Gilles Deleuze is a philosopher of revolution and may even be a revolutionary thinker. Revolution is certainly the milieu of his thinking, where he breaks things open.

Whatever their target, his critiques have nothing to do with understanding, nor with attentive or thoughtful action. Instead, Deleuze misunderstands things and these misunderstandings have rules – that is, they repeat. Repetition sets things in motion, transforming them, and Deleuze's metaphysics is constructed for this virtual context of movement and change.

Here understanding offers only a weak mode of thought because understanding is always bound to its historical contingencies. The concept of change, by contrast, which grounds Deleuze's critique, must be radically distinguished from the concept of history. It is in this difference that the effective revolutionary nature of his work may be found.

Revolution is Change

What characterises revolution? In one word: duration. And duration is always something that resists, something that endures. Resistance always has a poetic aspect. Duration goes beyond the limits of the linear or spatial conception of time. In this sense revolutions are monuments of collective action, they are aere perennius, but without spatial existence. There is no room for them. Revolutions exist only in memory, in time. This means that revolution never ‘is’ but rather ‘goes on’. It is an event in time. This temporal, enduring dimension of revolution is also its metaphysical dimension.