Anti-Oedipus and the Political Philosophy of the Third World

Anti-Oedipus and the Political Philosophy of the Third World 

 Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

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It has been 50 years since Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus in 1972. In his review, which appeared right after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, Jean-François Lyotard wrote that ‘contrary to all expectations, or in fact because the shattering title works an illusory effect, what the book subverts most profoundly is what it doesn’t criticize: Marxism’.[i]

For[KS1]  Lyotard, the first collaborative work of Deleuze and Guattari challenged the orthodox Marxist piety towards the proletariat and surplus-value. His optimistic praise of capitalist dynamics described in Anti-Oedipus led him to declare that the authors freed Marx’s fascination with capitalist perversion from ‘bad conscience’.[ii] However, it seems to me that Lyotard did not correctly get the main argument in the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia when he emphasized that capitalism would disappear by excess ‘because its energetics unceasingly displace its limits’.[iii] Unlike his estimation, the book in question should be read more like an attempt to clarify how revolution is still possible against the ossified end of the communist experiments. They would disagree with an opinion like Lyotard’s, a hasty conclusion to proclaim the failure of communism. About this issue, Deleuze succinctly argued ‘I don’t, at any rate, see the slightest analogy between what Anti-Oedipus did with Freud and what the “new philosophers” have been doing with Marx’.[iv]

For Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus was about ‘the univocity of the real’, which was discovered through May 1968 -- ‘the pure reality breaking through’ something imaginary or symbolic.[v] He repeatedly suggested this idea in conversation with Antonio Negri. Deleuze claimed that May 1968 was ‘a demonstration, an irruption of a becoming in its pure state’.[vi] What did he try to articulate by this assertion? What is ‘the pure reality’?

The[KS2]  situation revealed the paradox of the State -- even the French Communist Party (PCF) came to agree with the preservation of the State on the verge of its collapse. However, Deleuze defended the universal proletariat by criticizing those who condemned the horrors of revolution and confused ‘the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary becoming’.[vii] History in particular circumstances and the event’s becoming are two sets of people, and the former is not an excuse for forgetting the latter. For Deleuze, ‘history isn’t experimental, it’s just the set of more or less negative preconditoins that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history’.[viii] In this sense, the crucial political question of Anti-Oedipus is about why capitalism did not perish even though there was the Russian Revolution and how the revolution can revive from the dead-end of its consequence.

Deleuze and Guattari challenge Lenin’s classical thesis of The State and Revolution through the discussion of the State. Their argument is nothing else than an engagement into the theoretical assumption of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The experience of May 1968 taught Deleuze and Guattari why the event could not abolish capitalism and how the revolutionary Left should come up with a strategy for the repetition of the event. They are convinced that the fantasy of the State prevented the revolutionary event from its realization. In this sense, Lyotard’s accelerationist view turns out problematic to understand the whole scope of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophical project. In my opinion, the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia are nothing else than the theoretical analysis of Urstaat, the Asiatic mode of production, and a practical guide to the creation of the new people; I would call this strategy the political philosophy of the Third World.

Deleuze and Guattari argue that the limit of capitalism reconstitutes what it has curtailed in its displacement against its primitive emplacement. In this manner, the Third World is nothing else than loci where the primitive accumulation of capitalism continously reproduces itself since its begining. The Third World is not archaic territories but instead comes from ‘modern industries and plantations that generate an immense surplus value’.[ix] To quote them,

 

As Samir Amin has shown, the process of deterritorialization here goes from the center to the periphery, that is, from the developed countries to the underdeveloped countries, which do not constitute a separate world, but rather an essential component of the world-wide capitalist machine. It must be added, however, that the center itself has its organized enclaves of underdevelopment, its reservations and its ghettos as interior peripheries. (Pierre Moussa has defined United States as a fragment of the Third World that has succeeded and has preserved its immense zones of underdevelopment.)[x]

 

In his answer to a question about why the subtitle of Anti-Oedipus is Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze described their fundamental idea of the book as the production of the unconscious -- ‘the unconscious “produces”’.[xi] This simple proclamation has been used as a stock phrase to tag Deleuze’s and Guattari’s thoughts. As mentioned above, Lyotard’s review would be one of the examples to read their conceptualization of the production of the unconscious as the analysis of the link between the libidinal investment and capitalist economy.

