François Zourabichvili’s “Deleuze and the Possible: on

Involuntarism in Politics”

Kieran Aarons, Caitlyn Doyle

Theory & Event, Volume 20, Number 1, January 2017, pp. 152-171 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/646850

No institutional affiliation (20 Nov 2018 22:23 GMT)

ARTICLE
François Zourabichvili’s “Deleuze and the Possible:
on Involuntarism in Politics”

Kieran Aarons and Caitlyn Doyle, Translators

Translators’ Preface

F
irst published in 1998, the following article presents French phi-
losopher François Zourabichvili’s (1965–2006) most sustained
reflection on the Deleuzian concept of political rupture. In it, he
argues that it is not the realization but rather the exhaustion of the pos-
sible that hatches new modes of living. The living ground of politics
lies not in the program or the party but in the visionary and involun-
tary mutation of our experience by encounters that render this world
insufferable. In an epoch marked by the obsolescence of the Left’s
imagination of revolution, Zourabichvili calls for an ethics of situated
rupture, wherein the destitution of the possible enables the elaboration
of experimental collectives oriented around convergent perceptions of
the intolerable.

*
What follows aims to take up the political stakes of Deleuze’s thought,
in a manner that is at once provisional and restricted. It is not imme-
diately evident which leftism can be said to characterize Deleuze. Re-
gardless of the variant one considers, the left is generally defined by its
voluntarism. Deleuze, on the other hand, developed the least volunta-
rist philosophy imaginable: he celebrates the ‘ill will’ of the Idiot in the
Russian style, and the ‘nothingness of the will’ of the Eccentric in the
American style.1 He has always insisted on the fundamentally invol-
untary character of all true thought, of all becoming. Nothing could be
more foreign to Deleuze, therefore, than the enterprise of transforming
the world according to a plan, or in view of an end. At the same time,
he never ceased to celebrate, to remain on the lookout for, and if need
be, to accompany what he calls ‘revolutionary-becomings.’
The space of ordinary political perception is completely occupied
by the dualism of conservation / transformation, to such an extent that
it is difficult to even conceive of a political attitude that aims neither
to conserve nor to transform, nor—as with reformism—to transform
what is conserved or to conserve what is transformed, which is to say,

Theory & Event Vol. 20, No. 1, 152–171 © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press
Aarons and Doyle | “Deleuze and the Possible: on Involuntarism in Politics”  153

to adapt. As soon as we begin to harbor doubts about certain political

organizations and their intentions, we will immediately be asked what
we ‘propose.’ Deleuze always refrained from proposing anything,
though this serene abstention implied no lacuna or deficiency in his
eyes. In politics as in art (or in philosophy), he regarded a certain kind
of disappointment as being a subjective condition conducive of some-
thing positive [effectif] (a ‘becoming,’ a ‘process’).2
Anyone can see that the Left no longer believes in programs. That
it nonetheless continues to be identified with the realization of pro-
grams would appear to leave it no other choice than to repudiate itself,
or else to attempt to believe in what it no longer believes: renunciation
or denial. In this sense, the voluntarism at issue here no longer even
concerns action per se, but the very belief in action. Meanwhile, leftist
philosophers receive vague reproaches for not producing an ideal in
which the Left can once again believe, as if a certain weakness or ex-
cessive complexity led them to an inadequate or failed survey of the
possible.
The last great text Deleuze wrote, published in 1992, is called ‘The
Exhausted.’ It is not a political essay, in that it is devoted to Beckett.
Yet it appears less than three years after the fall of the Berlin wall, at
a time when self-satisfied discourses proliferated about the death of
utopias and the illusion of any alternative to the market economy; and
its theme is the exhaustion of the possible.
“There is no more possibility: a relentless Spinozism.”3 With
Deleuze, it would be highly unlikely for the invocation of Spinoza to
be a sign of affliction, although this does not exclude the possibility
of its being sarcastic. At first glance, therefore, we might reassure our-
selves that there is nothing political at stake here. Except that Deleuze
attributes to the personae of the exhausted the famous formula of Her-
man Melville’s Bartleby, to which he had only recently dedicated a text
with expressly political content.4 Still, one does not rejoice in the ex-
tinction of the possible without a certain touch of perversity.
Let us therefore attempt to attune ourselves to the political har-
monics of ‘The Exhausted,’ even if the text addresses itself to an al-
together different matter. To the Left, who despair of the possible,
Deleuze seems to say: the exhaustion of the possible is a good thing;
and above all do not believe that the exhausted is simply tired, and
that the possible persists beneath the present impotency to realize it.
“Being exhausted is much more than being tired.”5 And if this makes
him suddenly appear a bit too close to the Right, in whose nature it is
to rejoice in the absence of the possible, to them he specifies: to have
exhausted the possible is not at all what you think it is. While the essay
begins with the duality of the exhausted and the tired, it quickly shifts,
and the statement ‘exhausting the possible’ is itself split depending on
154  Theory & Event

whether the possible is understood as an alternative or a potentiality.

The multiplication of doubles: perhaps it is in this that its perversity
consists, considering the humorous effects that ensue (surprise or dis-
appointment). The Left must in any event challenge the statement; but
the Right cannot take it up either, except on the condition of misunder-
standing it (or understanding it in its own manner: ‘the possible never
existed anyway…’). If Deleuze generally arouses the irritation of the
Left, given his attacks on the possible, free speech, the rights of man,
etc., on the Right he elicits rather a suspicion of perversity (at least the
latter grasp something, if only negatively).
Two apparently opposed discourses coexist in Deleuze: exhaust-
ing the possible / creating the possible. Too obvious to be real, the con-
tradictions of great philosophers are generally quite interesting, in that
they signal a moment of extreme tension in their thought, a difficult
affirmation rather than a difficulty to affirm.

