unique critical
power, and outlines maps on the desert of the real (in a desert full of
mirages). In its joyful proclamation of a thought of immanence, beyond
any reliance on moral or messianic structures, it still gives us reasons for
resistance, to go on thinking, when it comes impossible to go on seeing
certain things without doing nothing, or go on living as we do. (Neither
dreams nor hopes, not even fidelity to old utopias;19 it is just a question
of perception, of sensibility, and, immediately, a problem of creation.20)
The production and administration of inequality, of injustice, of
misery, are still a pervasive reality in our societies. The attempts of
the most different formations of power to control life collide, and will
keep colliding, with the shocking fact that the pieces do not fit. Power
claims to deal with this fact just as a spare, as junk. But included in
that spare are thousands, millions of people convicted every day (people
who die from diseases that a simple pill could cure, victims of collateral
damage from anti-terrorist operations, but also students educated for
unemployment, adolescents enclosed in urban ghettos or suburbs, elderly
people without pensions or social security).
We do not have faith in the advent of a new happy world, but we
cannot renounce to the exercise of a resistant thought, in the difficult,
unpredictable and dangerous intersection of our powerlessness and our
ignorance. Without it, the various dystopias that may be glimpsed on

the horizon would see the space that distances them from their total or
totalitarian fulfilment surmounted.21
Thus, the new revolutionary praxis will be, in the first place, a work
of de-totalisation of life (the creation of a world in which many worlds
could fit, in which all possible worlds could fit). And it will be, also,
an everlasting work, because power learns from its mistakes and knows
how to take advantage of its defeats. (But will we stop working for that
reason?) After all, as Deleuze and Guattari say:
the success of a struggle lies just in the very struggle, in the vibrations, in the
embracing, in the openness that it gives to men at the moment it takes place,
and that compounds in itself a monument, always in progress, as those graves
where every new traveler adds a stone. The victory of a struggle is immanent,
and consists in the new relations it sets up between men, even if they do not
last more than their material fusion, and they quickly give place to division,
to betrayal. (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 167)
Thought is the monument of that struggle, always to start over again

in the labyrinth of the mixed up battles in which we are compromised
every day. A monument that does not commemorate anything, does not
honour anyone, but whispers at the ear of the future the feelings that
embody the everlasting suffering of men, and its recreated protest, its
sustained fight.
In this sense, struggle without any future of revolution comes to trans-
value the imperatives of compromise we inherited from past generations;
it comes to give them sense, necessarily a new sense, in these winter years
of every man for himself.
I think of the words Sartre raised so many times as a flag: 'Everything
I do is probably destined to failure, but I still do it, against all odds,
because it has to be done.'22
But I think also, as counterpoint, of the tough, excessive, desperate
order- word, in which - against the setbacks of our recent history -the
sense of a remarkable event that goes by the name of Ernesto 'Che'
Guevara survives:
Hasta la victoria siempre!
Notes
1. There is no hope of progress, no expectation of a complete vanishing of

