The heart of the plot
Nietzsche’s phrase “accelerate the
process” is essential in shaping the concept
of a «headless revolution» that Deleuze,
Guattari and the revolutionary Nietzschean
community were elaborating in the years
1968 - 1975. To fully understand the
meaning of The Strong of the Future we
need a hypertextual reading of the content
because as Deleuze said “a text is nothing
but a cog in a larger extra-textual practice”
(DI, 259) to prolong and make it fruitful.
An alliance with Klossowskì’s exegesis
of the fragment The Strong of the Future
and his masterful book Nietzsche and the
Vicious Circle is necessary. Klossowski defines The Strong of the future as the
fragment at the «heart of the plot»,
Deleuze and Guattari understanding
the powerful message of anti-capitalist
conspiracy, transfer it into the «heart» of
their accelerationist passage known as
The Civilized Capitalist Machine, essential
core of the entire book Anti-Œdipus.
Theirs is an indirect and updated reply to
Nietzsche’s sovereign anti-gregarious
cast theory and a direct and affirmative
reply to Klossowski’s revolutionary query
of an anti-establishment and anti-market
conspiracy. Foucault will share the same
impressive newness as expressed in his
Introduction to the American edition of
Anti-Œdipus: “Anti-Œdipus shows first of
all how much ground has been covered.
But it does much more than that. It wastes
no time in discrediting the old idols, even
though it does have a great deal of fun with
Freud. Most important, it motivates us to go
further.” (INFL, 5) and about Klossowski he
defines his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle
as the best book of philosophy ever read.
What is then so precious and at the same
time so subversive in Klossowski’s book
about Nietzsche that makes the two French
philosophers completely side with him?
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Going further in the movement
of decoding and deterritorialization
Let us better analyse the proposal of going further. To go against Samir Amin’s
left wing nationalism means, for Deleuze
and Guattari, to go further in the movement
of decoding and deterritorialization of
the market, where the movement does
not solely apply to the market but to the
revolutionary realm too. The expression
to go further can be read as a prolongation
not only of the capital itself - as it may
seem under an «economical» reading of
the passage - but as a movement to take
the process as far as possible, overturning
the initial meaning. Deleuze reports in his
Nietzsche (1965) that the same expression
had already been used by Nietzsche in a
passage from The Antichrist: “Mankind
has ventured to call pity a virtue (--in every
superior moral system it appears as a
weakness--); going still further, it has been
called the virtue, the source and foundation
of all other virtues--but let us always bear
in mind that this was from the standpoint
of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and
upon whose shield the denial of life was
inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this:
that by means of pity life is denied, and
made worthy of denial--pity is the technic
of nihilism” (AC, 11). The phrase «to go [still]
further» is repeated twice in the passage
The Civilized Capitalist Machine. If we follow
Nietzsche’s interpretation of the nomadic
deterritorialization and the lawless
destruction - the decoding - we understand
that the «process» to accelerate is quite
the opposite of the one proper to the
market. In Nietzsche’s thought the market
movement implies a nihilist praxis, a double
negative movement, a «saying “no” to life»,
in Nietzschean words. The first movement
represses any impulse and destroys any
difference, any self-organized network,
being its only goal the constant flow of
goods to create and distribute richness
through the the remuneration of the
capital. The second movement, immanent
to the first one, produces a process of
levelling and compliance as necessary
condition to the survival of humanity at
such level of artificiality. In Nietzsche’s
fragment entitled The Strong of the Future
the same process is highlighted and the
two positive movements of liberation
and differentiation - Nietzsche’s «saying
yes to life» - represent, in Deleuze and
Guattari’s words, a way to “free[ing] flows,
going further and further into contrivance:
a schizophrenic is someone who's been
decoded, deterritorialized” especially when
considering the process as a theory and
a praxis of fluxes with high schizophrenic
content. “We make a distinction between
schizophrenia as a process and the way
schizophrenics are produced as clinical
cases that need hospitalizing: it's almost the
same thing in reverse. The schizophrenics
in hospitals are people who've tried to do
something and failed, cracked up. We're not
saying revolutionaries are schizophrenics.
We're saying there's a schizoid process, of
decoding and deterritorializing, which only
revolutionary activity can stop turning
into the production of schizophrenia.” (N,
23) At this point their question is: what is
schizoanalysis if not a militant libidino-
economic, libidino-political analysis? (N, 19)
Moreover, assuming that the subconscious
produces desire through a schizo-process, which goal does schizoanalysis
have? Deleuze stunning definition follows:
“Schizoanalysis has one single aim- to
get revolutionary, artistic, and analytic
machines working as parts, cogs, of one
another. Again, if you take delire, we see
it as having two poles, a fascist paranoid
pole and a schizo-revolutionary pole. That's
what we're interested in: revolutionary
schisis as opposed to the despotic signifier.”
(N, 24) Our task now is to identify whether
Nietzsche’s strong of the future exponents,
and anticapitalist parasitic bohemians,
introduced by the accelerationist fragment
in the Anti-Œdipus, may correspond
to Deleuze and Guattari's anti-oedipal
desiring machines and a-fascist nomadic
singularities.
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Codebreakers
“Codes” are, according to Deleuze, laws,
contracts, institutions. According to the
French philosopher, Marx and Freud,
due to their «school of thought», remain
enchained to the old [renewed] codes: a
new State, a new family, a new relation of
production. Nietzsche is, on the contrary,
completely outside this set of codes:
he is the «codebreaker» of philosophy,
the anti-philosopher who disowns laws,
contracts and institutions. (NT,143) He gave
thought a dimension of «war-machine», a
«nomadic unit» (NT,149). Such Deleuzian
interpretation of Nietzsche’ philosophy
marks a total break with the previous
political and philosophical thought and
takes the fracture into the revolutionary
decoding scenario. In The Civilized Capitalist
Machine three decoding actions take place:
we may call the first one Schizophrenia
of the Capital and it is minutely analyzed
in the book Anti-Œdipus, the second one
is the above mentioned action of the
codebreaker, a useless position in terms
of insurrection as it does not provide any
pragmatic or epistemological indication
for a potential revolution. It’s none of
Nietzsche’s intention to create movements
nor to establish parties and new states,
because he serves both as the agent and
object of decodification (NT, 146). That is
the reason why Nietzsche is a powerful ally
to the third decoding action expressed by
Deleuze and Guattari in the Anti-Œdipus
and by the revolutionary movement born on
the barricades of May 1968 - which refused
the old ways to act and think, looking for
innovative theoretical paths as well as
efficient subversive practice. Klossowski
and Foucault are two other relevant
allies: this close-knit community will be
able to answer which revolutionary path
and accelerationist process The Civilized
Capitalist Machine passage refers to.
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