Indeed,[KS3] [u4]  Deleuze and Guattari intended to provide an alternative analysis about capitalism, but the purpose of their ‘schizoanalysis’ was far different from the previous attempts to bring Freud and Marx together.

 

The Third Theory

 

In my opinion, Anti-Oedipus is an experiment to bring forth the third theory between psychoanalysis and Marxism. Its aim was the investigation of the real, i.e., of délire at work in reality.

The délire i[KS5] s the precondition of any illusory categories such as the imaginary and the symbolic. Deleuze clarified that ‘if our book was significant, coming after ’68, it’s because it broke with attempts at Freudo-Marxism: we weren’t trying to articulate or reconcile different dimensions but trying rather to find a single basis for a production that was at once social and desiring in a logic of flows’.[xii] Deleuze’s point is that they endeavoured to reveal the ground of the production from a monistic viewpoint. In this sense, Deleuze called their project the ‘Spinozism of the unconscious’.[xiii] 

Their attack on psychoanalysis should be considered as a strategic intervention into an expedient consolidation between psychoanalysis and Marxism. Deleuze’s preface to Guattari’s Psychoanalysis and Transversality, which was published in 1972, the same year when Anti-Oedipus came out, indicates that their starting point was to solve the problem of the militant-psychoanalyst combination.

There, Deleuze [KS6] recounted ‘three different problems’, which emerged from this strategic alliance: first, ‘in what form does one introduce politics into psychoanalytic theory and practice (it being understood that, in any case, politics is already in the unconscious)?’; secondly, ‘is there a reason to introduce psychoanalysis into militant revolutionary groups, and if so, how?’; finally, ‘how does one conceive and form specific therapeutic groups whose influence would impact political groups, as well as psychiatric and psychoanalytic groups?’[xiv] For Deleuze, Guattari himself is the example of a ‘the double agent’ who exhibits ‘a particular evolution’ of the three different problems through the Liberation and May 1968.[xv] It is because the passionate militant psychoanalyst supported Trotskyism in his early life and moved on to the oppositionnels (The Left Opposition) in the PCF, such as La Voie communiste, and furthermore, to the Movement of March 22, which gravitated towards May 1968.

As for Guattari’s answer to the three problems, Deleuze clarified that ‘the unconscious is directly related to a whole social field, both economic and political, rather than the mythical and familial grid traditionally deployed by psychoanalysis’.[xvi] Deleuze thought that Guattari’s thesis is an insight into the connection between the libidinal economy and political economy. Unlike Wilhelm Reich, Guattari’s formulation does not presuppose the repression of the unconscious. For this reason, Deleuze accentuated that there is ‘only one economy’ and ‘desire or libido is just the subjectivity of political economy’.[xvii] If the economy as such is libidinal, i.e., an economy of flows, the economic institution can be defined as ’a subjectivity of flows and their interruption in the objective forms of a group’.[xviii] With this assumption, the monistic unification of the object and the subject, base and superstructure, production and ideology, is justified and ‘the strict complementarity of the desiring subject of institution, and the institutional object’ comes to replace the conventional dualism.[xix] Following this discussion, Deleuze defended Guattari’s disagreement with the psychoanalytic application for the political situation and explained why psychoanalysis rather enhances the logic of capitalism.

Deleuze did not go for French Maoism and its conceptualization of contradiction. Endorsing Guattari, more likely sympathetic to Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution, Deleuze pointed up that the capitalist production, mobilized through national sentiment, cannot go beyond the national frameworks nor can abolish the State. The nation-states are the terrains and instruments, which retains the relations of production and the valuation of capital. It is the nation-state structure that capital works as repression. Deleuze calls this functional mechanism an ‘archaic structure’, which is not an absolute given but rather the consequence of a compromise. In other words, state-monopoly capitalism, which was the PCF’s official notion of defining de Gaulle’s economic drives towards greater industrial and financial concentration through state intervention, is the assemblages of state apparatuses by which the bourgeoisie strives to grasp an initiative for production. In those days, ‘state economic plans became increasingly drawn up by technocrats and experts’, and this trend was regarded as ‘a necessary condition of economic and social progress’.[xx]

 

Postwar French Experiences

 

