Dark Deleuze

Included here are excerpts from an early version of the forthcoming book Dark Deleuze and the Death of this World by Andrew Culp.

(2) From the Chapel to the Crypt
There are those who have hitherto only enlightened the world in various ways; the point is to darken it. Some speculate that humans first pondered the ways of the world under the brilliant light of the heavens.1 On that vast celestial stage, the gods played out great dramas of arts and culture. This cosmos also inspired the earliest sciences of mathematics and astronomy, which wove the many constellations into a single tapestry. As the light of the stars became cycles and then detailed calendars, so came the dawn of time.2

A more modern story begins in 1609, when upon hearing news of the Dutch invention of the telescope, Galileo created his own. Almost immediately, Galileo was peering into the dark quadrants of the Moon and illustrating its angle of illumination. These discoveries would lead him to loudly endorse heliocentrism – replacing God with a new light at the center of the universe. Galileo curiously flaunts the rules of astronomy in his lunar record, as he does not date each ink wash according to its time of observation nor does he make a photo-realistic reproduction of the Moon’s landscape.3 Centuries of critics have tried to determine the source of Galileo’s inaccuracy. Johannes Hevelius, the father of stenography, wondered if Galileo’s instruments were too crude.4 Others suggest that he may have been too overtaken by the excitement of discovery.5 But what if Galileo choose not to view the Moon mathematically but philosophically? He was less concerned about its angles of illumination as an astronomical object than what his telescopic perspicillum revealed about it as a cosmological concept. His styling of the Moon reveals about a way of seeing far more appropriate to Baroque visual argument than geographic measure. Galileo’s ink washes demonstrate the Baroque’s beautiful convergences. Referring “not to an essence but rather to an operative function,” Galileo’s Moon unfurls in the collision of multiple points of view as darkness and landscape meet in its leaping shadows.6 More importantly, he marks a transition driven by “the force of divergences, impossibilities, discords, dissonances.”7 In a world no longer illuminated by the light of God, Galileo paints “many possible borders between worlds” in a chromatic scale so as to be irresolvable from the lens of any one camera set to a single angle.8 How then does one continue Galileo’s journey to the far side of the moon? By refusing divine harmony and instead conspiring with divergent underground worlds.

The most immediate instance of lightness, connectivism, is the realization of the techno-affirmationist dream of complete transparency. The fate of such transparency is depicted in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In it, the drive for complete communicability elevates transparency the false transcendence of a New Tower of Babel. Deep in the shadows of the Lower City labors the work class, enslaved to the machines that automation promised to eliminate. Only in the catacombs does the secret rebellion commence. But instead of ending in Lang’s grand Hegelian mediation, it would be better to listen to Metropolis’s Whore of Bablyon, who says, “Let’s watch the world to go Hell.” Such an untimely descent into darkness begins with a protest: lightness has far too long been the dominant model of 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.9 Early Basilicas contain a crypt as a “second church” under their choir, featuring a vaulted ceiling, many columns, several aisles, and an altar.10 Some great churches even included a second crypt dedicated to a particular saint.11 At times when sacred objects are of special interest, crypts of especially renowned saints have inspired mass pilgrimages.12 Deleuze notes that these spaces fold in on themselves simultaneously expressing the “autonomy of the inside” and the “independence of the façade” as an inside without an outside or an outside without an inside, depending on how you approach it.13 Looking at El Greco’s great Baroque Mannerist painting The Burial of Count Orgaz, we are given the choice. Above the great horizontal line, a gathering of saints ascends to the height of Jesus, whose own ascension grants the heavens eternal lightness. Below, a communion of cloaked pale men crowd together to lay the count to rest under a dark background illuminated only by torchlight. The painting reveals the Baroque truth of knowledge: “for ages there have been places where what is seen is inside: a cell, a sacristy, a crypt, a church, a theater, a study, or a print room.”14 So beyond the association of crypts with rot and death, it is a projection of subterranean architectural power.