1. The Creation of the Possible and Possibilities of Life

Deleuze inverts the habitual relation between the possible and the
event. The possible is what can take place, actually or logically. ‘We
mustn’t give up, the situation is full of possibilities, we haven’t tried
everything’: we wager on an actual alternative. Following Bergson,
Deleuze says to the contrary: you do not have the possible in advance;
you do not have it until you have created it.6 What is possible is to
create the possible. Here we pass into a different regime of possibility,
which no longer has anything to do with the availability of a realiz-
able project, or with the vulgar acceptation of the word ‘utopia’ (the
image of a new situation to be brutally substituted for the actual state
of affairs, the hope that we can depart from the imagination in order
to reconquer the real: an operation upon the real, rather than of the
real itself). The possible arises from the event and not the reverse; the
political event par excellence –revolution—is not the realization of a
possibility, but an opening of the possible.

In historical phenomena such as the revolution of 1789, the Com-

mune, the revolution of 1917, there is always one part of the event
that is irreducible to any social determinism, or to causal chains.
Historians are not very fond of this aspect: they restore causality
after the fact. Yet the event itself is a splitting off from, a breaking
with causality; it is a bifurcation, a deviation with respect to laws,
an unstable condition which opens up a new field of the possible.7

In its positivity, a revolution is no more the causal consequence or

mechanism of a given situation than it is the realization of a project or
of a plan (even if reference to plans is a feature of action therein). By
Aarons and Doyle | “Deleuze and the Possible: on Involuntarism in Politics”  155

‘opening a new field of the possible,’ are we to understand that some-

thing previously unrealizable becomes so? that everything is possible
or realizable in an insurrectionary situation? that the ordinary limits of
the possible are in fact only the result of an inhibition or a submission,
rather than real constraints? The voluntarist idea according to which
the secret of power [pouvoir] lies in the will cannot be attributed to
Deleuze, even if two dense passages in Anti-Oedipus—which we will
clarify shortly—appear at first blush to move in this direction, in spite
of clearly distancing themselves from the possible understood as an
instance of realization:

The real is not impossible; on the contrary, within the real every-
thing is possible, everything becomes possible. Desire does not
express a molar lack within the subject; rather, the molar organiza-
tion deprives desire of its objective being. Revolutionaries, artists,
and seers are content to be objective, merely objective: they know
that desire clasps life in its powerfully productive embrace, and
reproduces it in a way that is all the more intense because it has
so few needs.8

The actualization of a revolutionary potentiality is explained less

by the preconscious state of causality in which it is nonetheless
included, than by the efficacy of a libidinal break at a precise mo-
ment, a schiz whose sole cause is desire—which is to say the rup-
ture with causality that forces a rewriting of history on a level with
the real, and produces this strangely polyvocal moment when ev-
erything is possible.9

What is a ‘new field of the possible’? Is it the horizon of everything

that can be imagined, conceived of, planned, and hoped for in a given
epoch? According to this view, a revolution already has the character
of a subjective mutation, and would itself render void the very proj-
ects that inaugurated it, since they would still belong to the previous
field of possibility. Or is it a redistribution of roles and functions, an
upheaval of the sum of all possible social positions? This would be
a mutation of another order, affecting capitalism itself. For example,
Deleuze describes the passage from ‘disciplinary society’ to a ‘soci-
ety of control’: here we witness not the opening of a new field of the
possible, but the installation of a new regime of domination. Such an
upheaval affects rather the historical conditions according to which a
political event could emerge.
A ‘new field of the possible’ must therefore mean something else:
the word possible no longer designates the series of real and imagined
alternatives (either … or … or …), the ensemble of exclusive disjunc-
tions characterizing a certain epoch and society. It now concerns the
dynamic emergence of the new. This is the Bergsonian inspiration of
156  Theory & Event

Deleuze’s political thought. Realizing a project brings nothing new into

the world, since there is no conceptual difference between the possible
as a project and its realization, there is only the leap into existence. And
to those who would transform reality according to a previously con-
ceived image, the moment of transformation itself ends up counting
for nothing. There is a difference in status between the possible that
one realizes and the possible one creates. The event does not open a
new field of the realizable, and the ‘field of the possible’ is not to be
confused with the boundaries of the realizable in a given society (even
if it marks them out and redistributes them).
Is the opening of the possible therefore a goal in itself, the problem
being less to construct the future than to sustain its prospects? Are we
urged to live on hope? Taking up Kierkegaard’s desperate cry, Deleuze
summarizes May ‘68 as a phenomenon of, “give me the possible, or
else I will suffocate!” Hope remains dependent on a logic of realiza-
tion, and Deleuze never wagered much on any such thing.10 He saw in
May ‘68 an eruption of the real and not of dreams: an emergence of the
possible, but certainly not in the form of an image of what might be.
What then is the possible, the ‘possible as such’? Deleuze tells us:
what is to be created are new possibilities of life.11 A possibility of life
is not an ensemble of realizable acts, nor the choice of this or that pro-
fession or recreation, this or that taste or idiosyncratic interest. “The
ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered” issues from
the alternatives that define a society, or the sum of concrete modes of
existence that are possible in a given society.12 But, more profoundly, a
possibility of life expresses a mode of existence: it is the ‘expressed’ of
a concrete assemblage of life. For Deleuze the expressed is never a sig-
nification or a collection of significations. It is an evaluation: not sim-
ply the evaluation of the possibilities of life, once we have already ap-
prehended them as such; but the possibility of life itself as evaluation,
a singular manner of evaluating or apportioning the good and the bad,
the distribution of affects. A possibility of life is always a difference.13
The invention of new possibilities of life therefore presupposes a
new way of being affected. Deleuze insists on the Spinozist concept
of a “capacity to affect and to be affected,” which he aligns with the
Nietzschean ‘will to power’ understood as a pathos, the instrument of
a typology of immanent modes of existence, of concrete ways of living
and thinking. In both cases, the possible is tied to capacity [puissance].
It might appear paradoxical to invoke Spinoza with regard to the pos-
sible; moreover, the etymological kinship is insufficient to identify
power with the possible, not to mention the plural and differentiable
character of the concept of power. But let us content ourselves for the
moment with defining the concept of the possibility of life as a differ-
ential distribution of affects (alluring / repugnant, etc.).
Aarons and Doyle | “Deleuze and the Possible: on Involuntarism in Politics”  157

