Deleuze' s Political Vision

Modernity and Political Thought

Series Editors:
Morton Schoolman, State
University of New York at Albany
and
Kennan Ferguson, University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee

This unique collection of original studies of the great figures in the history of
political and social thought critically examines their contributions to our un-
derstanding of rnodernity, its constitution, and the promise and problerns latent
within it. These works are written by sorne of the finest theorists of our time for
scholars and students of the social sciences and hurnanities.

Titles in the Series

The Augustinian Imperative: A Rejlection on the Politics of Morality, by William
E.Connolly
Emerson and Self-Reliance, by George Kateb
Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics, by Stephen K. White
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Polilics of the Ordinary, by Tracy B. Strong
Michel Foucault and the Polilies of Freedom, by Thomas L. Dumm
Reading "Adam Smith": Desire, His tory, and Value, by Michael 1. Shapiro
Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, IndividuaUty, and Chastened Politics, by Richard
E. Flathrnan
Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild, by Jane Bennett
G. W. F. Hegel: Modernity and Politics, by Fred R. Dallrnayr
The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, by Seyla Benhabib
William James: Politics in the Pluriverse, by Kennan Ferguson
Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism, by Diana Coole
Aquinas and Modernity: The Lost Promise of Natural Law, by Shadia Drury
Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of PoUtics, by Kam Shapiro
Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Disconlinuity, by
Davide Pangia
Publius and Political Imagination, by Jason Frank
John Rawls: Liberalism and the Challenges ofLate Modernity, by 1. Donald Moon
Deleuze 's Political Vision, by Nicholas Tampio
Deleuze' s Political Vision

Nicholas Tampio

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Pu blication Data

Tampio, Nicholas.
Deleuze's political vision / Nicholas Tampio.
pages cm. - (Modemity and political thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-5315-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-5316-2
(electronic)
1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995-Political and social views. 2. Political
science-Philosophy-History-20th century. 1. Title.
JC261.D39T36 2015
320.01-dc23
2015022709

§TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To Bill Connolly,
mentor, friend,
Deleuzian
 Contents

Series Editors' Introduction IX

Preface XIX

1 Entering Deleuze's Political Vision

2 The Image of Pluralism 24

3 Deleuze's Soul Hypothesis 55

4 The Rhizomatic Contract 77
5 Toward a Deleuzian Liberalism 100

6 The Politics of the Garden (pairidaeza) 124

Conclusion 151
References 159
Index 169
About the Author 175

vii
 Series Editors' Introduction

Nicholas Tampio's Deleuze 's Political Vision is the eighteenth volume in

Modemity and Political Thought (MPT), the Rowman & Littlefield series
in contemporary political theory. Tampio's study follows the publication
of recent MPT volumes on Rawls by 1. Donald Moon, Publius by Jason
Frank, David Hume by Davide Panagia, Carl Schmitt by Kam Shapiro,
and Aquinas by Shadia Drury.l Planned volumes beyond these include
works on Aristotle by Mary Dietz, Thomas More by Peter Euben, Kant
by Nikolas Kompridis, Karl Marx by Wendy Brown, Abraham Lincoln
by Steven Johnston, J. S. Mill by Kirstie McClure, Friedrich Nietzsche
by David Owen, and Sheldon Wolin by Nicholas Xenos. MPT has long
served as a series that both reintroduces and refigures important and ca-
nonical political theorists and philosophers in relation to the politics of
our modern world and includes works by distinguished political thinkers
of today. Previous volumes have focused on Augustine (William Con-
nolly), Hobbes (Richard Flathman), Burke (Stephen White), Emerson
(George Kateb), Rousseau (Tracy Strong), Thoreau (Jane Bennett), Adam
Smith (Michael Shapiro), Foucault (Thomas Dumm), Hegel (Fred Dall-
mayr), Arendt (Seyla Benhabib), William James (Kennan Ferguson), and
Merleau-Ponty (Diana Coole).2
Not only have these studies adopted a variety of approaches and posed
diverse and creative questions about modemity, but they have also done so
by proposing critical interpretations and arguments about key figures in the
history ofpolitical theory. Each contributorto MPT critically examines ways
in which major political theorists shape our understanding of modemity-
not only its origins and constitution but also its overt and latent problems,
promises, and dangers. In addition to the works themselves, a central goal
ix
x Series Editors . Introduction

of the series has been to iIIustrate how the history of political thought can
be brought to bear on modernity's political present to acquire deeper insight
into its possible political futures. As a whole, MPT offers an unparalleled
presentation of the discussions and debates that define much of political
theory today. To that end, through our introductions to each of the MPT
volumes, series editors try to accomplish two fundamental aims. On the one
hand, our interest is to describe MPT's rationale, namely, its continuing theo-
retical investigation into the question of modemity by way of examining the
writings of key figures in the history of political thought. And on the other
hand, how each of its contributors has come to the study of their particular
subjects through a deep interest in how the thought of an influential politi-
cal theorist or philosopher can enable us to better understand the historical
and global constellation of institutions, relations, and events that has been
problematized as modemity. This approach allows the reader to appreciate
the unique understanding of modemity offered by political theorists, past
-and present, and the extent to which the question of modernity occupies the
theoretical imagination today and willlikely do so for the foreseeable future.
Though there are many more ways in which his work departs from
rather than agrees with Kant's critical philosophy, Nicholas Tampio must
be considered Kant's disciple in the most fundamental and important of
senses-in the sense in which ail political theorists ought to be disciples
of Kant, and the sense in which MPT is modeled on the exemplar of
"Kantian courage" that Tampio takes as his philosophical point of origin
for Deleuze 's Political Vision and his work leading up to it.
In Kantian Courage: Advancing the Enlightenment in Contemporary
Political Theory, Tampio distills Kant's position on the meaning of cour-
age from among the philosopher's most influential writings. 3 Through
an examination of arguments belonging to Kant's Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of MoraIs, the Critique of Practical Reason, "An Answer to
the Question: What Is Enlightenment," Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View, and Metaphysics of MoraIs , Tampio fleshes out three dis-
tinct conceptions of courage. Although each is in part at odds with the
others, and ail are problematic in their own unique ways, taken together
they conscript thinking individuals to creatively engage the most serious
problems of their day by designing new approaches allowing the fash-
ioning of new solutions, ail the while accomplishing such intellectually
pragmatic tasks by drawing upon ail available cultural resources offered
 Series Editors ' Introduction xi

by the historical process of enlightenment. Such moral and intellectual

courage to embrace the new and different is what distinguishes Kant's
own philosophical relation to modernity, in Tampio's estimation. Yet it
is the sort of courage too often missing from the cultural terrain inhabited
by contemporary political theory and by other fonns of thought. At least
in this one emphatic sense, we must ail become Kantians if we are to be
able to think deeply and honestly-with courage, that is to say-about
our modern world's predicaments. Somewhat paradoxically, however,
to be Kantian in this respect would entail breaking with Kant by having
his courage to include voices and ideas in discussions that challenge the
Kantian concept of Enlightenment we have inherited and that consistently
informs our unsuccessful approaches to our own modernity, whose prob-
lems now even threaten the very basis of life itself.
Raising contemporary political theory to the level of Kantian courage,
Tampio's theoretical strategy is not to recommend that we further adopt
Kant's or Kantian ideas and arguments. It is rather to ally political theory
with Kant insofar as an alliance would facilitate a discussion between
major contemporary political theorists who, even though perhaps signifi-
cantly influenced by Kant, have broken with the Enlightenment heritage
he bequeathed. To this end three distinct philosophical voices and con-
cepts circulate throughout Tampio's book-the political liberal Rawls
and the notion of overlapping consensus he introduced to imagine bridges
erected between liberal and nonliberal peoples, the poststructuralist Gilles
Deleuze and his antifoundationalist idea of the rhizome, and the Muslim
political reformer Tariq Ramadan and his image of the space oftestimony.
Importantly, at the same time as it continues to be heard through
Rawls's voice, arguably the most authoritative Kantian voice in twentieth-
century philosophical thought, Kant's own voice is never silent through-
out Tampio's book. In effect, Tampio moderates a debate between four
great thinkers, each of whom makes a decisive contribution to the project
ofrethinking Enlightenment in tenns that decisively break with how it has
been understood to this point. Kantian Courage must thus be considered
a work in the philosophical tradition of radical Enlightenment studies
whose origins are traceable to the Greek materialist Epicurus and the Ro-
man student of Epicurean teachings Lucretius. Through Kantian Courage
Tampio emerges as a latter-day apostle of a philosophical history from
which multiple trajectories of the Enlightenment emerged, including the
xii Series EditOl's' Introduction

political enlightenment of the American Founding. Hence the history of

radical Enlightenment authorizes the agonistic approach Tampio adopts in
Kantian Courage. And Tampio's agon assembles not only continental and
American voices and views, but also non-Western along with Western,
which opens contemporary political theory to differences held by sorne
to be political theory's Other. 4 As Tampio summarizes this dimension of
his work,

Europeans and Americans have a legitimate right to worry about the future
of the Enlightenment in the face of certain militant groups-such as al-
Qaeda and Hizb ut-Tahrir-committed to its demise. Yet the Enlightenment
as a living tradition must be willing to keep its ears, mind, and heart open
as it charts its own future, and this may mean leaming and respecting the
viewpoints of Muslim groups in Europe, the United States, and around the
world. (Kantian Courage, 159)

As is apparent here, Tampio's commitment to pluralizing contemporary

political theory by making it more inclusive ofvoices and theoretical stand-
points is set against the historical background of political and civilizational
struggles. Although his commitment is, in other words, to the pluralization
of political theory, in the first instance it is a commitment inspired by an
underlying allegiance to the achievement of a democratic world that is in-
clusive of differences and thus to the ways in which contemporary political
theory, with a practical intent, let us say, can contribute to such a radical
pluralism. So in Kantian Courage we find his discussion of Religion within
the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant' s response to the horrors of the
Thirty Years' War that for Tampio represents the first significant Enlight-
enment treatise to prevent religious wars by promoting the pluralist idea
of an interfaith ethical community. Tampio's argument leads him to one
of the boldest moves in Kantian Courage, where he addresses the problem
of how to prevent a second 9/11. In this context he proposes that the heirs
of the Enlightenment, an assemblage of "elites, politicians, and statesmen,
as well as celebrities, entertainers, intellectuals, newscasters, restaurateurs,
sports planners, and others [,] ... participate in the micropolitical battles
that cultivate the soil on which pluralism can flourish" (Kan tian Courage,
178). Contemporary political theorists may weIl play political-pedagogical
roles in the cultural redetinition of democratic pluralism. Yet such a new-
Enlightenment politics inaugurated by political theory can hardly succeed
 Series Editors' Introduction xiii

without itself first becoming pluralized through like-minded alliances with

constituencies sharing its radical Iiberal orientation to difference. This is
why Tampio does not conti ne the membership of his assemblage to Euro-
peans and Americans, but he insists that Euro-Americans listen carefully
to constituencies at the global level.
Following Kantian Courage, we tind Tampio continuing to make vari-
ous torms of this argument in a series of seminal essays in comparative
political theory. In essays on the Muslim political retormers Tariq Ra-
madans and Abdullahi Ahmed An-'Na'im,6 Tampio explores a progres-
sive side to Muslim thought that subscribes to norms governing Western
democratic pluralist societies, namely, an enlarged way of thinking and
a political sensibility encompassing a respect for majority rule, minority
rights, and a pluralistic idea of the general good. 7 In an essay anticipating
his MPT volume, Tampio adopts a similarly critical approach to Western
contemporary political theorists and balances the political ledger by tu rn-
ing to Deleuze and Guattari for radically pluralistic philosophical images
able to accommodate religious and existential faiths as those represented
by different Muslim thinkers, such as the Sufi scholar Seyyed Hossein
Nasr,8 the al-Qaeda ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri,9 and the Shiite politi-
cal reformer' Abdolkarim Soroush. JO Tampio presses tor a pluralist ac-
commodation that would go so far as to permit Muslim and non-Muslim
thinkers and activists to seek mutually agreeable remediable approaches
to stem the ecological crisis." Finally, in a spirited defense of Rawls's
political constructivism that resonates with lines of argument in Kantian
Courage, Tampio discovers how it lends itself to principles that could
earn the support of Euro-American Muslims such as Taha Jabir AI-
Alwani'2 and how it could likewise serve the formulation of principles in
Euro-American societies enabling their productive engagement with the
Islamic revivalY Ifwe look at his work to date overall, Tampio's consis-
tent interest has been to iIIuminate and explicate the incipient pluralistic
openings to Western, Chinese,'4 and Islamic thinking characterizing each,
and to consider how such openings can be developed for the purpose
of forging a corn mon set of values that serve to create and maintain an
ongoing deliberative process among such a diversity of differences-a
deliberative process that abolishes the perception of Otherness attributed
by each to its near and distant partners in dialogue. An especially valuable
part ofthis project has been Tampio's focus on the pluralistic orientations
xiv Series Editors' Introduction

of Islamic political thought. It is a history of political thought with which

Western political thinkers and theorists are largely unfamiliar, to their
own political and theoretical disadvantage. 15
As is evident, Tampio's abiding interest is to continually and indefinitely
expand the number and kinds of voices-philosophical and theoretical,
political and nonpolitical, secular, religious, and existential, ideological aIl
along the political spectrum, conciliatory and even militant, among many
others-that ought to be regular participants in a radical Enlightenment
project seeking new ideas and ideals better able to craft a global future than
those ideas we have inherited from the Enlightenment's past. Tampio's
radical pluralism appears to be situated within the context of a radical lib-
eralism. If this is correct, however, in what way is his liberalism radical?
To begin with, John Rawls is the cornerstone of a political liberalism
that Tampio then proceeds to radicalize along various dimensions through
the thought of Gilles Deleuze and non-Western thinkers such as Ramadan,
especially those non-Western thinkers who are Muslim. What is distinc-
tive about Rawls for Tampio is that he is the exemplar of a Euro-American
thinker, though also the one with whom North American, British, and
Continental audiences are readily familiar, who offers us the opportunity
to formulate a version of liberal pluralism that can be revised on an ongo-
ing basis to be ever more inclusive of the kinds of dramatically different
voices identified above. Tampio appears to begin with Rawls because he
understands his politicalliberalism to provide a liberal opening to the non-
West, as it were, to differences often constructed and excluded by Western
thinkers as the Other. It is for this reason that Rawls is crucially important
to Tampio's project of radical enlightenment. Among the most salient of
Rawls's ideas of service to Tampio in this regard is the permission he
grants liberals to relinquish their adherence to transcendent principles on
which they rely for the foundations of liberal political institutions, prac-
tices, and values. In Tampio's reading, Rawls's receptivity to difference
(my term) already moves in the direction that Tampio subsequently turns
to Deleuze to more sharply and emphatically articulate. As Tampio puts it,

Rawls, when pressed, acknowledges that wide reflective equilibrium com-

pels political theorists to consider new theories of justice, whereas Deleuze
explicitly proposes a "model that is in perpetuaI construction" ... Deleuze
urges politicalliberals to relinquish their "State model ofthought" in which
 Series EditOl'S' Introduction xv

Kantians take center stage in political debates on the left. Instead, the idea
of the rhizome presses political liberals to embrace a decentered vision of
pluralism in which multiple constituencies craft provisional terms ofpoliti-
cal alliance. (Kantian Courage, 106)

The ali-important distinction between Rawls and Deleuze highlighted

here is the decisive move for Tampio's project. Rawls's receptivity to dif..
ference is, in his remarkable The Law of Peoples, still based on a modern
model of constitutional representative democracy resting on liberal insti-
tutional principles that nonliberal societies would have to agree to despite
moral and philosophical objections to Iiberal doctrines with which they
can find no compromise. Rawls's political liberalism thus ultimately re-
stricts liberalism at precisely the point it holds great promise for inclusive-
ness, which Deleuze's philosophy can then continue to develop. Whereas
in Tampio's view Rawls is insistent that aIl participants determining
principles of justice operate at the level of ideas-the level of constitu-
tions and doctrines and principles-Deleuze is attentive to the bodies of
potential constituencies. Not to ideas only, but also to percepts and af-
fects, aIl of which configure constituencies as porous entities for whom
a range of conventional and unconventional politics are imminently pos-
sible. Tampio's radical Enlightenment project traces a political imaginary
whose possible politics runs from Rawls to Deleuze to Ramadan so that it
becomes inclusive of ways of life marginalized by a liberalism remaining
at the height of ideas only. On its basis, could we imagine, for example,
that the new Muslim communities growing in Western countries might be
better able to resist the generalized feelings of social and political alien-
ation and the fortunately rarer, profound feelings of discontent that incline
a few toward extrem ism?
Given the centrality of Deleuze to Kantian Courage, it is no surprise
Tampio would feel a great need to devote a much longer discussion to
how Deleuze's coauthored masterpiece with Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, can anchor the further unfolding of the pluralism at the heart of
his earlier conception of another Enlightenment. The image of a healthy
and robust political pluralism for which he laid the foundation in Kantian
Courage is now completely fleshed out in Deleuze 's Political Vision,
which inc1udes an engagement with Islamic political thought that affirms
political pluralism's inc1usiveness of diverse religious voices. Through
xvi Series Editors' Introduction

his study of how Deleuze's great work with Guattari develops his ambi-
tions for the radical pluralism without which a new Enlightenment could
not progress, Tampio thus enables us to understand why Deleuze ought
to be counted among the great thinkers belonging to the canon of politi-
cal thought. And it enables us to understand why Michel Foucault could
claim without blushing that "one day this century will be known as De-
leuzian." If there is any merit to Foucault's claim, as there clearly is at
the philosophical level, Tampio's exhaustive efforts to help us appreciate
the value of Deleuze's work will redeem Foucault'sjudgment as it pushes
Tampio's own project further along. Surely Tampio is correct in believ-
ing that what distinguishes Deleuze's thought as it has no other thinker is
his conviction that what defines being are the possibilities it offers us for
continuously becoming different, the conviction that becoming ditferent
is a telos that does not conscript being to ultimate ends that do not include
ail possible ends, and that su ch a sensibility to becoming different is
perfectly alert to whatever would blind us to being's infinite potential for
the production of difference. These are the aspects of Deleuze's thought
that Tampio especially valorizes tor contemporary political theory, which
we believe is the mode of cultural thought best equipped to capture the
democratic modernity of a Deleuzian century.

We are grateful to Jon Sisk, Vice President and Senior Executive Editor
for American Government, American History, Public Policy, and Political
Theory at Rowman & Littletield, tor the thoughtfulness and professional-
ism that make it possible for authors and editors alike to produce their best
work. His support of a series dedicated to examining authors through the
lens ofmodern thought has led to a compilation ofvolumes that, as a who le,
refigure the relationship between critical thinkers and the contemporary
world. Editors and publisher together strive to provide an indispensable set
of volumes, which, taken in their totality, provide a guide to the complexi-
ties and nuances of history's most important political philosophers. Un der
his stewardship, Rowman & Littlefield's Modernity and Political Thought
series continues to define the critical importance of the study of classical,
medieval, modern, and contemporary political theory today.

Morton Schoolman, State University of New York at Albany

Kennan Ferguson, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
 Series Editors' Introduction xvii

NOTES

1. 1. Donald Moon, John Rawls: Liberalism and the Challenges of Late Mo-
dernity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Jason Frank, Publius and
Politicallmagination (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013); Davide Pan-
agia, Impressions of Hume (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013); Kam
Shapiro, Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2009); Shadia Drury, Aquinas and Modernity: The Lost Promise of
Natural Law (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
2. William E. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative: A Rejlection on the
Politics of Morality (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Richard E.
Flathman, Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality, and Chastened Politics
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke:
Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002);
George Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2002); Tracy B. Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Jane Bennett, Thoreau 's Nature:
Ethics, Politics, and the Wild (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002);
Michael J. Shapiro, Reading "Adam Smith": Desire, History, and Value (Lan-
ham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Thomas L. Dumm, Michel Foucault
and the Politics of Freedom (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Fred
Dallmayr, G. W. F. Hegel: Modernity and Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2002); Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Kennan Ferguson, William James:
Politics in the Pluriverse (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and Diana
Coole, Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
3. Nicholas Tampio, Kantian Courage: Advancing the Enlightenment in Con-
temporary Political Theory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), chap. 2.
4. See, for just one example, Allan Bloom's critique of openness in The Clos-
ing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and
Impoverished the Souls of Today 's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1987), esp. Bloom 's "Introduction: Our Virtue," 25-43.
5. Tariq Ramadan (b. 1962) is a Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies
at Oxford University. Ramadan is the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder
Hassan al-Banna and was famously banned from the United States between 2004
and 2010.
6. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim is a Sudanese native and Professor of Law at
Emory University.
xviii Series Editors' Introduction

7. Nicholas Tampio, "Constructing the Space of Testimony: Tariq Rama-

dan's Copernican Revolution," Politieal Theory 39, no. 5 (2011): 600-629;
Nicholas Tampio, "Promoting Critical Islam: Controversy, Civil Society, Revo-
lution," Polities and Religion 6, no. 4 (20l3): 823-43; Nicholas Tampio "Plural-
ism in the Ethical Community," in Kant 's Religion within the Boundaries ofMere
Reason, ed. Gordon E. Michalson, Jr. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2014), 175-92.
8. Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933) is a professor of Islamic studies at George
Washington University. Once a philosophy professor in Iran, Nasr is a scholar
and popularizer of Sufism, a mystical bran ch of Islam.
9. Ayman al-Zawahari (b. 1951) is a doctor, an Egyptian national, and, with
Usama bin Laden, the founder of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda.
10. 'Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945) is an Iranian philosopher who once sup-
ported the Revolution, became an advocate of democratization, and then went
into exile in the United States.
Il. "The Politics of the Garden (pairidaeza)," Theory & Event, 16, no. 2 (2013).
12. Taha Jabir AI-Alwani (b. 1935) teaches at the International Institute for
Islamic Thought (Hern don, VA), an organization responsible for training Muslim
prayer leaders (imams) in the U.S. military.
13. Nicholas Tampio, "A Defense ofPolitical Constructivism," Contemporary
Politieal Theory, Il, no. 3 (2012): 305-23; Nicholas Tampio, "Two Faces of
Political Liberalism," Contemporary Politieal Theory, Il, no. 3 (2012): 331-35.
14. Nicholas Tampio, "What If the Pious Don't Want to Deliberate?" Politieal
Theory, 42, no. 1 (2014): 106-18.
15. Along these Hnes, see Nicholas Tampio's essay "Islamic Political
Thought," in The Encyclopedia of Politieal Thought, ed. Michael Gibbons (New
York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 1915-24.
 Preface

In a review essay on two of Gilles Deleuze's books from the 1960s (Dif-
ference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense), Michel Foucault made a
famous remark about his friend's project: "Perhaps one day this centUl)' will
be known as Deleuzian."1 What did Foucault wish to accomplish with this
statement? In "Theatrum Philosophicum," Foucault thought that Deleuze
had disclosed a powerful way of mapping developments in the modern
world. Rather than impose a Platonic or Kantian scheme of categories on
unruly experience and reality, Deleuze had declared, "we must abandon our
tendency to organize everything into a sphere."2 Deleuze was not the first to
try to overturn Platonism, that is, to privilege ditference over identity: De-
leuze situated himself in a minor tradition within the history of philosophy
running from Epicurus and Lucretius up to Nietzsche and Bergson. Rather,
Deleuze had renewed this project by drawing on the resources of modem
art, science, and philosophy. Deleuze had become, as it were, a voice ofhis
generation, the postwar one trying to reconstruct European philosophy on
new grounds. Yet Foucault thought that Deleuze's project had another side,
one that could shape rather than merely express historical ontological de-
velopments. In his preface to Anti-Oedipus (originally published in 1972),
Foucault proclaimed that the book is "the tirst book of ethics to be written in
France in quite a long time" and that "most important, it motivates us to go
further."3 Foucault wanted his friend to elaborate his vision of a Deleuzian
modernity, in part, to help others actualize it.
Deleuze tleshed out his vision of the modem world, in aIl of its glories
and dangers, in his 1980 magnum opus coauthored with Félix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus (A TP). What happens when one opens this book for the
tirst time? The table of contents offers a hint of the subject matter in each
xix
xx Preface

chapter: the concept of the rhizome (1), psychology (2), the natural sci-
ences (3), linguistics (4), religion (5), ethics (6), the face (7), literature (8),
politics (9), becoming (10), music (11), war (12), economics (13), ontology
(14), and a conclusion (15). Once one begins reading, however, one dis-
covers that each chapter-in fact, each passage-is a plateau, "a continu-
ous self-vibrating region of intensities," that connects in myriad ways with
other plateaus in the book (ATP, 22).4 Upon connecting points and lines of
the text, one begins to see Deleuze's picture of "our modemity" (ATP, 5).
Deleuze once said, ''l'm interested in the way a page of writing flies off in
ail directions and at the same time closes right up on itself like an egg."5
Most scholars who have written on A Thousand Plateaus appreciate the
way that Deleuze's ideas follow lines of f1ight: fewer have seen or tried to
convey how A Thousand Plateaus closes on itself like an egg.
My strategy in this book is to explicate Deleuze's political vision and
situate it in the history of political thought and contemporary political
theory. To understand Deleuze's critique of arboreal philosophy, 1 apply
this critique to Jürgen Habermas's postsecular political theory; to under-
stand Deleuze's account of n sexes, 1 contrast his views with Carole Pate-
man's account of gender; to justify my claim that Deleuze is a cutting-
edge liberal, 1 show how he recasts John Stuart MiII's intuitions; and so
forth. Through this process, 1 argue that Deleuze may be the thinker who
best expresses the spirit of the age, not in a Hegelian sense of identifYing
a telos that everyone will reach sooner or later, but as a visionary who
first sees threats and wonders that can affect our reality. According to
Antonio Negri, Deleuze's magnum opus reinvents the sciences of spirit
(Geisteswissenschaften) for our age:

In rereading A Thousand Plateaus ... what is most impressive is the incred-

ible capacity of anticipation which is expressed there. The development of
computer science and automation, the new phenomena of media-society
and communicative interaction, the new paths followed by the natural sci-
ences and by scientific technology, in electronics, in biology, in ecology,
etc., are not only considered but already taken into account as an epistemo-
logical horizon .... A Thal/sand Plateaus announces the renaissance of a
historical materialism wOlihy of our epoch. 6

Though Deleuze may have objected to Negri's calI for a "revolutionary

event" to confirm his philosophy-A Thousand Plateaus counsels the "art
 Preface xxi

of caution" in practical affairs (see ATP, 159-60)-many philosophers,

political theorists, cultural critics, artists, activists, and others agree that
Deleuze is the philosopher of the moment. One purpose of my book is to
use a political theory toolkit to make that case.
Chapter 1 presents a methodology for entering Deleuze's political vi-
sion in A Thousand Plateaus. The chapter begins with an explanation of
how A Thousand Plateaus satisfies the conditions of a canonical political
theory and why Deleuze (rather than Deleuze and Guattari) is the proper
name to enter the history ofpolitical philosophy. The chapter offers seve rai
principles for deciphering Deleuze's most obscure passages in A Thousand
Plateaus, incIuding using etymology to find the simple image beneath
concepts such as deterritorialization or schizoanalysis. To discIose the
heart of Deleuze's political vision, the chapter interprets an aphorism from
A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze gives advice about how to become
a "Body without Organ s," or chisel at the border of one's own ethical or
political identity. Deleuze's advice to "gently experiment" gives cIues to
how Deleuzians can think about policy matters regarding drugs, immigra-
tion, the environment, and the economy. The chapter concIudes by offering
a reason why Deleuze is such a timely political thinker: he provides a way
to perce ive the virtual side of politics missed by rationalists such as Haber-
mas and Rawls. Deleuze's philosophical system helps liberal democrats
perce ive elusive threats and cultivate joyful social orders.
Chapter 2 thinks through Deleuze's statement that "we are tired of
trees" and that "nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from
underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes"
(ATP, 15). The chapter begins by offering Deleuzian critiques of arboreal
political theorists and schools, incIuding Alasdair MacIntyre (Thomism),
Leo Strauss (right-Nietzscheanism), Hannah Arendt (civic republican-
ism), Jürgen Habermas (deliberative democracy), Charles Taylor (multi-
culturalism), and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (communism). Then,
the chapter shows how a rhizomatic pluralism welcomes religious and
philosophical diversity, permits the saying of great words and doing of
great deeds, cultivates a certain civic ethos, stretch es and deepens multi-
culturalism, and promotes the formation of left assemblages to work for
the ideal of equality. The rest of the book considers how a Deleuzian ex-
istential faith (or flower) ought to promote its own faith and engage others
in multiple policy arenas (or gardens).
xxii Preface

Chapter 3 reconstructs A Thousand Plateaus's teaching on the topic that

Hume describes as the capital of the sciences: human nature. Deleuze does
not believe that humans are ontologically different than other animais, but
he do es propose what Nietzsche calls a "soul hypothesis" within a one-world
metaphysic. This chapter follows Deleuze's account ofwhat makes humans
differ from other animais, including free hands, supple larynxes, lips, and
an ability to explore different layers of the cosmos. Instead of a two-world
thesis of souls and bodies, Deleuze distinguishes abstract machines and con-
crete assemblages intertwined on a single plane of immanence. Contra many
Deleuze scholars, 1 show that Deleuze does have a conception of human
nature, one that appreciates the earthiness of the human mind. The chapter
concludes with an exposition of Deleuze's Spinozist thesis that liberal de-
mocracies are the milieu best suited to protecting naturalist philosophers.
Chapter 4 reconstructs A Thousand Plateaus as a social contract theory
for deeply pluralistic societies. Deleuze's account of states and nomads
satisfies the main criteria for a social contract theory, namely, an account of
parties in an initial situation choosing principles to govern society. Deleuze
en riches contemporary accounts of a social contract that aim to better rep-
resent the interests of women (Carole Pateman), racial minorities (Charles
W. Mills), nonhuman animais (Martha Nussbaum), and plants and minerais
(Bruno Latour). The brilliance of Deleuze's social contract teaching is a
receptivity to minority-becomings that dety easy categorization.
Chapter 5 investigates how Deleuzian intuitions may be translated into
liberal political theory. Rather than portray Deleuze in the light of Marx
(as ntùnerous scholars have already done), the chapter highlights affinities
between Deleuze and John Stuart Mill. Each section-on utilitarianism,
liberalism, democracy, feminism, and socialism-shows how Deleuze
extends Mill's project to create a society that nurtures personal autonomy
or difference. Deleuzian liberalism steers a path between perfectionist and
politicalliberalism, proudly announcing its modern Epicureanism but also
recognizing the value of other existential faiths.
To illuminate how A Thousand Plateaus may contribute to contemporary
debates about interreligious dialogue and cooperation, Chapter 6 outlines
a Deleuzian comparative political theory. Wh en approaching someone
else's conceptual system (or "regime of signs"), Deleuze advises studying
the regime's history, concepts, and divisions; diagramming the arguments
of internai reformers; and gently exploring where new lines of tlight may
 Prefixe xxiii

be germinated. To illustrate this approach, the chapter offers a Deleuzian

reading of several prominent Muslim political thinkers, including the Sufi
scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the al-Qaeda ideologue Ayman al-Zawahari,
and the Shiite political reformer' Abdolkarim Soroush. The chapter con-
cludes by exploring how Deleuzians and Muslims may cooperate to address
matters of common concem, such as the ecological crisis.
The Conclusion asks how we may best achieve a Deleuzian modernity.
ln The Hermetic Deleuze, Joshua Ramey contends that Deleuzians should
take the lead in a politics of sorcery to combat the black magic of late-
modern capitalism. Though 1 appreciate this approach, 1 think that Deleu-
zians should translate his insights into more familiar vernaculars to make
them more politically powerful. To support this thesis, the chapter turns
to Christina Beltnin's account of rhizomatic Latinidad in The Trouble
with Unity. In sum, the political task for Deleuzians today is not so much
to convert other people to Deleuzianism as to promote a certain type of
politics that allows diverse existential faiths to experiment in peace.

ln the fall of 1997, 1 attended one of William E. Connolly's lectures where

he drew a garden on a blackboard and talked about Deleuze and Guattari's
concept of the rhizome. This book pursues the intimations of that drawing
and shows how A Thousand Plateaus provides a fresh vantage point on top-
ics such as pluralism, human nature, the social contract, intercivilizational
dialogue, democracy, liberalism, socialism, and feminism. 1 thank Bill for
introducing a generation of political theorists, including me, to Deleuze.
lan Buchanan invited me to the First International Deleuze Studies
conference in Cardiff, and he also published, after an immensely helpful
peer-review process, my article in Deleuze Studies. Jeffrey Bell, Paul Pat-
ton, Daniel W. Smith, and 1 participated on a roundtable to discuss Paul's
Deleuzian Concepts at an American Philosophical Association, Pacific
Division, conference in San Francisco, where we had a memorable din-
ner at a French restaurant afterwards. Through our mutual interests in
Deleuze, 1 have also become friends with Levi Bryant, Joshua Ramey,
Audrey Wasser, and Nathan Widder.
1 belong to a community of political scientists who read Deleuze,
including Christina Beltnin, Jane Bennett, Jodi Dean, Thomas Dumm,
Davide Panagia, and Lars T0nder. 1 thank Jodi and Davide for publishing
my essay on the politics of the garden in Theory & Event.
xxiv Preface

1 first met Morton Schoolman at the Vocations of Political Theory

conference at Johns Hopkins at roughly the same time as Bill's lecture.
Since then, we have had many conversations about the political science
profession and Deleuze's political vision. 1 thank Kennan Ferguson, Mort,
and Jon Sisk at Rowman & Littlefield for publishing this book in their
Modemity and Political Thought series.
ln January 2012, 1 taught an intersession course on A Thousand Plateaus
at New College of Florida. Barbara Ceo, Mike Michalson, Jessica Rog-
ers, and Sarah Thompson helped coordinate my visit, and Hana Alqasem,
Jonathan Amos, Alan Sachnowski, Lewis Wistanley, and 1 had sorne Iively
discussions, including one at the Ringling estate overlooking Sarasota Bay.
Fordham is a great place to teach and research political theory, and
l'm grateful for my colleague Nicole Fermon for supporting my work on
Deleuze and giving me a copy of Elizabeth Grosz's Becoming Undone.
1 thank the students at Johns Hopkins, the University of Virginia,
George Mason University, Hamilton College, and Fordham University
who have studied A Thousand Plateaus in my courses. 1 leanl by teaching.
Finally, my wife, Gina, and our sons, Giuliano, Luca, Nicola, and Gior-
gio, have been a source of happiness as l've worked on this book. Our
life together helps me understand Deleuze's notion of becoming-child, or
tapping into a child's sense of openness to the universe. More concretely:
1 love to spend time with them hiking in the mountains, exploring muse-
ums, swimming in the ocean ...

NOTES

1. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays

and Interviews (lthaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 165.
2. Ibid.
3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xv, xiv.
4. AlI internaI citations are to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
5. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995), 14.
6. Antonio Negri, "On Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Pla-
teaus," Graduate Faculty PhilosophyJournal18, no. 1 (1995): 93-109.
 Chapter One

Entering Deleuze' s
Political Vision

The task of political philosophy-according to Sheldon Wolin in his

cIassic text Po/ilies and Vision-is to "fashion a political cosmos out of
political chaos."1 Many of the great statements of political philosophy
arise in times of crisis, that is, when old paradigms and institutions have
been shattered-for instance, in postwar Europe. 2 A political philosopher
advances a political metaphysics that includes categories of time, space,
reality, and energy; he or she describes what exists but, more importantly,
iIIuminates "tantalizing possibilities" to inspire the formation of a better
world. 3 A political philosopher may have a method, that is, a step-by-step
procedure for initiates to arrive at predetermined destinations, but what
gives a political philosophy richness is "extra-scientific considerations,"
that is, knowledge of literature, cinema, religion, metaphysics, scientific
developments in other fields of inquiry, and the history of ideas. 4 A po-
litical philosopher participates in a tradition of discourse, an ongoing
conversation about how to order collective human Iife. And yet a great
political philosopher innovates, that is, expresses a vision that no one has
seen before, in the same way that Van Gogh' s paintings have changed
how many of us view sunflowers or starry nights. At the beginning of
the twenty-first century, it seems, we need a new epochal political theory
to make sense of our fast-paced, interconnected world in which multiple
constituencies interact on many registers of being. 5
Deleuze may be becoming "our Kant," that is, the philosopher who
orients contemporary discussions of epistemology, metaphysics, eth-
ics, politics, and aesthetics in the same way that Kant dominated those
discussions in the high Enlightenment. 6 Take Deleuze's magnum opus,
A Thousand Plaleaus (ATP).7 The book constructs a stunning array of
2 Chapter One

concepts to redescribe political time ("the geology of morals"), political

space ("smooth" and "striated," "territory," "earth," and "the Natal"),
political bodies ("assemblages," "rhizomes," "bodies without organ s,"
"multiplicities," "apparatuses of capture," "war machines"), and political
energy ("macro- and micropolitics"). On the one hand, the book displays
Deleuze's apprenticeship in the history of philosophy, with concepts re-
cast from Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Bergson, Nietzsche, and others. 8 On the
other hand, Deleuze presents a singular vision that seems to accomplish
the mission he assigned transcendental philosophy in Difference and
Repetition: to explore the upper and lower reaches of this world, that is,
the mysterious factors that influence politics but that elude traditional
categories of political science. 9 For many leftist political theorists and
activists today, Deleuze provides the impetus to replace or reformulate
Marxist-Leninist and liberal-republican paradigms. IO
Anyone who has read or taught A Thousand Plateaus knows, how-
ever, that the entry cost to glimpsing Deleuze's political vision is high.
Consider, for example, Ian Buchanan 's "preliminary guide for how to
get started" reading the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia:
Anti-Oedipus. 11 Buchanan recommends that newcomers to that book ex-
amine Deleuze's earlier work (particularly Difference and Repetition, The
Logic of Sense, Empiricism and Subjectivity, Nietzsche and Philosophy,
Dialogues, and Negotiations), study the c1assic texts of psychoanalysis
(including by Freud, Lacan, Bettelheim, Klein, and Reich), master the
literature on historical materialism (including books by Foucault, Sartre,
Fanon, and Turner), and peruse the referenced literary sources (includ-
ing by Artaud, Lawrence, Proust, Beckett, Büchner, Nerval, and Butler).
Presumably, once one has accomplished this task, then one may begin to
tackle the imposing secondary literatures addressed in A Thousand Pla-
teaus on geology, linguistics, politics, aestheties, and (a thousand?) other
topies. To be sure, great philosophers always demand time and effort and
generate multifaceted research projects. Given that Deleuze envisioned
his philosophy as an "open system," whereby "concepts relate to circum-
stances rather than essences," Deleuze scholars may rightly rejoice at ail
the myriad directions contemporary Deleuzians may explore. Yet setting
the intellectual bar to entering Deleuze's political vision too high may
confirm the accusation that Deleuze is a "highly elitist author, indifferent
toward politics."12 Is there a way to make Deleuze's work more acces-
 Entering Deleuze 's Political Vision 3

sible without compromising its intellectual rigor or precision? May one

democratize Deleuze's esoteric or hermetic passages, as it were, without
collapsing into common sense?
One of the more surprising remarks that Deleuze made in an interview
about A Thousand Plateaus-a book in which one protagonist, Professor
Challenger, empties a lecture hall (ATP, 64)-is that he wants to forge
alliances with like-minded people: "The question that interests us in rela-
tion to A Thousand Plateaus is whether there are any resonances, com-
mon ground, with what other writers, musicians, painters, philosophers,
and sociologists are doing or trying to do, from which we can ail derive
greater strength or confidence."13 Deleuze was indifferent, though not
necessarily hostile, to many features ofdemocratic politics as traditionally
understood, including governance by the majority and the rule of public
opinion. 14 Yet Deleuze declared himself a leftist (homme de gauche) and
envisioned a left composed of an "aggregate of processes of minoritarian
becomings" in which everybody has sorne hand in governance, though
no one easily identifiable group (majority) dominatesY Deleuze saw A
Thousand Plateaus as a work of left political philosophy and wanted his
book to be comprehensible to a wide array of people (each of whom is
plied by ditference and does not fit neatly into categories that define a
majority). Deleuze did not think or desire his work to be easily accessible
to currently existing mass populations, but he also did not envision him-
self as a beautiful soul who cared about his own salvation rather than the
well-being of society.16 The question remains, though, how can Deleuz-
ians advance the project of identifying or making corn mon ground with
an array of intellectuals and activists to enact concrete change? How can
one make A Thousand Plateaus as easy to understand as possible while
still honoring Deleuze's vision in ail its singularity and complexity and
injunctions to use it as a toolbox rather th an as a package containing a
settled meaning?17
This chapter proposes a handful of principles to facilitate entering
Deleuze's political vision. Initially, 1 offer several rules of thumb that
make Deleuze's political theory comprehensible with little more than a
good dictionary and sketchpad. To extract these rules 1 plumb Deleuze's
writings on Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, and his books written in his
own voice; and, once again, 1 emphasize that Deleuze's political theory
"ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organi-
4 Chapter One

zations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and

social struggles" (ATP, 7). Deleuze's philosophy is an intricate, plastic,
and porous system that demands both careful study and receptivity to
developments in philosophy, art, science, and politics. 18 There is no royal
road to Deleuzian political philosophy, but there are straighter ones. To
substantiate this point, 1 explicate a sentence that contains an important
political teaching of A Thousand Plateaus. The aim is not to simplify the
Deleuzian "abstract machine," or conceptual system, but to present a way
to diagram the machinery so that others may more readily plug into it. 1
conclude by explaining why Deleuze deserves a more prominent place in
the academic political theory canon.

THE POLITICAL VISION OF A THOUSAND PLATEAUS

To comprehend what is is the task ofphilosophy, for what is is reason.

