Fascism in Deleuze and Guattari

Despite the modest excuse that ‘schizoanalysis as such has strictly no political program to propose’ (AO, 380), two volumes of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia definitely belong to the theoretical and practical speculations on political philosophy. Theoretical in the sense that they, reassessing Spinoza and Nietzsche in their own way, create philosophical smooth spaces which ultimately lead to what might be called the ontology of power (pouvoir); practical not because they insist on the radical politicality of desire itself or the task of politicising molecular desire, but because they keep suggesting ways to prevent lines of flight being blocked off and turning on themselves. Their work is, in short, ‘not so much pro-revolution as it is anti-counterrevolution’ (Buchanan 2008: 117).

A lot of scholars have, however, been very much sceptical of the politicality of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical thinking, arguing that their politics enjoys no specific significance as a domain of thought comparable to aesthetics and philosophy and that they ‘subscribe to violent anti-historicism that leads [them] to insist more and more on the distinction between history and becoming’ (Patton 2011: 115–16). Critics also point out that Deleuze and Guattari’s political thought, if there is any, is focused more on individual and collective forms of desire than on the structural capture of state power, thereby reducing all politics to micropolitics.

Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari are not particularly inclined to refer directly to the political categories that traditional Marxist class politics favours; they rather insist that ‘the impetus for social change was pro-vided by movements of deterritorialization and lines of flight’ (Patton 2011: 116), new ‘geographical’ concepts that illustrate what they call ‘revolutionary-becoming’ (D, 111). The reason why they seem consistently critical of Marxist politics in general relates to their political diagnosis that classical Marxism failed to understand the micropolitical movement of May ‘68. For them, May ‘68 in France was a molecular event in Alain Badiou’s sense, making what spurred it all the more imperceptible if solely approached from the viewpoint of macropolitics.