OUT NOW ! Obsolete Capitalism :: Deleuze e l'algoritmo della rivoluzione (Rizosfera / SF 004 / 2016)

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OUT NOW! Obsolete Capitalism: The Strong of the Future. Nietzsche's accelerationist fragment in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (Rizosfera, 2016, SF 001.eng)

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" (...) As widely known the reference to Nietzsche in the famous «accelerationist passage» in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is decisive and closes the paragraph entitled "The Civilized Capitalist Machine" (Chapter III, Par. 9, pp. 222-239). Until today the various commentators of such passage have left aside or overshadowed the specific reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s «Große Prozeß», others have simply quoted the «accelerate the process» issue referenced by Deleuze and Guattari, mentioning Nietzsche’s book "The Will of Power" but no one has ever referred to the precise fragment or its context and the potential themes it implies. (...) Our research has identified the precise Nietzschean fragment quoted by Deleuze and Guattari as shown above. It is a fragment positioned in two different Friedrich Nietzsche’s posthumous editions. (...) "

OUT NOW! - MONETA, RIVOLUZIONE E FILOSOFIA DELL'AVVENIRE (RIZOSFERA/OBSOLETE CAPITALISM FREE PRESS, 2016)

E' finalmente disponibile online l'antologia e.book curata dal collettivo Obsolete Capitalism intitolata «Moneta, rivoluzione e filosofia dell'avvenire. Nietzsche e la politica accelerazionista in Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari, Klossowski» (Edizioni Rizosfera/Obsolete Capitalism Free Press, 2016).

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Gli autori sono: Algorithmic Committee, Sara Baranzoni, Edmund Berger, Lapo Berti, Paolo Davoli, Ettore Lancellotti, Network Ensemble, Obsolete Capitalism, Obsolete Capitalism Sound System, Letizia Rustichelli, Francesco Tacchini, Paolo Vignola. 

Moneta, rivoluzione e filosofia dell’avvenire

a cura di Obsolete Capitalism

Siamo proiettati a velocità fotonica nella comunicazione istantanea e nel controllo continuo mentre le forme di dominio rapido appaiono inarrestabili. Il museo delle ideologie si riempie di concetti in via di esaurimento quali capitalismo, neoliberismo, marxismo, keynesismo. Ora, con più esattezza, il sistema modula i vari flussi che innervano il pianeta: Moneta, Ricerca, Controllo, Informazione, Circuito sono i vecchi nomi che attraverso una nuova velocità producono potere. Maggiore è l’immanenza del Mercato, maggiore è la probabilità che al conflitto si sostituisca l’interruzione, il virus, la fuga di notizie, l’invisibilità, il fuori-circuito, la biforcazione. Uno squarcio nella «zona grigia» dell’egemonia.

Gli autori del libro Moneta, rivoluzione e filosofia dell’avvenire indagano alcune aree poco battute di politica accelerazionista attraverso linee teoriche contagiate dalle filosofie più visionarie: Nietzsche, Klossowski, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault. Più che analizzare la grande trasformazione culturale in atto, la presente antologia evidenzia i pericoli in cui incorre il pensiero del futuro quando ancora mantiene pratiche, schemi e linguaggi di un’epoca industriale e post-industriale che mostra in tutti i suoi aspetti una crisi perpetua. Siamo tutti coinvolti nel duro intreccio di liberazioni insperate e nuovi asservimenti che ci prospetta la presentificazione del futuro da parte della tecnologia a linguaggio numerico, ma - come afferma Deleuze - «non è il caso né di avere paura, né di sperare, bisogna cercare nuove armi». Sperimentare è dunque il primo impegno politico e filosofico per un futuro differente.

4.6. Compliant supports and formations of sovereignty - Pt. XXVII - Excerpt from the essay «Money, Revolution and Acceleration in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