From the crypt, Dark Deleuze launches a conspiracy. It is fueled by negativity, but not one of antimonies. Following Freud, negation is not a necessary byproduct of consciousness. The lesson to be drawn from him is that negation is finding a way to say ‘no’ to those who tell us to take the world as it is. To this end, the path forward is Deleuze’s nondialectical negation, the ‘contrary,’ which operates as the distance between two exclusive paths.15 The target of the conspiracy is to break the collusion between institutionalized morality, capitalism, and the state.16 The preliminary materials were prepared by Nietzsche, who wanted to use his laughter as an experimental instrument to dissolve all identities into phantasms.17 A number of commentators have tried to rehabilitate the conspiracy on the basis an esoteric/exoteric distinction, whereby exoteric discourses are the mere public face to a deeper paranoia whose desire is concealed in an esoteric code.18 To the extent that it is true, the esoteric tradition must be avoided because it “demystifies only in order to mystify better.”19 The point is not to replace angelic messages with arcane ones. This raises an important question: what is an appropriately cryptic language? Deleuze and Guattari note that “the man of war brings the secret: he thinks, eats, loves, judges, arrives in secret, while the man of the state proceeds publicly.”20 Fortunately, in our conspiratorial world of phantasms, one does not hold a secret but instead becomes a secret.21 Even if they end up spilling everything, it turns out to be nothing.22 Why? The secret first hides within dominant forms to limit exposure, yet what it smuggles inside is not any specific thing that needs to evade discovery. Rather, it is a perception of the secret that spreads under the shroud of secrecy: perception + secret = the secret as secretion.23 Conspiracies do not remain limited to a few furtive missives; their creeping insinuations are part of a universal project to permeate all of society.24 The best conspiracy is when it has nothing left to hide.

Dark Deleuze follows a fairly modest ambition: to keep alive the idea of revolution in counter-revolutionary times. In this book, I reenact Winston’s trips to the shallow alcove of his apartment in 1984 to keep our own illicit diary of slogans. This is how I learned to find my own way to say, “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” and “If there is hope, it lies with the proles.”25 Listed below is the cipher I develop. In the column on the left, I list a series of tasks broken into four parts that each respectively speaks to the fields of philosophy, geography, political theory, and media studies. Across each column I have placed two contrary approaches, one joyous and one dark. Contrary approaches should be taken as mutually exclusive, as they are independent process each meant to fulfill the given task without recourse to the other. My ultimate purpose in this book is to convince readers to completely abandon all the joyous paths for their dark alternatives.

	Joyous	Dark
The Task	Create Conceptions	Destroy Worlds
Subject	Assemblages	Un-becoming
Existence	Genesis	Transformation
Ontology	Realism	Materialism
Difference	Inclusive Disjunction	Exclusive Disjunction
Diagram	Complexity	Asymmetry
Organization	Rhizome	Unfolding
Ethics	Processural Democracy	Conspiratorial Communism
Affect	Intensity	Cruelty
Speed	Acceleration	Escape
Flows	Production	Interruption
Substance	Techno-Science	Political Anthropology
Nomadism	Pastoral	Barbarian
Distribution	Crowned Anarchy	The Outside
Politics	Molecular	Cataclysmic
Cinema	The Forces of Bodies	The Powers of the False
The Sensible	Experience	Indiscernibility

 

PART I

The Task: Destroy Worlds (Not Create Conceptions)

The conspiracy against this world will be known through its war machines. A war machine is itself “a pure form of exteriority” that “explains nothing,” but there are plenty of stories to tell about them.26 They are the heroes of A Thousand Plateaus – Kleist’s skull-crushing war machine,27 the migratory war machine that the Vandals used to sack Rome,28 the gun that Black Panther George Jackson grabs on the run,29 and the queer war machine that excretes a thousand tiny sexes.30 “Each time there is an operation against the state – insubordination, rioting, guerilla warfare, or revolution as an act – it can be said that a war machine has revived.”31 War machines are also the greatest villains of A Thousand Plateaus, making all other dangers “pale by comparison”32 – there is the constant state appropriation of the war machine that subordinates war to its own aims,33 the folly of the commercial war machine,34 the paranoia of the fascist war machine (not the state army of totalitarianism),35 and worst of them all, the “worldwide war machine” of capitalism “whose organization exceeds the State apparatus and passes into energy, military-industrial, and multinational complexes” to wage peace on the whole world.36

