Conclusion

1  

We are not concerned in this book to separate the contributions of Deleuze and Guattari to the work published under both their names. However, the focus is on Deleuze’s political thought and we read their collaborative work against the background of his earlier philosophy.

2  

See Deleuze and Guattari 1987:69; Deleuze and Parnet 1987:117. On Deleuze’s concept of concepts and their relation to metaphor, see Patton 1997c.

3  

The original title of this book is Empirisme et subjectivité: essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume. Deleuze argues that Hume presents an idea of society that is opposed to that of the social contract theorists. ‘The main idea is this: the essence of society is not the law but the institution. The law, in fact, is a limitation of enterprise and action, and it focuses only on a negative aspect of society…The institution, unlike the law, is not a limitation but rather a model of actions, a veritable enterprise, an invented system of positive means or a positive invention of indirect means…The social is profoundly creative, inventive, and positive…Society is a set of conventions founded on utility, not a set of obligations founded on contract’ (Deleuze 1991:45–6).

4  

Guattari’s exact words were: ‘Nous faisons partie d’une génération dont la conscience politique est née dans l’enthousiasme et la naïveté de la Libération, avec sa mythologie conjuratoire du fascisme’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1972:15).

5  

Several short publications by Deleuze dealing with Palestine and the Gulf War have been translated in a special issue of Discourse, vol. 20, no. 3, Fall 1998. On Palestine, see Deleuze 1998b, 1998c, 1998d and Deleuze and Sanbar 1998. On the Gulf War, see Deleuze et al. 1998 and Deleuze and Scherer 1998.

6  

‘We no longer maintain an image of the proletarian of which it is enough to become conscious’ (Deleuze 1995b:173 trans. modified).

7  

See also the discussion of public and private thinkers in ‘1227: Treatise on nomadology—the war-machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:376–7).

8  

‘Politics is active experimentation, since we do not know in advance which way a line is going to turn’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987:137).

9  

In this manner, Gatens and Lloyd suggest that ‘Spinoza’s own political philosphy is folded into the metaphysical and ethical concerns addressed in the Ethics’ (Gatens and Lloyd 1999:8).

10  

The important distinction between absolute and relative deterritorialization is discussed in Chapter 5, pp. 106–7.

1  

Our concern here is not with the nature of these assemblages but the practice of philosophy which gives rise to a book of this kind. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, pp. 42–6.

2  

In an interview published after his death, Deleuze described A Thousand Plateaus as the best thing he had ever written, alone or with Guattari (Deleuze 1995a:114).

3  

The ‘secret link’ which unites these thinkers is their ‘critique of negativity, their cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces and relations, the denunciation of power’ (Deleuze 1995b:6).

4  

In What Is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze and Guattari suggest that both contemporary analytic and communicational or conversational images of thought remain bound to the recognition model (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:138–9, 145–6).

5  

In the Critique of Judgement, Kant explicitly grounds this accord among the faculties by means of a ‘common sense’ (Kant 1987:89–90). However, in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Deleuze 1984), and in his article published in the same year, ‘L’ldée de genèse dans l’esthétique de Kant’ (1963), Deleuze argues that the notion of such an accord between faculties or common sense is implicit in the accounts given in the preceding Critiques. Common sense is defined as ‘an a priori accord of the faculties, an accord determined by one of them as the legislative faculty’ (Deleuze 1984:35). In the case of knowledge claims, it is the imagination, understanding and reason which collaborate under the authority of the understanding to form a logical common sense, while in the case of moral judgment, it is reason which legislates. Kant ‘multiplies common senses’, creating as many as there are ‘interests of reason’ (Deleuze 1994:136–7).

6  

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze uses Heidegger’s example (Deleuze 1994:165) but the analogy holds for any individual body attempting to coordinate bodily movement with a greater force, such as the novice rider attempting to coordinate his or her bodily movement with that of the horse. In an interview, Deleuze points to the contemporary passion for surfing (Deleuze 1995b: 121). For the example from Plato, cf. The Republic, 523b-c, and Deleuze 1994:138–9.

