Political Theory After Deleuze (Deleuze Encounters)
Nathan Widder
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 1441150889
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Recentpolitical theory has shifted decidedly towards ontology, the ‘science of being',and thus towards examining fundamental concepts of identity, difference, space,and time. This new focus has reinvigorated questions concerning the nature ofpower, meaning, truth and agency, inspiring novel approaches to individual andcollective subjectivity, the emergence of political events and the relationshipbetween desire and politics. In this new study, Nathan Widder shows how Deleuze's philosophy both inspires and pressesbeyond political theory's ‘ontological turn'.
Linkinghis thought to current political theory debates, Widder explains how Deleuze'sphilosophy and ontology of difference are cashed out through a micropolitics ofcreative and critical experimentation. He further demonstrates how Deleuze challengesideas of identity and the subject that still dominate both political thoughtand practice today. Connecting Deleuze to key figures in both classical andcontemporary political philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel,Nietzsche, Lacan, and Foucault, this book will be of interest to students andscholars in political theory, philosophy, and related disciplines, looking toengage the emerging field of Deleuze studies.
approach from one that took other thinkers ‘from behind’ in order to make them say something that broke with the traditional 62 POLITICAL THEORY AFTER DELEUZE readings of the history of philosophy to one that brought his own voice into works of original philosophy. And, interestingly, Deleuze identifies his Bergson book as an exemplar of the earlier approach, suggesting that Bergson’s thought was more a kind of fertile soil for experimentation than the key influence on the way Deleuze read
Information on Prisons (GIP). In his notebooks, Nietzsche writes: ‘Even the thought of a possi bility can shake and transform us; it is not merely sensations or particular expectations that can do that! Note how effective the possibility of eternal damnation was!’ (Nietzsche in Heidegger 1979– 87: Vol. 2: 129). For Deleuze, it is the thought of an incompossibility that can shake and transform us, by opening us to a multiplicity that is both thought and acted. This domain of incompossible
POLITICAL THEORY AFTER DELEUZE of identity associated with dialectics or theories of lack, some form of constitutive exclusion. Thus even post-identity political theories, which are critical of the anti-pluralism and rigorous policing of identity borders found in many forms of identity politics, seek to moderate this tendency and make connections across diverse identities, but nevertheless maintain the necessity for some form of exclusion.2 For these theorists, if identity crises are ubiquitous,
composed of whole objects to which the psyche adapts itself. On the earlier Deleuze’s relation to Klein, see Widder (2009b). 20 The Logic of Sense presents three syntheses with the same names, albeit in the order of connective, conjunctive and disjunctive (see Deleuze 1990: 47, 174–6, 231–2). In both cases these syntheses can be related back to the three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition, with the differences in order of presentation being linked to the place given to the subject
to the question of what knowledge is, Deleuze contends that it ‘presents simultaneously both a positive model of recognition or common sense, and a negative model of error’ (148) that in a quite different context governs the search for Forms in Plato’s Republic (148–9). ‘But who can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts, and that when we recognise, we are thinking?’ (DR 135). Deleuze’s reference is to Plato (1961: Republic 523b–524d). An example is provided by Foucault’s