E.3.6. The Great Politics and the revolutionary - Pt. XX - Excerpt from the essay «Money, Revolution and Acceleration in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

The Great Politics and the revolutionary

Another point we have to make is to identify the revolutionary type of the Anti-Œdipus. The physiognomy has been already outlined in two different forms in Anti-Œdipus. Guattari in an interview for the magazine «Neue Zeitung» in 1972 with regards to the identification among analyst, patient and activist says: “First of all no one has ever said that the analyst is the same as the schizophrenic man but that the analyst, as well as the activist or the writer or anybody else, is more or less engaged in a schizoid process and there is always a difference between the schizo process and the process of a schizophrenic man interned in an insane-asylum, as his schizo process is blocked or goes uselessly around in circles. We are not saying that the revolutionary group need to identify with the madmen going uselessly round in circles, but that they need to push their actions into a schizo- way process.” According to Guattari the schizophrenic man does not coincide with the madman but becomes schizo when he clashes with an individual or collective «desiring process» which holds at its centre a «libidinal energy» able to drive him from an assessed subject to a new open code subject, passing through a metamorphosis and a process of both de-subjectivation and neo-subjectivation. In this transition we can identify parts of former subjectivity - the doctor, the worker, the white man, the human being - and some of the new one - the homosexual, the trans-gender, the foolish man, the analyst. It is therefore not possible to locate one single typical revolutionary man, but multiple individual and/or group connections in schizo- revolutionary processes. What revolution really requires, according to Guattari, is an experimental revolutionary process and not revolutionary subjects tailored by ideology. “Repeated mistakes and insignificant results are more necessary than a stupid passivity and claw back mechanisms.”
To deeply understand the concept of the revolutionary man as intended by Deleuze we need to look at Klossowski again and in particular to his speech at the Collége de Philosophie in Paris during a conference entitled Nietzsche, Polytheism and Parody in 1957. Klossowski was considered one of the central figures in French Nietzsche’s studies, especially after his masterful translation of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science in 1954. In this speech Klossowski underlines the figure of the «actor as interpreter of a celestial revelation» able to contrast the catechontic institutions with artistic antinomic «accelerated» creations: “But art has a very wide meaning, and in Nietzsche, this category includes institutions as much as works of free creation. For example - and

here we can see immediately what is at issue- how does Nietzsche consider the Church? For him, the Church is constituted grosso modo by a cast of profound impostors: the priests. The Church is a masterpiece of spiritual domination, and it required that impossible plebian monk, Luther, to dream of ruining that masterpiece, the last edifice of Roman civilization among us. The admiration Nietzsche always had for the Church and the papacy rests precisely upon the idea that truth is an error, and that art, as willed error, is higher than truth. This is why Zarathustra confesses his affinity with the priest, and why, in the Fourth Part, during that extraordinary gathering of the different kinds of higher men in Zarathustra's cave, the Pope -the Last Pope- is one of the prophet's guests of honor. This betrays, I think, Nietzsche's temptation to foresee a ruling class of great meta- psychologists who would take charge of the destinies of future humanity, since they would know perfectly both the different aspirations and the different resources capable of satisfying them. (NPP; 106, 107) What he is saying is that Nietzsche at the end of the 80’s of the XIX century had already understood that the Great Politics needed an entertainment sphere where institutions, dominating castes, gregarious masses could express a certain will to power. Deleuze admires Klossowski and his Nietzsche (as he will write in a letter sent to him in December 1969) and will retrieve the concept of acceleration of processes of a community of irregulars who confound all codes, thus entwining Klossowski- Nietzsche’s conspirative theory with the political riots of the 70’s in France. Their alliance is clearly detected in the talks at the famous meeting of Cerisy-la-Salle in July 1972 where Klossowski defines the fragment entitled The Strong of the Future - 9 [153] - as the «heart of conspiracy». After he has finished reading the fragment he poses a question wondering what Nietzschean comportment we would adopt in relation to the current upheavals - namely youth poverty, revolutionary riots, clashes between the adverse forces - "no longer from the point of view of power but from the perspective of the vicious circle” to conclude that he would support the comportment "of the vicious circle, seen as a manifestation of the nihilist judgment passed upon all acting." (CV, 38)
Klossowski, choosing the comportment of the nihilist judgment, reaffirms Nietzsche’s parodistic behaviour on the economic planetary planning scenario and again he reminds an attentive audience - Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida, Calasso and Nancy - the thought of eternal return: “As I have insisted, this thought, as the theme of Nietzsche’s highest contemplation, becomes the instrument of conspiracy. It is from this stage that the god of the vicious circle can truly be considered the blossoming of a delusion. The question that I now pose is whether delusory or deranged behaviour, in this sense, when confronted with reality, can become in any way efficacious, or if, more generally,

any deranged comportment might be said to constitute an efficient resistance in the face of a determined adverse force.”(CV, 38) According to Klossowski, Nietzsche moves from the position of the biological contemplative observer of the law of the Eternal Return to the one of the strong political watcher, thus building - employing Deleuze and Guattari terminology - a real war machine so to be able to transform the Eternal Return into a conspiracy which should subvert the current domination of the levelled industrialized man. But why should such conspiracy be delirious? For at least two reasons: the first one because the double parody of the current social model and of its simulacrum subvert all codes, as a consequence of the nihilist judgment passed upon all acting. The second reason is linked to Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of the post-68 revolutionary riots: “Delirium is the general matrix of every unconscious social investment. Every unconscious investment mobilizes a delirious interplay of disinvestments, of counterinvestments, of overinvestments”. (AO, 277) Similarly Klossowski’s delirium - the radical departing from the established path - coincides with the delirious polarity in Anti-Œdipus: if every social investment is delirious, the same will be for a no longer secret conspiracy plotted by idle urban dissidents whose aim justifies and realizes itself through the same means of manifestation. The question at this stage is about fulfillment: can the schizo-delirious approach be incisive both in the revolutionary riots of the ‘70s and on a any other future moment to come, as the law of the Vicious Circle seem to suggest? In Klossowski words the question is: does the schizo delirious process simply represent the current version of the Vicious Circle or are we in front of a general peremptory coherent identity between Process, Circle and Return? 

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