7  

In The Logic of Sense (1990) and later writings, Deleuze proposes that the Leibnizian domain of the event is the ultimate element of thought. In What Is Philosophy? (1994), transcendental or ‘pure’ events are singled out as the external conditions of philosophical thinking: concepts express pure events. Deleuze’s concept of events and the relation between philosophical concepts and events is discussed further below.

8  

Deleuze and Guattari insist on the difference between concepts and the plane of immanence which is not a concept but the region or milieu of thought in which particular concepts may be formed: ‘Concepts are concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine, but the plane is the abstract machine of which these assemblages are the working parts’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:36). In order to highlight continuities between the concept of philosophy outlined in What Is Philosophy? and that in Chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition, we focus on the identity asserted between the conceptual plane of immanence and the image of thought. However, it should be noted that the concept of the plane of immanence also has links to the important concept of the plane of consistency developed in A Thousand Plateaus: see for example Deleuze and Guattari 1987:70–3, 265–72.

9  

‘I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or manufactures something that does not as yet exist, that is, “fictions” it’ (Foucault 1980:193).

10  

In similar fashion, Best and Kellner read Anti-Oedipus (1977) as ‘a materialist, historically grounded, Foucauldian-inspired critique of modernity with a focus on capitalism, the family and psychoanalysis’ (Best and Kellner 1991:85). At the other extreme, Philip Goodchild argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s theory ‘should never be judged according to its apparent “truth” or “falsehood’’… Deleuze and Guattari’s social theory does not tell us about society in general, nor about the society in which we live; it only tells us about the social unconscious which Deleuze and Guattari have created, out of the resources which lie to hand, and it provides a resource through which we may create our own social meanings and relations’ (Goodchild 1996:46).

11  

The equivalence of transcendental problems and pure events is reaffirmed in Deleuze’s account of the logical genesis of propositions in The Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1990:123).

12  

The passage Deleuze cites from Péguy’s Clio reads as follows: ‘Suddenly, we felt that we were no longer the same convicts. Nothing had happened. Yet a problem in which a whole world collided, a problem without issue, in which no end could be seen, suddenly ceased to exist and we asked ourselves what we had been talking about. Instead of an ordinary solution, a found solution, this problem, this difficulty, this impossibility had just passed what seemed like a physical point of resolution. A crisis point. At the same time, the whole world had passed what seemed like a physical crisis point. There are critical points of the event just as there are critical points of temperature: points of fusion, freezing and boiling points, points of coagulation and crystallization. There are even in the case of events states of superfusion which are precipitated, crystallized or determined only by the introduction of a fragment of some future event’ (Deleuze 1994:189; cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1994:111–13; 156–7). Note that it is in this context that Deleuze first introduces the categories of importance and distinctiveness as criteria for the evaluation of thought, suggesting that the problem of thought ‘is not tied to essences but to the evaluation of what is important and what is not, to the distribution of singular and regular, distinctive and ordinary points, which takes place entirely within the inessential or within the description of a multiplicity, in relation to the ideal events which constitute the conditions of a “problem”’ (Deleuze 1994:189).

13  

Kant 1992:153–7; cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1994:100.

14  

Deleuze and Guattari’s characterisation of the event as the contour of an event ‘to come’ is mirrored by Derrida’s concept of the ‘to come’ as ‘the space opened in order for there to be an event, the to-come, so that the coming be that of the other’ (Derrida 1993:216). A concept of the pure event appears in Derrida’s accounts of the undecidable objects of his quasi-concepts: for example, his discussion of signature explains the ‘enigmatic originality’ of every such mark of identity by reference to ‘the pure reproducibility of the pure event’ (Derrida 1988:20). In effect, all the objects of deconstructive a-conceptual concepts might be described as pure events, or as variations upon the one pure event of sense or meaning: writing, iteration, differance, incineration, justice, etc. The experience of the undecidable, which is associated with all of these objects, is also an experience of the event or an experience of that which is necessary in order for there to be an event. For Derrida as for Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of the pure event functions as an inaccessible incorporeal reserve of being which guarantees a freedom in things and states of affairs.

