THEORETICAL GEOCENTRISM

In his sole authored work and in his collaborations with Guattari, Deleuze frequently deployed the figure of the desert as a means to think life in relation to the territories it makes for itself. He is often seen as a vitalist thinker, a philosopher of creative life in the vein of Henri Bergson, a figure known for his concept of ‘élan vital’, or vital impulse, proposed to account for evolution in nature. Deleuze and Guattari's work is thus sometimes read as a postmodern or neo- Romantic Naturphilosophie, in which life becomes an obscure, quasimystical force. While this has led to them being maligned from an ecocritical point of view, their influence on contemporary theoretical research on ecological and environmental issues is undeniable. Their complex theoretical system has also been mobilised to help theorise the Anthropocene. Indeed, their work of the 1970s and 1980s can be said to have anticipated many questions relevant to the Anthropocene by offering a broad historical view that, even as it addresses contemporary capitalist society, does not limit itself to human temporalities or to ‘history’ narrowly conceived. They offer a ‘political geology’, as Gregg Lambert puts it, that broadens the scope of historical materialism. The pioneering work of Manuel DeLanda has demonstrated how a Deleuzian approach may allow us to conceive of social phenomena such as the Industrial Revolution as part of the deep history of the Earth and of terrestrial matter, and not solely as a chapter of human social development. More recent work has stressed the centrality of the geophilosophical paradigm to understanding Deleuze and Guattari's oeuvre more generally. Their influence may even be said to account for a key part of what some have termed a ‘geological turn’ within the humanities and social sciences.

As I began to suggest in the last chapter, the desert has featured in European philosophy since Nietzsche as a means to think space and spatiality in an age when ontological foundations have been undermined. In a tradition that passes from Heidegger to Derrida and Deleuze via Levinas and Blanchot, Nietzsche's idea of a growing desert of nihilism has been used to describe the devastations of capitalist modernity and the death of God.