Deleuze’s Communism

Gilles Deleuze, seminar at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes, 1975. Photo H. Gloagen / Raphopho.

This is an excerpt from Alex Taek-Gwang Lee’s Communism After Deleuze, published recently by Bloomsbury.

Deleuze and Minor Communism

My subject-matter is ambitious: a minor Red Deleuze. It sounds strange to link Deleuze’s philosophy to the color of communism. However, my argument focuses on the fact that Deleuze was one of the European philosophers who philosophized the idea of communism, considering the revolutionary movements in the Third World. I would call Deleuze’s project “minor communism,” which attempted to reformulate political philosophy through the political experiments of non-European revolutionaries. This inquiry does not mean I will deal with Deleuze’s direct relation to the Third World or discuss its historical developments.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the Third World is not only a geographical term but also one that denotes the Third zone “by which a language can escape, and animal enters into things, an assemblage comes into play.”1 For Deleuze, the Third World is not a geopolitical subject-matter, but a “chaos-cosmos”—a “play of sense and non-sense”—that constitutes the global totality of capitalism created through imperialism and colonialism.2 In this sense, the Third World is not subordinate, but serves to deconstruct and subvert Western language and law. The zones of the Third World are “to make a minor or intensive use” of language for opposing “the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality.”3 This concept of minor literature, i.e., the “minor use” of language, does not mean the specific “literature” of a minority. As Daniel Smith points out, “minor” refers to “the revolutionary conditions for every literature.”4 I would argue that this concept of the minor concerning the Third World should be seen as a keyword in understanding Deleuze’s approach to communism—communism as a creation of revolutionary conditions. For this reason, minor communism implicates the multiple exercises of communism to produce the conditions of revolution.

In this way, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of the Third World concerning minor communism, in my reading, could be seen as operating alongside the concept of minor literature, which implies a very different use of language against the dominant Signifier of the capitalist State. These concepts are cognate with Deleuze’s early notion of a “transcendental exercise” of the faculties by which he critiques Kant’s synthesis of representation. For Deleuze, Kant is not critical enough, not empirical enough, and too dogmatic. Nevertheless, Deleuze does find some valuable elements in Kant’s original insights into temporality, Ideas as problems, and discordant faculties. Deleuze’s purpose does not lie in rejecting Kantian philosophy as such but, rather, in revolutionizing his critical philosophy. In this sense, the concept of the Third World in Deleuze’s later philosophy in collaboration with Guattari must be considered his continued project of critical philosophy, bringing forth an immanent critique in the age of global capitalism.

Today, radical leftism has declined and is shrinking, while the rise of fascist populism is apparent and gaining speed. Against this pessimistic vision of the present political situation, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s radicalization of philosophy after May 1968 is still relevant to us. Furthermore, their attempt to join political philosophy with the concept of the Third World is powerful enough to shape the future of leftist politics. To some, the term “Third World” is outdated, replaced now by the phrase “Global South.” Furthermore, the political movement of the Third World, i.e., the Non-Aligned Movement, turned out to be a total failure, ending as an obsessive competition among nation-states to “win” in the full swing of global capitalism. The reconsideration of Deleuze’s philosophy concerning his conceptualization of the Third World must be confronted with political frustration. Against the grain, I will argue that their concept of the Third World aimed at challenging the given Signifier of “major communism,” i.e., the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and further “official” Marxism. Many have argued that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophical project emerged directly from the events of May 1968. Indeed, their political philosophy could be said to preserve the spirit of the radical movement. However, this definition of their radicalism is ambivalent. It seems to ossify their philosophical project while it preempts a reconsideration of their politics from a nonnormative perspective. It is essential to consider what sort of vision they tried to maintain in their political philosophy.

The term “political philosophy” is regarded as the theory of governing in general. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terminology has a different nuance from that common usage. Smith also points out that, with the unique use of the notion, “Deleuze is clearly distancing himself from other approaches to social theory, which have instead been based, for instance, on a theory of the State (Plato) or the social contract (Hobbes) or the spirit of the laws (Montesquieu), or on the problems of “perpetual peace” (Kant) or legitimation (Durkheim, Habermas), and so on.”5 Like the concept of minor literature, Deleuze brings in the “transcendental exercise” of political philosophy here to create new politics, i.e., the experiments of multi-politics against normative political theory. From this perspective, interestingly, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the Brazilian anthropologist, observes:

