Marx as Ally: Deleuze outside Marxism,Adjacent Marx

Aldo Pardi Université Lille III

Translated by Daniel Richter

Abstract

Deleuze reworks Marxist concepts in order to identify those thatrepresent discontinuity and produce a theory of revolution. Marx isimportant because, along with Spinoza and Nietzsche, he is a part ofa project to leave behind concepts such as transcendence and univocitywhich underlie the totalitarianism of traditional philosophy. Deleuzeis looking for concepts that might form a different theory, withinwhich the structures of production are not organised vertically bythe domination of universal concepts, such as ‘being’ or ‘essence’,but flow horizontally through a multiplicity of relations of conceptualsingularity. The production of a different series of concepts is astrategic and tactical operation that, in confronting prior notions oftranscendental philosophy, turns philosophy itself into a battlefield.Marx provides the general methodology for this tactical approachthrough two fundamental categories: production and conflict. Deleuzepractises Marx’s theoretical method and by using Marx’s own centralconcepts challenges traditional Marxism, to arrive at a totally differentand revolutionary philosophical structure based on concepts such asthose of force, variation, difference, singularity, production and the warmachine.

Keywords: Conflict, production, forces, linking, battlefield, substance,immanence, transformation

Marx is at our side. That is to say, to reconstruct a thought worthy of apossible revolution means to cross the threshold of Marx. He has alwaysbeen thought of as the eldest brother who, representing the beginning ofa lineage, assigned and distributed roles and positions within a familytree. Half-father and half-mother, Marx was the reference necessary

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and sufficient to recognize oneself, to define oneself in relation to anidentity. Marx was at the same time a space of thought and a fieldof activation, the precursor who had already accomplished in advanceall the events brought about in his name. He was the first projectionof the origin, the necessary process of history, and the identity of themotor which pushed it onward. Each event related to Marxism was,and presented itself as, the accomplishment of a potential which historyhad until then kept hidden within its folds. Marx therefore himselfcontained that potential, as an iconographic image of the general formof thought. But what thought? What thought did Marx incarnate? Thelineage that the Marxist tradition always wished to attain in makingof Marx the first son of a revolution already present and given in itsideational terms: consumption as necessary passage, but so determined,between production and appropriation, and the motor which poweredthe two moments which accomplished each other. The first was called‘natural dialectic of need and consumption’, or ‘nature’. The other wasdenominated ‘subjectivity’. Nature is a dialectic process that circulatesinside of a network of organic functions organised inside of a superiorsystem, the corporeal organism. Production appears as an exteriorapplication of its biological articulations, in their turn the formationof one sole model. This model remains the accomplished figure ofthe natural character of the organism and does not ideally guide itsmanifestations.

The continuity that links function to satisfaction is guaranteed byneed. Need is the a priori form which gives to function its structure,the direction for its undertakings, the sense of each cogwheel whichconstitutes its mechanism. Need is the carving tool that gives to thething the image of a function, in rendering consumption a continuallabour of recuperation and incorporation. It is the motor which pushesfunction beyond itself. It discovers itself in the mirror where the bodywill coincide with the body of nature. The natural organism is natureitself in the expression of its accomplished totality, form actualised bythe resolution already foreseen in its cracks. Nature is not a substrate,a ‘hyle’, to speak like Husserl, but is the sole content, the ontologicalhorizon that presides over the existence of every phenomenon.

Nature projects itself forward from itself. As positional signifier andthetic signified, it is ‘Subject’. It devotes itself to the centring of thecircuits which find their necessity in the form they accomplish. Each ofthem is a variant of the logic of identity which reshuffles nature upon itsbody. Its homogeneity affirms itself through the centrifugal movementof extrusion that activates it. Its contents are nothing other than itself,

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a manifestation which never strays from its origin, for it recalls nothingother than the character which it already was. Nature is the principleof reason that governs all processes by unifying them. Its projectionsare the figures it assumes in expressing itself. Nature is the invisibleand the visible, a source which springs forth everywhere. This originarycore remains forever in its properties, and cannot surpass them becauseit has already brought them back to the interior of its intentionalities.Nature expresses itself in making of existents the signs of a supremesignifier which engraves the marks of one sole meaning. Objects reducethemselves to being the transcendental return of a general principle.There are processes of subjective totalisation everywhere. Once wesuppose the existence of a function related to a body, we also admit thepresence of its specular double, the thing, and their originary unity. Atthis point, it gives itself a subjective projection. Needs are always naturalneeds, even originary intentionalities, of the transcendental substanceof the principle. What differentiates the manifestations of nature is nottheir content, but their gradient of formalisation. We will find givenswhich are still embryonic, simple inferior moments of the dialectic whichactivates the passage towards a superior manifestation. We will be ableto trace an entire hierarchy of passage which makes the inorganic fallaway onto the organic, and from there to superior living forms, tospill eventually into the human, with its capacity for manipulation andmanagement, and its linguistic potential which is a sign of its proximityto the principle. Having attained the human, we installed ourselves atthe level of the totality. Human reason is only the enacted position oftranscendental contents which qualify the thetic constitution of nature.Man is the adequate expression of its lines of totalisation. Man is natureas given to itself, life as it is exploding forth, the transcendence ofreason which makes itself flesh. The body of man, his flesh, representshis intentional projection, which envelops beings, and his totalisationthanks to signifying links which intertwine. Man exercises his needsand works in order to consume: his productive activity is the identityof meaning and signification. For man, what happens in other naturalentities is not valuable in itself. The different manifestations of thehuman are not reference points of a complete signifying expression.Man and signifier are one. He is the model which serves as criterion forother living and non-living elements (for they are also the superior stageenvisaged by the non-organic). Man is the universal which is in the midstof living. His existence is totalisation because man synthesises in himselfthe identity between functions and things, and distributes them all alongsignifying chains. Functions and things do not indicate the collocation of

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the signifying chains in the pyramidal organisations which thought, andeven language, have at their summit.

In man the organism and the thing complete each other in a perfectidentity, assured by consumption. Consumption is the link which makesof any thing a human object: the other dimension, the other face, thesecond aspect, reversed, of the breaking forth of the life of man in acompletely human world. Consumption demonstrates that beings areonly pieces of the enlarged universe of humanised nature, that is to say,of complementary modules of a milieu which does not exist if not asa human signifier. They are managed and distributed according to theorder of signification which emerges from its projections, declinations ofa universal principle which proffers itself in its acts.

