originally published in “&&& (an online journal run by New Centre of Research & Practice and edited by Ekin Erkan)
Within Deleuze scholarship there has been a relatively recent turn towards Deleuzian negativity. While brought forward most prominently in Andrew Culp’s Dark Deleuze (2016), J. Adams put forward a notion of Deleuzian negativity in 2010 with a focus on the selective process of Deleuze’s “Dionysian yes”—an affirmation which draws upon the powers of the negative to negate in the act of affirmation.[1] Culp’s text implicitly draws upon this sort of selective affirmation insofar as his monograph selects the “dark” conceptualizations of Deleuze against the “joyous” reading that is typically given. One can take up any number of his “dark” concepts as an example: He selects “escape” against “acceleration,” “the outside” against “nomos,” “unfolding” against “rhizome,” etc.[2] In each case, Culp performs a Dionysian selection; a yes that says no to the joyful Deleuze in saying yes to the dark Deleuze.
While continuing the trajectory of a Deleuzian negativity, this essay aims at a supplemental negativity. Rather than suggesting that this form of pessimism is present in Deleuze’s work, I argue that it is necessary for his work with Guattari in order for their theory operate as they envision. Rather than a negativity at the conceptual level (a selection between concepts), this essay works from the position of the genetic, suggesting a genetic pessimism is necessary for the fulfillment of what Deleuze and Guattari call an “absolute positive deterritorialization” to occur; one that doesn’t fall into either a “absolute relative deterritorialization” or a fascistic deterritorialization.
Deleuze explicates the aleatory point in Difference and Repetition (1968/1994) and The Logic of Sense (1969/1990) as a roll of the dice: an opening to an indeterminable, unknown outside filled with chance. This event affirms the roll of dice each time in a single roll, insofar as the aleatory point contains all throws in its singular point. In a certain manner, the aleatory point can be read as a messianic event that structures the field of possibilities. Deleuze relates the aleatory point to both Aion (cyclical and mythical time) and Chronos (linear time), with the altering of possibility occurring in both. The aleatory point, then, works as genesis of both series to implement its conditions as an a-temporal rupture. Through this bifurcation, the aleatory extends over the entire field—even if a particular instance occurs chronologically prior to this point (via Chronos), that instance is nevertheless qualitatively rendered under the conditions determined by the point (through the mythical time of Aion). Beyond the possibility of merely changing the future, the aleatory point qualitatively transforms past, present and future in a single event.
This aleatory point is, thus, central to Deleuze’s conception of Nietzsche’s eternal return. Beyond what he terms the eternal return of the same, and the eternal turn where some things return, Deleuze posits an aleatory third return where only difference (in itself) is said to return—a rejection of the cyclical hypothesis. Putting aside the accuracy of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche,[3] what he posits in Difference and Repetition is an aleatory point capable of rupturing of the dogmatic image of identity, representation, and the same. This is the instantiation of a qualitative rupture that fundamentally alters reality. In the language of Nietzsche, this is a qualitative rupture of the overhuman beyond the form of Man and God: “the advent of a new form that is neither God nor Man and which, it is hoped, will not prove worse than its two previous forms.”[4] In aiming at this aleatory point, Deleuze simultaneously targets the death of Man, instituting a qualitative difference in the eternal return of difference in itself. This difference functions, for Deleuze, as genetic element that determines both Man and God and is, thus, capable of rupturing their dominance. It is from this singular point that the there is an opening to an indeterminable, aleatory future: a roll of the dice in the Aion.
The aleatory point is an integral reference for a consideration of deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is introduced in Anti-Oedipus as a tool of capitalism. “The great mutant flow of capital is pure deterritorialization, but it performs an equivalent reterritorialization when converted into a reflux of means of payment.”[5] What capitalism deterritorializes with the one hand it is constantly reterritorializing with the other. It is on this basis that they conceive of the overcoming of capitalism on capitalist terrain by means of a process of acceleration—the call to accelerate the process of capitalist deterritorialization to the point that capitalism deterritorializes itself.