These affective mutations induce a new distribution of good and

bad, of the delectable and the intolerable. This may transpire in one
and “the same” person (who, from that point on, is at a loss to identify
the past she has lived as hers), at other times in a collective. The “Many
Politics” chapter of Dialogues begins by evocating such a mutation,
drawing on a famous short story by Fitzgerald. Beyond the ‘cuts’ [cou-
pures] by which one becomes famous, ruined, old, etc., there are trans-
formations of another type, ‘cracks’:

The crack happens on this new line—secret, imperceptible, mark-

ing a threshold of lowered resistance, or the rise of a threshold of
exigency: you can no longer stand what you put up with before,
even yesterday; the distribution of desires has changed in us, our
relationships of speed and slowness have been modified, a new
type of anxiety comes upon us, but also a new serenity…14

It is the same with political events: a new distribution of affects, a new

delimitation of the intolerable. Such a subjective mutation cannot sim-
ply call itself into being, and it is not a question of wishing for it or
not: the for and against intervene only at the stage of the response or
reaction, depending on whether we choose to assume the consequenc-
es of the event, or else to pretend that nothing has happened. This, for
Deleuze, would be the living ground of the Right-Left division, which
is never embodied in existing political organizations.

2. Encounters and Potentialities

Politics is therefore first of all an affair of perception:

May ‘68 is more of the order of a pure event, free of all normal, or
normative causalities. Its history is a ‘series of amplified instabili-
ties and fluctuations.’ There were a lot of agitations, gesticulations,
slogans, idiocies, illusions in ‘68, but this is not what counts. What
counts is what amounted to a visionary phenomenon, as if a so-
ciety suddenly saw what was intolerable in it and also saw the
possibility for something else. It is a collective phenomenon in the
form of: ‘Give me the possible, or else I’ll suffocate.’15

Here the seer or the visionary is not the one who can see the distant
future; on the contrary, he neither sees, nor foresees any future at all.
The visionary seizes the intolerable in a situation; he has ‘visions,’ by
which should be understood perceptions in their becoming, or ‘per-
cepts,’ which envelop an affective mutation collapsing the ordinary
conditions of perception. The opening of a new field of the possible is
linked to these new conditions of perception: the expressible of a situ-
ation suddenly irrupts.
158  Theory & Event

What is the condition of such a subjective mutation? If the percept

distinguishes itself from a simple perception, this is because it envel-
ops an encounter, a relation with the outside. There is an event or vi-
sion when we encounter our own conditions of existence, or those of
others; what we call ‘struggles,’ at least in their ascendant and living
phase, are therefore less the expression of a coming-to-consciousness
than the hatching of a new sensibility. In 68, the perceptive and affec-
tive mutation consisted of “new relations of the body, time, sexuality,
place, culture, work…” Granted that each of our subjectivities is con-
stituted by a synthesis of just such relations, we see here how they can
change, or else how new relations can emerge from the same themes,
the same fields. And given that for Deleuze relations are always ex-
ternal, these new relations comprise so many encounters. We brutally
encounter what lies daily before our eyes.16
The visionary seizes what is unactualizable in the situation, the el-
ement that exceeds the actuality of the situation: the ‘possible as such.’
The seer sees the possible, and in doing so accedes to a new possibility
of life that demands fulfillment. However, seeing the possible does not
consist of elaborating a plan: we seize the actual situation in its poten-
tiality, as a ‘field of the possible.’ We seize in the actual situation the
potentialities that it actualizes, but which can be actualized otherwise
since they differ by nature from their actualization: again inspired by
Bergson, the dualism of free will and determinism here dissolves in fa-
vor of the excluded middle, the new. The positivity of the virtual (real)
takes over from the realization of the (imaginary) possible.
Potentialities are pure capacities [puissances], pure dynamisms
seized independently of all spatiotemporal coordinates (language en-
velops them in the infinitive form of the verb, singularities of sense
and of the event).17 It is a question of the different forces or aptitudes
at work in a situation, which now must evolve: aptitudes of men, of
the milieu, technological aptitudes, etc. Under a concrete mode of
existence we perceive the possibilities of life that it offers to us as so
many affective possibilities: these possibilities of life are the way in
which potentialities are distributed and condensed in a given epoch
and social field. A situation, therefore, expresses an open ensemble of
potentialities, divided, distributed, joined, condensed as they are (a re-
visable ensemble of possibilities of life). When we seize the situation
as pure possibility or in its potentiality, we evaluate these possibilities
of life (or these condensations), and they are consequently redistrib-
uted differently. It is then up to us to invent the concrete connections
or material, spatiotemporal assemblage that will actualize these new
possibilities of life, instead of abandoning them to suffocate in the old
assemblage.
To suddenly see these potentialities as such, and not actualized
in a determined manner: this is the event, which sweeps its mutating
Aarons and Doyle | “Deleuze and the Possible: on Involuntarism in Politics”  159