Once man has been mentioned, we are directly addressing society.The totalisation of nature in the human anticipates a definition of manas a general collectivity, a global horizon of human characteristics andtheir intentional contents, an extensive milieu which invests the entirespace of existence. Society is the human in its totalisation. It holds in allits partitions the same adequation between thetic signifier, significationand meaning. Once again, it is the circuit of consumption that takes onthe value of logical sequence which strings together the active tensionof social subjectivity with all the forms which constitute the lines ofsense. The process of assuaging that fashions beings in the blast furnacesof human expression causes the piercing cry of totalitarian reason toresound. Each being is the song which glorifies its perfection; each thingis a sign which indicates it; all movements are signals which indicate it,the rays of one sun which recall its source, light.

In nature, only the interior exists. The form and actualisation ofthis absolute interior is consumption. The subject is a total subject,constituting inasmuch as it is capable of appropriation. Man realiseshis materialisation at the level of transcendent principle because he isby definition the being who has needs and thus speaks and works. Hesatisfies his needs as it is given that his acts are the universal origin whichtotalises itself as society. He comes a priori from a general social milieuthat represents rational value. We can thus say that a thought of theindividual as such is impossible. Every time an attempt was made toreconstruct humanity from man in shared milieus by glances met fromfar away, it was discovered, at times with horror, that the human was aconcept which has society as its form. However, what is more importantis that this human society is regulated, which is to say managed, in oneway or another. The universal rationality which displays the essenceof the human spreads its manifestations about according to an order.

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Society, which does not represent acts, finds in itself the logic thatallows production to attain its ends. Society is always rational, even inits dysfunctions. It moves in forced conduct which forcibly drags thesignifier to meaning.

Human society is a transparent collectivity that governs itsmanifestations while containing within itself the identity between actionsand significations. This is the heritage that Marxist thinkers, amongothers, wished to claim. Need/production and subject/society is the gridthat realised the circulation of the ontological principle in its forms, andthe schema which gave an accomplished definition of the transcendentalcoordinates of the existent. Marxism was the conception which couldbring thought to its goal by ending the problem of history. It wentbeyond the limits of bourgeois thought which, stuck in its divisions anddichotomies, did not succeed in holding the four together, as the woodenlegs of a theory of universal history, adequate to its object.

But again, what thought? And why was history a problem forthought? Once again these questions remained open, but unasked. Infact, they were the same which invested the famous ‘adversarial’ field. Ifthis thought was essential to the philosophy of Marx, its ends were notto be distinguished from those of other philosophies. Surely it was a stepforward in relation to them. However, the categories, the theoreticalstructures and the conclusions inhabited the same terrain. The grid ofhistory targeted by Marxism also marked non-Marxist thought. Thecircularity that linked need, production and thing, and the historicalprocess of subjectification which one could pull from them, were thepoints of departure of all the theories which made of the position of atranscendental form the fundamental task of a possible ontology.

We can construct the passages of this strategy of conquest,this imperial campaign of thought directed by exceptional strategicintelligences. We could start with the Platonic partition of the fourgenres of knowledge, which found the asymmetrical equilibrium ofall that is by organising it into a hierarchy between matter and idea.We could continue with Aristotle, who made of the accomplishing ofsouls, through their productive activation, the articulation of a universalsubstance having the same quality of realness. We can follow that withAugustine, who understood that time was the movement of totalisationwhich allowed need to jump beyond the finite and establish itself directlyin the universal principle that spreads out everywhere in order to takehold of every thing. We can see how Hobbes made scissions producedby needs, i.e. the drives, in order to fold history onto the linear dynamicwhich appeases them in a principle that was henceforth socialised, which

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finds in its social form the very foundation of its transcendence. We cancite Descartes and his operation of negation of the existence of need,which was necessary in order to subjugate it to the ideal equation thatregulates the correspondence between the absolute nature of subjectiveprojections and their transcendent dimension.

But the man who accomplishes this long search through the centuriesis Hegel. Hegel realised the project of rendering the spread of needs incontingence, the realisation of their transcendence, by unifying it in onesole and unique movement of totalisation. It is the principle itself thatis affirmed in the scissions of the finite, for they are only the unifyingand necessary journey which assures complete extension. Beyond itsmovement there is no existence. Everything begins from nothing: thenothing of reality which exists at the exterior of the universality of theconstituting foundation. It is already its beyond, projected, in any of itsparts, to the celebration of its completion. It imposes itself by making ofthe negativity of the contingent a linear process of which each momentis a sign of its manifestation. It is in its end, as intrinsic goal of itsabsolute existence. It is absolute spirit, a transcendent principle whicharranges the real according to its effusion. There is no longer in Hegela distance between contingence and foundation. Absolute spirit is at thesame time contingence and subsistence. Hegel’s operation is unheard of:all beings are organised into a hierarchy and forced to submit to theinterior of a system of domination which enlists them into its regiments.It is not limited to assigning them forcibly an order of position, thatis, a determined value proportional to the portion of totality whichit incarnates. It also imposes upon them their form, their possibilities,their behaviours, and thus, their goals. All objects are the intentionsof one sole source of activation. Absolute spirit is subject, possessor ofits spiritual body: the dialectic of opposites, the negation of negation,expresses its activation. History is its property, and is controlled by it.It is an extraordinary, dominating power, and it is no coincidence thatits definitive affirmation happens with the State. To attack Hegel is togo in the opposite direction of the pestle of the totalitarian thought oftranscendence. Deleuze understood this well: ‘What is philosophicallyincarnated in Hegel is the enterprise to “burden” life, to overwhelm itwith every burden, to reconcile life with the State and religion, to inscribedeath in life – the monstrous enterprise to submit life to negativity, theenterprise of resentment and unhappy consciousness’ (Deleuze 2004b:144).

The State, as separated but immanent mechanism, is the scaffold-ing which harnesses all of reality’s movement. Need, labour and

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consumption are the movement accomplished by the State to assimilatereality. They are, under the name of ‘civil society’, the propertiesincorporated by this total conscience which presents itself in the formof order and organised human society into a hierarchy as totalisingexpression of an apparatus which is in itself totalised (and thuscollective), thetic, and constituting. In other words, its primacy isexplained by its nature as absolute reason, originary and universalconscience which imposes its norm. Its power affirms its supreme lawand its infinite power of control.