problems, but that does not signify the absence of an immanent hope, that is,
hope of getting out -through creative solutions -of the mousetraps (Sartre) in
which we find ourselves caught. Each dispositif implies new submissions, but
also, certainly, new lines of flight: 'Dans le capitalisme il y a donc un caractère
nouveau pris par les lignes de fuite, et aussi des potentialités révolutionnaires
d'un type nouveau. Vous voyez, il y a de l'espoir' (Deleuze 2002: 376).
As a matter of fact, from this statement to the affirmation of Empire as a
better sociopolitical assemblage (in the same sense that Marx maintained that
capitalism was better than the modes of production that preceded it) there is a
long way that won't be surpassed by Deleuze.
2. Even if UAnti-Oedipe ends with a 'Program for desiring machines',
schizoanalysis 'does not have a proper political program to propose' (Deleuze
and Guattari 1973: 380). On the contrary, it raises a series of conceptual
contrasts that allow us to analyse social fields or processes, evaluating the
assemblages at stake (see Patton 2000: 71).
3. 'Well, I don't think so because, once again, the molecular revolution is not
something that will constitute a program. It's something that develops precisely
in the direction of diversity, of a multiplicity of perspectives, of creating the
conditions for the maximum impetus of processes of singularisation. It's not a
question of creating agreement; on the contrary, the less we agree, the more we
create an area, a held of vitality in different branches of this phylum of molecular
revolution, and the more we reinforce this area. It's a completely different
logic from the organisational, arborescent logic that we know in political
or union movements' (Guattari and Stivale 1985). See also Anne Querrien,
'Esquizoanálisis, capitalismo y libertad. La larga marcha de los desahliados',
in Guattari (2004: 28).
4. Negri's worry about the institutionalisation of Deleuzian political philosophy
was not strange to Guattari, who regretted the difficulties that molecular
revolutions have creating links between singular achievements: 'Will these micro-
revolutions, these profound impugnations of social relationships, be put away to
restricted spheres of the social held? Or will they be articulated in new "social
segmentations" that won't imply the restitution of hierarchy and segregation?
In short, will all these micro-revolutions set up a new revolution? Will they
be capable of "assuming" not just the local problems, but the management of
big economic sets? . . . How far could these molecular revolutions go? Aren't
they condemned, at best, to vegetate in German style ghettos? Is the molecular
sabotage of the dominant social subjectivity enough in itself? Should molecular
revolutions make alliances with social forces at the molar (global) level? . . . How
can we imagine, then, revolutionary war machines of a new type that could graft,
at the same time, into the manifest social contradictions and these molecular
revolutions?' (Guattari 2004: 54). 'We cannot be content with these analogies
and affinities; we must also try to construct a social practice, to construct new
ways of intervention, this time no longer in molecular, but molar relationships,
in political and social power relations, in order to avoid watching the systematic,
recurring defeat that we knew during the '70s, particularly in Italy with the
enormous rise of repression linked to an event, in itself repressive, which was the
rise of terrorism' (Guattari and Stivale 1985). This very same problem concerns
Deleuze. But the multiplicity of revolutionary focuses does not represent a
lack or a weakness for him, but a power (potentia) of resistance to power
(potestas). Talking with Foucault, in fact, Deleuze said that 'les réseaux, les
liaisons transversales entre ces points actifs discontinus, d'un pays à un autre
ou à l'intérieur d'un même pays', even when imprecise, they imply 'qu'on ne
peut en rien toucher à un point quelconque d'application sans qu'on se trouve
confronté à cet ensemble diffus, que dès lors on est forcément amené à vouloir
faire sauter, à partir de la plus petite revendication qui soit. Toute défense ou
attaque révolutionnaire partielle rejoint de cette façon la lutte ouvrière' (Deleuze
2002: 287-98).
5. Cf. Tomás Segovia's 'Alegatorio', in Subcomandante Marcos (1997): 'First, I