Compliant supports and formations of sovereignty

The settlement and the coalition of instinctual forces in an endless turmoil aimed at opposing the besieging social and economic body provide us with the grid of the battle that happens inside and outside bodies. The “grim organisations” of social syntheses that surround bodies and impulsive forces are nothing but Nietzsche Herrschaftsgebilde, the formations of sovereignty which we can trace in Nietzsche’s posthumous fragments of 1887 and 1888. Inside and outside the body, the battle between impulsive forces infuriates. Sensuality, and its following stage, sexuality, impede any perspective, even an economic one, thus they must be repressed. The first wave of repression is used by formations of sovereignty to structure a compliant whole, or, in Klossowski’s terms, an “organic and psychic unity”. Although it is formed inside the shell of the whole as “completed essence”, the compliant support is always and anyway object of the battle of impulses and instincts in the attempt to free themselves from formations of sovereignty and from the forces that constitute them. The expression outbursts of these struggles and counter-struggles, attacks and oppositions, manifest themselves “through a hierarchy of values translated into a hierarchy of needs” (LC, 4). According to Klossowski “the hierarchy of needs is the economic form of repression that the existing institutions impose by and through the agent’s consciousness on the imponderable forces of his psychic life” (LC, 4). Klossowski’s condemnation of traditions – and his gregarious “translations” – which dominate society is rather incisive. He faces three contemporary interpretations which fight the liberation goals of the Rhizosphere and attack the generalized economy in which the libidinal values participate through the new hierarchy of impulses, which philosophers like Deleuze want to initiate: the laissez-faire attitude that traverses the hierarchy of needs dictates a different hierarchy of values thanks to the exclusion of the sexual need from primary needs, nullifying its emotional value; Marxism, which enthrones industrial economy and commercialized values as the primary structure, relegating the sexual sphere to the super-structure; psychoanalysis, which accepts to segregate the libidinal economy to the family triangle, separating the social aspect from the object of study, and suffering the same division operated by Marxism – society will be the object of study of scientific socialism, while the subconscious and the family social atom will be of interest to psychoanalysis. In Klossowski, the authors that belong to the triad of dominance and subjection are Raymond Aron, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. The purpose of the Rhizosphere will be to liberate the individual and collective revolutionary potential by overturning and overcoming on this point Nietzsche, who, on the contrary, in The Strong of the Future wished for a discrete community of irregular and exchangeable seditious. Deleuze and Guattari in the Anti-Œdipus intervene on the topic of the opposition to the dominant economic rules through secret impulsive production, and they do so by linking their argument to this exact crucial passage of Klossowski’s Living Currency. The two Parisian philosophers point out that “[t]he two kinds of fantasy, or rather the two regimes, are therefore distinguished according to whether the social production of "goods" imposes its rule on desire through the intermediary of an ego whose fictional unity is guaranteed by the goods themselves, or whether the desiring-production of affects imposes its rule on institutions whose elements are no longer anything but drives” (AE, 63). We will have, in the first regime, the subjugated, the gregarious-supports and exchangeability, while in the second regime the “desiring machines”, nomads and the schizo of the future who crave for commercial inconvertibility. In the history of utopian socialism, a French philosopher, among the least current, worked on topics like community, affections, economy and social harmony: Charles Fourier. Both Klossowski – in The Living Currency – and Deleuze and Guattari – in the Anti-Œdipus – recall his work:

“If we must still speak of Utopia in this sense, a la Fourier, it is most assuredly not as an ideal model, but as revolutionary action and passion. In his recent works Klossowski indicates to us the only means of bypassing the sterile parallelism where we flounder between Freud and Marx: by discovering how social production and relations of production are an institution of desire, and how affects or drives form part of the infrastructure itself. For they are part of it, the y are present the re in every way while creating within the economic forms their own repression, as well as the means for breaking this repression” (AE, 63).

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4.3. The xeno-dollar and money as an instrument of hegemonic power - Pt. XXIV - Excerpt from the essay «Money, Revolution and Acceleration in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

The xeno-dollar and money
as an instrument of hegemonic power

At the beginning of the 70’s, the topic of money became a primary concern in the rhizosphere. Thanks to differential- money, namely the main instrument used by liberal democratic systems to assault, restructure and regularise national and international economic crises, the French Nietzschean revolutionary community wanted to build a new analytic grid that could overcome the ideological morass which still clutches a significant portion of the traditional Left as well as of the new antagonistic Left. Klossowski produced, as his farewell to publishing and writing, a brief text, dense and enigmatic, titled La Monnaie vivante (Living Currency, 1970), which presented his peers with more than one critical interrogative on the industrial and commercial world, and on money as an instrument and simulacrum of the vital agent soothing human impulses. In a handwritten letter sent in autumn 1970, Foucault greeted Klossowski’s volume as “the greatest book of our times”. That was the same period in which, at the beginning of 1971, Deleuze and Guattari attended Foucault’s lectures at the Collège, having just finished the in itinere draft of the Anti- Œdipe. The role of the “imperial” currency – the US dollar as hegemonic currency – within the Western economic system, as well as the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rates regime, were at the centre of the tense international political debate. In December 1969 inflation in the United States reached 6%. Nixon, as soon as he was elected president, was struck by the prediction made by his own staff that the dollar had to be rescued in maximum two years. The world was jammed by xeno-dollars and the US reserves could not compensate anymore the increase in the global amount of dollars with the corresponding amount of gold as contemplated in the agreement. In a few months, in 1971, violence in the Vietnam war reached its peak, and so did military expenses and the related budget deficit. The United States had entered a

