mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, hair, hard trans-

parent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set
with lashes—but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so
also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus,
dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut
Dark Deleuze
and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon,
then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and
polluted with shit; as though your dressmaker’s scissors were Andrew Culp
opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the
small intestines’ alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the
duodenum, or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its
comers, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split
it. Spread out the bats’ wings of the palate and its damp base-
ments, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat un-
der construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle
and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then
the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense
mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony
pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end
to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the
aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and ex-
tract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out
like smooth sleeping dolphins. (1–2)
Though Lyotard’s account is compelling, we must remain
more vigilant. For what is it that fuels capitalism if not the mas-
sive energy generated through the unfolding of bodies? This is
what inspires the famous line of The Manifesto of the Commu-
nist Party, whereby the constant revolutionizing of the forces
of production leads to an “uninterrupted disturbance of all so-
cial conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation” summa-
rized in the phrase “all that is solid melts into air” (chapter 1).
But to be clear: communism is revolutionary because it too be-
lieves in the process of dissolution. Capitalism is to be criticized
for falling short—it pairs the conductive power of unfolding 2016

44
a narrative device, unfolding builds tension until it suddenly
“bursts open like a spring” (N, 151). Expectation, anticipation,
climax, release. Modern Times is a masterful piece of unfold-
ing. At a certain point (“the moment Charlie Chaplin makes
the board fall on his head for a second time”), the film unfolds
with the “short-circuits of a disconnected piece of machinery”
(AO, 317). We cease to identify with the main character and
instead envelop his events, surprises, premonitions, and habits.
There is no more to unfold at dawn as the couple, “seen from
the back, all black, whose shadows are not projected by any
sun, advance toward nothing” (317). A line of telegraph poles
on the left and pathetic trees on the right, the two fade into an
empty road with no horizon—disappearing as they unfold into
the void.
Unfolding operates through conduction, not communication—
at least according to Jean-François Lyotard in Libidinal Econ-
omy (254–62). As a conductor of affects, unfolding does not
build capacities through the accumulative logic of rhizomes,
which changes through addition or subtraction. Unfolding’s
disconnection is not the dampening of power but the buildup
of charges that jump across the divide. This operation is
so vital that Deleuze elevates unfolding to the absolute of
unfolding substance itself (S, 310). Yet this process always
takes place through a body, which stands at the limit of wild
unfolding. The body staves off the “operation of vertigo”
that comes from chasing after the “tiny and moving folds
that waft me along at excessive speed” (L, 93). Seen from its
slower speed, we see that unfolding generates force. Consider
Lyotard’s project of an “invulnerable conspiracy, headless,
homeless, with neither programme nor project,” which begins
by “deploying a thousand cancerous tensors” (262) across the
body’s “great ephemeral skin”:
Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not
only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its
great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its

43
its own inevitability. We know better than to think that a rhi-
zome is enough to save us. Even something as rhizomatic as
the Internet is still governed by a set of decentralized protocols
that helps it maintain its consistency—the drawback being that
these forms of control are diffuse, not immediately apparent, Contents
and difficult to resist (Galloway, Protocol, 61–72).
A contrary path: cast a line to the outside! These lines are
found in folds, which are what connects a world where “re- Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
lations are external to their terms” (H, 101). It is through the Works by Gilles Deleuze . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
external bridge of the fold that “a world where terms exist like Works by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari . . 5
veritable atoms” communicates through their irreducible exte-
Introduction 6
riority (DI, 163). More importantly, folding is movement. The
Timely Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
inside is not erased from this world; rather, the interior is an
Hatred for This World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
operation of the outside (F, 97). Such “in-folding” is a structura-
From the Chapel to the Crypt . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
tion, “the folding back on itself of the fiber to form a compact
structure” that transforms mere sedimentation into hardened The Extinction of Being 26
strata (TP, 42). It is in this way that we can understand fold- The Task: Destroy Worlds, Not Create Conceptions . 26
ing as a double-relation of force enveloping itself (and not of The Subject: Un-becoming, Not Assemblages . . . . 30
some forces’ relation to others) as found in inorganic life, bi- Existence: Transformation, Not Genesis . . . . . . . 33
ological evolution, art, and thought (N, 92). But folding only Ontology: Materialism, Not Realism . . . . . . . . . 34
accounts for one moment in the rhythm of movement; it is Difference: Exclusive Disjunction, Not Inclusive Dis-
complemented by unfolding—“to unfold is to increase to grow; junction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
whereas to fold is to diminish, to reduce, ‘to withdraw into the
recesses of a world’” (L, 8–9). Advancing toward Nothing 37
Although called joyous by some, the great unfolding sparks Diagram: Asymmetry, Not Complexity . . . . . . . 37
an experience of terror driven by the question, “how far can Affect: Cruelty, Not Intensity . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
we unfold the line without falling into a breathless void, into Organization: Unfolding, Not Rhizome . . . . . . . . 41
death, and how can we fold it, but without losing touch with Ethics: Conspiratorial Communism, Not Processual
it, to produce an inside copresent with the outside, correspond- Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
ing to the outside?” (N, 113). A boring biological example is an
animal’s deterritorialization of its milieu by in-folding a func- Breakdown, Destruction, Ruin 48
tion by way of an organ that enables it to escape to form new Speed: Escape, Not Acceleration . . . . . . . . . . . 48
relations with a new outside, such as a tetrapod’s water retrain- Flows: Interruption, Not Production . . . . . . . . . 52
ment, which enabled it to carry the sea with it on land. The Substance: Political Anthropology, Not Technoscience 54
most exciting version of unfolding operates purely in time. As Nomadism: Barbarian, Not Pastoral . . . . . . . . . 57

42 3
The Call of the Outside 59 world swelling into a single ocean of excess (28, 304). Toward
Distribution: The Outside, Not Nomos . . . . . . . . 59 the end, he tells us that history presides over every determina-
Politics: Cataclysmic, Not Molecular . . . . . . . . . 62 tion since the birth of the world (219). Even though it may not
Cinema: The Powers of the False, Not the Forces of progress “by its bad side,” as Marx would have it through his
Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 critique of Proudhon, history is not “any less bloody or cruel
The Sensible: Indiscernibility, Not Experience . . . . 66 as a result” (268).
Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty gives shape to the way forward.
Conclusion 68 He would be amused by the cinematic experiment of A Clock-
work Orange. His theatrical cruelty targets those who see them-
Acknowledgments 73 selves as Alex—those who complain, “I can no longer think
what I want, the moving images-are-substituted for my own
Bibliography 74
thoughts” (C2, 166). The resulting theater is not for telling sto-
ries but to “empower,” to implant images in the brains of those
powerless to stop it (174, 166). The cruel force of these images
strikes something in the skull but not the mind (a nerve? brain
matter?) (167). But the only thought it allows us to ponder is
“the fact that we are not yet thinking,” that we are “powerless
to think the whole and to think oneself,” a “thought which is
always fossilized, dislocated, collapsed” (167). Cruelty here is
“a dissociative force,” “a figure of nothingness,” and “a hole in
appearance” good only for unlinking us from ourselves (167).

Organization: Unfolding, Not Rhizome

Enough with rhizomes. Although they were a suggestive im-
age of thought thirty-five years ago, our present is dominated
by the Cold War technology of the Internet that was made as
a rhizomatic network for surviving nuclear war. The rhizome
was a convincing snapshot of things to come, but Deleuze and
Guattari left out a few things, most notably the question of
movement. How does a rhizome advance, except in the crawl
of the blob that slowly takes over everything? This is proba-
bly why connectivists have come to revere it—the alleged open
ecology of the network specifies nothing except the bluster of

4 41
Affect: Cruelty, Not Intensity Abbreviations
The story of a tyrant: finding his cruelty mollified, God bur- Works by Gilles Deleuze
dens the world with infinite debt. Before him, memories were
written on the body in a “terrible alphabet” so as never to for-
get them (AO, 145). This system was cruel but finite, which C1 Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986)
allowed it to form elaborate crisscrossing systems that warded C2 Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989)
off the centralization of power, such as potlatches (190). A para- D Dialogues 2 (with Claire Parnet; 2007)
noid despot arrives from the outside, as described by Nietzsche DI Desert Islands (2004)
in On the Genealogy of Morality, installing history “just like DR Difference and Repetition (1994)
lightning appears, too terrible, sudden,” with the founding of ECC Essays Critical and Clinical (1997)
the state to redirect the horizontal lines of alliance up and to- F Foucault (1988)
ward himself. Finite is made infinite—“everything is owed to FB Francis Bacon (2005)
the king” (AO, 192). Against the infinite torture of unlimited H Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of
debt, cruelty combats both history and the judgment of God Human Nature (1991)
with “a writing of blood and life that is opposed to the writing L The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993)
of the book” (ECC, 128). Cruelty returns as language written LS Logic of Sense (1990)
on flesh—“terrible signs that lacerate bodies and stain them” as N Negotiations (1997)
“the incisions and pigments” that reveal “what they owe and NP Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983)
are owed” (AO, 128). Only then does the eternal collapse into P Proust and Signs (2000)
the finitude of our existence. PI Pure Immanence (2005)
Ours is “the most cruel of all worlds” (DI, 108). Cruelty has a S Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990)
lighter cousin, intensity, which induces the event of individua- TR Two Regimes of Madness (2007)
tion that “affirms difference” without resorting to extension’s
depth (DR, 233). The definition of intensity as “felt” has been Works by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
the source of incredible confusion. Having reduced intensity
to a special kind of feeling, practitioners of “affect studies” per-
form autoethnographies of the ineffable. This is quite peculiar AO Anti-Oedipus (1977)
given the antiphenomenology of Deleuze’s transcendental em- K Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986)
piricism, which is explicitly nonhuman, prepersonal, and asub- TP A Thousand Plateaus (1987)
jective. Instead of intensity as “a strong feeling,” cruelty more WP What Is Philosophy? (1994)
aptly describes the “being of the sensible” as “the demons, the
sign-bearers,” who bring thought to us (266). Consider how
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition opens with lightning streak-
ing through the black sky and ends with all the drops of the

40 5
 Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker note in their media
theory of the exploit that “it is not simply that feminism is op-
posed to patriarchy, but that they are asymmetrically opposed;
racism and antiracism are not just opposed but exist in a rela-
Introduction tionship of asymmetry” (The Exploit, 14). The result is a formal
mechanism for political antagonism that draws on the powers
of the outside.
SUMMARIZING HIS DEEPLY IDIOSYNCRATIC WORK, Asymmetry is ultimately a question of combat, even if it is
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes writing about formally established diagrammatically. Its best realization was
others as “a sort of buggery” or “immaculate conception” that the twentieth-century guerrilla. The guerilla demonstrates two
is the result of “taking an author from behind and giving things about asymmetry: first, each side is opposed in terms
him a child” (N, 6). Deleuze is still quick to distinguish his of its strategic imperatives, but second, as each side varies in
project from outright falsification. He strictly limits himself orientation, it also varies in type. As Henry Kissinger writes
to what an author actually says; he attends to a thinker’s about the American strategy in “The Vietnam Negotiations” for
“shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions” to give Foreign Affairs,
him “a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous” we fought a military war; our opponents fought a political
(N, 6). More than thirty years after making these remarks, one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our
Deleuze now has plenty of little monsters of his own—rootless psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of
rhi-zombies, dizzying metaphysicians, skittish geonaturalists, the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he
enchanted transcendentalists, passionate affectivists. My aim does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.
is to give him another child that shares his last name: “Dark The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-
Deleuze.” fighter uses his cape—to keep us lunging in areas of marginal
Deleuze once told a friend that a “worthwhile book” per- political importance. (214)
forms at least three functions: polemics, recovery, and creativ- Fact: while the United States was fighting a war, Vietnam
ity. In writing the book, the author must reveal that (1) other was engaged in combat; one for domination, the other for
scholarship commits an error; (2) an essential insight has been freedom (ECC, 132–35). This is how Marxist struggles for
missed; and (3) a new concept can be created. You will find all national liberation raised formal asymmetry as a resource for
three is this book. First, I argue against the “canon of joy” that world-historical proportions. Mao defeated the national army
celebrates Deleuze as a naively affirmative thinker of connec- of China with guerrillas who “move amongst the people as
tivity. Second, I rehabilitate the destructive force of negativity a fish swims in the sea.” Che helped Castro’s rebels flood the
by cultivating a “hatred for this world.” Third, I propose a con- countryside so that they could spark a revolution that would
spiracy of contrary terms that diverge from the joyous task of eventually consume the cities. We must find ways to avoid
creation. complexity from deferring our own “full guerrilla warfare”
Picking out a particular strain of thought: scholars of “new (LS, 156–57).
materialism” turn to realist ontology by way of Deleuze’s meta-