After the long debate around the strategy to engage de Gaulle’s policy, the PCF decided to collaborate with “the government of the monopolies” for the restoration and renewal of democracy. The Party did not intend to fight against Gaullism because they ‘preferred to regard the presidential regime instituted by the Fifth Republic as one which best suited the centralized stage reached by French capitalism, but not as one which involved the forcible destruction of working class and democratic opposition’.[xxi] Against this background, Deleuze agreed with Guattari’s critique of national communist parties promoting ‘the integration of the proletariat into the State’.[xxii] Deleuze’s interrogation of the nation-states and its compliance with capitalism is precisely grounded on the French experiences of the historical economic transition during the Gaullist regime of the Fifth Republic. For Deleuze, this complicity of communist parties to the State leads to the misunderstanding of the Third World’s revolutionary struggles.

Even when the necessity of resistance in the Third World is affirmed, ‘these struggles mostly serve as chips in a negotiation, indicating the same renunciation of an international strategy and the development of class conflict in capitalist countries’ -- the subsumption under the imperative: ‘the working class must defend national productive forces, struggle against monopolies, and appropriate a State apparatus’.[xxiii] Because of this ideology of economic competition and peaceful coexistence with the West, the actualization of the Leninist strategy at the creation of the NEP, the new State developed a socialist economy ‘only in accordance with the realities of the global market and according to objectives similar to those of international capital’.[xxiv] Against this tactical failure, Guattari presented in his ‘Nine Theses of the Left Opposition’ that ‘there is no abstract outline of capitalism, with one country or another representing the model that the others would tend to follow’.[xxv] He emphasized that capitalism is ‘a structure existing in this very diversity and inconceivable’ without such a prototype and thus it is impossible to create the single control of proletarian internationalism.[xxvi]

Following Trotsky, Guattari elucidates that the international revolutionary alliance must be based on ‘its particular form, not on the similarity of the conditions of struggle but on their interdependence’.[xxvii] This idea of many capitalisms is not merely Guattari’s personal thought but closely concerned with Marx’s discussion of the Asiatic mode of production. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx wrote that ‘in broad lines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society’.[xxviii] Here, Marx defined the Asiatic mode of production as one of the various modes of production, and his conceptualization of the mode seems to deserve the reconsideration of Marx’s approach to the non-European revolutionary movements. Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich in 1881 confirmed the fact that Marx himself recognized the possibility of many alternative social transitions to the European mode of production. He wrote that his discussion about the ‘historical inevitability’ of primitive accumulation is expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe.[xxix] In this sense, the archaic structures of the State can be regarded as the assemblages of various apparatuses to manage the multiplicity of production and the universal foundation of global capitalism.

Indeed, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia aim to solve the problem of communist movements that are trapped in the nation-states’ political economy and thus fail to support the revolutionary struggles in the Third World. Deleuze already had this intuitive insight into the Third World when discussing the desert islands and Robinson in The Logic of Sense. Even before he met Deleuze, Guattari found his intellectual affinity to Deleuze after he read the book and ‘became the spokesman for a philosophy of the event’.[xxx] Deleuze’s theses in The Logic of Sense were the starting point for Guattari’s turn to the ideas of Anti-Oedipus. However, Deleuze also confessed that Guattari rescued him from psychoanalysis.[xxxi] According to Anne Sauvagnargues, Guattari transformed Deleuze’s relationship with Marx.[xxxii]

What does this change mean? It seems to me that the impact on Deleuze’s thought indicates his theoretical break with Louis Althusser. Deleuze was tacitly influenced by Althusser’s interpretation of Marx against Hegel and his encounter with Guattari after May 1968 brought him to a chance to solve the problem that he found out in Althusser’s orientation towards a general theory. When he declared that ‘there is no ideology, the concept itself is an illusion’, Deleuze seemed to pin his disagreement with Althusser’s theory of ideology.[xxxiii] However, his estrangement from Althusser denoted neither the rejection of Theory nor the denouncement of Marxism but rather an attempt to make a theoretical breakthrough. Even though Deleuze indirectly criticized Althusser’s amicable attitude to psychoanalysis, he still preserved Althusser’s concept of Theory producing its object as sort of fiction.[xxxiv] Deleuze’s preface to Guattari’s book proves that he had a clear motivation to engage with Marxism to get out of its impasse. The hidden layer of their anti-psychoanalysis lied in the debate around the problem of “democratic centralism”, which was the official line of the USSR.