recession in 1970 and unemployment was at 6% and growing. The issues presented by domestic economic circumstances were unprecedented: inflation was high in a phase of recession, as opposed to the usual combination of recession and deflation, as it had previously happened during the Great Depression in 1929. The situation was out of hand. There was no empirically tested academic theory which corresponded to such an economic situation; there was no plan. Any technical decision could equally mean the salvation of global commercial leadership or its collapse, precisely at a time when the international Communist movement was challenging Anglo-Saxon industrial capitalism the most. The sudden breakdown of the Bretton Woods system could cause a rapid downfall of the hegemony of American power, the winner of World War II. Power can switch sign. Nixon’s staff was divided between monetarists, namely the rising star Friedman and the Chicago School, and orthodox mainstream economists, such as Burns and the Federal Reserve. Friedman and those favouring the free floating of exchange rates unpegged from the gold standard prevailed. Timing was crucial. In May 1971 West Germany left the Bretton Woods system, instituted in 1944 on the ashes of the Axis Powers, letting the German Mark free to float. The situation deteriorated and Nixon’s economic staff had to hurry: it was time to take actions because the element of surprise and the promptness of intervention were crucial. In August 1971, Nixon suddenly announced to the nation and to the whole world that the US dollar was not convertible in gold anymore, leaving the American currency free to float too. After about 3,000 years from its invention, money lost its tie to an objective and concrete value. It was the first time in Western history, without considering the periods of war and brief experiments, always ended in failure: money completed its final transformation, to which it was probably destined ever since its invention, becoming a pure simulacrum of value in all its forms, from the round- shaped metal piece to banknotes. The question that economists asked themselves are several: Will the “orphan money” be able to stand only based on its face value? Will the hegemonic currency, i.e. the dollar, be able to walk on an “empty space”? Has money grown enough to demonstrate its maturity? The monetary de-aurification is the temporary situation in which we are still today: a mixture of sovereign, post- sovereign, xeno- and headless currencies that float freely without any fixed exchange rate, victims of speculations and market imbalances. However, the monetary coordinates within which Foucault develops his analysis are not simply related to the contingency of events, but rather to the study of forces and their effects on the domain of sovereign formations associated to the research and analyses conducted within the Rhizosphere. The concept of money considered by Foucault in the lectures that he gave between 10 February

and 10 March 1971 is, surprisingly for most people but not for the Rhizomatics, the Ancient Greek currency employed between the seventh and fifth century B.C.; that is the historical, social, economic and institutional period when money, conceived as Greek measurement, eventually becomes the core of an “immense social and polymorphous practice of assessment, quantification, establishing equivalences, and the search for appropriate proportions and distributions” (LWK, 134). According to Foucault, this analysis should approach the hypothesis according to which money constitutes a political instrument used to create and preserve new balances during profound social transformations: thus, money does not preserve relations of sovereignty but relations of dominance. It is fascinating how Foucault introduces the concept of money towards the end of the lecture he gave on 17 February 1971, as redistribution of relations between the discourse of justice and the discourse of knowledge, and of the relations between the just, measurement, order and truth: “The institution of money, which is not just a measure of exchange, but which was established mainly as an instrument of distribution, division, and social correction” (LWK, 129). 

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4.2. The insurrection of subjugated knowledges - Pt. XXIII - Excerpt from the essay «Money, Revolution and Acceleration in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

The insurrection of subjugated knowledges

In the lecture he gave on 7 January 1976, Foucault focused his attention on returns of knowledge that descend from what he calls “insurrection of subjugated knowledges”.