6 39
gether difference into a strange alliance of philosophy and sci- physics of positivity. The basis for the realist side of Deleuze
ence (Delanda, Intensive Science, 46–47). Though offering some is perhaps best evinced by his biography. Those who knew
provocative insights, this flattening still often leads to “a uni- Deleuze consistently note his firm commitment to joyful affir-
formization of diversity” and “equalization of inequality” (DR, mation and his distaste for the ressentiment of negativity. Be-
223). As a resource, the labyrinthine structure of complex sys- atifying this sentiment, Deleuze has been used to establishing
tems can both mobilize and impair forces. Such complexity a whole canon of joy. In the canon of joy, the cosmos is a com-
multiplies paths, which stocks one’s arsenal with either a range plex collection of assemblages produced through the ongoing
of new options (as in de Certeau’s “tactics”) or a trap to bog processes of differentiation. The effect of the Joyous Deleuze’s
down their opponents (Kafka’s The Trial). It is this second as- image of thought is a sense of wonder, accompanied by the en-
pect that contributes to the third dimension of complexity: de- joyment of creating concepts that express how the world really
ferral. A matter’s “complexity” has become a way to defer a exists.
sufficient answer (“it is too complex for me to give a complete A different Deleuze, a darker one, has slowly cast its shadow.
answer now …”). The trouble with deferral is its collusion with Yet this figure only appears when we escape the chapel choir of
capitalist time, which delays the arrival of the proletarian rev- joy for the dark seclusion of the crypt. Emerging from scholars
olution (Balibar, Philosophy of Marx, 101). Just ask complexity concerned with the condition of the present, the darkness re-
progenitor Stuart Kauffman, who now speaks in a mixture of fashions a revolutionary Deleuze: revolutionary negativity in
religious mysticism and computational entrepreneurship (Rein- a world characterized by compulsory happiness, decentralized
venting the Sacred; Kauffman et al., “Economic Opportunity”). control, and overexposure. This refashioned Deleuze forms a
Deleuze outlines his case for asymmetry in Difference and countercanon out of the perfused negativity of his concepts
Repetition. Everything we know is the work of a calculating and affects. On the level of concept, it recognizes that negativ-
god whose numbers fail to add up, he says (DR, 222). The ef- ity impregnates Deleuze’s many prefixes of difference, becom-
fect is a basic injustice, an “irreducible inequality,” that is “the ing, movement, and transformation, such as de-, a-, in-, and
world” (222). “If the calculations were exact there would be no non-. On the level of affect, it draws on Deleuze’s talk of indis-
world,” Deleuze argues, that makes the world itself the “remain- cernibility, concealment, the shame of being human, and the
der” that is “the real in the world understood in terms of frac- monstrous power of the scream. The ultimate task of this ap-
tional or even incommensurable numbers” (222). This asymme- proach is not the creation of concepts, and to the extent that it
try is not meant as a refutation of the dubious hypothesis of does, Dark Deleuze creates concepts only to write apocalyptic
the computational universe, though he does thoroughly show science fiction (DR, xx–xxii).
how the “partial truth” of energetics (e.g., the thermodynamics
of entropy) is a “transcendental physical illusion” that should
not be applied to the rest of the world (225, 229). The wider
Timely Connections
significance of asymmetry is an alternative to dialectics. A di- Michel Foucault half-jokingly suggested in 1970 that “per-
alectical framing of gender, for instance, would establish an in- haps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian” (“The-
trinsic relation between masculinity and femininity, hopelessly atrum Philosophicum,” 885). It is easy to see how boosters have
entangling each within each other. Extracted from dialectics,

38 7
used this phrase to raise the profile of Deleuze, who was far less
popular than Foucault or Derrida during the initial reception
of poststructuralism in America. But what if it is a subtle jab?
Foucault makes the remark in the same breath as a reference
to Pierre Klossowski, a crucial member of the secret society Advancing toward Nothing
Acéphale, which helped revive Nietzsche in France when oth-
ers too easily dismissed the thinker as fascist. “Historically fit-
ting” would be an insult to Nietzsche, who proudly proclaims Diagram: Asymmetry, Not Complexity
the untimeliness of thought “acting counter to our time and
thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of “The ‘nothing’ (Heidegger), the ‘trace’ or ‘différance’ (Der-
a time to come” at the beginning of his essay on the uses and rida), the ‘surplus always exterior to the totality’ (Levinas),
abuses of history for life (Untimely Meditations, 60). As a major the ‘differend’ (Lyotard), ‘the invisible’ (Althusser),” and “the
French interlocutor of Nietzsche, Deleuze uses this exact same ‘pariah’ (Arendt), ‘the jew’ (Lyotard), the ‘migrant’ (Virilio),
phrase on untimeliness in the opening pages of Difference and the ‘nomad’ (Deleuze and Guattari), the ‘hybrid’ (Bhabha), the
Repetition—the very book that Foucault was reviewing when ‘catachrestic remainder’ (Spivak), the ‘non-being’ (Dussel), the
he made the comment. Bearing out the implication by mincing ‘refugee’ (Agamben), and, most resonantly, the ‘émigré’ (Said),”
another Nietzschean phrase, then perhaps Foucault was accus- are the terms literary theorist William Spanos uses to describe
ing him of being “timely, all too timely.” the fleeting figures of the late twentieth century (“Question
What would make Deleuze’s thought especially timely? of Philosophy,” 173). Each term names a conflict between
Critics such as Slavoj Žižek accuse him of being a poster differences in kind, mapping lines of flight to the outside and
child for the cultural excesses of postmodern capitalism those who dwell there. They speak of effects not equal to their
(“Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution’”). A recent round of denuncia- cause. The generic term for this relation is asymmetry, which
tions underwritten by a mix of wonderment and red-baiting expresses difference as formal inequivalence. Asymmetry
exclaim, “The founder of BuzzFeed wrote his senior thesis works to impede reciprocal relations and prevent reversibil-
on the Marxism of Deleuze and Guattari!,” adding to a long ity. It diagrammatically starts by constituting two formally
list of guilty associations—“the Israeli Defense Force reads A distinct terms as contrary asymmetry. It is maintained by
Thousand Plateaus!,” “Deleuze spouts the fashionable nonsense concretely establishing a relationship of incommensurability
of pseudoscience!” Deleuze’s defenders are correct to dismiss between their sets of forces.
such criticisms as either incomplete or outright spurious. Yet Complexity is snake oil in the age of singularity—everyone
there is a kernel of truth that goes back to an old joke—a and everything is a unique snowflake, what relations they can
communist is someone who reads Das Kapital; a capitalist is establish is not predetermined, and what they can become is
someone who reads Das Kapital and understands it. Saying the limited most by how well they apply themselves! Any criticism
same about Deleuze: there is something absolutely essential of complexity must take into account its three levels: complex-
about his work, but it would not be best to take it at face ity as a fact, complexity as a resource, and complexity as defer-
value. The necessity of “taking another step” beyond Deleuze ral. As a fact, it culminates in a “flat ontology” that stitches to-

8 37
own (Empire, 44–45, 138–56, 190–201, 339–43). Capital is now avant la lettre is especially true when both capitalists and
indistinguishable from the exemplary subject, the schizo, who their opponents simultaneously cite him as a major influence.
is voiced by Nietzsche in his wild claims to be “all the names The exact rapport between Deleuze’s thought and our time
of history” (AO, 86)! Power is now diffuse, and the antagonism thus remains a puzzle for us to solve. Does the problem arise
of Marx’s class war has been drowned in an overwhelming sea because certain readers act like doctors who participate in
of difference. This development calls for a reorientation that death penalty executions, who follow protocol to make a
entails learning how to become contrary. In the case of Dark perfectly clinical diagnosis, only to help administer a set of
Deleuze, the contrarian position is the forced choice of “this, drugs condemned by their field? Or is there something about
not that.” Deleuze is perfectly happy to demand “no possible his prescription that only exacerbates our current condition?
compromise between Hegel and Nietzsche” (NP, 195). Why not Ours is the age of angels, says French philosopher Michel
experiment with our own exclusive disjunctive synthesis that Serres (Angels, a Modern Myth). Armies of invisible messengers
is limited, restrictive, and constrained? Hardt and Negri take now crisscross the skies, tasked with communication, connec-
their cue from those in the Global South who “homogenize real tion, transmission, and translation. As inspiring as they may
differences” to name “the potential unity of an international op- seem, they also compel us to embody their messages in word
position, the confluence of anticapitalist countries and forces” and act. Click, poke, like. We feel the nervous prick of incom-
(Empire, 334). A better response has been the terrifying screams ing missives that set us in a feverish state until we address
of no that occasionally break apart its grand accords (Holloway, the incoming text message, reply to the overdue e-mail, or re-
“The Scream,” 1). Though not demanding the suppression of dif- spond to the pending friend request. These everyday behav-
ference, the problem of Empire reignites the necessity of con- iors show that the seemingly modern world of commodities
spiracy, the power of hatred, and the task of destroying worlds. has not stolen our sense of wonder—we are as divinely moved
by media as we once were by angels. Marx, who, in Artaud’s
phrase, has “done away with the judgment of God,” shows that
this mystical character of the commodity is capitalism and also
its most popular trick. Let us then follow Marx’s old mole in
the search of history, moving from the heavens to the under-
ground. Refusing to sing the hymns of the age, Deleuze and
Guattari made a crucial declaration in 1991 as the Iron Curtain
crumbled and the first commercial Internet service providers
came online: “We do not lack communication. On the contrary,
we have too much of it… We lack resistance to the present” (WP,
108).
Dark Deleuze’s immediate target is connectivity, the name
given to the growing integration of people and things through
digital technology. Acolyte of connection and Google chair-
man Eric Schmidt recently declared at the World Economic

36 9
Forum that soon “the internet will disappear” as it becomes in- counter, 174). This permanent revocation of the fait accompli
separable from our very being (“it will be part of your presence is at work in politics of destruction, which has too long been
all the time”) (Business Insider). This should raise suspicion. No mistaken for deliberation but is instead exemplified by the war
one should ever take futurologists at their word—technology machines of popular insurrection whose success is registered
progresses with the same combined and uneven gait as all by the streets themselves—consider the words of the Invisible
other types development. Yet the numbers behind Schmidt’s Committee in To Our Friends: “Like any specific strike, it is a
claim are hardly a matter of dispute. Five billion new people politics of the accomplished fact. It is the reign of the initia-
are slated to join the Internet in the next decade, and the tive, of practical complicity, of gesture. As to decision, it ac-
“Internet of things” has motivated individual users to integrate complishes that in the streets, reminding those who’ve forgot-
a vast array of online-enabled devices into their everyday ten, that ‘popular’ comes from the Latin populor, ‘to ravage,
lives. Even if they do not fully realize his dreams, they still devastate.’ It is a fullness of expression … and a nullity of delib-
make up the substance of Google’s government of things and eration” (54). By showing the nondurability of what is taken as
the living. real, so-called reality itself, communist politics is a conspiracy
Many traditional concerns have been raised about connectiv- that writes the destruction of the world.
ity. Almost all use the conservative voice of moral caution. A
band of “Net Critics” warn that technology is developing more
quickly than our understanding of its effects. Popular media,
Difference: Exclusive Disjunction, Not
the great screen of the collective unconscious, materialize fears Inclusive Disjunction
about runaway technology. There is a whole string of Asian
horror films that depict cursed media objects ruining our lives “Too much!” is a potential rallying cry—too many products,
(Ringu, Pulse, Phone, One Missed Call, White: The Melody of the too many choices, too much of this world! Instead, become
Curse). The usual cottage industry of romanticizing life without contrary! Difference, for Deleuze, is the result of a “disjunc-
technology now suggests that “cell phones make us lazy,” while tive synthesis” that produces a series of “disjointed and diver-
circulating ideas on how to “get on a social media diet.” Some gent” differences (LS, 174–76, 177–80). Importantly, these dif-
philosophers, such as Bernard Stiegler, even say that technol- ferences can be immediately brought together at a distance
ogy is stealing our precious insides. Behind these suggestions through resonance, globally coordinated, or contracted into a
lurks a drive to get back to our roots. divergent multitude (172–76). Following the rule “always per-
The “mad scientist” criticism of technology misses the mark. versify,” Deleuze and Guattari propose including disjunctions
The trouble is not that myopic technicians have relentlessly in a mad mixture of “world-historical, political, and racial con-
pursued technical breakthroughs without considering the con- tent” as a strategy for scrambling oppressive codes (AO, 15, 88–
sequences (“forgive them, for they know not what they do”; 89).
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 28). The antidote for such Global capitalism quickly caught on. Michael Hardt and An-
ignorance would just be a small dose of ideology critique. Al- tonio Negri have shown us how it rules over a virtual Empire
ternatively, technology has not exceeded humanity’s capacity of difference that eagerly coordinates a wide arrangement of
to manage it—if anything, Foucault’s insights (the analytic of diverging differences while also producing many more of its

10 35
Toynbee’s nomads who shed their habits so they do not have finitude, biopower) suggest that humanity influences its own
to leave their habitats. future more than ever before (DI, 90–93). The problem is, they
know perfectly well what they are doing, but they continue doing
it anyway!
Ontology: Materialism, Not Realism Philosophically, connectivity is about world-building. The
Our appetite produces the real. But do not mistake the real goal of connectivity is to make everyone and everything part
for a simple projection—it is real through and through. “I take of a single world. The cases made for such a world are virtu-
my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my de- ous enough—Kantian cosmopolitanism wants perpetual peace,
sire,” says the streets of Paris in 1968 (Anonymous, “Graffiti”). Marxist universalism demands the unity of theory and practice,
In response, Deleuze and Guattari say that “the real is not im- and Habermas would have us all be part of one great conversa-
possible, on the contrary, within the real everything is possible, tion. Yet connectivity today is determined far more by people
everything becomes possible” (AO, 27). The only reason that like Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, who demonstrates the
we lack anything, they say, is that our social system deprives significance of Deleuze’s argument that “technology is social
us of what we desire. On this account, our taste is not a corre- before it is technical” (F, 17). Trained as a counterterrorism ex-
lationist yearning, as Quentin Meillassoux calls it in After Fini- pert, Google poached Cohen from a position at the Department
tude, which would say that we are reaching for a thing-in-itself of State, where he convinced Condoleezza Rice to integrate so-
always outside the grasp of our perception. Yet this should not cial media into the Bush administration’s “diplomatic tool kit”
lead us to embrace the philosophical realism that connectivists (Rice, No Higher Honor, 305). In a geopolitical manifesto cowrit-
apologize for as an attack on anthropocentrism. “Things exist ten with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt, The New Digital Age,
independently of perception,” the realists assert to bring the Cohen reveals Google’s deep aspiration to extend U.S. govern-
Death of Man. But they forget that “there is no such thing as ment interests at home and abroad. Their central tool? Connec-
either man or nature” when there is “simply the production tivity.
of production itself” (AO, 2). So while there is no man, nature When connectivity is taken as a mantra, you can see its
also must vanish. Without treating the real as truly artificial, effects everywhere. Jobseekers are told to hop on to the web
thought is regrounded as a theology of this world that plugs (“While your resume can help you get the interview for a new
all the leaks to the outside. job, a fully optimized LinkedIn profile can bring you more busi-
A superior materialism “constructs a real that is yet to come” ness, more connections, and can increase your professional
(TP, 142). It does not follow so-called new materialism, which reputation!”). Flat hierarchies are touted as good for business
is really just a new form of animism, but Marxist materialism management (“Power is vertical; potential is horizontal!”). And
as the revolutionary subversion of material necessity. Deleuze the deluge of digital content is treated as the world’s greatest
and Guattari find their superior materialism by exchanging the resource, held back only by unequal access (“Information
theater of representation for the factory of production. It is wants to be free!”). As perverse as it sounds, many Deleuzians
the materialism of Epicurus and the atomism of the swerve as still promote concepts that equally motivate these slogans:
the necessity of contingency (Althusser, Philosophy of the En- transversal lines, rhizomatic connections, compositionist
networks, complex assemblages, affective experiences, and