For my generation, the name of Gilles Deleuze immediately evokes the change in thought that marked the period circa 1968, when some key elements of our contemporary cultural apperception were invented. The meaning, consequences and very reality of this change have given rise to a still-raging controversy.6

As Viveiros de Castro acknowledges, the legacy of Deleuze’s political philosophy is open to discussion. Viveiros de Castro indicates here that the name Deleuze reminds his generation of “the change in thought” that originated in May 1968. My interest lies in the Deleuzian (and Guattarian) moment of political vision, and my arguments presuppose that the change that Deleuze and Guattari attempted to bring about in the revolutionary period was the après coup of their interventions in European philosophy from the perspective of the Third World—the theoretical engagement into the dominant Signifier of communism: the Party. Minor communism means many communisms without the central Party. It is undeniable that Deleuze and Guattari took the idea of decentralized communism from the revolutionary movements in the Third World.

The Philosophy of the Third World

Indeed, their political philosophy would not make sense without the immanence of the Third World, which cannot be represented. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of concepts would be the only way to understand their political philosophy. In this sense, the Third World is not so much present as virtual in their politics. Therefore, their philosophy of the Third World lies in their concept of the minority as “a people who are missing,” those who are not represented by language or the ruling ideology. Moreover, the concept of the Third World refers to the transcendental exercise of language, i.e., the immanent critique of representation. We may pause here to wonder what the ideological context was when Deleuze and Guattari brought the concept of the Third World into their philosophical discourse. Immanuel Wallerstein claims that “the primary protest of 1968 was against US hegemony in the world-system.”7 It is, therefore, not surprising that Deleuze and Guattari presupposed anti-US hegemony in their arguments of political philosophy. In many places, they directly describe their political project as anti-imperial or postcolonial. This political inclination was not accidental or extraordinary in those days; it may be argued even that May 1968 was a culmination of the way in which the European left discovered the people of the Third World.

Amidst that situation, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s political philosophy was intended to philosophize the actuality of people in the Third World. One piece of evidence that reveals the link between Deleuze and the Third Word is that Deleuze (with Guattari) adopted the notion of the people who are missing to explain the global scope of politics. Who are these people, then? His idea of people invisible to the West is not a metaphor but the potentiality of anti-representational politics—the invention of the universal proletariat. A unified revolutionary class is not currently identifiable within the existing social division. Future events may lead to the emergence of such people.

I would say that the concept of missing people resonates precisely with the historical event of the Non-Aligned Movement in the Third World. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s political project thus does not fit into the three historical groups of the French left: the republican left, the socialist left, and the communist left. Michel Winock calls the fourth group of the left the “l’ultragauche,” the ultraleft.8 Louis Auguste Blanqui and Jean-Paul Sartre are examples of that fourth group, who criticized the establishment of the existing left and rejected representative democracy. For them, formulating elections was a governing device to trap the people’s revolt. With Winock’s model of the ultraleft against him, Christoph Kalter observes that the radical new leftists were driving towards a fourth revolution after 1956. He argues:

The end of the colonial empires affected two core areas of the Left’s self-understanding that had great potential for conflict: “revolution” and “internationalism.” Discussions over the commitment to revolution and the appropriate ways of achieving it led to constant quarrels within the Left. The theory and practice of internationalism also spawned conflicts, because the inherent demand to show “solidarity” with the colonized often collided with the politics of the French Left, whose orientation was national, pro-colonial, or pro-Moscow. Disagreements over leftist conflicts and politics were concentrated in the concept of the Third World.9

The concept of the Third World raised questions about the French left’s role in the world, as well as questions about “the character, actors, locations, and thrust of political-social revolution.”10 The diversification and convergence of the left revolved around the very concept of the Third World by insisting that solidarity with colonized people was necessary for a radical revolution. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s political philosophy undoubtedly resonated with the demands of the New Radical Left. From this perspective, their political project, focusing on desire rather than power, should be understood as an attempt to criticize the old leftist language and rejuvenate the virtuality of revolution. Deleuze and Guattari built on their political foundation by claiming the virtuality of the Third World through their discussions about “the people who are missing.”