1  

For example, Iris Marion Young acknowledges the importance of discussions of difference in the work of Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault and Kristeva for her approach to the politics of difference (Young 1990:7). Similarly, Seyla Benhabib notes that ‘the term “difference” and its more metaphysical permutations, “différance” in the work of Jacques Derrida, and “le différend” in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, have become rallying points for two issues: a philosophical critique of Enlightenment type rationalism, essentialism and universalism, and a cultural battle cry for those who insist on the experience of alterity, otherness, heterogeneity, dissonance and resistance’ (Benhabib 1996:5).

2  

Similarly, Alex Callinicos argues that ‘Deleuze’s significance is in part that, starting from [a] fundamentally Nietzschean position…he has sought, drawing on a variety of sources ranging from Kant and Bergson to Artaud and Scott Fitzgerald, to develop a comprehensive philosophy of difference’ (Callinicos 1982:85).

3  

See Bogue 1989:15; Schrift 1995b:60–1. Other authors who point to the importance of this book in establishing Nietzsche as a key figure in poststructuralist thought include Leigh 1978, Pecora 1986 and Perry 1993. Derrida makes reference to Deleuze’s concept of power as the effect of difference between forces in his essay ‘Différance’ (Derrida 1982:17). Foucault also testifies to the enduring effect of Deleuze’s differential reading of the will to power on his own work: see Chapter 3, note 1. In his inaugural address to the Collège de France, Foucault remarked, speaking of his teacher Jean Hyppolite, ‘I am well aware that in the eyes of many his work belongs under the aegis of Hegel, and that our entire epoch, whether in logic or epistemology, whether in Marx or Nietzsche, is trying to escape from Hegel’ (Foucault 1984a:134). His own work develops the theme of difference in a variety of ways: in his account of Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy, in his theory of discourse, and in his theory of power. Foucault returns to this theme in the anti-teleological manner in which he interprets Kant’s question about enlightenment: Kant, he writes, ‘is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?’ (Foucault 1984b:34).

4  

In Plato, Deleuze argues, ‘a moral motivation in all its purity is avowed: the will to eliminate simulacra or phantasms has no motivation apart from the moral. What is condemned in the figure of simulacra is the state of free, oceanic differences, of nomadic distributions and crowned anarchy, along with all that malice which challenges both the notion of the model and that of the copy’ (Deleuze 1994:265).

5  

Notably by Baudrillard (1983). See also the entry ‘Simulacrum’ by Michael Camille in Nelson and Sniff 1996:31–44, as well as the discussion of simulationist art and art criticism in Foster 1996:99–107, 127–8.

6  

See the extensive discussion of Bergson’s distinction between two types of multiplicity and its relation to his theory of duration in Turetzky 1998:194–210. On Deleuze’s use of Bergson’s concept of multiplicity and his relation to neoDarwinism, see Ansell Pearson 1999:155–9.

7  

Similarly, in Negotiations he comments: ‘I see philosophy as a logic of multiplicities’ (Deleuze 1995b:147).

8  

Deleuze is not guilty here of misusing or mystifying mathematical concepts in the manner suggested by Sokal and Bricmont 1998:160–5. Rather, he draws upon the history of metaphysical interpretations of the calculus in order to develop a philosophical concept of transcendental Problems or Ideas from a genetic point of view, in full awareness that this is a philosophical rather than a scientific enterprise (Deleuze 1994: xvi, xxi, 170–82). For mathematically as well as philosophically informed comment on Deleuze’s remarks on the calculus, see Salanskis 1996.