34 11
enchanted objects. No wonder Deleuze has been derided as Existence: Transformation, Not Genesis
the lava lamp saint of “California Buddhism”—so many have
reduced his rigorous philosophy to the mutual appreciation of Philosophy “has always maintained an essential relation to
difference, openness to encounters in an entangled world, or the law, the institution, and the contract” (DI, 259). Founda-
increased capacity through synergy. tions thus hold a special place in philosophy, with philosophers
Instead of drawing out the romance, Dark Deleuze demands obsessively writing and rewriting the book of Genesis. It is
that we kill our idols. The first task is negative, as in Deleuze Kant, the great thinker of the genetic “condition,” “who finally
and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, a “complete currettage”— turns the philosopher into the Judge at the same time that rea-
overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their son becomes a tribunal” (WP, 72). Deleuze refuses to disown his
groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of own “in the beginning.” But for him, the movement of thought
their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place (AO, follows an explosive line whose genesis comprises problems
311). Put more modestly, the first step is to acknowledge that manifest from imperceptible forces that disrupt habits of mind.
the unbridled optimism for connection has failed. Temporary Such thinking does not build a courthouse of reason whereby
autonomous zones have become special economic zones. The each advance in thought confirms more about what was al-
material consequences of connectivism are clear: the terror ready self-evident, as if developing an elaborate mirror of the
of exposure, the diffusion of power, and the oversaturation world (N 38–39; DR 129). In contrast, the “enemy” Kant does
of information. A tempting next move would be to criticize something intolerable by creating a theory of law that diverts
Deleuzian connectivists as falling behind the times, having the ungrounding called thought, ending its journey to an un-
not recognized their own moment of recuperation. Yet such recognized terra incognita (DI 58; DR 136). He does this by re-
an accusation would only prepare the ground for a more versing the Greeks, making it so the law does not depend on
timely intervention. Dark Deleuze does not take up the mantle the good like a material substrate and instead deriving the good
of prophetic guruism or punctual agitprop. As a project, it from law—“the good is that which the law expresses when it
instead follows Deleuze’s advice to create untimely “vacuoles expresses itself” (K, 43). Expressing their disapproval, Deleuze
of non-communication” that break circuits rather than extend and Guattari draw a “portrait” of Kant that depicts him as a
them (D, 175). The point is not to get out of this place but to vampiric death machine feeding off the world (WP, 56). But
cannibalize it—we may be of this world, but we are certainly even as Kant makes the law rational, he opens up a way out
not for it. Such out-of-jointedness is a distance. And distance in the third critique through a synthesis that allows a free har-
is what begins the dark plunge into the many worlds eclipsed mony of the faculties, though he is quick to betray it (WP, 32,
by the old. 46, 100). Latching on to this furtive insight, Deleuze advances
a “mobile war machine” in its place, to be used against the
“rational administrative machine” of philosophers who “would
Hatred for This World be the bureaucrats of pure reason” (DI, 259). And in making
thought into a siege engine, it gains the nomadic force of trans-
“We need reasons to believe in this world,” Deleuze demands
formation. The key is to avoid founding a new order on a new
(C2, 172). We are so distracted by the cynicism of ideological
image of world. Fortunately, we can follow the pure idea of

12 33
of run-of-the-mill empiricists is that even in the best-case critique that we too easily dismiss the real world as an illusion.
scenario, when they step out of the perspective of the subject, The problem is exaggerated even more now that we mistake
they still reduce existence to conditions of reproduction knowledge for belief, a confusion fed by growing databases
or chart something’s “degree of freedom.” For us, then, the of readily available information. He asks us to relink with the
subject should be spoken about scornfully as simply the sum world as a matter of faith, to believe in something even as tran-
of a body’s habits, most of which are marshaled to evade sient as the fleeting sensations of cinema (C2, 169–173). Al-
thought. though his suggestion is not wrong, it is incomplete. In his
The undoing of the subject is un-becoming. Deleuze with- haste, Deleuze forgets to pose the problem with the ambiva-
holds praise for the subject but does not deny it a place, un- lence found in all his other accounts of power—how affects are
like Althusser, who theorizes “subjectivity without a subject” ruled by tyrants, molecular revolutions made fascist, and no-
(Badiou, “Althusser,” 58–67). But subjects are only interesting mad war machines enrolled to fight for the state. Without it, he
when they cast a “line to the outside”—in short, when they stop becomes Nietzsche’s braying ass, which says yes only because
being subjects (with a double emphasis on “being” and “sub- it is incapable of saying no (NP, 178–86). We must then make up
jects”) (N, 99). This process is how Deleuze describes Foucault’s for Deleuze’s error and seek the dark underside of belief. The
subjectivization, which is not a “coming back” to subjectivity key to identifying what lies beneath begins with the path of be-
to rescue it but the disintegration of the subject as it evaporates lief, but only to pursue a different orientation. So start with a
into a field of forces where neither persons nor identities sur- similar becoming-active that links up with the forces that auto-
vive (N, 93). This is the secret to becoming, for it has nothing to produce the real. But instead of simply appreciating the forces
do with “subjects developing into more of themselves.” Becom- that produce the World, Dark Deleuze intervenes in them to
ing is really a process of un-becoming. In what Elizabeth Grosz destroy it. At one time, such an intervention would have been
calls “undoing the givenness of the given” of Becoming Undone, called the Death of God, or more recently, the Death of Man.
un-becoming exercises undoing, a process that works to “undo What is called for today is the Death of this World, and to do
the stabilities of identity, knowledge, location, and being” (210, so requires cultivating a hatred for it.
3). But in proposing undoing as an alternative to subjectivity, Deleuze refutes the image of Nietzsche as a dour pessimist.
it is necessary to be specific about how to orient the process. Flipping that image on its head, Deleuze argues that Nietzsche
While it is easy for an aesthete to indulge in the powers of the is an unparalleled thinker of affirmation. But in doing so, even
outside like a good after-dinner drink, “letting loose, freeing Deleuze’s masterful pen cannot erase the many moments
up, and putting into play,” undoing can fulfill the higher pur- of negativity that impregnate Nietzsche’s work. Deleuze
pose of nursing a hatred for this world (55). For it is only when thus turns his eye to Nietzsche’s moments of creation, as
we locate something intolerable outside ourselves that we will exemplified in a passage from the fifty-eighth aphorism of The
“leap beyond shame” and “transform [our] paltry undertakings Gay Science:
into a war of resistance and liberation” (ECC, 125). How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to
point out the origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order
to destroy the world that counts as real, so-called “reality.” We
can destroy only as creators.—But let us not forget: it is enough

32 13
to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order from one’s own privileged experience are bad and reactionary
to create in the long run new “things.” arguments” (N, 11–12). Shame is our defense against these peo-
Dissatisfied with Nietzsche’s implied goal of destruction, ple, queer theorists remind us, and it must be put to work on
Deleuze inverts the phrase into “destroy in order to create” them as a weapon—an affect that acts as a solvent to dissolve
(DI, 130). This formulation appears over and again in his work. whatever binds it to an identity (Halperin and Traub, “Beyond
To name a few places: in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari Gay Pride,” 25). There are those who have worked to square
say that capitalism destroys what came before to create its identity with Deleuze (Donna Haraway, Tim Dean, Jasbir Puar,
own earthly existence, a process of three tasks whereby the Édouard Glissant). Their theorizations only avoid the problem
first is negative (destroy!) and the second two are positive of shame to the extent that they make identity’s many perfora-
(create! create!). Deleuze later argues that the painter must tions into points of leverage and transformed differences into
first destroy prior clichés before creating a new image (FB, a million cutting edges.
71–90). And in their final collaboration, Deleuze and Guattari For some, the world is made up of assemblages, and all
scold “those who criticize without creating” as “the plague of assemblages are subjects. In no time, people, hurricanes,
philosophy” (WP, 28). and battles all get addressed in the same register (as all
There is something disarming about the sincerity of Deleuze subjects should be afforded proper names)! Although this is,
and Guattari’s definition of philosophy as the art of construct- perhaps, technically true, such assemblage-thinking misses
ing concepts (WP, 2). Yet it feels odd in an era full of trite invi- the point—it reduces subjectivity to the name we use to pin
tations to being constructive: “if you don’t have anything nice down the sum of a body’s capacities (AT, 256–57). It sanctifies
to say, don’t say anything at all,” “if constructive thoughts are a bloodless world by cataloging the networks that make up its
planted, positive outcomes will be the result,” or, simply, “be many attributes. This is why assemblage-modeling is a perfect
constructive, not destructive.” The simple if–then structure of fit in a world where capitalism produces subjectivity “the
these self-help maxims is more than logical; it discloses a tran- same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars” (AO, 245).
sitive theory of justice. Just as the meek will inherit the earth, it Further proof of its noxious conservativsm is arch-thinkers
promises the just deserts of construction. Good things come to Manuel DeLanda’s and Bruno Latour’s dismissive rejection
those who are constructive! How far this is from Marx’s “ruth- of Marxism. Fortunately, Deleuze already warned us by
less criticism of all that exists” (“Letter to Arnold Ruge”). Now channeling Spinoza on the limits of adequate knowledge, in
that advertisers claim to be the most creative of all creatures on the often-repeated words that “we do not know what a body is
earth, it is time to replace creativity as the central mechanism capable of” (NP, 39). The phrase should not be read as an appeal
of liberation. to some evasive essence but simply as applying a principle
Deleuze would have hated today’s images of creativity— of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, which holds that the
there is a great violence in comparing the fabrication of conditions of actual experience are not represented through
concepts to any happy means of construction; concepts empirical tracing (DR, 95, 221, 321). This is crucial, because
are friends only to thought, as they break consensus (WP, philosophy is too easily thrown back into the transcendental
4–6, 99). Concepts are not discovered but the result of a illusions through the personal identitarian experiences built
catastrophe, Deleuze and Guattari say, from turning away, by self-centered habits of mind (DR, 207–8, 73, 119). The pitfall

14 31
Lambert, and François Zourabichvili, to name a few (Zoura- tiredness, distress, and distrust (6–7). True thought is rare,
bichvili, A Philosophy of the Event, 36). The statement does painful, and usually forced on us by the brutality of an event
not imply that ontology is an illusion, but criticizing those so terrible that it cannot be resolved without the difficulty
who build a Deleuzian system around a coherent ontology of thought. As such, we must quit treating concepts as some
of the world is ill considered, as it fails draw a line to the “wonderful dowry from some wonderland” to understand the
outside—“to incalculable forces, to chance and improvisation, hard, rigorous work that goes into their creation (5).
to the future” (Flaxman, “Politics and Ontology”). Blazing such Productivism is Dark Deleuze’s second object of criticism
a path may require “the extinction of the term ‘being’ and (connectivism being the first). It may be possible to distinguish
therefore of ontology,” or in so many words, a destruction of concept creation from productivism, for the latter is “commer-
this world (37). Deleuze and Guattari suggest as much when cial professional training” that aspires for thought only ben-
they propose to “overthrow ontology” (TP, 25). Summed up, eficial “from the viewpoint of universal capitalism” (WP, 14).
this stance names the “joyful pessimist” Deleuze. Too restless Maintaining such a distinction is difficult—in an age of compul-
to stop there, the Dark Deleuze broadens the coup de force into sory happiness, it is easy for construction to be conflated with
a fierce pessimism that shatters the cosmos. capitalist value, the empty promises of democracy, or just plain
helpfulness (106–8). To that end, productivism distinguishes it-
self with two formal principles: accumulation and reproduc-
The Subject: Un-becoming, Not tion. First, productivism manages political conflicts through
Assemblages a logic of accumulation, as seen in the “full mobilizations” of
World War II as well as in Stalin’s and Mao’s dreary attempts to
Subjectivity is shameful—“subjects are born quite as much outproduce the capitalist world system. Second, productivism
from misery as from triumph” (N, 151). It grows from the seeds limits production to reproduction, as capitalism attempts to do,
of a “composite feeling” made from the compromises with our by initiating only those circuits of production that operate on
time: the shame of being alive, the shame of indignity, the an expanding basis (what Lenin called “imperialism”). The sig-
shame that it happens to others, the shame that others can do nificance of the critique of productivism is that it expands the
it, and the shame of not being able to prevent it (WP, 108, 225). grammar of power beyond what is beholden to accumulation
Existence is the result of a disaster, yet it says very little about or reproduction.
us; it does not explain but rather must be explained. This is Dark Deleuze does not philosophically quibble with creation.
what makes shame “one of philosophy’s most powerful motifs” But it is easy to get drowned out by those who praise Deleuze
(108). The subject is always something derivative that “comes for his “joy.” The difficulty with joy is that it lies in the slippage
into being and vanishes in the fabric of what one says, what between metaphysics and normativity. Michel Serres, for in-
one sees,” resembling “specks dancing in the dust of the visible stance, remains steadfast that Deleuze’s death must have been
and permutations in an anonymous babble” (N, 108). This does an accident because he felt that suicide was not in Deleuze’s
not keep some from clinging to their shame. On this account, character or philosophy (Flint, “Michel Serres’ Angels”). Such
Deleuze has nothing but scorn for identity politics—“we have liberties may be authorized by the term itself, as it comes from
to counter people who think ‘I’m this, I’m that’ … arguments Spinoza’s Ethics, in which the line between the two is blurred.