With this expression he refers to two specific factors: 1) the ‘knowledges’ that derive from historical contents, which he deems buried, and thus adequate to be subjected to a rediscovery attributable, to a ‘sumptuous’ research linked, in a way, to “typical secret societies of the West” since ancient times and emerged at the time of early Christianity: the “great warm and tender Freemasonry of useless erudition” – here, with his peculiar and subtle humour, Foucault introduces his own analysis and the one of his rhizospheric fellows just like modern variations of the struggle and insurrection of Alexandrine gnosis related to the idea of salvation through knowledge. The French rhizosphere is, according to the malicious Foucaultian antichristian- Nitzschean-accelerationist interpretation, a sort of secular and revolutionary neo-gnosis which hands its wisdom and research over from one generation to the next, following the Hellenic-Alexandrine tradition.
2) those ‘knowledges’ that are assumed to lay on the opposite side of “dusty and useless” erudition, that is, those disqualified and inadequate knowledges – here, once again, presented in an extraordinary way. In this category of “naïve knowledges located low down on the hierarchy” beneath the required academic and scientific levels, Foucault includes popular knowledge (“le savoir des gens”) – which must not be confused with “general common sense” – like those of criminals, crazy people, ill persons, psychiatric patients, detainees. The direct knowledge of these subjects, merged with the specific knowledges of specialised workers, like nurses, doctors and soldiers, will not result in a “general common-sense knowledge”, but in a “a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity and which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it” (PK, 82)
Foucault does not miss the paradox of enclosing in the same rhizomatic framework of subjugated knowledges both “the academia and the street”: nonetheless he finds in this well-marked disparity the essential leverage of the critique promoted with those discontinuous discourses. According to Foucault this is “historical knowledge of struggles”: “In the specialised areas of erudition as in the disqualified, popular knowledge there lay the memory of hostile encounters which even up to this day have been confined to the margins of knowledge. What emerges out of this is something one might call a genealogy, or rather a multiplicity of genealogical re- searches, a painstaking rediscovery of struggles together with the rude memory of their conflicts. And these genealogies, that are the combined product of an erudite knowledge and a popular knowledge, were not possible and could not even have been attempted except on one condition, namely that the tyranny of globalising discourses with their hierarchy and all their privileges of a theoretical avant-garde was eliminated” (PK, 83) . In this passage, Foucault attempts an early outline of his overall plan, where he

generously includes and aligns the French components of the rhizosphere and, above all, the authors of the Anti-Œdipe, although the detailed description of the “returns of knowledge” fits perfectly his research style. That style which he adopted at the beginning of his lectures at the Collège de France (1970) and carried on until the end of that period, 1975-1976, the year before the crucial 1977 when he entered a period of crisis and suspended his course. It was Foucault’s annus horribilis, during which he received attacks from multiple fronts – such as Baudrillard’s Forget Foucault – and started a profound reformulation of his thought, his analysis and his political approach, which in turn would end his friendship with Deleuze and destroy the underground empathy within the French Nietzschean revolutionary community. What seems extraordinary is the way in which Foucault linked his research to the fight and critique of his rhizospheric fellows, attributing the essential leverage of the critique and of the “success” of those years precisely to the discontinuity and de-centralisation of practices and discourse advocated by Klossowski, Deleuze and Guattari, Blanchot and Lyotard, among others. In 1976, Foucault is able to advance this critique: “Let us give the term genealogy to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today” (PK, 83) . During the same lecture, Foucault links the genealogy to the struggle against the alleged “scientificity” of the new sciences, namely Marxism and Psychoanalysis, guilty of bearing “power ambitions”, not even concealed, and thus of pursuing those “effects of power” that usually institutions assign to enthroned sciences. According to Foucault, “By comparison, then, and in contrast to the various projects which aim to inscribe knowledges in the hierarchical order of power associated with science, a genealogy should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical knowledges from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse. It is based on a reactivation of local knowledges – of minor knowledges, as Deleuze might call them – in opposition to the scientific hierarchisation of knowledges and the effects intrinsic to their power: this, then, is the project of these disordered and fragmentary genealogies. If we were to characterise it in two terms, then 'archaeology' would be the appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursivities, and 'genealogy' would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play” (PK, 85)
In Foucault’s works, within the genealogy/ archive relation mentioned above, special attention is reserved to money, ever since the first lectures of his inaugural course in 1970-71, directly after the re-emergence in Klossowski and Deleuze of Nietzschean

topics such as will to power, formations of sovereignty, impulse and value. Indeed, an early taste of the strong and innovative critical capacity on this front – which includes aspirations, will to power, universal rhizomatic economy, physical and noologic subconscious – comes from the debut of Deleuze and Guattari as authors, under the sign of Klossowski. La synthèse disjunctive is the title of their first essay dedicated to Klossowski and published in the 43rd issue of the journal L’Arc, precisely in the third term of 1970. The text is presented already as the abstract of a book titled Capitalism and schizophrenia. The writing style is already the imaginary, transverse, aggressive, humoristic and “genealogic” one of the Anti-Œdipe. La synthèse disjunctive is an incisive prelude to an announced explosion: Foucault immediately grasps the collateral effects that it would have on the style and content of his own research. 