9  

Constantin Boundas discusses this concept of different/ciation and its relation to Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson in Boundas 1996:90–8.

10  

In their discussion of pack, herd and swarm multiplicities typically found in cases of becoming-animal (see Chapter 4), Deleuze and Guattari point out that these continually cross over into one another as in the case of werewolves which become vampires when they die. As such, these mythological pack animals illustrate the transformative character of all qualitative multiplicities: ‘Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:249).

11  

Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) was a French philosopher, criminologist and psychologist. Along with Durkheim, he was one of the founding figures in French sociology. His major works include Lois de l’imitation, Paris: Alcan, 1890 (translated as The Laws of Imitation, Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1962); La logique sociale, Paris: Alcan, 1893; Essais et mélanges sociologiques, Lyon: Stock, 1895; and L’opposition universelle, Paris: Alcan, 1897. Other works by Tarde translated into English include Penal Philosophy, Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1968, and On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Deleuze and Guattari refer to Tarde as the founder of a ‘microsociology’ in which the social is considered from the perspective of infinitesimal gestures which form waves of influence both beneath and beyond the level of the individual, and ‘differences’ and ‘repetitions’ that elude the dialectic of identity and opposition. Tarde is cited in Difference and Repetition (1994:25–6, 76, 307, 313–4, 326), Foucault (1988:36, 142) and The Fold (1993:109–10, 154), and in A Thousand Plateaus (1987:216, 218–219, 548, 575). In part owing to the revival of interest in Tarde inspired by thinkers such as Deleuze, a series of his major works is currently being reissued by Synthélabo/Les empêcheurs de penser en rond with prefaces by Eric Alliez, Isaac Joseph, Bruno Karsenti, Maurizio Lazzarato, Jean-Clet Martin and René Scherer.

12  

In his discussion of Foucault’s theory of discourse, Deleuze comments that the primary elements of discourse, statements or énoncés, are not only inseparable from multiplicities (discursive formations) but are themselves multiplicities (Deleuze 1988b:6). With reference to his own concept of substantive multiplicity, he suggests that Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge represents ‘the most decisive step yet taken in the theory-practice of multiplicities’ (Deleuze 1988b:14).

13  

‘There is no doubt that an assemblage never contains a causal infrastructure. It does have, however, and to the highest degree, an abstract line of creative or specific causality, its line of flight or deterritorialization; this line can be effectuated only in connection with general causalities of another nature’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:283).

14  

See Chapter 4, pp. 73–4.

15  

‘Since every search for identity includes differentiating oneself from what one is not, identity politics is always and necessarily a politics of the creation of difference’ (Benhabib 1996:3).

16  

On the differentialist arguments of the French new right, see Taguieff 1994. On the case of EEOC v.Sears see Scott 1988 and Milkman 1986.

17  

See also Deleuze 1994:130. In this context, note Deleuze’s comment in ‘Intellectuals and power’ concerning the practical lesson provided by Foucault with regard to ‘the indignity of speaking for others’: ‘We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this “theoretical” conversion—to appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf (Foucault 1977b: 209).

18  

At the end of Plateau 13 ‘7000 B.C.: apparatus of capture’, they assert: ‘this is not to say that the struggle on the level of the axioms is without importance: on the contrary, it is determining (at the most diverse levels: women’s struggle for the vote, for abortion, for jobs; the struggle of the regions for autonomy; the struggle of the Third World; the struggle of the oppressed masses and minorities in the East or West’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:470–1).

19  

Compare William Connolly’s discussion of the politics of becoming where he comments that ‘To the extent it succeeds in placing a new identity on the cultural field, the politics of becoming changes the shape and contour of already entrenched identities as well’ (Connolly 1999:57).

