Contenu du sommaire : Deleuze/Guattari

Deleuze, Guattari and Marx
In their discussion, Isabelle Garo and Anne Sauvagnargues reexamine the intellectual and political evolution of Deleuze and Guattari, focusing on their relation to Marx and to the Marxism of their time. In particular, they confront their interpretations of the way the works jointly authored by Deleuze and Guattari can be placed within the May 1968 moment and its aftermath. They also reflect on the implications of Deleuze and Guattari's relation to Freudo-Marxism. The underlying question is that of the political meaning of their work and the possibility of a renewal of Marxism which might take them as its starting point.

From One Historic Situation to Another: Deleuze and Guattari and their Aftermath
This text addresses some difficulties encountered reading Deleuze and Guattari “in situation”, in order to suggest a “symptomal reading” of their historico-conceptual moment. It first reexamines the distinction between a “history of revolutions” and “revolutionary-becoming”, in order to explain the meaning of the latter in connection with the Deleuzian concept of event and in the context of the historical sequence which demanded this new concept. The concept of event involves a foreclosed reference to the problem of the revolutionary situation in Marxism; it acknowledges the theoretical difficulties of elaborating a materialist notion of revolutionary situation, but also the political impasses which, in the post-war decades, had brought about a crisis in the representation of the revolutionary subject which Marxism believed it could guarantee. In the light of this double crisis, theoretical and political, the article concludes with an examination of the contemporary reflections of Althusser and Guattari concerning the connection between revolutionary circumstances and political subjectivation.

Psychoanalysis of “Battleship Potemkin”: Desire and Revolution from Reich to Deleuze and Guattari
During the first revolts of 1905, the soldiers, as Lenin noted with a certain perplexity, surrendered and the revolution thus failed fail, although there was nothing which stood as an obstacle to them anymore. The situation calls for a reexamination of the question of power and exploitation in relation to sexuality, and of the conventional reading which argues that the sailors are urged by an uncontrollable unconscious guilt to desire a punishment through the superego. The present article seeks to invert Lenin's question, from an analytic point of view: what is this force which brutally causes burglary and forces the sailors to rebel? How are we to analyse this desire for revolt, which causes them to break out of their dominated condition, till they become, for a while, “revolutionary subjects”? A psychoanalysis of “Battleship Potemkin” permits us to re-examine the question of alienation and the problematic relation between unconscious desire, revolution and subjection. Far removed from the ideological influence which has dominated mainstream psychoanalysis, the investigation which Reich initiated, and which Deleuze and Guattari continued, enables us to interrogate the unconscious and its articulation to politics, up to the final period of Lacan.

Deleuze between Nietzsche and Marx: Universal History, Modern Fact and Becoming-revolutionary
This article examines how Deleuze attempts to conceive the possibility of a non-Hegelian universal history by referring simultaneously to Nietzsche's history of nihilism and to Marx's history of social formations in the light of capitalism. It shows that this attempt involves a diagnosis of modernity after the historic failures of the nineteenth century messianisms. It also leads to the notion of becoming-revolutionary, which replaces Marx's conception of revolution. From this triple point of view (universal history, the diagnosis of modernity, becoming-revolutionary), it would seem that Deleuze's reading of Marx stems from his interpretation of Nietzsche.

A Violence which Presupposes Itself: The question of Violence from Benjamin to Deleuze and Guattari
This text examines some parallels between Walter Benjamin's “critique of violence” and the theory of violence proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Whatever the differences between these two approaches, they both share an important common feature, defining the violence of state and law in terms of a “violence which presupposes itself”. This circular structure of the concept of violence renders utterly problematic the attempts to envisage a wholly other, revolutionary form of violence, which could be opposed to that of the state or its law. Benjamin's hypothesis of a divine violence which breaks the circle of the mythical one, as well as the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of the war machine, have been devised in order to come to terms with this situation. However, these concepts are not intended to serve as a basis for the legitimation of possible acts of counter-violence. What they assert is rather the fundamental and irreducible unavailability of the event in the sphere of social struggles, where our actions can neither be calculated in advance as to their results nor be ultimately justified.

Anti-Oedipus and Political Economy in “Primitive” Societies: From Trade Reciprocity to Alliance Strategies, a Logic of DebtThe aim of the present article is to pinpoint the issues involved in the analysis of the economy of “primitive” societies, as carried out by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. To do so it focuses on a logic of debt (Nietzsche) rather than on a logic of reciprocity (Lévi-Strauss). Deleuze and Guattari's critical discussion of Lévi-Strauss's ethnology can thus be related to the problematization of kinship, understood as a system of alliance and filiation relationships, which is formulated within French Marxist anthropology (E. Terray, C. Meillassoux) on the one hand, and Edmund Leach's critical anthropology on the other. This double mediation helps to show that in Anti-Oedipus, what Deleuze and Guattari seek to identify are the political strategies at work in economic relations. In the present instance, this means the finite alliance strategies operating in “primitive” societies and which are deeper than trade and production relationships.