As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a
child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is ifs own time comprehended
in thoughts.
-Hegel, Philosophy of Right l9

A Thousand Plateaus may be the philosophical work that best captures

our time in thought. Such a statement must immediately be qualified.
Deleuze's entire philosophical corpus evades and opposes the Hegelian
account of the phenomenology of spirit. 20 Each chapter title of A Thou-
sand Plateaus has a date, but the dates are not arranged sequentially, thus
subverting any attempt to find a historical metanarrative that explains hu-
manity's roots or telos. Deleuze prefers to view history stratographically,
rather than chronologically, meaning that "Iuminous points," physical or
noetic, from the past may rise up to enrich or disrupt the present.:21 Yet our
time expresses its own singularity, both because of political, economic,
technological, social changes from earlier milieus-such as the collapse
of the Soviet Union, the accelerated construction of global markets, the
emergence of the Internet, and the growing consensus in favor of treat-
ing men and women as equals-and because the historical archive has
a renewed vitality in our age. Today, we can travel the world quickly in
thought and extension and thus take an interest in the history of humanity,
 En te ring Deleuze 's Political Vision 5

religion, science, music, mathematics, the state, capitalism, and other top-
ics discussed in A Thal/sand Plateaus. Such investigations are spurred by
curiosity, but also by a practical conviction that we have a much broader
palette of ideas and practices than heretofore to paint, in words and deeds,
our time. The purpose of A Thal/sand Plateaus is to help us understand the
contemporary world and steer it in life-affirming ways, to actualize what
1 cali a "Deleuzian modernity."
A Thal/sand Plateal/s stretch es the Greek definition of politics as ta
politika, that which happens in a polis, or "city." Take the sentence: "ev-
erything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics
and a micropolitics" (ATP, 213). Many political scientists view politics
as who gets what, when, and how. Deleuze diffèrs from most political
scientists by refusing to privilege human rational actors as the main or
sole actants in the political realm and by attributing primary motivation to
subrepresentational desires rather than self-conscious interests. Political
scientists may enter Deleuze's terminology by distinguishing levels of
analysis, from state policies and elections to public opinion and political
psychology. But that entry-point may misrepresent the elusive and mys-
terious features of the micropolitical that Deleuze wants to iIIuminate.
Deleuze views the political, in terminology he primarily used in the late
1960s, as an "Idea." An Idea is a "virtual multiplicity" defined by "dif-
ferential relations" and "concomitant singularities."22 Like a Platonic
Idea, the Deleuzian Idea transcends the actual world that we perceive
with our naked eyes and helps structure, or pilot, those things that we
see and touch. Deleuze's Idea, though, is Dionysian, or wild, combating
every effort to place an Apollonian, or static, framework upon it. In the
defense of his Doctorat d'Etat, published as "The Method of Dramatiza-
tion," Deleuze uses terms that are both philosophic and poetic to describe
the elusive forces that press us to think anew: Ideas inhabit "a zone of
obscure distinction" that generates more stable concepts and things, but
Ideas also have an intrinsic power to overturn established orders. 23 Like
Hannah Arendt, Deleuze celebrates the political as the site of natality,
the capacity to give birth to something new. 24 Deleuze ditfers from Ar-
endt, though, through his astonishing statement that everything-not just
humans in their civic or personal roles-is political. Deleuze stretches
and deepens the field that political theorists may investigate to determine
6 Chapter One

how we-now including the trans- and nonhuman-do and ought to live
together in the universe. 2S
So is it proper to describe A Thousand Plateaus as a work of political
philosophy or political theory? Political philosophy, in academic political
science departments, often refers to the quest "to replace opinion about
the nature of political things by knowledge of the nature of political
things."26 Deleuze does not endorse Platonic metaphysics or its accom-
panying elitist polities, but given his extensive retlections on the nature
of philosophy, we may still consider the possibility that he is a political
philosopher. In the 1960s, Sheldon Wolin argued for a type of political
philosophy-subsequently called political theory-that privileges the
exercise of the imagination over reason. In this respect, Deleuze-whose
first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity, dedicates a chapter to the power
of the imagination in ethics and knowledge-would probably cali him-
self a political theorist. But does this term connote a dualism-between
theory and practice, or possible and real experience-that Deleuze sought
to overcome?27 Theoria, in Greek, means "a looking at" (from thea, "a
view" + horan, "to see"); praxis, from the Greek prattein, "to do," means
"action." Theory, put simply, is what we do with our eyes and practice
is what we do with our hands. The Platonic tradition tries to maintain a
sharp distinction between these two activities. Deleuze recasts this dual-
ism rather than discards it entirely. In an interview with Michel Foucault
ca lIed "Intellectuals and Power," Deleuze explains:

The relationships between the ory and practice are ... partial and fragmen-
tary. On one side, a theory is always local and related to a limited field, and
it is applied in another sphere, more or less distant from it. ... Practice is a
set ofrelays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from
one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually encoun-
tering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall,28

For Deleuze, it is senseless to talk of disembodied philosophizing. We

always inhabit bodies that interact with other bodies in concrete physieal
locations. Nerves connect our eyes and hands, and skin is porous. There is an
open circuit Iinking the images in our eyes, concepts in our brains, sensations
on our fingertips, and actions of other bodies.29 And yet, Deleuze insists, the
relationship between sensibility and thinking is asymmetrical, meaning that
there is always a disjunction between Ideas and concepts, on one side, and
 Entering Deleuze 's Po/itical Vision 7

actuality, on the other. Corporeal practices can jolt thinking, but they cannot
detennine it. Conversely, Ideas and concepts can prompt action that trans-
fonns the political sphere, but there is always friction in the transition from
theory to practice. Deleuzian political theory is a sort of practice insofar as
it en riches our vision of political possibilities and inspires us to work toward
goals that would otherwise have remained occluded or unimagined.

HOW TO ENTER DELEUZE'S POLITICAL VISION

Let us now propose a few rules, extracted from years of reading and
teaching A Thousand Plateaus, to facilitate a deeper comprehension of its
political vision.

Track Etymology
A philosopher masters concepts in the same way that a painter masters
percepts or an author masters affects. 3o Deleuze's method minimizes as
far as possible "typographical, lexical, or syntactic creations" (ATP, 22).
Deleuze's language is both strange and famil iar. 31 How? In his Introduc-
tion to Kant 's Anthropology, Foucault notes that Romance languages
follow "the secret law of a Latinity ... which serves to guarantee the
intrinsic exchange value ofwhat is said."32 If one uses a dictionary to find
the etymology of Deleuze's concepts in A Thousand Plateaus, one almost
inevitably finds a Latin, Greek, and/or Indo-European root. One of the key
concepts of A Thousand Plateaus, for instance, territory (territoire}-and
its cognates territorialization and deterritorialization-emerges from both
"earth, land" (terra) and "to terrorize" (terrere)Y
Why does Deleuze say that "etymology is like a specifically philo-
sophical athleticism" or that we leam to think in dictionaries?34 Clearly,
a philosopher must master the art of thinking, and concepts are the basic
thought-units that enable us to mentally grasp the sensible. Intuitions with-
out concepts are blind: to see with our minds, we need to have a reservoir
ofconcepts. The purpose of Deleuze's earliest philosophical monographs is
precisely to practice using mental tools and weapons that he can redeploy
in his own philosophy.35 Reading a dictionary does not suffi ce to think new
thoughts, but it is crucial exercise in a philosophical apprenticeship.
8 Chapter One

In addition, studying etymology lets you recover a language before

Christianity "ruined the Roman preservation of the Greek enlighten-
ment."36 When Deleuze uses an ordinary word "filled with harmonics so
distant that it risks being imperceptible to a nonphilosophical ear"37 he is
taking up the project of the N ietzschean Enlightenment: to resituate the
accomplishments of the "West" upon an Epicurean, rather than a Platonic,
metaphysical foundation. 38 "The untimely is attained in relation to the
most distant past, by the reversai of Platonism"-and the way to do that
is to use words in a sense before they were overcoded by democratic Pla-
tonism, or Christianity.39 In sum, Deleuze, like Nietzsche, thinks the art of
etymology empowers one to think c1early and in a way that circumvents,
at least in part, the Christian inheritance. 40

Find Images
Let us dwell more on why etymology helps c1arify thinking. One of the
surprising features of researching the etymology for concepts in De-
leuze's most abstract, dense passages is that virtually aIl of them have a
root in a concrete object: "Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks
through affects and percepts."41 Hegel drew a sharp tine between concepts
and percepts: "in th in king, the object does not present itself in picture-
thoughts but in Notions, i.e. in a distinct being-in-itself."42 According to
the Hegelian narrative of the history ofphilosophy, primitives (such as the
Egyptians) thought in term of images and sculptures, whereas the march
of self-consciousness is defined by its abstraction into concepts or No-
tions. Deleuze, on this front as on many others, opposes Hegel's effect on
philosophy. This is how Deleuze advises a fellow philosopher:

In the analysis of concepts, it is always better to begin with extremely

simple, concrete situations, not with philosophical antecedents, not even
with problems as such (the one and the multiple, etc.). Take multiplicities,
for example. Vou want to begin with questions such as what is a pack? ... 1
have only one thing to tell you: stick to the con crete, and always retum to itY

Deleuze, like many of the canonical figures in the history of political phi-
losophy, "sticks to the concrete," even if the concrete today difIers from
that of earlier eras. 44
 Entering Deleuze 's Po/itical Vision 9

Deleuze's defense of picture thinking goes back at least ta his read-

ing of Hume. In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume extols Berkeley's
idea that "aIl general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annex'd ta a
certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes
them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar ta them."
Abstract ideas always bear the trace of a sensation or impression: "the
image in the mind is only that of a particular abject, tho' the application
of our reasoning be the same, as if it were universal."45 Thinking cannot
be reduced to sensations given to us: Deleuze and arguably even Hume
himself recognize that the mind imposes conceptual casting upon the raw
material of sensation. 46 Yet Deleuze shared Hume's suspicion of a priori
theorizing and thought that it led to duplicity or confusion. That is why
Deleuze opens the English translation of Dialogues by declaring that he
has always been an empiricist, committed to tracing "concepts from the
lines that compose multiplicities."47
Finding the image, though, does not mean sticking to the banal. Hume's
example of returning to the everyday, famously, is playing a game of
backgammon. 48 Deleuze calls his project transcendental empiricism,
however, to suggest that we need to experiment with our philosophical
studies and corporeal practices to open the aperture through which we
receive the world: '''Transcendental empiricism' is a kind of cognition
that violates the normal rules of experience, yet nevertheless attains a 'su-
perior' realization of sensation, imagination and thought."49 Deleuze is an
empiricist, but he resists the attempts to domesticate the faculties through
the doctrines of good and common sense. To visualize the strange, we
may need to employ intellectual and visceral techniques on our singular
and collective bodies. 50

Diagram Schemata
A Thousand Plateaus uses the method of "stratoanalysis" (ATP, 22). Stra-
tum is from the Latin stratum, "layer" (and the Indo-European base *stre-
to- "to stretch"); analysis is from the Greek analysis, "break up, unfasten-
ing." Stratoanalysis means to diagram the layers, sides, and components
of a body. Deleuze wrote his book on Francis Bacon with reproductions
of the paintings in front of him. 51 One helpful exercise when reading
10 Chapter One

Deleuze's texts is to reverse this project: to diagram their conceptual ar-

rangements, or schemata.
In What 1s Philosophy? Deleuze advises philosophers to master "the art
of the portrait": it is not a matter of"making lifelike," that is, of repeating
what a philosopher said but rather ofproducing resemblance by separating
out both the plane of immanence he instituted and the new concepts he
created. These are mental, noetic, and machinic portraits. Although they
are usually created with philosophical tools, they can also be produced
aesthetically.52
A "noetic" portrait-from Greek nous, "mind"-represents the struc-
ture and content, the bones and flesh, of a philosophical argument. We
need to grasp a philosophical argument with our minds, but we can also
use our hands and eyes to make the argument more intuitive.
Take, for example, the paragraph from A Thousand Plateaus that
opens: "Let us consider the three great strata concerning us, in other
words, the ones that most directly bind us: the organism, signifiance, and
subjectification" (ATP, 159). One way to diagram this argument is to
draw a circle with a compass, lifting the head frequently to convey "the
principles of connection and heterogeneity" that makes ail borders in the
universe porous (ATP, 7). Then, with a ruler, one may draw lines to make
three st rata, which may be labeled organism (body), signifiance (soul),
and subjectification. And yet, the purpose of this paragraph is to draw
attention to the side of the body (the one facing the pole of scission) that
fluctuates and decomposes. 53 We may then make one side of our circle
more perforated, with lines of tlight tleeing this side of the body, and
label the strata disarticulation, experimentation, and nomadism (Fig. 1.1).
There is much more work to do to make this paragraph comprehensible
or usable, but we can begin to appreciate the Apollonian (and not just
Dionysian) features of Deleuzian political theory.
This strategy also gives us a clue to why Deleuze calls his philosophy a
"constructivism" in What 1s Philosophy? Like Kant in the Critique of Pure
Reason, Deleuze thinks that philosophers can gain insight from mathemati-
cians about how to construct concepts, objects, and figures. What makes
Deleuze a Kantian is his recognition that we draw the lines that define our
concepts and mental representations ofreality. Yet, in his practical philoso-
phy, Kant thinks thatpure practical reason lays the ground for the object of
our striving (the "realm of ends"), whereas Deleuze agrees with Hume that
 Entering Deleuze 's Political Vision Il

The three strata concerning us

------....-- ---

Subjectification Nomadism
1
L - -_ _._ _.__... _ __
f
1
f
f
1
(
1
1

\\ Signifiance (soul) Experimentation

\
\
\
\
\
\,
------

Organism (body) Disarticulation

----- .. --~~--"".
Figure 1.1. A Diagram of the Schema for A Thousand Plateaus, 159-60.

imagination is the key tàculty of ethical and political thinking. 54 The signifi-
cance of this fact, for us, is that each of us may draw or fill in the schema
with our own impure content. Just as there are no straight lines in nature,
so too there are no straight lines in Deleuzian schemata (a wooden, plastic,
or metal ruler always has tiny divots). That is why Deleuze recommends
cartography rather than decalcomania, map-making rather than tracing: be-
cause any such drawing (one circle, two sides, three strata) is a provisional
start to practical retlection or experimentation (ATP, 12).

Construct Theories
A norm is an ought-claim; it is also, etymologically, a "carpenter's
square" (Latin nOr/na; Greek gnomon). By diagramming Deleuze's argu-
ments, we begin to see that he is a profoundly normative thinker when
he asks how we ought to draw the lines that compose our individual and
collective bodies. 55 "How do you make yourself a Body without Organs
12 Chapter One

[BwO]?"-the title of Plateau 6-could also be restated: how ought we

balance the side of our bodies that tends toward order with the side that
opens up onto difference? An ethical question: how do 1 experience the
heightened sensations afforded by drugs without self-destructing or con-
tributing to social violence?S6 A political question: how do we delimit the
identity and borders of Europe or North America in conditions of glo-
balization?57 Once we attend to the normative dimension of A Thousand
Plateaus, we begin to see a pattern of injunctions.
First, map or diagram the body of which we are composed. Deleuze
speaks of "territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of
a surveyor" (ATP, 160). Political theorists ought to avail themselves of
empirical research produced by political scÏentists using techniques such
as multiple linear regression, and relevant scholarship produced by soci-
ologists, historians, and economists.
Next, chisel the borders that delimit our identities. "It is an inevitable
exercÏse" for humans, who must breathe, eat, defecate, and perform other
activities that involve taking or releasing things into and out of our bodies
(ATP, 149). But it is also a political question par excellence: How do we
define our ethical and political subjectivities? What historical material do
we want schools to teach or not teach? With what countries, international
organizations, and foreign political parties do we want to forge alliances?
What bodies threaten our integrity or amplify our joy? Deleuze's crite-
ria for addressing these questions are Spinozist: "life and death, youth
and old age, sadness and joy" (ATP, 151). Sadness and joy diminish or
increase the power of a body; thus, evaluative criteria always shift de-
pending on the body and the forces that act upon it: "each individual' s
pleasure or pain differs from the pleasure or pain of another to the extent
that the nature or essence of the one also differs from that of the other."58
There is no a priori answer to the question of how to draw or puncture the
lines that define us, so we need to experiment. 59 And the sensibility of A
Thousand Plateaus-though more sober than Anti-Oedipus6°-is that we
need to experiment more aggressively: "Let' s go further still" (ATP, 151).
Yet Deleuze also recommends the "art of caution" to ensure that we
do not experiment recklessly: "You don 't do it with a sledgehammer, you
use a very fine file. You invent self-destructions that have nothing to do
with the death drive" (ATP, 160). Philosophy, for Deleuze, may be about
exploring the powerful and mysterious forces ab ove and below the level
 Entering Deleu::e 's Po/itical Vision \3

of perception (the molecular), but political philosophy means translating

these insights into concrete practice: "molecular escapes and movements
would be nothing if they did not return to the molar organizations to re-
shuftle their segments" (ATP, 216-17).
ln an article titled "Dramatization as Method in Political Theory," Iain
Mackenzie and Robert Porter detail the provisional and experimental
procedure that Deleuze recommends for constructing concepts and prin-
ciples: "Dramatization is a method aimed at determining the dynamic
nature of political concepts by 'bringing them to life,' in the way that
dramatic performances can bring to 1ife the characters and themes of a
play script."61 A philosopher performs the role of screenwriter and direc-
tor, issuing prompts on what to think as one goes through a text. But the
text itself does not come alive unless the reader invests his or her own
thoughts, interests, and desires into it. Deleuze's philosophy has a system-
atic character that rewards determining how the parts fit together. Deleuze
viewed his writing as an egg in which concepts and themes shoot off into
every direction and yet reunite into a whole. 62 At the same time, Deleuze
encourages his readers to experiment with the concepts, looking for new
ways to use them and to enlarge the stock of concepts: "In political theory,
dramatization as method requires that we stage new relations within and
between the concepts that animate politics in order to express the indeter-
minate yet endlessly provocative nature of the Idea of the political."63 This
process combines intellectual, aesthetic, and practical faculties: no two
people will dramatize a political theory the exact same way. Still, a politi-
cal theory can provide a useful function by outlining a "realistic utopia"
towards which political bodies can strive. 64

A POLITICAL APHORISM

An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered"

just because it has been read out; on the contrary, this is just the beginning
of its proper interpretation, for this, an art of interpretation is needed.
-Nietzsche, On the Genea/ogy of Mora/ity65

There is a difference between how philosophers exposit their ideas

(Darstellung) and how they fonnulate them (Forschung).66 1 have been
14 Chapter One

articulating an "art of interpretation" that enables us to see a pattern, a

refrain, in many of Deleuze's key political arguments; in this section, 1
employ this art to decipher a remarkable political theoretical statement
in A Thousand Plateaus. This analysis reveals more of the steps (the
Forschung) than may be necessary for most Deleuze commentary or ap-
plication. But my hope is that this procedure will help us understand and
explain to others-who may be on the fence about whether to invest time
and energy in the Deleuzian venture-the power and appeal of Deleuze's
VISIOn.
The aphorism addresses the question: How you do make yourself a
body without organs? Or, how does one, as a political actor, maximize joy
and minimize sadness?67: "This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself
on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advanta-
geous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, pos-
sible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and
there, try out continuum of intensities segment by segment, have a sm aIl
plot of new land at aIl times" (ATP, 161). The image that informs the title
of A Thousand P lateaus may be "the landscape of Limousin, specifically
the Millevaches plateau [Deleuze] could see from the windows of his
house at Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat."68 Regardless, the tenns in this pas-
sage paint a landscape of land (stratum, place, deterritorializations, land),
sky (lines of flight), and water (flow conjunctions).
Deleuze invites us to imagine ourse Ives inhabiting this landscape.
Lodge is from the Frankish *laubja, "shelter"; stratum is a "horizontal
layer." To lodge yourself on a stratum means to inhabit a slice of the
world: to be part of a family, country, religious group, profession, school
of thought, or any other customary practice. In each of our worlds, there
are elements of stability, flux, and uncertainty; the challenge is to diagram
them with the "craft of a surveyor."
We can schematize this passage, like so many in A Thousand Plateaus,
by drawing a circle with a perforated line down the middle, with the left
side of the circle more solid (though, importantly, with ho les), and the
right side more porous, with lines of flight escaping out the side. The
circle represents ourse Ives, and the left side is our "normal" or "estab-
lished" side (with a family, career, major language, profession, favorite
sports teams, and so forth), the right side is our more experimental side
(that gently challenges established fàmily norms, that stretches the canon
 Entering Deleuze 's Political Vision 15

of our academic disciplines, that ignores popular customs and adopts

unusual ones, and so forth), and the "fines of flight" emanating from that
side represent our nomadic tendencies, whose origin we may not recog-
nize or whose destination we may not anticipate (listening to new music
may germinate these tendencies).
Deleuze's practical rules in this passage are more "counsels of pru-
dence," given the various landscapes we each inhabit, than "categorical
imperatives," which apply unconditionally to every rational being. 69 On
the one hand, Deleuze c1early presses us to test out (Latin experiri) new
possibilities of life, to make the hemisphere oftraditional values and prac-
tices sm aller and the hemisphere of new values and practices larger. For
each layer, stratum, we can try out appropriate strategies, say, by making
friends with peoples of other religions, by attending lectures in other aca-
demic disciplines, by learning other languages, by going to the movies,
by ingesting hallucinogens, by practicing yoga, and so forth. If we are
to imagine ourse Ives inhabiting a landscape, Deleuze presses us to culti-
vate a garden with more wildness. On the other hand, Deleuze's advice
to "keep a small plot of new land at ail times" indicates that we should
not gamble everything at once in our experiments. Hard drugs or violent
revolutionary politics may be terrible ways to become a BwO. From the
perspective of a U.S. citizen, Deleuze reveals how misleading the duali-
ties between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, can
be: we ail balance traditional and experimental elements, though that fact
does not diminish the still-relevant ethical distinction between how we
balance those sides.
Finally, we have many options for how to flesh out this passage, for one,
because we ail inhabit multiple strata. In the same paragraph, Deleuze notes,
"We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us
and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper
assemblage within which we are held" (ATP, 161). Social is from the Latin
sequi, "to follow," and implies any way in which two or more humans
are connected. We cou Id apply this passage to ourse Ives and our spouses,
ourse Ives and our mentors, ourse Ives and Egyptian activists, ourselves and
other people who aren't rich, and so forth. An aphorism "must produce
movements, bursts of extraordinary speed and slowness."70 The aphorism
we are considering can move fast, as when a college student interprets this
immediately in connection to how she ought to participate and intervene in
16 Chapter One

her sorority ("gently tip the assemblage"); but the aphorism can also linger
in our minds and produce new thoughts and connections ("actually, what
happens in Egypt affects our own way of life," or "maybe 1 thought 1 was
more open-minded than 1 was on this particular issue: how can 1 expand
my thinking or acting in productive ways?"). Deleuze's political vision
bears the mark of its creator, but it also aims to enrich rather th an supplant
the singular ways that each of us views the world and ourselves. A genius
does not want to be imitated but to be emulated "by another genius, who is
thereby awakened to the feeling ofhis own originality."71 By this definition,
Deleuze's political vision is both genius, or profoundly original, and aims to
help ail of us produce our own fresh ways of seeing the world.

DELEUZE AND THE POLITICAL THEORY CANON

Wolin's PoUlies and Vision has been an extraordinarily influential text for
leftist academic political theory since its original publication in 1960. 72
Yet the updated edition dism isses postmodern ists such as Deleuze for
both misreading Nietzsche and corrupting democratic theory and practice
with playfulness. 73 In a recent survey of political theorists in the United
States, Deleuze is ranked number 38 among scholars who have had the
greatest impact on political theory in the pa st twenty years. 74 Several
decades into Foucault's prediction/invocation of what would come to be
known as a Deleuzian century, Deleuze has not yet entered the canon of
the history of political thought.
Why should political theorists treat Deleuze wÎth the seriousness hith-
erto reserved for Rawls and Habermas (1 and 2 in the aforementioned sur-
vey)? First, Deleuze illuminates aspects of the virtuallevel ofpolitics that
elude traditional political science and theory. Joshua Ramey has shown
that Deleuze participated in the hermetic and mystical traditions, as wh en
he extols "a politics of sorcery" in A Thousand Plateaus. As Rawls's and
Habermas's constant invocations of reason and reasonableness attest,
there is something deeply unsettling for post-Enlightenment philosophers
to think about magic and the occult. Yet Kant himselfrecognized that there
were Iimits to what could be explained phenomenally, and thus many of
his most interesting (and controversial) passages consider the realm of
reality that we can only think about but not know. Deleuze's explorations
 Entering Deleu::e 's Po/itical Vision 17

of the "virtual"-his recasting of the Kantian "noumenal"-illuminate

"the multiplicity of experiential states in which lines are blurred between
human consciousness and animal awareness, between biopsychic Iife and
the nature of matter itself."75 From the perspective of thinking about the
subtIe forces that influence politics-for instance, the way that support
for a political idea or movement, as in the 2010 Arab Spring, can spread
like wildfire-Deleuze provides an invaluable pair of lenses. Just as Van
Gogh presented the energy radiating from trees, stars, and suntlowers in a
way that cameras cannot, Deleuze portrays the political tlows and lines of
tlight that slip beneath the radar of most political scientists and theorists.
ln addition, Deleuze provides a normative framework that enables us to
recognize the greatest threats to contemporary liberal democratic societ-
ies and the most fruitful avenues to their transformation. AI-Qaeda is a
"rhizome"-that is, an acentered, multidimensional, often-imperceptible
network-that has befuddled political scientists and actors around the
world. Deleuze helps us recognize the existence of these non-state "war
machines" and, as should be c1ear from Deleuze's more "conservative"
statements, marshal the resources to combat them. 76 More affirmatively,
though, Deleuze's vision presses us to live Iife with a greater appreciation
of the porosity that defines our ethical and political subjectivities. Many of
us know, on sorne level, that bodies take things in from and leak out into
the world and that, for instance, in seven years our bodies will retain none
of their current cells. Yet this philosophical insight constantly combats
the commonsense habit of ascribing fairly stable identities to bodies. Part
of Deleuze's brilliance is that he provides a philosophical vocabulary-
grounded in the roots of European languages and anomalous-to appreci-
ate the plasticity and openness of our political identities, territories, parties,
economies, and so forth. Reading Deleuze gives us insight into how to fold
joy into our political practices.

NOTES

l. Sheldon Wolin, Polities and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western

Politieal Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 9.
2. David Reggio, "The Deleuzian Legacy," History of the Human Sciences 20,
no. 1 (2007): 145-60.
18 Chapter One

3. Wolin, PoUtics and Vision, 20.

4. Sheldon Wolin, "Political Theory as a Vocation," American PoUlical Sci-
ence Review 63, no. 4 (1969): 1062-82.
5. William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 2-3.
6. John Protevi, Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body PoUlie
(New York: Athlone, 2001),6-7.
7. Félix Guattari contributed key concepts-including the "refrain" (ritour-
nello)--to A Thousand Plateaus and wrote important essays and books on his
own, including The Three Ecologies and Chaosophy. See François Dosse, Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010); Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari 's A Thousand Plateaus
(New York: Bloomsbury, 20l3). In this book, 1 focus on Deleuze rather than
Deleuze and Guattari for at least two reasons. Deleuze had expressed his politi-
cal vision before meeting Guattari in 1968-see, for instance, the discussion of
institutions in Empiricism and Subjectivity or the treatment of nomads in Differ-
ence and Repetition. And Deleuze wrote the final drafts and built a conceptual
system from Guattari's "schizoid writing-flow." See Daniel W. Smith, "Inside
Out: Guattari's Anti-Oedipus Papers," Radical Philosophy 140 (2006): 36-37.
Deleuze is the proper name for the candidate to enter the history of political phi-
losophy. On how proper names describe a collective machine of enunciation that
includes multiple voices, see ATP, 37-38.
8. See Graham Jones and Jon Roffe, Deleuze 's Philosophical Lineage (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
9. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), l35.
10. Marcelo Svirsky, ed., Deleuze and Political Activism (Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 2010).
Il. Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Guattari 's Anti-Oedipus: A Reader 's Guide
(London: Continuum, 2008), 152.
12. Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New
York: Routledge, 2004), 20.
13. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 27. See also Deleuze's remark in an interview about Anti-
Oedipus: "We're looking for allies. We need allies. And we think these allies are
already out there, that they've gone ahead without us, that there are lots ofpeople
who've had enough and are thinking, feeling, and working in similar directions:
it's not a question offashion but ofa deeper 'spirit of the age' infonning converg-
ing project in a wide range of fields" (ibid., 22).
 Entering Deleuze 's Po/itical Vision 19

14. Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 161-84.
15. L'Abécédaire De Gilles Deleuze, directed by Gilles Deleuze and Claire
Parnet (Éditions Montparnasse: Arte Video, 1997), http://www.langlab.wayne.
edu/CStivale/D-G/ABCs.html, G (Gauche). See also Nicholas Tampio, "As-
semblages and the Multitude: Deleuze, Hardt, Negri, and the Postmodern Left,"
European Journal of Political Theory 8, no. 3 (2009): 383-400.
16. Deleuze rejects the mantIe of "the self-styled lucid thinker of an impossible
revolution, whose very impossibility is such a source of pleasure" (Gilles Deleuze
and Claire Parnet, Dialogues Il [New York: Columbia University Press, 2007], 145).
17. Ian Buchanan, Deleuzism: A Metacommental)J (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2000).
18. "Deleuze and the political can only refer to an open-ended series of rela-
tions between philosophy and politics, a series of encounters between philosophi-
cal concepts and political events" (Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political [New
York: Routledge, 2000], 10).
19. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right,
ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 21.
20. On Deleuze's critique of Hegel, see Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An
Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993); Nathan Widder, Rejlections on Time and Politics (University Park: Penn-
sylvania State University Press, 2008).
21. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham
Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),59.
22. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, ed. David
Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotexte, 2004), 100.
23. Ibid., 100-101. See also Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 106-21.
24. Hannah Arendt, The Hl/man Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998).
25. Deleuze's main contribution to contemporary political theory may be "an
unwavering attempt to expose [the micropolitical], investigate its mechanisms
and dynamics ... , show how it unfolds to form the concepts and categories that
define so much of personal, social, and political life, and explore how it can be
engaged and adjusted" (Nathan Widder, Political Theory after Deleuze [New
York: Continuum, 2012], x).
26. Leo Strauss, An Introduction to Po/itical Philosophy: Ten Essays, ed. Hi-
lail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 5.
27. Smith, Essays on Deleuze, 89-105.
20 Chapter One

28. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays

and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 206. On the dif-
ferences between Deleuze's and Foucault's conceptions of the theory-practice
relation, see Paul Patton, "Activism, philosophy and actuality in Deleuze and
Foucault," Deleuze Studies 4, 2010 Supplement, Deleuze and Political Activism
(2010): 84-103.
29. On the political implications of a Deleuzian conception of the body/brainl
culture network, see Connolly, Neuropolitics.
30. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?
31. "Perhaps it is finally the strangeness of the lexicon, the heterogeneity of
the abstract terms and their sheer number that are most striking about Deleuze's
diction: an abstract, incorporeal, alien vocabulary for a new foreign language"
(Ronald Bogue, Deleuze's Wake: Tributes and Tributaries [Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 2004], 12). The question becomes, though, how can
we democrats popularize Deleuzian insights?
32. Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant's Anthropology, ed. Roberto
Nigro, trans. Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs (Cambridge, MA.: Semiotexte,
2008), 98.
33. William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1995), xxii. In general, the etymologies in this book draw
upon the Oxford English Dictionary (www.oed.com) and the Online Etymology
Dictionary (www.etymonline.com/).
34. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 8; Deleuze, Difference and
Repetition, 165.
35. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xv.
36. Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 174.
37. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 8.
38. Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, 166-86.
39. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990), 265.
40. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith AnselI-
Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 34.
41. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 66.
42. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology ofSpirit, ed. J. N. Find-
lay, trans. Arnold V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 120.
43. Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-
1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Cam-
bridge, MA: Semiotexte, 2006), 362--63.
44. Classical political philosophy "hardly uses a term which did not originate in
the marketplace and is not in common use there" (Strauss, Introduction to Political
 Entering Deleuze 's Po/itical Vision 21

Ph ilosophy, 130). Deleuze, in the Straussian narrative of the history of political

philosophy, is a modem, refusing his assent to otherworldly metaphysics or elitist
politics. On the other hand, Deleuze replicates the ancients' efforts to follow "care-
fully and even scrupulously the articulation which is inherent in, and natural to,
politicallife" (ibid., 61). On how Kant and Hegel may do the bestjob articulating
the concepts of modem life, see Robert B. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectiv-
ity: On the Kantian Aftermath (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 1
contend that our era requires a different conceptual system and that Deleuze may
be its finest exponent. Even though Deleuze's political philosophy requires intense
effort to analyse the concepts and synthesize the whole, the language almost always
emerges from simple images, such as the flow of a stream or a gust of wind.
45. David Hume, A Treatise of Hum an Nature, eds. David Fate Norton and
Mary 1. Norton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17, 18.
46. Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo ofPhilosophy: From Kant
to Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 4.
47. Deleuze and Pamet, Dialogues II, viii.
48. Hume, Treatise, 175.
49. Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Ph ilosophy, 69-89; Claire Cole-
brook, Gilles Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 2002), 22-26.
50. Connolly, Neuropolitics, 80-113.
51. Daniel W. Smith, "Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in
The Logic of Sensation," in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, ed. Gilles
Deleuze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xi.
52. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 55.
53. A Thousand Plateaus employs intuition, the method of Bergsonism: "If
the composite represents the fact, it must be divided into tendencies or into pure
presences that only exist in principle (en droit)" (Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam [New York: Zone, 1988],23). In
Bergsonism, Deleuze speaks of any body having two slopes, or directions, space
and duration, but in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze employs other comparable
distinctions, such as between the poles of fusion and scission. On the one hand,
Deleuze's philosophical corpus as a whole grapples with the question of how to
convey the distinctions and interconnections between the visible and the invis-
ible, the actual and the virtual. On the other hand, Deleuze tries out several planes
of immanence that do not necessarily present the (political) cosmos in the same
way. See Patton, Deleuzian Concepts, 9-15.
54. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume 's TheOly
of Hum an Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1991),55-72.
55. See also Nathan Jun, "Deleuze and Normativity," Philosophy Today 53,
no. 4 (2009): 347-58.
22 Chapter One

56. William E. Connolly, Why 1 Am No! a Secularis! (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1999),97-114.
57. Rosi Braidotti, "The Becoming-Minoritarian of Europe," in Deleuze and
the Contempormy World, eds. Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 2006): 79-94.
58. Baruch Spinoza, The Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans.
Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 309.
59. What does Deleuze mean by joy and how is it possible to justify a politi-
cal vision with this criterion? Joy, for Deleuze, means an increase in the power
to act and to feel (or be affected). This criterion is quasi-utilitarian insofar as it
promotes the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain, but only
quasi- in that Deleuze disavows the scientific pretensions of certain utilitarians.
For many political theorists, including those influenced by Kant, the criterion of
joy is useless if not positively harmful. How maya Deleuzian respond? First, a
Deleuzian cou Id point to the pain caused by political moralities guided by com-
mandments and imperatives. Second, a Deleuzian could note that the affective,
aesthetic dimension of politics is ever-present: the salient question is what kind
of ethos are we going to cultivate. From a Deleuzian perspective, established
codes and moralities may serve a useful function, but political theorists ought
to dedicate as much attention to the arts of the self and micropolitics that affect
how codes and moralities are interpreted and enforced. For a defense of ground-
ing a political theory aesthetically, see Jane Bennett, '''How Is It, Then, That We
Still Remain Barbarians?' Foucault, Schiller, and the Aestheticization of Ethics,"
Political Theoly 24, no. 4 (1996): 653-72.
60. Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: A Reader's Guide
(London: Continuum, 2008); Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-
Oedipus (New York: Routledge, 1999).
61. Robert Porter and Iain Mackenzie, "Dramatization as Method in Political
Theory," Contempormy Political Theory 10, no. 4 (201 1): 482.
62. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues Il, 14.
63. Porter and Mackenzie, "Dramatization as Method," 494.
64. Patton, Deleuzian Concepts, 185-210.
65. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 9.
66. Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 87.
67. See also Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert
Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 28.
68. Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 249.
69. Immanuel Kant, Grollndworkfor the Metaphysics of MoraIs, ed. Allen W.
Wood, trans. Allen W. Wood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
 Entering Deleuze 's Po/itical 1'ision 23

70. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2006), xiii.
71. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power ofJudgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans.
Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
195.
72. On Wolin's influence, see Jason A. Frank and John Tambornino, Voca-
tions of Political TheOly (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
Aryeh Botwinick and William E. Connolly, Democracy and Vision: Sheldon
Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001).
73. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 708.
74. Matthew J. Moore, "Political Theory Today: Results of a National Sur-
vey," PS: Political Science & Politics 43, no. 2 (2010): 207.
75. Joshua Ramey, "Deleuze, Guattari, and the 'Politics of Sorcery,'" Sub-
stance: A Review of Theory & Literaly Criticism 39, no. 1 (2010): 210.
76. For instance, the examination of terror networks may be enriched through
Deleuzian concepts of the crack (fêlure), regimes of signs, war machines, and
Iines of destruction. This topic merits its own books and articles: 1 merely men-
tion it as a promising research agenda for Deleuzian political scientists.
 Chapter Two

The Image of Pluralism

In The Lagic af Sense, Deleuze explains what is at stake in Nietzsche's

counsel "to reverse Platonism." In the Republic, Plato distinguishes the
realm of the intelligible (ta naetan) and the realm of the visible (ta hara-
tan) and grants ontological primacy to the former over the latter. One part
of reversing Platonism means eluding this method of dividing appearance
and reality, copies and models, and appreciating the singularity, the haec-
ceity, of each particular thing. Yet the motivation behind Platonism is not
so much theoretical as practical: "The Platonic project cornes to light only
wh en we turn back to the method of division .... It assembles the whole
power of the dialectic." The purpose of the dialectic is to rank suitors to
the truth, to distinguish between those who seek etemai things and those
who desire sensual, fleeting things: "In fact, the States man distinguishes
such a hierarchy in detail: the true statesman or the well-founded aspirer,
then relatives, auxiliaries, and slaves, down to simulacra and counter-
feits."1 Platonism is not so much a doctrine as a drive to establish hierar-
chies and order people in a polity. Even philosophers who disagree with
Plato' s account of the Ideas may participate in the Platonic tradition if
they assume that politics is about establishing laws and ranking hum an
beings. For Deleuze, to reverse Platonism means to reject the assumption
that a politY must be structured as a pyramid in which those at the base
serve those above them. But what would an alternative political arrange-
ment look like? What shape does politics take in a Deleuzian modemity?
In A Thausand Plateaus, Deleuze suggests that politics can be imagined
as a garden composed of existential faiths (rhizomes, or flowers) that
combine forces to ensure mutuai flourishing and prevent the emerge of
hegemonic powers (oak trees) or destructive forces (weeds). In this chap-
24
 The Image ofPluralism 25

ter, 1 explicate Deleuze's model of rhizomatic pluralism by considering

how it challenges and incorporates elements of prominent perspectives
in contemporary political theory. Initially, 1 show how Deleuzians may
criticize Thomists, right-Nietzscheans, civic republicans, postsecularists,
multiculturalists, and Marxists for grounding diversity on an ideologi-
cal trunk. From a Deleuzian perspective, such arboreal visions exercise
cruelty toward other ways of life. And yet a Deleuzian garden would also
welcome each of these thinkers and approaches if they recast themselves
as modest flowers rather th an as imperious trees or belligerent weeds, and
the second half of the chapter explores how this may be done. A Deleuz-
ian garden has space for many types of religious believers, philosophers,
political actors, cultures, and leftist political bodies, on the condition that
none of these constituencies dictate the terms of political cooperation.

THE PROBLEM WITH TREES

Deleuze observes the tree "has dominated Western reality and ail of West-
ern thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology,
theology, ontology, ail of philosophy" (ATP, 18). In the realm of political
philosophy, arboreal doctrines prize order over chaos, assign groups and
individuals predetermined roles, sharply distinguish and police the border
between inside and outside, and, most importantly, demand that different
constituencies in any polity (branches) come together on an ideological
trunk. Deleuze appears to disparage trees in favor of rhizomes-plants
such as tulips, Spanish moss, potatoes, and grasses that do not put down
deep roots into the soil: "We're tired oftrees. We should stop believing in
trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. Ali of arbo-
rescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing
is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial
roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes" (ATP, 15). Why is Deleuze
tired of trees?2 Speculatively, arboreal thought simplifies and misrepre-
sents political phenomena. Arboreal political philosophy often posits that
the mind-the locus of the important work for political philosophy-
transcends the visceral. Yet "thought is not arborescent, and the brain is
not a rooted or ramified matter" (ATP, 15). Take, for example, Deleuze's
critique of Aristotelian logic, a mode of thinking embraced by nearly ail

BM0696251
26 Chapter Two

Western political philosophers. Logicians ho Id that we füllow modus

ponens when we go from fact A to fact B (see Fig. 2.1). For Deleuze,
this model greatly oversimplifies how the mind works. The mind often
proceeds directly from point A, forms reciprocal connections with point
C, takes circuitous routes from point D, and often threatens to veer off
towards point E, before we arrive at point B, and even then, this position is
always unstable: "the brain itself is much more a grass th an a tree" (ATP,
15) (see Fig. 2.2). A mind that proceeds only according to Aristotelian
logical precision unduly narrows the aperture through which philosophers
grasp political reality. Arboreal political philosophy recognizes only one
form of cognition and diminishes or marginalizes other ways of knowing
or intuiting political things.
Deleuze also attaches a negative normative evaluation to arboreal
political philosophy: "The tree and root inspire a sad image of thought"
(ATP, 16). Why sadness? In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze ex-
plains that a Spinozist ethics differentiates joyful encounters that increase
a mode's power of acting or force of existing from sad ones that decrease
a mode's power or force. 3 Here, we may see a direct connection between
the speculative and the practical. Arboreal political philosophy's willful
blindness to the unexpected or strange-its stupidity, if you will-hurts
modes of being that it does not recognize. "Arborescent systems are hier-
archical systems"-and those lower in or outside of the hierarchy suffer
(ATP, 16). Deleuze's wager is that we may aIl benefit from letting a little
more chaos into our political sensibilities, a willingness to open our eyes
and hearts to modes of being that confound our expectations. Trees pun-

Arboreal litical Logic

-A B
• A
• .... B
Figure 2.1.
 The Image of Pluralism 27

Rhizomatic Political Logic

Figure 2.2.

ish difference-or, majoritarian ways of thinking and acting harm sexual,

racial, religious, and other types of minorities. AIternatively, gardens
promote diversity-that is, free societies allow multiple ways of living
and thinking to flourish.
Deleuze does not think that we can or should try to eliminate trees
from politics or political thought. Trees shelter rhizomes, providing a
stable environment in which to grow: "a new rhizome may form in the
heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch" (ATP, 15).
Rhizomes, furthermore, have a symbiotic relationship with trees, gain-
ing life and power by tapping into and redirecting the forces of trees:
"To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to
be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but
put them to strange new uses" (ATP, 15). Deleuze rarely celebrates the
beauty of established practices and traditions. 4 But Deleuze does recog-
nize that trees-for instance, sovereign states with capitals and interna-
tional political bodies with headquarters--sustain and empower joyful
rhizomatic activity. Trees are fictions-insofar as reality is uItimately
28 Chapter Two

rhizomatic-but they are useful fictions, making possible coordination

on a much grander scale than otherwise possible.
Deleuze also holds that "the rhizome includes the best and the worst"
(ATP, 7; emphasis added). A tree kills a garden's diversity by block-
ing out sunlight; a rhizome may destroy diversity by strangling other
plants' roots. Rhizomes such as tulips enchant and entrance, providing
a source of beauty to ail other interested observers in the garden; but
crabgrass, another type of rhizome, may also spread quickly and reduce
the garden to a pockmarked terrain. Recognizing the dangers of weeds,
though, raises a set of questions that a systematic Deleuzian political
theory must address: Who determines which plants enter or are barred
from the garden? What criteria should plants use when determining how
to engage other plants? How can plants coordinate to sustain a healthy
and f10urishing garden? To address these questions, 1 now consider how
Deleuze's critique of trees applies to several prominent perspectives in
contemporary political theory.