Is it possible to embark upon another project, in another direction?Was it possible to search for a different route? Was it a hopelessenterprise to push through the history of domination in order to arriveat a path of liberation? Was it possible to wrench theory away from itsostensibly natural task of affirming in the sign the power which makesof every layer of reality the object of a tremendous domination? Theproblem was that of manoeuvring oneself as an alternative force throughthought. One had to make war against the power which forced signs intosubmission, in order to join with experiences of emancipation whichstruggled against the actual form of domination, i.e. capitalism. Besides,Hegel, the steel point of occidental philosophy, had been responsible formaking of history the living presence of the transcendent principle, inorder to transform the government of the bourgeoisie into the completedreality of absolute reason under the State form. It was necessary to freeoneself from the problems which led to the imposition of a governmentfounded upon transcendence. To embark upon the path to liberationmeant to draw theory out of the dialectic game which rendered naturethe concretisation of the subject, and the subject the proper name ofnature. One had to put on the map an ‘other’ project, to make ofthought an escape, instead of a place of integration. The tactic andthe strategy of this ‘at the limit’ experience should have been twofold:1) the desegregation of transcendence and the idea of the negative,which sustained it; 2) the affirmation of a scission, which would enableextrication from the process of totalisation.

It is in this direction that Deleuze engages philosophy. From thebeginning of his theoretical work, he embarks upon a lateral movement,traversing philosophy diagonally in search of faults capable of openingout upon the possibility of liberation. It is a veritable combat strategyagainst the normalising conceptions of transcendence and domination.1

Of course, it was not an explicitly declared struggle, the sort thatprovides a small pleasure which comforts narcissistically with self-recognition in what are only self-aggrandising good deeds. It was not a

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question of small transgressive reassurances which give the impression ofomnipotence. In Deleuze, there is none of this sort of hidden complicitywith the ideas he fought against. He did not seek self-affirmationthrough attention-seeking gimmicks, similar to many philosophers whoremain attached, in a sort of eternal adolescence, to the idealisation ofdaddy-theories from which they believe themselves emancipated whileremaining all the more dependent. Deleuze constructed piece by piecehis theoretical strike forces with the concentrated silence of the artisanwho is one with the labour he is accomplishing. And like a true artisancompletely immersed in the process of creation which is not himself,because it is only a movement of fashioning that comes from theoutside and renders him an anonymous field of transformation, Deleuzecultivated the silent calm which gives speech, one could say humbly,to the piecing together of a work which springs up like a collectiveconstruction, and never becomes the auto-referential din of a paranoiacindividual haunted by himself.

What he practised was a revolutionary action of a theoretic gesturetowards escape. In positioning himself in order to perceive experiences ofrupture that produced new regimes of signs in the arts and in literature,he allowed himself to be contaminated in order to render thought a partof a constellation of forces, and no longer the solitary birth of a sage,of a ‘philosopher’, but the collective construction of all the dissociationswhich constitute the pluralist fields of alternatives to domination.

Thought must reconstitute itself as a network of an apparatusof productive extrication. It should not return to a social basesuperimposed upon its second manifestations, it must in itself socialiseitself. It must become an institution:

We are forced back on the idea that intelligence is something more socialthan individual, and that intelligence finds in the social its intermediatemilieu, the third term that makes intelligence possible. What does the socialmean with respect to tendencies? It means integrating circumstances intoa system of anticipation, and internal factors into a system that regulatestheir appearance, thus replacing the species. This is indeed the case with theinstitution. It is night because we sleep; we eat because it is lunchtime. Thereare no social tendencies, but only those social means to satisfy tendencies,means which are original because they are social. (Deleuze 2004b: 21)

We must practise theory as a curve that tears the law away frompower, assemble an entirely new toolbox that can bend thought andprovoke in it radical scissions. In this sense Deleuze disperses thetraditional concepts, in particular those of ‘nature’ and ‘subject’, while

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traversing practices of thought which made of movement and changeprecarious equilibria, always problematised by the social componentswhich engendered them, or their field of production. Deleuze works onHume (Deleuze 2001a), Bergson (Deleuze 2001b) and Kant (Deleuze1984). In Hume, he takes up again the idea of nature composed ofsensible processes, a transferential collation which forms a socialisedimaginary. This phantasm is on the one hand a partial mechanism ofmanagement of sensible stimulations, and on the other a schema ofregulation of practices which activate it. Hume’s problem is to emphasisethe juridical rather than ontological nature of natural associations,partial applications of processes of the management of complex systemsof partial practices of regulation.

Bergson is the philosopher who first proposed the theme of change atthe heart of a possible ontology. After Bergson, reality is only visible ifone considers it from the point of view of time which passes by whilechanging its connotations. This passing does not accomplish a givenpresent, i.e. the return of a stasis which reaffirms itself each time. It isthe past which presents itself as an already passed instant. Reality isthe leap forward which is always overtaken by a leap which overtakesitself. It carries along with it all beings by projecting them far fromtheir constituted form, a transformation which has already happened,and in spite of this, is in the process of realising itself again. Life is lossand forgetting, for it is evolution which creates through detachment anddifference:

The Bergsonian question is therefore not: why something rather than nothing,but: why this rather than something else? Why this tension of duration?Why this speed rather than another? Why this proportion? And why willa perception evoke a given memory, or pick up certain frequencies ratherthan others? In other words, being is difference and not the immovable orthe undifferentiated, nor is it contradiction, which is merely false movement.Being is the difference itself of the thing, what Bergson often calls the nuance.(Deleuze 2004b: 25)

Kant revolutionises the theory of knowledge by producing a doublemovement of scission. On the one hand, he blocks the relation betweenthought and the immediately given sensible; on the other, he breaks apartthe universality without individuation of ideas founding traditionalmetaphysics (God, soul and world), empty representations of a beingwithout positive manifestation. The faculties, and in particular thefaculty of knowing, support intuitive dynamics which intertwine withideas strung together by functional relations, qualified by their proper