Deleuzo-guattarian Machinations
The essay revisits Deleuze and Guattari's complex relation to Marxism, which it seeks to capture under the name para-Marxism, by way of a close reading of plateau n? 4 of A Thousand Plateaus, which criticizes the mainstream conception of language and draws on Lenin's pamphlet on slogans. This close reading leads to an account of the articulation of the Deleuze and Guattari machine with the Marxist analysis of language, to be found, for purposes of comparison in Lukacs's Ontology. The conclusion is that Deleuze and Guattari's conception of language is an intervention within Marxism: they take to its limit the anti-humanist position defended by Althusser – not so much a flight away from Marxism as a line of flight within Marxism.

Marx's Ecologist Conception
Four papers of John Bellamy Foster have been brought together in a short book entitled Marx écologiste. Foster is a theorist of ecosocialism who puts forward an original interpretation of Marx's work. The latter is frequently presented as a scientist conception the effect of which was to stifle subsequent attempts within the communist movement to apprehend capitalism's destruction of nature. Foster shows that such an interpretation is not valid. He claims that Marx has an ecologist consciousness. To support his claim, Foster uses three arguments. Firstly, Marx elaborates the concept of metabolism, that is to say the relations between human activities and nature. Secondly, while the word sustainability is not to be found in Marx's Capital, the idea is indeed present. Thirdly, Marx has understood that nature and the human societies move simultaneously. Foster's demonstration is convincing. At the least, it will relaunch the discussion about the integration of the ecology in Marxism.

The Dynamics of Modes of Production and Social Orders
Marx's conceptualization of history emphasizes the succession of modes of production. However the dynamics of productive forces and relations of production are continuous. Central to this analysis is the “socialization of production” and the rise of the managerial class. These trends require the adjustment of institutions, notably those in which the ownership of the means of production is expressed, an adjustment that is often implemented under the pressure of structural crises. The article illustrates these dynamics in the United States since the late 19th century, in particular in relation to the tripolar class patterns, capitalists, popular classes and managerial class. What is involved is the gradual emergence of a new mode of production whose dominant class is intended to be the managerial class. A “social order” is a shorter period marked by the configuration of class dominations and alliances: the hegemony of capitalist classes during the first third of the 20th century, the alliance between managers and popular classes after the Great Depression and World War II, and neoliberalism as a new hegemony of capitalists in alliance with managers. The approach in terms of social orders allows for the interpretation of the state as the institutional “locus” in which social orders are formed, rather than as the exclusive domination of a ruling class.

Gramsci Reloaded in the Postcolonial Condition: National Identity and Disidentification in the « linguistic turn »The present paper offers a postcolonial ‘conversion' of Gramsci's linguistic approach to political and cultural practice and theory. The ethnolinguistic and sociocultural divide which Gramsci focuses on in relation to the question of Southern Italy reemerges in our times, in the context of the globalized postcolonial and migratory conditions in the Western metropoles. Particularly in France, where the memory of the Algerian war of independence is still alive, the established hegemony is confronted with the presence of a North African migratory population and the resulting presence of Arabic language varieties. This situation represents a permanent provocation to the hegemonic linguistic and sociocultural codes and it reveals the anachronistic character of the notion of national identity itself. In the light of the neo-Gramscian “subalternist” perspective, the disidentificatory potential of this complex contact situation can be identified as the key to a postcolonial conception of a counter-hegemonic project within the framework of a revolutionary socialist strategy for the 21st century.

Postideological Market Apparatuses: The Interpellations of Advertising and the Unpayable Debt
If neoliberalism names a mode of « governance by debt », the task which is addressed here, starting from Althusser's article on Ideology and State Ideological Apparatuses is that of the formation of « subjects » within the framework of a social structure where paramount importance is given to « liberty ». The mobile hypothesis adopted here involves the reformulation of the question of subjectivity in terms not only of the interpellation of the subject by the policeman, as in the Althusserian scenario, but also in terms of its interpellation through advertising. Without postulating a suppression or replacement of the earlier apparatus, the challenge addressed here is to try to envisage how State coercion is redoubled by Market conditioning. If the “classical” mode of interpellation couples the Forbidden to the logic of guilt, what is to be examined in the case of this new apparatus is the coupling of hedonistic permissiveness and victimization, to ensure that that consumers, all by themselves, will walk to credit. In considering these issues, we shall draw upon two contemporary readers of Althusser's text, Slavoj Žižek et Judith Butler.

Anticapitalist Trends in China: The Viewpoint of a Philosopher The interview discusses the components of “anticapitalist” trends in contemporary China, namely the Old Left, the New Left, the NeoMaoists, and the Cultural Conservatives. A link is established with the history of China during the 20 th century and with present-day debates on the nature of Chinese society. The currents mentioned above can be opposed to the Liberalists, in favor of capitalism and democracy as in western countries. The old left draws on the framework of traditional Marxism and it supports the government's ideology of “socialism with chinese characteristics”. new programs are, thus, funded by the government which is in favor of this form of academic “Marxism”. in the “New enlightenment movement” of the 1980s, while the New Left used western Marxist philosophy to build a form of “humanist Marxism” it finally abandoned the Marxist filiation. Much of the debate with the liberalists hinges around the issues of inequality and democracy, constitutional democracy, as advocated by Liberalists, or more direct forms, supported by the New Left. The NeoMaoists—originally a grass-root movement, now in power in Chongqing—attempt to revive some of the principles of Maoism, in a combination with certain forms of “neoPrudhomian socialism”. The cultural conservatives favor a return to the morals of Confucianism, in the context of a democracy confined to a “Confucian elite”.