beg you not to mix up Resistance with political opposition. Opposition does not
oppose to power but to government, and its complete and successful form is the
party; on the other hand, Resistance, now by definition, can't be a party: It is
not made for government, but to . . . resist.'
6. Cf. Alemán (2007: 91): 'There is no reality, as consistent and hegemonic as
it may appear, as, for example, actual capitalism, that could be considered
definitive
of the historic reality of Capitalism. Even when the way out or the passage to
another reality is defered, even if that transit has no guarantee and could stay
unfinished, even if that other reality, different of Capitalism, could not be call
Socialism.'
7. Every assemblage presents, on one hand, a stratification more or less hard (let us
say, the dispositifs of power; Deleuze says: 'a concretion of power, of desire and
territoriality or reterritorialisation, ruled by the abstractions of a transcendent
law'), but, on the other hand, implies points of deterritorialisation, lines of flight
where it is disarticulated and transformed ('where desire is liberated of all its
concretions and abstractions', says Deleuze).
8. 'Par "nouveau champ de possibles", il faut donc entendre autre chose: le mot
possible a cessé de designer la série des alternatives réelles et imaginaires (ou
bien. . . ou bien. . . ), l'ensemble des disjonctions exclusives caractéristiques d'une
époque et d'une société données. Il concerne à présent l'émergence dynamique
de nouveau. C'est l'inspiration bergsonienne de la pensée politique de Deleuze'
(Zourabichvili 1998: 339).
9. '[I]ls ont bien une spontanéité rebelle
moment-là qui est important, c'est la chance qu'il faut saisir
monde, c'est ce qui nous manque le plus; nous avons tout à fait perdu le
monde, on nous en a dépossédé. Croire au monde, c'est aussi bien susciter des
événements même petits qui échappent au contrôle, ou faire naître de nouveaux
espaces-temps, même de surface ou de volume réduits' (Deleuze 1990: 238).
10. 'L'événement n'ouvre pas un nouveau champ du réalisable, et le "champ de
possibles" ne se confond pas avec la délimitation du réalisable dans une société
donnée (même s'il en indique ou en induit le redécoupage). L'ouverture de
possible est-elle alors un but, le problème étant moins de construire l'avenir
que d'entretenir des perspectives à son sujet
de possibilité, qui n'a plus rien à voir avec la disponibilité actuelle d'un
projet a réaliser, ou avec l'acception vulgaire du mot 'utopie' (l'image d'une
nouvelle situation qu'on prétend substituer brutalement à l'actuelle, espérant
rejoindre le réel à partir de l'imaginaire: opération sur le réel, plutôt que du réel
même). Le possible arrive par l'événement et non l'inverse; l'événement politique
par excellence - la révolution - n'est pas la réalisation d'un possible, mais une
ouverture de possible ... Le possible est le virtuel : c'est lui que la droite nie, et
que la gauche dénature en se le représentant comme projet' (Zourabichvili 1998:
345).
1 1 . Anyway, Guattari considers that one of the tasks of political commitment could
consist in the precipitation of events: it consists in the active research of those
differences that take place against the homogenising movement of integrated
world capitalism.
12. Deleuzian involuntarism collides with Gramscian concept of political
commitment: pessimism of reason, optimism of will. The left-wing, indeed,
generally defined itself through voluntarism, that is, by means of the idea that
if we do all we have to do, that if we do everything we can (following the
guidelines of a revolutionary project, in this case), things will necessarily change
for better. Deleuzian involuntarism implies a problematisation of this idea, but

this certainly does not mean a total alienation of the political by the pessimism
of reason. In fact, what is put in question by Deleuze is the hope of a total
fulfilment of revolutionary projects, not the will of change. Then, the question
that has to be raised is: what kind of action is possible without the hope of
its total fulfilment? Does the impugnation of any project's fulfilment imply the
impugnation of the very notion of will? I would say that Deleuze probably meets
up here with the sense that Duns Scot or Schopenhauer used to give to the
concept of voluntarism, that is, the principle according to which will is the first of
human spiritual powers (previous, in that sense, to reason or intellect). Certainly,
this will is not for Deleuze a subjective will, but an impersonal, event-by-product
will (but isn't this the case with all doctrines of will?). Deep down, Deleuzian
involuntarism states that a subjective mutation can't be decided, that is, that a
subjective mutation could never be the outcome of a dedicated fulfilment of an
idea postulated by reason; it is, indeed, the impersonal will of the event which
decides a new sharing out of the affects, a new circumscription of the intolerable
('the event is the very revolutionary potential itself' [Zourabichvili 1998: 354]);
it is that impersonal will in relation to which we can react (oppose some kind of
resistance) or respond (the subjective mutation is real, but it must be prolonged
by a rational assemblage of the new relations that it provokes or shows). In this
sense, as suggested by François Zourabichvili (who has said the most interesting
things about this), change is not to come, but is inscribed as a tendency in the
contradictions of a situation in which we are compromised, that authorises us to
talk about the future without having a relapse into fantasy; it can be deciphered
in the very becoming of present (actuality), by opposition to the structure of
fulfilment that has the future as an image thanks to the dialectical apparatus.
Between the act of deciphering the future at the level of the virtual, and its
assemblage at the level of the actual, there must exist an act of creation, and
not the mere fulfilment of a possible (system of alternatives): 'le néant de volonté
procède à la destitution d'un faux problème: le système des alternatives. Son
envers, ou la consistance positive de la politique, est l'élaboration expérimentale
de nouveaux agencements concrets, est l'élaboration expérimentale de nouveaux
agencements concrets, et la lutte pour l'affirmation des droits correspondants'
(Zourabichvili 1998: 354). In short, even if it is not possible to talk about
hope in the context of this militant praxis, neither can we conclude a politics
of total despair. Deleuze writes: 'ne pas savoir d'avance comment quelqu'un,
éventuellement, se trouvera capable d'instaurer en lui et hors de lui un processus
de rationalisation. Certes il y a tous les cas perdus, le désespoir. Mais s'il y a
une chance, de quoi quelqu'un a-t-il besoin, comment procède-t-il pour sortir
de ses démolitions? Tous peut-être, nous naissons sur un sol de démolition,
mais nous ne gâcherons aucune chance. Il n'y a pas de Raison pure, ou de
rationalité par excellence. Il y a des processus de rationalisation, hétérogènes,
très différents suivant les domaines, les époques, les groupes et les personnes.
Ils ne cessent d'avorter, de glisser, d'aller dans des impasses, mais aussi de se
reprendre ailleurs, avec de nouvelles mesures, de nouveaux rythmes, de nouvelles
allures' (Deleuze 1988: 14-15).
13. '[SJuivre les flux qui constituent autant de lignes de fuite dans la société
capitaliste, et opérer des ruptures, imposer des coupures au sein même
du déterminisme social et de la causalité historique; dégager les agents
collectifs d'énonciation capables de former les nouveaux énoncés de désir;
constituer non pas une avant-garde, mais des groupes en adjacence avec les
processus sociaux, et qui s'emploient seulement à faire avancer une vérité
sur des chemins où elle ne s'engage jamais d'ordinaire; bref, une subjectivité
1 1 ó Eduardo Pellejero
révolutionnaire par rapport à laquelle il n'y a plus lieu de se demander ce