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content. Their general character does not escape the indeterminationof their form, but is their result, rather than the necessary effects offigures taken by the two coordinates which are closer to any experiencewhatsoever: space and time. They preside over the movements ofcoupling that reunite the sensible elements into series, arranging them inordered relations where each spatial point connects to the next accordingto the parabola traced by the instants of time. Since space and time arethe principles of constitution of the objective syntheses, they come beforeand after each real manifestation. They contain within them all sensibleelements, since these latter are only their phenomena, partial moments,a posteriori, of a network of normal relations a priori which reconnectthe extension of all existence. Space and time are the universal formswhich govern the consistence of reality in terms of conceivable subsis-tence. It is the reason of proximity that discharges an infinite complexof points in a dynamic which assigns them form and function, returningthem to the norm that brings them together. They remain above things,principles of an ideal constitution that selects the phenomenal modalitiesof the presentation of beings. A concept, an existing given, finds itsobjective dimension in the regulated constellations which unite it withelements composed by a law which transcends them all. Space and timeare thus the transcendental principles of a normalising activity whichinforms experience. They manage to fill the totality of what exists byaffirming the norm posed by their twistings and turnings in such a way asto represent presence enacting the universal. They must remain detachedfrom empirical reality.2 They compartmentalise inside of a specific andgeneral physical equation an infinite number of sensible impressions,whose concrete character is assured by their collocation in the spatio-temporal relations. They cannot be confused with an individual given,an empty content-less box incapable of finding its qualification. Theysurround the complex evolutions which dig through existence from oneend to the other while forcing them to become the points of applicationof a disciplinary power which surpasses them as proper variations.

The Kantian universe is an infinite outpouring of equation wherespace is arranged in relation to unities of time. The collocation of objectsin space is a function of temporal diagrams which do not regulatetheir relations. It is thus time which commands, and it is time whichdivides the idea, or the active expression of the law, from the sensiblereality it incorporates into norms. However, the scission which separatesforever the concept from the individual matter subsists while imposingobstructions. They prevent each position of existence that works tofound the universal in the immediate apprehension of a universal given

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without passing through the categorical grid which gives its ‘normal’quality to the object. Reason falls into its amphibologies when it wishesto attain the infinite in one stroke. This is the defeat of any metaphysicthat would like to assign itself the value of a first ontology. Thegeneral norm that governs the existent establishes itself by seizing thedynamic of constitution which, in surpassing the particular, attachesit back infinitely to its global application. The law is a categoricalcontent sprung from a general stratification of synthetic mechanisms ofregulation. This is why space and time are always ideal factors, and theactivity of transcendental constitution of real series is a production ofconcepts in the form of singular indices, despite being plural, of formaldiscontinuities. From this it follows that judgements are a priori activeintuitions of an activity of knowledge which is the mirror of an idealplane that ceaselessly develops.3

Deleuze does not approach these authors in order to assign them aperfunctory interpretation. He does not unearth their ‘veritable’ spirit inorder to offer it forward to the reader in the form of a lifeless review.His reading is already engaged in a theoretical project which is theaffirmation of a political position inside of theory. He crosses paths withphilosophers according to the requirements of his own travels, pushedby strange meetings which emerge from a foreign collocation inside ofphilosophy. His experience of thought does not take off vertically, froma base to a summit, but moves horizontally while it encircles, throughscission, a plane of conceptual construction where each thesis is at thesame time a rupture, an overlapping and an aggregate.4 In describingthese hyperboles, theory is separated from its spiritual ghost to offeritself up to shapings provoked by cracks which trouble the identity ofits concepts. Philosophy is no longer the lightning flash that reveals theessence, but the practice of difference which resides in the theatre ofrelations between elements which intertwine.

We must leave behind us the grid of totalisation, hollowed outby the dialectic binary nature–subjectivity, of which Plato defined theassumptions and which Hegel brought to its conclusion with his ideaof the ‘negative’. Deleuze begins to produce thought in difference,exploiting the power of liberation it contains:

It is as though Difference were evil and already negative, so that it couldproduce affirmation only by expiation – that is, by assuming at once boththe weight of that which is denied and negation itself. Always the same oldmalediction which resounds from the heights of the principle of identity:alone will be saved not that which is simply represented, but the infiniterepresentation (the concept) which conserves all the negative finally to deliver

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difference up to the identical. Of all the senses of Aufheben, none is moreimportant than that of “raise up”. There is indeed a dialectical circle, but thisinfinite circle has everywhere only a single centre; it retains within itself allthe other circles, all the other momentary centres. The reprises or repetitionsof the dialectic express only the conservation of the whole, all the forms andall the moments, in a gigantic Memory. (Deleuze 2008: 65)

According to this method, one touches on philosophies in order tolocate the necessary gears of an engine which does not realise itselffrom total notions. It must act as a sort of drill which pierces ahole in the domination of transcendence and its hierarchies. Deleuzeaddresses himself to theories which made of difference the centre oftheir questioning, to theses which took speculative knowledge as thepoint of departure of a practice of putting into question, and not asits solution. This is how Deleuze meets Hume, Kant and Bergson, fromthe angle of the crises which they provoked in thought. It was said thatthese were arbitrary operations of interpretation, at the very limit ofthought, and this is true: they deliberately abandon the fact that Humefinds his equilibria in the dependence of institutions upon sympathy,that Bergson submits change even more to transcendence in makingof time a life force (un élan) towards a personal absolute being whichaccomplishes unheard-of creations, and that Kant twists the ontologicalsuperiority of the general idea into the immanence of space and timein order to inject it directly into the particularity of the sensible. ButDeleuze was well aware of this, to the point that these conceptions areused by him to strike the foundations of ontology, and to invade its fielditself through the place where it seemed the most secure: the grid whichorders reality in the specular game between ‘nature’ and ‘subject’. Theywere only bridgeheads which served to break the defences of theories oftranscendence and begin to ravage them: ‘Precisely, by virtue of thosecriteria of staging or collage we just discussed, it seems admissible toextract from a philosophy considered conservative as a whole thosesingularities which are not really singularities: that is what I did forBergsonism and its image of life, its image of liberty or mental illness’(Deleuze 2004b: 144).