Religious Arborealism
When Nietzsche said that God is dead, his point was as much sociological
as theological: God no longer has a vital presence in the modern West, or,
as Charles Taylor observes, "In our 'secular' societies, you can engage
fully in politics without ever encountering God."5 Still, certain philoso-
phers and theologians try to reverse this state of affairs and reinstate God
and the church at the center of community Iife.
In After Virtue, for instance, Alasdair MacIntyre contends that the
West' s moral vocabulary largely originates from Aristotle and Chris-
tianity. Yet moderns misuse this vocabulary by ignoring the question
of "human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos."6 Influenced by
Newton, Bacon, and the scientific revolution in general, Enlightenment
philosophers discredit the notion that humans have souls or a purpose for
being. But by rejecting Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics-or by
marginalizing religious traditions in general-moderns cut themselves
offfrom the sources oftheir moral judgments. That is why the Enlighten-
ment project of secularizing morality and politics fails: "The rational and
rationally justified moral subject of the eighteenth century is a fiction,
an illusion; so, Nietzsche resolves, let us replace reason and let us make
 The Image of Plllralism 29

ourselves into autonomous moral subjects by some gigantic and heroic act
of the will."7 Yet Nietzsche's alternative-rule by the Übermensch--is
hideous: the terrible culmination of a turn towards human autonomy. For
MacIntyre, the only sane response to this predicament is to reject "the
ethos of the distinctively modern and modernizing world" and recover the
insights of the Aristotelian, or Thomistic, traditions. 8
MacIntyre ends Afler Virtue by sketching a portrait of the political op-
tions available to Christians living in the new Dark Ages. In an earlier era,
Christians decided that civility and moral community no longer required
supporting the Roman imperium. Today, Christians may likewise construct
"local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and
moral Iife can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already
upon US."9 Christians must bear the rule of the modern barbarians and,
simuItaneously, yearn for "another--doubtless very different-St. Bene-
dict," that is, presumably, a founder of a monastic order and a promoter
of Christian nonns and governance throughout Europe and America and
perhaps the rest of the world. 10 In the short term, Christians must suffer the
reign of the secularists and, in the long term, cultivate a Thomistic moral
politics fit to govern society and politics.
Deleuze's political theory recoils at MacIntyre's theocratic politics:
"The Church has always burned sorcerers," that is, leaders of "minoritar-
ian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revoit, or always
on the fringe of recognized institutions" (ATP, 247-48). For many West-
ern theologians and philosophers, "God's perfection is the model for the
self-ordering of the ideal, politically attuned human organism."ll The
problem with models of perfection is that they punish groups that fail to
realize them or, worse, refuse to recognize them as objects of striving. In
this respect, at least, Deleuze participates in an Enlightenment tradition
that refuses to allow churchmen to reclaim the power they he Id in the
medieval era. 12

Right-Nietzschean Arborealism
Is it possible to agree with much of Nietzsche and still think that there
is something dangerous about publicizing his teaching? That is, cou Id a
philosopher endorse Nietzsche's doctrines of eternal return and will to
power and think that he made a mistake by shouting from the rooftops
30 Chapter Two

what he should have just whispered in a few other philosophers' ears?

Might political philosophers reinstate an arboreal political regime even if
they themselves do not believe that its founding doctrines are true? Leo
Strauss, on one reading of his work, answered yes to these questions, and
we may now consider what a Deleuzian could say in response.
ln Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, Lawrence Lampert argues that Strauss
was a lifelong reader of Nietzsche who agreed with much of the substance
of his teachings. Lampert points to biographical evidence, such as a re-
mark in a letter to Karl L6with that "Nietzsche so dominated and charmed
me between my 22nd and 30th years that 1 literally believed everything 1
understood of him."13 Lampert also reads Strauss's late essay, "Notes on
the Plan ofNietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil," to show how that Strauss
agreed with Nietzsche on "why 'will to power,' though a weak and attenu-
ating metaphor, can serve as an initial naming for the 'intelligible char-
acter' of the world seen from the inside; why eternal retum must be the
highest ideal for a nonascetic philosophy in love with the world viewed
as will to power; and why Ariadne and Dionysus were part of a fitting
new poetry that could perhaps outfit the new sensibility with festivals of
recognition and celebration."14 According to Lampert, Strauss cou Id have
pursued each of these points to advance the project of the Nietzschean
Enlightenment. But he didn't.
The reason is that Strauss's political philosophy took its bearings from
the medieval Enlightenment. Alfarabi and Maimonides loved philosophy,
an activity "always at odds with the fundamentals of social order because
it must question those fundamentals"; on the other hand, these men found
a "way to finesse its danger even in the new setting of a revealed reli-
gion."15 Rather than swim against the tide of revealed religion, both phi-
losophers found a way to give the reigning orthodoxy its blessing: "Their
apology for philosophy set out the le gal grounding for philosophy in the
divine law; in return, as it were, their apology provided a philosophical
grounding for the law."16 For Strauss, as for Plato before him, the basic
prerequisite for philosophy is peace and harmony in the city, and one way
to accomplish that is to tell noble lies that convince everyone to work for
the benefit of the city. For postrevelatory philosophers, there is no need
to invent those lies; rather, one can merely manipulate the lies at hand to
coyer the dangerous investigations of philosophy. Medieval political phi-
losophers believed that "the well-being of philosophy dictated that philos-
 The Image ofPluralism 31

ophy apparently concede authority to existing authority which believed its

authority divine."17 On this interpretation, Strauss himself did not believe
in the Truth of any of the Abrahamic religions, but he did believe that the
masses needed religion to do the right thing wh en no one is looking. That
is why Strauss's official position is that Nietzsche was a profoundly dan-
gerous character in the history of political philosophy: "He used much of
his unsurpassable and inexhaustible power of passionate and fascinating
speech for making his readers loathe, not only socialism and communism,
but conservativism, nationalism, and democracy as well."18 For Strauss,
Nietzsche obliterated the trunks of Western civilization without identi-
fying a suitable alternative: far better, today, to reinforce a trunk-any
trunk-that can sustain Western civilization in the face of its internai and
external enemies. 19
There are at least two Deleuzian arguments why Strauss's arboreal
political vision is problematic today. First, Strauss maintains that it is
possible for people to block their eyes and ears to alternate perspectives
that may disrupt their worldview. Yet we are living under conditions of
accelerating speed in the transmission of ideas, the circulation of images,
the movements of populations, the effects of state and non-state violence,
and so forth. Strauss wants society to be like a medieval cathedral in
which each person finds his or her meaning as a stone in the edifice; but,
as the Deleuzian political theorist William E. Connolly notes, we are no
longer material for such a cathedral.

An advantage of the old type of society for a "free spirit" was that it set
members of the herd into a stone edifice, thereby containing sorne of the
most adverse effects of herd resentment against the absence of intrinsic pur-
pose in the world. But that world is gone. A more fluid, democratic culture
rises before us. In this new world space for the free spirit can only be found
in a democratic culture, if it is to be found anywhere. 20

Strauss, according to Connolly, misreads the contemporary political

condition. Perhaps and understandably scarred by the Jewish Holocaust
in which much of his family was killed at Auschwitz, Strauss feared the
political effects of popularizing Nietzsche, whose irresponsible polemics
inspired the Nazis. Yet, in the age ofmass transportation, communication,
and education, we simply cannot go back to medieval politics in which
most people believe religious noble lies.
32 Chapter Two

Furthermore, as recent U.S. history demonstrates, there are pemicious

consequences to arboreal politics. Neoconservatives influenced by Leo
Strauss helped lead the United States into war in Iraq in 2003. Further-
more, Straussian terminology-including regime change, tyranny, and
evil-provided the theoretical edifice for much of the disastrous U.S. for-
eign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and much of the world during the George
W. Bush administration. 21 Though Strauss thought that philosophers could
handle nuance and ambiguity, he held that the majority of people need
the clear moral commands of the "you're either with us or against us"
variety. The abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay reveal that such
a mind frame foments moral viciousness-all for little to no substantiated
improvement in U.S. security.22

Civic RepubIican ArboreaIism

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt goes back to the ancient Greeks
and Romans to revalorize a politics that cherishes spontaneity, singularity,
and action in concert. In her account of the vita activa, Arendt explains
that human beings give birth to who they really are through action, words
and deeds that transpire in public and concern the shared world: "Since
action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality,
may be the central category of political, as distinguished from meta-
physical, thought."23 Furthermore, politics discloses the singularity, the
irreplaceability, of each actor: "Plurality is the condition ofhuman action
because we are aIl the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody
is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or willlive."24 The
appeal of Arendt's vision--or civic republicanism in general-is that it
promotes the disclosure of each person's singularity through action that
may benefit the public.
There are at least two Deleuzian critiques of Arendt's conception of
the political. First, Arendt confines the vita activa to human beings. Ar-
endt takes up Aristotle's definitions of man as a zoon politikon ("political
being") and a zoon logon ekhon ("a living being capable of speech").25
Arendt goes back to the Greeks precisely to gain insight into "an autono-
mous and authentically human way of lite" and worries about modern
science's thoughtless experiments on human nature. 26 Arendt fears that
lowering the boundary between the human and the animal empowers
 The Image of Pluralism 33

modern forces (economic, social, scientific, administrative, and so forth)

to shape human thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Deleuzians may share
Arendt's concerns about certain types of biopower and still think that
Arendt's duality between humans and animais may toster its own type of
cruelty. Jane Bennett, for instance, in Vibrant Matter, explains why she
pursues a Deleuzian, non-Arendtian account of political agency:

Why advocate the vitality of matter? Because my hunch is that the image
of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and
our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by
preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling)
a fuller range of nonhuman powers circulating around and within human
bodies. These material powers, which can aid or destroy, enrich or dis-
able, ennoble or degrade us, in any case calI for our attentiveness, or even
"respect."27

Bennett shares Arendt's concern about human thoughtIessness destroying

the earth, but she contests Arendt's insistence on attributing agency only
to human beings. For Arendt, there is no sense listening to nonhuman,
much less nonorganic, beings; for Bennett, on the contrary, we ought to
strive to Iisten better to nonhuman or not-quite-human-things. Arendt's
political vision is resolutely anthropocentric; Bennett interprets Deleuze's
idea of "becoming-animal" to mean that we ought to be more sensitive to
the proto-thoughts and feelings of other creatures and things.
A Deleuzian could also join Arendt' s critics who argue that her concep-
tion ofhuman politics is too narrow. Arendt famously argues that political
action requires publicity, and, ideally, not just any type of action made
in public to effect common things, but the doing of "great deeds" and
the speaking of "great words."28 Arendt strikes an aristocratic note when
she says, "Excellence itself, are te as in the Greeks, virtus as the Romans
would have called it, has always been assigned to the public realm where
one cou Id excel, cou Id distinguish oneself from aIl others."29 In Why 1
Am Not a Secularist, Connolly highlights the consequences of Arendt's
distinction between the social and the pure realm of politics: "such a per-
spective ... not only removes diverse dimensions of life from the politics
of enactment such as diet, gender identity, the organization of sensuality,
health, the cultural organization of dying, and the cultivation of critical
responsiveness. It also places profoundly important dimensions of ethical
34 Chapter Two

life beyond the reach ofpractical action."30 From a Deleuzian perspective,

civic republicanism tums a deaf ear to too many concerns that it does
not consider political, thus hindering the proper hearing or addressing of
grievances.

PostsecuIar ArboreaIism
In Between Naturalism and Religion, Jürgen Habermas explains the guid-
ing intuition of liberal, secular political thought: "Only the ideologically
neutral exercise of secular govemmental authority within the framework
of the constitutional state can ensure that different communities of belief
can coexist on a basis ofequal rights and mutual tolerance, while neverthe-
less remaining unreconciled at the level oftheir substantive worldviews or
doctrines."3l Habermas, like Deleuze and many other post-Enlightenment
philosophers, wants to avoid reinstating a religious orthodoxy at the helm
of a state or the center of a political culture. And yet how do secularists
avoid the danger that they may be placing their own conception of the
good at the pinnacle of social legitimacy? To highlight his awareness of
this problem, Habermas calls his political vision postsecular.
According to Habermas, liberal democratic political orders are being
pulled apart by militant religious fundamentalists and dogmatic scientific
naturalists. Liberal democracies cannot survive unless theists and natural-
ists find some way to communicate and coexist amicably: "The ethos of
liberal citizenship demands that both sides should determine the limits of
faith and knowledge in a reflexive manner."32 Habermas takes for granted
that viable political cultures require some kind of glue, and the political
theoretical task is to describe this glue in ways that both believers and
nonbelievers (or believers in something other than God) can endorse.
Habermas calls this glue, at times, an ethos of Iiberal citizenship, civic
solidarity, a shared understanding of the democratic constitution, or self-
reflexivity. In whatever iteration, Habermas emphasizes that a Iiberal
civic ethos presses theists and naturalists to learn from and respect one an-
other. Secularists teach, or encourage the religious to develop, "the epis-
temic ability to consider one's own religious convictions reflexively from
the outside and to connect them with secular views."33 Secularists press
the religious to articulate political principles in the formai institutions of
the state (such as parliament or courts) in ways that the religious could
 The Image of Pluralism 35

reasonably expect other people who do not share the same confession to
endorse. The religious, in tum, teach secularists moral truths that become
occluded by tixating on pure reason: "Philosophy has repeatedly learned
through its encounters with religious traditions-and also, of course, with
Muslim traditions-that it receives innovative impulses wh en it succeeds
in freeing cognitive contents from their dogmatic encapsulation in the
crucible of rational discourse."34 Secularists are not trying to fool the reli-
gious into endorsing the secular state; rather, they are humbly explaining
why state institutions should not enforce any particular confession white
also remaining open to leaming from the religious, which is why the po-
litical theory is postsecular or postmetaphysical.
Deleuze's political vision is postsecular insofar as it appreciates both
the secular concern with prohibiting one existential faith from impos-
ing its will on others through the mechanism of the state or extra-state
violence and the impulse to think and believe beyond the confines of sci-
ence. A Deleuzian, though, might worry about how Habennas frames the
commonalities shared by theists and naturalists in a way that reimposes a
certain ideological core on pluralistic societies. Habermas writes:

Post-metaphysical thinking does not restrict itself to the heritage of West-

ern metaphysics but also reconfirms its internaI relationship to those world
religions whose origins, Iike those of ancient philosophy, date back to the
middle of the first millennium before Christ, i.e. to what Jaspers called the
"Axial Age." For the religions that have their roots in this period made the
cognitive leap from mythical narratives to a logos that differentiates be-
tween essence and appearance in a very similar way to Greek philosophyY

When Habermas speaks of "religion," he does not mean Taoism, Bud-

dhism, or animism; rather, he is thinking of the Abrahamic religions that
define the Axial Age. And though he says that of course he includes Islam
(and presumably Judaism) in this family of religions, the theologians with
whom he dialogues-including, most notably, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
in The Dialectics of Secularization-are Christian. Furthermore, when
Habermas talks of Greek philosophy, he does not mean atomists such as
Epicurus or skeptics such as Sextus Empiricus; he means, rather, Plato,
whose distinctions between essence and appearance were taken up by the
Church Fathers. Though Habennas is receptive in principle to the idea
that postsecularists listen to a wide range of naturalists and theists, in
36 Chapter Two

practice he defends traditions that ultimately agree to present their case

before the court of reason: "In a secular state, only those political deci-
sions can count as legitimate that can be impartially justified in the Iight
of generally accessible reasons."36 But how do postsecularists treat exis-
tential faiths that do not threaten the viability of the garden but that do not
use or emphasize the concept ofreason? Can a pluralistic society welcome
unreasonable constituencies?
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze castigates Kantian and Hegelian phi-
losophers who bless the secular state as reasonable: "Ever since philoso-
phy assigned itself the role of ground it has been giving the established
powers its blessing, and tracing its doctrine of faculties onto the organs of
State power" (ATP, 376). Deleuze does not valorize the unreasonable as
such. Rather, Deleuze-like Scottish Enlightenment philosophers in the
West and multiple non-Western philosophers and theologians--thinks
that reason is an impoverished concept to describe mysterious forces
at work in the human mind or the universe in genera1. 37 Wh en Deleuze
discusses the Body without Organs, one of the main organs missing from
these ethical and political bodies is reason. For Deleuze, we need to
imagine political orders that do not require, through law or social norms,
people to think in the grooves of reason.

MulticuIturaI Arborealism
In "The Politics of Recognition," Charles Taylor advances a notion of
multiculturalism that expands the Iiberal image of pluralism. The goal of
multiculturalism is to protect certain basic individual rights and promote
a wide range of flourishing cultures:

Multicultural liberalisms do call for the invariant defense of certain rights,

of course. There would be no question of cultural differences determining
the application of habeas corpus, for example. But they distinguish these
fundamental rights from the broad range of immunities and presumptions
of uniform treatment that have sprung up in modem cultures of judicial re-
view. They are willing to weigh the importance of certain forms of uniform
treatment against the importance of cultural survival, and opt sometimes in
favor of the latter. They are thus in the end not pro ce duraI models of liberal-
ism, but are grounded very much on judgments about what makes a good
life-judgments in which the integrity of culture has an important place. 38
 The Image of Plllralism 37

Taylor's example in this essay is Quebec's place in Canada's national

culture. The Quebecois do not want to abridge fundamental human
rights, but they do want to preserve French language and culture, and it
seems unnecessary and punitive to demand that they speak English and
give up their collective goals. How, though, does one determine what
constituencies or practices are beyond the pale in liberal multicultural
societies?
Taylor indicates an answer to this question in his account of the modem
identity in Sources of the Self. According to Taylor, the modem identity
emerges from the Christian tradition that informs our commitment to
human welfare and equality, the Enlightenment that prizes intellectual
and moral autonomy, and the Romantic tradition that brings humans into
closer contact, largely through art, with nature. Though Taylor gives the
Enlightenment and Romanticism their due, Sources of the Self primarily
vindicates Christianity in Western culture:

High standards need strong sources. This is because there is something

morally corrupting, ev en dangerous, in sustaining the demand simply on the
feeling ofundischarged obligation, on guilt, or its obverse, self-satisfaction.
Hypocrisy is not the only negative consequence. Morality as benevolence
on demand breeds self-condemnation for those who fall short and a depre-
ciation of the impulses to self-fulfillment, seen as so many obstacles raised
by egoism to our meeting the standard. Nietzsche has explored this with
sufficient force to make embroidery otiose .... Only ifthere is such a thing
as agape, or one of the secular c1aimants to its succession, is Nietzsche
wrong. 39

Even though Taylor displays admiration for many authors, ideas, and
arguments dismissed by Maclntyre, he still thinks that moderns need
to recuperate a moral sense that resonates with Christian agape. Taylor
does not want to plant a Catholic oak tree; rather, he wants to encourage
multiple parties within modernity to embrace standards that accord with
Christian morality.
How wide is Taylor's spectrum of cultures worth protecting? Take
Deleuze's explication of masochism in A Thousand Plateaus. After re-
viewing the program of a masochist and mistress-rider, Deleuze explains:
"The masochist constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously
draws and fills the field of immanence of desire; he constitutes a body
38 Chapter Two

without organs or plane of consistency using himself, the horse, and the
mistress" (ATP, 156). Deleuze does not so much celebrate masochism as
he does an ethos that prompts many different experiments of living, in-
cluding ones that depart from Judeo-Christian norms. A Deleuzian might
ask Taylor: how tolerant are liberal multiculturalists of masochists? If
they are not, that might indicate the truth of Nietzsche's assertion that
"God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia
be caves in which they show his shadow."40

Marxist Arborealism
Marxist-Leninism would seem to be a paradigmatic example of arboreal
politics. In The State and Revolution, Lenin promotes a revolutionary pro-
letariat party that has no space for "petty-bourgeois democrats," and for
contemporary Leninists su ch as Alain Badiou, Peter Hallward, and Slavoj
Zizek, "rhizomatic pluralism" is just another tenn for the affirmation of
late-modem consumer capitalism. 41 And yet Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri think that it is possible and desirable to synthesize Marx's and De-
leuze's political visions.
In books such as Empire and Multitude, Hardt and Negri reconfigure
communist politics for the twenty-first century. Left-wing politics domi-
nated by the white, male, industrial worker is a thing of the past. Today,
the proletariat is a highly diverse entity, combining many races, genders,
and types ofwork. Hardt and Negri cali the new proletarian political body
the multitude. This concept is Deleuzian insofar as it proceeds within an
ontology of immanence and eschews hierarchical vanguards in favor of
horizontal networks: "In the multitude, social differences remain diffèr-
ent. The multitude is many-colored, like Joseph's magical coat."42 But
the multitude is also a Leninist political body insofar as it is a coherent,
militant political body that fights the latest manifestation of global capi-
talism, Empire: "When we enter into political consideration ... we do
insist on thinking of 'the multitude' rather th an 'multitudes' because we
maintain that in order to take a constituent political role and form society,
the multitude must be able to make decisions and act in common."43 Hardt
and Negri want the postmodem proletariat to incorporate the maximum
possible difference and have the ideological and material unity to change
 The Image of Pluralism 39

the world. Is it possible to reconcile Lenin's concept of a revolutionary

vanguard and Deleuze's concept of the rhizome?
Deleuze did not think so. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze differenti-
ates totalitarianism and fascism and argues that leftists who avoid the first
danger may walk straight into the second:

The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropoliticallevel,

to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode oftotalization and centraliza-
tion. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular forces in
interaction, which skip from point to point, be/ore beginning to resonate
together.... Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfas-
cisms. I1's too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the
fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish
with molecules both personal and collective. (ATP, 215)

Hardt and Negri oppose vanguards and states: they are antitotalitarians.
Instead, they want the proletariat to organize itself as "a swarm" that can
attack Empire as a powerful, amorphous body.44 The problem is that Hardt
and Negri allow different groups to persist as long as they are like sticks
held together in a bundle (in Latin,fasces). Hardt and Negri do not want
older, white, male workers to dominate leadership of the proletariat, true,
but they do want the multitude to have a certain ideological cohesion
that punishes individuals or groups who stray too far from the Marxist
agenda. In the 1970s, Maoists under the command of Alain Badiou would
disrupt Deleuze's seminars and institute the "People's Rule."45 Deleuze
anticipated and tried to ward off a Marxist-Leninist appropriation of his
philosophy (see ATP, 431).

WHO INHABITS THE GARDEN?

Though Deleuze's political vision opposes any one constituency becom-

ing hegemonic or destructive, it still welcomes each of the constituencies
we have surveyed on the condition that they exercise a certain modesty,
that is, that they carry themselves as flowers rather than trees or weeds
(though different constituencies can express that sentiment in their own
ways). Here is how.
40 Chapter Two

Religious FIowers
Deleuze agrees with MacIntyre that a good human Iife requires participat-
ing in communities and traditions. Maclntyre presents his political theory
as opposed to Nietzschean moral solipsism that advocates cutting "oneself
off from shared activity in which one has initially to leam obediently as
an apprentice leams."46 But Deleuze endorses Nietzsche's counsel in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra that a philosopher must become a camel who takes up
the inherited knowledge of the past before one can rebel against it as a lion
or see the world through the fresh eyes of a child. 47 Philosophers must first
"study the arrows or the tools of a great thinker, the trophies and the prey,
the continents discovered" before "we trim our own arrows, or gather
those which seem to us the finest in order to try to send them in other
directions."48 Deleuze does not present himself as a secularist who rises
above faith; rather, he writes from one existential faith to other existential
faiths to determine how we can ail coexist fruitfully.
Deleuze would also evince a certain sympathy for MacIntyre's cali
for Catholics to form enclaves until a new Benedict can rescue them and
Western civilization. In 1943, Deleuze joined a spiritualist community
organized by Marie-Magdeleine Davy, a woman who had eamed a degree
in theology from the Paris Catholic Institute and during World War II had
tumed her estate outside of Paris into a sanctuary for Jews, Resistance
fighters, British and U .S. pilots, and a wide array of artists and intellectu-
ais who would rejuvenate French cultural life after the war. 49 In addition
to this biographical detail, A Thousand Plateaus celebrates multiple com-
munities that set themselves apart from majoritarian norms. A Deleuzian
garden nurtures diversity, wildness, and hybrids. Deleuze's rhizome is
not the fleur-de-lis, the symbol of France and a f10wer that clings to rocks
and symbolizes persistence, but rather "laterai offshoots in immediate
connection with an outside" (ATP, 19), including monasteries, cloisters,
and utopian communes.
Still, no garden can long survive if it allows just any plant to grow
within it. Deleuze would wam against religious minorities that actively
seek to destroy the garden or its diversity. A f10wer may dream or talk
big about its plans to conquer the garden. Even a noble faith will seek
to gain converts and gain more terrain within the garden. But there is a
distinction between words and actions-however much that distinction
 The Image ofPluralism 41

is subject to philosophie scrutiny-and no flower is allowed to impose

its vision on others through force. It is one thing to pine for another St.
Benedict; it is another to purge actually existing pluralistic societies of
religious difference. Part of Deleuzian pragmatics is measuring one's
particular religious-political milieu "with the craft of a surveyor" (ATP,
160) to determine whether any particular individual or group has crossed
the line From passionate advocate to dangerous militant.
The second caveat is that no faith may forbid its members From leaving
the fold. Here Deleuzians might appreciate an argument made by William
Galston. According to Galston, civil associations in a pluralistic society
"may significantly abridge individual freedom and autonomy without
legitimating external state interference." In Deleuzian terms, a garden
requires a great deal of diversity to be beautiful, and it is not necessary
that every flower enjoy the visage of every other flower. That is a cost of
pluralism. But "these associations may not coerce individuals to remain
as memhers against their will, or create conditions that in practical terms
make departure impossible."50 Civil associations may replicate the worst
qualities of trees and weeds on a small scale, stifling individuality and
diversity. Given that a pluralist society hosts a variety of faiths, and sorne
of these faiths are indifferent or hostile to the Deleuzian ideal of pursu-
ing one's own lines of flight, then one compromise is to allow groups to
pursue their own ideal on the condition that they allow their members to
escape to another corner of the garden.

A Counter-W ager

Deleuze, unlike Strauss, gambles that democratic citizens can handle

Nietzsche's insights about the historicity and fragility of moral codes and
political orders. He explicates this wager in his essay "Nomadic Thought."
On the Genealogy of Morality tells the story of humanity's transi-
tion from primitive communities to despotic states: "On the foundation
of primitive rural communities, the despot sets up his imperial machine
which over-codes everything, with a bureaucracy, an administration that
organizes major enterprises and appropriates the surplus work for itselt:"51
Deleuze does not deny that humanity proceeds through demarcated stages:
Plateaus 12 ("Treatise ofNomadology") and 13 ("Apparatus of Capture")
of A Thousand Plateaus build upon this framework to explain humanity's
42 Chapter Two

transition from primitive groups to towns, states, and worldwide organiza-

tions. Yet Deleuze thinks that Nietzsche overstates the ditference between
historical epochs.
In "Nomadic Thought," Deleuze offers a principle that opens up a new
way to read Nietzsche and think politically. The principle is that "there is
always an indescribable joy that springs from great books .... You cannot
help but laugh when you mix up the codes. If you put thought in relation
to the outside, Dionysian moments of laughter will erupt, and this is think-
ing in the clear air."52 To read Nietzsche aphoristically means to open up
his ideas to outside elements, including personal idiosyncrasies, political
events, scientific discoveries, artistic breakthroughs, and so forth. Deleuze
illustrates this procedure in his rereading of On the Genealogy ofMorality
as a symptomatology of forces that are present in any political body rather
than states of a fixed progression.

It is true that rural communities at their center are caught and transfixed in
the despot's bureaucratie machine, with its scribes, its priests, its bureau-
crats; but on the periphery, the communities embark on another kind of
adventure, display another kind of unity, a nomadic unity, and engage in
a nomadic war-machine, and they tend to come uncoded rather than being
coded over. Entire groups take off on a nomadic adventure: archeologists
have taught us to consider nomadism not as an originary state, but as an
adventure that erupts in sedentary groups; it is the caU of the outside, it is
movement. 53

Perhaps inspired by the events of May 1968, in which Parisian students

and workers challenged the authority of the French state, Deleuze pro-
poses that every political body is plied by two kinds of forces. State forces
pull the political body together and give it a physical shape and symbolic
codes; nomadic forces disintegrate the material and linguistic structures
of political bodies. Most Western political philosophers prize order over
chaos. Deleuze's wager is that we ought to experiment with allowing
more chaos to percolate in our political orders. Deleuze celebrates Nietz-
sche for making thought a nomadic power. The next step is to actualize
a Dionysian, or nomadic, political order: "And even if the journey goes
nowhere, ev en if it takes place in the same place, imperceptible, unlooked
for, underground, we must ask: who are today's nomads, who are today's
N ietzscheans?"54
 The Image ofPluralism 43

How can one justity this wager? Above, we considered part of an an-
swer: the world is moving too fast today to try to structure society as a me-
dieval cathedral, at least, if one does not condone the intliction of massive
amounts of violence on large groups of people. Still, Straussians could
reply that there is a difference between speeding up or slowing down the
deterritorializing and decoding forces ofmodernity. Here, 1 think, Strauss-
ians may serve as valuable conservative interIocutors to Deleuzians who
may sometimes be too reckless in their calls for experimentation. Strauss-
ians may teach Deleuzians to hedge their bets, both on the intellectual ter-
rain when considering what constitutes a classic that students of political
philosophy should read and on the political terrain wh en alerting people to
the danger of discarding one's moral and religious traditions too quickly.
But Deleuzians should also be alert to the militant strain of Straussianism
that agitates for a cultural war to stop the encroaching threats of relativism
and nihilism.

Statesmen and Sorcerers

Deleuze is wary of Arendt's celebration of statesmen doing great deeds
and saying great words in a rarified political realm, but he does think that
politics infuses life and that exceptional individuals play a role in steering
a polity. Here is how Deleuze's "politics of sorcery" incorporates certain
elements of civic republicanism.
Deleuze agrees with Arendt's worry about the rise of mass society that
"expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing
innumerable and various rules, ail of which tend to 'normalize' its mem-
bers."55 Deleuze also views politics as a way to protect and empower the
"an-omaUe ... the unequal, the coarse, the rough, the cutting edge of
deterritorialization" (ATP, 244), that which, in other words, gives birth to
new ideas and practices, or what Arendt calls the natal. Deleuze does not
celebrate the cIassical ideal of a "fiercely agonal spirit" whereby citizens
seek "to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best
of ail (aien aristeuein)."56 Such an elitist, combative conception of poli-
tics forecIoses other ways to achieve distinction and power in the world.
But Deleuze does think that "politics precedes being," that politics-or
contestation over how to make or rearrange the Iines that compose our
individual and social bodies-is always ongoing and thus unavoidable
44 Chapter Two

(ATP, 203). Although Deleuze does not commend the vila activa as such,
he does think that ethical subjects need to intervene occasionally in "poli-
tics on a grand scale" (ATP, 204) and that sorne bodies experience joy in
Arendtian action.
In general, Deleuze pursues a way to think about politics that eludes
categories handed down from the Greeks and Romans. 57 A politics of
sorcery "is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family
nor of religion or of the State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups,
or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revoit, or always on the ffinge
ofrecognized institutions" (ATP, 247). Arendt celebrates the miraculous of
politics, but she also places strict boundaries on what kind of action quali-
fies as politics. Deleuze, instead, ho Ids that politics means perforating and
constituting one's identity through interactions with other beings, including
nonhuman animaIs. Politics is a "power of alliance inspiring illicit unions
or abominable loves" (ATP, 246). Deleuze's conception of the political is
deeper than Arendt's, insofar as it incorporates the actions of animaIs and
other elements, and wider, insofar as it stretches to listen to minoritarian
groups.
Does Deleuze valorize statesmen, or great political actors? Deleuze
calls such figures sorcerers: "Sorcerers have always held the anomalous
position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They
are at the borderline of the village, or between villages. The important
thing is their aftinity with alliance, with the pact" (ATP, 246). Deleuze
thinks that history rightly records the actions of political leaders, but he
redescribes them as sorcerers rather than statesmen to highlight the way
in which such figures envelop mysterious, suprahuman forces: "The only
'great' Statesmen are those who connect with tlows ... it is not by chance
that these men encounter each other only on lines of tlight, in the act of
drawing them, sounding them out, following them, or forging ahead of
them" (ATP, 225). If Deleuze thinks that it is necessary and somewhat
admirable that people pursue politics on a grand scale, he also detlates
extravagant claims made on their behalf. Statesmen are "exchangers,
converters, oscillators" of forces circulating throughout a political body,
not their creator or master (ATP, 226).
Despite the differences between Deleuzians and Arendtians on what
constitutes a satisfactory human Iife, in practice, they could be allies on
many issues aftècting a political garden, including issuing wamings about
 The Image ofPlura/ism 45

certain technologies (such as hydraulic fracturing for natural gas), the

spread of a bureaucratic mindset (both philosophers loved Katka's writ-
ings), or the rise of theocratic politics (that would signal the end of both
Arendtian and Deleuzian politics).

Rhizomatic Virtues
A flourishing political garden will need to cultivate ethico-political vir-
tues across diverse constituencies committed to the diversity and sustain-
ability of the garden. In The Ethos of Pluralization, Connolly specifies
three Deleuzian virtues for a democratic polity.
The first virtue is agonistic respect. This is a comportment between
"two contending constituencies, each of which has gained a fair amount
of recognition and power in the existing order."58 Respect matches up
with the liberal concept oftoleration, but agonism-from the Greek agon,
"contest"--conveys that established constituencies may compete with
each other. In other words, one rhizomatic body (tulips) may compete
with another rhizomatic body (roses) for power, influence, members,
and so forth, but they should also refrain from destroying alternate ways
of life. To switch images: rather th an imagine constituencies sitting on
their hands and using the discourse of public reason (as for Habermasian
deliberative democracy), or fighting each other to the death (as in Carl
Schmitt's theory of the friend-enemy distinction as the essence of the
political), we might imagine constituencies wrestling with each other and,
like noble athletes, respecting the opponent through the competition.
The next Deleuzian civic virtue is critical responsiveness. This is "an
ethical relation a privileged constituency establishes with culturally de-
valued constituencies striving to enact new identities."59 Big plants face
a choice wh en they see a bud breaking through the soil: share water and
sunlight, or not. Connolly thinks that established constituencies should
be generous to emerging identities, but he adds the qualifier critical to
indicate that established constituencies ought to be wary of additions that
threaten the health and diversity of the garden.
A third Deleuzian civic virtue is studied indifference. Just as the Nietz-
schean noble forgets slights, so too a Deleuzian democrat seeks to relin-
quish anger towards people who have ditferent beliefs and practices. But
as the qualifier "studied" indicates, one can pursue this plan only after
46 Chapter Two

one has determined that the other constituency does not pose an imminent
threat.
In Why 1 Am Not a Secularist, Connolly specifies how a Deleuzian
perspective pluralizes-rather than merely rejects-the Habermasian
conception of the secular. In a more critical vein, Deleuzians question
wh ether it makes sense for any constituency to describe itself as post-
secular or postmetaphysical: "Academic secularists are almost the only
partisans today who consistently purport to leave their religious and meta-
physical baggage at home. So the claim to being postmetaphysical opens
you to charges of hypocrisy or false consciousness."60 Above we saw that
Habermas thinks primarily ofChristianity when he speaks of religion and
Platonism when he thinks of metaphysics. Habermas does not need to
apologize for being raised and living in a particular milieu: he should just
be more forthright that he is embedded in the garden rather than writing
from a perspective somehow above it. In a more constructive vein, De-
leuzians press Habermasians to "rewrite secularism to pursue an ethos of
engagement in public litè among a plurality of controversial metaphysi-
cal perspectives, including, for starters, Christian and other monotheistic
perspectives, secular thought, and asecular, nontheistic perspectives."61
Connolly agrees with Habermas that society needs a certain glue to ho Id
society together--but the concept of an "ethos of engagement" folds in a
Deleuzian appreciation for acentered models ofpluralism that affirm deep
difference.

Stretehing M ui tieui turaHsm

Deleuze both shares and stretches Taylor's conception of multicuItural-
ism. Deleuze shares Taylor's critique of arid models of secularism and
appreciation t'or the cohabitation of multiple cultures on a single political
terrain. But the concept of the rhizome is meant to widen the range of
respected constituencies in modernity by Hegelian liberals such as Taylor.
Take werewolves, witches, or vampires-beings that can go back and
forth between human and animal form. In Sources of the Self, Taylor tells
a story of the formation of the modern autonomous subject that renounces
the claims of magic or transmutation. From the viewpoint of the modern
self, "the world of magic seems to entail a thralldom, an imprisoning of
the self in uncanny external forces, even a ravishing or loss of the self."
 The Image ofPlllralism 47

Taylor considers the phenomenon of witches and their persecution a

symptom of dismay and confusion of human beings leaving an enchanted
world for a scientific one, "a response to the fragility of the emerging
identity as it was establishing itself, a function of its immaturity and lack
of solidity." Taylor expresses a certain sympathy for the women accused
of being witches, but he condescends towards those who retain an inter-
est in magic: "For our contemporaries who are very secure in the modern
identity or even feel imprisoned within it, playing with the occult can
provide a pleasant frisson for the contented."62 In Sources of the Self-a
sort of updating of Hegel' s Phenomenology of Spirit-Taylor narrates the
formation of the modern identity from a synthesis of Christian, Enlighten-
ment, and Romantic sources. In turn, this view informs which constituen-
cies may flourish on Taylor's model of multicultural liberalism. Taylor
does not advocate the persecution of witches, but he also does not see
much need to think about protecting them or Iistening to their claims.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze thinks that animal-becomings are
much more common and serious than Taylor allows: "We believe in the
existence of very special becomings-animal traversing human beings and
sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than the human. 'From
1730 to 1735, ail we hear about are vampires'" (ATP, 237). Deleuze cou Id
be speaking Iiterally when he says, "Becomings-animal are neither dramas
nor phantasies. They are perfectly real," but Deleuze is not claiming that
we ought to believe at face value reports offered by and about humans who
have become bats, cats, or wolves. Rather, tales of vampires and the like
express a real process that every human being undergoes at every moment:
an exchange ofparticles with the atmosphere: "The becoming-animal of the
human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not;
and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even if that something other
it becomes is not." Human beings are not only open to cultural influences,
as Taylor cIaims, but they are also receptive to forces working on multiple
levels of being, what Bergson calls "very different 'durations,' superior or
inferior to 'ours,' ail ofthem in communication" (ATP, 238). Human beings
are porous vessels that are in constant commerce with the environment, in
the same way that every plant and animal is. What this means for the cur-
rent discussion is that multiculturalists should appreciate that virtually every
being emerges from its own culture (or plot of land) and that culture fluctu-
ates. On the macro level, multiculturalists should appreciate the formation
48 Chapter Two

of new cultures, religions, practices, and traditions; and on the micro level,
multiculturalists should recognize that everyone is a haecceity, a singular
being, and exercise care for difference.

Left Assemblages
Can the left attain sufficient unity in Deleuze's political vision? Deleuze's
Marxist critics seem to fear that if the left envisions itself as flowers,
and the right organizes itself as a tree, then the tree will crush the flow-
ers, much as the fascists crushed the anarchists in Barcelona during the
Spanish Civil War. How can Deleuzians respond to the charge that they
either celebrate capitalism or offer insufficient means to stop its destruc-
tive power?
In his 1989 interview with Claire Pamet, L'Abécédaire de Gilles De-
leuze, Deleuze explains what it means to be on the left. The left is a "phe-
nomenon of perception." To be on the right means starting from one's
own concems and interests and moving outwards, to other people, cities,
countries, and species. Citizens of wealthy industrial countries tend to
think first about their own financial status, then the gross domestic prod-
uct of the country, and then, remotely, the effects of global capitalism on
other people, regions, animaIs, or plants. The left strives to invert this per-
spective. Being on the left means discovering that "Third World problems
... are often closer to us than the problems in our own neighborhoods."63
Deleuze, here, refashions the central concept of the left: equality.64 Rather
than focus on the equivalence between identical beings, Deleuze encour-
ages us to situate ourse Ives mentally in the place of intrinsically different
beings. In other words, Deleuze proposes a way that a postidentitarian
metaphysics can still support the left's concern with reducing inequality.
The left is also "never of the majority." A majority is a constant or
standard used to measure other beings. In Western political thought, the
majority is often implicitly an "average adult-white-heterosexual-male-
speaking a standard language" (ATP, 105). Ontologically, no being ever
measures up exactly to this standard; the majority is literally an empty set.
Ethically, however, beings can torture themselves to conform to the stan-
dard. A minoritarian becoming refuses to fit into a mold: the concept of
minoritarian, then, revitalizes the notion of liberty. The left, in Deleuze's
final assessment, is "the aggregate of processes of minoritarian becom-
 The Image of Pluralism 49

ings."65 This definition expresses the way the left maintains a tension
between the ideal ofunity ("an aggregate ofprocesses") and plurality ("of
minoritarian becomings").
ln A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari create two concepts-
abstract machine and assemblage-to designate how the left exists in
thought and in extension. Ideationally, the left is an abstract machine,
an incorporeal power that pilots the formation of assemblages (ATP,
141). An abstract machine shapes a body's content and expression. Paul
Patton provides a helpful example of an abstract machine: a software
program that turns a computer into a calculating or a gaming machine. 66
A Thousand Plateaus offers a political example: Lenin's 1917 text, "On
Slogans," was an abstract machine that piloted the Boishevik Revolution
(ATP, 83). An abstract machine is not a Platonic idea, waiting in the ether
for philosophers to discover it. An abstract machine is "singular and im-
manent": singular insofar as its meaning is contingent to its time and place
and immanent insofar as it dwells on the virtual plane of unseen forces
that shape our lives and thoughts (ATP, 510). The abstract machine of
the left provides both unity and latitude to assemblages committed to the
concepts of liberty and equality.67
Materially, the left becomes concrete in assemblages. According to the
ontology of A Thousand Plateaus, a single "flow of matter-movement"
courses through the universe. This flow of matter-movement differenti-
ates itself, un der the piloting of abstract machines, into assemblages. An
assemblage is a "constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the
flow" (ATP, 406). Order emerges out of chaos through assemblages. The
brilliance of the concept of assemblages is that it describes an entity that
has both consistency and fuzzy borders. A political assemblage-a city,
state, party, or international order---has some coherence in what it says
and what it does, but it continually dissolves and morphs into something
new. An antiwar rally, for example, is an assemblage whose numbers of
participants may change by the moment and whose messages may confl ict
with and complement each other. An assemblage perpetually transforms
itself, like a cloud that pulls together and loses water molecules, or a hu-
man body that replenishes its cells (ATP, 249).
We may now pull together Deleuze's reflections on left assemblages.
Left assemblages are semicoherent political entities that express and work
for the ideals of liberty and equality. They are steered by a plurality of
50 Chapter Two

abstract machines--often referred to by the names and dates in which they

initially become manifest, for example, the 1917 Lenin abstract machine
or the 1927 John Dewey abstract machine-that often clash with one
another. Being on the left means acknowledging that the virtual ideas of
liberty and equality may never be definitively defined or actually realized.
The abstract machine, or diagram, of the left is "highly unstable or fluid,
continually churning up matter and functions in a way likely to create
change."68 Leftist ideas and practices are "essentially contestable."69 Left
assemblages operate on several spatial scales, from individuals to friend-
ship networks, institutions, cities, nation states, and international bodies.
There is no guarantee that they will fit together in their ideals, aims,
strategies, and tactics. The concept of assemblages, in short, displays a
tragic vision of politics, in which ambiguity and conflict are unlikely to
be resolved.
The concept of left assemblages differs in at least three ways from the
concept of the multitude. Left assemblages may or may not fight for the
working class. Environmental groups, for example, may decide that "per-
ceiving on the horizon" means protecting endangered animaIs rather than
fighting for class interests. For Deleuze, Hardt and Negri's claim that left
assemblages may magically cohere, like "Joseph's magical coat," repeats
a Leninist fiction ("the united front") that should be dismantled. Left as-
semblages are not committed to revolution. Wh en Deleuze counsels po-
litical actors "to gently tip the assemblage" (ATP, 161), he recognizes that
violently overturning the social order often does more harm th an good.
Finally, left assemblages appreciate the possibilities and the dangers of
sovereignty. War machines may help new identities cross the threshold
of being, but states are needed to protect these identities in the long term.
The multitude is a left assemblage, but left assemblages are not neces-
sarily the multitude. Hardt and Negri insist that the multitude is necessary
to constitute society, "to make decisions and act in common."70 Deleuze's
whole political philosophy recoils at this demand. Deleuze constructed
the concept of assemblages precisely to show how the left could nurture
diversity and disagreement. For Deleuze, the left can harbor deep difIer-
ences within itself between environmentalists and industrialists, theists
and atheists, traditional-value workers and liberal capitalists. 71 The left
may be strong enough to permit the presence of militant communists, but
it should seek to cultivate a more modest ethos among its members. The
 The Image ofPluralism 51

concept of assemblage helps the left envision political bodies that may
"gently tip" society in the direction of freedom and equality.