“Make thought a war machine,” Deleuze and Guattari insist, “place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside.”37 Two important inventions follow: speed and secrecy.38 These are the affects of the war machine, its weapons of war, which “transpierce the body like arrows.”39 The resulting violence is not so vulgar as to encourage blow-by-blow bloodletting or a ‘once and for all’ immediate killing, but institutes an economy of violence whose hatred is unlimited and therefore durable.40 The war machine engages in war along two poles: one forms a line of destruction “prolongable to the limits of the universe,” while the other draws a line of flight for the “composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space.”41 Deleuze and Guattari would prefer to promote the connectivist line by saying they “make war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something else.”42 But today, that path leads to collusion with capitalism’s “creative destruction.”43 This is certainly not lost on those in Silicon Valley who spread the mantra of ‘disruptive innovation.’ We can thus take heed Deleuze and Guattari’s warning against treating terms as having “an irresistible revolutionary calling.”44 It is time to accept Nietzsche’s invitation to philosophize with a hammer, rendered here in the voice of Krishna: ‘I am become Time, the destroyer of worlds.’ We must find an appetite for destruction that does not betray Deleuze and Guattari’s “abolitionist dream.” This takes the “progressive, anxiety-ridden revelation” that destroying worlds is just another way of “smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine by other means.”45

Make the whole world stand still.46 Indeed, it may be the only way to think the present in any significant sense. To be clear: the suspension of the world is not a hunt for its conditions of reproduction or a meditative “rhapsody of sensations.”47 It is thought that treats the world as if struck by an unspecified disaster, where the best friends you have left are your own ideas. This is not the banal disaster movie, whose ambitions are usually limited to teaching us what are the bare essentials to survive. Writing the disaster is how we break free from the stifling perpetual present, for the present carries with itself a suffocating urgency.48 The present imposes material limits. To it, the past and the future are the empty form of time, and they must endure the complications of having a body to become part of the present.49 The past and the present exist in their own right only through representation – the former in history as the present memorialization of things passed, and the latter in the yet-to-come as the projection of an image of the present.50 Such re-presentation is why the future appears with the distinct impression that “we have seen it all before.”51 The productivist sees the event of thought as an eminently practical reorientation toward the present achieved while generating a new image of the future.52 In contrast, those learning to hate the world must short-circuit the ‘here and now’ to play out the scene differently. While still being in this world, they turn away from it. This is the life of characters so agitated that they force the world to stand still – Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, the head of Kurosawa’s seven samurai.53 Against bleating urgency, “there a fire, there’s fire… I’ve got to go…” they insist that “everything could burn down to the ground but nothing happens, one must find out the most urgent problem”!54

There are those who say that we already have one foot in utopia; but would it not be more suitable to say that we have both feet firmly planted in a present slouching toward dystopia? Deleuze and Guattari call upon utopia in their search for a new people and a new earth.55 They look to Samuel Butler, dissecting his Erewhon as a simultaneous “now-here” and “no-where.”56 Yet a closer examination of his novel reveals utopia to be a farce. While not exactly a dystopia, the utopia Erewhon is a comic satire of the British Empire. The narrator is a crass traveler with settler colonial dreams who catalogues the strange ways of Erewhon – they punish the sick (“convicted of aggravated bronchitis”)57 and sentence the misfortunate to hard labor (“ill luck of any kind… is considered an offense against society”),58 but nurture financial transgressions with medicine (“taken to a hospital and most carefully tended at the public expense”).59 Beyond being an object lesson in reading footnotes, Deleuze and Guattari’s reference to Erewhon demands an attention to the exact configuration of conceptual devices [dispositifs] and how power flows through them. Link thought with its epoch, they suggest, begin with a survey to identify whatever forces are already circulating and then work with them – “connecting up with what is real here and now in the struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed.”60 They warn of “proud affirmation” as the guise of restoration that opens the door to transcendence, such as appeals to truth, right, or authority.61 For Butler, Erewhon summons neither a new people nor a new earth, but is instead a field guide to negate everything he finds intolerable in his present. Utopia becomes the map to transforms the ‘now-here’ into the ‘no-where.’