In order to reach a position, we first must decompose the lines ofthe adversary. This action had to be accomplished by detaching thedomain of signs from the problem of the position of reference. Oneintervened in signification by breaking, with the hammer of paradox,the closed triangulation which connected designation, manifestation andeven signification itself, henceforth dispersed in the proliferations of

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propositions which produce uninterrupted series of predications, pointsof crossing of plural lines of sense. The first was the task of Proustand Signs (Deleuze 2000), the second the undertaking of The Logic ofSense (Deleuze 2004a). But this is still not enough. The decompositionof transcendence could succeed in a real upheaval of the philosophicalfield only in attaching to the decomposition of the centred structureconceptual totalisations of apparatuses capable, in the same moment,of affirming a new arsenal of concepts: no longer valuable transcendentideas such as origins and ends in a closed circuit of biunivocal andpolar designation, but zones of contact, connectors, pressure points,of detachment and connection; practical exercises of uncoupling andgrouping in which pluralities of elements divide in a conflicting field,the horizontal plane of serial organisation realised by scission. Deleuzeaccomplished this task before and beside his search for an escape fromthought dominated by ressentiment.

He begins by positioning himself to listen to the affirmative practiceof Nietzsche’s thought. He gives Nietzsche the density of the sensiblein placing him in the positivity of conflicting contacts which relatedsingular elements to each other: this is the theme of Nietzsche andPhilosophy (Deleuze 2002), Deleuze’s second book.5 The quality of thesecomponents is not defined negatively, in relation to an essential naturegiven in advance. They are dissolved and recomposed in the reversalsof asymmetrical engagements, effects of their meetings. This quality isdiscovered via evaluation, that is to say by a line of division whichregroups forces among themselves by splitting them away from theothers, themselves grouped in plural and singular constellations. Thiscut which welds complex and articulated bodies is what Nietzsche willcall ‘will’. Thus, the content of partial segments is defined by orientationand position in a striated space of conflict.

These divisions criss-cross the formations, abandoning them toconflictual games which harm every attempt at identitary formation.The shocks’ blows repeat tirelessly, similar to a throw of the dice whichfalls back into the same modality without ever producing the definitivecombination. The detaching of constellations prevents there from beingan interruption of the division which the objects of a group removein order to unite them to another. Things enter into a combat whichdistributes them into infinite series of scissions, a laboured earth inwhich they are affirmed by movements of conflictual disintegration anddifferential formation. They are forces, sensible bodies that traverse theterrain opened up by their tactics of combat. This terrain, a veritabledesert, does not know time, because it is the eternal return of an infinite

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plurality of effects, a sliced up surface that transforms itself and becomesin relation to figures created by the scissions.

‘To think’ is no longer anything to do with an essential glance, withreflection which looks down upon existence while judging it accordingto its principles; it is action, strategic practice, a politics of constructionof conceptual bodies. This relational activation is affirmative inasmuchas it does not refer to anything. The dynamic of forces poses theircontent and their signification. It expresses the political tasks whichproduce their movements. Their becoming is necessary inasmuch as ithas no other reference than the changes effectuated by their counter-blows. The necessity which Nietzsche is talking about is the recognition,always situated, of a strategic chessboard which draws out a politicalcartography. Thought is a topological art, a geographic designation ofplaces where bodies hit against each other and divide up the earth intodistinct domains.6

A force can never become universal. It is the fruit of a pluralcomplexion, engendered by determined encounters of singularelements.7 A body is always situated by relations to a field of manoeuvreswhere other forces already assumed places. If a body is composed, it isby seizing hold of elements which are parts of complexes present on theterrain. If an aggregate is taken apart, it is because it was swallowedup by an apparatus capable of incorporating it in its own process ofaggregation.

It is this strategic chessboard which splits up bodies betweendominating and dominated. The dominating forces are those whichsucceed in becoming by attaching composites to their body. Theyare thus active aggregations. The dominated forces are subjected to aprocess of fragmentation, second form of activation, and submit to thedominating forces. This difference separates the forces qualitatively. Ittraces the equation which distinguishes them as different natures: thedifferential relation which defines their activation potential. It does notfollow that the quality of forces is a question of quantity: the morebodies realise anchorages, the more their power of formation grows,the more the forces become affirmative. The concept of the ‘will topower’ expresses the practical action which posits a domination thatcriss-crosses the genealogy of asymmetrical relations that realise thesingular constellations of bodies.

Force–domination: these are the first categories of a new imageof thought. They dislocate it inopportunely, a never-finished worldmade of impersonal individuations or of pre-individual singularities.8

And nevertheless, it would not be possible to guide it back into this

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practical dimension where the vitality of conflicts erupts without anothertheoretical operation. This intervention must block the framing of theexistent in the unconditioned supremacy of a transcendent essence. Thefigures of the ‘negative’ subdivide beings in proportion to their proximityto the last principle, all the while furthering them from the being which,always beyond them, remains frozen in a single point of concentration.The effacement of the negative must pass through a definitive prohibitionof all possible ontology. We must construct concepts which do notpossess any ontological value, and begin to act theoretically in anothersense, on this earth, irreducible to any unity, worked upon by thepolitical effects of encounters between sensible bodies. To do that meansto relinquish the thread of mutual recallings that allowed the universaland the singular (which is, besides, its negative image) to take hold ofthe entire space of theory, forcing it to mechanically repeat the sameact: the analogical judgement which forced all beings onto the One andthe Same. We interrupt the vertically moving vicious circuit that makesof objects simple variants of a general biunivocal relation, equalisingthem on a plane without exteriority, the transcendental condition ofimmanence which only admits singular variations. Spinoza’s conceptof ‘substance’ and his theory of power give to difference the force toassail all constituting ontology (Deleuze 1992). There is only one plane,the egalitarian dimension where the eminence and ideal consistence oftranscendent contents are reduced to formal variations. Apparently, eachbeing lays claim to an essence. We must admit a plurality of eminententities which found all the levels of existence. But how can we discoverthe difference of ontological constitution among these beings? How willthe absolute nature of being not be touched by the presence of theseother ‘minor’ essences? There will be a multiplication of these substanceswhich will lay claim to all their rights. They will have to settle for sharingthe transcendent constitution of the first essence. How is it, however,that elements of the same nature are differentiated? The relation betweenbeings and existence, and the successive distinction by ‘genux proximoet differentia specifica’ are abolished in their own logical possibility.There is only infinite immanence where the substance will equalise allelements. The movement of elevation that poses a transcendent instanceis deprived of its own presuppositions. If there is no transcendence, itis impossible to acquire the ethereal nature that gives to essences theirmetaphysical flesh. Substance is only a single material block (Deleuze1992).