30 15
Joy surfaces as the feeling of pleasure that comes when a body he outlines how they punish the sick (“convicted of aggravated
encounters something that expands its capacities, which are bronchitis”) and sentence the misfortunate to hard labor (“ill
affects said to “agree with my nature,” to be “good” or simply luck of any kind … is considered an offense against society”)
“useful” (S, 239). To end the story here (though some do) would but nurture financial transgressions with medicine (“taken to
reproduce a naive hedonism based on inquiries into subjects a hospital and most carefully tended at the public expense”).
and their self-reported affective states. Spinoza’s theory of af- Beyond being an object lesson in reading footnotes, Deleuze
fects is not an affirmation of a subject’s feelings but a proof and Guattari’s reference to Erewhon demands an attention to
of the inadequacy of critique. Affects are by-products emitted the exact configuration of conceptual devices (dispositifs) and
during the encounter that hint at a replacement for recognition how power flows through them. Link thought with its epoch,
or understanding as the feedback loop to indicate if knowledge they suggest, begin with a survey to identify whatever forces
was sufficient. But there are innumerable forms of knowledge, are already circulating and then work with them—“connecting
many of which invite stupidity or illusion. What characterizes up with what is real here and now in the struggle against
Spinoza’s “adequate knowledge” is its ability to create some- capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier
thing new—it is that knowledge then becomes “identical to the one is betrayed” (100). They warn of “proud affirmation” as
construction of reality” (138). This is why Spinoza says that the guise of restoration that opens the door to transcendence,
God = nature; knowledge-as-God is defined as that thought such as appeals to truth, right, or authority (100). For Butler,
which increases the capacity to make actions flourish in the Erewhon summons neither a new people nor a new earth but is
natural world (“I think, therefore I am active”) (WP, 31). The instead a field guide to negate everything he finds intolerable
implication is that critique is not effective in its own right, no in his present. Utopia becomes the map to transform the
matter how loudly it proclaims its truth. The only adequate now-here into the no-where.
knowledge is activity. “It should have been an apocalyptic book,” laments Deleuze,
Deleuze corrupts the holism of an already heretical Spinoza disappointed that the “old style” Difference and Repetition
through an old atomist proposition: the relation between two did not make apparent a key implication—he killed God,
terms produces an independent third term. (“Sometimes the humankind, and even the world (xxi). The Death of God began
relations of two bodies may agree so well that they form long before Deleuze, who sees Feuerbach as completing it long
a third relation within which the two bodies are preserved before Nietzsche with the proposition that “since man has
and prosper”; S, 239; H, 101). This is how Deleuze builds his never been anything but the unfold of man, man must fold and
metaphysics of positivity—all elements stand alone without refold God” (F, 130). Nietzsche identifies a different problem:
recourse to (Hegelian) opposition, contradiction, or identity. that God was reborn in the form of Man. For Deleuze, it takes
Deleuze and Guattari’s “line of flight” conceptually embodies Foucault to establish the finitude of humanity—“Man has not
the Nietzschean notion that things are not wholly dependent always existed, and will not exist forever”—thus sealing its fate
on their context of production. For them, anything that has (F, 124). But to destroy the world … that is the truly heretical
gained its own internal consistency is free to travel outside its proposition. A small group of dissident Deleuze scholars
place of origin. They even define art this way—as impressions have rallied around the slogan that “there is no ‘ontology of
that have congealed enough to become their own mobile army Deleuze’”—Gregory Flaxman, Anne Sauvagnargues, Gregg

16 29
are usually limited to teaching us what are the bare essentials of sensations (WP, 163–64). Deleuze and Guattari’s contem-
to survive. Writing the disaster is how we break free from the poraries share this insight, most notably Foucault’s strategic
stifling perpetual present, for the present carries with itself a reversibility of power relations (History of Sexuality, 92–102)
suffocating urgency. The present imposes material limits. To it, and Althusser’s aleatory materialism (Philosophy of the En-
the past and the future are the empty form of time, and they counter). For Foucault, the reversibility of power is illustrated
must endure the complications of having a body to become part in homosexuality, which is first created as a medical category
of the present (LS, 146–47, 165). The past and the future exist of sexual perversion but grows into a whole way of life that
in their own right only through representation—the former in “spoke on its own behalf.” For Althusser, the “underground
history as the present memorialization of things passed and current” of capitalism is made up of various noncontempora-
the latter in the yet to come as the projection of an image of neous elements always in a process of “becoming-necessary”
the present (147). Such re-presentation is why the future ap- that “gels at certain felicitous moments,” while the singular
pears with the distinct impression that “we have seen it all be- importance of each haunting contingency simultaneously
fore” (Flaxman, Fabulation of Philosophy, 392). The productivist reveals the system’s unstable horizon. Atomism thus shows
sees the event of thought as an eminently practical reorienta- how the world supplies the materials for its destruction.
tion toward the present achieved while generating a new im- The powers of the outside, a component of Deleuze’s
age of the future (WP, 58). In contrast, those learning to hate thought largely driven underground, offer an additional
the world must short-circuit the “here and now” to play out escape. First, there is this book’s key pivot point: Deleuze
the scene differently. While still being in this world, they turn and Guattari establish in Anti-Oedipus the autoproduction
away from it. This is the life of characters so agitated that they of the Real, which is a passive process that occurs largely
force the world to stand still—Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, the head of beyond human understanding. Confusing metaphysics for
Kurosawa’s seven samurai (TR, 317–18). Against bleating ur- politics, many Deleuzians parrot this production as a positive
gency that “there a fire, there’s fire … I’ve got to go,” they insist end unto itself. Yet a return to a politics worthy of the name
that everything could burn to the ground but nothing happens, “communism” demands the opposite, as the greatest system of
because one must seek out a more urgent problem! autoproduction is capitalism, which throws billions into abject
There are those who say that we already have one foot poverty, wages horrific wars of devastation, and subjects
in utopia; but would it not be more suitable to say that we humanity to a growing matrix of social oppression. Appeals
have both feet firmly planted in a present slouching toward to the frailty of life only obscure the issue even more. To say
dystopia? Deleuze and Guattari call on utopia in their search something rather controversial, though well established by
for a new people and a new earth (WP, 99). They look to ecologists decades ago: life will survive us. All human concern
Samuel Butler, dissecting his Erewhon as a simultaneous “now- for the world is ultimately selfish anthropocentrism, for it was
here” and “no-where” (100). Yet a closer examination of his never life that was at risk (“the combined detonation of all
novel reveals utopia to be a farce. While not exactly a dystopia, the world’s nuclear weapons would be like a warm summer
the utopia Erewhon is a comic satire of the British Empire. The breeze to Gaia,” I once heard), just the world’s capacity to
narrator is a crass traveler with settler colonial dreams who sustain humans (Luke, Ecocritique; Stengers, In Catastrophic
catalogs the strange ways of Erewhon—in chapters 10 and 11, Times). Second, the way forward is to invite death, not to

28 17
avoid it. Deleuze and Guattari suggest this in their reworking tions follow: speed and secrecy. These are the affects of the war
of the death drive. Similar sentiments are echoed in the punk machine, its weapons of war, which “transpierce the body like
ethos of “no future,” which paradoxically realizes that the arrows” (356, 394). The resulting violence is not so vulgar as
only future we have comes when we stop reproducing the to encourage blow-by-blow bloodletting or a once-and-for-all
conditions of the present (Edelman, No Future). So let us stop immediate killing but institutes an economy of violence whose
romanticizing life and wish a happy death on calcified political hatred is unlimited and therefore durable. The war machine
forms, no-good solutions, and bad ways of thinking. engages in war along two poles: one forms a line of destruc-
We must correct Deleuze’s error: failing to cultivate a hatred tion “prolongable to the limits of the universe,” while the other
for this world. It begins with the “ambivalent joy of hatred”— draws a line of flight for the “composition of a smooth space
“What my soul loves, I love. What my soul hates, I hate” (F, 23; and of the movement of people in that space” (422). Deleuze
ECC, 135). Or to echo Proust, “we must be harsh, cruel, and and Guattari would prefer to promote the connectivist line by
deceptive to what we love” (P, 92). It is not even that Deleuze saying they “make war only on the condition that they simul-
never mentioned hatred in a positive light; in fact, he often taneously create something else” (423). But today, that path
praises Nietzsche’s “sense of cruelty” and “taste for destruc- leads to collusion with capitalism’s drive toward creative de-
tion” (DR, 53). Deleuze was too often overtaken by a naive affir- struction (Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, 87).
mation of joy, and as such, he was unable to give hatred its nec- This is certainly not lost on those in Silicon Valley who spread
essary form. His image for the future resembles too much of the the mantra of “disruptive innovation.” We can thus take heed
present, and those who repeat it have come to sound like a par- of Deleuze and Guattari’s warning against treating terms as
ody: “rhizomatic gardens,” “cooperative self-production,” and having “an irresistible revolutionary calling” (387). It is time
“affirming the affirmative of life.” Against those maxims, the to accept Nietzsche’s invitation to philosophize with a ham-
Dark Deleuze is reborn as a barbarian depicted in Rimbaud’s mer, rendered here in the voice of Krishna: “I am become Time,
season in hell: “I’m of a distant race: my forefathers were Scan- the destroyer of worlds.” We must find an appetite for destruc-
dinavian; they slashed their sides and drank their own blood. tion that does not betray Deleuze and Guattari’s “abolitionist
I will make cuts all over; I’ll tattoo myself, I long to be as a dream.” This takes the “progressive, anxiety-ridden revelation”
hideous Mongol: you’ll see, I’ll scream in the streets. I want to that destroying worlds is just another way of “smashing capi-
be mad with rage… I dreamt of crusades, of unrecorded voy- talism, of redefining socialism, of constituting a war machine
ages of discovery, of republics without history, wars of sup- capable of countering the world war machine by other means”
pressed religion, moral revolutions, movements of races and (385, 417, 372).
continents” (A Season in Hell). Barbarian hatred is not to be in- Make the whole world stand still. Indeed, it may be the only
discriminate, but it does not follow from a science of judgment. way to think the present in any significant sense. To be clear:
In fact, it is what is left after having done away with judgment the suspension of the world is not a hunt for its conditions of re-
(of God, of Man, and even of the World). Hatred is the ambiva- production or a meditative “rhapsody of sensations” (DR, 56).
lent complement to love and, as such, can easily evade a decline It is thought that treats the world as if struck by an unspeci-
into ressentiment. For ressentiment is just as much a depreciated fied disaster, where the best friends you have left are your own
image of love, as demonstrated by the Christian God who loved ideas. This is not the banal disaster movie, whose ambitions

18 27
 this world so much that he introduced the moral judgment of
the ascetic ideal. In the end, hatred will prove to be just as im-
portant for the Death of this World as it was for the Death of
God and the Death of Man.
The Extinction of Being
From the Chapel to the Crypt
The Task: Destroy Worlds, Not Create There are those who have hitherto only enlightened the
Conceptions world in various ways; the point is to darken it. Some speculate
that humans first pondered the ways of the world under the
The conspiracy against this world will be known through its brilliant light of the heavens. On that vast celestial stage,
war machines. A war machine is itself “a pure form of exteri- the gods played out great dramas of arts and culture. This
ority” that “explains nothing,” but there are plenty of stories to cosmos also inspired the earliest sciences of mathematics and
tell about them (TP, 354, 427). They are the heroes of A Thou- astronomy, which wove the many constellations into a single
sand Plateaus—Kleist’s skull-crushing war machine, the migra- tapestry. As the light of the stars became cycles and then
tory war machine that the Vandals used to sack Rome, the gun detailed calendars, so came the dawn of time.
that Black Panther George Jackson grabs on the run, and the A more modern story begins in 1609, when, upon hearing
queer war machine that excretes a thousand tiny sexes. “Each news of the Dutch invention of the telescope, Galileo created
time there is an operation against the state—insubordination, his own. Almost immediately, Galileo was peering into the
rioting, guerilla warfare, or revolution as an act—it can be said dark quadrants of the moon and illustrating its angle of
that a war machine has revived” (386). War machines are also illumination. These discoveries would lead him to loudly
the greatest villains of A Thousand Plateaus, making all other endorse heliocentrism—replacing God with a new light at
dangers “pale by comparison” (231)—there is the constant state the center of the universe. Galileo curiously flaunts the rules
appropriation of the war machine that subordinates war to of astronomy in his lunar record, as he does not date each
its own aims (418), the folly of the commercial war machine ink wash according to its time of observation, nor does he
(15), the paranoia of the fascist war machine (not the state make a photorealistic reproduction of the moon’s landscape
army of totalitarianism) (230–31), and, worst of them all, the (Gingrich and van Helden, “From Occhiale to Printed Page,”
“worldwide war machine” of capitalism, “whose organization 258–62). Centuries of critics have tried to determine the
exceeds the State apparatus and passes into energy, military– source of Galileo’s inaccuracy. Johannis Hevelii, the father
industrial, and multinational complexes” to wage peace on the of stenography, wondered if Galileo’s instruments were too
whole world (387, 419–21, 467). crude (Selenographia sive Lunae Descriptio, 205). Others sug-
“Make thought a war machine,” Deleuze and Guattari insist. gest that he may have been too overtaken by the excitement
“Place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with of discovery (Kopal, The Moon, 225). But what if Galileo chose
the forces of the outside” (TP, 376–77). Two important inven- not to view the moon mathematically but philosophically?

26 19
He was less concerned about its angles of illumination as an of this world, the final defeat of the state, and full communism.
astronomical object than about what his telescopic perspicil- It is far more likely that various aspects of darkness will be
lum revealed about it as a cosmological concept. His styling captured along the way. Like any other war machine, a dark
of the moon reveals a way of seeing far more appropriate term is defeated when it isomorphically takes on relations or
to baroque visual argument than to geographic measure. forms of its joyous counterpart. So it is worth uttering a cau-
Galileo’s ink washes demonstrate the baroque’s beautiful tionary note from A Thousand Plateaus: even when contrary,
convergences. Referring “not to an essence but rather to an never believe that darkness will suffice to save us.
operative function,” Galileo’s moon unfurls in the collision
of multiple points of view as darkness and landscape meet Joyous Dark
in its leaping shadows (L, 3). More importantly, he marks a The Task Create Concep- Destroy Worlds
transition driven by “the force of divergences, impossibilities, tions
discords, dissonances” (81). In a world no longer illuminated Subject Assemblages Un-becoming
by the light of God, Galileo paints “many possible borders Existence Genesis Transformation
between worlds” in a chromatic scale so as to be irresolvable Ontology Realism Materialism
from the lens of any one camera set to a single angle (81). How, Difference Inclusive Disjunc- Exclusive Dis-
then, does one continue Galileo’s journey to the far side of the tion junction
moon? By refusing divine harmony and instead conspiring Diagram Complexity Asymmetry
with divergent underground worlds. Organization Rhizome Unfolding
The most immediate instance of lightness, connectivism, is Ethics Processural Conspiratorial
the realization of the techno-affirmationist dream of complete Democracy Communism
transparency. The fate of such transparency is depicted in Fritz Affect Intensity Cruelty
Lang’s Metropolis. In it, the drive for complete communicabil- Speed Acceleration Escape
ity elevates transparency in the false transcendence of a New Flows Production Interruption
Tower of Babel. Deep in the shadows of the Lower City labors Substance Techno-Science Political Anthro-
the working class, enslaved to the machines that automation pology
promised to eliminate. Only in the catacombs does the secret Nomadism Pastoral Barbarian
rebellion commence. But instead of ending in Lang’s grand Distribution Nomos The Outside
Hegelian mediation, it would be better to listen to the Whore Politics Molecular Cataclysmic
of Babylon in Metropolis, who says, “Let’s watch the world go Cinema The Forces of Bod- The Powers of the
to hell.” Such an untimely descent into darkness begins with a ies False
protest: lightness has far too long been the dominant model of The Sensible Experience Indiscernibility
thought. The road there descends from the chapel to the crypt.
Crypts are by their very nature places of seclusion. Early
Christians facing public persecution fled to the underground
catacombs below Rome, where they could worship in secret