In A Thousand Plateaus one is informed that there are at least four types of deterritorialization operating along a matrix of two dichotomies: relative-absolute, positive-negative. Thomas Nail has presented something of a taxonomy of these four types, rendering them relative-negative, relative-positive, absolute-negative, absolute-positive.[6] The relative forms of deterritorialization do not necessarily institute a total rupture but disrupt within a particular apparatus to produce change within that apparatus. The relative-negative deterritorialization reverts the disruption to a pre-conceived State assemblage. Here, a popular demand can result in legal reform to provide a solution to the disruption within the State. This can be a tool for capitalist expansion to areas of the State that initially appear to disrupt its dominance. An example of this would be something like Women’s suffrage, insofar as it disrupts the internal mechanisms of dominance, but in a way that keeps those mechanisms in place, albeit with slight alterations.
Related is the notion of a relative-positive deterritorialization. This deterritorialization offers the possibility of an absolute rupture, but ultimately comes under a co-option by the dominant apparatus for whatever reason. It cannot be immediately brought under the current state of affairs, and thus does disrupt, but is ultimately brought under the control of the apparatus. Again, an example can be garnered from social movements, this time through the becoming Pride of the Stonewall uprising. A violent demonstration by the most oppressed members of the LGBTQ+ community presents an opportunity for inventing a new world that ruptures the police state of capitalism. Yet, over time, stonewall is co-opted by the capitalist apparatus in the development of Pride. The rupture of the apparatus is now overdetermined by rainbow capitalism.
Neither of these relative deterritorializations should be taken as ‘failures’ because they weren’t able to produce an absolute deterritorialization. Both should be taken as successful insofar as they were able to fundamentally alter the shape of the State apparatus. Women’s suffrage was able to do this within the apparatus in which it existed. It should only be taken as ‘negative’ in the theoretical sense that it adopted the juristic measures of the apparatus at hand to institute its break from the past. Women’s suffrage instituted positive change within that apparatus for those calling for that change. Even if this was insufficient for complete liberation from that apparatus (or women’s liberation more generally), it nevertheless produced an affirmative change within the State apparatus in terms of women’s liberty.
The Stonewall Uprising is closer to what Deleuze and Guattari term an absolute deterritorialization—and also to what will later be developed as the pessimistic implications of the absolute positive deterritorialization—but it remains relative insofar as it the LGBTQ+ liberation movement was subsequently (over a number of years) co-opted by the apparatus of capital. Deleuze and Guattari speak of ruptures in terms of ‘thresholds,’ where a change in an assemblage occurs when that assemblage passes through a threshold. Water that is placed over a heated surface slowly intensifies until the point when it reaches a threshold where it is no longer water but becomes steam (or inversely, in a freezer, intensifies in the other direction to a threshold where it becomes ice). In terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the aleatory point, it is where the threshold at hand presents a point of no return. Once the threshold is past it is not easy to return to what came before: the conditions have been fully altered once the threshold is past and the dice are rolled.
David Carter’s Stonewall (2004) presents the event as an eruption of the community that had experienced increasing harassment from the various organs of power: most prominently the police, but through policy that had been put in place by other members of the judiciary. The SLA policy, for instance, was used by the police to systematically close all gay bars in New York in the 1960s. In the midst of this movement, the Stonewall Inn reopened as a gay night club. This Mafia run club used a variety of security measures to keep the police at bay, becoming a prominent gay bar in the city. In June of 1969, five other prominent gay bars had been shut down in the span of three weeks, with the police planning a raid of the Stonewall Inn the night of June 27. Just after one in the morning on June 28, the police entered Stonewall, declaring “Police! We’re taking the place!”[7] (Carter 2004). The police forced members out of the club, and prepared to bust the Inn for serving unmarked alcohol. Initially it was members of the trans community who provided the most resistance to the officers, as they refused to be “examined” by the police. As patrons exited the club, they formed a crowd and quickly gained an audience outside. As arrests mounted, the crowd became increasingly disgruntled with police harassment. A police officer shoved a trans woman, who subsequently struck the officer with her purse. This enraged the crowd. Similar displays of harassment intensified anger in the crowd, which began to throw coins at the police. These various intensifications can be understood as culminating in the uprising, which can itself be read as passing through a threshold. The patrons of the inn fought back against the police, forcing the police to barricade themselves inside the Inn. Fed up with police harassment, and seeing the possibility of no future, the Stonewall patrons rolled the dice of the future. In pushing through that threshold, Stonewall constitutes a central event in the LGBTQ+ liberation movement, with the inaugural Pride commemorating the event a year later on June 28, 1970.
