Posts Tagged ‘ Politics ’

The eclipse of stra­tegic reason should logic­ally be paired with the return in full force of spec­u­lat­ive philo­sophy, rein­ves­ted with a pro­trud­ing mis­sion — or one of sur­veil­lance— to police “any instance of abuse of power on the part of polit­ical ration­al­ity.” Con­trary to its her­al­ded decline, this resur­rec­tion con­ferred on the resus­cit­ated philo­sophy a “very prom­ising life expect­ancy.” (Dits & écrits, 954) This stra­tegic abdic­a­tion implied in fact the renounce­ment of a the­ory, no longer a sci­ence or an art (in the sense of empir­ical know-​how), but simply an expres­sion of ant­ag­on­istic forces in motion. It is then not sur­pris­ing to find in Deleuze a return to philo­sophy: “I think of philo­sophy as a sys­tem.” (Deux regimes, 339) In response to polit­ical dis­il­lu­sion, philo­sophy was ...
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The Deleuzean oppos­i­tion between the molecu­lar and the molar, between flux and state-​coding, were coeval with the lib­eral turn of dereg­u­la­tions and prom­ised to lead the great cap­it­al­ist decod­ing and the mar­ket deter­rit­ori­al­iz­a­tion to their ulti­mate con­sequences. “But which revolu­tion­ary path should one choose? Is there one? To retreat from the global mar­ket in an uncanny reen­act­ment of the ‘fas­cist eco­nomic solu­tion?’ Or go in the oppos­ite dir­ec­tion, instead, that is to say even fur­ther fol­low­ing the move­ment of the mar­ket, of decod­ing and of deter­rit­ori­al­iz­a­tion? But then again per­haps fluxes are not yet deter­rit­ori­al­ized enough, not decoded enough, from the point of view of a the­ory and a prac­tice of high-​Schizophrenia fluxes. The idea then was not to retreat from ...
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Since 1977, Deleuze insight­fully grasped the decep­tion and the reac­tion­ary logic inher­ent to, the then nas­cent new philo­sophy: “the habitual threshold of bull­shit is on the rise (…),” says Deleuze. “The hatred of 68, resent­ment of 68 (…). The revolu­tion must be deemed impossible, uni­formly and at all times…” The most talked about themes at the time were tears, tis­sues and good­byes: a farewell to pro­let­ariat, a farewell to the revolu­tion (“we have loved it so much!”), and a farewell to the event as “an open­ing up to the pos­sible.” It was all about the “neg­a­tion of all polit­ics.”1 But, para­dox­ic­ally, Deleuze’s own philo­soph­ical dis­course did con­trib­ute to this absent-​mindedness: “Becom­ing is not to pro­gress or regress fol­low­ing a series (…). Becom­ing does ...
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Translator’s note: “The Eclipse of Polit­ics” is the fourth chapter of Daniel Bensaid’s Eloge de la poli­tique pro­fane (Albin Michel, 2008) (tr: In Praise of Sec­u­lar Polit­ics). In this chapter, the author situ­ates the most prom­in­ent dis­courses of the event, as developed by Fou­cault, Deleuze and Guat­tari among oth­ers, in the polit­ical con­text of the 1970s. Start­ing with the after­math of May 68 and end­ing with the Ira­nian Revolu­tion of 79; Ben­said revis­its the main ten­ets of the philo­sophies of the event to under­score their inad­equacy to under­stand the revolu­tion as a polit­ical concept. Iron­ic­ally, the philo­sophies of the event would have missed the two main events of the same dec­ade that marked their rise to prom­in­ence. But how did that ...
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