subject into a revolutionary-becoming. The vision is necessarily fleet-

ing, since the manifestation of a potential merges with its dissipation.
What is paradoxically glimpsed by the revolutionary-seer is intensity,
in an image that is itself intensive, and which fades precisely as it be-
comes extended, since intensity dissipates as it becomes image. Birth
and death coincide in this image, which can only be repeated.18 We
experience the possible as such, or the possible as capacity [puissance]
only in its collapse, in its exhaustion: what matters, therefore, is “to
exhaust the possible.”19
This perception of the pure possible implies a distinctive space-
time, one deprived of coordinates, a pure potential exposing capacities
and singularities independently of all actualization in the states of af-
fairs or milieus: a ‘pure locus of the possible.’20 We can now see in what
sense ‘everything becomes possible’: the conditions have aligned for a
new mapping, yet without any routes being imposed in advance. Cre-
ation operates in the space of a general redistribution of singularities,
venturing new concrete assemblages, under the injunction of a new
sensibility: the space of desire as such, peopled not with forms and
individuals, but with events and affects. Guided by affective explora-
tion, creation maps a new spatio-temporal assemblage, an assemblage
of space and of time and not simply in space and time; the question is
no longer to know how to fill ordinary space-time, but to recompose
the space-time that deploys us as much as we deploy ourselves in it.
The assemblage is a new division, a new striation, a new distribution
that implicates an operation in a space and a time that are themselves
unique, intensive, and not given in advance. Hence the ‘axes’ invoked
by Deleuze to define the new field of the possible opened up by May
68: pacifism along the West-East axis, a new form of internationalism
along the North-South axis.21 Vectorial, directional, problematic, the
field of the possible has the consistency of movement, political orga-
nization as movement. Strictly speaking, a revolutionary movement
does not realize an image, it produces the image, not unlike the char-
acter in Beckett who exclaims, “It’s done I’ve done the image.”22 Can
one witness a revolt? Or is it the revolt that sees, and is the witness of
itself? The image is fragmentary, and dissipates here and there, ade-
quate to the possible as such (as opposed to the possible understood as
an image of the real).23
If suddenly ‘everything is possible,’ or ‘everything becomes pos-
sible,’ this is to the extent that the component parts of the situation,
as grasped by the visionary, are not already connected in advance:
they are so many pure events that problematically compose one single
event (the situation), and it belongs to events to resonate with each
other, each one within all the others, chaotically.24 That everything is
possible but nothing is yet given fits with the new definition of the
possible, since it remains to be created: the possible is what becomes,
160  Theory & Event

and capacity or potentiality merits the name of the possible for as long
as it opens the field of creation (from which point everything remains
to be done). The possible is the virtual: it is that which the Right denies,
and the Left denatures in representing it as a project.

3. Fulfilling or Foreclosing the Possible: Actualization

The possible as such should not, therefore, be understood solely as

a possibility of life, in the sense of it being possible to evaluate or be
affected otherwise (differentiation of the concept of capacity or of life,
the possible as alternative): the conditions are there for existence to
change, for a mutation of the real itself. Subjective mutation is definite-
ly real, but it demands to be accomplished, and it can be accomplished
only by actualizing itself.

The possible does not preexist, it is created by the event. It is a

matter of life. The event creates a new existence, it produces a new
subjectivity (new relations with the body, with time, sexuality,
the immediate surroundings, with culture, work). When a social
mutation appears, it is not enough to draw the consequences or
effects according to lines of economic or political causality. Society
must be capable of forming collective agencies of enunciation that
match the new subjectivity, in such a way that it desires its own
mutation. It’s a veritable ‘redeployment.’25

At this point, the idea of the creation of the possible splits in two com-
plementary aspects. On the one hand, the event provokes the emer-
gence of a new sense of the intolerable (a virtual mutation); on the oth-
er hand, this new sense of the intolerable calls forth an act of creation
that responds to the mutation, that maps a new image, and literally
creates the possible (an actualizing mutation). To create the possible is
to create a new collective spatio-temporal assemblage, that responds
to the new possibility of life itself created by the event, or which serves
as its expression. An effective modification of the situation does not
take the form of a project to be realized, since what is it stake is the
invention of concrete social forms corresponding to the new sensibili-
ty, and the inspiration for this can only come from the latter. The new
sensibility does not have at its disposal any concrete image that could
be adequate to it: from this point of view there is only creative action,
guided not by an image or a project prefiguring the future, but by affec-
tive signs that, according to a leitmotif-formula, ‘do not resemble’ that
which actualizes them. To move from the virtual to the real following a
process that is real from the outset, not to move from the imaginary to
the real along a trajectory that is from the outset already actual.26
The event demands a response: “Men’s only hope lies in a revolu-
tionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or respond-
Aarons and Doyle | “Deleuze and the Possible: on Involuntarism in Politics”  161