Deleuze’s and Guattari’s idea of virtual politics, i.e., the politics of the people who are missing, goes hand in hand with their anti-representational aesthetics. Deleuze’s understanding of cinema provides several clues for my argument. He makes the following symptomatic argument about the “missing people” in Cinema 2:

In American and in Soviet cinema, the people are already there, real before being actual, ideal without being abstract. Hence the idea that the cinema, as art of the masses, could be the supreme revolutionary or democratic art, which makes the masses a true subject. But a great many factors were to compromise this belief: the rise of Hitler, which gave cinema as its object not the masses become subject but the masses subjected; Stalinism, which replaced the unanimism of peoples with the tyrannical unity of a party; the break-up of the American people, who could no longer believe themselves to be either the melting-pot of peoples past or the seed of a people to come (it was the neo-Western that first demonstrated this break-up). In short, if there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet … the people are missing.11

It is not difficult to see here that Deleuze clearly describes three poles of political ideology—Stalinism, Nazism, and Americanism—that regard cinema as the “art of the masses,” the means of revolution and democracy that produce the “true” mass subject. This truth of the masses is perceived as madness to Western realpolitik, such as liberalism or political economy. Deleuze, with Guattari, indicates that “the cinema is able to capture the movement of madness, precisely because it is not analytical and regressive, but explores a global field of coexistence.”12 In this sense, cinema could be an effective political weapon to build war machines escaping from the nation-states as the apparatuses of capture. Deleuze’s concept of the Third World is related to this “inter-nationalism,” which begins to exist beyond the nation-states. This betweenness is where the truth of cinema meets the people who are missing.

Interestingly, Deleuze points out “the break-up of the American people,” who, during the Cold War, had already forgotten their history of multinational immigration. America was once the land of promise for deterritorialized people, but now, as in neo-Western movies, Americans are obsessed with preservation. Also, Deleuze directly indicates,

No doubt this truth also applied to the West, but very few authors discovered it, because it was hidden by the mechanisms of power and the systems of majority. On the other hand, it was absolutely clear in the third world, where oppressed and exploited nations remained in a state of perpetual minorities, in a collective identity crisis. Third world and minorities gave rise to authors who would be in a position, in relation to their nation and their personal situation in that nation, to say: the people are what is missing.13

What Deleuze implies by this argument is his hidden impetus to revive political cinema. The foundation of political cinema is “the people no longer exist, or not yet.”14 How can it bring forth the coming of the people who no longer (or not yet) exist? In Deleuze’s sense, political cinema does not represent revolutionary situations but rather the creation of the third zone beyond description and narration—the story.15 The story is open to infinite variations and finds its expression in “the ‘adequation’ of the subject and the object.”16 This equal relation comes with identifying what a camera sees objectively and what a character sees subjectively. The story does not need the literate public when writing is impossible in the dominant language. The other of language, not the language of the other, is nothing less than a basis on which art (in particular, cinematographic art) must participate for the invention of a people. Deleuze insists that “the moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘There have never been people here,’ the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute.”17

For examples of political cinema, he takes a few authors such as Jean Rouch, Pierre Perrault, and Ousmane Sembene. According to Deleuze, these filmmakers created a new status, which transformed the speech-act into the act of storytelling. This indirect status of the changed speech-act (i.e., storytelling) is the political dimension of the constitution of a people. Through this process, the directors and their characters become “a collectivity which gradually wins from place to place, from person to person, from intercessor to intercessor.”18 Referring to Serge Daney’s comments on Sembene’s Ceddo, Deleuze emphasizes African cinema as “a cinema which talks, a cinema of the speech-act.”19 Cinematic talking is the act of storytelling, the foundation of living speech, which gives rise to “the value of collective utterance.”20 This shared speech-act is opposed to the myth of majority and isolates a lived present under the surface of the myth, “which could be intolerable, the unbelievable, the impossibility of living now in ‘this’ society.”21

In his discussion of political cinema, Deleuze seems to find the potential power of politics not in the West but in the Third World. Decolonization and the Cold War were two poles of the French left at that time. Deleuze’s idea was not exceptional within the historical context. In those days, many leftist groups in France struggled to bring forth the concept of minorities as an alternative to the majority of the French left. Those different groups shared the rejection of representative democracy and the political apparatus of significant parties. In this way, they regarded themselves as “true” internationalists and anti-fascists.22 The concept of the Third World, as such, was nothing less than the political ground for a new internationalism and anti-fascism against the growing nationalism and conformism of the dominant left in both France and the Soviet bloc. The concept catalyzed the conflicts within the French left and mediated an alliance with the “ultraleftist” groups at the same time. Deleuze’s emphasis on the Third World as the foundation of political cinema occurred within that context.