“It should have been an apocalyptic book,” laments Deleuze, disappointed that the “old style” Difference and Repetition did not make apparent a key implication – he killed God, humankind, and even the world.62 The death of God began long before Deleuze, who sees Feuerbach as completing it long before Nietzsche with the proposition that “since man has never been anything but the unfold of man, man must fold and refold God.”63 Nietzsche identifies a different problem: that God was reborn in the form of Man. For Deleuze, it takes Foucault to establish the finitude of humanity – “Man has not always existed, and will not exist forever” –thus sealing its fate.64 But to destroy the world… that is the truly heretical proposition. A small group of dissident Deleuze scholars have rallied around the slogan that “there is no ‘ontology of Deleuze.’”65 The statement does not imply that ontology is an illusion, but criticizing those who build a Deleuzian system around a coherent ontology of the world is ill considered, as it fails draw a line to the outside – “to incalculable forces, to chance and improvisation, to the future.”66 Blazing such a path may require “the extinction of the term ‘being’ and therefore of ontology,” or in so many words, a destruction of this world.67 Deleuze and Guattari suggest as much when they propose to “overthrow ontology.”68 Summed up, this stance names the “joyful pessimist” Deleuze.69 Too restless to stop there, the Dark Deleuze broadens the coup de force into a fierce pessimism that shatters the cosmos.

The Subject: Un-Becoming (Not Assemblages)

Subjectivity is shameful – “subjects are born quite as much from misery as from triumph.”70 It grows from the seeds of a “composite feeling” made from the compromises with our time: the shame of being alive, the shame of indignity, the shame that it happens to others, the shame that others can do it, and the shame of not being able to prevent it.71 Existence is the result of a disaster, yet it says very little about us; it does not explain, but rather, it must be explained. This is what makes shame “one of philosophy’s most powerful motifs.”72 The subject is always something derivative that “comes into being and vanishes in the fabric of what one says, what one sees,” resembling “specks dancing in the dust of the visible and permutations in an anonymous babble.”73 This does not keep some from clinging to their shame. On this account, Deleuze has nothing but scorn for identity politics – “we have to counter people who think ‘I’m this, I’m that’ … arguments from one’s own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments.”74 Shame is our defense against these people, which must be put to work on them as a weapon – an affect that acts as a solvent to dissolve whatever binds it to an identity.75 There are those who have worked to square identity with Deleuze. These theorizations only avoid the problem of shame to the extent they make identity’s many perforations into points of leverage and transformed differences into a million cutting edges.

For some, the world is made up of assemblages and all assemblages are subjects. In no time, people, hurricanes, and battles all get addressed in the same register (as all subjects should be afforded proper names)!76 While perhaps technically true, such assemblage-thinking misses the point – it turns subjects into the name we use to identify the sum of a body’s capacities.77 It sanctifies a bloodless world by cataloguing the networks that make up its many attributes. This is why assemblage-modeling is a perfect fit in a world where capitalism produces subjectivity “the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars.”78 Further proof of its noxious conservativsm is arch-thinkers’ Manuel DeLanda Bruno Latour’s dismissive rejection of Marxism. Fortunately, Deleuze already warned us by channeling Spinoza on the limits of adequate knowledge, in the often-repeated words that “we do not know what a body is capable of.”79 The phrase should not be read as an appeal to some evasive essence, but simply applying a principle of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, which holds that the conditions of actual experience are not represented through empirical tracing.80 This is crucial, because philosophy is too easily thrown back into the transcendental illusions through the personal identitarian experiences built by self-centered habits of mind.81 The pitfall of run-of-the-mill empiricists is that even in the best-case scenario, when they step out of the perspective of the subject, they still reduce existence to conditions of reproduction or chart something’s ‘degree of freedom.’ For us, then: the subject should be spoken about scornfully as simply the sum of a body’s habits, most of which are marshaled to evade thought.

The undoing of the subject is unbecoming. Deleuze withholds praise for the subject but does not deny it a place, unlike Althusser, who theorizes “subjectivity without a subject.”82 But subjects are only interesting when they cast a “line to the outside” – in short, when they stop being subjects (with a double emphasis on ‘being’ and ‘subjects’).83 This process is how Deleuze describes Foucault’s subjectivisation, which is not a ‘coming back’ to subjectivity to rescue it, but the disintegration of the subject as it evaporates into a field of forces where neither persons nor identities survive.84 This is the secret to becoming, for it has nothing to do with ‘subjects developing into more of themselves.’ Becoming is really a process of un-becoming. In “undoing the givenness of the given,” unbecoming exercises undoing, a process that works to “undo the stabilities of identity, knowledge, location, and being.”85 But in proposing undoing as an alternative to subjectivity, it is necessary to be specific about how to orient the process. While it is easy for an aesthete to indulge in the powers of the outside like a good after-dinner drink, “letting loose, freeing up, and putting into play,” undoing can fulfill the higher purpose of nursing a hatred for this world.86 For it is only when we locate something intolerable outside ourselves that we will “leap beyond shame” and “transform [our] paltry undertakings into a war of resistance and liberation.”87

