Second portrait of the revolutionary:
the Deleuzian rhizomatic nomad
Following the words of the book Anti-Œdipus we portray a quite canonical image of the schizo-delirious revolutionary man: “... a schizo-revolutionary type or pole that follows the lines of escape of desire; breaches the wall and causes flows to move; assembles its machines and its groups-in-fusion in the enclaves or at the periphery—proceeding in an inverse fashion from that of the other pole: I am not your kind, I belong eternally to the inferior race, I am a beast, a black.” (AO, 277) But in other writings Deleuze’s position is less reassuring: “Militant revolutionaries cannot be concerned with delinquency, deviance, and madness — not as educators or reformers,but as those who can read the face of their proper difference only in such mirrors.” (DI, 201). The subversive is then a prismatic simulacrum who collects various points of view: the criminal’s or the diverse and fool man’s and is forced to elaborate the different aspects in which he mirrors his diversity: himself, his marginality, the phantasmal world he belongs to and the
rest of the social body, reaching a deformed
singularity which self-affirms differently
from what the false counter-identity of
a presumed antagonistic vocation would
do, once compared to «respectable
people». Differently from Nietzsche the
rhizomatic is not nihilist, he appreciates
the revolution as an accelerated event of
transvaluation of all values, and provided
that he accepts the register of Nietzsche’s
corrosive parody, he will revolve it in
positive looking for «new ways». This new
rhizomatic politics is very different from
the more traditional one of the communist
and socialist movements in the XIX and XX
century. To evaluate such difference let us
read the conspiracy notion as interpreted
by Klossowski and Deleuze: “There is a
topic which Klossowski addressed, I believe,
at the same time that he was addressing
the loss of identity, namely, the topic of
singularity, by which he means the “non-
identical”. A conspiracy, if one understands
Klossowski’s thinking, is a community of
singularities. The question, then, configured
in term of the political (understood either in
its contemporary or ancient sense) is this:
how are we to conceive of a community of
singularities?” (CV, 46). For the first time
in history one could here locate a new way
of being revolutionary, a strategy of ways,
of non-identities: an overturning of the
basic concepts of revolution as expression
of organization of a social group, in favour
of a heuristic insurrectional. A revolution
which does not recognize useful any of the
previous revolutionary models, and whose
final aim is not gaining power. As Deleuze
said, the so-called society is a community
of regularities or more precisely, a certain
selective process which retains select
singularities and regularises them. In
order to maintain the proper functioning
of society it selects for regularisation, to
use the language of psychoanalysis, what
might be called paranoiac singularities. But
a conspiracy - this would be a community of
singularities of another type, which would
not be regularised, but which would enter into
new connections, and in this sense, would
be revolutionary.” (CV 46, 47). Here lies the
real “heart” of the fragment The Strong of
the Future and of Deleuze’s Nomad Thought.
With the eyes of the book Anti-Œdipus the
great process of regularization is the same
great process of the Western oikonomia
which allows the rational functioning of a
highly numbered community of market-
subjugated singularities: “... the human
species... articulates itself, through
production, in order to maintain itself at
the level of humanity, [and] can only do so
through the absurdity of a total reduction
of its moral resources achieved through
work itself.” (CV,37) What remains open is
the way singularities can be linked among
them, we mean «connections» and not
«institutions». The selective criterion of
the Eternal Return - if the perspective is the
extreme bifurcation of discrete productions
of non-identities from macro-repetitions of
homogenous identities - is possible only on
the basis of a double selection of human
types: the essential - seen as «mass-value»
in relation to the mercantile society, and
the surplus - seen as «waste-value», an
impersonal and singularized-plusvalue
apt to form societies and groups (CV, 47).
According to Deleuze the «surplus men»
“are motionless, and the nomadic adventure
begins when they seek to stay in the same
place by escaping the codes.”(DI, 259) The
nomad is defined by Deleuze as a mobile
centre of resistance, an enchanted traveller
with inconceivable horizons, a motionless
traveller on collective bodies. The last big
problem to face now is the following: both
gregarious and unassimilated ones live
and fight in a demoralizing unjust macro-
scenario. How is it possible to weave the
net of light self-organized bounds in the
existing massive-unifying social structure?
Will such a net be able to support the
various connections among diversities in
future times?
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