GARDENS AND FLOWERS

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze envisions pluralistic societies that

have space for theists, communitarians, civic republicans, deliberative
democrats, Marxists, and others. But within this garden, Deleuzians are
partisans for Epicurean ethics, individual rights (Iiberalism), majority rule
(democracy), feminism, and socialism. 72 The rest of the book explicates
Deleuze's partisan political theory, or the content and expression of De-
leuze's particular tlower.

NOTES

1. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 253-56.
2. For an early critique of dogmatic philosophy along these lines, see Gilles
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), chap. 3.
3. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Praetical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San
Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 49-50.
4. For a defense of conservatism that complements Deleuze's calls for ex-
perimentation, see Michael Oakeshott, RationaUsm in PoUties and Other Essays
(Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010). Deleuze does concede that molar lines, or
arboreal modes of being, include "much tenderness and love" (ATP, 195).
5. Charles Taylor, A Seeular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007), 1.
6. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral TheO/y (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984),53.
7. Ibid., 114.
8. Ibid., x.
9. Ibid., 263.
10. Ibid.
Il. John Protevi, PoUtical Affect: Conneeting the Social and the Somatie
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 61.
52 Chapter Two

12. On Deleuze's participation in the tradition of the radical Enlighten-

ment, see Nicholas Tampio, Kantian Courage: Advancing the Enlightenment in
Contemporwy Political TheOly (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012),
151-57.
13. Cited in Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1996), 5.
14. Ibid., 179.
15. Ibid., 136.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 138.
18. Leo Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays, ed. Hi-
lail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 57.
19. Lampert both praises Strauss's scholarship in the history of political phi-
losophy and criticizes him for setting a bad precedent for his students: "Strauss
could not show his followers any way toward political responsibility except per-
petuating a supposedly noble Iying on behalf of views rendered both incredible
and unpalatable by modern experience" (Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, 173).
20. William E. Connolly, "Debate: Reworking the Democratie Imagination,"
Journal of Political Philosophy 5, no. 2 (1997): 201.
21. See Nicholas Xenos, Cloaked in Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the
Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy (New York: Routledge, 2008); Anne Nor-
ton, Leo Strauss and the Po/itics of American Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2004). On how neoconservatives have misused Leo Strauss, ig-
noring, for instance, his late appreciation for internationallaw, see Robert Howse,
Leo Strauss: Man of Peace (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
22. See Mark Danner, "The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means." New
York Review of Books 56, no. 7 (2009): 48-56.
23. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 9.
24. Ibid., 8.
25. Ibid., 27.
26. Ibid., 13.
27. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Po/itical Ecology of Things (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010), ix.
28. Arendt, Human Condition, 25.
29. Ibid., 49.
30. William E. Connolly, Why 1 Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999), 182.
31. Jürgen Habermas, Bell'veen Natura/ism and Religion: Philosophical Es-
says, ed. and trans. Ciaran Cronin (Malden, MA: Polity, 2008), 2-3.
 The Image ofPluralism 53

32. Ibid., 2.
33. Ibid., 130.
34. Ibid., 142.
35. Ibid., 141-42.
36. Ibid., 122.
37. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham
Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),43.
38. Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism: Ex-
amining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1994), 61.
39. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 516.
40. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Jose-
fine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 109.
41. Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cre-
ation (New York: Verso, 2006); Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Slavoj Zizek, Organs with-
out Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004).
42. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), xiv.
43. Ibid., 222-23.
44. Ibid., 91.
45. François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 367.
46. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 258.
47. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, eds. Adrian Del Caro and
Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 16-17.
48. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xv.
49. Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 91.
50. William A. Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications oiValue Plural-
ism for Political Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 122.
51. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, ed. David
Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotexte, 2004), 258.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 259.
54. Ibid., 260.
55. Arendt, Human Condition, 40.
54 Chapter Two

56. Ibid., 41.

57. See Joshua Ramey, "Deleuze, Guattari, and the 'Politics of Sorcery,'"
Substance: A Review of Theory & Literary Criticism 39, no. 1 (2010): 8-23.
58. William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1995),235.
59. Ibid.
60. Connolly, Why 1 Am Not a Secularist, 37.
61. Ibid., 39.
62. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 192.
63. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, L'Abécédaire De Gilles Dèleuze
(Éditions Montparnasse: Arte Video, 1997), http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/
CStivale/D-G/ABCs.html, G (Gauche).
64. On the notion of equality as the basis of the left, see Norberto Bobbio,
Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, trans. Allan Cameron
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
65. Deleuze and Parnet, L'Abécédaire De Gilles Deleuze.
66. Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2000), 31.
67. On how the U.S. Constitution is an abstract machine, see Jeffrey A. Bell,
Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Differ-
ence (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 217-18.
68. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988), 35.
69. For a comparison of Deleuze's and Connolly's notions of philosophical
concepts, see Patton, Deleuze and the Political, 13-14.
70. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 223.
71. On how Deleuze' s concept of the rhizome transforms the leftist pluralist
imaginary, see William E. Connolly, "Assembling the Left," Boundary 2 26, no.
3 (1999): 47-54.
72. One of the most important distinctions in contemporary liberal political
theory is between a political conception of justice and a comprehensive moral
doctrine. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2005). To avoid reinstating a new arborealism, Deleuzians would do weil
to advance their own version of this distinction-to differentiate, in other words,
the mIes of the garden and the beliefs and practices of one's own flower.
 Chapter Three

Deleuze' s Soul Hypothesis

ln A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume identifies human nature as

the capital of the sciences. Mathematics, natural philosophy, and natural
theology concem numbers, physical objects, and God, but the researchers
are humans and it is their faculties that determ ine the extent and boundar-
ies of knowledge. How much more important is defining human nature
when humans are both the subjects and objects of inquiry-as in morals
(the science of tastes and sentiments) and politics (the science of men as
united in society)? For Hume, the only way empiricists may defeat ratio-
nalists is "to march up directly to the capital or center of these sciences,
to human nature itself; which being once masters of, we may everywhere
else hope for an easy victory."J From his first book on Hume (subtitled
An Essay on Hume 's Theory ofHuman Nature) to his last published essay
("Immanence: A Life"), Deleuze grapples with the question of human na-
ture. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze describes human nature as a physi-
cal body (con crete assemblage) and immaterial pilot (abstract machine)
that straddles the forces of order and chaos. In this chapter, 1 argue that
Deleuze's conception of human nature lays the foundation for a liberal
democratic political theory.
Other political theorists, however, think that Deleuze is interesting
precisely because he thinks beyond or instead of the human. In Vibrant
Matter, for instance, Jane Bennett proposes to "emphasize, even overem-
phasize, the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces ... in an attempt to
counter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought."2 Bennett
identifies Deleuze as an ally in this project, one whose one-world meta-
physic of multiple agentic bodies deflates cIaims of human singularity

55
56 Chapter Three

or importance: "A Thousand Plateaus is full of quickening, effervescent

proto- and no-bodies--ofbecomings-animals, of Bodies without Organs-
which are best described, in Spinozist tenns, as 'a set of speeds and slow-
nesses between unformed particles [with] ... the individuality of a day,
a season, a year, a life. "'3 Likewise, Levi Bryant, in The Democracy of
Objects, enlists Deleuze to develop "a post-humanist, realist ontology ...
where humans are no longer monarchs of being but are instead among be-
ings, entangled in beings, and implicated in other beings."4 Many Western
political philosophers draw a solid line between humans and other beings,
or between the rational and animal levels of human nature. Deleuze chal-
lenges this major tradition of philosophy through his portrayal of a world
composed of dotted and intertwined lines. 5 Deleuze's flat ontology places
human beings on a continuum with other intelligent mammals, such as
dolphins or monkeys.6
And yet Deleuze's oeuvre is filled with meditations on the question of
human nature. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche gives us a clue as to
what Deleuze is doing. Modern science has discredited one conception
of the soul: "the belief that the soul is something indestructible, eternal,
indivisible, that it is a monad, an atomon: this belief must be thrown out
of science!" At the same time, "the path lies open for new versions and so-
phistications of the soul hypothesis-and concepts like the 'mortal soul'
and the 'soul as subject-multiplicity' and the 'soul as a society constructed
out of drives and affects' want henceforth to have civil rights in the realm
of science."7 The entire history of Western philosophy-including au-
thors Deleuze mostly admires, such as Hume, Nietzsche, and Bergson,
and those he mostly contests, such as Plato, Descartes, and Kant-dwells
upon the question of human nature. 8 To throw out this Iiterature and at-
tempt to start thinking from scratch is a daunting prospect-and, accord-
ing to Nietzsche, unnecessary. Contemporary philosophers may build
upon and amend, rather than ignore, the substantial literature exploring
the mystery of how human beings differ from each other and other spe-
cies. Rather than shy away from defining these differences-which just
hands the keys to the capital of the sciences to rationalists and anthro-
pocentrists-naturalists need to experiment with their own accounts of
human nature. The aim ofthis chapter, then, is to consider Deleuze's soul
hypothesis and its political implications.
 Deleuze 's SOltl Hypothesis 57

STRATIFICATION AND HUMAN NATURE

A Thousand Plateaus provides an account of how human beings emerge

out of the strata that define rocks, plants, and other animais. Human be-
ings are made of the same stuff as everything else in the universe, but
they have a degree of alloplasticity-or world-changing ability-that dif-
ferentiates them from other beings. Here are the main steps in Deleuze's
account of the stratification procedure that generates human beings.
Litè begins on earth: "The Earth-the Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the
giant Molecule-is a body without organs. This body without organs is
permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by f10ws in ail directions, by
free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles"
(ATP, 40). The earth is chaos, atoms swerving in the void. So how do
things settle and grow? In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius asserts that ev-
erything is generated "out of connections, densities, shocks, encounters,
concurrences, and motions."9 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze caBs this
process stratification: "Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist in giving
torm to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into
systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the
earth molecules large and small and organizing them into molar aggre-
gates" (ATP, 40). What does Deleuze mean by calling strata "judgments
of God" (ATP, 40)? Deleuze, an Epicurean, does not endorse the biblical
account whereby a Creator God separated heaven from earth, light from
dark, water from sky, and so forth. But Deleuze does express wonder and
gratitude for the vital energies coursing through the universe that bring
atoms together into molecules and, beyond that, molar aggregates such
as rocks, plants, animais, hum an beings, cities, and states. Rather than
abandon the concept of God, one of humanity's most enduring and awe-
inspiring symbols, Deleuze, Iike the complexity theorist Stuat1 Kauffman,
redefines the tenn to mean the natural creativity in the universe. 1o
Deleuze resists any cosmological or ontological narrative that posits
big gaps between humans and other beings: "We should be on our guard
against any kind of ridiculous cosmic evolutionism .... The difference
between materials and substantial elements is one of organization; there is
a change in organization, not an augmentation" (ATP, 49). If the universe
is a single plane of immanence, then there is no Creator God to implant
58 Chapter Tlzree

qualities or souls into beings. Still, some st rata are relatively simple and
homogeneous and some are complex and heterogeneous. The simplest
strata are "the geological stratum, the crystalline stratum, and the physi-
cochemical strata, wherever the molar can be said to express microscopie
molecular interactions" (ATP, 57). Molar is from the Latin word moles,
"mass, barrier," and molecular (from the French word molécule) is its di-
minutive, meaning, "extremely minute particle." On the geological level,
what you see is basically what you get: that is to say, there is a close con-
nection between a rock's content and its expression, what it is on a mo-
lecular level and how it appears, as a molar object, to external observers.
Things become more complex on the organic stratum. Now, "expression
becomes independent in ils own right, in other words, autonomous" (ATP,
59). Plants and animaIs are not simply an accumulation of molecules, but
complex entities with different parts and a symbiotic relationship to the
world. Organic beings have nucleotides and nucleic acids, RNA and DNA
that enable them to survive and pass on their genetic blueprints to the
next generation. Plants and animaIs live in a way that rocks do not: "The
alignment of the code or linearity of the nucleic sequence in fact marks a
threshold of deterritorialization of the 'sign' that gives it a new ability to
be copied and makes the organism more deterritorialized than a crystal"
(ATP, 59). In other words, plants and animais have a greater vitality, a will
to power, th an rocks: a bird drops a seed into a boulder's crevice and the
tree breaks apart its home. Politics, the competition for scarce resources,
takes place everywhere, such as wh en sand, grass, and worms fight over
the bord ers of the forest and desert.
Humanity constitutes the third stratum upon the earth. This stratum
is "defined less by a human essence than ... by a new distribution of
content and expression. Fonn of content becomes 'alloplastic' rather than
'homoplastic'; in other words, it brings about modifications in the exter-
nal world" (ATP, 60). The Greek word alios means "other, different"; the
Greek word plassein means "to mold," and plastikos means "able to be
molded." Human beings are able to mold the world, and themselves, into
something different. A theological tradition going back at least to Au-
gustine holds that initium ut esset homo creatus est: "that a beginning be
made, man was created."" One definition of a miracle is that it is a viola-
tion of the laws of nature. Human beings are both miraculous creations
and creators of m iracles-products and agents of events that could not be
 Deleuze 's Soul Hypothesis 59

predicted ev en if one knew every preceding cause. How is it possible to

describe this miracle-producing function of humanity? Deleuze calls it
alloplasticityY It is not so much that rocks and other animais lack allo-
plasticity: the example from the preceding paragraph of the bird dropping
a seed shows that is not the case. Still, human beings have alloplastic pow-
ers different from-and greater than-rocks, plants, and other animais.
Deleuze identifies several ways that the content and expression, speeds
and powers, of humans ditfer from those of beings on the physicochemi-
cal or organic strata. Human beings have opposable thumbs. Thumbs
transform paws into hands. Hands grasp tools. A human being is a homo
faber, one who makes things: "With the hand as a formai trait or general
form of content a major threshold of deterritorialization is reached and
opens, an accelerator that in itself permits a shifting interplay of com-
parative deterritorializations and reterritorialization" (ATP, 61). Hands-
whether clenched in a fi st, holding a hammer, or starting a fire-can
destroy (or deterritorialize) nature, that which has been given to humans.
In tum, hands make it possible to rebuild (or reterritorialize) the natural
world to serve human ends. The hand primarily amplifies the intrinsic
power, the content, of human beings, but it also accelerates how human
beings express themselves: "The hand must not be thought of simply as
an organ but instead as a coding (the digital code)" (ATP, 60-61). Fingers,
digits, make it possible to write down laws and symbols-as did human-
ity's earliest specimens wh en they scratched on tablets made from a tree
trunk (Latin caudex, the basis for the word "code"): "It would be difficult
to maintain that the emergence of human beings marked the absolute ori-
gin ofthis distribution" (ATP, 60). Deleuze contests the biblical narrative
that God created human beings in a day. Archeologists may always find
an older hominid. But Deleuze maintains that the hand-tool couple makes
it possible for humans to destroy, create, and communicate in ways inac-
cessible to other animais (to the best of our knowledge).
Human beings have supple larynxes. Early hominids moved from the
forest to the steppe, and, consequently, certain genetic variations led to
an increased rate of reproduction: "The steppe ... seems to have exerted
strong pressures of selection: the 'supple larynx' ... could have arisen
only in a deforested milieu where it is no longer necessary to have gigan-
tic laryngeal sacks in order for one's cries to be heard above the constant
din of the forest. To articulate, to speak, is to speak softly" (ATP, 62). A
60 Chapter Three

biological descent with modification leads to enhanced powers for human

beings: "Physiological, acoustic, and vocal substance are not the only
things that undergo ail these deterritorializations. The form of expression,
as language, also crosses a threshold" (ATP, 62). What does it mean for a
form of expression to cross a threshold?
A human being is, in Aristotle's famous formulation, a zoon logon
ekhon ("a living being capable of speech"). 13 Plants have a genetic code,
but a plant's genetic code "has neither emitter, receiver, comprehension,
nor translation, only redundancies" (ATP, 62). Though plants have sorne
agency-a capacity to grow and change their environment-they do not,
in any meaningful way, reflect or choose, they grow or fail to grow. Other
animaIs, too, communicate-whales sing for hours and bees direct others
to flowers-but they lack the power of the human tongue (in Latin, Zin-
gua) or language. Language empowers humans "to represent aIl the other
strata and thus achieve a scientific conception of the world. The scientific
world (Welt, as opposed to the Umwelt of the animal) is the translation
of aIl of the flows, particles, codes, and territorialities of the other strata
into a sufficiently deterritorialized system of signs, in other words, into an
overcoding specifie to language" (ATP, 62). Human beings can survey the
world in ways that other animais apparently cannot and write and system-
atize their observations. Human beings choose how to impose a pattern on
the manifold that flutters before their eyes. Whenever human beings have
been handed a code, they have the power to erase and rewrite it: this is the
power of overcoding specifie to human language. Deleuze hesitates to use
the word "freedom" in his writings-perhaps because of its philosophical
and theological baggage-but he does maintain that human beings have a
power to choose their words and actions in ways seemingly inaccessible
to other creatures: "aIl human movements, ev en the most violent, imply
translations," that is, a choice about where to transfer (Latin, transferre;
past participle, translatus) bodies or words (ATP, 63).
Deleuze identifies other strata that differentiate humans from other
beings. The first is the body. We have just reviewed how Deleuze under-
stands the significance of thumbs and larynxes. A Deleuzian perspective
could further explore how certain well-defined organs-such as the lips
(ATP, 61-62)--shape human life and how the human organism works as
a system. But Deleuze also agrees with Spinoza that we still do not know
what a (human) body can do. Deleuze identifies an aspect ofhuman corpo-
 Deleuze 's Soul Hypothesis 61

reality that eludes the physical sciences: the Body without Organs (BwO).
The "BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, co-
agulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism ... occur"
(ATP, 159). The BwO is both other than human and unique to humans.
The BwO is other than human because it opens to everything else in the
universe: the BwO is "nothing more than a set ofvalves, locks, floodgates,
bowls, or communicating vessels" (ATP, 153). If the organism is the side
of human corporeality that persists, the BwO is the side that decomposes
and recomposes into its environment. And yet the BwO is distinctly human
because other animaIs seemingly cannot regulate their valves in the same
way that humans cano
The next stratum of the human being is the unconscious. Christian
Kerslake has shown that Deleuze "ransacked every forgotten cranny
in modern thought in search of theories of the unconscious that restore
dimensions, passages, syntheses and dramas of the mind occluded by
Freudian psychoanalysis" and that "the single idea that unites these
disparate theories is the belief that there is such a thing as unconscious
mentality."14 Deleuze criticizes the Freudian paradigm most relentlessly in
Anti-Oedipus for "keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of
mommy-daddy."15 Psychoanalysis, with its one-size-tits-all mythological
explanatory framework, would induce laughter if it did not cause such
mental anguish to those it misdiagnoses. Deleuze concedes that psychoan-
alysts are often gifted surveyors of subterranean mental layers that have a
profound influence on human life. The problem is that the psychoanalysts
misuse their best insights: "For what Freud and the first analysts discover
is the domain of free syntheses where everything is possible: endless
connections, nonexclusive disjunctions, nonspecific conjunctions, partial
objects and flows."16 The earliest psychoanalysts perceived that the un-
conscious is productive, that it conjugates multiple elements-from one's
own past and present and the exterior milieu-to generate the mind be-
neath the mind, the soil on which one grows one's ideas, percepts, affects,
and so forth. Yet Freud and his disciples crushed desiring-production and
subjected the unconscious to the requirements of representation. 17 Freud,
in other words, placed psychoanalysis in the service of bourgeois morality
and economics, ignoring the political conditions of possibility of the un-
conscious or how an appreciation of the wild elements of the unconscious
might pave the way for a politics of desire. 1S In A Thousand Plateaus,
62 Chapter Three

Deleuze renews the psychoanalytic project by showing how the uncon-

scious is an open system, penneated by elements from the economy, the
political regime, popular culture, animal molecules, collective dreams,
and other ragtag elements: "the unconscious itself [is] fundamentally a
crowd" (ATP, 29). And yet for aIl of the qualities that make, say, the
Wolf-Man somebody who really, and not just symbolically, blends his
elements with those of a pack ofwolves, the Wolf-Man is not a wolf.
The final named stratum in A Thousand Plateaus is subjectivity: "You
will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled
into a subject of the statement--otherwise you're just a tramp" (ATP,
159). Deleuze's political philosophy objects to any account ofsubjectivity
that posits a self-enclosed mind, soul, cogito, or transcendental subject.
Deleuze uses his name "out of habit, purely out of habit" (ATP, 3). For
Deleuze, the whole weight of the philosophical tradition, and the impera-
tives of the modern socio-economic-political order, demands the fonna-
tion of responsible subjects. Like Hume, Deleuze thinks that personal
identity is a serviceablefiction to describe beings that find their bearings
through interactions with others. Perhaps in ditIerent circumstances, De-
leuze would see the need to develop a more robust account of subjectivity,
but as things stand now, the most interesting and important philosophy
investigates the flows into and out of the human subject. 19 Deleuze uses
the term "BwO," once aga in, to describe the side of hum an nature that
fights or flees from subjectivity: "To the strata as a who le, the BwO op-
poses disarticulation (or n articulations) as the property of the plane of
consistency, experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signifier,
never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in
place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification" (ATP,
159). The BwO is not human or a human. The tenn, rather, conceptualizes
the aspect of existence that eludes the straightjacket of the anthropocen-
tric assumptions pervasive in the history of Western political philosophy.
The BwO is a "field of immanence," a flow of matter-movement that
surges under, through, and over human subjectivity (ATP, 157). As Wil-
liam Behun has shown, Deleuze's description of the BwO matches up in
many ways with the Body of Light or the Subtle Body that "is the object
of several forms of magical, mystical and alchemical practices, including
Buddhism, Theosophy, and Hermeticism."20 For a Deleuzian political the-
 Deleuze 's Soul Hypothesis 63

orist, the key point to see is that joyful ethics and politics require building
launching pads for human subjects to explore different planes of reality.
In sum, human beings differ from other beings. Human beings, unlike
rocks, have a genetic code. Unlike plants, human beings are alloplastic-
that is, they have a power to choose how to constitute and express them-
selves. Ethologically speaking, human beings are similar to other primates.
Capuchin monkeys, for example, use rocks to crack open palm nuts, under-
stand the concept of exchange (the basis of money), and may recogn ize their
own image in a mirror. But human beings differ trom monkeys-literally,
in that we possess opposable thumbs and supple larynxes-but also in more
supple categories, such as artistic and symbolic abilities. Philosophers and
theologians have long claimed that naturalists cannot explain the formation
of singularly human virtues; rather than ignore this criticism, Deleuze pre-
sents a naturalistic account of such qualities as freedom and subjectivity.21
Up to now, however, we still have not directly answered the question: what
is a human being? For it is possible that an animal with opposable thumbs
and a supple larynx could remain a monkey. What is it that tums a monkey
into a human? How does Deleuze explain many of the human fèatures that
other philosophers ascribe to the soul?

ABSTRACT MACHINES AND CON CRETE ASSEMBLAGES

One of the most important and mysterious concepts in A Thousand Pla-

teaus is abstract machine. The first stratum on the earth, to review, is the
minerai one, and the second is the organic.

The third stratum sees the emergence of Machines that are fully a part of
that stratum but at the same time rear up and stretch their pincers out in
ail directions at a11 the other strata. Is this not like an intermediate state
between the two states of the abstract machine?-the state in which it re-
mains enveloped in a corresponding stratum (ecumenon), and the state in
which it develops in its own right on the destratified plane of consistency
(planomenon). The abstract machine begins to unfold, to stand to full
height, producing an illusion exceeding ail strata, even though the machine
itself still belongs to a determinate stratum. This is, obviously, the illusion
constitutive of man (who does man think he is?). (ATP, 63)
64 Chapter Three

Genetically, human beings are almost identical to other primates. Human

beings are fully immersed in immanence. There is no transcendent source
that breathes life into them or makes them in His image. But human be-
ings do have a spark within them that allows them to think, choose, use
symbols, and remake the world. Abstract derives from the Latin word ab-
strahere, "to drag away"; machine derives from the Proto-Indo-European
root maghana, "that which enables," which in turn comes from the root
magh- "to have power." An abstract machine is something that cannot
be touched with one's hands or seen with one's eyes, but it is a source of
power in the world.
There are two states of the abstract machine, or, alternatively, there are
two kinds of abstract machine (ATP, 414). Either way, Deleuze describes
a universe composed of abstract machines that pull things together and
abstract machines that pull things apart. The abstract machine of stratifi-
cation provides a being, su ch as a plant or human, an identity, or a unity
of composition that persists even as its molecules and substances change:
"The organic stratum does have a specific unity of composition, a single
abstract Animal, a single machine embedded in the stratum, and presents
everywhere the same molecular materials, the same elements or anatomi-
cal components of organs, the same formai connections" (ATP, 45-46).
The abstract machine is like DNA, insofar as it is a code that expresses it-
self in complex ways. And yet neuroscience, despite its impressive recent
achievements mapping where the brain feels and when its parts activate,
still has not solved the riddle of how life fonns or how cogitation is pos-
sible. As a philosopher, Deleuze invents a concept to describe the life-
generating and life-sustaining element of the virtual realm inaccessible to
scientific method: abstract machine. The correlate to the abstract machine
of stratification is the abstract machine of destratification. Is this abstract
machine Thanatos to the other's Eros? Not exactly. The abstract machine
of destratification opens up to the plane of consistency, where some of
humanity's most enchanting, life-affirming moments occur. The abstract
machine of destratification connects beings to "something else, assem-
blages of another type, the molecular, the cosmic; they constitute becom-
ings" (ATP, 510). The virtual realm has two magnets, as it were, one
pulling forces together into solid formations and the other pulling them
into bits and pieces. The former, the ecumenon, makes the world inhabit-
able-the Greek word oikoumenikos refers to the inhabited world-and
 Deleuze 's Sou! Hypothesis 65

the latter, the planomenon-receives emanations from the cosmos-plane

derives from the Latin verb planare, "to make level," but its deeper root
is from the Greek word pelanos, "a sacrificial cake offered to the gods."
Deleuze, in sum, envisions a world enacting a drama between the forces
of order and the forces of chaos, much as Nietzsche in The Birth ofTrag-
edy saw the ancient Greeks doing in their myths of Apollo and Dionysus.
The concept of abstract machine, however, tells only half the story.
The etymology of the term indicates that an abstract machine needs some-
thing to pull away from and something on which to enact its power. This
something is a concrete assemblage. Concrete (from the Latin concretus)
is something that has grown together into a relatively solid substance.
Assemblage (agencement) suggests an agglomeration of semirandom
elements, like those constructed by artists su ch as Marcel Duchamp and
Jean Dubuffet. A concrete assemblage, like an abstract machine, is con-
stantly being pulled in two directions. An assemblage envelops a territory
in such a way that it has a body: "The first concrete rule for assemblages
is to discover what territoriality they envelop, for there always is one"
(ATP, 503). An assemblage provides the membrane that stops a being
from flowing into its milieu. An assemblage can be formed by a refrain
that a child sings to keep its confidence while walking by a graveyard or
a fence that separates one country from another, but on the simplest level,
each human being is enwrapped by its skin. The skin's porosity gives
us a clue to the second feature of an assemblage-it always opens up to
the outside: "Assemblages swing between a territorial closure that tends
to restratify them and a deterritorial izing movement that on the contrary
connects them with the Cosmos" (ATP, 337). A human body is a porous
vessel, constantly losing and taking in elements-including things that
natural scientists investigate (water, oxygen, and nutrients), things that
social scientists study (political ideas and mores), things perceptible
primarily to artists and mystics (cosmic rays), and things beyond human
comprehension. Once again, for Deleuze, philosophers do not know-and
may never know-what a human body can do.
The abstract machine is the immaterial force that provides a blueprint
and a pilot to the concrete assemblage: "The abstract machine is like the
diagram of an assemblage. It draws lines of continuous variation, while
the concrete assemblage treats variables and organizes their highly diverse
relations as a function of those lines" (ATP, 100). The abstract machine
66 Chapter Three

pertàrms many functions assigned to the will in, say, Kant's practical phi-
losophy. The abstract machine has negative freedom, in that it can remove
itself from the laws of nature to choose to make a concrete assemblage
take this form rather than that. An abstract machine has positive freedom,
in that it tàrmulates certain rules (or variables) that give the concrete as-
semblage consistency in its material (content) and symbolic (expressive)
dimensions. An abstract machine has a power of choice-in German, a
Willkür-to determine whether a concrete assemblage goes with the tlow,
as it were, or decides to swim against the tide of its milieu. Lenin, the
man, was a concrete assemblage, but he was steered by a "Lenin abstract
machine": "The abstract machine is always singular, designated by the
proper name of a group or individual" (ATP, 100). At the same time, the
abstract machine is not a Kantian will. For Kant, the will transcended its
physical body entirely, which is why he could postulate its immortality in
Critique of Practical Reason. For Deleuze, on the contrary, "the abstract
machine does not exist independently of the assemblage, any more than
the assemblage functions independently of the machine" (ATP, 100). The
abstract machine breathes Iitè into a body-that is, is its spirit (from the
Latin spiritus, "breath")-but the abstract machine cannot exist detached
from a body. The abstract machine is an earthy sou!.
What is gained by calling the soul an abstract machine and the body
a concrete assemblage? On a theoretical plane, we see that the soul "can
be connected to anything other, and must be" (ATP, 7). Western philoso-
phers such as Plato, Descartes, and Kant have often posited a sharp div ide
between the mind and the body, yet they have trouble explaining the con-
nection between ares cogitans and ares extensa. 22 Deleuze illuminates
the way that the mind is immersed in an ocean of being where things are
both separate and connected. Take, for example, language. Philosophers
in the Platonic, Cartesian, and Kantian traditions have long prided them-
selves on thinking in pure ideas. Largely as a result of Wittgenstein's
Iinguistic turn, many philosophers now accept that language shapes the
way that we think. Still, many philosophers and Iinguists-following
Chomsky's lead-believe that there is a "deep grammar" that organizes
thoughts but that is not itself affected by environmental influences. De-
leuze invites us to connect "a language to the semantic and pragmatic
contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a
whole micropolitics of the social field" (ATP, 7). Language expresses
 Deleuze 's SOlll Hypothesis 67

meaning fairly consistently over time: dictionaries serve a function. Yet

language is always connected to practice: how a peasant greets, or doesn 't
greet, a local landowner, for instance, indicates the power relations exist-
ing at a particular time and place (ATP, 216). Language is an incorporeal
entity that is always decomposing and recomposing itself, losing words,
adding more, and redefining others-largely as a result of its symbiosis
with an outside composed of nonlinguistic forces: "A semiotic chain is
like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also
perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself,
nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois,
slangs, and specialized languages" (ATP, 7). Deleuze's duality of abstract
machine and concrete assemblages spurs us to view the mind and body
as porous entities that each have a certain independence from and power
over the other. For Deleuze, the environment affects genes and, more
profoundly, the soul (abstract machine).23
Deleuze's philosophy illuminates the connections between entities that
the Western intellectual tradition often considers discrete. Rather than
think of the universe as composed of subjects, objects, and collectivi-
ties-each with solid borders-a Deleuzian perspective presses us to view
a body/brain/culture network where the entities are different but entan-
gled. 24 Why does this matter, politically? Because suddenly we recognize
that politics-the contest over our shared future-transpires on multiple
terrains and in numerous arenas. On a macro level, human beings speak
and act in public forums and governmental institutions. But politics also
takes place on a micro level, beneath the gaze of most political scientists.

In short, everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a mac-

ropolitics and a micropolitics. Take aggregates of the perception or feeling
type: their molar organization, their rigid segmentarity, does not preclude
the existence of an entire worId of unconscious micropercepts, unconscious
affects, fine segmentations that grasp or ex peri en ce different things, are
distributed and operate differently. There is a micropolitics of perception,
affection, conversation, and so forth. (ATP, 213)

According to Deleuze, political theorists and actors on the right-most no-

tably European fascists-have long been masters ofmicropolitics. German
beer halls were the petri dish for the National Socialist Party. Rather than
ignore the viscerallevel to focus on the level of cognition (as, for example,
68 Chapter Three

Habermas and Rawls, both of whom extol political reasonableness), De-

leuze thinks that left pluralists need to become students and practitioners
of micropolitics. In William E. Connolly's words, "techniques of the self
and micropolitics are critical to an expansive ethos of pluralism, as weil
as to more closed regimes at odds with such an ethos."25 Political theorists
are just beginning to appreciate Deleuze's insights about the multiple lay-
ers of human nature and the tactical interventions necessary on each layer
to enact a positive ethos of pluralism. 26 Deleuze's political counsel is to
experiment for the sake of constructing joyful political bodies.

HUMAN NATURE AND LIBERALDEMOCRACY

A conception of human nature grounds, but does not determine, a political

theory. A conception of human nature identifies what is realistic to expect
of humans: if we were angels, there would be no need for govemment. Any
viable political theory must address the fact that human beings are animais
and need food, water, fresh air, shelter from the environment, and so forth.
And yet virtually every political theorist-working in either the major or
minor traditions27-confronts the fact that human beings differ in important
ways from other animais. Take Spinoza's definition of an ethology: "Spi-
noza asks: What can a body do? ... In the same way that we avoided defin-
ing a body by its organs and functions, we will avoid defining it by Species
or Genus characteristics; instead we will seek to count its affects" (ATP,
256-57). For Deleuze's Spinoza, "A racehorse is more different from a
workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox" (ATP, 257)-and, presumably,
some humans are more different from each other than they are from other
animaIs, discrediting the notion that there is a human essence. Be that as it
may, the fact is that most humans have similar affects, as Hobbes explained
in Leviathan: "Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and
mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger
in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when aIl is reckoned together,
the difference between man and man is not so considerable."28 Political
theorists begin with the assumption that human beings, ethologically speak-
ing, share certain powers: the crucial political question is how to address
human commonalities and differences.
 Deleuze 's Soltl Hypothesis 69

How does Deleuze define human flourishing? At a basic level, the hu-
man being has to exercise care and caution to preserve his or her body,
unconscious, and conscious: "Y ou have to keep enough of the organism
for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of sig-
nificance ... and you have to have to keep small rations of subjectivity
in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality"
(ATP, 160). A revolution means turning one's life upside down: Deleuze
warns against this ambition in A Thousand Plateaus: "Staying strati-
fied--organized, signified, subjected-is not the worst that can happen;
the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or sui-
cidaI collapse, which brings them down on us heavier than ever" (ATP,
161). At the same time, Deleuze thinks that the most enchanting aspects
of life occur wh en human beings open themselves up to nonhuman forces
circulating throughout nature. Here is one of many such formulations in
A Thousand Plateaus: "Where psychoanalysis says, 'Stop, find your self
again,' we should say instead, 'Let's go further still, we haven't found our
BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self.' Substitute forget-
ting for anamnesis, experimentation for Interpretation. Find your body
without organs. Find out how to make it. It's a question of life and death,
youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out"
(ATP, 151). We experience joy wh en we amplify our power to affect and
be affected, and the way to amplify our power is to destroy old barriers
and welcome new elements (ideas, nutrients, practices) into our lives. Part
of becoming-Deleuzian means generating new ways of thinking, acting,
feeling, and seeing.
If Deleuze's ethics is Spinozist, so is his politics. In Spinoza: Practical
Philosophy, Deleuze identifies what kind of political regime best favors
human flourishing: liberal democracy.

The philosopher cannot integrate into any milieu; he is not suited to any
of them. Doubtless it is in democratic and liberal milieus that he finds the
best living conditions, or rather the best conditions for survival. But for him
these milieus only guarantee that the malicious will not be able to poison
or mutilate Iife, that they will not be able to separate it from the power of
thinking that goes a little beyond the ends of the state, of a society, beyond
any milieu in general. 29
70 Chapter Three

To explicate this passage, 1 wish to review Spinoza's liberal democratic

political vision in the Theological-Political Treatise and then show how
its main contours are replicated in A Thousand Plateaus.
The purpose of the Theological-Political Treatise is to demonstrate
that philosophical freedom may and should coexist with religious piety
and political stability.30 Spinoza himself does not believe in supernatural
accounts of prophecy or miracles. The Theological-Political Treatise is
written, in part, to convince other philosophers of this naturalist world-
view-·and thus the book complements Spinoza's Ethics. Yet Spinoza
also believes that most human beings have, and will have for the fore-
seeable future, stronger imaginations than faculties of reason. Spinoza
may demystify religion for the few, but he recognizes that religion pro-
vides the many a comforting framework to explain the unexplainable.
Spinoza's ethics may invite philosophers to think and pursue joy in a
universe composed of one substance, but Spinoza's politics merely asks
that the multitude let philosophers be. Monarchs disguise the fear that
sways men "with the specious name of religion, so that they will fight
for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance ....
But in a free republic (res publica), on the other hand, nothing that can be
devised or attempted will be less successful. For it is completely contrary
to the common liberty to shackle the free judgment of the individual with
prejudices or constraints of any kind."31 Monarchs collude with priests
to promulgate religions that inculcate political acquiescence. The liberal
ideal, on the contrary, promotes "living in a republic where every person's
liberty to judge for himself is respected, everyone is permitted to worship
God according to his own mind, and nothing is thought dearer or sweeter
than freedom."32 Many people in a Spinozist republic will abuse their
freedom and retreat to the religious myths that Spinoza-like Lucretius
before him and Nietzsche afterwards-considers "vestiges of our ancient
servitude."33 But liberalism allows sorne people to think foolish thoughts
so that others, philosophers, may have the right to follow the dictates of
reason: "The freest state ... is that whose laws are founded on sound
reason, for there each man can be free whenever he wishes, that is, he can
live under the guidance of reason with his whole mind."34
Though liberalism--committed to the ideal of free thought and
expression-may survive under an enlightened despot, Spinoza holds that
it is best served in a democratic regime. Spinoza defines democracy as "a
 Deleuze 's Soul Hypothesis 71

united gathering of people which collectively has the sovereign right to do

ail that it has the power to dO."35 For Spinoza, "each individual thing has
the sovereign right to do everything that it can dO,"36 and the most naturai
political order is one in which human beings consent to transfer power to
a sovereign under their direct control. And yet Spinoza does not defend
democracy primarily because it expresses the will of the people or exercises
positive freedom. 37 The appeal of democracy is that it is not liable to the
abuses of monarchy: "For it is almost impossible that the majority of a large
assembly would agree on the same irrational decision. In addition, there is
its toundation and purpose which is precisely ... to avoid the follies of ap-
petite and as much as possible to bring men within the limits of reason."38
What does Spinoza mean that democracy avoids the follies of appetite and
brings men within the limits of reason? He answers this question in chapter
19, "'where it is shown that authority in sacred matters belongs wholly to the
sovereign powers and that the external cult of religion must be consistent
with the stability of the state."39 Spinoza does not vindicate pure democracy,
or majoritarianism. Spinoza defends liberal democracy, an ideal that com-
bines popular rule with the inviolable right to think and say what one wants. 40
The value of democracy is that it prevents a monarch, a priestcraft, or even
the majority from imposing a religion on everyone else. As James Madison
explains in the Federalist Papers: distributing power widely may serve the
cause of liberty.
A Thousand Plateaus does not expect everyone to embrace Deleuze's
ethical vision. One reason is fear: "We are always afraid of losing. Our
security, the great molar organization that sustains us, the arborescences
we cling to, the binary machines that give us a well-defined status, the res-
onances we enter into, the system of overcoding that dominates us-we
desire ail that" (ATP, 227). Deleuze does not condescend to others who
do not take him up on his invitation to chisel at the borders of their iden-
tity; in fact, he advises people to cling to their identities if they perceive
that they are on the road to suicide, injury, or death. Deleuze's model
of rhizomatic pluralism also presumably allows sorne existential faiths
(tlowers) to conserve old ways of thinking and acting. But Deleuze's
political theory is Iiberal insofar as it prizes the individual's right to chart
his or her own course: "Experimentation: not only radiophonic but also
biological and political, incurring censorship and repression. Corpus and
Socius, politics and experimentation. They will not let you experiment
72 Chapter Three

in peace" (ATP, 150). The goal of A Thousand Plateaus is to envision a

political order where individuals, and individuals assembled into groups,
have the right to experiment in peace, on the condition that they do not
harm others.
Is A Thousand Plateaus democratic?41 Unfortunately, Deleuze rarely
uses the concept of democracy, and when he does, he pays it the back-
handed compliment of a democratic state offering commendable, but ulti-
mately futile, resistance to the worldwide capitalist system: "In principle,
ail States are isomorphic, in other words, they are domains of realization
of capital as a function of a sole external market" (ATP, 464). But de-
mocracy is not reducible to the democratic state, and one does not need
to use the concept to have a democratic vision. A Spinozist praises liberal
democracy because it means "the malicious will not be able to poison
or mutilate life." A politics of mass ressentiment-whether religious or
atheistic, Western or non-Western; in any case, predicated on hatred for
others-violates the criteria of a successful democracy. But Deleuze's
concept of the rhizome presents a political order where multiple con-
stituencies enter the political arena to compete and cooperate together.
Take "Amsterdam, a city entirely without roots, a rhizome-city with its
stem-canals, where utility connects with the greatest folly in relation to
a commercial war machine" (ATP, 15). This passage parallels Spinoza's
description of Amsterdam in the Theological-Political Treatise as "a fine
example of a city which enjoys the fruits of liberty, with its great growth
being the admiration of ail nations. In this tlourishing republic, this su-
perb city, people of every sect and nation live together in the greatest
harmony."42 Amsterdam, for both Deleuze and Spinoza, illustrates the joy
of living in a liberal democratic polity that promotes commerce-finan-
cial, intellectual, sexual, and other kinds-and inhibits religious or secular
fundamentalism.
We will explore Deleuze's contribution to the liberal democratic tradi-
tion throughout the rest of the book.

NOTES

1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, eds. David Fate Norton and
Mary J. Norton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4.
 Deleuze 's Salt! Hypothesis 73

2. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xvi.
3. Ibid., 55.
4. Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Hu-
manities, 2011), 40.
5. Carsten Strathausen, "Epistemological Reflections on Minor Points in
Deleuze," Theory & Event 13, no. 4 (2010).
6. On how recent discoveries about nonhuman hominids-particularly Den-
isovans and Neanderthals-deflate the account of human singularity in regard to
culture, biology, language, or politics, see Kennan Ferguson, "What Was Politics
to the Denisovan'?" PoUtical Theory 42, no. 2 (2014): 167-87.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evi!, eds. Rolf-Peter Horstmann
and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 14.
8. In Bergsonism, Deleuze defines the human being as a creature capable of
understanding and exploring the cosmos in ways that other animaIs seemingly
cannot.

