Politics and Ontology

A review of Nathan Widder, Political Theory After Deleuze. London: Continuum, 2012.

It’s no coincidence that Gilles Deleuze’s most sustained discussions of politics dwell on its plurality; politics is not given any clearly denotative sense, nor do we find its determinate abstraction (“the political”), except insofar as particular instantiations give rise to “many politics.” In an eponymous essay, Deleuze begins by explaining, “Whether we are individuals or groups, we are made up of lines,” and he elaborates each line according to a different political dimension (Dialogues 124). The most recognizable and rigid of lines determine our lives according to the institutional segments through which we pass and to which we return (family, school, the military, one’s profession).[1] Nevertheless, these lines are liable to give rise to encounters which detour us into more supple lines, aberrant paths and anomalies (the bourgeois housewife who, by some contingency, confronts the factory: “I thought I was seeing convicts…” [qtd. Negotiations 178]). Finally, Deleuze says, there are lines of flight that carry us beyond the thresholds of both rigid segments and supple movements—delirious and insurgent lines whose destination we cannot predict (“Instead of being bombarded from all sides in a limiting cosmos, the people and the earth must be like the vectors of a cosmos that carries them off” [Thousand 346]).
 
Given these varied lines, which Deleuze will only divide and multiply, it’s hardly surprising that he never wrote a master-work of political philosophy—no theory of justice, sovereignty, or democracy. Like Nietzsche, he regarded the task of Bildungsphilosophie with suspicion, if not distaste: the earnest questions asked of these “big concepts” and the architectural lines they inspire are grounded in the presupposition of the state-form (above all, the reasonable subject and rational consensus). Forgoing the thick geometry of such segments, Deleuze and Guattari devote themselves to the most slender of lines, the most oppressed but also the most vital, which effectively disappear into molecular movements. From their analysis of the compulsory system of grammatical instruction (“all children are political prisoners”[2]) to their elaboration of Kafka’s political conjecture (“a literature of small peoples”[3]), Deleuze and Guattari affirm the power of what has been subjected to domination—the “minoritarian”—to create forms of life, expression, and politics that elude the stratifications of the state.[4]
 
Thus it’s strange to read critics who condemn Deleuze as the advocate of a radically totalizing politics when, especially with Guattari, he writes to escape the overcoding elements of the state-form (A Thousand Plateaus notoriously begins by declaring that its “plateaus may be read independently of one another” [xx]). Far from a “grand politique,” Deleuze devises a “micro-politique” that insists on the modesty of power and the multiplication of its lines into ever finer gradients. Politics is capillary, and the same ought to be said of Deleuze’s own “political theory,” which forgoes the model of state-form for the profusion of lines, a garden of forking paths: so many politics! For this reason, the real problem of Deleuze’s political theory has always been: which one? Do we consider Deleuze’s explicit political interventions, such as his devotion to penitentiary reform or the letters he published in protest of Antonio Negri’s imprisonment? Should we begin, instead, with Deleuze’s philosophical interventions into recognizable domains of political theory, where he and Guattari analyze the conditions of the Greek polis or the capitalist state-form? Perhaps we ought to return to the concept of minorization as the revolutionary political project of painting, literature, and then cinema to invent a “people who are missing”? Alternately, we could focus on Deleuze’s devotion to a lineage of “minor philosophers”—above all, Spinoza and Nietzsche—in whom he discovered the most intimate relations between politics and life. Or should we rather start with Deleuze’s enduring engagement with Michel Foucault, from whom he derives a remarkable account of power-knowledge and develops a critique of our new “control society”? Where do we begin?
 
In Political Theory After Deleuze, his smart and tightly argued new book, Nathan Widder formulates an ingenious solution to the dilemma. In the face of so “many politics,” among which we would otherwise be forced to choose and prioritize, Widder actually turns away from politics stricto sensu to something like an ontology of the political. This is by no means a conventional move, and it has a number of advantages, perhaps the greatest of which to is avoid the question of “which one” by virtue of Deleuze’s concept of univocity—the “one-all.” Like many recent commentators, Widder takes univocity to be the basis for an ontology that displaces the traditional account of being. As he explains, Deleuze produces an “ontology of difference in which what is expressed in a ‘single voice’ is nothing but difference itself” (27). In a sense, Widder affirms Deleuze’s diverse profusion of politics as expressions of the self-same (i.e. univocal) voice: “A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings” (Difference 304).
 