Existence: Transformation (Not Genesis)

Philosophy is “essentially related to law, institutions, and contracts.”88 Foundations thus hold a special place in philosophy, with philosophers obsessively writing and rewriting the book of genesis. It is Kant, the great thinker of the genetic ‘condition,’ “who finally turns the philosopher into the Judge at the same time that reason becomes a tribunal.”89 Deleuze refuses to disown his own ‘in the beginning,’ but he fuses together genetics and history as a resource most effective when either forgotten or taken for granted. In contrast, the ‘enemy’ Kant does something intolerable by creating a theory of law the reverses the Greeks, where instead of the law depending on the good like a material substrate, the good is derived from law – “the good is that which the law expresses when it expresses itself.”90 Expressing their disapproval, Deleuze and Guattari draw a “portrait” of Kant that depicts him as a vampiric death machine feeding off the world.91 But even as Kant makes the law rational, he opens up a way out through synthesis, though he is quick to betray it.92 Latching onto this furtive insight, Deleuze advances a “mobile war machine” in its place, to be used against “the utterances of a rational, administrative machinery, whose philosophers would be bureaucrats of pure reason.”93 And in making thought into a “battering ram,” it gains the nomadic force of transformation.94 They key is to avoid founding a new order on a new image of world. Fortunately, we can follow nomads who shed their habits so they do not have to leave their habitats.95

Ontology: Materialism (Not Realism)

Our appetite produces the real. But do not mistake the real for a simple projection, it is real through and through. “I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desire.”96 “The real is not impossible,” Deleuze and Guattari say, “on the contrary, within the real everything is possible, everything becomes possible.”97 The only reason that we lack anything, they say, is that our social system deprives us of what we desire.98 On this account, our taste is not a correlationist yearning, as Quentin Meillassoux calls it, which would say that we are reaching for a thing-in-itself always outside the grasp of our perception.99 Yet this should not lead us to embrace the philosophical realism that connectivists apologize for as an attack on anthropocentrism. ‘Things exist independent of perception,’ the realists assert to bring the death of Man. But they forget that “there is no such thing as either man or nature” when there is “simply the production of production itself.” So while there is no man, nature also must vanish. Without treating the real as truly artificial, thought is re-grounded as a theology of this world that plugs all the leaks to the outside.

A superior materialism “constructs a real that is yet to come.”100 It does not follow so-called new materialism, which is really just a new form of animal, but Marxist materialism as the revolutionary subversion of material necessity. Deleuze and Guattari find their superior materialism by exchanging the theater of representation for the factory of production. It is the materialism of Epicurus and the atomism of the swerve as the necessity of contingency.101 This permanent revocation of the fait accompli is at work in politics of destruction, which has too long been mistaken for deliberation, but is instead exemplified by the war machines of popular insurrection whose success is registered by the streets themselves – “Like any specific strike, it is a politics of the accomplished fact. It is the reign of the initiative, of practical complicity, of gesture. As to decision, it accomplishes that in the streets, reminding those who’ve forgotten, that ‘popular’ comes from the Latin populor, ‘to ravage, devastate.’ It is a fullness of expression…and a nullity of deliberation.”102 By showing the non-durability of what is taken as real, so-called reality itself, communist politics is a conspiracy that writes the destruction of the world.

Difference: Exclusive Disjunction (Not Inclusive Disjunction)

‘Too much!’ is a potential rallying cry – too many products, too many choices, too much of this world! Instead, become contrary! Difference, for Deleuze, is the result of a “disjunctive synthesis” that produces a series of “disjointed and divergent” differences.103 Importantly, these differences can be immediately brought together at a distance through resonance, globally coordinated, or contracted into a divergent multitude.104 Following the rule “always perversify,” Deleuze and Guattari propose including disjunctions in mad mixture of “world-historical, political, and racial content” as a strategy for scrambling oppressive codes.105