qui est premier, des déterminations économiques, politiques, libidinales, etc.,
puisqu'elle traverse les ordres traditionnellement séparés; saisir ce point de
rupture où, précisément, l'économie politique et l'économie libidinale ne font
plus qu'un
prétention d'avant-garde ou d'hégémonie, simple support permettant le transfert
et la levée des inhibitions' (Deleuze 2002: 279). (The movement of March 22 was
an anti-establishment student movement that, headed by Daniel Cohn-Bendit,
would be the revolutionary seed of May '68.)
14. Yet, everything comes to flee again, opposing to the biopolitical articulation
of society a series of insurmountable becomings in the domain of libidinal
economy: Daily relationships between women and men, homosexuals and
heterosexuals, children, adults, etc., as well as production mutations, imply
coefficients of freedom irretrievable to the dominant system (Guattari 2004:
68-9): 'J'ai beaucoup de mal à imaginer une petite communauté libérée qui
se maintiendrait au travers des flux de la société répressive, comme l'addition
d'individus tour à tour affranchis. Si le désir constitue en revanche la texture
même de la société dans son ensemble, y compris dans ses mécanismes de
reproduction, un mouvement de libération peut "cristalliser'' dans l'ensemble
de la société' (Deleuze 2002: 370) (it is Guattari who speaks this way).
15. Cf. Kaufman (2007: 67): 'A left-wing perspective would be a perspective
involved with the antagonisms that structure the conditions of injustice, much
more than with the institutional modalities that result from this concern.'
16. 'Although Empire may have played a role in putting an end to colonialism
and imperialism, it nonetheless constructs its own relationships of power
based on exploitation that are in many respects more brutal than those
it destroyed
construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia
for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that
involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the nation-
state to protect against global capital. We claim that Empire is better in the same
way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and
modes of production that came before it' (Negri and Hardt 2000: 61).
17. 'In contrast, any postmodern liberation must be achieved within this world,
on the plane of immanence, with no possibility of any even Utopian
outside
that Spinoza proclaimed at the dawn of modernity when he claimed that the
prophet produces its own people' (Negri and Hardt 2000: 83). 'There is not
Anally here any determinism or utopia: this is rather a radical counter-power,
ontologically grounded not on any " vide pour le futur " but on the actual activity
of the multitude, its creation, production, and power -a materialist teleology'
(Negri and Hardt 2000: 66).
18. 'La rupture des schemes, ou la fuite hors des clichés, ne conduit certes pas
à un état de résignation ou de révolte tout intérieure: résister se distingue de
réagir. Résister est le propre d'une volonté dérivée de l'événement, qui s'alimente
à l'intolérable. L'événement est le "potentiel révolutionnaire" même, qui se
tarit lorsqu'il est rabattu sur des images toutes faites (clichés de la misère et
la revendication)' (Zourabichvili 1998: 354). 'Un événement politique est du
même type: une nouvelle répartition des affects, une nouvelle circonscription de
l'intolérable ' (Zourabichvili 1998: 341).
19. 'Pourquoi se révolter? En dehors de l'intérêt spéciflque qui motive telle lutte
pour ceux qui sont directement concernés, quelle raison de s'engager au côté
de la subversion? Est-ce une question de morale ou d'éthique, de simple dignité
Minor Marxism: An Approach to a New Political Praxis 1 17
pour soi-même, comme on a envie de répondre, qui plus que toute autre chose
nous obligerait à écouter la voix des insoumis, des victimes, des singularités qui
se dressent un moment, un instant se soulèvent? . . . Pourquoi se révolter? Par
rêve, espoir, fidélité à l'utopie . . . Soit. Mais, du coup, le caractère de ce désir
le rapproche dangereusement du désir freudien, dirait-on. Ce désir, en effet,
à jamais insatisfait historiquement, comment peut-il se maintenir , et relancer
continûment dans l'histoire des actions toujours nouvelles sans sombrer dans le
découragement, le désespoir? . . . Éthique et rébellion. Qui a pour mot d'ordre:
On a toujours raison de se révolter
état social et politique, a disparu. Ce qu'il en reste donc, c'est, exactement, un
mode de vie, un style d'existence , avec une forme particulière de rapport à soi et
aux autres' (Mengue 2003 : 146-57).
20. 'Oh ne peut que répondre à l'événement, parce qu'on ne peut pas vivre dans un
