Gilles Deleuze Quotes on Politics
Gilles Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus (1972, with Félix Guattari) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) give late twentieth-century French philosophy one of its most influential reorientations of post-1968 radical political thought around a positive ontology of difference and desire. The central commitments — that desire is productive rather than lacking, that the social field is constituted by the assemblages of desiring-machines that capitalism has progressively decoded, and that the distinctively political response is the creative production of new connections through nomadic rather than statist forms of organization — articulate a Spinozist-Nietzschean alternative to both the dominant psychoanalytic and dialectical-Marxist frameworks of the period. The framework, drawing on Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, and the broader continental tradition Deleuze had reconstructed in his earlier monographs, shaped contemporary continental political theory through the work of Hardt, Negri, and the broader engagement with affect, assemblage, and the politics of becoming.
Quotes
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Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:
“We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.”
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Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:
“There is no ideology and never has been.”
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“A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.”
from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche (“Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics”), 1988–1989. -
“from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche (“Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics”), 1988–1989.”
A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments. -
“Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible , and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistence which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States?”
from Dialogues with Claire Parnet, p. 147 [emphasis in original]. -
“A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and counter-current, of back-wash with other flows — the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other — two flows in what relationship?”
from I have Nothing to Admit