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Marx, moneta e capitale nel dibattito della sinistra marxista italiana e francese ai tempi dell'Anti-Edipo. Intervista con Lapo Berti (tratto da «Moneta, rivoluzione e filosofia dell'avvenire», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press, 2016)

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4.1. To subvert the braking effect of totality - Pt. XXII - Excerpt from the essay «Money, Revolution and Acceleration in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

chapteR iv

The infinite money: desire, value and simulacrum

Truths are coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, On truth and lies in a non-moral sense
We need units in order to count, but it may not be assumed that such units [of measure] exist.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, fr. 14[79]

To subvert the braking effect of totality

If we examine the main works of Deleuze, Foucault and Klossowski published between 1968 and 1972, we can observe that the courses of these texts objectively bear enigmatic and common features that could allow us to regard them as ‘fragmentary research projects’; these are investigations that could hardly be conceived and envisaged if we evaluate them from a ‘revolutionary’ perspective with the aim of identifying on which common battleground and common agenda these three intellectuals act. They swing with remarkable aplomb from far-sighted and vibrant essays with an academic flavour, such as Difference and Repetition or The Archaeology of Knowledge, to hermeneutic works on Nietzsche – which include both anthologies of fragments like Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, and of first editions of his Œuvres Complètes published by Gallimard – continuing with literary criticism or tout-court literature works such as The Logic of Sense or The Women of Rome, and finishing with cryptic economical essays, La Monnaie Vivante, or aggressively political pamphlets, The Anti-Œdipus; not to mention, then, their academic lectures ranging from Freud to Marx, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, from Greek currency to the Medieval Inquisition or history of sexuality, without any interruption. Foucault himself, with a certain irony, in his first lecture on 7 January 1976 part of a course titled Society Must Be Defended, wants to terminate a line of research that he himself defines incoherent and discontinuous. Foucault feels the need to end and systematise, in some way, the several lines of research, insight and analysis that he had been carrying on since he started his lectures at the Collège de France (1970). From a certain point of view, Foucault does not mention only his research, but alludes also to a common path of the French revolutionary rhizosphere when he lists among the relevant, or at least interesting, elements of the previous fifteen years “I am thinking of the efficacy of a book such as L 'Anti-Œdipe, which really has no other source of reference than its own prodigious theoretical inventiveness: a book, or rather a thing, an event, which has managed, even at the most mundane level of psychoanalytic practice, to introduce a note of shrillness into that murmured exchange that has for so long continued uninterrupted between couch and armchair” (PK, 80) . This is an important indication to his students since

the philosophical work of Deleuze has always been a crucial point of reference for Foucault, because it had openly established itself as an “ally” of his theories since the early sixties, or at least from the beginning of the “Nietzsche Renaissance” and, thus, from the publication of Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and the Royaumont conference (1964). What is most surprising is the importance that Foucault confers to the anti-œdipic text, because his analysis takes into account “the last ten, fifteen, twenty years at most”, hence the timeframe that goes, approximately, from 1956 and 1976: not only the Anti-Œdipus is the only book to be referenced, but its position in Foucault’s argument surprises us the most. The volume, indeed, is referred to in the context of “this amazing efficacy of discontinuous,particularandlocalcriticism” and its efficacy is compared to that of entire movements such as anti-psychiatry, existential analysis, and attacks upon the legal and penal system. Foucault concludes: “I would say, then, that what has emerged in the course of the last ten or fifteen years is a sense of the increasing vulnerability to criticism of things, institutions, practices, discourses. A certain fragility has been discovered in the very bedrock of existence- even, and perhaps above all, in those aspects of it that are most familiar, most solid and most intimately related to our bodies and to our everyday behaviour. But together with this sense of instability and this amazing efficacy of discontinuous, particular and local criticism, one in fact also discovers something that perhaps was not initially foreseen, something one might describe as precisely the inhibiting effect of global, totalitarian theories. It is not that these global theories have not provided nor continue to provide in a fairly consistent fashion useful tools for local research: Marxism and psychoanalysis are proofs of this. [...] In each case, the attempt to think in terms of a totality has in fact proved a hindrance to research” (PK, 80-81) By following Foucault’s outline, we can identify two opposite fronts: on the one hand, the «accelerationist» front, irregular, peculiar and local; on the other hand, a front more “restraining”, “braking”, continuous, global, total, and openly totalitarian. Marxism and psychoanalysis can still be useful instruments at a local level, but, according to Foucault, when confronted with facts, they have had a “braking” thus negative function for the insurrectionary front. L 'Anti-Œdipe, in Foucault’s opinion, fits perfectly in the domain of those critical entities capable of causing landslides and provided with some peculiar characteristics that could be summarised as follows: 1) autonomous – instead of centralized – technical production 2) wisdom returns to scale which descend from the insurrection of subjugated wisdoms.

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E.3.7. Second portrait of the revolutionary: the Deleuzian rhizomatic nomad - Pt. XXI - Excerpt from the essay «Money, Revolution and Acceleration in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

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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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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