 

De-Stalinization

 

After the Liberation, the PCF still retained the organizational principle based on Lenin’s party of the new type because the rule of centralized leadership was regarded as the invaluable legacy of La Résistance. Following this hierarchical model, ‘any debate must take place strictly inside the Party through the correct channels permitted by democratic centralism’.[xxxv] Due to this regulation, the minoritarian groups, i.e., the oppositionnels, sought to give themselves ‘an underground organization’.[xxxvi]

They[KS7]  felt that there were not enough means of expression within the PCF and then created bulletins and reviews to spread their opinions and ideas during the Algerian War. La Voie communiste was one of the groups in which Guattari participated. However, these oppositional activities did not mean that ‘they stemmed from a disagreement over the Party line’.[xxxvii] Almost all the oppositionnels did not say no to democratic centralism and followed as ‘they had been taught to understand it’.[xxxviii]

It[KS8]  was the Krushchev report on Stalin that opened a gate for the avalanche of criticisms from all sides. Before the beginning of de-Stalinization, a philosopher like Althusser was perceived as one of the ordinary intellectuals in the marginal position within the Party and his argument of anti-humanism was regarded as the grandiloquent exercise separated from political practice. After Krushchev’s open affirmation of Stalin’s error, however, there arose the philosophical activities for encouraging the critique of Stalinist dogmatism and the creative application of Marxism to theoretical and political problems within the PCF in the mid-1960s.

Althusser also participated in the debates about Marxist humanism and advocated ‘greater scientific rigour’.[xxxix] His rivals were Roger Garaudy, inclined to liberal humanism, and Lucien Sève, who called for a middle way. Althusser’s novel interpretation of Marx startled the significant figures of the Party, and his reading of Marx as a theoretical anti-humanism made a big stir among them. Of course, Althusser’s controversial view of Marx was not accepted by the members when the Central Committee of the PCF gathered at Argenteuil in March 1966. In the meeting, Michel Simon argued that anti-humanism was a dangerous notion to accredit the bourgeois demonization of communists as those who were not concerned with humanity. The conclusion of the humanist controversy in the PCF ended up the reaffirmation of Marxist humanism. After the three-day conference, party economists organized a roundtable to discuss the distinct characteristic of capitalism in France and defined its stage as state-monopoly capitalism. In short, the restoration of Marxist humanism against state-monopoly capitalism was the political solution of the PCF before May 1968. This aftermath of de-Stalinization in the Party proved that the central leaders in the committee still focused on socio-economic changes within the nation-state and returned to their early idea of domestic politics when they discussed the meaning of Gaullism.

When[KS9]  considering these political conditions, it would not be difficult to understand why Deleuze and Guattari decided to write Capitalism and Schizophrenia. After the event of May 1968, their political task was twofold: first, they had to insist on the anti-humanist position against Marxist humanism; secondly, they suggested an alternative model of political organization to democratic centralism.

 

Centralization and de-centralization

 

Democratic centralism was the official doctrine for the communist parties since Lenin’s strategy of the Bolsheviks. Criticizing Rosa Luxemburg’s focus on the spontaneity of the masses, Lenin suggested democratic centralization in What Is to Be Done: Burning Questions of Our Movement.

Guattari [KS10] called this tactical model ‘the great Leninian rupture’.[xl] Although Lenin insisted on the central role of the avant-garde, he did not repudiate the spontaneous element of ‘consciousness in an embryonic form’ in the early stage of the revolutionary procedure.[xli] In this manner, Lenin laid stress on the relationship between the centralized party and the masses and argued that ‘the crowd will advance from its ranks increasing numbers of professional revolutionists, for it will know that it is not enough for a few students and workingmen waging economic war to gather together and form a “committee”’.[xlii] The masses will demand more professional revolutionaries and think of training them. From this viewpoint, Lenin argued that ‘the centralization of the secret functions of the organization does not mean the concentration of all the functions of the movement’.[xliii]

However, Guattari defined Lenin’s rupture or breakthrough as ‘group castration’, which severs the Party from the masses.[xliv] Here, ‘castration’ did not mean the privilegization of the Party but a fundamental frame for the political movement. As a result, this separation ended up in the bureaucratic centralism in question. One of the tragic consequences happened to the Communist Party of Korea after the Second World War.