Global capitalism quickly caught on, and now rules over a virtual Empire of difference that eagerly coordinates a wide arrangement of diverging differences while also producing many more of its own.106 Capital is now indistinguishable from the exemplary subject, the schizo, who is voiced by Nietzsche in his wild claims to be “all the names of history”!107 Power is now diffuse, and the antagonism of Marx’s class war has been drowned in an overwhelming sea of difference. This development calls for a reorientation that entails learning how to become contrary. In the case of Dark Deleuze, the contrarian position is the forced choice of ‘this not that.’ Deleuze is perfectly happy to demand “no possible compromise between Hegel and Nietzsche.”108 Why not experiment with our own exclusive disjunctive synthesis that is limited, restrictive, and constrained? Some take their cue from those in the Global South who “homogenize real differences” to name “the potential unity of an international opposition, the confluence of anticapitalist countries and forces.”109 A better response has been the terrifying screams of ‘no’ that occasionally breaks apart its grand accords.110 Though not demanding the suppression difference, the problem of Empire reignites the necessity of conspiracy, the power of hatred, and the task of destroying worlds.

1) Edwin Krupp, Echoes of the Ancient Skies: The Astronomy of Lost Civilizations (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).

2) Gaffney et al, “Time and a Place: A luni-solar ‚time-reckoner‘ from 8th millennium BC Scotland,” Internet Archaeology (2013), http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue34/gaffney_index.html.

3) Owen Gingrich and Albert van Helden, “From Occhiale to Printed Page: The Making of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 34:116 (2003), 258-262.

4) Johannis Hevelii, Selenographia sive Lunae Descriptio (Gdansk, 1647), 205.

5) Zdeněk Kopal, The Moon (Dordrecht: D Reidel Publishing Company, 1969), 225.

6) Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1993 [1988]), 3.

7) Deleuze, The Fold, 81.

8) Deleuze, The Fold, 81.

9) “Essay Upon Crypts,” The Crypt: or, Receptacle for Things Past, VI (September 1829), 73-77.

10) Wilhelm Lübke, Ecclesiastical Art in Germany During the Middle Ages, trans. IA Wheatley (London: Cassell, Petter, & Galpin, 1871 [1852]), 24-25.

11) Lübke, Ecclesiastical Art, 26.

12) Henry Donald Maurice Spence-Jones, Early Christianity and Paganism, A.D. 64 to the Peace of the Church in the Fourth Century (London, Paris, New York: Cassell and Company, Limited, 1902), 269.

13) Deleuze, The Fold, 28.

14) Deleuze, The Fold, 27-28.

15) Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990 [1969]), 172-176; 177-180.

16) These are the targets outlined by Pierre Klossowski, especially in his last piece on Nietzsche, which he presented at a conference organized by Deleuze, and was followed by an extensive conversation including Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida; “Circulus Vitiosus,” trans. Joseph Kuzma, The Agonist: A Nietzsche Circle Journal, II:I (2009), 31-47. Also see Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 [1969]), 171.

17) Klossowski, Nietzsche, xv; 168.

18) The three most notable commentators who use the esoteric/exoteric distinction are Lawrence Lambert, Stanley Rosen, and Geoff Waite.

19) Klossowski, Nietzsche, 131.

20) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]), n75 on 543-544.

21) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateau, 289.

22) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 289.

23) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 286-287.

24) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 286-287.

25) Orwell, 1984, 181

26) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 354; 427.

27) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus,260.

28) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 222-223.

29) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus,204.

30)Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 278;213

31) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 386.

32) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 231.

33) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 418.

34) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 15.

35) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 230-231.

36) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 387.

37) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 376-377.

38)Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 354.

39) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 356; 394.

40)Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 396.

41) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 422.

42) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus,423.

43) Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1950 [1942]), 87.

44) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 387.

45) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 385.

46) Deleuze, Cinema 2, 169.

47) Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 56.

48) This is played out in the opposition of chronos and aiôn in Deleuze, Logic of Sense. See in particular the twenty-third series.

49) Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 146-147; 165.

50) Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 147.

51) Flaxman, Fabulation of Philosophy, 392.

52)Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 58. For a critique of productivism, see part three of the introduction.

53) Gilles Deleuze, “What is a Creative Act?,” French Theory in America, trans. Alison Gingeras (New York: Routledge, 2001), 102-103.

54) Deleuze, “What is a Creative Act,” 102-103.

55)  Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 99.

56) Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 100.

57) Samuel Butler, “Chapter 11: Some Erewhon Trials,” Erewhon: or, Over the Range (London: AC Fifield, 1910 [1872]), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1906/1906-h/1906-h.htm.