ing to what is intolerable.”27 There is nothing voluntarist about such an

imperative: it is no longer a question of reconquering being by depart-
ing from what should-be, of submitting the real to an extrinsic, tran-
scendent judgment, that is in any case arbitrary and powerless; the will
no longer precedes the event, dissension no longer operates between
this world and another, but within the world (the immanence invoked
by Deleuze means that exteriority has ceased to be positioned some-
where beyond the world: the infinity of possible worlds are henceforth
deciphered directly from the world [à même le monde], as so many
signs of its heterogeneity). One cannot but respond to the event, be-
cause we cannot live in a world that has become intolerable, insofar as
we can no longer bear it.28 Here we discover a peculiar sort of respon-
sibility completely foreign to that of governments and major subjects,
a properly revolutionary responsibility. In it, one is not responsible for
any particular thing, or to anyone; we represent neither a project nor
the interests of a collectivity (since these interests are precisely in the
process of changing and we cannot say yet in which direction). We are
responsible before the event.
Henceforth, the notion of realization must be replaced by two
words: to actualize [actualiser] and to accomplish/fulfill [accomplir]. To ac-
tualize the virtual, or to accomplish the possible. Anti-Oedipus closes
with these words: “completing the process and not arresting it, not
making it turn about in the void, not assigning it a goal,”29 it being
understood that the process “is always and already complete as it
proceeds.”30 The Exhausted states: “we no longer realize, even though
we accomplish something,” and then later: “the protagonists become
tired depending on the number of realizations.31 But the possible is
accomplished, independently of this number, by the exhausted charac-
ters who exhaust it.”32 Distinct from all present alternatives and future
projects, the possible qua novelty is something to be accomplished, not
to be realized Accomplishment entails an act of creation, and is hence-
forth inseparable from an actualization.33
To accomplish the possible as such means to affirm the new sen-
sibility, to enable it to affirm itself. This is why a society in the grips of
an event must be capable of creating the corresponding assemblages,
“in such a way that it desires its own mutation.” For it is always pos-
sible to deny and to combat that which affirms itself within us. Here
we return, once again, to the living ground of the cleavage between
Left-Right: are we capable of affirming what we are in any case becom-
ing, what affirms itself in us regardless? One cannot at the same time
deny becoming and ask that people ‘progress’ [deviennent]: the French
Right busies itself ‘foreclosing the possible’, and then deploring the fact
that people shrivel up into archaic positions, overidentifying with
their present situations.34 It is noteworthy that the Right has exactly
the attitude for which it reproaches the Left: it would like to be able to
162  Theory & Event

choose the future, it would like for people to change, all the while it
goes about stifling all of the real outlets by which they might positively
do so; it remains, like the Left, fixated on the idea that change arises
from a coming to consciousness.35 Foreclosing the possible has nothing
whatsoever to do with exhausting it: it is to violently reduce the future
[le devenir] to nothingness. Two effects can follow from this: that the
people learn to fear the future, for it glimmers only of nothingness, is
itself only a nothingness (an archaistic refolding), or that they are left
with only a nothingness to desire (whether it be rioters [casseurs] or
terrorists). Violence then becomes paramount, an end in itself, the will
having nothing left to desire except what lays before it, which is to say,
nothing: a will to nothingness.
We arrive at a double distinction: (1) realization / actualization—
what is real or effective in struggles is always of the order of a creation
whose operation is a function of a field of the possible (in the sense
previously defined); and, (2) actualization / inactualisable part—this
designates the expressed of struggles or of processes of actualization,
or that which is itself accomplished : the “evental part”, “the event as
possible that no longer even has to realize itself.”36

4. Clichés, or a Merely Possible Politics

Politics therefore commences or recommences each time a collectivity

encounters its own conditions of existence (it is already in play from
the moment an individual encounters his or her own conditions, or
those of others). Such a requirement, according to Deleuze, surfaces
only in modern circumstances: it was necessary that we cease to believe
in the possible as an instance of realization; it was necessary that the
alternatives, whether present or still to come, appear to us as clichés. A
‘rupture of sensory-motor schemas,’ whose romantic or post-romantic
germs flourished post-war (and not post-Berlin Wall). It is a question
of having done with clichés.
‘To exhaust the possible’ thus has two meanings, conforming to
the two regimes of the possible: attaining the pure possible that the
Image exhausts (2) having done with clichés (1). Whence the theme of
a ‘nothingness of will’ and its disintegrating force37. Bartleby is in this
respect the character most emblematic of a Deleuzian politics: the Re-
sister par excellence, or even the Survivor (in whom the minimum and
the maximum of life coincide: a sur-vival as in surplus-life [sur-vie], the
way Nietzsche will speak of an overman [surhomme]).38 Bartleby ‘pre-
fers not to’: abdicating every preference afforded by the given situa-
tion, he impugns the regime of alternatives and exclusive disjunctions
that assure the closure of the situation. Bartleby’s interiority appears
to be a mystery (and perhaps it is empty, stupid): it is merely a signal
that affects and effects are of another order—an incredible, contagious
Aarons and Doyle | “Deleuze and the Possible: on Involuntarism in Politics”  163

disturbance of everyone around him. Melville’s short story offers us

nothing beyond this, nor does Deleuze take it any further, except to
describe and celebrate the great American Dream, which finishes no
better than Bartleby. But what is essential is the moment this dream
[espérance] takes on a local consistency, not as hope but as reality, in
the future that the attorney momentarily accepts and that tears from
him the final cry: O Bartleby! O humanity! Deleuze calls for a literal
reading, and this applies to his own commentary as well as to the text.
Bartleby’s attitude is therefore not the symbol or the allegory of a po-
litical activism to come, glimpsed through the fog. There is no mystery
to it: the short-story describes a process, not so much of transformation
as of social deformation (in this regard it matters little that the hero is
an individual as opposed to a crowd, since what is essential in rebel-
lion is less its reasons than its effects, a way of enacting [effectuant], so
to speak, the central question of the community). Melville’s story is
not symbolic, it is exemplary: Deleuze extracts from it a whole set of
political categories.
To foster in oneself and one’s milieu the growth of a nothingness
of will is to engage with the situation as a potentiality, a capacity for
encounter. This is not a voluntarist formula—what it offers is not a set
of practical means by which we could attain vision (the encounter),
but their correlate. The nothingness of will is a modern fact. Nietzsche
diagnosed it already, as nihilism’s point of no return, as well as the
chance of a reversal. At the same moment, Dostoevsky and Melville
each produce corresponding characters: the Idiot, who can no longer
respond to the exigencies of a situation because he is seized by an even
more urgent question, and the Eccentric (Bartleby) who prefers not to
have to pronounce on the situation at all.39 What they share is the fact
of having seen something that exceeded the givens of the situation,
and which rendered any reaction to it not only derisory and inappro-
priate, but intolerable.
This nothingness of the will, this disaffection with regard to all
recognized stakes, is the result of an encounter with the world. We
have ‘seen’ not only the situation, but also all of the sensory-motor
schemas that ordinarily attach us to the world—we have seen that they
have grasped nothing of this world, that they are nothing but clichés.
“A pitiful faculty then emerges in their minds, that of being able to see
stupidity and no longer tolerate it…”40 Our ordinary relations with the
world are revealed to be arbitrary conventions, that shelter us from
the world and render it tolerable: this is the intolerable compromise,
a compromise with powers that maintain and propagate poverty of
every kind. Our best interests always tend toward the side of subser-
vience.41 Sensory-motor schemas offer ready-made responses to situ-
ations of suffering that are themselves singular and evolving, and in
this testify to an interiorization of repression (it is not for nothing that
164  Theory & Event