In man, and only in man, the actual becomes adequate to the virtual. It cou Id be said
that man is capable of rediscovering ail the levels, ail the degrees of expansion and
contraction that coexist in the virtual Whole. As if he were capable of ail the fren-
zies and brought about in himself successively everything that, elsewhere, can only
be embodied in different species .... Man therefore creates a differentiation that is
valid for the Whole, and he alone traces out an open direction that is able to express
a whole that is itself open. Whereas the other directions are closed and go round in
circles, whereas a distinct "plane" of nature corresponds to each one, man is capable
of scrambling the planes, of going beyond his own plane as his own condition, in
order finally to express naturing Nature. (Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habbe~jam [New York: Zone Books, 1988], 106-7)

Deleuze's thesis puts him in the Romantic tradition that views the human being
as the voice of nature. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze will rework this thesis in
his account of abstract machines that "stretch their pincers out in ail directions at
ail the other strata" (ATP, 63). The political question becomes how to empower
and protect human beings in their role as cosmic explorers.
9. Cited in 8rooke Holmes, "Deleuze, Lucretius, and the Simulacrum of
Naturalism," in Dynamic Reading: Studies in the Reception of Epicureanism,
eds. Brooke Holmes and W. H. Shearin (New York: Oxford University Press,
2012),322.
10. See Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science,
Reason and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
74 Chapter Three

11. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, eds. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott
and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 147.
12. Jacques Rancière places dissensus, the miraculous ability of humans to
repartit ion the sensible, at the core ofpolitics: "The essence ofpolitics is dissen-
sus. Dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the dem-
onstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself." Furthermore, Rancière
identifies Deleuze as an ally in extolling the artist as "one who finds himself or
herself exposed to the excess of the power of the pure sensible" (Jacques Ran-
cière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steve Corcoran [New
York: Continuum, 2010],38, 180). Although there are resonances between Ran-
cière's and Deleuze's views of aesthetics and politics, there are important differ-
ences. Rancière sharply distinguishes the police (the management of the normal
order of things) and the political (a break from this order). For Deleuze, on the
contrary, "molecular escapes and movements wou Id be nothing if they did not
retum to the molar organizations to reshuffle their segments" (ATP, 216-17). In a
word, Rancière has revolutionary and anarchistic tendencies, whereas Deleuze is
a meliorist and a social democrat. For a contrary reading of Rancière, see Samuel
A. Chambers, "Jacques Rancière and the Problem of Pure Politics," European
Journal of Political Theory 10, no. 3 (20 Il): 303-26.
13. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 27.
14. Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious (New York: Continuum,
2007), 1.
15. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1983), 50.
16. Ibid., 54.
17. Ibid.
18. On the politics of desire in Anti-Oedipus, see Philip Goodchild, Deleuze
and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage, 1996).
19. A Deleuzian cou Id be, in Michael Oakeshott's words, a trimmer, someone
who disposes his weight to keep a boat on an even keel. Deleuze wrote A Thou-
sand Plateaus, in part, to confront "a Hegelianism of the right that lives on in
official political philosophy and weds the destiny of thought to the State" (ATP,
556n42). But what happens ifphilosophy moves in an antistatist direction? Then,
a Deleuzian may need to provide a thoughtful defense of certain state institutions
and practices that "must be protected at any cost" (ATP, 162). On the character
of a trimmer, see Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon,
1975), 123.
 Deleuze 's Soul Hypothesis 75

20. William Behun, "The Body of Light and the Body without Organs," Sub-
stance: A Review of TheOly and Litermy Criticism 39, no. 1 (2010): 125.
21. For a similar attempt to achieve reflective equilibrium between post-
Darwinian evolutionary biology and phenomenological experiences of freedom,
see William E. Connolly, "Species Evolution and Cultural Freedom," Political
Research Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2014): 441-52.
22. See, for instance, Descartes' argument that the mind connects to the body
through the pineal gland in The Passions of the Soul.
23. Deleuze does not shy away from stating the Lamarckian conclusions of
his foray into genetics:

There is no genetics without "genetic drift." The modern theory of mutations has
cIearly demonstrated that a code, which necessarily relates to a population, has an
essential margin of decoding .... In addition, fragments of code may be transferred
from the cells of one species to those of another, man and Mouse, Monkey and Cat,
by viruses or through other procedures. This is not translation between codes (viruses
are not translators) but a singular phenomenon we cali surplus value of code, or side-
communication. (ATP, 53)

On Deleuze's neo-Darwinianism, see Keith Ansell-Pearson, Germinal Life: The

Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 1999).
24. On the bodylbrain/culture network, see William E. Connolly, Neuropoli-
tics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2002).
25. Ibid., 20.
26. See, for instance, Leslie Paul Thiele, The Heart of Judgment: Practical
Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2006).
27. On the distinction between major and minor literature, see Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986).
28. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 86-87.
29. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San
Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 3-4.
30. Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Jonathan 1. Israel
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1.
31. Ibid., 6.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 6-7.
34. Ibid., 201.
76 Chapter Tllree

35. Ibid., 200.

36. Ibid., 195.
37. For an alternate reading of Spinoza's political vision, see Antonio Negri,
The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
38. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 200-201.
39. Ibid., 238.
40. Steven B. Smith, "What Kind of Democrat Was Spinoza?" Political
Theory 33, no. 1 (2005): 6-27.
41. On how Deleuze's philosophy supplements rather than proposes an alter-
native to democracy, see Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Ph ilosophy, Coloni-
zation, Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 161-84.
42. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 257.
 Chapter Four

The Rhizomatic Contract

How is it possible to generate political principles for contemporary so-

cieties that are both profoundly diverse and interconnected on multiple
levels? Perhaps the most famous thought device to formulate princip les in
modern Western political philosophy is the social contract. The premise
of social contract theory is that disclosing the foundations of a political
order sheds light on the rules that ought to govern political bodies now.
Most social contract theorists assume that people think and feel the same
way about important issues: that is, that people consentire on the problems
with the state of nature and the need for a certain political arrangement.
As Jeremy Waldron explains, a central tenet of liberal political theory is
that "a social and political order is illegitimate unless it is rooted in the
consent of ail those who have to live under it."l Can liberal political phi-
losophers use the device of the social contract when people dissentire on
basic existential and political questions?2 That is, can the idea of the social
contract make the transfer from arboreal political philosophy-premised
on the notion that diverse citizens share the same creed or moeurs-to rhi-
zomatic political philosophy, where constituencies are flowers that inhabit
a garden without a center?
In this chapter, 1 reconstruct Deleuze's social contract teaching in A
Thousand Plateaus. 3 Initially, 1 draw upon John Rawls's Lectures on the
History of Political Philosophy to identify the main features of a social
contract teaching. Then, 1 show that Deleuze's account of states and
war machines in A Thousand Plateaus provides a social contract teach-
ing for polities that seek a joyful balance between order and chaos. To
explicate the novelty of Deleuze's social contract teaching, 1 show how
it contributes to contemporary debates about how the social contract
77
78 Chapter Four

tradition may better represent the interests of women, racial minorities,

nonhuman animaIs, and plants. In the conclusion, 1 argue that Deleuzian
social contract theory seeks to include as many perspectives as possible
in the dialogue about how to manage political affairs. One cost of this
approach, though, is that it abandons the traditional social contract aspi-
ration to identify a political code that transcends the rough-and-tumble
of everyday politics.

THE ELEMENTS OF A SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY

The idea of the social contract, according to Rawls, arose in order to chal-
lenge the notion that power emanates from on high. Originally, political
philosophers such as Locke and Kant used the idea to diminish royal
authority and empower the bourgeoisie; later on, social contract theorists
employed the idea to enfranchise the working class; and today, social
contract theorists are receptive to the possibility of expanding the relevant
socius. The central thesis of liberalism is that "a legitimate regime is such
that its political and social institutions are justifiable to ail citizens-to
each and every one-by addressing their reason, theoretical and practical.
... This requirement of a justification to each citizen's reason connects
with the tradition of the social contract and the idea that a legitimate po-
litical order rests on unanimous consent."4 Importantly, liberal political
theorists committed to the ideal of wide retlective equilibrium think that a
social contract theory is always a work in progress, subject to reconstruc-
tion as new evidence and ideas prompt reconsideration of old philosophi-
cal frameworks. 5
The first element of a social contract theory is an account of the initial
situation. Did the initial situation occur at a precise historical moment, as
Locke seemed to think in the Second Treatise on Government? Or is it
rather an idea of reason that anyone can think his or her way into, as Kant
argued in his essay "Theory and Practice"?
The second element is a description of the parties to the contract: "What
are their intellectual and moral powers? What are the parties' aims and
wants? What are their general beliefs, and how much do they know about
their particular circumstances? What alternatives do they face; or what are
the several contracts they may enter into?"6
 The Rhizomatie Contl'aet 79

The third element is a means to limit the knowledge of the parties in

the initial situation: "The explanation is that the kind of knowledge that
people often have may lead to endless wrangling and enable sorne to
drive hard bargains, setting the stage for the nastiest individuals getting
more than their share."7 Only by a device like Rawls's veil of ignorance
will social contract theorists be able to generate fair princip les rather than
those that unjustly reward a particular constituency.
Social contract theory, in sum, constructs the principles of a political
order by thinking through the choices made by parties in an initial situa-
tion behind a veil of ignorance. Rawls is clearly describing the method-
ology of A Theory of Justice, but he is also indicating ways that social
contract theorists may generate new political principles, by redescribing
(l) the location of the initial situation, (2) the parties to the original con-
tract, or (3) the cognitive elements that block simply legislating for one's
own constituency. With this in mind, let us reconstruct the social contract
teaching of A Thousand Plateaus.

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

TEACHING OF A TJIOUSAND PLATEAUS

Deleuze presents the elements of a social contract teaching in Plateaus 12,

"1227: Treatise on Nomadology-The War Machine," and 13, "7000 B.C.:
Apparatus of Capture." Here are the main features of his account of the
rise of the state and the political assignment today.
Early in human history, there were primitive societies: "Primitive, seg-
mentary societies have often been defined as societies without a State, in
other words, societies in which distinct organs of power do not appear"
(ATP, 357). Many social contract theorists look back at the state of nature
as astate ofwar (Hobbes), a state of insecurity (Locke), or an idyllic place
of natural simplicity (Rousseau). Deleuze rejects each of these options.
Primitive societies were not violent, simple, or pacifie: rather, they were
organized to prevent the rise of the state: "Warding off the formation of
aState apparatus, making such a formation impossible, would be the ob-
jective of a certain number of primitive social mechanisms, even if they
are not consciously understood as such" (ATP, 357). Deleuze calls politi-
cal bodies that ward off state formation-such as chiefs or gangs-war
80 Chapter Four

machines. War machines "animate a fundamental indiscipline of the war-

rior, a questioning of hierarchy, perpetuaI blackmail by abandonment or
betrayal, and a very volatile sense of honor, ail of which ... impedes the
formation of the State" (ATP, 358).
"The State seems to rise up in a single stroke" and "makes possible
the undertaking of large-scale projects, the constitution of surpluses, and
the organization of the corresponding public functions. The State is what
makes the distinction between governors and governed possible" (ATP,
359). Like Nietzsche, Deleuze thinks that the historical record shows that
"nature, in order to bring society about, uses pitiless inflexibility to forge
for herse If the cruel tool of the state-namely that conqueror with the
iron hand."8 Whereas war machines disperse power, the state accumulates
it: "The State-form, as a form of interiority, has a tendency to reproduce
itself, remaining identical to itself across its variations and easily recog-
nizable within the limits of its poles, always seeking public recognition"
(ATP, 360).
The question ofwhether war machines or the state cornes first, though,
misses how they coexist at ail times:

We are compelled to say that there has always been aState, quite perfect,
quite complete. The more discoveries archaeologists make, the more em-
pires they uncover. The hypothesis of the Urstaat seems to be verified:
"The State clearly dates back to the most remote ages of humanity." It is
hard to imagine primitive societies that would not have been in contact with
imperial States, at the periphery or in poorly controlled areas. But of greater
importance is the inverse hypothesis: that the State itself has always been
in a relation with an outside and is inconceivable independent of that rela-
tion. The law of the State is not the law of Ail or Nothing (State societies or
counter-State societies) but that of interior and exterior. (ATP, 360)

Is the Urstaat hypothesis actual or conjectural history? One commen-

tator chastises Deleuze for relying upon a "violently representational,
colonial ethnography" to draw unwarranted conclusions about "primitive
peoples."9 In Deleuze's defense, philosophers have a right to draw upon
whatever sources they want to support their theses. lO More importantly,
Deleuze's account of the origins of the state expresses ontological theses
that permeate A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze's political vision is as appar-
ent in his discussions of games, science, cloth, architecture, and countless
 The Rhizomatic Contract 81

other topics as it is in his account ofwar machines and states. In Deleuze's

ontology, the abstract machines of stratification and destratification al-
ways ply reality, and the political realm is no exception. Paul Patton is
right: "Nomads are not essential to [the] definition ofnomad war machine
type assemblages."ll Deleuze could have made the exact same political
theory argument using entirely different sources. 12
Rather than a just-so story about the past, Deleuze's social contract
is situated in present-day circumstances, where states and war machines
wage an interminable struggle: "It is in terms not of independence, but
of coexistence and competition in a perpetuaI field of interaction, that
we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machines of meta-
morphosis and State apparatuses of identity, bands and kingdoms, me-
gamachines and empires. The same field circumscribes its interiority in
States, but describes its exteriority in what escapes States or stands against
States" (ATP, 360-61). Deleuze does not posit a dualism between astate
of nature (war machines) and a social contract (state) whereby one leaves
one condition for the other. Rather, Deleuze's vision is Spinozist in that
each agent has a natural right to "persist in its own state so far as it can."13
Political actors face a recurrent choice whether to buttress the state or join
the war machines, to solidify the borders of a political body or to open
them up to externat elements. The social contract is renewed or violated
at every moment. We enter the initial situation not so much by eliminating
information from our minds as perceiving the abstract machines at work
in any political order. 14
Does Deleuze give us criteria by which to detennine whether to support
the state or the war machines? Yeso Political actors should do whatever
amplifies desire, conatus, or will to power, and avoid whatever reduces the
power of bodies: "Ifs a question of life and death, youth and old age, sad-
ness and joy" (ATP, 151). These criteria are admittedly fuzzy, but this is
because reality is fùzzy, confounding the application of a simple template:
"Politics is in no way an apodictic science. It proceeds by experimenta-
tion, groping in the dark, injection, withdrawal, advances, retreats" (ATP,
461). Deleuze does not determine once and for aIl the principles of a just
political order. Rather, he illuminates the "singular keys that open or close
... a territory" (ATP, 334). Deleuze's social contract teaching provides a
fresh perspective on how political arrangements can and should change to
amplify joy, an enhancement of our power of acting. 15 Rather than justify
82 Chapter Four

either a powerful sovereign (Hobbes) or the legitimacy of revoit (Locke),

Deleuze advocates becoming-revolutionary, a constant chiseling and ex-
perimentation with the borders that define a political identity.'6

THE RIIIZOMATIC CONTRACT

The concept of the social contract is pervasive in contemporary political

theory. One reason is that John Rawls employed this concept to power-
fuI effect in A Theory of Justice (1971). Another is that multiple theorists
after Rawls wish to refute, modify, or provide an alternative to his narra-
tive of rational agents, in the original position, behind a veil of ignorance,
choosing principles of justice for the basic structure of society. As a rule,
post-Rawlsians contend that we need to broaden the range of voices and
deepen the issues considered when constructing principles of justice. Let
us now consider how Deleuze's philosophy contributes to the discussion
about how to renew the social contract tradition to better address the inter-
ests of women, racial minorities, nonhuman animais, and plants.

Women and the Rhizomatic Contract

In The Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman argues that social contract theory
was created by and for men and thus cannot be salvaged by women. Yes,
the original social contract theorists did combat the notion of father-ruIe,
exemplified by Robert Filmer's text Patriarcha. However, the great con-
tract theorists replaced paternal power with fraternal patriarchy: "Modern
civil society is not structured by kinship and the power of fathers; in the
modern world, women are subordinated to men as men, or to men as a
fraternity."'7 The social contract theory holds that men consent with other
men to justify a political regime-but the often-silent premise is that
women will maintain the household that makes possible male political
participation. Modem patriarchal men-concerned about protecting "the
law of male-sex right"-multiply means to subject women and cali it
freedom: the sexual contract, the marriage contract, the prostitution con-
tract, the surrogate-mother contract, and so forth. What justification did
the social contract theorists give for this injustice?-"The elaboration that
they provide merely consists in references to the man' s greater strength
 The Rhizomatie Contmet 83

of body and mind."18 One could try to amend social contract theory to in-
clude women's perspectives, but sexist premises are woven into the body
of social contract theory. It is time, according to Pateman, to try different
approaches to generate feminist political theories.
Deleuzians could agree with many planks of Pateman's critique of
social contract theory. Social contract theory seems to be premised on
building a just society from the blocks of autonomous individuals: "To-
day ... many feminists appear to see only the advantages in the current
political c1imate in making feminist demands in contractual tenns, and to
be unaware that the 'individual' as owner is the fulcrum on which mod-
ern patriarchy turns."19 A consistent refrain in Deleuze's philosophical
corpus is an attack on the notion of an atomistic individual, c10sed off
from the rest of the world but with property rights over it. Deleuze does
not deny that subjectivity exists: he just thinks that subjects are porous to
their environment, and that individual well-being depends upon a flour-
ishing community. In this respect, both Pateman and Deleuze challenge
the contractarian--or, in the American case, libertarian-conception of
thick subjectivity. Furthermore, Deleuze shares Pateman's suspicion of
contract theories that proceed on a high level removed from the actual
human experience. 20 That is why Deleuze often advises us to start from
where we are and then con si der how to experiment with political possi-
bilities. 21 80th Pateman and Deleuze worry that contract theory may be a .
way for a ruling class-such as men or the bourgeoisie-to legitimate its
rule. Finally, Deleuze endorses feminist struggles for the right of women
to participate in politics, control their reproductive lives, and join the
workforce as equals (ATP, 471).
Yet some feminists argue that Pateman overlooks the positive feminist
potential in the social contract tradition. Elizabeth Anderson, for one,
argues, "Pateman ... mistakenly supposes that the only conception of
contract available to us is one which relies on a conception of agreement
as founded on self-interested bargaining for the exchange of exclusively
appropriated goodS."22 A Deleuzian cou Id support this effort to redeploy
the concept of the social contract by drawing upon Deleuze's metaethical
reflections in What Is Philosophy? On this account, philosophers gener-
ate concepts and principles by thinking through the actions of conceptual
personae on a mental plane of immanence. The concept of the social con-
tract simply requires philosophers to imagine what concepts and principles
84 Chapter Four

parties to a constitutional assembly would choose on the condition that

they are ignorant of their particular status in the society for which they leg-
islate. One ought to at least experiment with contract theories for feminist
ends before concluding that they are useless. 23
Deleuze would counsel social contract theorists against simply adding
women to the parties in the initial situation. One reason is that the concept
ofwomen, like the concept ofmen, oversimplifies sexuality.

For us ... there are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, as many
differences as elements contributing to a process of contagion. We know
that many beings pass between a man and a woman; they come from dif-
ferent worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they
cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms of becom ing.
(ATP, 242)

Male and female, for Deleuze, are abstract machines, incorporeal forces
that pilot the generation ofhuman sexuality. In the process of differentiat-
ing human beings, these abstract machines draw upon countless elements
in the world, including, before birth itself, DNA, RNA, water, blood,
food, and chemicals ingested by mothers and fathers. Sexuality "is badly
explained by the binary organization of the sexes .... Sexuality brings
into play too great a diversity of conjugated becomings; these are like
n sexes, an entire war machine through which love passes" (ATP, 278).
Two sexes may be a useful fiction, but one task of Deleuzian political
philosophy is to spur us to perce ive and appreciate nuances missed by
relying on binaries.
Here is one passage that we may use as a launching pad for a Deleuzian
social contract:

The field of immanence or plane of consistency must be constructed. This

can take place in very different social formations through very different
assemblages (perverse, artistic, scientific, mystical, political). . . . It is
constructed piece by piece, and the places, conditions, and techniques are
irreducible to one another. The question, rather, is whether the pie ces can
fit together and at what priee. (ATP, 157)

The political assignment is to construct a political regime. A regime (in

Greek, politeia) is "the order, the form, which gives society its charac-
 The Rhizomatic Contract 85

ter." The regime includes the basic political and economic institutions,
but it also covers "its style of life, its moral taste, form of society, form
of state, spirit of laws."24 The political regime is an island of stability-a
plane of consistency-in an entropic universe. A political regime is con-
structed piece by piece, largely independent of human reflection, but hu-
man beings can still intervene to shape the regime. "Although there is no
preformed logical order" to generating a social order, "there are criteria,
and the important thing is that they not be used after the fact, that they be
applied in the course of events, that they be sufficient to guide us through
the dangers" (ATP, 251). A Thousand Plateaus helps us think about how
to construct ajoyful order, one that has enough stability to make possible
enchanting Iines of flight for those who wish to take that risk.
What kind of rules would you want to apply to the garden if you did
not know where you were placed in it after you determined the rules? The
primary question of Deleuzian social contract theory does not take place
behind a thick veil of ignorance. The question presumes that the addressee
knows many facts about contemporary Iife and, weil, gardening. The
purpose of the question, rather, is to invite people to reflect upon the well-
being of existential fàiths and communities far removed from one's own. 25
Clearly, this question, like Rawls's in A Theory of Justice, would inspire
parties in the initial situation to prohibit oppression based on arbitrary
biological distinctions, such as sex. Deleuze's philosophy, though, would
also press parties to think about the problems raised by the existence of"n
sexes." Take, for example, the question ofmarriage. Whereas Rawls's so-
cial contract theory opens the door to the legal recognition of homosexual
marriage, Deleuze's would also press parties to consider and appreciate
queer sexual arrangements. 26 In this way, Deleuze's social contract theory
is the cutting-edge of liberalism.

Race and the Rhizomatic Contract

Can different races be incorporated into the social contract? In The Racial
Contract, Charles W. Mills extends Pateman's analysis to show that many
of the early modern social contract theorists were as racist as they were
sexist. Unlike Pateman, Mills retains hope that the concept of the social
contract can be recuperated: "The 'Racial Contract' is really in the spirit
of a racially informed ldeologiekritik and thus pro-Enlightenment."27 Let
86 Chapter Four

us consider a bit more ofMills's argument to see how Deleuze would sup-
port, qualiry, and incorporate it into the idea of the rhizomatic contract.
Mills proposes the Race Contract as the key ta understanding modern
life in Europe, North America, and, through their acts of imperialism,
the world. The Race Contract is a set of fonnal and informai agree-
ments whereby one subset of human beings-who designate themselves
white-exploit and subjugate another subset of human beings-who may
be designated black, yellow, brown, or red: "The general purpose of the
Contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group
with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies,
land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities
to them."28 The motivation for the Race Contract is primarily economic:
it enables one category of humans to take more than their fair share from
other sets of hmnans. 29 Sometimes, the Race Contract is enforced through
violence, as in the genocides perpetrated in the Americas, Australia, and
South Africa, the colonial expeditions in Africa and Asia, or the slave trade
from Atrica. Other times, including today, the Racial Contract proceeds by
interpellating whites as whites and other races as natural inferiors: "Race is
sociopolitical rather th an biological, but it is nonetheless real."30
According to Mills, the early modern social contract theorists either
propounded the Race Contract or were complicit with it. Ironically, Kant,
the founder of a moral philosophy based on an ostensibly race-neutral
category of personhood, laid the foundation for modern variants of racism
in his anthropological writings: "His 1775 essay 'The Different Races of
Mankind' (' Van den Verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen') is a classic
pro-hereditarian, antienvironmentalist statement of 'the immutability and
pennanence of race. "'31 Kant invented a distinction between persons and
subpersons-Herrenvalk and Untermenschen-that would later be taken
up by the Nazis. Contemporary Kantians may seek to minimize such pas-
sages, but that indicates their thoughtlessness about the legacy of Euro-
pean colonialism on modern philosophy: "One could say ... as a general
rule that white misunderstanding, misrepresentatian, evasian, and self-
deceptian an matters related ta race are among the most pervasive mental
phenomena of the past hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy
psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement."32
Twin tasks await progressive political thinkers aware of the racist
origins of classic social contract theory. Looking backwards, we should
 The Rhizomatic Contract 87

combat the "epistemology of ignorance" that overlooks the racist culture

that nurtured the early modern Enlightenment. American liberals, for in-
stance, need to acknowledge that European settlers killed, through mass
murder and disease, 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Ameri-
cas. Only through an honest assessment of the past may we consider the
debts we owe in the present. Looking forward, we need to rethink the
social contract to incorporate the insight that ail human beings, and not
just those of privileged races, have dignity. In this process, there may be
no alternative to the moral political vocabulary of the social contract tra-
dition: "When in a modern Western society people insist on their rights
and express their outrage at not being treated equally, it is to these classic
ideas that, whether they know it or not, they are appealing."33
In Plateau 7, "Year Zero: Faciality," Deleuze argues the White-Man
face is an abstract machine that slots people into boxes of privilege or
depravity:

Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to

the White-Man face, which endeavors to integrate nonconfonning traits into
increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at
given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing
them from the wall, which never abides alterity .... Racism never detects
the particIes of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who
resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow them-
selves to be identified at a given degree of divergence). Its cruelty is equaled
only by its incompetence and naïveté. (ATP, 178)

Going back at least to 1968's Difference and Repetition, Deleuze protests

ideologies such as racism that ignore or denigrate difference. The thought
experiment of the rhizomatic contract asks us to consider the possibility
that we may be racialminorities.
Still, Deleuze would resist identitarian logic at work in The Racial
Contract. Mills dedicates The Racial Contract to "the blacks, reds,
browns, and yellows who have resisted the Racial Contract and the white
renegades and race traitors who have refused it."34 Deleuze recognizes
that concepts are necessary even though they simplify reality. One role
of philosophy, however, is to rip apart commonsense assumptions, such
as that there are five or six races defined largely by skin color. A Deleuz-
ian may recognize the injustice of past behavior and institutions and see
88 Chapter FOllr

the legitimacy of addressing it. A Deleuzian would also recognize that in

present-day circumstances we might need to use race in matters such as
affirmative action. And yet a Deleuzian would strive to cultivate a politics
where groups do not injure others because of race or where groups nurture
wounds that h istorically define their identity .35 8arack Obama addresses
both sides of this racial politics in his 2008 speech, "A More Perfect
Union." According to Obama, blacks have a right to be angry about a lack
of economic opportunity that erodes black families and a lack of basic
services in urban neighborhoods that create a cycle of "violence, blight
and neglect." Working-class and middle-class whites, in tum, may be an-
gry about affirmative action policies that benefit wealthy minorities. The
dangerous spiral is when the two races coalesce into competing factions:
the Reagan coalition, on one side, and the African American community,
on the other. The challenge for a pluralistic left is to relax anger over
historic and present-day injustices enough to make possible coalitions for
common concerns. For blacks, this means "binding our particular griev-
ances-for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs-to the
larger aspirations of ail Americans-the white woman struggling to break
the glass ceiling, the white man who's been laid off: the immigrant trying
to feed his family."36 Garden politics th rives when constituencies relax
(often justified) anger over the past to focus on how to ensure the health
and diversity of the garden for the foreseeable future.

Nonhuman Animais and the Rhizomatic Contract

Is it possible to include nonhuman animais in a social contract? In Fron-
tiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality and Species Membership, Martha
Nussbaum argues that there is "no good reason why existing mechanisms
of basic justice, entitlement, and law cannot be extended across the spe-
cies barrier. "37 The challenge that Nussbaum identifies is that nonhuman
animais cannot, properly speaking, be parties to legislative conventions:
"Law and political princip les are made by human beings."38 After go-
ing through Nussbaum's quasi-contract theory, we may consider how
Deleuze's concept of becoming-animal complements and complicates
Nussbaum 's account.
Nussbaum presents her argument as combining elements ofRawls's so-
cial contract theory and what she calls the "capabilities approach." Nuss-
 The Rhizomatic Contract 89

baum' s theory shares nearly the same starting points and ends of Rawls' s
theory of justice. Both begin with the ethical ideas of mutual respect,
reciprocity, and fairness, and both end with principles that demand justice
for the least advantaged. And yet Nussbaum holds that the premises of
traditional social contract theory are tlawed "because oftheir commitment
to rationality as the ground of dignity and because of their conception
of political princip les as deriving from a contract among rough equals,
they deny that we have obligations of justice to nonhuman animals."39
The theoretical problem with traditional social contract theories is that
they conflate two questions: "'By whom are society's basic principles
designed?' and 'For whom are society's basic principles designed?'''40
The practical problem with traditional social contract theories is that they
deny that obligations of justice ho Id in cases of asymmetrical power and
capacity. Rawls, for one, maintains that we should show kindness to non-
human animais, but we do not owe them anything. Nussbaum's ambition
is to show that this way of thinking f'ails to honor the legitimate rights
possessed by nonhuman animais.
In Frontiers of Justice, Nussbaum explores how social contract theory
may be reconfigured to better recognize animal rights: "In a very basic
way, the whole idea of a contract involving both humans and nonhuman
animaIs is fantastic, suggesting no c1ear scenario that would assist our
thinking."41 And yet we might be able to imagine that the parties to the
social contract are trustees for nonhuman animaIs, articulating their con-
cerns in a language unavailable to them. Nussbaum frames her thought
experiment as follows:

The purpose of social cooperation ... ought to be to live decently together

in a world in which many species try to flourish. (Cooperation itself will
now assume multiple and complex forms.) The general aim of the capa-
bilities approach in charting political principles to shape the human-animal
relationship, ifwe follow the intuitive ideas of the theory, would be that no
sentient animal should be cut offfrom the chance for a flourishing life, a life
with the type of dignity relevant to that species, and that ail sentient animaIs
should enjoy certain positive opportunities to flourish. 42

The vexed question becomes, though, how are trustees to determine what
qualifies as a flourishing life for nonhuman animaIs? Certain treatments
of animaIs seem unnecessarily cruel, but there are many borderline cases
90 Chapter Four

regarding, for instance, circuses, zoos, and medical experiments. More

than most philosophers, Nussbaum acknowledges that imagination is at
least as important as reason or understanding in thinking ourse Ives into
the situation of animals. 43
Nussbaum balances two sets of consideration wh en speaking of obliga-
tions to nonhuman animais. She extends the left's concern with equality
to nonhuman animais, fellow beings capable of thinking, loving, com-
municating, and performing acts of kindness and cruelty: "We humans
share a world and its scarce resources with other intelligent creatures. We
have much in common with these creatures, although we also differ in
many ways. These commonalities sometimes inspire sympathy and moral
concern."44 The Stoic/Judeo-Christian tradition holds that human beings
are uniquely worthy of dignity, whereas the Epicurean tradition believes
that corporeal souls of both humans and nonhuman animais disintegrate
upon death. 45 Nussbaum evinces more sympathy for the Epicurean side of
this debate. She also seems committed to maintaining an ontological dis-
tinction and ranking between humans and other animais. No matter how
capacious one' s imagination, a human being is always an outsider to the
lives of other animais: "AlI literary depictions of the lives of animais are
made by humans, and it is likely that aIl our empathic imagining of the
experiences of animais is shaped by our human sense of life."46
Like Nussbaum, Deleuze renovates the Epicurean tradition to better ac-
count for the interests of animais. Take, for instance, Deleuze's thesis that
"the plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine
... its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals, each of which
groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or
less interconnected relations" (ATP, 254). Everything in nature resides on
the sa me plane; therefore, humans have no right to treat animais as their
ontological inferiors.
Deleuze's concept of "becoming-animal," however, challenges anthro-
pocentric premises that remain in Nussbaum's philosophy. The concept
of becoming-animal signais the porous border between humans and other
animais: "We believe in the existence of very special becomings-animal
traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no
less than the hum an" (ATP, 237). Becoming-animal describes something
that happens to every human being regardless of his or her intentions: an
exchange of particles with the environment. The ethical task, for Deleuze,
 The Rhizomalic Conlracl 91

is how to navigate this exchange in joyful (power-enhancing) rather th an

sad (power-diminishing) ways: "Do not imitate a dog, but make your or-
ganism enter into composition with something else in such a way that the
particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a
function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity,
into which they enter" (ATP, 274). The ethical injunction is not for a hu-
man to pretend to be a dog, but rather to enter a zone of indistinction with
animais, incorporating their percepts and affects, so that we see and feel
more of the universe: "The politics ofbecoming-animal remains, of course,
extremely ambiguous" (ATP, 247). Becoming-animal can be a dangerous
venture, for others and ourse Ives, ifwe enter a becoming-animal with, say,
an attack dog. But given that becoming-animal is something we do every
moment we breathe, eat, sleep, communicate, and so forth, we ought to
dedicate more care and thought to determine how to do it weil.
A rhizomatic social contract could incorporate Nussbaum's idea of
"intelligent, species-sensitive paternalism."47 Deleuze, we saw in the pre-
vious chapter, thinks that human beings differ from other animais because
of our thumbs, supple larynxes, alloplastic capacities, Oedipal structures,
subjectivities, and (apparently) unique relationship to the cosmos. Yet
Deleuze does challenge strong anthropocentrisms that make humans the
monarchs of beings who may use and waste natural resources as they
please. In the thou~ht experiment of the rhizomatic social contract, we
will think our way into the concerns and feelings of other animais. We
will Iikely generate the principle that no constituency may wantonly
destroy the garden by, say, deep-sea oil drilling, which virtually always
leads, sooner or later, to polluting the oceans and killing sea Iife. Equality
is too strong a demand: Deleuzians are not necessarily vegans and would
not want to legislate veganism for a polity. But Deleuzians would want to
minimize animal suffering.

Plants and MineraIs and the Rhizomatic Contract

The social contract tradition, we have seen, recurrently expands the range
of constituencies deliberating about the principles of a just society. Does
it make any sense to take into account the interests of nonanimal beings
su ch as plants and minerais? Bruno Latour, a pioneer in the field of politi-
cal ecology, acknowledges that the history of Western political philosophy
92 Chapter Four

focuses almost exclusively on the concerns of human beings. And yet

"new words are needed to convene a new assembly," one that Iistens to the
voices of nonhuman actors that already shape our world profoundly.48 Let
us consider Latour's cali for a "Parliament of Things" and its affinities to
the project of A Thousand Plateaus.
In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour seeks to unveil the modem
Constitution that effectively prohibits nonhuman things from getting a
say in political governance. Latour begins his narrative with an account of
the seventeenth-century debate between the political philosopher Thomas
Hobbes and the natural philosopher Robert Boyle. Hobbes argues that
calculating human beings entrust the sovereign, the Leviathan, to ensure a
safe escape from the state of nature. Boyle argues that scientists patiently
represent the facts of nature made manifest, for instance, by the air pump.
Hobbes and Boyle differ in methodology: Hobbes proceeds by math-
ematical demonstration that brokers no reasonable objection, Boyle by as-
sembling trustworthy witnesses who document facts. Hobbes den ounces
the Royal Society for granting legitimacy to immaterial spirits, such as
the vacuum, that may foment civil strife. Despite this dispute, Boyle and
Hobbes collaborate to separate the spheres of politics and science:

They are like a pair of Founding Fathers, acting in concert to promote one
and the same innovation in political theory: the representation of nonhu-
mans belongs to science, but science is not allowed to appeal to politics;
the representation of citizens belongs to politics, but politics is not allowed
to have any relation to the nonhumans produced and mobilized by science
and technology.49

The modem Constitution digs a trench between the work of politicians

and scientists.
A problem with the modern Constitution is that it denies what it pro-
motes. Officially, the modern Constitution separates the spheres ofhuman
subjects (politics) and material objects (science). In reality, the modem
Constitution accelerates boundary crossing between the human and the
nonhuman. Latour points to modem phenomena such as "frozen embryos,
expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn,
data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales outfitted with radar sounding
systems, gene synthesizers, audience analyzers."5o In the premodem era,
human beings often established rituals that prevented unruly mixtures
 The Rhizomatic Contract 93

between humans and gods, animaIs, foods, and so forth; in modernity,

human beings relentlessly perforate the boundaries between themselves
and the natural world while still insisting that politics concerns human
beings pure and simple.
Latour aims to develop a nonmodern metaphysics and politics to ad-
dress the situation at hand. A non modern metaphysics elides the simplifi-
cations of the subject--object dichotomy. Nature and society, for instance,
are not ontologically distinct entities, but rather "tectonic plates" of a
deeper flow of the matter-movement. 51 Latour wants a philosophic vo-
cabulary that enables us "to take into account, at the same time and in the
same breath, the nature ofthings, technologies, sciences, fictional beings,
religions large and small, politics, jurisdictions, economies and uncon-
sciousnesses."52 What gives this project urgency? In a move familiar from
the preceding sections, Latour argues that democratic commitments re-
quire the social contract to incorporate the perspectives of groups hereto-
fore unfairly excluded. Just as the eighteenth century empowered citizens
and the nineteenth century enfranchised the working class, "we shaH have
to transform ourse Ives just as thoroughly in order to make room, today,
for the nonhumans created by science and technology."53
In PoUties of Nature: Bringing the Sciences into Democracy, Latour
acknowledges the challenge of listening to voices of beings that do not
speak in a language that human beings can (easily) understand. Still, La-
tour invents two concepts-actant and spokesperson-that can advance
this project. Latour acknowledges that human beings are ''justly proud" of
their ability to speak and perform politics. 54 And yet human beings often
submit to environmental pressures, and nonhuman objects often resist the
endeavors of human beings. That is to say, there is a spectrum between
necessity and freedom that connects human beings, plants, and mineraIs.
Latour proposes the term actant for any being-human or nonhuman-
that can impede or redirect the actions of other beings. Rather than view
the world as composed of agentic subjects and docile objects, Latour
proposes that we imagine a world constituted of beings with greater and
lesser degrees of agentic capacity. The concept of actant thus deflates
human arrogance or, stated more positively, encourages human beings
to appreciate what they have in common with other beings: "Whereas
the subject-object opposition had the goal of prohibiting any exchange
of properties, the human-nonhuman pairing makes such an exchange
94 Chapter Four

not only desirable but necessary."55 One goal of Latour's actor-network-

theory is precisely to expand the category of the social to include any
association between heterogeneous elements. 56
By itself, the category of actant does not solve the problem of how de-
mocracy-traditionally conceptualized as a political regime in which the
people govern-may incorporate the perspectives of plants and mineraIs.
l'hus Latour invents the concept of spokesperson to designate "the whole
gamut of intermediaries between someone who speaks and someone else
who speaks in that person's place."57 Scientists should not pretend that
facts can speak for themselves, nor should politicians focus only on hu-
man actors and ignore the myriad nonhuman forces that impact the com-
mon world. The role of spokespersons is to bridge the divide between
politics and the natural sciences, to serve as speech prostheses for beings
that are otherwise silent in deliberative assemblies. The idea, to be clear,
is not to represent human interests when thinking about nonhumans;
rather, the idea is to amplity the "participation of new entities in collec-
tive life."58 A constitutional debate about the natural environment, for in-
stance, will pull together representatives of the ozone hole, the Monsanto
chemical industry, workers in that industry, the voters of New Hampshire,
the meteorology of the polar regions, and so forth. 59 The idea of the Par-
liament of Things bridges the gap between an anthropocentric discourse
and a world in which plants and mineraIs both affect and are affected by
humans. Latour envisions a social contract theory that encompasses many
actants, including "microbes, scallops, rocks, and ships."60
Deleuze would appreciate Latour's efforts to puncture strong claims
made on behalf ofhuman singularity. In the previous section, we consid-
ered how Deleuze's concept ofbecoming-animal invites us to experiment
with incorporating and emitting animal particles in our individual and
collective lives. In A Thousand Plateaus, however, becoming-animal is
only one among many kinds of becoming: "A kind of order or apparent
progression can be established for the segments of becoming in which
we find ourselves; becoming-woman, becoming-child; becoming-animal,
-vegetable, or -mineraI; becomings-molecular of ail kinds, becomings-
particles. Fibers lead us from one to the other, transform one into the other
as they pass through doors and across thresholds" (ATP, 272). Human
beings are not purely human; rather, we are also profoundly connected to
other humans, nonhuman animaIs, plants, rocks, and imperceptible forces
 The Rhizamatie Cantme! 95

in the cosmos. To formulate a social contract for this ontological vision

now requires us to care for virtually every entity in the garden, now under-
stood less as a metaphor for political life than as an actual assemblage of
organic and inorganic materials. 61 Deleuze contributes to Latour's project
by providing a rich philosophic vocabulary to describe the interconnect-
edness ofthings. 62

MESSY POLITICS

How does Deleuze contribute to the social contract tradition? Let us begin
by noting how he differs from the early modern social contract theorists
who aspired to provide a new foundation for naturallaw. Unlike the theo-
cratic visions of, say, Augustine and Aquinas, social contract philosophers
contend that human beings generate the basic rules of society when they
decide why they should leave the state of nature. Take, for instance, John
Locke's account in the Second Treatise:

If man in the state of nature be so free ... if he be absolute lord of his own
person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to nobody, why
will he part with his freedom, why will he give up this empire, and subject
himselfto the dominion and control of any other power? To which it is ob-
vious to answer, that though in the state of nature he hath such a right, yet
the enjoyment of it is very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the invasion
of others .... This makes him willing to quit a condition, which, however
free, is full of fear and continuai dangers: and it is not without reason that
he seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others ... for the mutuaI
preservation oftheir lives, liberties, and estates. 63

The state of nature, for Locke, is messy, particularly because it lacks "an
established, settled, known law, received and allowed by common consent
to be the standard of right and wrong, and the common measure to decide
ail controversies between them."64 The appeal of classical social contract
theory is that it promises to detennine, once and for ail, the principles that
govern civilized social life.
Deleuze's social contract teaching does not make any such promise.
On the contrary. Gardens are messy. There is no way to remove dirt
from politics, where dirt could mean fights between constituencies over
96 Chapter Four

resources, natural disasters, traumatic or joyous political events, new cul-

tural understandings, a change in birthrates, and so forth. One cannot step
in the same garden twice. At every moment, forces are coalescing and
colliding, rewriting the social contract. What Deleuze's philosophy does
is help us perceive a wider spectrum of elements in the garden and take
responsibility for their care. A Thousand Plateaus poses rather than solves
many great political questions. When should we side with the forces of
chaos (war machines) and when should we buttress the forces of order
(the state)? How do we negotiate the politics of difference when the in-
terests of different groups (e.g., women, racial minorities, nonhuman ani-
maIs, and plants) diverge? How do we minimize the injustice that arises
in political life when there is not room for every admirable way of life in
the garden? For Deleuze, leaving these questions open does not signal an
abdication to relativism; rather, it displays a willingness to recognize the
complexity of politics and the responsibility of political actors to cuItivate
a healthy, diverse garden.