While Stonewall can be understood as pushing past a threshold, the reality of Pride as it exists today enables one to see the event as a relative deterritorialization. Pride has become a worldwide phenomenon, that is increasingly commercialized. Today, the police forces who raided Stonewall are an integral part of the celebrations. This culminated in the agonistic disruption of Toronto’s Pride by Black Lives Matter in 2016, with protestors taking issue with the prominence of Toronto police forces in the celebrations.[8] Again, like women’s suffrage, corporatization of Pride should not be taken as a failure of the Stonewall event. The institutionalization of Pride within the capitalist apparatus does not undermine the immense changes within the State apparatus that occurred precisely because of this event. Even if these changes are insufficient for LGBTQ+ liberation from this apparatus, they nevertheless present a historical shift that has made parts of the World more hospitable. Even so, the co-option of Stonewall by the capitalist apparatus’ use of Pride does constitute a relative deterritorialization, insofar as the apparatus retains its place of dominance.
Insofar as both are co-opted into the dominant apparatus (as changes that occur within that apparatus), neither form of relative deterritorialization successfully implements an aleatory rupture. What is necessary for this sort of rupture to occur, then, is an absolute deterritorialization. While the relative deterritorialization can be understood as change, it is change within the apparatus in which it occurs (whether intentionally or through co-option). The absolute deterritorialization attempts to push through a threshold to an aleatory point that fundamentally pushes past the apparatus in which it exists, instituting a new and novel future that goes beyond the current world in an act of transvaluation. In Deleuze-Guattarian jargon, the relative is understood as ‘stratic or intrastratic,’ while the absolute are the destratification of the apparatus as a whole.
The absolute negative deterritorialization can be read through the program of Anti-Oedipus. It seeks out the negative deterritorialization of the State apparatus without a positive project in mind. Nail describes this as a process that undermines all political apparatuses without supporting any apparatus at all. He suggests that this leaves the negative absolute deterritorialization to be easily targeted by the capitalist State apparatus (resulting in something of a relative deterritorialization). But, I would suggest that the negative absolute deterritorialization presents an even more dangerous possibility than merely being co-opted into the capitalist apparatus: one that can be seen in the suicidal production of the fascist State. Drawing upon Paul Virilio’s analysis of fascism as a suicidal rather than a totalitarian State, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the internalization of absolute war as a State destroying itself. Destruction, as the only function of the State, turns inward when there is nothing left to destroy on the outside. This culminates in Hitler’s telegram that the nation should perish if the war is lost. It is described as “A war machine that no longer had anything but war as its object and would rather annihilate its own servants than stop the destruction.”[9] This is the end of the World that occurs through an overdetermination of the negative.
In a sense, this negative form of absolute deterritorialization becomes a relative form of deterritorialization, insofar as the negative becomes the operational apparatus onto which one constantly falls back. In the case of the drug addict who wanted to escape segmentarity through the use of drugs, the destruction of dominance (i.e. the use of the drug) becomes itself a form of dominance: The destructive deterritorialization comes to function in the role of dominance. Drugs allow one to empty oneself through this negativity, but in turn produces nothing but a persistent need of the drug. Drug use is, in this way, suicidal in the same way that fascist state is suicidal: destruction becomes the dominant apparatus on which each operates, to the degree that it will destroy itself in order to continue the process of destruction.
These destructive (or suicidal) tendencies of the absolute negative deterritorialization are the terrifying possibility that leads Deleuze and Guattari to take pause of the project put forward in Anti-Oedipus. In the earlier text there is a no-holds bars, gung-ho leap into the possibilities of the negative that has influenced the trajectory of literature that is loosely held together under the moniker ‘accelerationism.’ Let us accelerate the destructive processes of capitalism to the degree that it destroys itself, they cry. The more cautious tone taken in A Thousand Plateaus signals a shift. A realization, perhaps, that these destructive processes of capitalism hold within them the possibility of a new suicidal apparatus. Remaining striated—to the degree of producing change within a ‘striated’ space (as seen in the two examples of relative deterritorialization)—may be more beneficial then believing that a ‘smooth’ space will suffice to save us.
It is on this basis that Deleuze and Guattari introduce what they term an absolute positive deterritorialization. Nail describes this a process that affirms a new apparatus while negating the current one. There is a positivity immanent to the destruction of the old in simultaneously selecting the new. This is the point that Adams raises regarding Nietzsche and Philosophy as a ‘Dionysian yes’ that selects while simultaneously negating: a positivity that is infused with the negative, using the negative as a tool. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it proceeds from the relative, insofar as it is not transcendent. Here, one can envision that possibility of the Stonewall uprising moving in a different direction, one that produced a new apparatus of liberation without State surveillance or capitalist co-option. Yet it is difficult to envision what sort of alternative apparatus could have occurred insofar as we exist within the apparatus that was the source of co-option.