we sometimes say of the Left, with its clichéd words and actions—its
same old songs of indignation and protest, its stereotyped forms of
militancy—that it serves as the indispensable auxiliary of the Right).
The clichés of struggle or of compassion seem to be reaching a parox-
ysm these days, all the more shameful in that they display a fantastic
capacity to adapt to the odious and its causes (shame on us as well,
since this is our world no less). The Idiot is therefore the one who does
not react, not due to insensitivity but because he does not manage “to
know what everybody knows” and “modestly denies what everybody
is supposed to recognize.” 42
The modern epoch is doubtlessly characterized by a deficit of will,
a certain ‘ill will,’ even if the evil we suffer be of a different nature. No
longer believing in the possible, we have lost both the taste for it as well
as the will to realize it: such is our fatigue, our lassitude. But if we have
lost faith, this is because our sensory-motor schemas appear hence-
forth as what they are: clichés. All that we see, say, live, even imagine
and feel, is always already recognizable, it bears in advance the mark
of recognition, the form of an already-seen [déjà-vu] or already-heard
[déjà-entendu]. An ironic distance separates us from ourselves, and we
no longer believe in what befalls us, because it seems as though noth-
ing could ever happen: from the outset, everything takes the form of
the already-there [déja-là], the already-done [tout fait], of preexistence.
The real in the image of the possible remains so confined within
an irreducible possibility that it attains neither positivity nor necessi-
ty. Clichés have the form of the possible, in the exact sense critiqued
by Bergson: we give ourselves a ready-made reality, “pre-existent to
itself.”43 “Everything is already completely given: all of the real in the im-
age, in the pseudo-actuality of the possible”44 The real is thus preceded
by its own image qua possible and, resembling the possible, it ends up
becoming confused with it. Which results in an epoch in which we no
longer perceive the real except as déjà-vu, an object of recognition; no
longer distinguishing it from the possible, we are invaded by clichés as
by simple possibilities. The world has lost all reality. Once both revolu-
tion and the people are conceived of in the mode of an already-there or
as preexisting themselves, it is inevitable that they eventually appear
to us as “paper revolutionaries” and a “cardboard people.”45 What
connects us to the world is nothing but clichés, simple possibilities. We
give ourselves the world in advance, and the people and ourselves.
Everything is possible now, that is to say, confined to mere possibili-
ty. But, equally, nothing is possible: the future is pre-formed, entirely
hackneyed in the form of the already-there. Necessity has deserted this
world, and we persist in moving about within the horizon of prefer-
ence, yet without believing in it.
Deleuze has always pursued another analysis of the possible in
addition to the one inspired by Bergson: we cannot base ourselves on
Aarons and Doyle | “Deleuze and the Possible: on Involuntarism in Politics”  165

a preconceived image of thought without simultaneously depriving

thought of its necessity, and condemning it to indefinitely ruminating
in an impassible possibility.46 To pre-form the transcendental, to make
it reliant on an originary form, can give us the conditions of a possible
experience, but not a real one. To trace the transcendental from the em-
pirical, to conceive of it in the image of the actual or of representation,
immediately evacuates the new or the event from the field of thought:
we know in advance that nothing will happen in thought other than
a pseudo-experience whose form we possess in advance, and that
never questions the image that such thought has of itself. Everything
we manage to think confirms that we have the possibility of thinking,
without testifying to any positive act of thinking. To the contrary, a real
experience implies the affirmation of a radical relation to what we do
not yet think (following the expression Deleuze inherits from Heide-
gger). It is the same in politics, where the people are in a situation of
having never yet existed: in each case, it is a question of affirming a
relation of exteriority or an encounter between thought and what it
thinks, between the people and themselves.47
What then becomes of political action? Positivity and necessity:
this is what is lacking from realization. Not only the State but also
activist structures have to deal with the popular forms of ‘ill will’
which—in line with the clinical definition of perversion—keep divert-
ing off course from the goal, not believing in what we tell them to.
Nonetheless, the Image that lies beyond clichés appears to lack any
motor for extending itself: vision can very well be momentary, with-
out being any less endless by right. Only imperatives of action, which
arise when we are assigned interests, can circumscribe the image and
bend it to the conditions of a possible experience (for interests require
a stable and non-mutating subject). Politics is born at last, but enters
the world as a paralytic, leaving us to choose between a phantasm of
action and a petrified fascination. In what respect does the encounter
offer the chance for a revolutionary becoming? What sort of leftism
characterizes Deleuze?
Firstly, it consists in challenging every form of voluntarism. But
this would not be worth much, and would certainly not constitute a
leftism, if the plea in favor of the involuntary concluded with the van-
ity of all action. It is true that there is such a tendency of leftism, one
that Lenin explained as a refusal of all compromise. But is this the right
way to formulate the problem? For Deleuze, compromises are both
shameful and always already over before they begin [passé d’avance]:
they are schemas forcing us to accept the very thing that appalls us.
Furthermore, the theory of the good compromise reserves by nature
the right to denounce the bad ones, preferably the one made by oth-
ers: an impure alliance, a betrayal. Such that ‘grown up’ activists and
leftists are loath to apprehend the event, owing to its necessary dis-
166  Theory & Event