Readers may recognize in this quotation the nominative source of Alain Badiou’s lamentably opportunistic commentary, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. And it’s worth noting that Widder’s engagement with univocity, going back to an important essay of his, “The Rights of Simulacra: Deleuze and the Univocity of Being” (2001), represents a genuinely rigorous response to Badiou’s bad faith. Widder is rightly regarded as one of the most penetrating and lucid commentators on Deleuze’s metaphysics, and while there may be reasons to resist the equivalence that he reads between this metaphysics and full-blooded ontology, there can be little quarrel with his command of Deleuze’s philosophy or his engagement with the history of philosophy. In his previous writings, Widder has worked through many of the philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, and Nietzsche—who inform Deleuze’s concept of univocity; and in concise, well-wrought prose he returns to that lineage in this new book. But if the terrain is familiar, the task is different: Widder’s aim here is to leverage Deleuze’s ontology for the purpose of political theory. What does this mean? There are, I think, two discrete (if related) senses in which we can understand this aim. In the first place, as I’ve already said, Widder renders univocity the differential field within which Deleuze’s “many politics” are grasped. In this respect, the “ontology of differences” is also a methodology according to which Widder extends his premise into what might otherwise seem more or less ontologically obvious domains, such as Deleuze’s readings of Nietzsche and Foucault, or his collaboration with Guattari on Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
 
This approach underwrites the book’s second aim, namely, to demonstrate that Deleuze’s ontology has profound ramifications for political theory, challenging certain assumptions and reorienting others. The time for such a project seems propitious: not only is “Deleuzianism” enjoying a kind of ontological moment but, as Widder suggests, the same can be said of political theory. Thus, the turn to Deleuze’s ontology responds to a broader ontological turn in political theory, and Widder’s first chapter sketches in broad strokes a history of how this has come to pass. The turn itself has been gestating, he says, for some time, but Widder traces its recent efflorescence to the fate of post-war liberalism, perhaps even to a tipping point when the latter’s metaphysical modesty no longer seemed sufficient. “Dominant forms of postwar liberal political thought have frequently conceived the human self in minimalist terms,” Widder explains in the book’s introductory chapter (2). But this effort to avoid metaphysical controversy, emblematized by Rawls’s Theory of Justice, has become the subject of increasing skepticism and critique for having reduced any “thick description” of subjects and objects, thoughts and things, into the narrowest of bandwidths. The injunction to produce an ostensibly universal theory demands the exclusion of other political “levels” (or what I have called other lines). “The ontological turn in political theory has sought to explore these levels,” Widder explains, adding that it “has stretched and revised the terms of political theory in the process” (7).
 
In this light, Political Theory After Deleuze initially seems to be a species of recent work, particularly notable among Australian philosophers (e.g. Paul Patton, Simon Duffy, and Sean Bowden, among others) dedicated to bridging the divide between Deleuze and the tradition of analytic (or at least Anglo-American) philosophy. But this is not really Widder’s game: while he frames the ontological turn in light of Rawls, his interlocutors—chiefly Judith Butler, William Connolly, Ernesto Laclau, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Žižek—are by no means analytic philosophers. In other words, Political Theory After Deleuze is addressed to, and seeks to intervene in, what is still loosely called theory (if I’m reluctant to call it political theory, this is due to a disciplinary difference and a terminological discrepancy between England, where Widder is located, and the U.S.).[5] Of course, Deleuze’s philosophy already claims currency among the aforementioned roster of political theorists, and so Widder dispenses with the “need to introduce a Deleuzian perspective” (ix) and, instead, produces a different perspective on Deleuze. Among its many virtues, Widder’s perspective remains a paragon of synthetic clarity: while this is not strictly speaking an introduction to Deleuze, Widder has produced a rigorous introduction to a particular kind of Deleuze. This particularity, which is also the source of the book’s originality, demands a measure of explanation. Widder writes an ontology organized by political theory, no less a political theory conditioned by ontology, and this approach entails specific and even structural decisions. Presumably, if the question of politics were not in play, Widder would have devoted greater space to Spinoza, Bergson, and even Whitehead—that is, philosophers who seem to precipitate Deleuze’s ontological commitment—and less to Nietzsche and Foucault. Likewise, if ontology were taken out of the equation, Widder surely would have devoted greater attention to Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborations (Kafka is never mentioned, and What Is Philosophy? appears somewhat tangentially) and less to his more traditionally philosophical texts.
 