After[KS11]  the announcement of their communist manifesto in Shanghai in 1921, the Korean communists officially launched the Party in Seoul in 1925 and organized long underground resistance until the last day of the Japanese Empire, even though almost all members were arrested, and the central committee of the Party was dissolved by Japanese police. Right after the Liberation, the Party was successfully revived, and its central committee was reorganized. According to U.S. Army Military Government in Korea’s opinion survey, 77 per cent of the responses enthusiastically supported socialism and communism in 1946. However, Stalin, the faithful successor of Lenin’s democratic centralism, thought that the proper stage of development in Korea was the upbringing of the bourgeois revolution and ordered the Party to change its title to the Workers’ Party of Korea. The center did not consider the local political demands and simply ordered their decision. As a member of the Communist International (Comintern), the Korean communists followed the direction from the central authority of the USSR and declined to be blasted into its disastrous failure.[xlv] The historical demise of communism in Korea is the typical example, which proves the disturbing aftermath of ‘group castration’ in Guattari’s sense. The problem of the central leadership lies in its bureaucratic ignorance of the relationship between unification and differentiation in the diverse conjunctures.

In ‘The Group and the Person’, Guattari discussed the association between an individual revolutionary and an organization and suggested ‘a subject group’ (un groupe-sujet), which is not assimilated to ‘a delegated individual who can claim to speak on its behalf’.[xlvi] Guattari’s point is that the Russian Revolution became to be fallen into the bureaucratization of the Party by abandoning the decentralized organization established by the Bolshevik Party. The revolutionary systems of the party during the period of the underground struggles faded away in favor of dogmatic centralism. It is interesting that Guattari regards Stalinism as the excessive form to repress ‘the fastest-flowing current of social expression the world has ever known’.[xlvii] In this sense, it is meant to reveal that the Russian Revolution did not fail, but the organization of its movement lacked success. Guattari argued that ‘the voluntarism of the Leninist organization and its systematic mistrust of the spontaneity of the masses undoubtedly led it to miss seeing the revolutionary possibilities represented by the soviets’ and declared that ‘in fact there never was any real theory of soviet organization in Leninism’.[xlviii] In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari elaborate this point further; they emphasize the ‘transversality’ between the revolutionary group and the masses in relation to Lenin’s discussion of spontaneity and centralization. Guattari affirms that the concept of transversality is ‘after all, no more than an attempt to analyze democratic centralism’.[xlix]

Resonating [KS12] with this purpose, Deleuze and Guattari argue in Anti-Oedipus:

 

If the preconscious revolutionary break appears at the first level, and is defined by the characteristics of a new aggregate, the unconscious or libidinal break belongs to the second level and is defined by the driving role of desiring-production and the position of its multiplicities. It is understandable, therefore, that a group can be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest and its preconscious investment, but not be so -- and even remain fascist and police-like-from the standpoint of its libidinal investments. Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire.[l]

 

Their presupposition of two levels in the revolutionary modus operandi does not oppose Lenin’s understanding of the association between the revolutionary organization and the masses. Guattari elucidates that ‘the Leninist solution of a political break, of establishing a separate institutional object, a machine of consciousness and action composed wholly of professional revolutionaries, was, as history has shown, the right one in a catastrophic situation like that in Russia in 1917’. [li] However, he also accentuates that Lenin’s strategy is no longer effective in highly developed capitalist regimes -- the regimes that power is held in ‘the meshes of an infinitely complex network of production relations covering every element of the world economy and even the smallest of our everyday actions’.[lii]

In[KS13]  Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s discussion pushes Lenin’s thesis to the deeper level of the movement, which is parallel to the globalized regimes of capitalism. This analysis does not mean the liquidation of Leninism but the modification of its tactics. As Gary Genosko says, this ‘molecular Leninism’ gives rise to ‘a Janus-faced conception of the party that Guattari developed through his non-absolute distinction between subjugated and subject groups’.[liii]

For them, the unconscious revolutionary rupture is more important than the preconscious revolutionary break, and otherwise, the preconscious spontaneity of a revolutionary subjugated group cannot resist the fascist entrapment and easily falls into the state of police. On the contrary, a subject-group is ‘a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary’.[liv] The concept of democratic centralism reveals the paradox of revolution. The confrontation between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin around spontaneity and centralism, further, proletarian internationalism and the right of national self-determination.