1  

In an interview published in 1972, Foucault said to Deleuze: ‘If reading your books (from Nietzsche and Philosophy to what I imagine will be Capitalism and Schizophrenia) has been so important for me it is because they seem to me to go very far in posing this problem [who exercises power and where is it exercised?]: underneath the old theme of meaning, signified and signifier etc., at last the question of power, of the inequality of powers and their struggles…’ See ‘Intellectuals and Power’ (Foucault 1977b), originally published as ‘Les intellectuels et le pouvoir’, L’Arc, 49, 1972:3–10. Deleuze’s thinking about power has also influenced others such as Negri, who admitted that without Deleuze’s work on Spinoza, his own ‘would have been impossible’ (Negri 1991:267). See also Hardt 1993.

2  

See also The Gay Science (Nietzsche 1974: bk 5, para. 107).

3  

In his critical discussion of Nietzsche’s complicated relation to Darwinism in Viroid Life, Keith Ansell Pearson points to his rejection of the reactive concept of life prevalent in ‘English Darwinism’ in favour of an active concept of life which emphasises the priority of the ‘spontaneous’, ‘expansive’ and selfoganising ‘form-shaping forces at the expense of adaptation (Ansell Pearson 1997a:92). At the same time, he argues that Nietzsche is ‘in fact, closer to Darwin in his thinking on evolution and adaptation than to the explicit Lamarckian position frequently attributed to him’ (Ansell Pearson 1997a:87). In Germinal Life (Ansell Pearson 1999), he makes Deleuze’e engagement with biological thinkers the focus of an account of Deleuze’s own ‘philosophy of germinal life’.

4  

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche writes ‘where I found a living creature, there I found will-to-power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master’ (Nietzsche 1969a: part 2, ‘Of self-overcoming’).

5  

See, for example, Daybreak, bk 4, para. 262: ‘Not necessity, not desire—no, the love of power is the demon of men.’

6  

See, for example, Schacht 1983; Schutte 1984; Warren 1988; Ansell Pearson 1994; Owen 1995.

7  

The concept of the feeling of power is vital to understanding the application of Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power to human culture and society. The reading of Nietzsche as a champion of violence and hierarchy is only possible because of the failure to notice this concept. While in the past there have been societies in which exploitation and cruelty towards others were glorified, this does not imply that this is an inescapable feature of human social relations. The history of human culture is in part a history of the development of new means for attaining the feeling of power. There are many evaluative comments throughout Nietzsche’s writings which suggest a hierarchy among the possible means of acting upon others. These imply that the feeling of power obtained from contributing to the feeling of power of others is preferable to all other means of obtaining this feeling. For examples and further comment, see Patton 1993.

8  

At least, it might be considered to enhance the powers of all so long as it is considered as an association entered into by equals, without regard to the bodies of women and others whose incorporation is simply a consequence of their prior subordination. But even if we imagine a body politic founded upon the effective equality of all its adult members, there are further distinctions to be drawn before we can judge the effect of this composite body on the powers of individual members: what is the quality of the power which predominates in its formation? Does this involve a primarily negative form of capture or is it an affirmative combination and transformation of the powers of its citizens? These kinds of evaluative questions raised by Deleuze’s theory of power will be considered in the next section of this chapter.

9  

See also Deleuze and Guattari 1987:238, 293.

10  

Similarly, but contrary to widespread opinion, Nietzsche’s concept of power does not imply that the exercise of power is inherently conflictual. Discussions of Nietzsche, as well as discussions of those influenced by him such as Deleuze and Foucault, tend to overlook this point of fundamental importance with regard to the potential utility of Nietzsche’s concept of power within political theory. See, for example, Read 1989; Bogue 1989:33.

11  

For criticisms of Foucault’s failure to address normative issues, see Fraser 1989:17–34; Habermas 1987:282ff. For responses to these criticisms and discussions of the manner in which Foucault addresses normative issues in his later work, see the essays collected in Moss 1998 and Ashenden and Owen 1999.

12  

In this respect, Deleuze suggests that Nietzsche is close to Callicles in the argument with Socrates over nature versus convention in Gorgias (Deleuze 1983:58).