58) Butler, “Chapter 10: Current Opinions,” Erewhon. 

59) Butler, “Chapter 10: Current Opinions,” Erewhon. 

60) Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 100.

61) Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 100.

62) Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xxi. Flaxman, Fabulation, 302-307

63) Deleuze, Foucault, 130.

64) Deleuze, Foucault, 124.

65) François Zourabichvili, Gilles Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event, trans. Kieran Aarons, ed. Gregg Lambert and Daniel W Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012 [1994]), 36. A list would include Gregory Flaxman, Anne Sauvagnargues, Gregg Lambert, and François Zourabichvili.

66) Gregory Flaxman, “Politics and Ontology: A review of Nathan Widder, Political Theory After Deleuze,” Postmodern Culture 24:2 (2014).

67) ourabichvili, Event, 37.

68) A Thousand Plateaus, 25.

69) Zourabichvili, Event, 38.

70) Gilles Deleuze, “On Philosophy,” in conversation with Raymond Bellour and François Ewald, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995 [1988]), 151.

71) This is also Deleuze and Guattari paraphrasing and extending Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Sphere Books, 1989 [1986]), What is Philosophy?, 108; 225n17.

72) Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 108.

73) Gilles Deleuze, “A Portrait of Foucault,” in conversation with Claire Parnet, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995 [1986]), 108. 

74) “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” 11-12.

75) David Halperin and Valerie Taub, “Beyond Gay Pride,” Gay Shame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 25.

76) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 264.

77) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 256-257.

78) Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 245.

79) Deleuze, Nietzsche, 39.

80) Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 95; 221; 321

81) Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 207-208; 73; 119. John Protevi, “Larval Subjects, Autonomous Systems, and E. Coli Chemotaxis,” Deleuze and the Body, ed. Laura Guillaume and Joe Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 31.

82) Alain Badiou, “Althusser: Subjectivity without a Subject,” Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (New York: Verso, 2005 [1998]), 58-67.

83) Gilles Deleuze, “Life as a Work of Art,” conversation with Didier Eribon, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995 [1986]), 99.

84) Gilles Deleuze, “Breaking Things Open, Breaking Words Open,” conversation with Robert Maggiori, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995 [1986]), 93.

85) Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 210n7; 3.

86) Grosz, Becoming Undone, 55.

87) Gilles Deleuze, “The Shame and the Glory: T.E. Lawrence,” Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W Smith (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 [1993]), 125.

88) Gilles Deleuze, “Nomad Thought,” trans. David B Allison, The New Nietzsche (New York: Delta, [1973]), 148. Another translation was also printed in Desert Islands as “Nomadic Thought,” which includes the post-talk discussion.

89) Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 72

90) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 [1975]), 43.

91) Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 56.

92) Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 31-32; 46; 100. For straight-forward take on how Deleuze works Post-Kantianism into his own philosophy, instead of turning to his book on Kant, see instead his What is Grounding?, trans. Arjen Kleinherenbrink (Grand Rapids, MI: &&& Publishing, 2015 [1956-1957]), especially section 4.3.2, “Post-Kantian objections.”

93) Deleuze, “Nomad Thought,” 149.

94) Deleuze, “Nomad Thought,” 149.

95) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 381; 482; Arnold J Toynbee, A Study of History, Volume I: Abridgment of Volumes 1-6, abridged by DC Somervell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 [1946]), 69-70.

96) Anonymous, “May 1968 Graffiti,” Bureau of Public Secrets, trans. Ken Knabb (2006), http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm.

97) Anti-Oedipus, 27.

98) Anti-Oedipus, 27.

99) If this were half a century ago, the reference point would be Freud, “the Adam Smith of philosophy” whom Deleuze and Guattari flip to place him feet down (like Althusser says that Marx did to Hegel) – instead of the real producing desire, it is desire that produces the real.

100) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 142. In this sense, it has little relation to so-called ‘new materialisms.’

101) Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, 174.

102) The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, trans. Robert Hurley (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015 [2014]), 54.

103) Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 174-176; 177-180.

104) Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 172-176.

105) Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 15; 88-89.

106) Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 44-45; 138-156; 190-201; 339-343.

107) Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 86.

108) Deleuze, Nietzsche, 195.

109) Hardt and Negri, Empire, 334.

110) John Holloway, “The Scream,” Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 1.