monde qu'on ne supporte plus, en tant qu'on ne le supporte plus. Il y a là une
responsabilité spéciale, étrangère à celle des gouvernements et des sujets majeurs,
responsabilité proprement révolutionnaire. On n'est ici responsable de rien, ni de
personne; on ne représente ni un projet ni les intérêts d'une collectivité (puisque
ces intérêts sont précisément en train de changer et qu'on ne sait pas bien encore
dans quel sens). On est responsable devant l'événement' (Zourabichvili 1998:
347).
21. I think that the generic threat of totalisation is, nowadays, much more worrying
than eventual totalitarian threats. Capitalistic totalisation - under the forms of
control societies (Deleuze), integrated world capitalism (Guattari), or empire
(Negri-Hardt) - implies a vast number of forms that go much further than
dictatorial (military or party based) totalitarianisms. Current capitalism, indeed,
establishes in our societies a kind of symbolic totalitarianism, a totalisation that
overdetermines reality by representation, and reaches zones which traditionally
are far away from power. Clumsy forms of totalitarianism are, from this point
of view, just a violent and voluntaristic reaction of states facing up to the failure
of operational totalisations by worldwide legitimated dispositifs of knowledge
and power (and, in this sense, they represent a kind of step backwards in the
direction of archaic dispositifs : discipline, sovereignty, etc.).
22. Cf. Jeanson (1975: 286). I owe this reference to Ignacio Quepons (G. C.), faithful
friend and tireless partner in this patient job of giving form to the impatience of
freedom.
References
Alemán, Jorge (2007) 'Nota sobre una izquierda lacaniana', Pensamiento de los
confines , 20 (June).
Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Foucault , Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Péricles et Verdi: La philosophie de François Châtelet , Paris:
Éditions de Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles (1990) Pourparlers 1972-1990 , Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles (1995) 'L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze', Metropolis , Paris: Arte.
Deleuze, Gilles (2002) L'île deserte et autres textes è. Textes et entretiens 1953-1974 ,
Paris: Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Deux régimes de fous : Textes et entretiens 1975-1995 , Paris:
Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1973) Capitalisme et schizophrénie tome 1:
L'Anti-Oedipe , Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1991) Qu'est-ce que la philosophie ?, Paris:
Éditions de Minuit.
Derrida, Jaques (1993) Spectres de Marx. L'Etat de la dette , le travail du deuil et la
nouvelle Internationale , Paris: Galilée.
Dunayevskaya, Raya (2004) Filosofia y revolución. De Hegel a Sartre y de Marx a
Mao , Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores.
Guattari, Félix (1984) 'La Gauche comme passion processuelle', La Quinzaine
littéraire , 422, pp. 4-5.
Guattari, Félix (1985) Les années d'hiver: 1980-1985 , Paris: Bernard Barrault.
Guattari, Félix (2004) Plan sobre el pianeta. Capitalismo mundial integrado y
revoluciones moleculares , trans. Marisa Pérez Colina, Raúl Sánchez Cedillo, Josep
Sarret, Miguel Denis Norambuena and Lluís Mara Todó, Madrid: Traficantes de
sueños.
Guattari, Félix and Charles J. Stivale (1985) 'Discussion with Felix Guattari', Wayne
State University; available at: http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/stivale.html
Jeanson, Francis (1975) Jean Paul Sartre en su vida , Barcelona: Barrai.
Kaufman, Alejandro (2007) 'Izquierda, violencia y memoria', Pensamiento de los
confines. 20 (June).
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1976) L'idéologie allemande , Paris: Editions
sociales.
Mengue, Philippe (2003) Deleuze et la question de la démocratie , Paris:
L'Harmattan.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (1983) La communauté désoeuvrée. Paris: Christian Bourgois.
Negri, Antonio and Michael Hardt (2000) Empire , Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Patton, Paul (2000) Deleuze and the Politicai , London: Routledge.
Péguy, Charles (1957) Clio: Dialogue de l'histoire et de l'âme païenne , in Charles
Péguy, Oeuvres en prose 1909-1914 , Dijon: Gallimard.
Subcomandante Marcos (1997) 'Siete piezas sueltas del rompecabezas mundial',
Revista Chiapas , 5, México: ERA-IIEC; available at: www.ezln.org
Zourabichvili, François (1998) 'Deleuze et le possible (de l'involontarisme en
politique)', in Eric Alliez (ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Une vie philosophique , Paris:
Synthébo.
DOI: 10.3366/E1 750224109000737