20 25
the middle. In response, we must contaminate every last one (“Essay upon Crypts,” 73–77). Early basilicas contain crypts
of those conceptual pairs with a third term that arrives from as a “second church” under their choirs, featuring a vaulted
the outside. Deleuze and Guattari set the example in how ceiling, many columns, several aisles, and an altar (Lübke,
they reimagine Dumézil’s tripartite state as two opposing Ecclesiastical Art, 24–25). Some great churches even included
poles besieged by a third term that arrives from the outside. a second crypt dedicated to a particular saint (26). At times,
Such a reformulation would more closely follow Deleuze’s when sacred objects are of special interest, crypts of especially
atomism of two terms relating through the production of an renowned saints have inspired mass pilgrimages (Spence-
independent third term. To make the stakes clear: we are told Jones, Early Christianity and Paganism, 269). Deleuze notes
in A Thousand Plateaus that the state is made of two opposing that these spaces fold in on themselves, simultaneously ex-
poles, one liberal and one authoritarian, that in fact work in a pressing the “autonomy of the inside” and the “independence
“complementarity” not dissimilar from the dialectical logic of of the façade” as an inside without an outside or an outside
determinate negation—this is the model of relation that must without an inside, depending on how you approach it (L, 28).
be avoided at all costs (for more, see the section “Difference: Looking at El Greco’s great baroque mannerist painting The
Exclusive Disjunction, Not Inclusive Disjunction”) (Dumézil, Burial of Count Orgaz, we are given the choice. Above the
Mitra-Varuna). This is why Dark Deleuze contrasts dark to great horizontal line, a gathering of saints ascends to the
joyous and not dark to light or joyous to sad. Each contrary height of Jesus, whose own ascension grants the heavens
is a forking path, an alternate route for every instance one is eternal lightness. Below, a communion of cloaked, pale men
tempted by affirmation. crowd together to lay the count to rest under a dark back-
Listed in what follows are the contrasting terms. In the col- ground illuminated only by torchlight. The painting reveals
umn on the left, I list a series of tasks. Across each column the baroque truth of knowledge: “for ages there have been
I have placed two contrary approaches, one joyous and one places where what is seen is inside: a cell, a sacristy, a crypt,
dark. The association each term has to its contrary is purely a church, a theater, a study, or a print room” (L, 27–28). So
incidental. Each term’s contrariness is not given, as if one im- beyond the association of crypts with rot and death, it is a
plied the other—I propose dark terms simply on their ability projection of subterranean architectural power.
to unexpectedly usurp the operations of their contraries. Con- From the crypt, Dark Deleuze launches a conspiracy. It is fu-
trary approaches should be taken as mutually exclusive, as they eled by negativity, but not one of antimonies. Following Freud,
are independent processes each meant to fulfill the given task negation is not a necessary by-product of consciousness. The
without recourse to the other. What makes them dark is the lesson to be drawn from him is that negation is finding a way
position of exteriority from which the irregular forces of dark- to say “no” to those who tell us to take the world as it is. To
ness attack the joy of state thought. The foreignness of relation this end, the path forward is Deleuze’s nondialectical nega-
is why each pair of contrasting terms is notably imbalanced. tion, the “contrary,” which operates as the distance between
My ultimate purpose is to convince readers to completely two exclusive paths (LS, 172–80). Klossowski identifies the goal
abandon all the joyous paths for their dark alternatives. The of the conspiracy as breaking the collusion between institu-
best scenario would be that these contraries fade into irrele- tionalized morality, capitalism, and the state (“Circulus Vitio-
vance after Dark Deleuze achieves its ostensible goal: the end sus”). He then shows how Nietzsche’s laughter can be used

24 21
as an experimental instrument to dissolve all identities into exploitation in which one class systematically extracts profit
phantasms. A number of commentators have tried to rehabili- by expanding the capacities of another. The conspiracy offers
tate the conspiracy on the basis of an esoteric/exoteric distinc- a way out. On the affective level, it takes the ambivalence of
tion, whereby exoteric discourses are the mere public face to a hatred to grasp how one’s own capacities are the yoke of his
deeper paranoia whose desire is concealed in an esoteric code. oppression. On the level of strategy, it takes deep, labyrinthine
To the extent that it is true, in his book Nietzsche and the Vi- paths to develop a cryptography. To do so myself, I reenact
cious Circle, Klossowski warns that the esoteric tradition must Winston’s trips to the shallow alcove of his apartment in 1984
be avoided because it “demystifies only in order to mystify bet- to keep our own illicit diary of slogans. This is how I learned to
ter” (131). The point is not to replace angelic messages with find my own way to say “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” and
arcane ones. This raises an important question: what is an ap- “If there is hope, it lies with the proles” (181). This is because
propriately cryptic language? Deleuze and Guattari note that the ultimate task of Dark Deleuze is but a modest one: to keep
“the man of war brings the secret: he thinks, eats, loves, judges, the dream of revolution alive in counterrevolutionary times.
arrives in secret, while the man of the state proceeds publicly” The conspiracy Dark Deleuze is a series of contraries.
(TP, 543–44). Fortunately, in our conspiratorial world of phan- Contraries are not poles, which are dialectical opposites
tasms, one does not hold a secret but instead becomes a secret. that ultimately complement each other. To distill a central
Even if she ends up spilling everything, it turns out to be noth- argument from Deleuze’s magnum opus Difference and Rep-
ing. Why? The secret first hides within dominant forms to limit etition, philosophy has (to its detriment) taken the nature of
exposure, yet what it smuggles inside is not any specific thing thinking to be the establishment of equivalence or logical
that needs to evade discovery. Rather, it is a perception of the identity between two terms (59). As such, contrasts must
secret that spreads under the shroud of secrecy: perception + avoid relating terms on the basis of “a conceived identity,
secret = the secret as secretion. Conspiracies do not remain lim- a judged analogy, an imagined opposition, or a perceived
ited to a few furtive missives; their creeping insinuations are similitude” (138). Deleuze summarizes this argument in an
part of a universal project to permeate all of society (TP, 286– interview: “It was Lévi-Strauss, I think, who showed you
89). The best conspiracy is when it has nothing left to hide. had to distinguish the following two propositions: that only
There is an affective dimension to our conspiracy. Pessimism similar things can differ [dialectics—presupposing a primor-
becomes a necessity when writing in an era of generalized pre- dial identity behind differences], and only different things
carity, extreme class stratification, and summary executions of can be similar [contraries—difference primary to identity]”
people of color. The trouble with the metaphysics of differ- (N 156). There is a second reason for avoiding opposites:
ence is that it does not immediately suggest a positive con- opposites imply a “golden mean” whereby the optimal place
ception of alienation, exploitation, or social death. To the ex- is found somewhere in between each extreme. Such middling
tent that those who affirm difference and its intensifications compromise is the greatest tragedy of Deleuze and Guat-
do make such violence thinkable, it appears as the consequence tari’s rhetorical presentation of what appear to be dualisms
of deprivation. As a result, they cannot explain the simultane- (smooth/striated, molar/molecular, arborescent/rhizomatic)
ous connection–separation of a body alienated from their own in A Thousand Plateaus. The unfortunate effect is a legion of
powers. Such joyousness makes no place for Marx’s theory of noncommittal commentators who preach the moderation of

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 The Anarchist Library with the rhizomatic logic of accumulation. A communism wor-
Anti-Copyright thy of its name pushes unfolding to its limit.

Ethics: Conspiratorial Communism, Not

Processual Democracy
Democracy should be abolished. Spinozist champions
of democracy, such as Antonio Negri, consider Deleuze a
fellow traveler. Some Deleuzians have even tried to smuggle
democracy back into his metaphysics, some even pervert him
into a liberal. Yet Deleuze lumps nothing but hatred upon
democracy—summarized by his mocking of the phrases “Ev-
erything is equal!” and “Everything returns!” at the beginning
and end of Difference and Repetition. Against the principle of
equivalence implied in the first, he agrees with Nietzsche, who
criticizes contract, consensus, and communication. Against the
principle of continuity implied in the second, he agrees with
Marx, who rejects the liberal proceduralism that underwrites
rights as an obfuscation of power. More than enough ink has
been spilled to support both of these positions. But to get the
tenor pitch perfect, it is worth mentioning that Deleuze and
Guattari viciously criticize democracy in their collaborations,
usually by calling it the cousin of totalitarianism. They discuss
democracy, fascism, and socialism as all related in Anti-
Oedipus (261). In A Thousand Plateaus, they discuss “military
democracy” (394), “social democracy” as the complementary
pole of the State to “totalitarianism” (462), “totalitarian-social
Andrew Culp democracy” (463), and a poverty-stricken “Third World social
Dark Deleuze democracy” (468). In What Is Philosophy?, they speak of
2016 Athenian “colonizing democracy” (97), hegemonic democracy
(98), democracy being caught up with dictatorial states (106),
Retrieved on 3rd May 2021 from libgen.rs
a social democracy that “has given the order to fire when
the poor come out of their territory or ghetto” (107), and a
theanarchistlibrary.org
Nazi democracy (108), which all lead them to conclude that

45
their utopian “new people and a new earth … will not be
found in our democracies” (108). Together, they can be neatly
summarized: no matter how perfect, democracy always relies
on a transcendent sovereign judgment backed by the threat
of force. Only twice is Deleuze caught with his pants down
in regard to democracy, both in moments of pandering—once
in a letter to Antonio Negri’s jailers that appeals through
self-distance to “everyone committed to democracy,” and
again when discussing America’s “virile and popular loves” in
a brief paean to Walt Whitman (TR, 169; ECC, 60). All other
“democratic” Deleuzes are the inventions of his commentators.
Deleuze happily embraces a Marxism so anti-State that it re-
fuses the project of democracy. It is up to us to render his Marx-
ism in darker terms than Rancière, who would rather break
down the state through the democratic dissensus of aesthesis
acting as “the power of an ontological difference between two
orders of reality” (Dissensus, 180). Outright, darkness begins
by subverting Negri’s joyous celebration of democracy, which
offers a productivist composition of forces as both the condi-
tions of and resolution to capitalism (Ruddick, “Politics of Af-
fect”). If Negriism was true, the only thing left for us to do is to
“dump the bosses off our backs” (Hardt, “Common in Commu-
nism”). But the balance of power is far too ambivalent to make
the epochal declaration that a revolutionary subject, such as
the multitude, has already been produced and merely needs to
be found. Our mad black communism is not a reworking of
Marx’s universalism, which is the seamless unity of thought
and action that can be found in productivist appeals to imma-
nence as immediate and unmediated, that is to say, automatic
(PI, 29; DR, 29). On this account, an a priori communism is
too dangerously close to Kant (DI, 60). We have no use for the
judgment of a communist natura, which comes from the Joy-
ous Deleuzians’ confusion of metaphysics for politics. Neither
automatic or automated, our communism is not tempted by
the fully automated luxury communism of cybernetics, which

46
is a temptation only from the perspective of control societies.
Our communism is nothing but the conspiracy of communism
(against ontology). It is the conspiracy to destroy the factory of
production. As a conspiracy, communism is a war machine that
turns the autoproductive processes of the Real into weapons
for destroying any project built on metaphysical consistency. It
targets the collusion between the creation of concepts and the
reproduction of this world. In this sense, it wages a guerilla
struggle against those who joyfully affirm “the ontology of
Deleuze.” It is a conspiracy for at least two reasons: first, it has
a penchant for negativity that makes its revolutionary force ap-
pear as a conspiracy against everything that the joyful take as
a given; second, its inclination toward collective forms of asym-
metric struggle sets it wholly at odds with scholarly common
sense. It dares any communism worth its name to wage a war
of annihilation against God, Man, and the World itself.

47
Breakdown, Destruction,
Ruin
Speed: Escape, Not Acceleration
Deleuze and Guattari’s “accelerationism” has been too tar-
nished to rehabilitate. The idea was hatched by Nick Land, who
held a charismatic influence over the students of the Cyber-
netic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick dur-
ing the late 1990s. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s in-
sistence on “accelerating the process” of capitalist deterritori-
alization to make a revolutionary breakthrough, Land instead
suggests that the commodity system “attains its own ‘angular
momentum’” to become a one-way street impervious to inter-
ventions, as it is made up of cosmic-scale processes that are
largely blind to human cultural inputs (Thirst for Annihilation,
80). For him, the accelerating speed of capital has only one pos-
sible conclusion: “a run-away whirlwind of dissolution, whose
hub is the virtual zero of impersonal metropolitan accumula-
tion” that hurls the human animal “into a new nakedness, as
everything stable is progressively liquidated in the storm” (80).
When he initially wrote this position, he left its significance
open-ended, only later cashing it out through a neoreactionary
project called the “Dark Enlightenment.” Land explains that the
project is dark because he eagerly adopts a “scary” mixture of
cognitive elitism, racist social Darwinism, and autocratic Aus-
trian economics. He denounces leftists as theologians of “the
Cathedral” founded at “Grievance Studies departments of New

48
England universities,” whose appeals to antiracism, democracy,
and equality are a type of authoritarian theology.
Commenting later on Williams and Srnicek’s “#Accelerate
Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Land gleefully ac-
cuses those leftists who speak favorably about capital’s destruc-
tive forces as “conditional accelerationists” (“Annotated #Ac-
celerate (#3)”). He says that they can only distinguish their posi-
tion from his own by way of an empty moralism in no position
to direct the process. There is perhaps some truth to Land’s crit-
icism of so-called Left Accelerationism as far as they endorse
Maoist skepticism for tradition and enthusiasm for productive
forces, a social democratic project for a new hegemony, or an
intellectual mission of “new rationalism”—all of which seek to
mitigate capitalism’s destructive tendencies without outlining
real steps to actualize its own future. To substantiate his case,
Land argues that “within capitalist futures markets, the non-
actual has effective currency,” which makes it “not an ‘imagi-
nary’ but an integral part of the virtual body of capital” because
it is “an operationalized realization of the future,” so “while
capital has an increasingly densely-realized future, its leftist
enemies have only a manifestly pretend one” (“Annotated #Ac-
celerate (#2b)”). The trouble then with either accelerationism
is that neither takes the process far enough, which is to say, all
accelerationism is conditional because it fails to surrender to
the outside. As such, Land dresses his fascism up as an athleti-
cism to hide the cowardice of defending the forces of this world,
namely, the courthouse of reason, the authority of the market,
and a religious faith in technology.
A truly dark path undoes everything that makes up this
world. Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal to “accelerate the
process” follows from R. D. Laing’s clinical prescription for
more madness in our “veritable age of Darkness” (AO, 131).
He supports the mad in turning “the destruction wrecked on
them” into a force of dissolution against the “alienated starting
point” of normality. This is a method made for breaking with