The most promising dissemination of absolute positive deterritorialization appears in the plateau on Faciality with its discussion of ‘probe-heads.’ Probe-heads are introduced as machines of experimentation. They are tests that are disseminated into the world to test whether an attempt at deterritorialization will be effective or not. Probe-heads are necessitated by the dangers of absolute negative deterritorialization insofar as they protect against fully committing to a revolutionary form that may simply lead to a suicidal state. These experiments provide an account of the fear presented in the more mature work. The dangers of the suicidal state lead Deleuze and Guattari to fear the dangers of the smooth space. The aleatory point—an opening to chance—is terrifying. By rolling the dice, one opens to any possibility, including that of the suicidal state. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari wish to take a more cautious approach, with attempts to provide a plan that will be selected alongside the negation. Probe heads are useful here, to determine whether a given action will produce something that follows this plan, or whether they will introduce a more negative capacity.
Yet, there is a fundamental contradiction in the development of an absolute positive deterritorialization. Insofar as the deterritorialization is absolute, it requires totalization. This is the affirmation of an aleatory point to an indeterminable future. On the other hand, insofar as it is positive, it puts forward a positive image of what is to follow that absolute destruction. This leads to a contradiction. Insofar as the deterritorialization is positive it must aim at something in particular. Yet, insofar as this aim is pursued within the apparatus that is to be overcome, it is overdetermined by the values of the apparatus in which it exists (either in affirming or negating, it repeats the values of the apparatus in which it is produced). If one aims at the production of a new assemblage, that aim is already trapped in the logic or valuation of the contemporary apparatus. The value cannot be provided from a place internal to the apparatus but must come from a position of externality. To posit something beyond the contemporary world, one must make a value judgement on what is to be posited, but in making a value judgement one is already working within the boundaries of the apparatus one wishes to deterritorialize. One can use a selective affirmation to select aspects of the contemporary assemblage (e.g. legal rights should be extended to everyone) but that selection affirms a relative deterritorialization insofar as it adopts the given framework (it extends the legal framework). Rather than a rupture, this deterritorialization retains the contemporary apparatus, producing a change within that apparatus. Even if it resulted in a complete inversion, the inversion retains the logic of that which it inverts: As Nietzsche is prone to suggest, Atheism doesn’t negate the logic of Christianity, but inverts it.
This is where the role of pessimism is necessary for the operation of the aleatory future. A certain pessimism or negativity is necessary to produce the aleatory point or absolute deterritorialization that Deleuze and Guattari discuss. In a review of Culp’s Dark Deleuze, Timothy Snediker suggests that Culp’s most glaring flaw is that he omits any reference to Afro-pessimism (an area of scholarship that he notes Culp is familiar with). Culp draws upon the language of the ‘death of this world’ without reference to the scholarship on black pessimism that preceded it. As a result, Snediker suggests that, in its negativity, Dark Deleuze remains “white—all too white.”[10] It is from this strain of thought that one can understand both the pessimism necessary for an aleatory rupture to occur, and simultaneously, understand why such a rupture is foreclosed to Deleuze and Guattari.
An opening to this reading is available in the text. Both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus cite George Jackson as a figure of deterritorialization. Jackson in Soledad Brother (1994) writes “I may run, but all the time that I am, I’ll be looking for a stick.”[11] This is understood as a means of taking flight from one’s capture and imprisonment. Jackson was an African American imprisoned at 18 for allegedly stealing $70. Rather than face trial, he accepted a plea deal for a minimum sentence that was altered, at sentencing, to “from one year to life.” While imprisoned, he was radicalized in the Black Marxist tradition. In 1970 he was killed by a prison guard, who claimed that Jackson attempted to escape with a gun. Circumstantial evidence has led many to believe that this was a cover for a politically motivated murder.
In an early letter, Jackson writes that “Capture, imprisonment, is the closest to being dead that one is likely to experience in this life.”[12] Capture and imprisonment, in this context, suggest an experience of social death that afro-pessimism equates with blackness. Frank Wilderson III, working within this tradition, suggests, following the work of Orlando Patterson, that Blackness cannot be separated from social death. He suggests “Blackness cannot be dis-imbricated from slaveness,” acknowledging the controversy of such a claim that “Blackness and slaveness cannot be dis-imbricated, cannot be pulled apart.”[13] Drawing from this position, the social death Jackson experienced as imprisoned is an extension of the social death inherent to Blackness: the black experience in the World is one of perpetual social death.