13  

‘From this spirit and in concert with the power and very often the deepest conviction and honesty of devotion, it has chiselled out perhaps the most refined figures in human society that have ever yet existed: the figures of the higher and highest Catholic priesthood’ (Nietzsche 1982: bk 1, para. 60).

1  

See Holland 1999:36–57, 78–91.

2  

Deleuze and Guattari employ the term ‘schizophrenia’ in this context to refer not to a clinical condition but rather to a semiotic process inherent in the nature of desire. See Holland 1999:2–3, 26–33.

3  

Gatens and Lloyd point out that, for Spinoza, ‘Desires arising from joy will, by definition, be increased by affects of joy; while desires of sadness will be diminished by affects of sadness. There is in this contrast an inherent orientation of joy towards engagement with what lies beyond the self, and hence towards sociability; and there is a corresponding orientation of sadness towards disengagement and isolation. The force of desire arising from joy will be strengthened, rather than weakened, by the power of external causes. The mind’s increase of activity, which is joy, will be strengthened by its understanding of the external causes of its joy’ (Gatens and Lloyd 1999:53).

4  

See the passage from Daybreak, bk 1, para. 23, cited in Chapter 3, p. 53. Mark Warren draws attention to the importance of the ‘feeling of power’ in Nietzsche’s account of human agency. He argues that Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power must be understood primarily as an account of the conditions of the human experience of agency and that, for Nietzsche, it is the self-reflective dimension of agency as expressed in the feeling of power which is paramount: ‘In being conscious and self-conscious, humans increasingly strive less for external goals than for the self-reflective goal of experiencing the self as agent’ (Warren 1988:138).

5  

Cited in Allison 1977:107; also Klossowski 1997:55.

6  

‘By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained’ (Ethics, III, def. 3). See Deleuze’s discussion in 1988c:48–51.

7  

See Charles Stivale’s discussion of a contemporary politics of becoming in cyberpunk science fiction (Stivale 1998:124–42).

8  

At one point they suggest that ‘becoming and multiplicity are the same thing’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:249).

9  

These are the affects which Nietzsche associates with actors, women and others who had to survive under conditions of dependency. See Nietzsche 1974: bk 5, para. 361, ‘On the problem of the actor’.

10  

See Jardine 1985; Braidotti 1991, 1994; Grosz 1994a, 1994b; Battersby 1998. Grosz provides a useful summary of previous feminist criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari in Grosz 1994a:163–4, 173–9. Olkowski 1999:32–58 and Goulimari 1999 undertake critical readings of earlier feminist responses to Deleuze and Guattari: both offer a more positive assessment of the prospects for a ‘minoritarian feminism’. Lorraine 1999 explores common ground between Irigaray and Deleuze.

11  

Grosz reads Deleuze and Guattari in this manner, taking them to be suggesting that ‘the liberation of women’ is a necessary phase in the larger process of human liberation. See Grosz 1994a:179; 1994b:208.

12  

Diana Coole (1993:84–7) points out the extent to which Berlin relies upon a series of spatial metaphors in order to define negative liberty.

13  

Deleuze’s concept of critical freedom has affinities with Bergson, especially in Time and free Will, where free acts are regarded as rare exceptions to the habitual actions of everyday life (Bergson 1913:168). Later, he argues that ‘freedom must be sought in a certain shade or quality of the action itself and not in the relation of this act to what it is not or to what it might have been—it really consists in a dynamic progress in which the self and its motives, like real living beings, are in a constant state of becoming’ (Bergson 1913:182–3). See also Cohen 1997:153–4.

1  

Kenneth Surin draws attention to this feature of Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of capitalism, suggesting that the capitalist axiomatic is capable of regulating the interaction of a series of cultural and social ‘accords’, such that in its current phase it should be regarded as a meta- or mega-accord: ‘As a set of accords or axioms governing the accords that regulate the operations of the various components of an immensely powerful and comprehensive system, capital is situated at the crossing-point of all kinds of formations, and thus has the capacity to integrate and recompose capitalist and noncapitalist sectors or modes of production. Capital, the “accord of accords’’ par excellence, can bring together heterogeneous phenomena and make them express the same world’ (Surin 1998).