49
the inside, which “turns in on itself” when “pierced by a hole, Spanos, William V. “The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in
a lake, a flame, a tornado, an explosion,” so that the outside the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/Imagining the Shadow of
comes flooding in (132). Such a break can go one of two ways: Metaphysics.” Boundary 2 27, no. 1 (2000): 151–74.
it can be a breakdown or a breakthrough (239, 132). Spence-Jones, Henry Donald Maurice. Early Christianity and
The best “breakthrough” is “making a break for it.” Deleuze Paganism, a.d. 64 to the Peace of the Church in the Fourth Cen-
is fond of repeating Black Panther George Jackson, who writes tury. London: Cassell, 1902.
from prison that “yes, I can very well escape, but during my es- Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethics. 1677. Translated by Edwin Curley.
cape, I’m looking for a weapon” (DI, 277). The phrase applies to New York: Penguin, 2005.
far more than Jackson’s literal imprisonment in San Quentin— Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming
what he really wanted was liberation from the American cap- Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Open Hu-
italist system of racial oppression, which is truly what killed manities Press.
him during his final escape attempt (eleven years into his one- Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War. 2001. Translated by Alexan-
year-to-life indefinite sentence for robbing a gas station for der R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith. Los Angeles, Calif.:
$70). The necessity of weapons should be clear. Even the most Semiotext(e), 2010.
terrifying nomadic war machine is overshadowed by the state, Unknown. “Essay upon Crypts.” The Crypt: or, Receptacle for
which calls its operations “keeping the peace” (as documented Things Past 6 (September 1829): 73–77.
by Foucault in his “Society Must Be Defended” lectures and be- Virno, Paolo. Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Con-
yond). Such violence has renewed meaning in 2015 as I write temporary Forms of Life. 2003. Translated by Isabella Berto-
in the wake of a white supremacist massacre and as an out- letti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. New York: Semio-
cry about racist police violence has finally started to generalize. text(e), 2004.
Jackson stands as a reminder that a revolutionary line of flight Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-
must remain active; revolution is not a system-effect, though structural Anthropology. 2009. Translated by Peter Skafish.
capitalism as a “system leaking all over the place” establishes Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal, 2014.
the terrain for “revolutionary escape” (such as a propaganda Williams, Alex, and Nick Srincek. “#Accelerate Manifesto
system that can be infiltrated to attract outside conspirators for an Accelerationist Politics.” Critical Legal Thinking.
or a legal system that provides lawyers who can smuggle sub- 2013, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-
versive objects into controlled spaces) (DI, 270). The brilliant manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/.
guerilla Che wrote the steps for one such dance, the minuet: the Žižek, Slavoj. “The Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution.’” Critical Inquiry
guerrillas begin by encircling an advancing column and split- 30, no. 2 (2004): 292–323.
ting into a number of “points,” each with enough distance to —. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.
avoid themselves being encircled; a couple pairs off and begins Zourabichvili, François. Gilles Deleuze: A Philosophy of the
their dance as one of the guerrilla points attacks and draws Event. 1994. Translated by Kieran Aarons. Edited by Gregg
out the enemy, after which they fall back and a different point Lambert and Daniel W. Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
attacks—the goal is not annihilation but to immobilize to the University Press, 2012. </biblio»
point of fatigue (Guevara, Guerilla Warfare, 58–59).

50 83
—. On the Genealogy of Morality. 1887. Translated by Carol Di- Escapism is the great betrayer of escape. The former is sim-
ethe. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. New York: Cambridge ply “withdrawing from the social,” whereas the latter learns to
University Press, 1994. “eat away at [the social] and penetrate it,” everywhere setting
—. Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. up “charges that will explode what will explore, make fall what
Edited by Daniel Breazeale. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- must fall, make escape what must escape” as a “revolutionary
sity Press, 1997. force” (AO, 341). The same distinction also holds between
Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Penguin, 1949. two models of autonomy: temporary autonomous zones and
Padgen, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian zones of offensive opacity. Temporary autonomous zones are
and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cam- momentary bursts of carnivalesque energy that proponent
bridge University Press, 1982. Hakim Bey says “vanish, leaving behind it an empty husk”
Plan C. “We Are All Very Anxious.” April 4, 2014. http:// when the forces of definition arrive (Temporary Autonomous
www.weareplanc.org/blog/we-are-all-very-anxious/. Zone, 100). Deleuze and Guattari suggest, contrary to orthodox
Proust, Marcel. “Cities of the Plain” [alternative title to “Sodom Marxists, that societies are defined by how they manage their
and Gomorrah”]. 1921. In Remembrance of Things Past [alter- paths of escape (rather than their modes of production) (TP,
native title to In Search of Lost Time], translated by C. K. Scott 435). As such, “psychotopological” distance established by
Moncrieff, 3–378. New York: Random House, 1932. temporary autonomous zones does not create a significant
Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited enough rupture to open into anything else and thus collapses
and translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, escape into escape-ism. Tiqqun’s zones of offensive opacity
2010. are an improvement, as they oppose a wider web of cyber-
Rice, Condoleezza. No Higher Honor. New York: Broadway, netic governance without packing maximum intensity into a
2011. single moment (Anonymous, “De l’Hypothèse Cybernétique,”
Rimbaud, Arthur. “A Season in Hell.” 1873. Translated by A. S. 334–38). Opacity is its first principle, something they learn
Kline. http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/ from the long tradition of autonomists and anarchists whose
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Cambridge University Press, 2006. Militant discussions of infrastructure, blockage, and inter-
Kauffman, Stuart. Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, ruption are refreshing—since the first “free” laborers threw a
Reason, and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 2008. shoe in the machine, sabotage has been an important tactic
Kauffman, Stuart, Teppo Felin, Roger Koppl, and Giuseppe of resistance. But with the elliptical dynamics of capitalism,
Longo. “Economic Opportunity and Evolution: Beyond which poses its own limits only to overcome them for a profit,
Landscapes and Bounded Rationality.” Strategic En- interruptions cannot be an end unto themselves (230–31). Ev-
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Kennedy, Robert F. Remarks at the University of Kansas. March by breaking down (36–37, 151, 192). One needs to look behind
18, 1968. the old social democratic criticism of productivism, “even pol-
Kissinger, Henry. “The Vietnam Negotiations.” Foreign Affairs lution, cigarettes, prisons, logging, napalm, and nuclear war-
48, no. 2 (1969): 211–34. heads are counted in the Gross Domestic Production,” to see
Klossowski, Pierre. “Circulus Vitiosus.” Translated by Joseph why (Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas). Antipro-
Kuzma. The Agonist: A Nietzsche Circle Journal 2, no. 1 (2009): duction, which prevents specific realizations of value in a sys-
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—. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. 1969. Translated by Daniel tioning this production” (235). Potlatch and ritualized warfare
W. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. are indigenous means of antiproduction that prevent the hoard-
Kopal, Zdeněk. The Moon. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel, ing that could lead to despotism (Maus, The Gift; Clastres, So-
1969. ciety against the State). Aristocratic glorious expenditure made
Kubrick, Stanley, dir. Clockwork Orange. Burbank, Calif.: sure that everything was owed to the king (Bataille, “Notion of
Warner Bros. Pictures, 1971. Expenditure”). Marx reminds us that capitalists dip into their
Lafargue, Paul. Social and Philosophical Studies. Translated by own capital stock at the expense of expanded reproduction, but
Charles H. Kerr. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1910. wasting money on the “political–military–industrial complex”
Lambert, Gregg. The Non-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. London: guarantees the smooth advance of the system as a whole (235).
Continuum, 2002. What interruption is revolutionary? The mold was set
Land, Nick. “Annotated #Accelerate (#2b).” Urban Future 2, no. by Marx, who proposed “expropriating the expropriators”
1 (2014). http://www.ufblog.net/on-accelerate-2b. (Capital, chapter 32). “Direct action at the point of production”
—. “Annotated #Accelerate (#3).” Urban Future 2, no. 1 (2014). would intervene in the apparatus of capture where the earth,
http://www.ufblog.net/annotated-accelerate-3/. activity, and objects are first coded by the state as territory,
—. “The Dark Enlightenment.” In The Dark Enlightenment. work, and money or decoded by capitalism as flows of land,
2013. http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark- labor, and capital (TP, 437–60). But if “societies are determined
enlightenment-by-nick-land/. by their mode of anti-production (and not a mode of produc-
—. Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. tion),” then action should be taken at the points of capitalist
London: Routledge, 1992. antiproduction (D, 135). Extending this line of argumentation,

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the avant-garde taunts the world with a claim: “capitalism Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit: A
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not the alienation of the worker from the fruits of his labor, Guevara, Ernesto “Che.” Guerilla Warfare. 1960. Translated by
Deleuze and Guattari protest, the fundamental separation of a J. P. Morray. Oxford: SR Books, 1997.
desiring subject from her means of satisfaction (AO, 70–75)? Halperin, David, and Valerie Traub. “Beyond Gay Pride.” In Gay
Think of an old German rock song, “Macht Kaputt, Was Euch Shame, 3–40. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Kaputt Macht” by Ton Steine Scherben, an anarchocommunist Hardt, Michael. “The Common in Communism.” 2010.
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“destroying what destroys you.” Harvard University Press, 2000.
Heidegger, Martin. What Is Called Thinking? 1952. Translated
by J. Glenn Gray. New York: Perennial, 1976.
Substance: Political Anthropology, Not Hevelii, Johannis. Selenographia sive Lunae Descriptio. Gdansk,
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Holloway, John. “The Scream.” In Change the World without Tak-
“Science does not think,” Heidegger sensationally claims in ing Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, 1–10. London:
his 1952 lecture What Is Called Thinking? A year later, Gas- Pluto Press, 2002.
ton Bachelard makes an opposing scandalous assertion in Le Invisible Committee. To Our Friends. 2014. Translated by Robert
Matérialisme Rationnel that “science does not get the philoso- Hurley. Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2015.
phy it deserves” (20). What science needs, Bachelard says, is a Joseph, Betty. “Projective Identification: Some Clinical As-
science that produces objects for thought. One such approach pects.” In Projective Identification: The Fate of a Concept,
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a direct response to Heidegger’s challenge that “we are still 98–111. New York: Routledge, 2012.
not thinking” (Thinking?, 6). Nomad science poses problems in Kafka, Franz. The Trial. 1925. Translated by Willa and Edwin
clarifying what is really going on in states of affairs (WP, 155– Muir. New York: Schocken, 1956.
62). In posing better problems, instead of trying to solve them,

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 ontea. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, science invites a range of potential solutions (80–83). “Like a
1931. compass, not a blueprint,” the saying goes, which is only use-
Eze, Emmanuel Chudwuki. “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ful for those who take the time to learn the terrain. In following
‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology.” In Postcolonial African Phi- some technological lines, humans tend to co-evolve with their
losophy: A Critical Reader, edited by Emmanuel Chudwuki technological counterparts, or make an even stronger claim:
Eze, 103–31. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997. certain technologies produce new peoples (TP, 404–15). So be-
Flaxman, Gregory. Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philoso- yond problems, the science of nomads is more an anthropol-
phy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ogy (or even a geography). Here it may be helpful to consider
—. “Politics and Ontology: A Review of Nathan Widder: Politi- Deleuze’s point about Pascal’s Wager in Nietzsche and Philos-
cal Theory after Deleuze.” Postmodern Culture 24, no. 2 (2014), ophy, which he says is not a theological question but an an-
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/580775. thropological query about how it would be to live without god.
Flint, Jim. “Michel Serres’ Angels: A Modern Myth.” Mute 1, The story about nomad scientists and their cousins, the met-
no. 4 (1996). http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/ allurgical smiths, is mostly a history of their appreciation for
michel-serres-angels-modern-myth. the singularities of matter, just as Heidegger says the thinking
Fontaine, Claire. “This Is Not the Black Bloc.” 2007. http:// cabinetmaker does when turning each knot and warp to its ad-
www.clairefontaine.ws/pdf/black_bloc_eng.pdf. vantage.
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduc- Deleuze and Guattari’s autopsy of Oedipus demonstrated
tion. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon the need for anthropology. Their method was analytically
Books, 1978. clear: dissect him with an internal critique of psychoanalysis
—. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” 1971. In Language, Counter- and then an external of anthropology. From the first, all they
Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, translated could determine was Oedipus’s illegitimate birth, which was
by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, 113–38. Ithaca, already a public secret. It was only through the subsequent
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. historical materialist explanation for Oedipus’s emergence
—. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de that they could plot his demise. We deserve a new anthro-
France 1977–1978. 2004. Translated by Graham Burchell. pology, especially if we plan to commit an act of sedition
Edited by Michel Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, against the whole world. It will not be born out of a new
2007. Enlightenment. Anthropology’s Enlightenment father Kant
—. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, paired anthropology with geography to generate the first
1975–1976. 1997. Translated by David Macey. New York: Pi- scientific classification of race (and white racial superiority)
cador, 2003. (Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race?”). Borrow-
—. “Theatrum Philosophicum.” Critique 282 (1970): 885–908. ing from his philosophical work, he lectured on the topic
Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after De- for forty years (1756–97) and published a foundational text,
centralization. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Eze, “Color of
Reason”). Even anti-Semitic Heidegger knew that reorganizing
philosophy along the lines of a succession of psychologies