Marxismo Minoritario-Pellejero, Ellen Bothe, Scarso, Deleuze Studies

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Marxismo Minoritario-Pellejero, Ellen Bothe, Scarso, Deleuze Studies

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Minor Marxism: An Approach to a New Political Praxis

Author(s): Eduardo Pellejero, Pauly Ellen Bothe and Davide Scarso

Eduardo Pellejero Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Translated by Pauly Ellen Bothe and Davide Scarso

In 1990, Antonio Negri pointed out some problems with Deleuze's

Keywords: Minor-dialectic, becoming-revolutionary, creation of

In 1990, in an interview conducted by Toni Negri for the magazine

The awareness of the impossibility of any totalisation of reality by

another sense, does not understand how it could be institutionalised:

If Deleuze offers us productive tools to emancipate us from the past and

In other words, the new instruments of analysis of capitalism, developed

to power, embraces -beyond government and opposition -the vocation

Briefly stated, Deleuze passes from REVOLUTION as the end of

When a social mutation takes place, it is not enough to think of the

This creation of assemblages covers the distance between becoming-

Creative articulation of the lines of flight in assemblages that allow

line of action); the power of resistance or, on the contrary, submission

oppressive historicist elements (This approach breaks methodologically

is just a dream, something that is never achieved, or that is achieved betraying

ignorance. Without it, the various dystopias that may be glimpsed on

Thought is the monument of that struggle, always to start over again

Hasta la victoria siempre!

1. There is no hope of progress, no expectation of a complete vanishing of

5. Cf. Tomás Segovia's 'Alegatorio', in Subcomandante Marcos (1997): 'First, I

for better. Deleuzian involuntarism implies a problematisation of this idea, but

révolutionnaire par rapport à laquelle il n'y a plus lieu de se demander ce

DOI: 10.3366/E1 750224109000737

You might also like