order. And while it is certainly true that themes like the line of flight,
the nothingness of the will, and disaffection (‘to remain disinterested’)
indicate a refusal to compromise, the problem is no longer at all one
of determining the means to achieve an already-agreed-upon goal. To
the tribunal of the good and the bad compromise, Deleuze responds
with the distinction between the traitor and the trickster. The latter
temporarily hides his true identity under a borrowed one: he can be
flushed out, because it is only a factual identity that escapes us, which
we mistake for another (for years we said ‘hello Theodorus’ to The-
atetus: Kautsky, Plekhanov...).48 But the traitor does not hide anoth-
er identity: in becoming a traitor, they escape by right any possible
identification.49 The procedure itself becomes inadequate, it confronts
its own impossibility (to which Bolshevism responded with a judicial
rage unequalled in history). Lenin saw only good and bad tricksters,
and justified his own ploys; he had no feeling for treason, no revo-
lutionary becoming. The intolerable is precisely that upsurge of the
‘impossible’ wherein reality no longer corresponds to its clichés, to its
sensory-motor anchorings.

We no longer have much faith in being able to act upon situations

or react to situations, but it doesn’t make us at all passive, it allows
us to catch or reveal something intolerable, unbearable, even in
the most everyday things.50

No possible reactions, does that mean everything becomes life-

less? No, not at all. We get purely optical and aural situations,
which give rise to completely novel ways of understanding and
resisting.51

It is true that, in cinema, characters of the ballad are unconcerned,

even by what happens to them…but it is precisely the weakness
of the motor-linkages, the weak connections, that are capable of
freeing up great forces of disintegration.52

The rupture of schemas or the escape from clichés certainly does not
lead to a state of resignation, or an entirely interior revolt: resistance
is not the same as reaction. Resistance belongs to a will that is drawn
from the event, and nourished by the intolerable. The event is ‘revolu-
tionary potential’ itself, which dries up when it is thrown back upon
ready-made images (clichés of suffering, of demands).
As the chance for a new Health rather than a morbid symptom,
the nothingness of the will destitutes a false problem: the system of
alternatives. Its other side, which makes up the positive consistency of
politics, is the experimental elaboration of new concrete assemblages,
and the struggle to affirm their corresponding rights. It is true that ‘cre-
ativity’ has today become a cliché, but only provided it is everywhere
Aarons and Doyle | “Deleuze and the Possible: on Involuntarism in Politics”  167

misunderstood, and that we hear in it nothing more than a voluntarist

slogan (as we wear ourselves out producing our own unique clichés,
living out our own existence as a cliché: the realization of fantasies,
etc.). The traitor is forced to create under the compulsion of a love or
an encounter, whereas the trickster must force himself to create. For
Deleuze and Guattari, experimentation has nothing to do with those
games of existence in which the role of chance is slim to none. Grop-
ing, discreet, partly unconscious, and tethered to collective struggles
for the new rights that will enable its accomplishment, it merges with
existence itself, an existence in the grips of a profound reorganization
of its conditions of perception, and of the affective imperatives that
ensue from it.
If we can no longer speak here of action in the traditional sense
of the term, this is because the situation has literally become impos-
sible. To say it is unmasterable can sometimes serve as a malevolent
excuse. It has not ‘become’ unmasterable, however complex modern
socio-economic mechanisms may be; it is so by right, in as much as the
future obeys no cliché. When our sensory-motor links to the world are
revealed to be clichés, the situation loses its global or totalizable char-
acter, shattering into singular processes. It is no longer traversed by a
major contradiction, the ultimate figure of unity beyond which there is
only divergence and conflict, but by local lines of flight at every level,
that communicate only where necessary, and from singular to singular,
from minority to minority (children, workers, women, Blacks, peas-
ants, prisoners, homosexuals …).
The only utopia to which Deleuze ever consented, based on the
ephemeral solidarities of his 60’s and 70’s, would be premised on the
emergence of a ‘universal minoritarian consciousness.’ This is only
justified to the extent that the becoming of a minority in principle in-
volves everybody, “affecting all of humankind”, being each time a sin-
gular manner of problematizing existence.53 People undergoing a pro-
cess of becoming are not concerned with existing alternatives: nothing
matters to them except what they themselves encounter, or what the
others encounter, even in contexts far off from one’s own.—“strangely
indifferent and for this very reason…in the right frame of mind.”54 Is it
not a similar dream that reverberates at the end of the commentary on
Bartleby, that of a “community of celibates” comparable to a “wall of
loose, uncemented stones.”55
Be that as it may, we can only reconnect with the positivity of pol-
itics by ridding ourselves of the mirage represented by a conquest of
power, and an extrinsic, demiurgic fashioning of society. To be a leftist
henceforth means to accompany lines of flight wherever they draw us,
to try by all means to connect them to those already at work within
us, shaking us loose from ourselves; and thereby to foster the accom-
plishment of the possible wherever it emerges. The intellectual ceases
168  Theory & Event

to function as a guide or a conscience: she proposes nothing, and is

ahead of no one. Her capacities and attention are directed toward the
involuntary, or the emergence of new fields of the possible.
The sickness of clichés leaves us in an agonizing in-between: we
no longer believe in another world, but nor do we yet believe in this
world, in the chance that an encounter with it represents.56 We are
poised to have done with the possible, without seeing that this is the
very condition of a positive possible, without yet abandoning the hab-
it of associating the possible with a preconceived notion of a better
world to be realized. It is by exhausting the possible that we create it:
it should now be clear that the apparent contradiction here is noth-
ing but the negative shadow of a paradoxical coherence (because it
includes time).