The important thing to say here is that Widder’s choices concern a thoroughgoing effort to shift the question of politics away from what have been, for some time, the default texts for Deleuze’s political theory: the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The importance of these books, especially in the U.K. and U.S., derives in large part from a history of translation and reception that lent Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus prominence (the former, originally published in 1972, appeared in English in 1977, while Difference and Repetition, originally published in 1968, did not appear in translation until 1994). While the two volumes inspired great enthusiasm, often outside philosophy proper, they also inspired rabid criticism. Deleuze and Guattari were cast as poets of liberated and irresponsible desire—Deleuze the beautiful soul and Guattari the avowed anarchist (and, often, the “bad influence”). In Arguments within English Marxism, to take one of the more famous and colorful examples, Perry Anderson dismisses Anti-Oedipus as the “the expression of a dejected post-lapsarian anarchism” (178). The great danger of this “subjectivist Schwärmerei,” he adds, is that it “can legitimate the desire for death” (ibid)—and Anderson leaves no doubt that the danger of Deleuze and Guattari’s desire consists in having followed Nietzsche’s path.[6]
 
When Widder seeks to develop a Deleuzianism that would “free Deleuze’s thought from some of the usual interpretations and appropriations” (ix), we should recall this reception history and recognize his own countervailing inclination. By no means does Widder omit Capitalism and Schizophrenia, but the center of gravity decidedly shifts to Difference and Repetition and, by extension, to Deleuze’s philosophical commentaries (especially those on Nietzsche and Foucault, as well as Spinoza and Leibniz).  After the introductory chapter describing the ontological turn, Widder elaborates Deleuze’s ontology on the basis of Difference and Repetition (and, to a lesser degree, The Logic of Sense). We ought to imagine this second chapter as the most contracted point of a series of concentric circles that extend Deleuze’s ontology into less suspected areas of Deleuze’s philosophy, especially in relation to Nietzsche (chapter three) and Foucault/Lacan (chapter four), before situating micropolitics once more at the heart of Difference and Repetition (chapter five). The order of chapters is belied by a kind of double movement: in the first place, Widder locates politics in the most philosophically recognizable (and, dare we say, legitimate?) of Deleuze’s writings, those that concern his putative ontology; but in the second place, Widder extends the ontology into more philosophically political (or politicized) regions of Deleuze’s philosophy.
 
One of the most significant results of this operation is that Nietzsche, who had formerly been the saint of schizoanalysis, now appears as the avatar of Deleuze’s ontology. Widder argues for this reading on the basis of Nietzsche’s late notebooks, the Nachlass, which anticipate the “ontology of sense” (63). While I don’t share Widder’s interpretation of Deleuze’s Nietzsche, it is (like every chapter in Political Theory After Deleuze) an undeniably formidable contribution to the project of a political ontology.[7] If there is a productive argument to be had with Widder’s book, it’s not about the impact that Deleuze’s ontology may yet have on political theory: rather, it’s about the equation of Deleuze’s philosophy with ontology, which this book all but presumes. Of course, this is not an uncommon position, but why is it an obvious or inevitable one?[8] Given Deleuze’s increasing allergy to the very word ontology, the localization of univocity as a concept, and his final insistence on constructivism as the definition of his philosophy, one can justly ask why the burden of proof, so to speak, should attach to the rejection of Deleuze’s ontology and not to its assertion. We don’t need to have answered this question to acknowledge the critical role ontology has played in so much recent scholarship on Deleuze or to intuit what this work tends to shunt aside. Notwithstanding the significant virtues of Widder’s approach and the seemingly ecumenical nature of univocity, his ontological turn tends to exclude (or, at least, occlude) the sorts of political lines that we might ascribe to fiction, fabulation, or art. Discussions of the minor and minoritarian never precipitate a discussion of minor literature, and aesthetics plays virtually no part in Political Theory After Deleuze.
 