NOTES

1. Jeremy Waldron, "Theoretical Foundations of LiberaIism," Philosophical

Quarterly 37, no. 147 (1987): 140.
2. For a critique of the "liberal fiction of the contract" from the perspective of
a radical democrat, see Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics,
ed. and trans. Steve Core oran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 34.
3. In 1960, Deleuze gave a course on Rousseau at the Sorbonne and wrote in
his lecture notes: "Determination of a political act which establishes the objec-
tive unity of the individual and the moral species: the Social Contract." On how
Deleuze weaves the idea of the social contract into his books from the 1960s,
see Joe Hughes, Philosophy after Deleuze (New York: Bloomsbury Academie,
2012),115-19.
4. John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel
Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), l3.
5. On the difference between wide and narrow reflective equilibrium, see John
Rawls, "The Independence of Moral Theory," in Col!ected Papers, ed. Samuel
Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999),289.
6. Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, 19.
7. Ibid., 17.
 The Rhizomatie Contl-ael 97

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-

Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 168.
9. Christopher L. Miller, "The Postidentitarian Predicament in the Footnotes
of A Thousand Plateaus: Nomadology, Anthropology, and Authority," Diacritics
23, no. 3 (1993): 13.
10. Paul Ernest Joset's research on hommes-léopardes, for instance, may still
provide material for political philosophers even if Joset was a colonial administrator.
Il. Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, PoUties
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 36-37.
12. Consider, for instance, Deleuze's remark about science that could apply
equally weil to politics: "What we have ... are two formally different compo-
nents of science, and, ontologically, a single field of interaction in which royal
science continually appropriates the contents of vague or nom ad science while
nomad science continually cuts the contents of royal science loose. At the limit,
ail that counts is the constantly shifting borderline" (ATP, 367).
13. Spinoza, Theologieal-Politieal Treatise, trans. Jonathan I. Israel (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 195-96.
14. For Deleuze, as for Nietzsche, "the more effects we are able to put into
words about a thing, the more eyes, various eyes we are able to use for the same
thing, the more complete will be our 'concept' of the thing, our 'objectivity'"
(Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, 87).
15. "When we encounter a body that agrees with our nature, one whose
relation compounds with ours, we may say that its power is added to ours; the
passions that affect us are those of joy, and our power of acting is increased or
enhanced" (Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Praetieal Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley
[San Francisco: City Lights, 1988], 27-28).
16. On this point, Deleuze sides with American authors rather than French
militants: "The French are too human, too historical, too concerned with the
future and the pasto ... They do not know how to become, they think in terms of
historical past and future. Even with the revolution, they think about a 'future of
the revolution' rather than a revolutionary-becoming .... They are too fond of
roots, trees, the survey, the points of arborescence" (Gilles Deleuze and Claire
Parnet, Dialogues /1 [New York: Columbia University Press, 2007], 37).
17. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contraet (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1988), 3.
18. Ibid., 94.
19. Ibid., 14.
20. See, for instance, the critique of the idea of the social contract in Gilles
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjeetivity: An Essay on Hume 's Theory of Human
98 Chapter Four

Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press,

1991), 45-46.
2l. See the passage beginning "We are in a social formation ... " in ATP, 16l.
22. Elizabeth S. Anderson, "Women and Contracts: No New Deal," Michigan
Law Review 88, no. 6 (1989): 1808.
23. Susan Moller Okin, "Feminism, the Individual, and Contract Theory,"
Ethics 100, no. 3 (1990): 658-69.
24. Leo Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays, ed. Hi-
lail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 32.
25. See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, L'Abécédaire De Gilles Deleuze,
(Éditions Montparnasse: Arte Video, 1997), http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/
CStivale/D-G/ABCs.html, G (Gauche).
26. Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, eds., Deleuze and Queer Theory (Ed-
inburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
27. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (lthaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1997), 129.
28. Ibid., Il.
29. Ibid., 32-33.
30. Ibid., 126.
31. Ibid., 70.
32. Ibid., 19.
33. Ibid., 16.
34. Ibid., vi.
35. See Wendy Brown, States of lnjury: Power and Freedom in Late Moder-
nity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
36. Barack Obama, "A More Perfect Union," Vital Speeches of the Day 74,
no. 5 (2008): 196, 197.
37. Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species
Membership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 326.
38. Ibid., 349.
39. Ibid., 327.
40. Ibid., 16.
4l. Ibid., 333.
42. Ibid., 351.
43. Ibid., 355.
44. Ibid., 325-26.
45. Ibid., 328.
46. Ibid., 353.
47. Ibid., 377.
 The Rhizomatic Contract 99

48. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993), 145.
49. Ibid., 28.
50. Ibid., 49-50.
51. Ibid., 87.
52. Ibid., 129.
53. Ibid., 136.
54. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democ-
racy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) 68.
55. Ibid., 161.
56. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Net-
work-Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
57. Latour, Politics of Nature, 64.
58. Ibid., 67.
59. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 144.
60. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 10.
61. On the political implications of the discussion of metallurgy in A Thou-
sand Plateaus, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), chap. 4.
62. Consider, for instance, Deleuze's conception of nature as "a pure plane
of immanence, univocality, composition, upon which everything is given, upon
which unformed elements and materials dance that are distinguished from one an-
other only by their speed and that enter into this or that individuated assemblage
depending on their connections, their relations of movement. A fixed plane of life
upon which everything stirs, slows down or accelerates" (ATP, 255).
63. John Locke, Two Treatises ofGovernment and A Letter Concerning Tol-
eration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 154-55.
64. Ibid., 155.
 Chapter Five

Toward a Deleuzian Liberalism

ln Toward a Liberalism, Richard E. Flathman identifies the paradox at the

heart of liberalism. On the one hand, Iiberalism is a doctrine with a his-
tory. The Liberal Principle states: "it is a prima facie good for persons to
form, to act on, and to satisfY and achieve desires and interests, objectives
and purposes."l Drawing upon a wide range of authors, including Mon-
taigne, Thomas Hobbes, and Michael Oakeshott, Flathman's conception
of Iiberalism is individualistic, pluralistic, and voluntaristic. That is to
say, Flathman prioritizes the freedom of the individual over the demands
of tradition, recognizes that individual well-being often depends upon the
f10urishing of multiple communities, and posits the inscrutability, rather
than the reasonableness, of the will. Furthermore, Flathman, while sympa-
thizing with anarchist ideals, thinks that liberalism as a coherent political
theory requires mechanisms of "acculturation, socialization, and educa-
tion."2 Even if the liberal temperament is cautious, skeptical, and antisys-
tematic, liberalism is still an ideology that imposes sorne conceptual and
political order upon the world. On the other hand, the "restless center" of
Iiberalism is "skepticism about and determined suspicion of paternalism,
authority, and power."3 Liberalism imposes limits on certain thoughts and
behaviors, but its vital spirit strives to extend and perforate those limits.
Liberalism requires internai critics to remain a vibrant philosophy.
ln this chapter, 1 consider how Deleuze contributes to the liberal tradi-
tion. Deleuze would not have had much sympathy for Kantian variants of
liberalism that emphasize rational self-Iegislation. A Thousand Plateaus
criticizes su ch views for saying, in effect, "Always obey. The more you
obey, the more you will be master, for you will only be obeying pure
reason, in other words yourself' (ATP, 376). And yet Deleuze's politics
100
 Toward a Deleuzian Liberalism 101

of desire-{;ommitted, as it is, to fostering the conditions under which

individuals may best chisel at their identities in the cause of amplify-
ing joy4-participates in a liberal tradition, namely, the one associated
with the name of John Stuart Mill. In this chapter, 1 stage a conversation
between Mill and Deleuze about ethics, liberty, democracy, feminism,
and socialism. In each section, 1 explicate the main line of Mill's argu-
ment in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Considerations on Representative
Government, The Subjection of Women, and Chapters on Socialism and
then show how Deleuze amplifies the liberal imaginary.5 ln opposition to
the literature claiming Deleuze for the communist or anarchist camps,6 1
contend that he is an immanent critic of liberalism, appreciative of its twin
impulses to celebrate the flowering of desire and create the political con-
ditions to sustain it. 7 The goals ofthis chapter are to persuade (1) Deleuz-
ians to see the philosophical and political advantages of connecting wÎth
the liberal tradition and (2) liberals to appreciate Deleuze's revitalization
of the liberal intuition that each individual has the right to chart his or her
own life course.

MODERN EPICUREAN ETHICS

Mill took a gamble in Utilitarianism, his great work of ethics, that his
conception of the term would prevail over the one proffered by his fàtl1er,
James Mill, and by Jeremy Bentham. Unfortunately, the instrumental-
ist version encapsulated in the slogan "the greatest good for the greatest
number" prevailed, and many commentators equate utilitarianism with the
technological Enlightenment project. 8 Thus, in Nietzsche and Philosophy,
Deleuze explains that the philosopher is neither a "Kantian tribunal judge"
nor "a utilitarian mechanic."9 And yet Mill's ethical philosophy might
be better understood as a modern Epicureanism, which would then bring
Mill into a natural conversation with Deleuze, who maintained a lifelong
interest in Epicurus and Lucretius. 'o
ln Utilitarianism, Mill traces his ethical creed back to Epicurus. Epicu-
rus offered a theory of 1ife that "pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the
only things desirable as ends" and the foundation for the Greatest Hap-
piness Principle, which "holds that actions are right in proportion as they
tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of
102 Chapter Five

happiness."11 Epicurus also distinguished lower from higher pleasures,

thereby refuting in advance his many critics who held that he equated
humans with swine. In a diary entry from 1854, Mill explains his relation-
ship to the Epicurean tradition:

Moral regenerators in this age mostly aim at setting up a new form either
of Stoicism or Puritanism ... [this] must be a failure now when an earthly
life both pleasant and innocent can be had by many and might be had by
aIl. What is now wanted is the creed of Epicurus warmed by the addition al
element of an enthusiastic love of the general goOd. 12

Epicureanism holds that human beings may enjoy life on earth and not fear
an omnipotent God or etemal damnation in the afterlife. Mill responds to
the charge that utilitarianism is a godless doctrine by protesting, "If it be
a true belief that God desires, above aIl things, the happiness of his cre-
ators, and that this was his purpose in their creation, utility is not only not
a godless doctrine, but more profoundly religious than any other."13 It is
hard to tell what theological doctrine Mill ho Ids in this passage, but Mill
clearly does not ground utilitarianism on revealed biblical truth nor does
the mere mention of God signal that Mill is a Christian. Consider the work
done by Spinoza's concept of "God or Nature" (Deus sive Natura). Mill
modemizes Epicureanism by taking an interest in politics and wanting to
provide everyone with the opportunity to live a pleasurable life.
Deleuze's debt to Epicurus is most apparent in The Logic of Sense,
where he states the Epicurean creed thusly:

The goal or object of practice is pleasure. Hence practice, in this sense, only
recommends to us the means of suppressing and avoiding pain. But our
pleasures have much more formidable obstacles than our pains: phantoms,
superstitions, terrors, the fear of death-everything that tends to disturb the
soul. ... The spirit's disquietude is therefore brought about by the fear of
dying when we are not yet dead, and also by the fear of not yet being dead
once we already are. 14

Deleuze and Mill agree that philosophy should demystify supernatural ac-
counts of morality that infuse human life with fear; that modem Epicureans
should be more political than ancient ones, perhaps content to host garden
 Toward a De/euzian Libera/ism 103

parties with friends; and that modern Epicureans should publicize the no-
tion that everyone can live a pleasurable life without a revealed religion.
In Utilitarianism, Mill provides a criterion to rank pleasures: "Of two
pleasures, if there be one to which ail or almost ail who have experience
of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling or moral
obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure."15 Mill asserts
that those who have experienced the pleasures of the higher faculties, as-
sociated with the intellect, will, as a rule, prefer their exercise than those
of the lower faculties, associated with the body. This is the basis for Mill's
exhortation to the philosophic life: "It is better to be a human being dis-
satisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool
satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because
they only know their own side of the question."16 A Deleuzian could raise
a series of questions and objections to these claims. Who says that plea-
sures or activities must be ranked on a scale of higher and lower? What
happens if a fool has intuitions unavailable to a trained philosopher? The
claim that "some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable
than others"17 can generate acts of cruelty, or at least stinginess, towards
other, unfamiliar ways of life. Deleuze protests the teleologies at work in
the philosophies of Aristotle and Kant. 18
Mill's teleology, however, differs in key respects from Aristotle's and
Kant's. Mill agrees with Aristotle that human beings possess mental,
moral, and muscular powers, or faculties, and experience happiness in
their exercise. Mill diverges from Aristotle in his insistence that human
beings contain a wide array offaculties and that their exercise may achieve
multiple kinds of excellence. According to Mill, human beings ought to
be given maximum latitude, within similar rights for others, to express
and develop their own talents. Mill states, for instance, that "such are the
differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their suscep-
tibilities ofpain, and the operation on them of diffèrent physical and moral
agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of
life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the
mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable."19
Mill disputes the Aristotelian thesis that human beings have a te/os in
politics or philosophy and the Kantian one that there is a pure faculty of
practical reason that legislates for ail imperfectly rational beings, such as
104 Chapter Five

humans. Mill is, in part, a Romantic, someone committed to the flourishing

of imaginative and cultural diversity.20
Deleuze's ethical vision is marked by a similar desire to celebrate
a plurality of excellences. 21 In Difference and Repetition, for instance,
Deleuze considers how a renovated doctrine of the faculties can help
make this possible. Yes, we have faculties mapped by Aristotle and Kant:
reason, understanding, imagination, and so forth. And yet those fàculties
may be forced-through confronting the sublime, for instance-to reach
heights and depths hitherto unknown: "Each fàculty must be borne to
the extreme point of its dissolution, at which it falls prey to triple vio-
lence: the violence of that which forces it be exercised, of that which it
is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the
ungraspable."22 Furthermore, philosophers may discIose new faculties that
confound common sense: Deleuze thus caBs for philosophy to envision
itself as a transcendental empiricism that explores the obscure layers of
the natural world. The ethical vision of A Thousand Plateaus challenges
Aristotelian and Kantian teleologies that demand that one organ, such as
reason, dictate how we should live our lives. Deleuze excoriates the theo-
logical premises and practical consequences of such teleological visions:
"The judgment of God, the system of the judgment of God, the theologi-
cal system, is precisely the operation of He who makes an organism, an
organization of organs called the organism, because He cannot bear the
BwO [Bodies without Organs], because He pursues it and rips it apart
so He can be first" (ATP, 158-59). At the same time, Deleuze counsels
strength to become a joyful ethical subject. In our individual and social
experiments, "we can never be sure we will be strong enough, for we have
no system, only lines and movements" (ATP, 350). Deleuze offers ex-
amples of people who have lacked the strength to become a joyful BwO:
hypochondriacs, paranoids, schizophrenics, drug addicts, and masochists
(ATP, 150). It is not purely their fault: sometimes the very means of ex-
perimentation themselves are too dangerous: "One do es not conform to a
model, one straddles the right horse. Drug users have not chosen the right
molecule or the right horse. Drugs are too unwieldy to grasp the imper-
ceptible" (ATP, 286). Like Nietzsche, Deleuze counsels against laissez
aller, letting go, in favor ofhard, careful work on the selfto achieve one's
own singular excellence.
 Toward a Deleuzian Liberalism 105

Mill and Deleuze situate themselves in the Epicurean tradition, chal-

lenge the claims of biblical morality, contest Aristotelian and Kantian
teleologies, promote ethical diversity, and encourage the strenuous ex-
ercise of one's own faculties. Deleuzians could place Mill in the canon
of minor philosophy, and Millians could consider Deleuzians a political,
experimental utilitarian.

INDIVIDUALITY

Mill's On Liberty is a polemic for individuality, the notion that each

person has the right to cultivate her own talents and ch art the course of
her own life, on the condition that she not infringe on the Iike right of
others. The enemy of individuality is social conformity, a power that
has increased in modernity with the rise of democratic elections, market
economies, mass media, national and international communication and
transportation systems, and so forth. Ancient tyranny may have exercised
sporadic violence against recalcitrant individuals, but at least there was a
chance that one could hide from the king. The tyranny of prevailing opin-
ion and feeling "Ieaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more
deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself."23
The challenge is to persuade the audience that is responsible for the
problem in the first place, the masses who do not value dissent or eccen-
tricity.24 Mill promotes individuality because it is a necessary condition
for the emergence of genius, original ways of thinking, feeling, perce iv-
ing, and acting: "Persons of genius ... are, and are always likely to be, a
small minority: but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the
soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere
offreedom."25 Mill is not making a Nietzschean argument that a society is
justitied only to the extent to which it produces an outstanding individual
such as Napoleon or Goethe. Mill thinks that modern civilization permits,
if not requires, everyone to experience freedom. Still, Mill's argument
might leave cold those who do not see themselves as geniuses. Mill thus
contends that geniuses may teach the masses valuable lessons: "There
is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out
wh en what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new
106 Chapter Five

practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better
taste and sense in human life."26
Mill offers a principle to encapsulate the liberal intuition that individu-
ality matters: "the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individu-
ally or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their
number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be
rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against
his will, is to prevent harm to others."27 Mill dedicates many pages to
fleshing out the harm principle, to explaining how to draw the line be-
tween individuality and harm to others. In his own Iifetime, Sir James
Fitzjames Stephen accused Mill of overlooking how ail individual actions
affect, and thereby potentially harm, others, and critics ever since have
identified the same fault in On Liberty.28 Mill knows that human actions
always affect others: the harm principle simply places the onus on "those
who maintain that curbing one person's interest is integrally related to
preserving another person's autonomy."29 That is to say, On Liberty re-
quires advocates of social control to explain how that control will advance
the cause ofindividual autonomy. Mill promotes the formation ofsingular
individuals, not the replication of reasonable, responsible citizens. Mill's
"grand, leading princip le" is "the absolute and essential importance of
human development in its richest diversity."30 Each person, for Mill, is
a haecceity, a singular agglomeration of faculties, and the task of Iiberal
politics is to enable each person's faculties to bloom. 31
A Thausand Plateaus refreshes Mill's assault on social tyranny. Here
is one such formulation in Plateau 7, "Year Zero: Faciality." The plateau
contends that in the modern West there are ideas and institutions-ab-
stract machines and concrete assemblages-that stamp each face in the
same way: "The face is Christ. The face is the typical European .... Je-
sus Christ Superstar: he invented the facialization of the entire body and
spread it everywhere" (ATP, 176). Primitive human beings have heads
connected to a "multidimensional polyvocal corporeal body" (ATP, 170).
That is to say, primitives maintain porous boundaries with the natural
world, whereas modems distance ourse Ives from the plane of immanence.
In the modern West, human beings are molded to have a strong subjectiv-
ity and a structured unconsciousness. Ifwe think ofa simple drawing ofa
face on a blank sheet ofpaper, we can appreciate Deleuze's description of
the face as a "white wall/black hale system" (ATP, 167): "Significance is
 Toward a De/euzian Liberalism 107

never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundan-
cies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its
consciousness, passion, and redundancies" (ATP, 167). The turning point
in the West, according to the narrative of A Thousand Plateaus, is year
zero, the birth of Christ. The book does not present itself as an authorita-
tive history of the formation of the Western identity, so quibbling with the
details misses Deleuze's diagnosis of the way that powerful forces in the
modern West generate a certain type ofhuman being with eyes (subjectiv-
ity) and cheeks (signifiance).
A Thousand Plateaus challenges the demand that each person mold his
or her face to the template evident in the history of Western (Christian)
art: "If human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to
dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become
clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the
head, but by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal" (ATP, 171). Is
this statement antiliberal or hyperliberal? 1 believe the latter. Mill resists
the social tyranny that imposes psychic templates on people. For Mill, each
human being is an organic entity that ought to develop in its own way, not
a machine that society ought to make and fine-tune. Mill would approve of
sorne people, if they wish, becoming-animal, on the condition, of course,
that they not concretely harm the self-defining capacities of others.
According to a biographer, "Mill expressed a total vision of liberal
culture that was shared by almost no one and had in 8ritain no natural
constituency."32 The Tories, by and large, opposed the modern age and its
leveling tendencies, and the working class had little interest in BUdung.
Mill's appeals to conservative sensibilities and heroes may lead readers to
overlook the unsçttling implications of On Liberty, but that is a mistake.
A Thousand Plateaus, written in the aftermath of the Parisian student-
worker uprisings in 1968, and, in general, a century of avant-garde art
and philosophy, takes advantage of the liberal turn in Western modernity.
Whereas Mill appeals to Christian ethics throughout On Liberty, Deleuze
seems to embrace, in various stages of his work, the need for new gods,
or at least post-Christian ethics. 33 Rather than emphasize the differences
between Mill and Deleuze, we might see both thinkers as working within
a Romantic tradition of celebrating human individuality, with Deleuze
drawing upon philosophical, scientific, and artistic resources unavailable
to Mill.
108 Chapter Five

DEMOCRACY

Democracy means rule by the people (demos); liberalism connotes the

right of the individual to be free from (eleutheros) other people. Let us
now consider how Mill addresses the intrinsic tension of liberal democ-
racy in Considerations on Representative Government and how Deleuze's
reflections on majority, minority, and minority-becomings complement
Mill' s efforts.
For Mill, "the ideally best form of government is that in which the
sovereignty, or supreme controlling power in the last resort, is vested in
the entire aggregate of the community."34 Democracy empowers persons
to protect their rights and interests from inside rather than outside of the
system. Furthermore, "the general prosperity attains a greater height, and
is more widely diffused, in proportion to the amount and variety of the
personal energies enlisted in promoting it."35 In a tyranny, talents shrivel
as people are estranged from holding real power or exercising initiative.
In a democracy, people strive to better themselves and others wh en they
know that the responsibility for self-government rests on their shoulders.
A well-constructed democracy empowers individuals to develop their
own abilities, which in turn en riches the community.
And yet Mill abjures the concept of democracy as majoritarianism. The
appeal of representative govemment is that it brings "the general standard
of intelligence and honesty existing in the community, and the individual
intellect and virtue of its wisest members, more directly to bear upon the
govemment."36 In a representative constitution, Mill ascribes different
classes of people distinct roles. Every adult, male or female, who owns
property and can read, may vote for deputies to Parliament. The Parlia-
ment serves as a Committee of Grievances and Congress of Opinions
where people raise and debate the most important issues of the time; the
Parliament also determines who should implement legislation and whether
to sustain support for the people so chosen. To draft scientific and system-
atic legislation, however, Mill calls for a "Commission of Codification" of
trained specialists, and to translate legislation into policy, Mill calls for a
semiautonomous bureaucracy. In Mill's conception of representative de-
mocracy, the Many control and criticize the government but "a specially
trained and experienced Few" perform the "actual conduct of affairs."37
 Toward a Delellzian Liberalism 109

Despite its elitism, Mill raises a quandary for liberal democrats that
persists up to the present. Here is one formulation:

One of the greatest dangers ... of democracy, as of ail other forms of gov-
emment, lies in the sinister interest of the holders of power: it is the danger
of class legislation; of govemment intended for ... the immediate benefit
of the dominant class, to the lasting detriment of the who le. And one of the
most important questions demanding consideration, in determining the best
constitution of a representative democracy, is how to provide efficacious
securities against this evil. 38

The danger of democracy is that the majority may ignore, if not actively
persecute, minorities. Perhaps Mill wants to protect the propertied c1ass
from the laboring c1ass. Several factors facilitate against this interpreta-
tion. Mill thinks that an "ideally perfect" Parliament ought to be balanced
between employers and laborers so that an enlightened minority may tip
the balance in favor of whichever group is in the right-Mill is receptive
to the idea that socialists, and even communists, should periodically win
elections and try their hand at governance. 39 The constituency that Mill ex-
plicitly advocates for are "highly educated and public spirited persons."40
Mill worries that the masses will marginalize or condemn any pursuit that
they do not understand: "We know how easily the uselessness of almost
every branch of knowledge may be proved, to the complete satisfaction
of those who do not possess it."41 Mill does not wish philosophers to
govern directly or through proxies. Rather, Mill wants to make sure that
intellectuals gain a voice somewhat approximate to their numbers, though
he hopes that they ,play gain a larger slice of power through widespread
respect for their wisdom. The liberal quandary is how to build or guar-
antee "a social support ... for individual resistance to the tendencies of
the ruling power; a protection, a rallying point, for opinions and interests
which the ascendant public opinion views with disfavor."42
A Thousand Plateaus addresses the problem of democratic tyranny in a
discussion of majorities, minorities, and minority-becomings.

Majority implies a state of domination, not the reverse. It is not a question of

knowing whether there are more mosquitoes or flies than men, but ofknow-
ing how "man" constitutes a standard in the universe in relation to which
110 Chapter Five

men necessarily (analytically) form a majority. The majority in a govem-

ment presupposes the right to vote, and not only is established among those
who possess that right but is exercised over those who do not, however great
their numbers. (ATP, 291)

The problem with majoritarianism is not that one group has numerical
superiority over others. Majority derives from the Latin word magnus,
"great," and the majority can form whenever one group dominates an-
other, even with the latter's consent and enthusiasm. The fundamental
problem of political philosophy is that "men fight for their servitude as
stubbornly as though it were their salvation."43 In his historical milieu,
Deleuze thinks that white male Europeans constitute the majority and
other groups consciously or unconsciously accept their ascendancy. And
yet one could imagine that "in blood and crisis, a more radical reversai
that would make the white world the periphery of a yellow world" (ATP,
470). The problem is not this or that majority, but the idea of majoritari-
anism as such. That is why Deleuze hesitates to advocate minority rights;
sometimes this approach legitimates a framework that oppresses minori-
ties in the first place. Ifwomen want to become equal to men, for instance,
they may sim ply replicate the criteria of human worth formed by men.
The goal of Deleuzian liberalism is to protect the space of becoming,
that is, to make possible the conditions of generating singular identities
that can nourish one another in some ways, contest each other in others,
and construct assemblages that promote common policies. Deleuzian
liberalism is not primarily interested in allowing solid identities-white,
black, male, female, Jew, gentile, and so on-to remain self-enclosed. The
focus, rather, is fostering an environment where individuals can assemble
diverse elements to make their lives works of art: "In a way, the subject in
a becoming is always 'man,' but only wh en he enters a becoming-minori-
tarian that rends him from his major identity" (ATP, 291). To experience
the plenitude of becoming, to experience joy, one must become a hybrid,
assembling elements from races, sexes, religions, philosophies, sciences,
and so forth. Deleuze, like Mill, celebrates the Romantic ideal of many-
sidedness. But that leaves unanswered the question of whether Deleuze
supports democracy, which is by definition rule by the majority.
In Deleuzian Concepts, Paul Patton develops a Deleuzian conception
of democracy. This conception valorizes jurisprudence-"the creative
 Toward a Deleuzian Liberalism 111

modification of exïsting legal principles or the invention of new ones to

fit particular cases"-rather than the establishment of an immutable legal
code. 44 This conception do es not so much deny the legitimacy of major-
ity rule as insist that the majority should be amenable to change and that
minority-becomings should be protected. The goal of Deleuzian politics
is to reconfigure the majoritarian standard "through democratic and legal
means" in response to "molecular movements and lines of flight."45 ln
other words, Deleuzian democracy values the contributions of eccentrics,
dissenters, heretics, and others who hold unconventional thoughts and
live singular lives. Deleuzian democracy views philosophy as "an aid or
a supplement, perhaps a necessary supplement, to political activity in the
public sphere."46 Deleuze's theory of democracy is incomplete, lacking an
account, for instance, ofhow the demos ought to govern itself. But Patton
sees affinities between Deleuze's philosophy and the experimental and
creative side of democratic politics.
Deleuze, 1 venture, contributes to the pluralist conception of democracy
formulated by James Madison in The Federalist Papers. 47 According
to Madison, human beings differ from one another for many reasons,
including "a zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning
govemment, and many other points, as weIl of speculation as ofpractice."
Madison argues that people are not so much selfish as partial, inclined
to sympathize with those closest to them and indifferent or antagonistic
to the rest. That is, most human beings join factions, "amounting to a
majority or minority of the who le, who are united and actuated by sorne
corn mon impulse of passion or of interest." Madison considers, and then
rejects, the idea that aIl citizens should be forcibly united into a single
unit: "Liberty is to faction, what air is to fire, an aliment, without which it
instantly expires. But it could not be a less fûIly to abolish liberty, which
is essential to politicallife, because it nourishes faction, than it would be
to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animallife, because it
imparts to fire its destructive agency." Madison's solution to the problem
of factions is to design a govenlment that gives many factions power and,
simultaneously, inhibits any group from acquiring too much power. That
is why Madison thinks that a large terrain facilitates healthy democracy:
"Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and inter-
ests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a
corn mon motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common
112 Chapter Five

motive exists, it will be more difficult for ail who feel it to discover their
own strength, and to act in unison with each other."48 In sum, Madison
advocates the widest possible distribution of power to promote social
diversity and hinder the formation of majoritarian factions. Madison's
conception of political pluralism is rhizomatic rather than arboreal.
Deleuze both appreciates and presses against the limits of the liberal
democratic political imaginary. Deleuze does not oppose interest-
group politics as such; rather, he wants a pluralistic politics that takes
into account the widest possible diversity of interests. Take Plateau 2,
"' 1914: One or Several Wolves." Deleuze discusses Freud's case study
of the Wolf-Man. As a child, the Wolf-Man dreamt that he opened a
window and saw white wolves sitting in a walnut tree in front of his
window. Freud explained that the child had witnessed a primaI scene of
his parents having sex: "'The trap was set from the start: never will the
Wolf-Man speak. Talk as he might about wolves, howl as he might like
a wolf, Freud does not even listen; he glances at his dog and answers,
'It's daddy.' For as long as that lasts, Freud calls it neurosis; when it
cracks, it's psychosis" (ATP, 38). What is the importance of this pas-
sage from the perspective of democratic theory? The example of the
Wolf-Man illustrates the psychic harm caused by misrecognition. Freud
speaks for the Wolf-Man and yet distorts his attempt to become-animal:
the Wolf-Man is "suffocated by ail he had to say" (ATP, 38). Deleuze's
political vision does not require one to experiment with one's animal-
ity in any particular way. Rather, Deleuze wants to give individuals the
maximum opportunity, on the condition that they do not harm others,
of self-experimentation and self-expression. On an institutional level,
this may involve creating a governmental structure with multiple entry
points. On a cultural level, this may encompass promoting diversity in
the arts, civil society, movies, and so forth. Mill and Deleuze agree on
the level of princip le, but Deleuze expands the range of thoughts and
experiments that a liberal democratic culture shelters.

FEMINISM

Mill is one of the first major Westem philosophers to protest injustice

against women, and his The Subjection ofWomen, in Martha Nussbaum's
 Toward a Deleuzian Liberalism 113

words, is "a wonderful work that says most of the most important things
about sex equality."49 Deleuze presupposes MiII's feminist agenda but
wonders whether it occludes important differences between the sexes.
Mill maintains that men and women are equal in the most important
categories and should thus be treated equally in virtually every arena. As
a fallibilist, Mill is willing to listen to arguments for why men differ from
women, but as things stand, Mill supposes that most differences reflect
cultural rather than natural differences.

1consider it presumption in any one to pretend to decide what women are or

are not, can or cannot be, by natural constitution. They have always hitherto
been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a
state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised;
and no one can safely pronounce that ifwomen's nature were left to choose
its direction as freely as men's ... there would be any material difference,
or perhaps any difference at aIl, in the character and capacities which would
unfold themselves. 50

Because men and women do not difter categorically in their character

and capacities, they should not be treated differently in their political,
economic, social, cultural, and familial roles. Thus Mill advocates a "prin-
ciple of perfect equality" between the two sexes, "admitting no power or
privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other."51
Mill explains the origins of gender inequality and argues why it no
longer has a place in the modern world. Gender inequality "arose simply
from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society, every
woman ... was found in a state of bondage to some man" and this de
facto hierarchical relationship became encoded in laws and customs. 52
Today, the system of gender inequality persists because half of the human
race-men-benefits from it and have raised women to be subservient to
their husbands or potential husbands. The system of gender inequality did
not arise from wisdom or con cern for the general welfare; rather, it "is the
primitive state of slavery lasting on" even if in a gentler manner than in
earlier eras. 53 Mill argues that modern men and women need only think
and act consistently to recognize the folly and cruelty of sexism. Once,
philosophers he Id that some human beings were naturally fit for slavery;
today, modern human beings, at least in "Christian Europe," recognize
slavery as a barbarian practice. The modern principle that people should
114 Chapter Five

be judged for their character and abilities, rather than arbitrary physical
distinctions, should be extended to gender:

The course ofhistory, and the tendencies of progressive human society, af-
ford not only no presumption in favor of this system of inequality of rights,
but a strong one against it; and that, so far as the whole course of human im-
provement up to this time, the who le stream of modem tendencies, warrants
any interference on the subject, it is, that this relic of the past is discordant
with the future, and must necessarily disappear. 54

The Subjection of Women applies the principle of perfect equality to

marriage, the fàmily, and the workplace. The ide a that marriage entails
women serving their husbands as slaves is malicious and antiquated: "the
moral regeneration of mankind will only really commence, when the
most fundamental of the social relations is placed under the rule of equal
justice."55 The patriarchal arrangement whereby men tyrannize over their
wives and children is both deleterious in itself and teaches undemocratic
political virtues. Currently, the family is "a school of despotism" whereas
it should be "the real school of the virtues of freedom."56 Regarding oc-
cupations, individuals and society as a whole sufTer when people place
artificial obstructions in the way of the most qualified persons, men or
women, performing their jobs. It is also unjust to deny to women "the
equal moral right of aIl human beings to choose their occupation ... ac-
cording to their own preferences, at their own risk."S7
Deleuze agrees with Mill that sexual hierarchies should be dismantled
and that men and women should be treated equally in virtually every policy
arena. Deleuze supports "women's struggle for the vote, for abortion, for
jobs" (ATP, 471): "it is, of course, indispensable for women to conduct a
molar politics, with a view to winning back their own organism, their own
history, their own subjectivity" (ATP, 276). And yet Deleuze wams femi-
nists against extolling a female subjectivity that is equal to a male one: "it
is dangerous to confine oneself to such a subject, which does not function
without drying up a spring or stopping a flow. The song of life is often
intoned by the driest of women, moved by ressentiment, the will to power
and cold mothering" (ATP, 276).
In Nomadic Subjects, Rosi Braidotti applauds Deleuze for challenging
phallocentric presuppositions throughout philosophy and public culture and
 Toward a DefeZlzian Liberafism 115

aligning with "the subversive, radical, and irreverent strands of feminist

thought."58 Deleuze displays "a great empathy with issues of difference,
sexuality, and transition, but he also invests the site of the feminine with
positive force."59 On both the ontological and ethical fronts, Deleuze helps
feminists navigate a world of fluid identities and porous borders, where
women are still determining who or what they may become: Deleuze "de-
essentializes the body, sexuality, and sexed identities."60 However, 8raidotti
thinks that Deleuze's cali for women to relinquish strong female subjectivi-
ties "is historically dangerous for women."61 Furthermore, 8raidotti thinks
that Deleuze's concept of "becoming-woman" opens the door to women be-
ing rendered different in a pejorative sense. "Deleuze's theory ofbecoming
is obviously determined by his location as an embodied male subject" who
finds it ail too convenient to ask women to think beyond gendered identi-
ties. 62 Ultimately, "women must speak the feminine, that they may think it,
write it, and represent it in their own terms."63
Deleuze scholars have not yet found the key to unlock Deleuze's con-
cept of becoming-woman. 64 Here is one hypothesis. Male and fèmale,
for Deleuze, are abstract machines, immaterial forces that pilot bodies in
different directions. Virginia Woolf maintains "writing should produce
a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and
impregnating an entire social field" (ATP, 276). The female abstract ma-
chine is an élan vital that makes possible conception, birthing, mothering,
and lactating. If that is th~ case, though, then how can Deleuze enjoin
men to become-woman? And is he interpellating women as maternai?
Deleuzians may become mothers, of course, but that is not Deleuze's
point. Rather, Deleuze thinks that there is a female energy circulating
throughout the universe that men and women ought to access. Consider
Nietzsche's counsel to "have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a
dancing star."65 Cosmic artisans must open their bodies to female energy
in order to give birth to new ideas, practices, feelings, images, and so
forth. The masculine and feminine abstract machines are always mixed in
any specifie human being. That is why Deleuze can differentiate the male
and the fèmale and still say that "sexuality brings into play ... a diversity
of conjugated becomings; these are like 11 sexes" (ATP, 278). A Deleuz-
ian liberalism works for both gender equality and an appreciation of the
power of creativity, or becoming-woman.
 116 Chapter Five

SOCIALISM

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze explains that a major political assign-

ment of our time is "redefining socialism" (ATP, 472), a task that Mill
undertook a century before in Chapters on Socialism.
In his earlier book, Principles of Political Economy, Mill saw himself
as disclosing the moral foundations of c1assical political economy and
argued that private property produces wealth, that central planning is
inefficient, that the good of individual autonomy places limits on state
power, and that economic redistribution is legitimate only if it promotes
liberty.66 In Chapters on Socialism, Mill states that socialism encompasses
many schemes united by a "remodeling generally approaching to aboli-
tion of the institution of private property."67 Mill disputes the socialist
thesis that the market economy makes the human condition worse: "The
evils and injustices suffered under the present system are great, but they
- are not increasing; on the contrary, the general tendency is towards their
slow diminution."68 Mill criticizes socialism for undermining initiative.
If socialists do not reward managers or laborers for excellent work, the
"strong personal motive to do their very best and utmost for the efficiency
and economy of the operations, would not exist."69 Mill promotes wealth
acquisition because it inspires the "striking out ofnew paths."70 Mill advo-
cates a market economy because it nourishes individuality and pluralism,
not because private property is an absolute right or that industrialists need
more money. Still, Mill thinks that defenders of private property need to
give socialism a fair hearing and determine how to best incorporate social-
ist insights. Ali reflecting persons should bring socialist arguments "under
the fullest light of investigation and discussion, so that, if possible, wh en
the time shaH be ripe, whatever is right in them may be adopted, and what
is wrong rejected by general consent, and that instead of a hostile conflict,
physical or only moral, between the old and the new, the best parts ofboth
may be combined in a renovated social fabric."71
Mill distinguishes two kinds of socialism. Revolutionary socialism,
based primari ly on the European continent, advocates "the management
of the whole productive resources of the country by one central author-
ity."72 Revolutionary socialists promise to eliminate aIl of the vices ofpri-
vate property in one bold act whereby the working classes, "or somebody
in their behalt:" seize control of the levers of society.73 Revolutionary
 Toward a Deleuzian Liberalism 117

socialists have "a serene confidence in their own wisdom" even though
their schemes disrupt how the present system, however imperfectly, feeds,
clothes, and sustains the populace. 74 Revolutionary socialists walking in
the footsteps of Robespierre and St. Just display "a recklessness of other
people's sufferings."75 And ev en if communists were somehow able to
implement their schemes, centralized authorities would crack down on
dissenting individuals or communities: "Already in ail societies the com-
pression of individuality by the majority is a great and growing evil; it
would probably be much greater under Communism."76 Communists, in
sum, "are unaware that chaos is the very most unfavorable position for
setting out in the construction of a Cosmos."77
Mill evinces more sympathy for the English reformist model of
socialism. This kind of socialism proposes "plans for a new order of
society ... on the scale of a village community or township" that may
then expand "by the multiplication of such self-acting units."78 English
socialists recognize that "great and permanent changes in the funda-
mental ideas of mankind are not to be accomplished by a coup de main"
and thus "direct their practical efforts towards ends which seem within
easier reach, and are content to hold back ail extreme theories until
there has been experience of the operation of the same principles on a
partial scale."79 Mill otfers an example of a provisional arrangement that
combines the best of both private property and socialism: cooperatives.
Cooperatives work by granting management and investors a small cut
of the profits and giving the laborers the rest: "This plan has been found
of admirable efficacy, both in this country and abroad."80 Mill might
support a communist order if it could prove its worth through practical
experiments, but he warns against political revolutions that impose an
untested system on an unconsenting populace. 81
Deleuze has an ambivalent relationship to capitalism. He shares Marx's
assessment that capitalism "has accomplished wonders far surpassing
Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has con-
ducted expeditions that put in the shade aIl former Exoduses of nations
and crusades."82 Deleuze's ethics prizes deterritorialization and decoding,
movements that erode old habits and laws and make possible new intel-
lectual and practical lines of flight. 83 Slavoj Zizek is partly correct that
Deleuze celebrates aspects of capitalist culture. 84 And yet Deleuze's writ-
ings are replete with warnings against capitalism: "There is no universal
118 Chapter Five

capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of

ail kinds of formations, it is neocapital ism by nature. It invents its eastern
face and western face, and reshapes them both-all for the worst" (ATP,
20). In Capital, Marx explains that capitalism constantly establishes Iimits
that it then transgresses in the search for new profits. Deleuze thinks that
this insight is necessary to make sense of the present-day situation:

Capitalism is indeed an axiomatic, because it has no laws but immanent

ones. It wou Id like for us to believe that it con fronts the limits of the Uni-
verse, the extreme limit of resources and energy. But aIl it con fronts are
its own limits (the periodic depreciation of existing capital); aIl it repels or
displaces are its own limits (the formation ofnew capital, in new industries
with a high profit rate). (ATP, 463)

Capitalism is good in that it destroys ancient hierarchies and makes possi-

ble individual and collective experiments, bad in that it spreads sadness by
exploiting the working class and shattering institutions and conventions.
ln A World of Becoming, William E. Connolly indicates how contem-
porary Deleuzians may refresh the tenns of left discourse. Connolly's
target in this book is the "Resonance Machine of Global Antagonism": "In
this (nearly) global machine, dissonant forces, drawing upon competitive
practices of sovereignty, resentments tied to uneven exchange, specula-
tive practices beyond the reach of those affected, and a regional division
of dominant religious institutions become condensed into a global reso-
nance machine of cross-regional antagonism."85 To combat this machine,
Deleuzians may, on a micro level, "induce cumulative changes in indi-
vidual and group conducts that shift the center of gravity in this or that
way," and, on a macro level, "escalate both internaI and external pressures
upon corporations, states, universities, churches and temples, investment
firms, the media, the Internet, and international organizations."86
Connolly, in a Deleuzian vein, calls for political experiments to see how
far capitalism can become eco-egalitarian. This ideal prioritizes inclusive
goods, in which nearly everybody benefits, such as mass transportation
systems, over exclusive goods, such as cars, that mostly benefit their indi-
vidual owners. This ideal also advocates an ecologically sound economy
"in which climate change is reversed; soil, air, and water pollution are
curtailed; the food system promotes health; waste disposai systems are
organized around recycling; and non-renewable sources of energy are
 Toward a Delellzian Liberalism 119

increasingly replaced by renewable modes."87 Deleuzian socialism, by

whatever name, does not seek to destroy the current economic-political
system but rather to experiment cautiously on new arrangements to create
an environment where multiple ways of Iife, human and nonhuman, may
flourish.