On the other hand, as it is impossible that something is totalisedwhile proposing itself as first essence, neither is substance ever totalised

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retrospectively, in affirming itself behind things in terms of creativepersonality or first cause. This is the fundamental argument Spinozamakes against Descartes. Substance exists in its singular manifestationsbecause it is nothing other than singularities which cannot be totalised.And since there are no universal entities, substance varies in its infiniteseries of controlled modulations. The attributes – although we knowtheoretically only of two, namely thought and extension – are infinite,and function by putting substance back in circulation at the material andegalitarian level of existing singularities. Attributes contain substance’sinfinite modalities of pluralisation. Attributes continue to pulverisesubstance into singular formations which do not designate their intrinsicmultiplicity. Nothing interrupts this collective distribution of contactsand disjunctions. It poses the insurmountable limit for beings. This isthe theoretical motivation which makes of substance a constellation ofmodes, singular and plural, and assigns them an essence, that is to say, areason for formation, different from that of substance. It is through thefault opened up by this difference that substance bursts out as a horizonof becoming.

We must take a step back: modes, never capable of beholdingthemselves like faces of an identical essence, plug into each other at theircontours, at their sensible shell. They encounter each other and formrelational configurations, linking their members like pieces of a giantmachine of production. Substance is the disarticulated factory whichlives in its power of production, and production is the concept whichexpresses the specific form of the becoming of substance.

Force–domination and immanence–production: this is the new griddiscovered by Deleuze at the end of his long deconstructive detour oftranscendence and the thought of the One. Now, it is possible to beginagain to think positively. It is possible to leave the circle of recognition toconstruct a ‘critical’ theory which works to ‘provoke crisis’ in the simpleidentification between need and subjective projection, and to work outa revolutionary theory of transformation.

At this moment Deleuze takes up conceptual tools which leave nothingfor the adversary. He returns to Marx. But another Marx, the Marxof forces of conflict, of social relations of power, of strategies and wartactics which impose systems of domination, and groups which opposethem. It is the Marx of bloody struggles which tear apart the conformityof the social body and indefatigably transform it. A revolutionary Marxwho makes of revolution the practice and content of his theory, andwho is close to all experiences of the same signs, at all levels and places.9

‘Marx’ is a plural name, the seal of an alliance: he is the comrade who

Marx as Ally: Deleuze outside Marxism, Adjacent Marx 69

fights by one’s side, who attacks with goals and blueprints, who sharestrenches.

Traditional Marxism took Marx out of his natural place: politics,the struggle against power and its actual form. This was a strangereversal: they took him out of the place where he alone could explainthe meaning of his theoretical project, that being political revolutionarypractice in theory and in society, hoping that such a sterilisation wouldclear the way towards an alternative. No, Marx is not the theoreticianwho realises the dialectic, bringing it to a possible accomplishmentwhich Hegel could not achieve.10 He did not introduce the mostefficient categories with which to force nature onto a subject that wouldsupposedly explain that subject’s dialectic development. DeterminedMarxist analysis is an assault, a political investment of a social fieldtowards an alternative, under the conditions posed by a determinedapparatus (mode of production) of the victorious forces, i.e. capitalism.To struggle next to Marx, one must practise another conceptualstrategy, one which makes pivots out of production, domination andthe immanence of the social field in the conflict of forces, in orderclear a path of escape towards another regime, conceptually and also insocial practice. It is no longer a question of ‘criticising’ capitalism, norof emphasising its backwardness, its contradictions or its irrationality.These are sterile positions, as they reproduce the capitalist ideology ofegalitarian exchange through which an identitary subject extends itselfall throughout history, or in this case, capital. It can be recognisedin the satisfaction of its needs: it is the summit and blossoming ofnature, in sum the essence of existent totality (the homo oeconomicusof Smith and other classical economists). The only possible critique hasalready been carried out by Marx. Capital is a combination of forceswhich compose a mode of production. It is not a neutral movement,set off by the nature of components which will be brought to theiraccomplishment. Upon forced labour, in its multiple configurations andstrata, is engraved the mark of the power of capital: it becomes ‘labourforce’.11 It is constrained to act, to speak and think under the weightof capitalist domination. Capitalism is an immense force of disjunctionand reconnection of a system of relations which has the production ofsurplus-value as its goal. Capitalism does not work, as in feudalism, toallow the feudal lord to make wealth the sign of his supremacy. Theideas of the feudal epoch are not associated with a version of naturewhich proceeds by degrees of minor perfection. This is the nature ofcapitalism, the decoding which sweeps away the feudal code and projectsit into a world of individual subjects which effectuate by themselves the

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comprehensive movement of a unique need for exploitation. Labour’ssubmission to capitalism is expressed in a closed social body, full tothe brim with the power of its apparatuses of management, selectionand control. These apparatuses discipline their subjects in reducingtheir functions to the circuit of accumulation composed by conjunction:‘That is why capitalism and its break are defined not solely by decodedflows, but by the generalized decoding of flows, the new massivedeterritorialization, the conjunction of deterritorialized flows. It is thesingular nature of this conjunction that ensured the universality ofcapitalism’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2000: 224). Capitalism does notdevelop out of an interior necessity at the heart of feudalism. It has agenealogy of alliances, combats and tactical positions taken to organiseitself as force and affirm itself as mode of production.

It is here that Deleuze returns to Marx, in occupying the sametheoretical front and reuniting himself with the latter’s revolutionarystruggles that would construct an other social mechanism of production,a mechanism that works not for surplus-value but in common. TheMarxian revolution is to have first announced that each historicalformation is a disposition which results from a struggle. Each historicalformation is the investment of an organised complex, stratified intomultiple components, and to master adversarial forces is to reducethem to the matter and cogwheels of a mechanism of production.It causes changes there, that is to say, transformations.12 Theconcept that opens the way for history in terms of revolutionarytransformations is ‘production’. These transformations have differentmodalities and directions, and Deleuze endeavours to map them out.Capital revolutionises the feudal regime by installing another system ofproduction. Feudalism knocks down the domination of the Urstaat, justas it subdued the savage connections of production, by intertwining theirpieces into an utterly different apparatus of subjugation. There is conflicteverywhere because there is production everywhere. ‘Production’ – theconnections, overlappings and disconnections which emerge – is thecategory which presents the possibility of accomplishing this recognitionof history.