It is from this pessimistic position that George Jackson is capable of producing a line of flight or escape that culminates in the aleatory point in which the dice are rolled. This is presented as an escape that is simultaneously an attack, rendered (through a translation into French and subsequently back into English): “I may take flight, but while I am fleeing, I will be looking for a weapon!”[14] This is to reach an aleatory point where the only possible thing to do is escape. It brings to light the notion put forward in Wilderson III’s work that the goal, insofar as there is a goal, is to destroy the world.[15]
If George Jackson is capable of opening the aleatory future, it is only because of his position in the World. It is his position of social death that produces the capability of destroying the world. Deleuze and Guattari are cautious of the absolute deterritorialization of the aleatory point because it holds with it their loss of privilege within French society. One is safe within the net of stratification; a safety that is lost in jumping through the aleatory point and into the indeterminable. A smooth space may not suffice to save us, but it is from a position of privilege that one can claim that the dominating stratification is not so bad. It is only the one who has nothing to lose that is capable of destroying the world while simultaneously escaping, because nothing can be worse than what already is. This is perhaps why white scholars (myself included) fail to understand the possibility the end of the world: It is a possibility outside the scope of white possibility. Insofar as one is white, one always has that whiteness to cling to. Deleuze and Guattari are incapable of reaching this aleatory threshold: their comfortable position in society precludes it.
Following the position of George Jackson, in light of afro-pessimism, there is the possibility of moving beyond the dichotomy of absolute positive and absolute negative deterritorialization as it is put forward in Deleuze, to imagine a pessimism that is genetic of an absolute deterritorialization in the first place. In Nietzsche contra Heidegger (1977), François Laruelle distinguishes the affirmative from the positive. This is a distinction that I believe is helpful. The affirmative is not in a dichotomous position to the negative. It is the negative and the positive which exist in a dichotomy. The affirmative is the determination of both positive and negative: it is the genesis or singular point that produces the dichotomy. Using Laruelle’s distinction of the affirmation from the positive, it is possible to suggest that there is a necessary pessimism for the genesis of an absolute deterritorialization to take place. This occurs not at the point of selection (a selection between the dichotomy), but at the point of genesis.
Jackson’s affirmation (rather than a positivity) is produced by what I would term a (non)affirmation. The (non), here, is not a negation of affirmation, but a problematization of affirmation that brings it into conversation with the pessimistic position that is needed for its operation to commence. Here, positivity and negativity operate in a zone of indistinction where one has nothing to posit, insofar as one is already socially dead. Nevertheless, one can posit a negativity: the end of the world. Yet, this is not a negativity for the sake of negativity (as one would see in an absolute negative deterritorialization), but the affirmation of the unknown that is known only negatively as “not this.” Without anything to affirm in this world, this zone of indistinction offers the possibility of affirming “not this” in a form of pessimism: the end of the world is necessarily better than anything that can be clung to in this world of social death. Such a position is not available to the majoritarian: those with the position to speak do not have the capacity to rupture. In rendering this pessimism an affirmation, I am drawing upon Jared Sexton’s suggestion that “Afro-pessimism is ‘not but nothing other than’ black optimism.”[16] This is an indistinction of pessimism and affirmation that are inclusively disjunct: both separated and together. The Stonewall uprising, while a relative deterritorialization, points at the pessimism that is necessary for a positive deterritorialization to fully occur. Those involved with the uprising were fed up. No future was available to them within the contemporary apparatus, insofar as their position as Other was intrinsically Other to the State apparatus. From this position of subordination, the uprising, as an attempt to roll the aleatory dice, was possible. Only from a pessimism of the world could a rupture of that world occur, even if that rupture was relative.