In this sense, Anti-Oedipus is nothing less than the philosophical intervention into the age-old paradox of revolutionary politics. On the one hand, it is the response to de-Stalinization within the PCF, on the other hand, a philosophical justification of the Third World revolutionary movements. Deleuze and Guattari do not think that the two categories are separated. For them, the struggles in the Third World are the repetition of “pure revolution”, which has successfully built internationalism and the universal proletariat, stepping out of the nation-states.

In Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm proposed the term “the short twentieth century” to reflect the extreme experiences of the century. The period refers to 78 years between 1914 to 1991, beginning with the First World War and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The [KS14] first Great War caused the fall of the German, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian empires and paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War. When the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs upon Japan in 1945, it seemed that the war had finally finished, the “justice league” of the Allies defeating the Fascist alliance. On the contrary to common belief, Hobsbawm emphasized that ‘the Second World War had barely ended when humanity plunged into what can reasonably be regarded as a Third World War’.[lv] While Europe settled into post-war conditions, the war did not end in the Third World. Ironically, the end of the great war meant the beginning of civil wars in the areas. For instance, Asia was ‘the zone in which the two superpowers continued, throughout the Cold War, to compete for support and influence, and hence the major zone of friction between them, and indeed the one where armed conflict was most likely, and actually broke out’.[lvi][KS15] 

 The rise of the nation-state belonged to the nineteenth century, a central theme that replaced empire building to become the crucial narrative of the twentieth century after the First World War. Whilst the stories and issues of imperialist empires were still very apparent then, nationalism’s reach began to dominate. Taking off on the global stage, the collective passion towards the republic spread across the world. This dialectical process accelerated national liberation movements and the invention of national identity. The republican spirit to establish a nation-state against imperialism was related to sovereignty in international politics. The political situation of the Third World after the Second World War gave rise to the crisis of central leadership within the communist parties. In 1920s, the Communist International (Comintern) supervised national parties to learn how to organize modern political groups and to mobilize people. Abiding by this rule, the PCF ordered its pied noir members to return to Algeria to facilitate the revolutionary movements.[lvii] However, the Algerian War disclosed the problem of Leninist centralism, which lurked behind the political situations after the Liberation.

The National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria, the central leading organization, never successfully formulated and distributed a comprehensive political doctrine across diverse revolutionary groups. The uneven degree of political development and radicalization had been observed in each branch. The young generation railed against the central committee for the absence of proper communication and the lack of a precise orientation. The decentralized structure of the FLN made its political activities fall into the impasse of internecine rivalries among individuals and clans. Therefore, ‘the front’s “transnational” nature was simultaneously its greatest strength and its greatest weakness’.[lviii] However, it was not easy to bring out the solution for this fundamental discrepancy between the central organization and the different political groups. The leaders perceived the decentralization of the movements as the deficiency of political education and invoked the revolutionary discipline and democratic centralism as the remedies for the inconsistencies. These resolutions proposed replacing the provisional government with a political bureau to centralize authority again.

The[KS16]  difficulty of the central leadership in the revolutionary movements confirms the paradox of democratic centralism. It does not mean that the Leninist mantra is a strategic fallacy or failure. Deleuze and Guattari do not insist that decentralization must replace centralization but instead regard the paradox between centralization and decentralization as the transversality of the revolutionary situation.

Deleuze and Guattari search for the possibility of revolution without the Party. I believe that the event of May 1968 is a crucial moment in marking the rupture. As Guattari confesses, Anti-Oedipus grows through their intellectual engagements into the political situation. No doubt, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s collaborative publication is the effect of the May movement, the revolution that does not yet take place, bearing the theoretical achievement of the French Left. The sequel of the book, A Thousand Plateaus, follows this first encounter, which will arrive again in the future.

 

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[i] Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Energumen Capitalism’, in Hatred of Capitalism: A Reader, ed. Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), pp. 229-230.

[ii] Ibid., p. 236.

[iii] Ibid., p. 237.

[iv] Gilles Deleuze, ‘On Philosophy’, in Negotiations: 1972-1990, transl. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 145.

[v] Ibid. p. 144.

[vi] Gilles Deleuze, ‘Control and Becoming’, in Negotiations: 1972-1990, transl. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 171.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid., p. 170.

[ix] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 231.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Gilles Deleuze, ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, transl. Michael Taomina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 232.