78 55
in human history was a grave error—though his negative —. Proust and Signs. 1964. Translated by Richard Howard. Lon-
anthropology leaves the door open to the wild phenomeno- don: Continuum, 2000.
logical speculation of Agamben, Stiegler, and Virno (Balibar, —. Pure Immanence: A Life. 1995. Translated by Anne Boyman.
“Subjection and Subjectivation,” 2–9). Rather, we need to New York: Zone Books, 2001.
return to structuralism, if for no other reason than American —. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. 1970. Translated by Robert
anthropology was never (post)structuralist. Such a provocation Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.
is not an attempt to be retro; it is a rejection of the postmodern —. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995.
“reflexive turn” as thirty years lost to naval gazing (Viveiros 2001. Translated by Amed Hodges and Mike Taormina.
de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 98–100). Edited by David Lapoujade. Los Angeles, Calif.: Semio-
Why not a structuralist political anthropology? Viveiros text(e), 2007.
de Castro says that the opening move would be to shatter Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. 1972. Trans-
anthropology as the “mirror of society,” which is to say, to shift lated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Min-
the crosshairs from psychoanalysis to anthropology to write neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
an Anti-Narcissus (Cannibal Metaphysics, 40–45). There are —. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. 1975. Translated by Dana
a few Deleuzian anthropologists who still take seriously the Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
structuralist project of studying the other: Philippe Descola, —. A Thousand Plateaus. 1980. Translated by Brian Massumi.
Eduardo Kohn, Patrice Maniglier, and Eduardo Viveiros de Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Castro, to name a few. Only with their help can we overturn —. What Is Philosophy? 1991. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson
the mode of production, perhaps learning from the cannibalist and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press,
Araweté and Tupinambá’s “metaphysics of predation” (Can- 1994.
nibal Metaphysics, 142–44). Yet even these anthropologists Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1977. Dialogues 2, rev. ed.,
need to get beyond the naturalist’s impulse simply to catalog translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New
everything that they see. For even they are struck with their York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
discipline’s postcolonial guilt and are content to paint their Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of
subjects’ lines of becoming in a connectivist “generalized Authority.” 1989. In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Jus-
chromaticism” only a few shades from productivism (45, 161). tice, edited by Drucilla Cornell et al., 3–66. New York: Rout-
Like Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks on Freud as the Martin ledge, 1992.
Luther and Adam Smith of psychology, these anthropologists Dumézil, Georges. Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-
remain imprisoned by their own states of affairs—until they European Representations of Sovereignty. 1984. Translated by
produce a body to perform an autopsy, Anti-Narcissus pulls Derek Coltman. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
its punches. And without a critique, it remains too close to “a Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.
bizarre mixture of ontology and anthropology, metaphysics Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004.
and humanism, theology and atheism” (NP, 183). Our conspir- Edmonds, John Maxwell. Elegy and Iambus, Being the Remains
acy demands more than knowing how the other conditions of All the Greek Elegiac and Iambic Poets from Callinus to
herself through the enemy, even if it is how they eat each Crates, Excepting the Choliambic Writers, with the Anacre-

56 77
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. 1983. Trans- other; it is a communism that wants to consume the flesh and
lated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Min- blood of the entire cosmos.
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
—. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. 1985. Translated by Hugh Tom-
linson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Min-
Nomadism: Barbarian, Not Pastoral
nesota Press, 1989. At first blush, nomadism appears pastoral. Deleuze’s works
—. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. 2002. New York: constitute one great “horse opera,” as the animals appear in
Semiotext(e), 2004. more than half of his published work. One question motivates
—. Difference and Repetition. 1968. Translated by Paul Patton. his obsession: what can a horse do? This is an affective inquiry
New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. into their capacities and not their meaning:
—. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of take the horse, the apocalyptic beast, as an example: the
Human Nature. 1953. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas. horse that laughs, in Lawrence; the horse that sticks his head
New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. through the window and looks at you, in Kafka; the horse “that
—. Essays Critical and Clinical. 1993. Translated by Daniel W. is the sun,” in Artaud; or even the ass that says YeaYuh, in
Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Min- Nietzsche—these are all figures that constitute so many sym-
nesota Press, 1997. bols through the building-up of forces, through the constitu-
—. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. 1968. Translated by tion of compounds of power. (ECC, 134)
Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books, 1990. Deleuze chastises Freud for making Little Hans’s fear of
—. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. 1988. Translated by Tom horses into an image of the father, when it is really a desire
Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. to escape to the street (ECC, 64). Horses appear as the first
—. Foucault. 1986. Translated by Seán Hand. Minneapolis: Uni- weapons, whose speed is essential to establishing the asym-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1988. metrical relation between nomads and the state (TP, 396).
—. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. 1981. Translated by When combined with inventions, such as the stirrup or the
Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota photograph, horses generate the peculiar movement of speed
Press, 2005. through immobilization—the voyages in situ of the knight
—. Logic of Sense. 1969. Translated by Mark Lester, with who sleeps on his horse and Muybridge’s Sallie Gardner at a
Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New Gallop (D, 74–75; C1, 5–6). They can be the cause of madness,
York: Columbia University Press, 1990. such the public beating of horses that scarred Dostroyevsky’s
—. Negotiations: 1972–1990. 1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. memory and triggered Nietzsche’s break with reality (TP, 257).
New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Yet there is little of ontological import about the horse itself; it
—. Nietzsche and Philosophy. 1962. Translated by Hugh Tomlin- takes “the earth” to slow one down through an “artificial reter-
son. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. ritorialization” to give any given horse “a particular substance
—. “On the New Philosophers and a More General Problem.” In- to the content, a particular code to the utterances, a particular
terview with Bertrand Augst. Translated by Bertrand Augst. limit to becoming, a particular indicative mood (present, past,
Discourse 20, no. 3 (1998): 34–43.

76 57
future) to time” (ECC, 72). As such, the warhorse is far more Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi, 11–36. Malden, Mass.:
like a wolf than a workhorse, which is the younger sibling of Blackwell, 2001.
the ox (TP, 256–57). Bey, Hakim. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological An-
The nomads that will dissolve capitalism are not cowboys archy, Poetic Terrorism. 2nd ed. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia,
but barbarians. Not self-attributed but a smear, the term bar- 2003.
barian was invented by Hellenistic Greeks as onomatopoeia for Brown, Wendy. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of
the blabber of those who could not speak their language (Pad- Identity and Empire. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
gen, Fall of Natural Man, 16). Lacking the capacity for reason, Press.
barbarian is used to paint certain foreigners as utterly black Buiness Insider. “Google Chairman: ‘The Internet Will Disap-
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teristics: they refuse to be educated in the language of the polis Butler, Samuel. Erewhon: or, Over the Range. 1872. London: AC
and they act with a savage roughness that exceeds the bound- Fifield, 1910. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1906/1906-h/
aries of appropriateness (Crisso and Odoteo, Barbarians, 40– 1906-h.htm.
42). The first jams the usual logocentric means of recognition Cazdyn, Eric. The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Cul-
that would extend them the communal rights of being a human ture, and Illness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012.
(Padgen, Fall of Natural Man, 16); the second banishes them to Chaplin, Charlie, dir. Modern Times. New York: Criterion Col-
the uncivilized realm of beasts that lacks decorum, protocol, lection, 1936.
and restraint (17–18). Nomads are perfectly satisfied with such Clastres, Pierre. Society against the State. 1974. Translated by
a one-sided story. What initially appears as an insulting depic- Robert Hurley and Abe Stein. New York: Zone Books, 1987.
tion of their limited capacities instead is a definition of how Cohen, Jared, and Eric Schmidt. The New Digital Age: Reshaping
they avoid capture. Barbarians can continue their siege as long the Future of People, Nations, and Business. New York: Dou-
as the likes of Hegel, “an honest subject of the Prussian state,” bleday, 2013.
cannot apprehend “a completely autonomous, sovereign, un- Connolly, William E. Pluralism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
compromising opposition—a multiplicity that does not allow Press, 2005.
itself to be enrolled in any synthesis” (Crisso and Odoteo, Bar- Crisso and Odoteo. Barbarians: The Disordered Insurgence.
barians, 14). The outside to the new “socially conscious” econ- Anonymous translation. 2003. http://theanarchistli-
omy, barbarians avoid the liberal trap of tolerance, compassion, brary.org/library/crisso-and-odoteo-barbarians-the-
and respect. The only risk is that their ferocity will abate and disordered-insurgence.pdf.
their passion subside. Debord, Guy. “The Bad Old Days Will End.” 1963. In Leaving
the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist In-
ternational, translated by Christopher Gray, 33–37. London:
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Bataille, Georges. “The Notion of Expenditure.” 1933. In Visions nomadic roots. Over the generations, nomos loses its nomadic
of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, translated by Allan heritage to become the administrative appropriation, distri-
Stoekl, Carl R. Lovin, and Donald M. Leslie Jr., 167–81. Min- bution, and use of land (22–29, 115–24, 178–205). During this
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. time, nomos is combined with the household (oikos) to name
Bernadette Corporation, dir. Get Rid of Yourself. New York: Elec- economics; first mentioned by Phocylides in a poem where
tronic Arts Intermix, 2003. he compares women to animals: to dogs, bees, free-range
Bernasconi, Robert. “Who Invented the Concept of Race? pigs, and long-maned horses (Edmonds, Elegy and Iambus,
Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race.” In 173–74). (Phocylides suggests that his friend marry the bee

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because she is a good housekeeper—oikonomos agathe; 174.)
But Marx shows in chapter 7 of Capital that he knows that
“what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees
is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination
before he erects it in reality.” Certainly there is a residual Acknowledgments
speciesism in Marx’s remark, as animals’ experience of the
world (Umwelt) is sophisticated enough to produce many
things (“art does not wait for human beings to begin”) (TP, Thanks to Mark Purcell, Keith Harris, Cheryl Gilge, and ev-
320). Yet there is a considerable difference in how humans and eryone at the University of Washington for the opportunity to
cows crown the space that they occupy. As such, we should write this book. I am grateful for critical feedback from Alex
be concerned more by how each constructs the world than by Galloway, Geert Lovink, Jose Rosales, Matt Applegate, Alejan-
the excrement with which they consecrate it. dro de Acosta, and an anonymous reviewer. Finally, I am in-
Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue demonstrates in his Social debted to the numerous people who stood beside me at the in-
and Philosophical Studies how nomos was turned against the tellectual and political barricades throughout the project, per-
barbarians. Land first “distributed by lot, with the aid of peb- haps too numerous to name, except for one: Eva Della Lana.
bles,” is set under the watch of Nemesis, the goddess of just
distribution (125; Laroche, Histoire, 89–106). Nomos continues
to affirm its groundlessness when it is played like a game of
chance at the table of the gods, with the dice affirming aleatory
points that fracture the sky and fall back to a broken earth (DR,
284). Lafargue posits that the great betrayal appears when jus-
tice, born out of equality, sanctions the inequalities of land dis-
tributed by right and not luck (Social and Philosophical Studies,
133–34, 129–30). No longer the protector of nomads, Nemesis
inflicts the death penalty “against those who menace property”
for the purpose of “teaching the barbarians to trample under
foot their noble sentiments of equality and brotherhood” (130–
31). Lafargue thus demands a communist revolution that sup-
presses private property to banish “the most frightful night-
mare which ever tortured sad civilized humanity,” the idea of
nomic justice (134).
There are two outsides to the state: one a worldwide union,
the other a fragmented resistance (TP, 381). To Deleuze and
Guattari, this exteriority demonstrates the irreducibility of the
nomos to the law. If there is anything to this notion, it is not

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not the pursuit of the ineffable or sublime, as it is neither es- found in a form of exteriority but in the fact of the outside—that
oteric nor mystical. It circulates as an open secret that retains there will always be nondenumerable groups (469–73), that
its secrecy only by operating against connectivism through the there are flows that even the best axiomatic can never mas-
principle of selective engagement. The lesson to be taken is that ter (468–69), and that power now produces more than it can
“we all must live double lives”: one full of the compromises we repress (F, 28–29). This is the true meaning of “deterritorial-
make with the present, and the other in which we plot to undo ization” and “the infinite speed of thought”—each concept con-
them. The struggle is to keep one’s cover identity from taking firms the extraordinary powers of the outside (AO, 105; WP, 21,
over. There are those whose daily drudgery makes it difficult to 35–38, 42). The difficulty is that “one cannot write sufficiently
contribute to the conspiracy, though people in this position are in the name of an outside” because it “has no image, no signi-
far more likely to have secret dealings on the side. Others are fication, no subjectivity” (TP, 23). How then to link with the
given ample opportunities but still fail to grow the secret, the outside? The simplest way is to fashion a war machine as a
most extreme example being those who live their lives “with relation to the outside (TP, 376–77). Another path to “a new
nothing to hide,” often declaring that they are “an open book.” relation to the outside” may be found in a fissured planet that
Some treat the conspiracy as a form of hobbyism, working to spews fires that consume the world (DI, 156, 158–59). Such de-
end the world only after everything else has been taken care territorializations unleash movements that “cease to be terres-
of—the worst being liberal communists, who exploit so much trial” when “the religious Nome blooms and dissolves” and “the
in the morning that they can give half of it back as charity in singing of the birds is replaced by combinations of water, wind,
the afternoon. And then there are those who escape. Crafting clouds, and fog” (TP, 327).
new weapons while withdrawing from the demands of the so- The outside appears like Frankenstein’s monster, with
cial, they know that cataclysm knows nothing of the produc- a crack of lightning late into the dreary night while the
tivist logic of accumulation or reproduction. Escape need not atomist’s rain patters away from the outside. Its darkness does
be dreary, even if they are negative. Escape is never more ex- not come from void worship or an existentialist reckoning
citing than when it spills out into the streets, where trust in with nothingness. Flashing brilliantly as a shock to thought,
appearances, trust in words, trust in each other, and trust in it appears as the “bearer of a problem” that paints the world
this world all disintegrate in a mobile zone of indiscernibility black with dread (DR, 140). This movement grounds thought
(Fontaine, “Black Bloc”). It is in these moments of opacity, in- as “the relationship with the outside” (DI, 255). Exteriority
sufficiency, and breakdown that darkness most threatens the here is not some transcendent light or yawning void. Rather,
ties that bind us to this world. the outside opens out to a new milieu, like cracking the
window in a house. The outside is seldom as pleasant as a
breeze, however, as it invades in all its alien force. Thought
here has a choice, to represent or intensify; the latter follows
Paul Klee’s famous formula: “not to render the visible, but to
render visible” (FB, 144). It amplifies the impinging power of
the outside to cause a horrible discord that splits apart the
harmonies of reason sung in the halls of state thought (DI,