2  

This phrase from Nietzsche, cited by Deleuze and Guattari 1977:34, comes from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 2, ‘Of the land of culture’.

3  

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the despotic machine involves a ‘formation’ that may be found in spiritual as well as in secular empires. They point to paranoia as the equivalent formation of desire, suggesting that ‘the despot is the paranoiac’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:193).

4  

See the commentary on the Qin dynasty treatise on government, The Book of Lord Shang, by Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi (1992:11–71).

5  

Elsewhere in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze points out that for every philosophy that begins from a subjective or implicit claim about what everybody is supposed to know, there is another that denies this knowledge or fails to recognise what is claimed. Such philosophies rely not upon the common man but on a different persona: ‘Someone who neither allows himself to be represented nor wishes to represent anything’ (Deleuze 1994:130). In the interview ‘Intellectuals and Power’, he suggests that it was Foucault who taught the intellectuals of his generation the indignity of speaking for others: ‘We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this “theoretical” conversion—to appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf (Foucault 1977b:209).

6  

Holland 1991:57. See also the extended discussion of deterritorialisation and decoding in Holland 1999:19–21.

7  

See the theorems of deterritorialisation elaborated in Plateau 7, ‘Year Zero: faciality’ and in Plateau 10, ‘1730: becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:174–5; 306–7).

1  

For a long time, the term ‘war-machine’ was associated with the type of military-industrial complex which emerged in the advanced industrial countries after 1945. Deleuze and Guattari use the term in this sense in their description of the post-war evolution of the nation-state, when they suggest that it is now plausible to view the major industrial states as subordinated to a global warmachine, a single many-headed monster whose most striking feature is its awesome destructive power: ‘We have watched the war-machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction story’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:422). Since the publication of A Thousand Plateaus in France in 1980, and in the aftermath of the ‘wars’ against Iraq and Serbia, the term has become commonly used to refer to anything remotely connected to the military capacity of a nation-state or multinational organisation such as NATO.

2  

See Stivale’s extended schizoanalytic analysis of this film and the documentary sequel Apocalypse Now, Hearts of Darkness (Stivale 1998:27–70). Stivale comments that ‘Colonel Kurtz’s apparent desire and (narrated) “becomings” that so tempt Willard during his journey relate directly to the dream of merging with the flows of a warrior band in a nomadic military operation supposedly beyond the limited logic of the US Government’s war machine’ (Stivale 1998:34).

3  

The forms of nomadism in actual societies are typically to be understood as a mixture of these distinct modes of social existence. Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the formal differences are important since ‘it is only on the basis of the distinct concept that we can make a judgement on the mix’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:410).

4  

‘The authors’ reservations about anthropology do not prevent them from using it in two important ways: first, they borrow heavily from anthropological sources, and second, they make anthropological statements of their own’ (Miller 1993:13).

5  

See their defensive comment at the end of Plateau 12: ‘We thought it possible to assign the invention of the war-machine to the nomads. This was done only in the historical interest of demonstrating that the war-machine as such was invented’ (Deleuze and Guatttari 1987:422).

6  

See William Connolly’s micropolitical analysis of the emergence of a right to die in Connolly 1999:146–9.

7  

Despite the fact that the first Governor of the colony of New South Wales was under instructions to take possession of lands only ‘with the consent of the natives’ and despite the long history of colonial negotiations and treaties with indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, the British authorities chose not to regard the indigenous inhabitants of Australia as settled peoples with their own law and government. Instead, they opted for the fiction that New South Wales had been acquired ‘as desert and uninhabited’. This principle was clearly stated by the British Privy Council in an 1889 case, Cooper v.Stuart, when it declared Australia to be a Crown colony acquired by settlement on the grounds that it was ‘a tract of territory practically unoccupied without settled inhabitants or settled law’ (Reynolds 1996:16, 110).