This is not a criticism; after all, it’s silly to ask a book to be what it manifestly is not, and it’s especially silly in the context of this fine book. But perhaps it’s worth considering, by way of conclusion, what the project to render a Deleuzian ontology often (perhaps even necessarily) discards.[9] When Deleuze says that the plane of immanence is a plane of consistency and of inconsistency, he means that the plane is open to the outside (le dehors)—to incalculable forces, to chance and improvisation, to the future. As Widder demonstrates, we can understand the relation to the outside topologically or metaphysically, but what of the forces themselves, which Deleuze affirms as “nonphilosophical” and “revolutionary”? Is ontology the best way to get at those unrepresentable forces, or are there other ways to think the outside which might incarnate a different sense of Deleuze’s philosophy and politics? There are times, reading recent ontologically-oriented scholarship on Deleuze, when one might wonder what role the outside can play, or whether history can claim a vital place, or how we can account for significant transformations within Deleuze’s own philosophy.[10] These strike me as the questions that Deleuzian ontologies confront, but it is thanks to Nathan Widder that those questions seem so profound and vital for political theory. Ironically, the success of Widder’s book lies in having contradicted the temporality of its title: Widder has brought Deleuze to life for political theory today.

Footnotes

[1] While is it true that the institutions of the welfare state (we could call them, as Althusser did, “ideological state apparatuses”) are breaking down, new forms of segmentation are already on the scene: the sciences of “assessment,” for instance, now insinuate their way into every one of these institutions. See Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies” in Negotiations.
 
[2] Deleuze borrows this line from Jean-Luc Godard (specifically, his television series Six fois deux). See Negotiations (41).
 
[3] The quote is taken from Kafka’s remarkable diary entry of Christmas day, 1911 (“Schema zur Charakteristik kleiner Literaturen”), which Deleuze and Guattari make the source of “minor literature.” See their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.
 
[4] Notably, this is why, for Deleuze and Guattari, the threshold of all becoming is becoming-imperceptible, which is to say, the point at which metaphysics is metamorphosis.
 
[5] Very broadly construed, as a field, political science in the U.K. and elsewhere is less contested and more ecumenical today than it is the U.S. Among the American theorists to whom Widder turns, only one (William Connolly) is “in” political science. More to the point, I’d venture to argue that the very sense of the phrase “political theory” is more disputed in the U.S. and more inclusive in the U.K. (it’s worth remembering that “theory” today is frequently invoked as a pejorative).
 
[6] I’ve dealt with this particular Marxian reception history in Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy (14-15, 68-70), but readers might also consult Gregg Lambert’s Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? and Ian Buchanon’s Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Anti-Oedipus’: A Reader’s Guide.
 
[7] Briefly, I think the stress that Widder places on Hegel as Nietzsche’s primary enemy ignores a more subtle, but perhaps more important, rivalry. There is no shortage of anti-Hegelianism in Nietzsche, who fundamentally rejected the “labor of the negative,” but the philosopher with whom he struggles is more truly, as Deleuze recognizes, Kant: “Although this supposition must be verified later we believe that there is, in Nietzsche, not only a Kantian heritage, but a half-avowed, half-hidden, rivalry” (Nietzsche, 52). After all, Deleuze says, Kantian critique is the precursor of and rival to Nietzsche’s genealogy. The problem is that Kant does not extend critique far enough—to the value of values, especially reason itself. In a sense, Deleuze says, the history of idealism that follows from this—especially, in Hegel and Schopenhauer—is the prolongation of an already corrupt principle, critique, which bids us to return to Kant and correct the problem at its source. And this is precisely what Nietzsche does in On the Genealogy of Morals.
 
[8] Today, it’s a lot easier to answer the question “who doesn’t believe in Deleuze’s ontology?” than “who does?” Whereas the believers include a great many scholars, the doubters are so few that, as in a Kafka or Borges story, one can wander for long stretches without finding a fellow thinker: in addition to myself, I count Anne Sauvagnargues, Gregg Lambert, and the late François Zourabichvilli.
 
[9] See my own Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy, especially chapter three, where I respond to Badiou’s reading of Deleuze, as well as chapter four and the “Coda,” where I regard univocity as a matter of free-indirect discourse.
 
[10] Widder does consider the outside, but only briefly and without the revolutionary political significance that Deleuze gives the term in relation, especially, to Foucault (18-19).