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259–60). Such philosophy does not sing, it screams in the usual abstractions of the Law and the State that hide the
analogical language of “expressive movements, paralinguistic workings of power; for denouncing Marxism “not so much
signs, breaths” (FB, 93). The outside howls with an “open because real struggles would have made new enemies, new
mouth as a shadowy abyss” (51). problems and new means arise, but because THE revolution
must be declared impossible”; and for reviving the subject
as part of a general martyrology. What stands between lib-
Politics: Cataclysmic, Not Molecular eralism and revolution is intolerance, but in a peculiar way.
“The revolutionary was molecular, and so was the counter- Intolerance arises out of this world as “something intolerable
revolution,” Tiqqun prophetically declares (Introduction to Civil in the world” to prove that there is “something unthinkable in
War, 200). Yet the “molecular revolution” actually begins with thought” (C2, 169). Which is to say, it is when we find it all
Proust, who writes in Sodom and Gomorrah of three levels of unbearable that we realize “it can no longer think a world or
sexuality: straights, gays, and queers. The first two types con- think itself” (170). This is where the Dark Deleuze parts ways
nect “molar” lines between fixed objects, each category simply with the joyful by inviting the death of this world. There are
being an inversion of the other (AO, 68–71). The third draws many fellow travelers of revolutionary intolerance, including
a “transversal” molecular line between the unspecified, par- Wendy Brown and Herbert Marcuse. Newton argues in his
tial, and flux of flows “unaware of persons, aggregates, and autobiography Revolutionary Suicide that the revolutionary
laws, and of images, structures, and symbols” (70–71, 311). For task is to risk one’s life for the chance of “changing intolerable
a long time, the love that dare not speak its name hid with other conditions” (5). In his essay on “repressive tolerance,” Marcuse
queer things made up of “very different mechanisms, thresh- extends tolerance only to the left, subversion, and revolution-
olds, sites, and observers” (WP, 78). But counterculture exposed ary violence and proposes a militant intolerance of the right,
the secret, which is to say, disclosed a molecular line of previ- this world, and “benevolent neutrality.” Together, they express
ously clandestine passions while blossoming into the flower the dark truth of the intolerable as the lived present of being
power of the Summer of Love publicly consecrated at Wood- trapped by something so unbearable, so impossible, that it
stock’s Three Days of Peace, Music, and Love. This new world must be destroyed. To be completely clear: the point is not to
bore what Paolo Virno calls in Grammar of the Multitude the grow obstinate but to find new ways to end our suffocating
liberatory “anti-socialist demands” of “radical criticism of la- perpetual present.
bor,” “an accentuated taste for differences” and “the aptitude (at Darkness advances the secret as an alternative to the liberal
times violent, certainly) for defending oneself from the State, obsession with transparency. Foucault smartly identifies trans-
for dissolving the bondage to the State as such” (111). But the parency’s role in the “science of the police,” which is used in the
life of this molecular line was short. It was put back to work task of maintaining order through the collusion between the
by disco, flexible production, and the Reagan revolution in an state and capital from liberalism’s beginnings in the German
odd “communism of capital” (111). notion of the police state through to contemporary biopolitics
The cataclysm is not an end but a new beginning, the cat- (Security, Territory, Population). The conspiracy is against the
aclysm of a temporary hell, “itself the effect of an elementary consistency of everything being in its proper place, and the se-
cret is the fact that nothing is as it seems. Such a conspiracy is

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material systems, or dispositifs. I simply call them “this world” injustice” that sweeps in and out, rather than being an abysmal
and plot for its destruction. Productivism links up with the au- lake of sulfur where souls burn forever (ECC, 46). It is the apoc-
tonomous, ceaseless autoproduction of the real. The most naive alypse before its decadent transformation into the system of
productivists sentimentally cherish creation and novelty for Judgment (39). Only a revival of this cataclysmic event can end
their own sake, whether as dewy-eyed admiration for the com- the apocalypse of an “already industrialized organization” that
plexity of nature or a staunch Voltairine defense of all types of appeared “a Metropolis” by way of “the great military, police,
diversity. The productivists worthy of criticism are those who, and civil security of a new State” with a “programmed self-
in the name of “finding something about this world to believe glorification” complemented by a “demented installation of an
in,” affirm what is given as if this wretched world already in- ultimate judiciary and moral power” (44, 46). We know from Ni-
cluded all materials for a better one. I find that in relinquishing etzsche’s Gay Science that the impending cataclysm of “break-
the power of destruction, they can only capitalize on produc- down, destruction, ruin” may appear gloomy (279). And it will
tion through the logics of accumulation and reproduction. So certainly cover the earth in a blackness darker than the world
in founding a new world on the terms of the old, its horizon has ever seen (279). Yet we should greet it with cheer. For the
expands barely beyond what already exists. The alternative I cataclysm brings with it a new dawn worthy of our highest
propose is finding reasons to destroy this world. expectations. Though the daybreak may not be bright, we will
The greatest crime of joyousness is tolerance. While have escaped the judgment of God, Man, and the World. “At
mentioning tolerance may have marked one as a radical in long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face
Deleuze’s time, Wendy Brown argues in Regulating Aversion any danger,” because “the sea, our sea, lie open again” … “per-
that liberal tolerance is now essential to the grammar of haps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’” (280).
empire’s “domestic discourse of ethnic, racial, and sexual
regulation, on the one hand, and as an international discourse
of Western supremacy and imperialism on the other” (1, 7).
Cinema: The Powers of the False, Not the
Today’s tolerant are to blame for a “liberal Deleuze,” such as Forces of Bodies
William Connolly, who names Deleuze as an antirevolutionary
who inspires his belief that “transformation is neither needed Bodies are a well-composed image of power. The body of
nor in the cards today; what is needed is creative modes of God (the Sacrament of Jesus). The body of a saint (the pierced
intervention posed at several strategic sites in the service of corpse of the martyr). The body of the sovereign (the King’s
reducing economic inequality, foster intra- and inter-state two bodies). The body of the tyrant (Big Brother’s face). The
pluralism, and promoting ecological sanity” in his book on social body (the body politic). A body of evidence (the state’s
pluralism (Pluralism, 159). Deleuze criticized a similar position case). The idea of society or the world functioning as an organ-
many decades ago when denouncing the media-hungry form ism is well sedimented. In its stupidest form, it posits a resem-
of the Nouveaux Philosophes, who had “inscribed themselves blance between the human body and society. Just as various
perfectly well on the electoral grid … from which everything organisms interact to form an organism as a functional whole,
fades away” (“On the New Philosophers,” 40–41). Liberal it states, society is the cooperation of various social organs. The
Deleuzians can be criticized accordingly—for endorsing the body provides an image for the much-talked-about “body with-

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out organs,” the great inspiration for Deleuze, who says that if of Man, we learned that the human sciences were impotent in
we are to believe in the world, “give me a body then” (C2, 189). the face of the systemic injustices of this world. Rather, Fou-
The body is not really the enemy, the organism is. Some cault shows how expert inquiry makes exploitation, sexism,
would have bodies appear through their opposites, locked in racism, poverty, violence, and war into the constitutive ele-
eternal combat—as the sinner and their Eternal Savior, the ments of how humanity defends itself. He shows that attempts
regicide and the King, the criminal and the Law (TP, 108). to save this humanity created a biopower that “makes live and
But as an organism, the body is put to use for extracting lets die,” which paradoxically administers life through “a power
“useful labor,” either as a product of work (where organs are to expose a whole population to death” that tends toward wars
connected to the technical machines of the capitalism) or of all-out destruction (Foucault, History of Sexuality, 135–37).
self-reproduction (where organs are connected to the social Elaborating on this condition, subsequent theorists say that we
machines of the species) (AO, 54). The image of the body as an have already been killed but have not yet died, making us an
organism might appear as a step forward, as it invokes a form “already dead” that makes us already ready to adopt a revolu-
of ecological thinking of interconnected systems. But we are tionary orientation that sacrifices our current time and space
only interested in the body as a frustrating set of resistances, for a new, not-yet-realized future (Cazdyn, Already Dead, 9).
“obstinate and stubborn,” as it “forces us to think, and forces Seen from this perspective, runaway climate change, the Sixth
us to think what is concealed from thought, life” (C2, 189). Extinction, and many other impending catastrophes are all es-
This is why it is said that “we do not even know what a body sential parts of this world. The Death of this World admits the
can do.” But with the relative ease in which the body has been insufficiency of previous attempts to save it and instead poses
confused for an organism, perhaps it is time to abandon the a revolutionary gamble: only by destroying this world will we
image of the body completely. Stop thinking like lawyers, who release ourselves of its problems. This does not mean moving
try cases only after a body has been found. There is a simple to the moon, but that we give up on all the reasons given for
reason: the point is not to construct a body without organs saving the world. In my own announcement of the death of
(organization, organism, …) but organs without a body. We this world, I propose critiques of connectivity and positivity, a
only get outside the productivist logic of accumulation when theory of contraries, the exercise of intolerance, and the con-
“at last the disappearance of the visible body is achieved” (C2, spiracy of communism.
190). Contemporary Deleuze scholarship tends to be connectivist
Against the state’s body of evidence: “The ‘true world’ does and productivist. Connectivism is the world-building integra-
not exist,” and even if it did, “it would be inaccessible, impossi- tion into an expanding web of things. As an organizational
ble to describe, and, if it could be described, would be useless, logic, it is the promiscuous inclusion of seemingly unrelated el-
superfluous” (C2, 137). The conspiracy against this world be- ements into a single body to expand its capacities. Academics
gins with time, which “puts truth in crisis” (130). This is the are not alone in endorsing connectivism—I argue that connec-
fundamental problem of the “body of the law” described by tivism drives Google’s geopolitical strategy of global influence,
Derrida whereby the law must continually rule against what which proceeds through a techno-affirmationist desire to an-
it previously established as the truth (and thus its own author- nex everything. Commentators use different names for their
ity) (“Force of Law”). It is these moments that reveal an in- webs of connections, such as rhizomes, assemblages, networks,

64 69
 effectivity of the truth—denouncing states, nations, or races
as fictions does little to dislodge their power, however untrue
the historical or scientific justifications for them might be (Se-
shadri, Desiring Whiteness). The state is nothing but these “not-
Conclusion necessarily true pasts,” the founding mythologies that fictional-
ize the origin of states and nations of people (C2, 131). This is
the power generated only between the true and the false: what
AS A PROLEGOMENA to any future negativity in Deleuze, Deleuze calls “the real.” The importance of the real is central,
this book risks being too condensed. The moves I make are as trying to use truth to dispute the false does not work: those
quick, and many will appear perverse to friends of the Joyous who denounce the illegal violence used to found legal orders
Deleuze. For justification: the force of thought is a matter of are quickly dismissed or jailed, and the many climate scientists
style and not the specification of concepts, or to use proper who harangue the public about the truth of global warming fail
names, Nietzsche contra Kant (DR, 5, 13, 306). I therefore build to spur policy change.
my case through formulations that are “rigorous yet anexact” Cinema “takes up the problem of truth and attempts to
like Deleuze’s, whose “essentially not accidentally inexact” resolve it through purely cinematic means” (Lambert, Non-
concepts modulate enough between books to deserve different philosophy, 93). There are films that go beyond metaphor and
names (TP, 367, 555). I promote minor terms through extensive analogy, operating instead through a realism of the false. This
footnotes generated through a deep reading of Deleuze across is not the epic cinema of Brecht or Lang, whose dissimulation
the breadth of his complete works. So on one hand, I am so and relativism ultimately return the morality of judgment
indebted to Deleuze that one could say that I merely provide through the viewer. It is a realism of what escapes the body,
a new nomenclature for old Deleuzian concepts. On the other, presenting something it cannot perceive on its own—not
this is a book that Deleuze himself could never have written, different worlds but realities that exist in the present (though
as his age was not one of obligatory positivity, distributed not currently lived) that confirm reality by weakening it.
management, and stifling transparency. My basic argument is Deleuze finds that the elusive truth of postwar cinema does
that a new untimeliness in a time not Deleuze’s own requires a not prevent the existence of a “truthful man” but the “forger”
negative project that his work introduces but does not sustain: as the character of new cinema (C2, 132). The forger refuses
the Death of this World. the moral origins of truth and frustrates the return to judg-
The end of this world is the third in a succession of deaths— ment (C2, 138–39). The realism of the false shows us love
the Death of God, the Death of Man, and now the Death of this through the eyes of a serial killer (Grandrieux’s Sombre), gives
World. This is not a call to physically destroy the world. The us the real thrill of self-destruction (Gavras’s Our Day Will
Death of God did not call for the assault of priests or the burn- Come), unleashes the cruelty of nature against the cool logic
ing of churches, and the Death of Man did not propose geno- of liberal patriarchy (von Trier’s Anti-Christ), and solicits us
cide or the extinction of our species. Each death denounces a in the horrifying conspiracies of a new flesh (Cronenberg’s
concept as insufficient, critiques those who still believe in it, Videodrome).
and demands its removal as an object of thought. In the Death

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The Sensible: Indiscernibility, Not siege engines to attack the new Metropolis that stands in
Experience Judgment like a Heaven on Earth (DI, 259).

The senses think when the boundary between the imaginary

and the real collapses. This is what happens whenever the sus-
pension of disbelief continues outside the frame (C2, 169). But
the suspension carries on only as long as it is not whittled down
to a narrow proposition through “infinite specification” (DR,
306). It expands by establishing a “distinct yet indiscernible”
proximity (TP, 279–80, 286). In this strange zone of indiscerni-
bility, figuration recedes—it is right before our eyes, but we lose
our ability to clarify the difference between a human body, a
beast, and meat (FB, 22–27). There is no mystical outside, just
the unrelenting intrusion of “the fact that we are not yet think-
ing” (C2, 167). This is because experience is itself not thought
but merely the provocation to think—a reminder of the insuf-
ferable, the impossibility of continuing the same, and the ne-
cessity of change.
“Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for
cutting,” says Foucault (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 88).
Neither is sense. The best sense is a sensation, a provocation,
that introduces insufficiency (L, 50–58). So instead of adequate
conceptions, we spread insufficient sensations. This insuffi-
ciency does not carry the weight of inevitability. It may begin
with a petulant indecisiveness, such as Bartleby’s “I would
prefer not to,” but it must not end there. The greatest danger
is that indecision consumes us and we become satisfied for
one reason or another, withering like Bartleby in jail cells of
our own making. Our communism demands that we actively
conspire under the cover of the secret; for there is nothing
more active than the Death of the World. Our hatred propels
us. Just as “an adventure that erupts in sedentary groups”
through “the call of the outside,” our sense that the world is
intolerable is what compels us to build our own barbarian

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