TOWARD A DELEUZIAN LIBERALISM

Deleuzian liberalism differs from the two kinds that Martha Nussbaum
discusses in her article, "Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberal-
ism." Perfectionist liberalism "spells out a set of controversial metaphysi-
cal and ethical doctrines concerning the nature ofvalue and the good life,
and then goes on to recommend political principles built upon these
values"; political liberalism, in contrast, "abstains from controversial
metaphysical, epistemological, and comprehensive ethical claims" and
hopes that a political conception of justice gains popular support. 88 De-
leuze presents an Epicurean metaphysics and account of the good life, but
his pluralistic vision encourages multiple types ofmetaphysics and ethical
systems to flourish. Deleuzian liberalism agrees with political liberalism
that it is unjust to oppress minority viewpoints, but it holds that it is bet-
ter to acknowledge one's ethical commitments rather than try to conceal
them. A Thousand Plateaus lays out materials that may be used for a
liberal political order that allows most individuals-incIuding modem
Epicureans-to live and experiment in peace.
Liberalism, as Flathman observes, is a restless ideology, one that rec-
ognizes the need for established princip les, institutions, and practices but
that always strives to extend the limits that it sets. This chapter has raised
several questions that Deleuzian liberals may further pursue. How is it
possible to articulate an Epicurean worldview in contemporary circum-
stances? What can be done to make liberal political culture even more
welcoming of diversity? How can we increase the range ofvoices consid-
ered in democratic deliberation? What kind of public policies and cultural
shifts emerge from thinking that there are n sexes rather than two? How
is it possible to recast socialistic intuitions? In the next chapter, 1 pursue
the question of how Delellzian liberals may confidently and respectflllly
interact with a different existential faith, Islam.
120 Chapter Five

NOTES

1. Richard E. Flathman, Toward a Libera/ism (Ithaca, NY: Comell Univer-

sity Press, 1989), 6.
2. Ibid., 8.
3. Ibid., 12.
4. For an overview of Deleuze's politics of desire, see Paul Patton, Deleuze
and the Po/itical (New York: Routledge, 2000), chap. 4.
5. At Hamilton College, 1 supervised a senior thesis by Jared Solomon on the
similarities and differences between the political theories of John Stuart Mill and
Gilles Deleuze. 1 thank Jared, in particular, for his discussion of sex and gender,
incIuding the case study of the Indian athlete Santhi Soundarajan, who failed a
gender test at the 2006 Asian Games.
6. 1 discuss the Marxist appropriation of Deleuze's philosophy in "Assem-
blages and the Multitude: Deleuze, Hardt, Negri, and the Postmodem Left,"
European Journal of Po/itical Theory 8, no. 3 (2009): 383-400.
7. On the reading of Deleuze as a liberal, see Daniel W. Smith, Essays on
Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 339-60.
8. Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 257-65.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2006), 2.
10. Brooke Holmes, "Deleuze, Lucretius, and the Simulacrum ofNaturalism,"
in Dynamic Reading: Studies in the Reception of Epicureanism, eds. Brooke
Holmes and W. H. Shearin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 316-42;
Ryan 1. Johnson, "Another Use of the Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze,
Lucretius and the Practical Critique of Demystification," Deleuze Studies 8, no.
1 (2014): 70-93.
Il. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Roger Crisp (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 55.
12. Cited in Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, 397.
13. Mill, Utilitarianism, 68.
14. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1990),272,273.
15. Mill, Utilitarianism, 56.
16. Ibid., 57.
17. Ibid., 56.
18. On DeIeuze's critique of Aristotelian and Kantian teIeology, see John
Protevi, Po/itical Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body PolWc (New York:
AthIone, 2001).
 Toward a Deleuzian Liberalism 121

19. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, eds. David Bromwich and George Kateb
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 132.
20. See Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, passim.
21. "While Mill was wary of religion, Deleuze and Guattari increasingly
sought connections to several available religious spiritualities that challenge
authoritarianism and arboreal faith. (lt finds sorne expression in A Thousand Pla-
teaus, even though it is emphasized more in Cinema Il.) They want rhizomatic
connections between atheism and theism, where each party has sorne predispo-
sition to pluralism" (William E. Connolly, personal correspondence, spring of
2014).
22. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1994), 143.
23. Mill, On Liberty, 76.
24. "Individual spontaneity is hardly recognized by the corn mon modes of
thinking, as having any intrinsic worth, or deserving any regard on its own ac-
count" (ibid., 122).
25. Ibid., 129.
26. Ibid., 128-29.
27. Ibid., 80.
28. Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, 278.
29. Ibid., 279.
30. This is the epigraph, by Wilhelm von Humboldt, of On Liberty.
31. "Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do
exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop
itself on ail sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it
a living thing" (Mill, On Liberty, 124).
32. Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, 357.
33. See the discussion of Ariadne and Dionysus in Deleuze, Nietzsche and
Philosophy.
34. John Stuart Mill, "Considerations on Representative Government," in On
Liberty and Other Ess ays , ed. John Gray (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991),244.
35. Ibid., 245.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 284.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 300-301.
40. Ibid., 305.
41. Ibid., 299.
42. Ibid., 316.
122 Chapter Five

43. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1983),29.
44. Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 175.
45. Ibid., 176, 177.
46. Ibid., 180.
47. Mill's political theory was influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville's Democ-
racy in America, which in turn f1eshed out James Madison's account of plural-
ism in The Federalist Papers. For now, 1 focus on how Deleuze contributes to
Madison 's pluralistic intuition in Federalist 10.
48. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist, eds.
George Wescott Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund,
2001),42-49.
49. Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 24.
50. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 173.
51. Ibid., 119.
52. Ibid., 123.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 134.
55. Ibid., 211.
56. Ibid., 160.
57. Ibid., 168.
58. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in
Contempormy Feminist TheOly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 245.
59. Ibid., 246.
60. Ibid., 247.
61. Ibid., 252.
62. Ibid., 259.
63. Ibid., 256.
64. Here is the seed of a promising research agenda: "Deleuze's elegy to the
transcendental role of sexuality resonates across esoteric traditions of thought
about the 'metaphysics' of sex, from Tantrism to Sufism. Such traditions of
spiritual sex attemptto harness the deeply cosmic nature ofsexuality, its potential
to activate and energize centers of consciousness within the body (such as the
chakras in tantric thought)" (Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy
and Spiritual Ordeal [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012], 99).
 Toward a Deleuzian Liberalism 123

65. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, eds. Adrian Del Caro and
Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 9.
66. Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, 223.
67. Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, 225.
68. Ibid., 259.
69. Ibid., 263.
70. Ibid., 265.
71. Ibid., 224.
72. Ibid., 260.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., 261.
76. Ibid., 270.
77. Ibid., 274.
78. Ibid., 260.
79. Ibid., 226.
80. Ibid., 267.
81. Ibid., 271.
82. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Jeffrey C.
Isaac (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 76.
83. See Patton, Deleuze and the Political.
84. Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New
York: Routledge, 2004), 163-64.
85. William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2010), 138.
86. Ibid., 144.
87. William E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Dur-
ham, Ne: Duke University Press, 2008), 93.
88. Martha Nussbaum, "Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism,"
Philosophy and Public Affairs 39, no. 1 (2011): 3, 36.
 Chapter Six

The Politics of
the Garden (pairidaeza)

In The Future of Islam, John Esposito explains why understanding Is-

lam and Muslims is a domestic imperative and Foreign policy priority
for Americans and Europeans. Currently, there are 1.5 billion Muslims
_ residing in fifty-seven Muslim-majority countries, and they constitute sig-
nificant minorities in Europe and the United States. Islam's major cities
and capitals span the globe, from Cairo and Jakarta in the Muslim world
to New York, Paris, and Berlin in the West. Today, Islam and Muslims
are principal actors on the global stage and part of the fabric of U.S. and
European societies: "In a world in which we too often succumb to the di-
chotomy between 'us' and 'them,' we are challenged to transcend (though
not deny) our differences, affirm our common humanity, and realize that
'we,' whether we like it or not, are interconnected and co-dependent, the
co-creators of our societies and our world."l Esposito, Iike many thought-
fui observers of global politics, recognizes the dangers inherent in models
of pluralism that reify antagonisms between Muslims and non-Muslims.
And yet many political theorists still wonder how to envision pluralistic
societies that affirm the interconnectedness of existential faiths and the
deep differences between, say, theists and naturalists. In this chapter, 1
draw upon Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus to help political
theorists envision the globe as a garden and engage Muslim constituencies
as represented by leading contemporary Islamic political thinkers.
On its face, this is a surprising endeavor given that Deleuze is a promi-
nent advocate of an immanent, or naturalist, theory of ethics. Deleuze
situates himself in a line of naturalists that goes back to Epicurus and
Lucretius and continues up to Spinoza and Nietzsche. 2 Naturalists oppose
moralities oftranscendence thatjudge existence From a supposedly higher
124
 The Palitics afthe Garden (pairidaeza) 125

ontological plane. In their stead, they proffer an ethics of immanence that

evaluates modes of existence by whether they cultivate health or sick-
ness, joy or sadness. Thus Nietzsche replaces the categories of good and
evil with noble and base modes of existence, just as Spinoza proposes
an ethics based on the distinction between passive and active affections.
Likewise, "for Deleuze transcendence is the fundamental problem of eth-
ics, what prevents ethics from taking place, so to speak."3 Though Muslim
schools and thinkers differ on how to conceptualize the relationship be-
tween immanence and transcendence, virtually every Muslim holds that
God transcends and is incomparable (tanzih) with every other thing in the
universe. 4 This is the doctrine encapsulated in the Qur'anic saying: Al-
lahu akbar, "God is great."5 The Qur'an also states that "[believers], you
are the best community singled out for people: you order what is good,
forbid what is evil, and believe in God (al-amr bi al-ma'ruf wa al-nahy
an al-munkar)" (3: Il 0). Deleuzian ethics and Islam differ profoundly in
how they conceptualize the structure of the universe and the appropriate
standard for measuring a good life.
Deleuze's political vision, however, is not the same as his ethical vi-
sion. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari state that they are
"tired of trees" and that "nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside
from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhi-
zomes" (ATP, 15). Deleuzian ethics, we might say, is a f1ower. Looking
inwards, this tlower strives not to become a tree, setting state policy and
blocking out the sunlight for other existential faiths, or a weed, an extra-
state force committed to marginalizing and hurting other existential faiths.
Yet a Deleuzian tlower must also articulate a foreign policy to sustain the
garden conditions that make its way of life possible. Thus a Deleuzian
f10wer will forge alliances with other noble faiths (or f1owers) committed
to maintaining the health and diversity of the garden. A Deleuzian f10wer
will also combat or contain ignoble faiths that wish to destroy, through
either the state or extra-state forces, the f10wering of diverse faiths. To
interact thoughtfully and effectively with other constituencies, Deleuzians
must study and evaluate the political theories of other existential faiths,
or do comparative political theory.6 In this chapter, 1 describe the main
features and principles of a Deleuzian comparative political theory and
perform a Deleuzian analysis of several major thinkers and schools within
Islamic political thought. My hope is that multiple existential faiths find
126 Chapter Six

insights in this analysis for how thoughtful people today from multiple
traditions may interact respectfully across deep differences.
The chapter begins by explaining what Deleuze's concept of the regime
ofsigns contributes to thinking about the coherence, complexity, and plas-
ticity of an intellectual and political tradition. Then, the chapter presents
Deleuzian principles for engaging another regime of signs, such as Islamic
political thought. These principles include tracing its major borders and
internaI divisions, diagramming the porous or fluid lines that make pos-
sible interreligious dialogue and cooperation, and creating or rearranging
concepts to generate a new way of thinking and acting. The second half of
this chapter performs a Deleuzian reading of the Sufi scholar Seyyed Hos-
sein Nasr, the al-Qaeda ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the Shiite po-
litical reformer' Abdolkarim Soroush. 1 argue that Deleuzians may forge
close alliances with Sufis, challenge the claims of militant Islamists, and
collaborate with critical Muslim scholars. Finally, the chapter discusses a
real-world payoffto the Deleuzian approach, namely, it illuminates a path
whereby Muslims and naturalists may work together to inhibit or reverse
the ecological crisis.

PRINCIPLES FOR A DELEUZIAN

COMPARATIVE POLITICAL THEORY

ln A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari define a regime of signs

thusly:

We call any specific formalization of expression a regime of signs, at least

when the expression is linguistic. A regime of signs constitutes a semiotic
system. But it appears difficult to analyze semiotic systems in themselves:
there is always a form of content that is simultaneously inseparable from and
independent of the form of expression, and the two forms pertain to assem-
blages that are not principally linguistic.... Hence the necessity of a retum
to pragmatics, in which language never has universality in itself. (ATP, 111)

There are linguistic, historical, and political aspects to a regime of signs.

A regime of signs is a linguistic entity insofar as it is a fairly coherent
hanging-together of words, grammar, and meanings; it is an immaterial
force-or an abstract machine-that shapes how people think about and
 The Patilies of the Garden (pairidaeza) 127

thus structure their households, families, economies, polities, cultures,

and so torth. A regime of signs proffers certain rules that make possible
communication and coordination: it is a form of expression. A regime of
signs is also tethered to the historical milieus from which it arose and on
which it persists. Social, cultural, economic, and political torces undergird
any system of symbolic communication and introduce material traces to
any ostensibly abstract use of language. Finally, a regime of signs is a
site of political contestation. Language evinces certain patterns that make
it possible for linguists to generate gram mars and dictionaries, but these
are merely snapshots of a metamorphosing entity: "Language stabilizes
around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It forms a bulb. It evolves by sub-
terranean stems and flows, along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads
like a patch of oil" (ATP, 7). Language is a flux that may coagulate for a
time but that is also always liable to start flowing in new directions. A re-
gime of signs, in sum, is a linguistic system that has sorne consistency, is
composed of multiple historical elements, and is subject to reconstruction.
Deleuze and Guattari offer the following advice about how to study a
regime of signs:

Pragmatics as a whole would consist in this: making a tracing of the mixed

semiotics, under the generative component; making the transformational
map of the regimes, with their possibilities for translation and creation, for
budding along the lines of the tracings; making the diagram of the abstract
machines that are in play in each case, either as potentialities or as effec-
tive emergences; outlining the program of the assemblages that distribute
everything and bring a circulation of movement with alternatives, jumps,
and mutations. (ATP, 146-47)

1 now extract from this passage three principles for a Deleuzian com-
parative political theory with illustrations from scholarship on Islamic
political thought.

Trace the Regime of Signs

The first activity in a Deleuzian comparative political theory is to trace
the major fines and divisions that structure a regime of signs. A regime
of signs provides the syntax, semantics, and logic that make possible
an intelligible proposition within a community. To map this regime, a
128 Chapter Six

scholar goes back and forth between analyzing specific propositions and
constructing general rules that impose a certain order on a class of such
propositions. A regime of signs cannot be observed comprehensively or
thought a priori: it is, rather, a transcendental idea that goads scholars to
constantly seek and consider new evidence. Still, scholars may periodi-
cally make tracings of their investigations and impose a pattern on the au-
thors, texts, schools, arguments, and so forth that they have encountered.
Consider, for example, how Roxanne Euben and Muhammad Qasim
Zaman trace the main contours of Islamist political thought in their intro-
duction to Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: "We take Islamism to
refer to contemporary movements that attempt to return to the scriptural
foundations of the Muslim community, excavating and reinterpreting
them for application to the present-day social and political world."7 To
delimit its borders, Euben and Zaman contrast Islamism with other Mus-
lim orientations and groups. Religious scholars ('ulama) hold great moral
and legal authority within the Muslim world, but Western colonizers and
internai critics have challenged them. Modernists believe that Muslims
may and should interpret Islam's norms according to the needs of chang-
ing times and sometimes adopt Western notions and practices. Salafis
claim to adhere to the normative practice of the pious forebearers (al-sala!
al-salih). And Sufis believe that certain "friends of God" possess gnosis
('irfan) of the deeper levels of meaning in the Qur'an. Lest the tracing
become too neat, Euben and Zaman show that Islamists are both Sunni
and Shiites and disagree with one another about gender roles, the meaning
ofjihad, and the legitimacy of democracy. This type of scholarship, both
nuanced and synoptic, is necessary to make sense of the borders and seg-
ments of a complex semiotic system such as Islamism or Islamic political
thought more broadly.

Diagram the Regime of Signs

If the first activity of a Deleuzian comparative political theory is to map
fairly solid lines and breaks in a semiotic system, the second is to diagram
the more fluid elements that transgress borders within and on the borders
of the regime of signs. When reading texts with this mindset, "one would
look into the possibilities not only of mixture but also of translation and
transformation into another regime" (ATP, 147). Deleuze and Guattari
 The Pofitics of the Garden (pairidaeza) 129

illustrate this procedure in a discussion of prophecy in Judaism. Judaism

requires prophets: "The god averts his face, and which must be seen by no
one; and the subject, gripped by a veritable fear of the god, averts his or
her face in turn. The averted faces, in profile, replace the frontal view of
the radiant face .... The prophet is the main figure in this assemblage; he
needs a sign ta guarantee the ward of Gad, he is himself marked by a sign
indicating the special regime ta which he belongs" (ATP, 123). There is
no Judaism without Moses. And yet a prophet sees things that no one else
sees and refuses ta do what he has been commanded: "Even the prophet,
unlike the seer-priest, is fundamentally a traitor and thus fulfills God's 01'-
der better than anyone who remained faithful could" (ATP, 123). Deleuze
and Guattari observe, "The Jewish God invented the reprieve, existence
in reprieve, indefinite postponement" (ATP, 123). In other words, Juda-
ism invented the myth of immortality that the Epicurean tradition seeks
to dispel. Rather than disprove Judaism on this point (as if that was an
option), Deleuze and Guattari point to elements within Judaism that make
it an unstable system, namely, its notion of prophets forging positive lines
of flight away from the community. In this way, they spotlight ways that
another religious tradition may temper its dogmatism and make possible
more modest and respectful conversations across difference.
Carool Kersten performs this type of comparative political theory in his
book Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and Islam.
Kersten focuses on the Indonesian public intellectual Nurcholish Madjid,
the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi, and the French Aigerian histo-
rian Mohammed Arkoun. These new Muslim intellectuals believe that the
cumulative Islamic heritage (turath) is complex and multifaceted; that ra-
tional thought is compatible with the message of Islam; and that Muslims
may practice a new form ofhumanism: "Madjid, Hanafi, and Arkoun rep-
resent an oppositional postcolonialism that exercises its agency through
endogenous intellectual creativity grounded in the acceptance of cultural
hybridity rather than a misleading essentialist or unsubstantiated purist
understanding ofauthenticity."s On the one hand, these new Muslim intel-
lectuals mine the Islamic heritage for ways to promote creative, postcolo-
niaI thinking. In no way do these intellectuals uncritically accept Western
ideas. On the other hand, each of these thinkers revives a thesis-contro-
versial from its earliest formulations among the Mu'tazilis up to its more
recent presentations by Fazlur Rahman and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd-that
 130 Chapter Six

the Qur'an was created in history and thus may be reinterpreted by each
generation. 9 If the new Muslim intellectuals are not Western liberals, they
also pose an intellectual challenge to Islamists and salafis who think that
the Islamic sources speak for themselves. Kersten acknowledges that the
new Muslim intellectuals are marginal to the Muslim umma: literally so
for the Indonesian intellectuals far from the Muslim homelands of the
Middle East.'o But old people retire, cassettes break, kids befriend kids of
other religions, movies expose people to new ways of life, and so forth:
the task of the Deleuzian comparative political theorist is to be sensitive to
when a regime of signs changes and, if possible, to accelerate that process
in a positive direction.

Create Propositions
The final activity of a Deleuzian comparative political theory is to create
- propositions for a regime of signs: '''one could try to create new, as yet
unknown statements ... even if the results were a patois of sensual de-
light, physical and semiotic systems in shreds, asubjective affects, signs
without significance where syntax, semantics, and logic are in collapse"
(ATP, 147). An example ofthis approach may be the novel Cyclonopedia:
Complicity with Anonyl71ous Materials, attributed to the Iranian philoso-
pher Reza Negarestani. In lieu of a summary ofthis enigmatic book, 1 cite
a review on the book jacket by Graham Harman: "Reading Negarestani
is like being converted to Islam by Salvador Dali." As intriguing as that
prospect sounds, there are real challenges for anyone who tries to create
propositions in Islamic political thought. First, there is a powerful strand
in Islamic political thought that condemns innovation ('bida) within
Islam. Muslims who believe this point to such passages in the Qur'an
that state, for example, "This day have 1 perfected your religion, for you,
completed" (5:3), or hadith, such as one attributed by the Prophet's wife
Aisha: "Allah's Messenger said, 'Ifsomebody innovates something which
is not present in our religion, then that thing will be rejected. '" Even for
Muslims who ho Id that Islam celebrates innovative thinking-and there
are many who do-there is still a presumption against being taught one's
religion by someone who does not believe it."
A Deleuzian comparative political theorist may make two responses.
First, the ontology of A Thousand Plateaus holds that every being in the
 The Pa/itics afthe Garden (pairidaeza) 131

universe is connected through thick or thin fibers to every other being

(ATP, 7). Regardless of whether one believes this ontological principle,
one can still recognize that in the modern worId virtually everyone is
affected by people of another existential faith. There is no sharp divide
between one regime of signs and another; virtually ail of us have a stake
in conversations within multiple linguistic communities. One task of com-
parative political theory is to persuade others to reexamine their tradition
to see the world in ways that may make possible a fruitful coexistence.
This method does not need to be imperialistic or duplicitous: one may
simply ask others to reexamine their sources or consider the work of
another thinker in their tradition. 12 Deleuzians should also show the same
courtesy to Muslims wh en asked hard questions that probe the weak spots
of immanent ethical theories. The second response is that non-Muslims
do not need to invent new words to say something new in another regime
of signs: they can merely drop or rearrange elements. The Islamic sources
are a keyboard that may play many songs depending on how the notes are
arranged. 13 This hermeneutic principle is a source of contention between
Islamists and reformers. 14 Deleuzian comparative political theorists,
however, forthrightly admit that they prefer to support, publicize, and
communicate with Muslim political theorists who promote the peaceful
flourishing of many existential faiths. 15

DELEUZIAN ENGAGEMENTS WITH

ISLAMIC POLITICAL THOUGHT

Deleuze and Guattari, we have seen, use garden imagery to promote a

model ofpluralism in which multiple constituencies (flowers) confidently
and modestly live their existential faith and collaborate with others to
fight off the twin dangers of authoritarian states (trees) or nomad war ma-
chines (weeds). Above, we considered the three activities that Deleuzian
comparative political theorists perform when negotiating with other con-
stituencies, namely, study their regime of signs, determine where points
of contact may be made, and, if necessary and possible, inject new ideas
and arguments into their political discourse. Now, 1 enact a Deleuzian
engagement with Islamic political thought to consider multiple issues that
arise when actually conversing with someone of another existential faith.
132 Chapter Six

According to Deleuze and Guattari, "wherever there is multiplicity, you

will also find an exceptional individual, and it is with that individual that
an alliance must be made" (ATP, 243). Taking this advice to heart, this
chapter foments a dialogue with three exceptional figures who represent
different points on the map of Islamic political thought.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr on the Sufi Garden

Seyyed Hossein Nasr is perhaps the most prominent Sufi scholar in the
West. Nasr was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1933 and moved to the United
States in 1945. He studied physics at MIT and geology and geophysics at
Harvard University and in 1958 detended a dissertation that became his
first book, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines. In 1958,
Nasr moved back to Iran to teach philosophy at Tellfan University and in
1974 helped found the Imperial Iranian Academy ofPhilosophy. In 1979,
Nasr left Iran for London and after several visiting academic appoint-
ments in 1984 became University Professor of Islamic Studies at George
Washington University. Nasr's book The Garden of Truth: The Vision
and Promise of Sufism, Islam 's Mystical Tradition "issues from the lived
reality of Sufism, the experience of Sufi spirituality, the alI-important
centuries-old oral tradition, and truths that are metahistorical."!6 ln this
section, 1 consider how Nasr's conception of Sufism relates to Deleuze's
conception of immanent ethics.
The impetus for this comparison arises, in part, because Deleuze's sup-
posed affinities to Sufism are at the heart of Peter Hallward's critique of
Deleuze in Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation.
According to Hallward, "Deleuze' s work tends to proceed broadly in
line with a theophanic conception of things, whereby every individual
process or thing is conceived as a manifestation or expression of God
or a conceptual equivalent of God."!7 Hallward reads Deleuze in light of
the Sufi mystic Shihab al-Din Yayhy al-Surhawardi (1154-1191), who
envisions an "imaginaI world" (alam al-mithal) that individual souls may
enter through a process of subtractive individuation, effectively the same
advice Deleuze gives about becoming imperceptible to reach the plane of
consistency. Hallward highlights these similarities to imply that Deleuze,
like al-Surhawardi (who was executed for heresy), is not "a thinker of
this world."!8 A more serious and sustained comparison, however, shows
 The Patilies of the Garden (pairidaeza) 133

Deleuzian ethics and Sufism are existential faiths that, though far apart on
important issues of doctrine and practice, could be close political allies
across the globe.
We may begin by noting ontological, ethical, and political resonances
between the work of Nasr and Deleuze. Nasr adopts Ibn 'Arabi's onto-
logical doctrine of wahdat al-wujud, the unity of being. This doctrine is
grounded in Qur'anic verses such as "Wherever you turn, there is the face
of God" (2: 115), and hadith, in which God states, through the Prophet,
"1 was a hidden treasure; 1 desired to be known. Therefore 1 created the
world so that 1 would be known." Nasr emphasizes God's presence in ail
things and repudiates readings of the textual sources-by rational theolo-
gians (mutakallimun) or salafis-that, from a Sufi perspective, overem-
phasize God's majesty to the detriment of His compassion. A strong ac-
count of dualism implies that there is a being other th an Absolute Being,
or God, which is impossible: "Every level of existence, ail that constitutes
the many levels of the universe, ail the creatures from the fish in the sea
to the birds of Paradise are nothing but the Self-Disclosure of God. As the
Sufis say, 'there is no one in the house but the Master of the house."'19
Although Deleuze draws upon ditferent authors and traditions, rarely cit-
ing Muslim authors,20 he too speculates that there is one plane of reality
on which everything transpires though human perception and cognition
may only reach certain strata of it: "At the Iimit, there is a single phyloge-
netic lineage, a single machinic phylum, ideally continuous: the flow of
matter-movement, the flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying
singularities and traits of expression. This operative and expressive flow
is as much artificial as natural; it is like the unity of human beings and
Nature" (ATP, 406). Both Deleuze and Nasr grapple with the mystery of
how one Being can manifest itself in multiplicity. In A Thousand Pla-
teaus, Deleuze explores this mystery using a naturalist, or more precisely
geological, account of the strata (and parastrata, epistrata, metastrata, and
so forth) ofreality. Nasr, alternatively, works within Ibn 'Arabi's account
of the Divine Presences that hierarchizes being into Hahut (the Supreme
Essence of the Divinity), Lahut (the level of the Divine Names), Jabarut
(the archangelic level), malakut (the imaginaI world), and nasut or mulk
(the terrestrial world).21 1 myself understand and am attracted to the De-
leuzian account more than the Sufi one. In The Garden of Truth, Nasr
explains why this may be the case: "The truth of the oneness of Being can
134 Chapter S/);

be fully known only by being experienced spiritually."22 Unless one actu-

ally lives and practices Sufism, there are Iimits to how far one can enter
its Weltanschauung. This point probably holds true across ail worldviews
and should thus infuse Deleuzian comparative political theory with hum il-
ity and respect for alternate ways of grasping and navigating the universe.
On the terrain of ethics, the Sufi ideas of annihilation (fana ') and
subsistence (baqa ') are remarkably similar to Deleuze's notions of deter-
ritoriaIization and reterritoriaIization. Sufis trace their ideas back to the
Qur'anic verse: "Everything upon the earth is undergoing annihilation,
but there subsists the face of your Lord, Possessor of Majesty and Gen-
erous Giving" (55:26-27). The goal of Sufi practice is to annihilate the
obstacles and impediments between oneself and God, to obliterate the ego
in order to reaIize one's true self and God. Nasr explains, "To be human
in the full sense is to be able to realize the Truth and become fully im-
mersed in its light. It is to be drawn so intimately into the bosom of the
Beloved that one could say with Rumi, 1 am no longer in this body or soul
but have 'become' the Beloved."23 As Hallward rightly notes, Deleuze's
philosophy is replete with advice to annihilate aspects of one's mind, un-
conscious, and body: for example, "how can we unhook ourse Ives from
the points of subjectification that secure us, nail us down to a dominant
reality?" (ATP, 160). And yet a comparison to Sufism highIights an as-
pect of Deleuze's philosophy that is missing from Hallward's account.
For Sufis, the highest stage on the path (tariqah) is not the intoxication
offana' but the sobriety after intoxication of baqa ': "In traveling to God,
the seekers undergo total transformation, but now they come back with
helping hands. They began as stones, they were shattered by the brilliance
of the divine light, and now they have been resurrected as precious jew-
els."24 Likewise, Deleuzian ethics may involve exploring the upper and
lower reaches of the universe, but it also entails bringing this heightened
and deepened awareness to changing the material world: "molecular es-
capes and movements would be nothing ifthey did not return to the molar
organizations" (ATP, 216-17). One could easily imagine productive con-
versations between Deleuzians and Sufis about techniques-for example,
chanting (dhikr) or music (sama ')--to perforate the bord ers of the ego and
overcome ressentiment.
On the political terrain, Nasr's notion of the philosophia perennis opens
up the prospect of respectful dialogue across philosophical and religious
 The Palitics afthe Garden (pairidaeza) 135

difference. The philosophia perennis holds that there is a Primordial

Tradition-"received through direct revelation when Heaven and earth
were still 'united"'-that is reflected in alliater traditions: "Each tradition
is marked by a fresh vertical descent from the Origin, a revelation which
bestows upon each religion Iying at the center of the tradition in question
its spiritual genius, fresh vitality, uniqueness, and the 'grace' that makes
its rites and practices operative."25 Speaking more concretely, Nasr ex-
plains that ditferent existential faiths today may enrich each other through
sacred art, profound religious doctrines, and human beings of deep spiri-
tuality. Unlike many secularists, Nasr thinks that the public sphere needs
more religious discourse and interaction rather than less, though Nasr
also shares the secularist concern with exclusivists who try to crowd out
ail other religious traditions, which, on Nasr's account, are also bearers
of revelation. Nasr's vision of deep, public, and respectful religious plu-
ralism resonates with that of William E. Connolly, a Deleuzian political
theorist who believes that "refashioning secularism might help to temper
or disperse religious intolerance while honoring the desire of a variety of
believers and nonbelievers to represent their faiths in public life."26 From
a Deleuzian perspective, there is nobility in Nasr's respect for and curios-
ity about other existential faiths.
Any ethical and political alliance between naturalists and theists, how-
ever, is bound to be fraught with tensions. On each of the points we have
just considered, Deleuze and Nasr differ. The famous tenth-century Sufi
Mansur al-Hallaj said, "1 am the Truth" (ana 'l-Haqq), and he paid for it
with his life. Ever since, Sufis have had to dispute the notion that they
are anything other than orthodox Muslims. The doctrine of the oneness of
being denies "that God is the world and the world in its totality is God,
a position held by pantheists. How could a metaphysics that speaks so
categorically of the transcendence of God be accused of pantheism?"27
Throughout his work, Deleuze registers debts to perhaps the most fa-
mously accused pantheist in modern European philosophy: Spinoza.
Deleuze himself explored themes that the vast majority of believers in the
Abrahamic religions consider heretical, including "a hermetic conception
of the potencies of lived creation, mathesis universalis, and regenerative
gnosis."28 When looking at the relations between Sufis and Deleuzians,
one should attend to the dissonances and also the harmonies between their
existential faiths.
136 Chapter Six

Regarding ethics, Nasr endorses the Sufi practice ofwalayah, the initi-
atic power of a master over a disciple: '"When a person wishes to embark
upon the path to the Garden, he or she must find an authentic spiritual
master in whom this power is present and receive through a rite that goes
back to the Prophet."29 Once a disciple has found an authentic master, his
or her job is to "submit completely."30 Perhaps problematically, Deleuze
advocates a notion of apprenticeship without adequately identifYing to
whom or what one apprentices. 31 Deleuze counsels: "Make a rhizome.
But you don't know what you can make a rhizome with, you don't know
which subterranean stem is effectively going to make a rhizome, or enter
a becoming, people your desert. So experiment" (ATP, 251). From a Sufi
perspective, Deleuze fails to see the importance offollowing a path (tariq)
to God. Deleuze, by contrast, opposes the "judgment ofGod" (from what-
ever religious tradition) that organizes and put Iimits on what humans
may think, feel, do, and so forth (ATP, 159). On the question of authority,
Sufism adheres to a premodern conception of spiritual authority, and De-
leuzian ethics advocates a modern, Romantic notion of autonomy.
Finally, Nasr emphasizes that Sufism presupposes that Islamic Jaw
(sharia) ought to govern the Islamic community. Sufism is a way of "do-
ing the beautiful" (ihsan) in addition to having faith (iman) and submitting
to the Law (islam)Y Sorne Sufis have been antinomians, or law-breakers,
but according to Nasr, "for Muslims the doing of God's Will on earth
begins with the practice of the Shari 'ah or Divine Law, which Islam
considers as the concrete embodiment of the Divine Will for its foIlow-
ers."33 Nasr is not a jurist, and his work focuses on cosmology, theology,
philosophy, and ethics rather than on overt political or legal topics. Fur-
thermore, there are many ways to interpret and implement sharia in the
modern Muslim world. 34 So it is hard to glean what Nasr envisions as a
sharia society. At the least, though, Deleuzians would be wary of any
conception ofIslamic law that establishes a dhimma system that punishes
or humiliates non-Muslims, particularly constituencies that fall outside of
the People of the Book (ahl al-kitab).35
In Sujism: A Global His tory, Nile Green raises severaJ points about
Sufism that a comparative Deleuzian political theorist ought to address. 36
First, twentieth-century European Muslims such as René Guénon (1886-
1951) and Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998) presented a version of Sufism
that made it seem Iike just another oriental religion of immanence (a
 The Po/itics o/the Garden (pairidaeza) 137

religio perennis, in Schuon's words). To generate a profound and mean-

ingful conversation, Deleuzians should interpret Sufism as the majority
of its adherents do, that is, as Islam, or more precisely, as the sunna of
the Prophet. Second, too often modern scholars of religion interpret Su-
fism through a Protestant lens that focuses on individual relations with
God rather than on community practices. If scholars attend to the history,
rather than merely the phenomenology, of Sufism, then they can see that
Sufis have often possessed great intellectual, social, economic, religious,
and political authority. This connects to the third point: Sufism, despite
the ways in which it may gamer the admiration of Deleuzians, has often
been a conservative, authoritarian, and anti-individualistic force in Mus-
lim communities. Finally, Sufism has suffered catastrophic setbacks in
the twenty-first century for many reasons, including the widespread belief
that Sutism has been partly responsible for Islam 's decline in the face
of growing European and U .S. power in the twentieth century. Even if
Deleuzians decide that Sufis represent their closest conversation partners
among Muslims, that does not mean that they necessarily hold much sway
within their communities.
While recognizing the complexity of Sufi doctrine and practice, Deleu-
zians may still agree with Nasr that Sutis can "play an important role in
bringing about understanding across religious borders"37 and thus consti-
tute valuable partners in promoting fruitful global pluralism.

Ayman al-Zawahiri on Loyalty and Separation

"The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or
the weed" (ATP, 7). Ayman al-Zawahiri (b. 1951)-a leading spokes-
man, polemicist, and ideologue for al-Qaeda38--exemplifies the worst
form of rhizomatic politics. Al-Zawahiri is not a trained Muslim scholar
('alim), nor does he speak for many Muslims around the world. But he
does draw upon and launch a dangerous line of flight from the Islamic
political thought regime of signs. 39 We now consider how the Deleuzian
framework can add nuance to academic and popular debates about how
best to respond to the al-Qaeda war machine.
The problem with couch grass is that: it threatens the diversity of the
garden. A tree kills difference by casting every other existential faith into
shadows, including through repressive state policies; a weed, by contrast,
 138 Chapter Six

spreads its roots horizontally making it impossible for other faiths to

find water and soil, intellectual and material sustenance. Garden politics
requires noble faiths to exercise vigilance on multiple fronts. Trees may
provide homes for healthy rhizomes: "there are anarchic deformations in
the transcendent system of trees, aerial roots, and subterranean stems"
(ATP, 20). Democratic majorities, powerful states, and monotheistic
religions can facilitate pluralism. Conversely, "there are despotic forma-
tions of immanence and channelization specific to rhizomes" (ATP, 20).
The qualities that distinguish rhizomes from trees-being acentered and
largely imperceptible-may facilitate microfascisms that breed social
conformity and destructive habits and policies (ATP, 214-15).
In December 2002, al-Zawahiri published an essay titled "Loyalty and
Separation: Changing an Article of Faith and Losing Sight of Reality" in
the Arab newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi. The essay interprets recent events
in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and the United States, but it also consti-
- tutes part of "the heart of the jihadist ideological corpus," particularly the
doctrine of al-wala wal-bara, whereby Muslims are loyal to each other
and separate from everyone else. 40
AI-Zawahiri's argumentative strategy in "Loyalty and Separation" has
four components. First, al-Zawahiri quotes a passage from the Qur'an,
such as the verse (5:51): "0 you who believe! Take not the Jews and the
Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and pro-
tectors to each other. And he among you that turns to them (for friendship)
is of them. Verity God guides not a people unjust."41 Then al-Zawahiri
cites an authority, su ch as Ibn Tamiyya (1263-1328), who interprets this
verse as follows: "The believers belong to the fellowship of God, and are
allied among themselves; the unbelievers are the enemies of God and of
the believers. God commanded Muslims to ally with one another, and
explained that this was an article of faith. "42 Next al-Zawahiri applies
this princip le to contemporary circumstances, asking rhetorically, for in-
stance, "What would Tabari, Ibn Hazm, and Ibn Tamiyya say ifthey saw
the forces of the Americans and their allies striking MusIims in Iraq from
their bases in the Gulf?"43 Finally, al-Zawahiri caBs for violence against
Islam's enemies: "Young Muslims need not waitfor anyone 's permission,
because jihad against the Americans, the Jews, and their allies, hypocrites
and apostates, is now an individual duty."44
 The Potilies of the Garden (pairidaeza) 139

One way to help dismantle the al-Qaeda regime of signs is to show

that Islamic political thought is more complex than al-Zawahiri indi-
cates. In this task, Deleuzians may promote the work of Muslim political
reformers such as Khaled Abou El Fadl, Abdullahi Ahmed An-'Na'im,
Fatima Mernissi, and Tariq Ramadan. In Western Muslims and the Fu-
ture of Islam, Ramadan describes the problem with literalist readings of
the Qur'an: "No trouble is taken to work out a reading based on critical
distance, contextualized interpretation, or determination of the meaning
of a verse in light of the message of the whole."45 Ramadan objects to
each step of al-Zawahiri's argument. The Qur'an contains many passages
promoting interreligious dialogue and cooperation, including the verse
(10:99): "If God had willed, He would have made you one community
but things are as they are to test you in what He has given you." Muslim
reformers may draw upon their own predecessors-including Jamal al-
Din al-Afghani and Muhammad' Abduh-to employa "dynamic relation
to the scriptural sources and a constant desire to use reason in the treat-
ment of the Texts in order to deal with the new challenges of their age
and the social, economic, and political evolution of societies."46 Muslims
may reject simplistic dualisms-such as between dar al-Islam and dar
al-harb-when thinking about European countries and the United States,
where Muslims are by and large free to practice their religion. And Mus-
lims may promote interreligious dialogue based on mutual respect rather
th an endorse the nihilist stance of al-Qaeda. For Ramadan, "One of the
best testimonies that a religious or spiritual tradition can give of itself lies
in acts of solidarity between its adherents and others."47
One advantage of Deleuze's concept of rhizomatic pluralism is that it
abandons the demands for cultural unity that can alienate Muslim con-
stituencies in Europe or the United States. In February 2004, al-Zawahiri
castigated the French law forbidding Muslim girls from wearing the Islamic
headscarves in state schools. 48 From both an ethical and a strategie perspec-
tive, Deleuzians will prefer to welcome Muslim constituencies in the West
in order to fashion alliances on more important issues than clothing. 49
Deleuzians should also encourage U.S. policymakers to fïnd a peaceful
resolution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In a 1983 article
called "The Grandeur ofYasser Arafat," Deleuze made prescient remarks
about the contemporary Palestinian situation. Deleuze notes that the Jews
140 Chapter Six

"suffered the greatest genocide in history," and yet the Zionist appropria-
tion of Palestine has inflicted evil upon an innocent people. Furthermore,
Israel has deliberately destroyed "aIl the occasions on which a solution or
element of solution was possible." The Palestinian people may disappear
by integrating into an Arab state or Islamic fundamentalism, "but this
wou Id be in such conditions that the world, the United States and even
Israel wou Id not finish regretting the lost occasions, inc1uding those that
still remain today."50 For Deleuze, the best prospect for Israel's survival is
to find a way to preserve Palestinian dignity and autonomy. If the world
is a garden, then sometimes flowers from other conlers can broker peace
between flowers competing on the same plot of land.
AI-Zawahiri's work starts from an Islamic point of reference but
launches into a line of "abolition pure and simple" (ATP, 229).5\ The
majority of al-Qaeda's victims are Muslims (inc1uding Shiites, Sufis),
Muslims deemed heretics or apostates, and innocent bystanders. 52 Deleuz-
ians can help combat the al-Qaeda regime of signs by collaborating with
critical Muslim scholars and supporting policies that cultivate positive
relationships between peoples of different faiths.

1 Abdolkarim Soroush on ReligiousDemocracy

Sufism is a welcome addition, and al-Qaeda a dangerous intrusion, to the
Deleuzian garden. How should Deleuzians proceed, however, with asser-
tive flowers of different faiths? That is, how should Deleuzians articulate
a foreign policy to approach political bodies that endorse a transcendent,
proselytizing morality but affirm the ideas of interfaith dialogue and co-
operation?
Take 'Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945), a leading Shiite political re-
former. Prior to the 1979 Iranian revolution, Soroush was influenced by
Ali Shariati, the Iranian sociologist and critic of "Westoxification" (in
Persian, gharbzadegi), and immediately after the revolution, Ayatollah
Khomeini entrusted Soroush to help restructure the Iranian universities,
inc1uding removing the Marxist presence. In the course of the 1980s and
1990s, Soroush became an internai critic of Iran' s political system-the
"guardianship of the jurist" (velayat al-faqih)--and argued for Muslim
versions of democracy and human rights. In the 2000s, Iranian authori-
ties and their proxies harassed Soroush-inc1uding physical assaults by
 The PotiNes of the Garden (pairidaeza) 141

Ansar-e Hezbollah-until he left the country. Currently, he is a visiting

scholar at the University of Maryland and widely considered one of the
most important public intellectuals in the world. 53 ln this section, 1 focus
on Soroush's concept of religious democracy as formulated in Reason,
Freedom, and Democracy in Islam.
Soroush lays the foundation for his political reflections through the
notion of the contraction and expansion (qabz-va-bast) of religious in-
terpretation. Soroush frames this notion using ideas from philosophers
of science, including Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, which he read as a
graduate student in London in the 1970s. The key idea is that "religion
is sacred and heavenly, but the understanding of religion is human and
earthly. That which remains constant is religion (din); that which un-
dergoes change is religious knowledge and insight (ma'refat-e dini)."54
According to Soroush, reason ('aql) and revelation (shar') complement
rather th an compete with one another. Revelation is eternal and reason
is the faculty of interpreting the teachings of religion. The teachings of
Islam do not change, but human understandings of these teachings do.
Muslim scholars once thought that Islam was compatible with slavery;
now, they realize that it is not. 55 Any Muslim religious scholar works
within a paradigm that has "a collective and dynamic identity and that
remains viable through the constant exchange, cooperation, and competi-
tion of scholars."56 Just as Western scientists reject the phlogiston theory
of combustion but still believe in science, Muslim scholars may reject
certain political appropriations of Islam and still remain Muslims. In fact,
a fallibilistic approach to Islamic political commitments best takes up the
Qur'anic injunction (39: 18) to hear ail and choose the best. 57
Soroush defends democracy and pluralism on epistemological grounds
to ensure that Muslims choose political and social policies that best ad-
vance the Islamic ends offreedom and justice. Democracy is a method "of
restricting the power of the rulers and rationalizing their deliberations and
policies, so that they will be less vulnerable to error and corruption, more
open to exhortation, moderation, consultation."58 Religious guardianship
entrusts decisions to one or a few individuals, who may not have access
to ail or much of the facts available in society at a given moment. De-
mocracy is the best available political procedure to incorporate the widest
range of perspectives. Likewise, Soroush thinks that Muslims inevitably
perce ive the world from different vantage points and the splintering of
142 Chapter Six

the Muslim community (Ul11l11a) into "seventy-two nations" is a blessing

rather than a curse: "Like wild flowers in nature, faith will grow and tlour-
ish wherever it wishes and in whatever fragrance and color it pleases. The
faithflll community is more like a wild grove than a manicured garden."59
Soroush's concept of religious democracy does place limits on what
kind offlowers are welcome in the garden: "Democratic religious regimes
need not wash their hands of religiosity nor turn their backs on God's ap-
proval. In order to remain religious, they, of course, need to establish re-
ligion as the guide and arbiter oftheir problems and conflicts."6o Soroush
emphasizes that in Muslim religiolls democracies, sharia will be the law
of the land and Islamic nonns will permeate society.