[xii] Deleuze, ‘On Philosophy’, p. 144.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Gilles Deleuze, ‘Three Group-Related Problems’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, transl. Michael Taomina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), pp. 193-194.

[xv] Ibid., p. 194.

[xvi] Ibid.

[xvii] Ibid., p. 195.

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] Maxwell Adereth, The French Communist Party: A Critical History (1920-84) from Comintern to ‘the Colours of France’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 167.

[xxi] Ibid., p. 171.

[xxii] Deleuze, ‘Three Group-Related Problems’, p. 196.

[xxiii] Ibid.

[xxiv] Ibid., p. 197.

[xxv] Félix Guattari, ‘Nine Theses of the Left Opposition’, in Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955-1971, transl. Ames Hodges (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015), p. 136.

[xxvi] Ibid.

[xxvii] Ibid., p. 137.

[xxviii] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 21.

[xxix] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 24 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010), p. 364.

[xxx] François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, transl. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 224.

[xxxi] Deleuze, ‘On Philosophy’, p. 144.

[xxxii] Isabella Garo and Anne Sauvagnargues, ‘Deleuze, Guattari et Marx’, Actuel Marx, 52 (2012), p. 8.

[xxxiii] Gilles Deleuze, ‘On Capitalism and Desire’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, transl. Michael Taomina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 264.

[xxxiv] See Étienne Balibar, ‘Althusser’s Object’, transl. Margaret Cohen and Bruce Robbins, Social Text, no. 39 (Summer, 1994), p. 157.

[xxxv] Danièle Joly, The French Communist Party and the Algerian War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), p. ix.

[xxxvi] See ‘Les groupes oppositionnels au P.C.F’, Le Monde, April 03 (1970).

[xxxvii] Joly, The French Communist Party and the Algerian War, p. 131.

[xxxviii] Ibid., p. 130.

[xxxix] Adereth, The French Communist Party, p. 180.

[xl] Deleuze, ‘Three Group-Related Problems’, p. 196.

[xli] Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, What Is to Be Done: Burning Questions of Our Movement (New York: International Publisher, 1929), p. 32.

[xlii] Ibid., p. 117.

[xliii] Ibid.

[xliv] Félix Guattari, ‘Causality, Subjectivity and History’, in Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955-1971, transl. Ames Hodges (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015), p. 270.

[xlv] See Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-Sik Lee, Communism in Korea, 2 vols (Berkley: The University of California Press, 1972).

[xlvi] Félix Guattari, ‘The Group and the Person’, in Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955-1971, transl. Ames Hodges (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015), p. 219.

[xlvii] Ibid., p. 216.

[xlviii] Ibid.

[xlix] Guattari, ‘Causality, Subjectivity and History’, p. 270, no. 19.

[l] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 348.

[li] Guattari, ‘Causality, Subjectivity and History’, p. 270.

[lii] Ibid.

[liii] Gary Genosko, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 15.

[liv] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 348.

[lv] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, London: Abacus, 1994, p. 226.

[lvi] Ibid, p. 227.

[lvii] Abderrahim Taled Bendiab, ‘La pénétration des idées et l’implantation communiste en Algérie dans les années 1920’, in Mouvement ouvrier, communisme et nationalismes dans le monde arabe, ed. René Gallissot (Paris: Editions Ouvrières, 1978), pp. 127–146.

[lviii] Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 120.

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 [KS1]Here is Azuma san's proposal of a paragraph break for the translation.

 [KS2]Here is Azuma san's proposal.

 [KS3]Here is Azuma san's proposal.

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 [KS5]Here is Azuma san's proposal of a paragraph break for the translation. As you see, this proposal is more aggressive than the others. If you don't like this, please feel free to turn down it or change the word.

 [KS6]Here is Azuma san's proposal.

 [KS7]Here is Azuma san's proposal.

 [KS8]Here is Azuma san's proposal.

 [KS9]Here is Azuma san's proposal.

 [KS10]Here is Azuma san's proposal.

 [KS11]Here is Azuma san's proposal.

 [KS12]Here is Azuma san's proposal.

 [KS13]Here is Azuma san's proposal.

 [KS14]Here is Azuma san's proposal.

 [KS15]Just a trivial thing, but this citation seems to come from p. 227, not from p. 226. Is it OK to correct the note 56?

 [KS16]Here is Azuma san's proposal.