8  

‘Just as eighteenth century colonial law harboured rules governing such matters as the constitutional status of colonies, the relative powers of the Imperial Parliament and local assemblies, and the reception of English law, it also contained rules concerning the status of the native peoples living under the Crown’s protection, and the position of their lands, customary laws, and political institutions. These rules form a body of unwritten law known collectively as the doctrine of aboriginal rights. The part dealing specifically with native lands is called the doctrine of aboriginal title’ (Slattery 1987:737).

9  

Johnson v.M’lntosh 21 US (Wheat) 543 (1823) at pp. 547, 573–4.

10  

For Aotearoa/New Zealand see R v.Symonds (1847) NZPCC, 387; for Canada, see St Catherine’s Milling and Lumber Company v. The Queen (1888) 14 AC 46.

11  

Mabo v.Queensland (1992) is reported at 175 CLR 1; 66 ALJR 408; 107 ALJR 1. It is published in book form, with commentary by Richard H.Bartlett, as The Mabo Decision, Sydney: Butterworths, 1993.

12  

For example, the Chief Justice said in his judgment that ‘the common law of this country would perpetuate injustice if it were to continue to embrace the enlarged notion of terra nullius and to persist in characterising the indigenous inhabitants of the Australian colonies as people too low in the scale of social organisation to be acknowledged as possessing rights and interests in land’ (Bartlett 1993:41).

13  

In a Deleuzian analysis of Canadian aboriginal politics (which in several respects parallels this account of aboriginal title jurisprudence) Kara Shaw emphasises the degree to which both the trial judge’s 1993 decision in Delgamuukw v.British Columbia and the 1997 Appeal decision by the Supreme Court amount to a reassertion of the sovereignty of the colonial State as the ground of any claim to special rights. At the same time, with reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the politics of minority and the majoritarian politics of the axiomatic (see Chapter 2, pp. 47–8), she points to the important sense in which these legal decisions also serve to expose the irreducible gap between the aspirations of the Gitskan and Wet’suwet’en plaintiffs and the available forms of recognition within the axiomatic of the colonial State. Without seeking to deny the importance of changes at the level of the axioms, she shows the sense in which, for the aboriginal plaintiffs as for Deleuze and Guattari, the domain of politics is not exhausted by struggle at this level (Shaw 1999:280–308).

14  

Calder et al v.Attorney-General of British Columbia (1973) 34 DLR (3d) 145.

15  

Re Southern Rhodesia 1919 AC 211, at 233–4. Cited in Bartlett 1993:26–7, 144.

16  

This view was enshrined in the common law of the colony in R v.Murrell (1 Legge 72). This case, heard in 1836, involved the trial of two aboriginal men for killing another aboriginal man. The defence argument that the defendants should not be tried under British law since they were acting in accordance with tribal law was rejected on the grounds that native customs were not worthy of recognition as laws. Rather, these customs were considered ‘only such as are consistent with a state of greatest darkness and irrational superstition’ (Reynolds 1996:62). In an 1847 case, Attorney-General v.Brown (1 Legge 312), the judge explicitly refused to recognise any aboriginal customary law in relation to land when he asserted that ‘the waste lands of this colony are, and ever have been, from the time of its first settlement in 1788, in the Crown’, for the simple reason that there was ‘no other proprietor of such lands’.

17  

Delgamuukw v.British Columbia (1991) 3 WWR 97 at 219–23. Cited in Asch 1999:438.

18  

Van der Peet v. The Queen (1996) 137 DLR (4th) 289 (SCC). In this case the Canadian Supreme Court directly addressed the question of the nature and content of aboriginal rights, arguing that these should be understood as the means whereby the assertion of Crown sovereignty is reconciled with the fact of prior occupation by distinctive aboriginal societies.