History is the battlefield of antagonistic productions, becauseeverything is production:

production is immediately consumption and a recording process(enregistrement), without any sort of mediation, and the recording processand consumption directly determine production, though they do so withinthe production process itself. Hence everything is production: production of

Marx as Ally: Deleuze outside Marxism, Adjacent Marx 71

productions . . . Everything is production, since the recording processes areimmediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptionsdirectly produced. This is the first meaning of process as we use the term:incorporating recording and consumption within production itself, thusmaking them the productions of one and the same process. (Deleuze andGuattari 2000: 4)

The body of history is a laminating constellation of strata ofproduction.13 It is this articulated production, its syntheses and its effectsof transformation, which are traced by genealogies divided betweendomination and flight. The modes of production function by connectingvanquished forces to engines which realise them. These vanquishedforces are the materials with which the mode of production nourishesitself and reproduces its apparatuses.

The word ‘being’ no longer has any meaning.14 It recalls the ana-logical reference which reduces the noisy motors of engines dispersedeverywhere to dreary images, phantasms of signification. Force –immanence – domination – production, it is thanks to these concepts thatconceptual machines are composed which break the cages constructed bythe dialectic.

The only logic familiar to this strategic plan linked to conjunctures ofwar is that of change by subordination, or even the political enterprisewhich affirms the government of partial collective entities through otherpartial constellations. It is the same for the Urstaat. Never was aDeleuzian concept less understood. The Urstaat is not the model of anideal type of State which is regularly represented throughout history. TheUrstaat is an apparatus of coupling of a particular group of forces. Theseforces compose a determined social formation which, if it conformspolitically to the formation of an Urstaat, in the process of work requiresan ensemble of systems of material production and exchange – includingthe market – to work for its pre-eminence. The Urstaat is the notion withwhich it is possible to seize the State from myths of the social natureof man (i.e. from ideology), and from the natural disposition of socialpractices to organise themselves in a juridical apparatus. The State isalso an effect, produced from the construction of a social body by packswhich conquer a territory and assume for themselves the right to inscribeupon it their mark.

Once the State is made an object of production like the others,we can retrace the changes of the juridical processes – jurisprudence,which so fascinated Deleuze – of the various regimes. At this moment,the state formation established under capitalism loses its sacred allure.The differential specificity, related to conjuncture, of forms of the

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State permit us to discover the content belonging to the capitaliststate apparatus. It is no longer the needle which by itself guides allthe members of society, similar to what happens under feudalism.Capitalism works through decoding. It must continually rework itsobjects in order to continue to obtain surplus-value from particulardegrees of exploitation. Capitalism does not have the State at its centrebecause it is its own centre. It schizophrenizes in a ceaseless movement,incorporating everything it encounters, in changing its nature, modellingit and modelling itself – even in relation to its fundamental disposition.Capitalism must stratify itself in occupying the entire body of society.Marx understood this well (judging from embryonic bits of theory whichhe left behind), so much so that he posed the capitalist State in terms ofa concrete category realised concretely from more abstract categorieswhich maintain it as a subordinated element (Marx 1970).15 The Statebecomes in a differential and stratified manner under the impulsion ofthe ‘creative’ evolutions of capital. The capitalist norm directly managesits world and projects it in productive flows, sliced-up strata whichspring forth from its intentional tensions similar to anonymous andmemory-less noematic nuclei.

We can thus appreciate the real value of minor flows, theschizophrenic lines traced by the subordinated which do not succeedin breaking free. They refuse the capitalist decoding and its law, andfind therein not transgressions, regardless of secondary troubles, but theslices of an alternative social body, a completely other ‘socius’.

As Deleuze specifies, in the body of capital, which integrateseverything through subjugation, there are never two classes, but one solefactory of reproduction of the capitalist axiomatic. The new full bodywhich results from the inverted capital is neither a development northe contrary of capitalism (which was called ‘socialisation’, especially‘by the State’, of ‘productive forces’) but the last result of the intrinsiclogic of accumulation. Socialisation resulted from the fictive oppositionof two opposing poles, or classes, of a unique molar structure. As ithappened, it only reproduced the totalitarian machine, inverted into the‘collective’ form of State. A ‘different’ socius is made instead of forceswhich ‘free themselves from this axiomatic just as they free themselvesfrom the despotic signifier, that break through this wall, and this wall ofa wall, and begin flowing on the full body without organs’ (Deleuze andGuattari 2000: 255). They are machines which do not work towardsdespotism, but produce liberation in persistently conserving a ‘minor’dimension, that is to say, in never totalising themselves in an attempt atending conflicts.

Marx as Ally: Deleuze outside Marxism, Adjacent Marx 73

Capitalist decoding flows are produced everywhere. They stock upon resources in order to direct themselves again and again at theirsubjects, swallowing them into one body, that of surplus-value. Thisaction which unites force, organisation and efficiency also producesreactions. A logic of combat then imposes itself which gradually becomesexplicit, on fronts in which are formed flows of singular machinesof liberation that approach, as allies, all the other experiences whichstruggle against capital’s domination of governed conjuncture. It isnot said whether they will triumph in constructing other bodies, butunder the pressure of domination, processes of work are set off whichform machines of a completely different direction, architecture andfunction. The molar body that encloses flows in a despotic axiomatic isconfronted by molecular actions which strike at the capitalist gears withweapons of a social disposition that already differ from their formation.This is the sole theoretical (and certainly political) criterion that maydistinguish machines of liberation from machines of axiomatisation.This demolishing action occurs on all levels. There is a combat in work,just as there is a combat in signs. They are not similar, they do noteven share modalities or movements. But they are all determining. Justas capital is extended over the totality of the social body, imposing itsviolence, various conflicts traverse it from one end to the other. Signsare also a battlefield, a matter of forces which confront each other in astruggle to affirm their own regime. The confrontations which producethe body of signs are also traced out on the cartography of conflicts. Itis a true body, material as effectuated by relations between signifyingelements which touch, connect with and detach from each other, andstruggle. They are sensitive, and in this also find the reason for theirproximity to the sensitive functions of the physical body. The strugglewaged by the schizophrenic is just as central to the struggle in the factory,for the schizo is a constellation torn apart by a struggle which playsitself out at the level of signs. It involves reattaching, under the sign ofproduction, the analysis of capitalism to that of schizophrenia in orderto bring signs into the immanent domain of production and conflict.The forces of decoding allied to capital are found on this stratum aswell. They have the name of Mommy and Daddy, and the factoryin which they are formed is the family. These figures, as material asthe materiality of capital’s axiomatic, are active in the psychoanalyst’soffice. It is there that the ruptures provoked by the freeing of signifyingelements irreducible to despotic signification are approached, discoveredand again subjugated. However, the struggle does not end. The schizocontinues to fabricate a new regime of signs, he turns to the factory

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where sense is produced to carry it away from capital’s totalisingaxiomatic. The schizo is in himself, in his very body, an advancedfront, a field of signifying forces that command an irreducible chain ofproduction.