Insofar as this (non)affirmation functions as determination of both positivity and negativity, it exists anterior to the selective capacity of a dark Deleuze. One does not select between the joyful and the dark Deleuze, for that selection retains the prominence of positivity in the Dionysian yes. Rather, (non)affirmation holds a pessimism at its core that is immanent to this selective process. In Black Skins, White Masks, Frantz Fanon famously quotes Aimé Césaire who states, “The only thing in the world worth starting: the end of the world, for heaven’s sake.”[17] In a reading of Fanon, David Marriott has suggested that Fanon’s text contains an “attempt to affirm a messianic moment, as one that remains radically indeterminable, and so prior to any notion of the messiah, the tabula rasa, for example, that cannot be mapped on any teleological schema.”[18] This reading of Fanon holds a (non)affirmational position of the end of this world to an indeterminable aleatory future. Here, the pessimism of afro-pessimism (one that is grounded in Fanon) serves as a supplement to Deleuze and Guattari that both ruptures their position, while making it tenable. It is not positive nor negative in the traditional sense: it neither dreams up a future apparatus, nor takes negativity as its sole object. Rather, is affirms the beyond because, in this pessimism, the beyond is the only thing possible to affirm.
Works Cited
Adams, J. “The Speeds of Ambiguity: An Interview with Paul Virilio.” Boundary2 37, no. 1 (2010): 167–78. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2009-040.
Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004.
Culp, Andrew. Dark Deleuze. Forerunners: Ideas First. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
—————-. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994.
—————-. Foucault. Translated by Seán Hand. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
—————-. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Fanon, Franz. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008.
Jackson, George. Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1970.
Kirchick, James. “Op-Ed: Politics on parade: How Black Lives Matter halted a gay pride parade in Toronto.” Los Angeles Times July 6, 2016. Retrieved from: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-kirchick-gay-pride-black-lives-matter-20160705-snap-story.html
Marriott, David. “With Fanon?” Textual Practice 25, no. 1 (February 2011): 63-64.
Nail, Thomas. “What Is an Assemblage.” SubStance 46, no. 1 (March 7, 2016): 21–37.
Sexton, Jared. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.” InTensions Journal, no. 5 (Fall/Winter, 2011): 1-47.
Snediker, Timothy. “Review – A Darker, Grittier Deleuze.” Religious Theory https://jcrt.org/religioustheory/2016/08/04/review-a-darker-grittier-deleuze/
Wilderson III, Frank B.. “Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation.” In Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction, 15–31. Minneapolis: Racked & dispatched, 2017.
—————-. “We’re trying to destroy the world” Anti-Blackness and Police Violence after Ferguson. Interview by Jared Ball, Todd Steven Burroughs, and Hate. Transcription of Audo Recording, 2014. imixwhatilike.org/2014/10/01/frankwildersonandantiblackness-2/.
[1] J. Adams, “The Speeds of Ambiguity: An Interview with Paul Virilio,” Boundary2 37, no. 1 (2010): 167–78, https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2009-040, 168.
[2] See Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2016), 21.
[3] See Paolo D’Iorio, “The Eternal Return: Genesis and Interpretation,” trans. Frank Chouraqui, The Agonist IV, no. 1 (2011 2000): 41–96, for a quite damning critique of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche.
[4] Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 132.
[5] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 374.
[6] Thomas Nail, “What Is an Assemblage,” SubStance 46, no. 1 (March 7, 2016): 21–37.
[7] David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004).
[8] This was reported by numerous sources, for example, see James Kirchick, “Op-Ed: Politics on parade: How Black Lives Matter halted a gay pride parade in Toronto” in Los Angeles Times July 6, 2016. Retrieved from: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-kirchick-gay-pride-black-lives-matter-20160705-snap-story.html
[9] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 231.
[10] Timothy Snediker, “Review – A Darker, Grittier Deleuze,” Religious Theory https://jcrt.org/religioustheory/2016/08/04/review-a-darker-grittier-deleuze/
[11] George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1994), 328.
[12] Ibid., 14.
[13] Frank Wilderson III, “Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation” (2015), in Afro-pessimism: an introduction (Minneapolis: Racked & Dispatched, 2017. Retrieved from https://rackedanddispatched.noblogs.org/files/2017/01/Afro-Pessimism2.pdf
[14] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 277.
[15] Frank B. Wilderson III, “We are trying to destroy the world”: Anti-Blackness & Police Violence After Ferguson,” https://illwilleditions.noblogs.org/files/2015/09/Wilderson-We-Are-Trying-to-Destroy-the-World-READ.pdf
[16] Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” inTensions Journal, 5, 2011: 37. https://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jaredsextonarticle.pdf
[17] Franz Fanon, Black Skins White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 76.
[18] David Marriott, “Wither Fanon?,” Textual Practice 25, 1 (February 2011): 63-64
taken from here