Throllgh protection of the outward appearances, the fragrance of religion

will reach even the weakest of nostrils and the faithful will gain a better
insight into their religious existence and identity. Pilgrimage to Mecca,
public prayers, and religious duties such as calling others to good deeds and
calling them away from evil are among the graceful actions that have su ch
blessed effects. 6 \

Soroush's religious democracy permits Shiite Muslims to elect leaders

and disagree with each other about Islamic principles of justice. Soroush
does not specify how minorities such as 8aha'is, Jews, or atheists fare
when the state and the public political culture express Shiite nonns.
A Deleuzian critique of Soroush could start with his appeal to the
conception of religious politics in Alexis de Tocqueville's Del110cracy in
America. Tocqueville's famous thesis is that American pluralism works
because virtually ail citizens share Christian mores: "Although religion
has no direct role in the government of the American society ... it should
be considered among the basic foundations of the political system of the
country."62 Soroush endorses this insight to formulate a Muslim demo-
cratic politics, officially secular but sustained by Islamic habits of the
heali and mind. Unfortunately, Tocqueville's conception of pluralism-
though admirable compared to more militant and dogmatic Christian
conceptions-justifies antagonism or indifference to non-Christians, such
as the Native Americans. 63 Soroush contests Western ideologies such
as Marxism, liberalism, and atheism that fight for external freedom but
that neglect the question of internai freedom: "Internai freedom can be
achieved only by the light of submission and through following the guid-
 The Po/ilies of the Garden (pairidaeza) 143

an ce of the divine messengers."64 Deleuze, by contrast, considers atheism

"philosophy's serenity and philosophy's achievement."65 Keeping the
precedent of Tocqueville in mind, one wonders how charitable Soroush
would be towards atheists if he were in charge.
But rhizomatic politics presupposes deep differences between ethical
visions. When interacting with other faiths, Deleuzians need thick skins
and capacious imaginations. There are multiple problems that confront the
global garden that need resolution before any conceivable rapprochement
between partisans of transcendence or immanence. AI-Qaeda. Nuclear
proliferation. Environmental degradation. In the short term, multiple con-
stituencies need to collaborate to protect the health of the garden. 66
Over the long term, diverse existential faiths may still respect one an-
other. Working within an Islamic universe of reference, Soroush presents
a vision of deep pluralism:

Those who have endured ebbs and tlows of the heart, avalanches of doubt,
clashes of belief, surges of faith, the violence of spiritual storm s, and the
plundering swell of visions that restlessly and ruthlessly assail the delicate
sanctuary of the heart understand that the heterogeneity of souls and the
wandering of hearts is a hundred times greater than that of thoughts, tasks,
limbs, and tendencies. 67

Soroush immediately qualifies this passage: "Belief is a hundred times

more diverse and colorful than disbelief."68 Soroush does not much elabo-
rate in Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam how Muslim pluralists
should reach out, if at ail, to hypocrites, unbelievers, Christians, or Jews.
But one could imagine that Soroush's theory of contraction and expan-
sion, and his defense of dissident perspectives in his native Iran, could
pave the way for a disposition of respect towards multiple existential
faiths, including naturalists. In comparison to his persecutors, Soroush
represents an openhearted and open-minded conversation partner.

THE POLITICS OF THE GARDEN (PAIRIDAEZA)

ln the summer of 2012, the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland,

hosted an exhibit titled "Paradise Imagined: The Garden in the Islamic
and Christian World." Through the exhibit, we learn that the pre-Islamic
 144 Chapter Six

Persian concept ofpairidaeza-an enclosed garden-inspired the Arabic

concept of firdaws, the Greek concept of parade is os , the Latin concept
ofparadisus, and much of the terminology we have used in this book. 69
It is also notable that the Epicureans-arguably Deleuze's earliest direct
philosophical ancestors-called their community on the outskirts of Ath-
ens "The Garden." Pointing out that multiple existential faiths use garden
imagery does not by itself solve political dilemmas. Instead, garden imag-
ery can broaden and deepen the conception ofpluralism that James Madi-
son articulated in his contributions to the Federalist Papers. According
to Madison, the way to prevent tyranny is to multiply centers of power;
likewise, Deleuze maintains that a flourishing garden will house multiple
constituencies and prevent any one of them from destroying the garden
through macropolitics (e.g., the state) or micropolitics (e.g., mores). De-
leuze presents a philosophical framework to think about pluralism, but
that still leaves real-world actors with the responsibility of enacting and
- participating within a political garden.
To illustrate this point, 1 now turn to the question of how Deleuzians
could collaborate with Muslims to protect the natural environment. 1 begin
with a reading ofSeyyed Hossein Nasr's "Religion and the Environmental
Crisis." ln this essay, Nasr makes a sensible argument for the origins of
and potential solutions to the ecological crisis: "The modem outlook is
based on fànning the fire of greed and covetousness."70 Historically and
even to sorne degree in the present, religion has served as a barrier to
covetousness. The Arabic virtue of rida-"contentment with our state of
being"-is one such barrier, but there are analogous virtues in Judaism,
Christianity, Buddhism, and other religious traditions. Only by appealing
to such virtues and traditions does one have a chance to assemble a large
enough force to stop the modern ideologies and practices that threaten to
destroy the planet's viability: "from a practical point ofview the only eth-
ics which can be acceptable to the vast majority, at the present moment
in the history of the world, is still a religious ethics."71 Only a religion
can exposit the rituals that make possible a vertical connection to the
cosmos or articulate a coherent doctrine of nature. Nasr's conception of
the philosophia perennis holds that a wide array of traditions-including
Eskimos, Australian Aborigines, Taoists, and Muslims 72·--can and need to
join coalitions to hait or reverse the ecological crisis. In Deleuzian terms,
to protect the health of the garden, in this case the natural environment,
 The Po/ilies of the Garden (pairidaeza) 145

one needs the help of many existential faiths, or flowers, and many of
them will be religious.
And yet at the end of his essay, Nasr takes aim at one faith that does
not quai ify as a traditional religion or as a worthy partner in an envi-
ronmental coalition: New Age. No one, to my knowledge, has called
Deleuzian ethics New Age. But Nasr's attack on New Age movements
performs collateral damage on naturalists who express gratitude for the
cosmos but do not believe in a Creator God: "In this New Age climate
the word 'cosmic' has gained a great deal of currency precisely because
of the dearth of an authentic religious knowledge of the cosmos in the
present-day world."73 Mainstream Western religious organizations-
Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox-"rightly oppose" these pseudo-
movements. 74 Why does Nasr confront New Age? Here, one touches
upon a profound difference between Nasr (and most Muslims) and De-
leuze (and most naturalists). The Qur'an calls Muhammad the "Seal of
the Prophets," "and, in fact, fourteen hundred years of history have con-
firmed Islam 's claim, for during ail the time there has not been another
plenary manifestation of the Truth like the ones that brought about the
births of Buddhism and Christianity, not to speak of the earlier major re-
ligions."75 The Qur'an names 25 prophets, and in a hadith, Muhammad
indicates that there have been 124,000 prophets, and thus, it is possible
that God sent prophets to, say, the Eskimos and Aborigines. But anyone
who claims to found a religion and be a prophet after Muhammad tells
a falsehood. In What ls Philosophy?, Deleuze differentiates the phi-
losopher and the prophet, philosophy and religion: "Whenever there is
transcendence, vertical Being, imperial State in the sky or on eatih, there
is religion; and there is Philosophy whenever there is immanence."76
The Qur'an states of the prophets, "We make no distinction between
any of them" (2: 136), because they ail recited the same truth about the
oneness of God. For Deleuze, on the contrary, philosophers have a right
and responsibility to generate new systems (or planes of immanence) to
filter order out of chaos. 77 There cannot be a seal to philosophy because
chaos is a problem that demands ever-new concepts. Deleuze and Nasr
are speaking past each other: Deleuze does not claim to be a prophet
or to vindicate prophecy. But anyone who claims to speak of Deus sive
Natura, as the Spinozist and then the Deleuzian philosopher does, could
be seen as entering the territory of prophecy.
146 Chapter Six

Here is one approach to invite Nasr to reconsider his theoretical and

practical dismissal of postrevelatory existential faiths. Nasr writes in The
Garden of Truth, "the traditional Islamic garden is an earthly reflection
of Paradise."78 As the exhibit at the Walters demonstrates, part of what
makes a traditional Islamic garden beautiful is the brightness and diver-
sity of the beings that it sustains. If what makes a garden exquisite is its
wealth of colors, scents, and textures, and if Muslims cultivate their gar-
dens to reflect Paradise, then might Nasr view Deleuzianism as an orchid
that makes the garden more beautiful and more Iike the Garden of Truth?
Just as Nasr views Eskimos and Taoists as potential allies without for a
moment doubting the veracity of his own faith, Islam, so might he view
naturalists as potential allies in poIicy arenas (such as protecting the air,
soil, and water around the globe) and respected competitors in describing
the cosmos? Deleuzians may pose these questions to Nasr and other senior
scholars, but the answers that matter are offered by younger generations
entering a multicultural, interconnected world who wish to cultivate in
beautiful ways the rhizomatic world we aIl already inhabit.

NOTES

1. John L. Esposito, The Future of Islam (New York: Oxford, 2010), 5.

2. Brooke Holmes, "Deleuze, Lucretius, and the Simulacrum of Naturalism,"
in Dynamic Reading: Studies in the Reception of Epicureanism, eds. Brooke
Holmes and W. H. Shearin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 316-42.
3. Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press,2012),176.
4. William C. Chittick, Sufism: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld,
2000),31.
5. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ed. William C.
Chittick (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2007), 44.
6. For an account ofhow translating Deleuze into Chinese may lead to a trans-
versal poetics that transcends the East-West binary, see Yu-lin Lee, "Translating
Deleuze: On the Uses of Deleuze in a Non-Western Context," Deleuze Studies
7, no. 3 (2013): 319-29. For an account of what Euro-American political theo-
rists should do when non-Westerners are not interested in an exchange of ideas,
see Nicholas Tampio, "What If the Pious Don't Want to Deliberate?" Political
Theory 42, no. 1 (2014): 106-18.
 The PoUlies of the Garden (pairidaeza) 147

7. Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton Readings

in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from AI-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 4.
8. Carool Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals
and the Study of Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 234.
9. See Fazlur Rahman, Islam & Modernity: Transformation of an Intellec-
tuaI Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Nasr Abu Zayd,
Reformation of Islamic Thought: A Critical Historical Analysis (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2006).
10. "The new Muslim intellectualism that has been investigated here has
found a more positive response in Indonesia than anywhere else in the Muslim
world" (Carool Kersten, Cosmopolitans and Heretics, 235).
Il. Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 210.
12. On the role of conjecture in comparative political theory, see Andrew F.
March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Searchfor an Overlapping Consensus
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
13. On Deleuze's approach to the history ofphilosophy-citing accurately but
arranging elements to say something new-see Gilles Deleuze, "Letter to a Harsh
Critic," in Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), 3-12.
14. In 2006, the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi gave a lecture in Alexan-
dria where he likened the Qur' an to a supermarket where one can take what one
likes. On the scandai this comment generated, see Carool Kersten, "Heretics,"
Critical Muslim 2 (2012): 101-22.
15. On the argument that "U.S. strategists have struck a common chord with
self-identified secular liberal Muslim reformers who have been trying to refash-
ion Islam along the lines of the Protestant Reformation," see Saba Mahmood,
"Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,"
Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006): 329. Mahmood's argument does not apply to
Deleuze or the Muslim thinkers discussed in this chapter. Deleuze is not a Prot-
estant (in doctrine or ethos), and his model ofpluralism promotes the flourishing
of multiple faiths around the globe. Nor do Seyyed Hossein Nasr or 'Abdolkarim
Soroush favor a Protestant conception of secular normativity.
16. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Practice of
Sujism, Islam 's Mystical Tradition (New York: HarperOne, 2007), xiii.
17. Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cre-
ation (New York: Verso, 2006), 4.
18. Ibid., 86.
19. Nasr, Garden of Truth, 50.
 148 Chapter SLY.:

20. Ibn Khaldun, author of the Muqadimmah, is one of Deleuze's main

sources on the relationship between bedouin (or nomads) and city-dwellers in A
Thollsand Plateaus (366, 481).
21. Nasr, Garden of Trllth, 49-50.
22. Ibid., 38.
23. Ibid.
24. Chittick, Sujism, 43.
25. Nasr, Garden ofTrllth, 22-23.
26. William E. Connolly, Why 1 Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999), 5.
27. Nasr, Garden of Truth, 40.
28. Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 209.
29. Nasr, Garden of Truth, 107.
30. Ibid., III.
31. William Behun, "The Body of Light and the Body without Organs," Sub-
- stance: A Review of TheOly & Literary Criticism 39, no. 1 (2010): 137.
32. Chittick, Sujism, 4.
33. Nasr, Garden of Truth, 97.
34. See Sadakat Kadri, Heaven on Earth: A Journey through Shari'a Law
from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
35. Abdullahi An-Na'im, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future
of Shari 'a (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
36. Nile Green, Slijism: A Global History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2012).
37. Nasr, The Garden ofTruth, xvi.
38. Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
(New York: Knopf, 2006), 38-68.
39. On how al-Qaeda ideologues depart from the Islamic legal tradition, see
Andrew F. March, "Anwar AI-'Awlaqi against the Islamic Legal Tradition," in
Islam, the State, and Political Authority: Medieval Issues and Modern Concerns,
ed. Asma Afsaruddin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 225-47.
40. Stéphane Lacroix, "Introduction: Ayman AI-Zawahari, Veteran of Jihad,"
in Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, eds. Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, trans.
Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 170.
41. Ayman AI-Zawahari, "Loyalty and Separation: Changing an Article of
Faith and Losing Sight of Reality," in Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, 210, 231.
42. Ibid., 214.
43. Ibid., 218.
 The Politics of the Garden (pairidaeza) 149

44. Ibid., 234.

45. Ramadan, Western Muslims, 205.
46. Ibid., 26.
47. Ibid., 212.
48. Stéphane Lacroix, "Introduction," 161.
49. At the same time, Deleuzians defend the right of Muslim women not to
veil. Amnesty International exhibits a Deleuzian characteristic by promoting
letter-writing campaigns to authorities in other countries that harass dissidents. In
other words, Deleuzians defend rhizomatic offshoots from cultures and traditions
on any corner of the globe.
50. Gilles Deleuze, "The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat," Discourse 20, no. 3
(1998): 30-34.
51. An al-Qaeda leader wrote in 2004: "The last months of al-Qaeda provide
the tragic example of a very poorly managed Islamic movement. Everyone knew
that their leader was leading them toward the abyss, indeed that he was leading
the entire country to its destruction, but they continued to carry out his orders"
(Cited in Kepel and Milelli, Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, 331).
52. "What is required of us in the ordinary, quotidian course of democracy? 1
think we are required to say something to the rogue, to the Muslim shehab ... :
'Marhaba' there is room enough for you, and' ahlan wa sahlan' you are among
your people here" (Anne Norton, "On the Muslim Question," in Democracy,
Religious Pluralism and the Liberal Dilemma of Accommodation, ed. Monica
Mookherjee [New York: Springer, 2011], 74). ft is valuable to expand the con-
ception of the democratic body to include multiple existential faiths, but for a
political community to survive it needs to police its borders and prote ct its cul-
ture, institutions, territory, and so forth. On "the art of caution," see ATP, 159-60.
53. On how Soroush criticizes political Islam, formulates his conception ofre-
ligious democracy, and contributes to a dialogue among civilizations, see Fred R.
Dallmayr, Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplmy Voices (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 167-84.
54. 'Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essen-
tial Writings of 'Abdolkarim Soroush, trans. Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 31.
55. Ibid., 127-28.
56. Ibid., 34.
57. Ibid., 100.
58. Ibid., 134.
59. Ibid., 143.
60. Ibid., 128.
61. Ibid., 147.
150 Chapter Six

62. Cited in ibid., 153.

63. William E. ConnoIly, The Ethos ofPluralization (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1995), 163-98.
64. Soroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam, 104.
65. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Ph ilosophy?, trans. Graham
Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),92.
66. At a minimum, democratic constituencies should practice "studied indif-
ference" to certain distasteful constituencies while collaborating with others. On
this virtue, see Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, passim.
67. Soroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam, 144.
68. Ibid., 144-45.
69. Melik Kaylan, "Heaven on Earth," Wall Street Journal, July 18,2012,05.
70. Nasr, Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 32.
71. Ibid., 33.
72. Ibid., 23.
73. Ibid., 38.
74. Ibid., 39.
75. Ibid., 54.
76. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 43.
77. Ibid., 42.
78. Nasr, Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr, xv.
 Conclusion

How is it possible for those enchanted by the idea of a Deleuzian moder-

nity to realize it? That is, how can A Thousand Plateaus shape contempo-
rary practice rather than serve, as Siavoj Zizek and others have warned,
as a celebration of drug use, capitalism, voyeurism, and other hedonistic,
individualistic practices? In a brilliant new book, The Herl71etic Deleuze:
Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal, Joshua Ramey pushes Deleuze "fmiher
in the direction of his own hermeticism" in order to "challenge the all-
pervasive magic of that confluence of desire and power Isabelle Stengers
once described as the great 'capitalist sorcery'" and "usher in a more
concrete and complex sense of how to engender new relations between
knowledge, power, and the spiritual forces of desire."1 Ramey invokes a
Deleuzian politics of sorcery to combat the black magic of capitalism and
to map a route to a utopian future. 2 Following Deleuze's advice to "go
further still" (ATP, 151), Ramey continues Deleuze's explorations of the
occult and the hermetic tradition. After reviewing Ramey's argument, 1
contend that Deleuzians ought to complement such effolis by translating
Deleuze's political vision into perspectives currently extant in pluralistic
democratic societies.

"LET'S GO FURTHER STILL ... "

In The Hermetic Deleuze, Ramey argues that Deleuze is an avatar of the

hermetic tradition. The hermetic tradition traces its roots to Hermes Tris-
megistus, a legendary Egyptian sage whose Corpus Hermeticum "otTers a
holistic vision in which the cognitive cannot be sundered from the affective
151
152 Conclusion

any more than can the natural from the spiritual, and where any genuine
increase in knowledge is tantamount to a transformation of the self."3 The
hermetic tradition seeks gnosis of the inner or secret truths of the cosmos;
promotes spiritual exercises to access this profound knowledge; and aims to
heal and regenerate individuals, communities, and the world. Renaissance
thinkers-including John Scotus Eriugena, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della
Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno--were "dark precursors" to Deleuze's phi-
losophy, constructing philosophies of immanence that Deleuze would study
to prepare his own system. Post-Kantian Romantic thinkers-including
Hegel, Schelling, Josef Hoëné-Wronski, and Francis Warrain-tumed to
the hermetic tradition for resources to combat the sterility of Enlightenment
reason. 4 And the nineteenth-century Italian doctor Johann Malfatti de Mon-
tereggio wrote a hermetic book, Mathesis, or Studies on the Anarchy and
HierarchyofKnowledge, for which a young Deleuze wrote the introduction
in 1946. Ramey argues that Deleuze's early fascination with the hermetic
tradition undergirds ail his later work:

For both Deleuze and the hermetic tradition generally, certain intense,
mantic, initiatory, ascetic, and transformative practices are necessary for
thought as much as for meditational or visionary experience. Conversely
... authentic thought is identified, beyond mere accumulation of cogni-
tions, with an expansion of the mind's ability to endure the intense modes
of perception and communication necessary for psychic reintegration and
cosmic renewal. Thought in this way might be defined ... as a regenerative
principle of natural and social development. 5

Deleuze's distinction within the hermetic tradition is his pragmatic and

experimental approach to the types of individual and collective exercises
required for esoteric gnosis.
Ramey shows that many of the key passages in Deleuze's oeuvre-
such as the description of the Body without Organs-may be interpreted
as hermetic. In his radio program, "To Have Done with the Judgment of
God," Antonin Artaud glimpsed "the contours of a body liberated from the
restrictions of habit, memory and societal expectations, a subtle or ethereal
body that would be capable of perceptions and sensations beyond the limits
of the organism as we know it."6 Deleuze pursued the question ofhow one
can reach this ethereal body accessible heretofore only to the mystic or
visionary. In addition to the exercise of reading books cheri shed by West-
 Conclusion 153

em academics, Deleuze also countenanced spiritual ordeals such "theurgy,

al chemy, kabbalah, astrology, divination ... transcendental meditation,
yoga, and tantra."7 For Deleuze, one must pursue knowledge through "in-
tense, mantic, initiatory, ascetic, and transformative practices" in order to
discover "as-yet-unrealized potentials of the mind and body."8 If the root
of ethics is from the Greek word ethoi (habits), then Deleuze expresses an
ethical vision of overcoming one's conventionallimits to reach new depths
and heights of experience: "At work is a deeply ethical program, in the
Spinozistic sense of ethics as an expansion of what a body can dO."9
What are the politics involved in Deleuze's revival of the hermetic tradi-
tion? Ramey holds that the question is impossible to answer decisively be-
cause we live in a society where capitalists, theologians, and even critical
theorists have waged a successful war against sorcerers, witches, and other
students of the occult. A theme in the hermetic literature is that a revolu-
tion is necessary to arrive at a utopian future. The Corpus Hermeticum,
for instance, prophesies the faB of Rome, the revival of Egypt's ancient
religions, and a renewal "of an 'enchanted' cosmos, in which humans will
once again be able to commune freely and directly with the divine through
intimate relations with nature."IO More recently, D. H. Lawrence in The
Plumed Serpent gleans in the book of Revelation a vision of an immanent
eschaton that destroys the old worId and weIcomes the new: "As opposed
to the sedate, mystical and 'aristocratic' perspective goveming the love-
message of the Gospels ... John ofPatmos's is an angry voice, the voice of
the resentful masses calling for the destruction of the world. But Lawrence
notices, beneath the caBs for universal destruction, 'flashes throughout
the first part of the Apocalypse oftrue cosmic worship.'''ll Responding to
Peter Hallward's charge in Out of This World that Deleuze is indifferent
to concrete social change, Ramey emphasizes that a Deleuzian revolution
discloses new aspects of human nature and the cosmos in order to heal the
world. Deleuze offers a "spiritual metapragmatics, one that might outline
a posthuman or transhuman future along archaic lines of spiritual ordeaI.
Such a thought traces a path toward the identification of immanence with
an eschatological endgame of cosmic scale."12 For Ramey, the best way to
extend Deleuze's project is to pursue hermetic investigations for how to
accelerate the process of utopian revolution.
Ramey has provided Deleuzians a welcome service in elucidating
the backdrop to Deleuze's philosophy and pointing out ways it can be
154 Conclusion

redeployed in new spiritual ordeals. There are reasons, however, that De-
leuzians ought to complement Ramey's work (and others like it l3 ) with
a more pluralistic political theory. It is highly unlikely in the foreseeabJe
future that many people will make the empiricist conversion (convertio)
towards Deleuzian ethics. Deleuze invites us to discover "the world with its
'possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to
new modes of existence, c10ser to animaIs and rocks. "'14 1 would be happy
if many people were willing to consider, experiment with, and respect prac-
titioners of animistic ethics. But politics requires collaborations with people
of different existential faiths. Any sort of realistic utopia requires that we
broker peaceful relations between Epicureans, Jews, Christians, Muslims,
Hindus, pagans, and other global constituencies. This thesis also comports
with Deleuze's conception of rhizomatic politics that wards off any attempt
by one constituency to seize control of the garden, including in the name of
a Deleuzian ethics of radical immanence.

TRANSLATING DELEUZE'S POLITICAL VISION

In this book, 1 have pursued the question ofwhat politics would look Iike
if it were modeled on the image of a garden rather than a tree. This assign-
ment has involved articulating a Deleuzian existential faith, determining
how to reach out to other existential faiths and discerning whether other
existential faiths pose a threat or an opportunity for alliance. 1 now wish to
argue that a good way to bring Deleuze's political vision c10ser to actual-
ity is to translate it into other vernaculars.
Christina Beltran shows how this may be done in her recent book, The
Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation ofIdentity. 8eltran's
object of inquiry is the politics of Latinidad, "the sociohistorical process
whereby various Latin American national-origin groups are understood as
sharing a sense of collective identity and cultural consciousness."15 Bel-
tran begins her study by noting that as of 20 10 there were approximately
45 million Latinos in the United States and that by 2050 Latinos could
compose about a quarter of the U .S. population. Many commentators
use the image of a sleeping giant to describe the Latino population in the
United States, and many Latino political elites see the strategic, emotive,
and experiential advantages to using this metaphor. If Latinos see them-
 Conclusion 155

selves as possessing a shared identity-defined by a common place of

origin, religion, language, class-consciousness, patterns of discrimination,
or something else-then the community may most effectively represent
its interest on the national stage once it is suitably roused.
ln other words, many Latino political elites embrace the arboreallogic of
diversity within unity. Many Latino political elites tacitly endorse Hobbes's
notion of a Leviathan, or artificial person, subsuming ail differences among
political subjects in a community and Rousseau's notion that democratic
politics must be primarily participatory rather than deliberative in order to
express the general will (rather than the contentious wills of individual sub-
jects). In various ways and at different degrees oftheoretical sophistication,
most Latino political elites cannot shake the assumption that Latinos must
unifY on a common trunk to be an effective political force.
Although Beltran acknowledges the value of shared identities and prin-
ciples, she also identifies limits and problems of identitarian logic. The
Latino sleeping giant, on her account, has not awoken because it cannot:
Latinos are too diverse to sustain any strong c1aim of shared identity.
Furthermore, such demands cause their own exclusions and harms. Take
Chicana feminists: "In challenging traditional gender relations, many
Chicana activists were accused of being lesbians, 'white identified,' nar-
cissistic, and antifamily."16 Although some Puerto Rican groups, such as
the Young Lords, challenged traditional gender nonns, other groups, such
as the Crusade for Justice and the Brown Berets, "sought to unite them-
selves politically around a shared cultural identity that too often conflated
culture with patriarchal norms."17 The problem with patriarchal groups
is not sim ply with leadership, membership, or c1aims of any particular
organization. The deeper problem is that the Latino community has not
found a philosophical framework to envision politics as something other
than becoming or dominating a tree.
Beltran explores how Deleuze's concept of the rhizome may help gen-
erate such a vocabulary.18 Rather than adhere to an arboreal conception
of Latinidad that emphasizes unity, hierarchy, subordination within the
group, and cultural maintenance, Beltran invites publics and theorists to
see themselves as multiple flowers within a diverse garden.

Rather than presuming the existence ofa taproot, we should understand Latino
pan-ethnicity as a process of connections and interactions .... Latinidad's
156 Conclusion

multiplicity is rhizomatic, a practice of identity capable of proliferating in

unexpected places. Understood as a form of action, Latinidad has no fixed
center-it can start up new Hnes from where it was once broken or shattered.
Random and proliferating, a rhizomatic reading of Latino pan-ethnicity finds
value in its capacity to be decentered, opportunistic, and expansive. 19

Beltran do es not discuss how Deleuze develops this concept in a meta-

physical account of reality with multiple layers, poles, flowers, and
processes; nor does she elaborate Deleuze's conception of ethics that
encourages subjects to experiment with their limits so that they may
deepen and widen their experiences and sources of joy; nor does she try
to explain how a Deleuzian assemblage may form a political assemblage
strong enough to smash capitalism. Beltran does not rule out this type of
scholarship or activism, but she does not make it a necessary condition for
spreading Deleuze's ideas throughout the Latino community.
In a beautiful passage, Beltran explains why Latinos may embrace the
concept of the rhizome and incorporate it into their own political thinking.
The concept of rhizomatic Latinidad seems to capture

the current proliferation of Latino politics and poIitical identities emerg-

ing across the country: undocumented Guatemalan labor activists living in
North CaroIina; Puerto Rican Libertarians attending college in New Jersey;
young Chicano environmentalists attending Morrissey concerts in Los An-
geles and supporting Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary; Ni-
caraguan evangelicals supporting conservative ballot initiatives in Florida;
Mexican American senior citizens registering voters in Colorado; queer
Cuban radicals campaigning for Barack Obama in New York. 20

Here, we see-using examples tailored to a particular time and place-

the appeal of Deleuze's political vision. Beltran points to Latinos work-
ing on presidential campaigns on the macropolitical level, but she also
spotlights the micropolitical practice of attending the concert of an
openly homosexual musician. Beltran portrays the excitement on mul-
tiple registers (cognitive, perceptual, affective, and so on) of forging
connections across difference, but she also notes that rhizomatic politics
welcomes constituencies (e.g., evangelicals) that may despise Deleuzian
ethics and pluralistic politics. Beltran uses the concept of the rhizome
to explain better the persistent phenomenon of Latinos failing to cohere
into a unified political force. But this theoretical clarification serves the
 Conclusion 157

purpose of opening up a politics that nurtures many different ways of

life, including Deleuzian ones that have hitherto been persecuted and
marginalized. Politics is an ongoing process of human and nonhuman
actants changing the world. Deleuzians may facilitate this process in
a fruitful direction by conjecturing how other existential faiths may
endorse the contours of a rhizomatic politics that allows Deleuzians to
experiment in peace.

NOTES

1. Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 8-9.
2. See also Joshua Ramey, "Deleuze, Guattari, and the 'Politics ofSorcery,'"
Substance: A Review of TheOly and Literary Criticism 39, no. 1 (2010): 8-23.
3. Ramey, Hermetic Deleuze, 3.
4. See also Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy:
From Kant to Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
5. Ramey, Hermetic Deleuze, 5.
6. Ibid., 90.
7. Ibid., 27.
8. Ibid., 5, 2.
9. Ibid., 149.
10. Ibid., 4.
Il. Ibid., 104.
12. Ibid., 218.
13. See also the essays discussed in Joshua Ramey and Paul A. Harris, "Spiri-
tual Politics after Deleuze: Introduction," Substance: A Review of Theory and
Literary Criticism 39, no. 1 (2010): 3-7.
14. Ramey, Hermetic Deleuze, 21.
15. Cristina Beltnin, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation
of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
16. Ibid., 48.
17. Ibid., 54.
18. Beltnin 's work challenges the Caesarist tendencies pervasive in Latin
American/Hispanic political thought. See Diego A. Von Vacano, The Color of
Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American/Hispanic Political Thollght
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
19. Beltnin, Trouble with Unity, 167.
20. Ibid., 168.
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 Index
abstract machine: and assemblages,
49-50; and conceptual system, 4,
49; and faciality, 87; and human
nature, 63--68, 73n8; and language,
126-27; and nature, 90; and sex,
84, 1 15; and war mach ine, 81; left
as, 49-50
actual. See virtual
al-Hallaj, 135
al-Qaeda, 17, 137-40
al-Zawahari, Ayman, 137-40
alloplasticity, 57-59, 63
Amnesty International, 149n49
An-'Na ïm, Abdullahi Ahmed, 139
Anderson, Elizabeth, 83
Anti-Oedipus: and A Thousand
Plateaus, xix, 12; and Freudianism,
61
Arendt, Hannah: and civic
republicanism, 32-34; Deleuzian
response to, 43-45; on the
political, 5
Artaud, Antonin, 152
assemblages: and human nature, 65;
and left poIitics, 49, 50, 110
atheism, 121n21, 143
Augustine, 58
169
Badiou, Alain, 39
becoming-animal, 33,47,90-91,94,
107
becoming-revolutionary, 82
becoming-woman, 115
Beltran, Christina, 154-57
Bennett, Jane, 33, 55-56
Bergson, Henri, 47
Bergsonism: and human nature, 73n8;
and intuition, 21 n53
Berkeley, George, 9
body without organs: and ethics,
11-12, 104; and human nature, 61,
62, 69; and politics, 11-12, 14; and
reason, 36; and the Earth, 57; as
hermetic, 152-53
Boyle, Robert, 92
Brai dotti, Rosi, 114-15
Bryant, Levi, 56
Buchanan, Ian, 2
cartography, II
Chomsky, Noam, 66
Christianity: and Habermas, 35,46;
and Islam, 138, 145; and language,
8; and MacIntyre, 28-29; and Mill,
107, 113; and Nussbaum, 90; and
170
Taylor, 37-38; and Tocqueville,
142-43; civic republicanism:
critique of, 32-34; recuperation of,
43-45
communism: critique of, 38-39;
recuperation of, 48-51
comparative political theory, 125-30,
134, 147
Connolly, William E., xxiii; and
Nietzsche, 33-34; on capitalism;
on democratic virtues; 45-46;
on micropolitics, 68; on post-
Darwinian evolutionary biology,
75n21; on refashioning secularism,
135; on religion, 121n21
constructivism, 10-13
democracy: and human nature, 68-72;
and Islam, 140-43; Mill on,
108-12; of objects, 56; Soroush on,
141-42; Spinoza on, 70-71
deterritorialization, 7, 1 17
Difference and Repetition, 2
dramatization, 13
drugs, 12, 15, 104
ecological crisis, 144-46
Empiricism and Subjectivity, 6, 55
Epicurean ethics, 57, 101-5
Epicurus: and animaIs, 90; and
mortality, 129; and the garden,
144; tradition of, xix, 8, 124
equality: and animaIs; and gender,
113-15; and the left, 48-51
Esposito, John, 124
ethics of immanence, 124-25, 154
etymology, 7-8
Euben, Roxanne, 128
faciality, 87, 106-7
fascism, 39, 139
Index
feminism: and liberalism, 112-15;
and the social contract, 82-85;
Chicana, 155
Flathman, Richard, 100, 119
Foucault, Michel, on Deleuze, xix-xx;
on theory and practice, 6
Freedom: human, 60, 66; political, 70
Galston, William, 41
genius: Kant on, 16; Mill on, 105-6
God: conception of in ATP, 57-58,
104; Mill on, 102; Spinoza on, 70
Green, Nile, 136-37
Guattari, Félix, as co-author of ATP,
18n7
Habermas, Jürgen, on postsecularism,
34-36; Deleuzian response to,
45-46
Hallward, Peter, 132, 134, 153
Hanafi, Hasan, 129, 147n14
Hardt, Michael. See communism
harm princip le, 106
headscarves, 139, 149n49
Hegel: and Taylor, 47; on philosophy,
4,8
hermeticism, 135, 151-54
Hobbes: and the modern Constitution,
92; on Leviathan, 155; on the
social contract, 79, 82
Holocaust, 31
human nature, 55-76; and politics,
68-72; and stratification, 57-63
Hume, David: and empiricism, 9; on
human nature, 55, on imagination,
10-11
Ibn 'Arabi, 133
Ibn Khaldun, 148n20
Ideas,5
images, 8-9
 Index \7\

individu al ity, 105-7 macro- and micro-politics, 5-6,

Iranian revolution, 140 67-68, 144, 156
Iraq war, 32 Madison, James, 71, 111-12, 144
Islam, 124-50 majorities, m inorities, and m inority-
Islamic modernism, 128 becomings, 109-10
Islamism, 128, 130 Marx, 117, 118. See alsa communism
medieval political philosophy, 30-31
joy as criterion, 12, 22n59, 26, 69, Mill, John Stuart: on democracy,
81-82, 85, 91, 101 108-12; on feminism, 112-15; on
Judaism, 129 individuality, 105-7; on socialism,
jurisprudence, 1 10-11 116-119; on utilitarianism, 101-5
MiIIs, Charles, W., 85-88
Kant, Immanuel, 1, 10, 16-17; and
modernity, xix-xxi, 4-5, 24
liberalism, 100; on race, 86; on
molar and molecular, 12-13
reason, 103; on social contract, 78;
multiculturalism: critique of, 36-38;
on will, 66
recuperation of: 46-48
Kauffman, Stuart, 57
multitude. See communism,
Kersten, Carool, 129-30
assemblages
Khomeini, Ayatollah, 140

Language: as human capacity, 60; as Nasr, Seyyed Hossein: on

incorporeal entity, 66-67 environmental crisis, 144-46; on
Latinidad, 154-57 Sufism, 132-37
Latour, Bruno, 91-95 Negarestani, Reza, 130
Lawrence, OH, 153 Negri, Antonio, xx-xxi. See also
left, the, 48-51 communism
Lenin: as abstract machine, 49, 50, neoconservatives, 32, 52n21
66; on vanguard, 38-39 New Age, 145
liberalism: and Spinoza, 66-72; Nietzsche and Philosophy, 101
perfectionist vs. political, 119. See Nietzsche, Friedrich: MacIntyre on,
also democracy, Flathman, Mill. 28-29; on aphorism, 13-14; on
liberty, 48-51. See also Mill Apollo and Dionysus, 5, 10, 65;
Locke, John, 78,95 on etymology, 8; on genealogy of
Logic of Sense: and Epicurus, 102; morality, 41-42; on laissez aller,
and Plato, 24 104; on philosophy, 40; on religion,
logic, 25-27 70; on the soul hypothesis, 56; on
Lucretius, 10 1; on religion, 70; on the state, 80; Strauss on, 3 l, 37
stratification, 57 nomads,42
Norton, Anne, 149n52
MacIntyre, Alasdair: Thomism of, Nussbaum, Martha: on liberalisrn,
28-29, 37; Deleuzian response to, 119; on Mill, 112-13; on
40-41 nonhuman animaIs, 88-91
172
Oakeshott, Michael, 51 n4, 74n 19
Obama, Barack, 88
pairidaeza, 144
Palestine, 139-40
pantheism, 135
Pateman, Carole, 82-85
Patton, Paul, 110-11
philosophia perennis, 134-35, 137,
144
Plato: and Habermas, 35; and Ideas,
5, 49; and metaphysics, 6, 8; and
Strauss, 30; overtuming, xix, 24
pluralism: and right of exit, 41;
arboreal, 25-39; civic republican,
32-34,43-45; communist,
38-39,48-51; image of,
24-54; multicultural, 36--38,
46-48; Nietzschean, 29-32,
41-43; postsecular, 34-36,
45-46; religious, 28-29, 40-41;
rhizomatic, 39-53
political theory canon, 16--17
politics of sorcery, 16, 43-45, 151,
153
portrait, 10
postsecular political theory: critique of
34-36; recuperation of, 45-46
pragmatics, 127
prophecy, 129
psychoanalysis, 61-62, 69
Qur'an: and Sufism, 133-34; on
best community 125; on hearing
ail and choosing the best, 141;
on Jews and Christians, 138; on
Muhammad, 145; on prophets, 145
race, 85-88
Ramadan, Tariq, 139
Index
Ramey, Joshua, 16, 151-54
Rancière, Jacques, 74n 12
Rawls, John: on a political conception
of justice, 54n72; on social
contract, 78-79. See a/sa reason
reason: and imagination, 6; Aristotle
on, 104; Deleuze on, 36, 100;
Flathman on, 100; Habermas on,
16,35-36,45,68; Hegel on, 4;
hermetic tradition on, 152; Kant
on, 10, 78, 103; MacIntyre on, 28;
Mill on, 106; Muslim reformers
on, 139; Nussbaum on, 90; Rawls
on, 16, 68, 78; Soroush on, 141;
Spinoza on, 70-71
regime: of signs, 126-31; political,
84-85
relativism, 43, 96
religious democracy, 141-43
revolution: Deleuze on, 15, 50, 69;
hermetic tradition on, 153; Lenin
on, 38-39; Mill on, 117
rhizome: al-Qaeda as, 17, 137; and
Latinidad, 155-57; and the social
contract, 77-99; as image of
pluralism, 25-54,71-72, 112, 121,
136-39, 143; right-Nietzscheanism:
critique of 29-32; recuperation of:
41-43
Romanticism: and Deleuze, 73, 136;
and Deleuze and Mill, 107, 110;
and Mill, 104
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 155
Rumi,134
salafism, 128, 130, 133
schemata, 9-11, 14-15
Schm itt, Carl, 45
sharia, 136, 142
Shariati, Ali, 140
 Index
Shiism, 126, 128, 140-43
social contract: 77-99; and Kant,
78; and Locke, 78, 79, 82, 95;
and messy politics, 95-96; and
nonhuman animais, 88-91; and
plants and minerais, 91-95; and
race, 85-88; and women, 82-85;
elements of, 78-79; Filmer and,
82; Hobbes on, 79, 82; in AT?,
79-82; Rancière on, 96n2; Rawls
on, 78-79; Rousseau on, 79;
Waldron on, 77
socialism, 116-19
Soroush, 'Abdolkarim, 140-43
sovereignty, 50
Spinoza, xxii, 12, 124; and prophecy,
145; on liberal democracy, 68-72;
on natural right to persist, 81;
on what a body can do, 60, 153;
pantheism of, 135. See also joy as
criterion
States. See war machines
Stengers, Isabelle, 151
stratoanalysis, 9-10
Strauss, Leo: as right-Nietzschean,
29-32; on political philosophy,
20n44; Deleuzian response to,
41-43
subjectivity: and sex, 114; and social
contract theory, 83; as stratum, 62
Sufism, 128, 132-37
173
Taylor, Charles: on multiculturalism,
36-38; Deleuzian response to,
46-48
teleology, 103
territory, 7, 12
Thomism: critique of 28-29;
recuperation of: 40-41
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 142-43
transcendental empiricism, 9, 104
translation, 154-57
unconscious, 61
utilitarianism, 101-5
utopia, 13, 151, 153, 154
Van Gogh, Vincent, 1, 17
virtual: and abstract machine, 64;
and humans, 73; and Ideas, 5;
and philosophy, 21 n53; level of
politics, 16-17
virtues, 45-46, 150n66
Waldron, Jeremy, 77
Walters Art Gallery, 143
war machines, 17, 79-82
Wolin, Sheldon, on political theory, 1,
6; on postmoderns, 16-17
Woolf, Virginia, 115
Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, 128
Zizek, Slavoj, 117, 151
 About the Author

Nicholas Tampio is Associate Professor of Political Science at Ford-

ham University. He earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University
and has taught at the University of Virginia, George Mason University,
and Hamilton College. He is the author of Kantian Courage: Advanc-
ing the Enlightenment in Contemporary Political Theory (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2012). He has also published articles in
journals such as Deleuze Studies, Political Theology, Political Theory,
and Theory & Event.

175