The relations between the conflicts that tear apart the layers of thesocius are subjugated to the evolution of the respective battlefields. Theymay construct reasons for alliances, confluences. Sometimes, they evenwork in parallel. They will however remain different. It is this verydistinction which prevents their totalisation. This distinction becomes,if guided with strategic intelligence, either a guarantee, or an excellentweapon: it can obstruct the orders of the adversary, which is always apresent risk. It strikes at his defences by continuing to break his totalising(molar) structures. The act of disjunction traverses these structures,through processes of singularisation. The despotic machine was knockeddown by the fabrication of a social body which puts into practice theabsolute democracy of a factory of scission, made of gears of liberationwhich work to open up new spaces to conflict and to ceaselesslydeconstruct totalitarian superimposition.16

Thought is also brought back to unstable equilibria which createtrembling in language, images and sounds, or the figural constellationsof the unconscious. It is swept away by the scissions and overturned asmuch as these latter. It has no pre-eminence. Thought and foolishness areone, because ideas are partial elements produced by partial layers, partsof a divided social body, criss-crossed by the conflicts which work uponall the strata. Theory is a singular moment in a singular proliferationof struggles.17 It must discover itself as one combat front and renounceits privileges. It is no longer the light which shines upon the learned,the rulers, on collective or organic intellectuals, inscribing upon themthe marks of reason. It is a war machine, a combat apparatus whichintervenes in the concept.

A theory which works scissions and is produced to liberate itselffrom the paranoiac discipline of capital is found in the wake of Marx.It shares trenches. It ceases thus to be the prophet who sanctifies thename of the father assigning the dignity of the son to his brothers, aprivileged voice of the sovereign principle, the dialectic of productiveforces and manager of its royal science. Marx is a celibate body. He isa toolbox and a revolutionary movement. Marx digs escape routes intheory, and delivers blows in the streets with the other comrades. Howmany people racked their brains (one thinks of certain ‘all too human’Italian theorists, such as Della Volpe18 or Luporini,19 for example) overthe question of ‘fetishism’, even of ideology, forgetting that it is only

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comprehensible in relation to the function of thought in Marx, and thusto the war machine in the theory he assembles. The fetish is the militaryconquest of signs drafted by a despotic axiom, which struggles for andwith capital. Furthermore, the analysis of the fetish has nothing to dowith its substitution by another totalitarian truth. It is the flight whichrevives theory in flows of alternative production, the assault carriedout upon a general domination which frees theory in order to bringabout conflicts everywhere in the strata of signifying production. TheMarxian theory of fetishism is analysis in so far as it is decompositionof a totalitarian abstraction which affirms one sole law upon all signs.Or rather, it is a force which strikes the despotic sign par excellence:money.20 Marx, in attacking the fetish, had already moved elsewhere.Marxist theory became a plural body of alliances, a riot of singularwar tactics against power and its machines of subjugation. Marx loseshis identity and begins to open out in thousands of growths, in aproliferation of plural machines of liberation. We no longer encounterMarx in the stuffy atmosphere of identitary lineages, which are housesmuch too tight to give liberty its space. We meet him, with the intense joyof a liberty always to come, in traversing as nomads the capitalist cityon our way to the desert where all encounters are possible, producingdemocracy without transcendence.

Notes1. On this see also Delcò (1988).2. ‘The phenomenon appears in space and time: space and time are for us the forms

of all possible appearing, the pure forms of our intuition or our sensibility. Assuch, they are in turn presentations; this time, a priori presentations’ (Deleuze1984: 8).

3. The important thing in representation is the prefix: re-presentation implies anactive taking up of that which is presented; hence an activity and a unity distinctfrom the passivity and diversity which characterize sensibility as such’ (Deleuze1984: 8).

4. On this see also Fadini (1998) and Montebello (2008).5. I refer here to Zourabichvili (1994).6. See Agostini (2003).7. See Hayden (1998).8. I refer here particularly to Sibertin-Blanc (2006: 717–93).9. In this regard Deleuze makes the same theoretical move as Althusser. See

Althusser (1969) and Althusser and Balibar (1970: 182–94).10. Gianfranco La Grassa made a great contribution in a non-dialectical critical

reading of Marx (in Kautsky’s and Bernstein’s deterministic and idealistic vein,but also similar to the hyper-subjective and even more idealistic dialectic ofLuxemburg, Korsch and Lukács). See La Grassa, Turchetto and Soldani (1979);La Grassa (1989, 2002); La Grassa and Preve (1996).

11. In my opinion, the most important contribution on this subject in Marxist theoryhas been made by Raniero Panzieri (1973, 1977).

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12. Etienne Balibar wrote a very important essay on this, which Deleuze knew verywell (see Balibar 1970: 199–308).

13. See Balibar (1970: 199–308).14. This is why I don’t believe that a Deleuzian ontology exists (and so ontological

interpretations of Deleuze’s theory are misguided, whether for or againstDeleuze’s approach). One study that makes this typical mistake about Deleuzeis Bergen (2001).

15. On this see Bidet (1985).16. Vaccaro (1990) has worked on this.17. I develop this idea in my introduction to the Italian translation of Deleuze’s

lessons on Spinoza (Pardi 2007).18. See Della Volpe (1964, 1968).19. See Luporini (1974), a fundamental essay for several generations of Italian

theorists.20. On the role of money in Marx’s theory, see Duménil (1978).

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DOI: 10.3366/E1750224109000713