To believe, not in a different world, but in a link between man and

the world, in love or life, to believe in this as in the impossible, the
unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought: ‘some-
thing possible, otherwise I will suffocate.’57

To attain the future by way of the possible, such is Deleuze’s route. To

arrive at the identity of the possible and of necessity, where the will is
no longer anything but a false problem, or born of the event as of its
own auto-affirmation; while the possible changes status and recovers
its authentic figure, that of the positive and virtual not-yet, in place
of the unreal projection into the future of the already-there. A strange
perception of the world, Deleuze said, one that is completely Spinozist:
we learn to breathe without oxygen, having realized, in the final analy-
sis, that it was this that oppressed us. “There is no longer any possible:
a relentless Spinozism”. Or again: “the true visionary is a Spinoza in
the garb of a Neapolitan revolutionary.”58 Thus it could be said that
Deleuze is a pervert, and his leftism—an admirable perversion. For,

The perverse world is a world in which the category of the neces-

sary has completely replaced that of the possible. This is a strange
Spinozism from which ‘oxygen’ is lacking, to the benefit of a more
elementary energy and a more rarefied air (Sky-Necessity).59

Notes
1. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994),130, and Essays Critical and the Clinical. trans.
Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1998), 71.
2. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2000), 34; Difference and Repetition, 200.
3. Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, 152–174, 152.
Aarons and Doyle | “Deleuze and the Possible: on Involuntarism in Politics”  169

4. Ibid., 154. “I would prefer not to, following Bartleby’s Beckettian formula.”
5. Ibid., 152.
6. Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 2013), 14, 113. English translation as The Creative Mind: An Introduction
to Metaphysics, trans. Mabel L. Andison (New York: Dover Publications, 1946).
7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “May 68 Did Not Take Place,” in Two
Regimes of Madness, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semi-
otext(e), 2007), 233– 237, 233.
8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Robert Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 29.
9. Ibid., 378.
10. Perhaps this is the moment to distinguish hope [espoir] from expectation
[espérance]. In this respect, Jacques Rancière has evoked the desperate mes-
sianism of the last pages of Bartleby. More generally, the philosophy of im-
manence implies expectation in its base clauses: “We can’t know in advance”
(cf. Difference and Repetition,187; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987], 250–251).
11. Cf. for example Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tom-
linson (New York: Continuum, 1986), 101–3; Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clin-
ical, 4.
12. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlin-
son and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 108.
13. We may note in this respect that the notions of “possibility of life” and
“possible world” are for Deleuze quasi-synonymous, in that both are of the
order of the expressed, and both are defined as difference (e.g. in Proust and
Signs: Combray as difference, or the Méséglise way or Guermantes way as
expressing heterogeneous possibilities of life, incompatible affective distribu-
tions).
14. Gilles Deleuze with Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 126.
15. Deleuze and Guattari, “May 68,” 233–34.
16. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 8. And if, in another register,
Deleuze and Guattari will claim that even women must become-woman, this
is because femininity is not a fixed essence but an event, the object of an en-
counter.
17. The terms ‘potentiality’ (or ‘potential’) and ‘singularity’ are equivalent
here.
18. Consequently, every revolution is stillborn, but not in the way this is nor-
mally understood: the precarious continuance of the vanishing depends on its
incessant reprisal, so that revolutions die from the inability to repeat, or the
suffocation of repetition (under the forces of subservience that denounce it as
‘treason’). It is not by chance that the theme of the traitor (as opposed to that
of the trickster) is for Deleuze aligned with becoming and lines of flight: every
creative mapping [tracé createur] is of necessity treason.
19. Hence also the ambiguity: a will that envelops its own abolition.
20. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (Athlone, 1986), 109.
170  Theory & Event

21. Deleuze, “May 68,” 236.

22. “The Exhausted,” 158.
23. On the dissipative image of revolt, the perception of the intolerable and the
response to it, as well as the desert as any-space-whatever [une espace quelcon-
que], cf. Essays Critical and Clinical (Chapter 14 on Laurence of Arabia).
24. A constant theme of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense.
25. Deleuze, “May 68,” 234.
26. It would seem that this schema of actualization already characterizes Marx-
ism, in its opposition to utopian socialism. In accordance with a famous pas-
sage from the German Ideology, “Communism is…not a state of affairs which
is to be established, [nor] an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself.
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of
things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in ex-
istence.” Marx & Engels, The German Ideology. marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm (italics are those of Marx and En-
gels). Strictly speaking, communism is not ‘to come,’ it is already at work as
a tendency inscribed in the contradictions of the present situation. What au-
thorizes us to speak of the future without having recourse to the arbitrary or
to dreams, is the possibility of deciphering it within a present that is itself in
becoming. Yet here as well, the structure of realization has not been sufficiently
resisted: we still possess an image of the future in advance, thanks to the de-
vice of dialectics: the realizable has simply been elevated to the status of the
necessary, while the virtual retains the anticipatory form of an end (thus does
the future continue to be anticipated within the present). Which is why the
operator of revolution par excellence is consciousness, which presupposes its
own content and paradoxically gives to the future the logical form of the past,
as opposed to the emergence of a new sensibility. The concept that has histor-
ically been opposed to this—spontaneism—does not for its part escape antici-
pation, since spontaneity is nothing but the unconscious perception of the end.
The whole opposition remains imprisoned within the schema of realization, as
is seen in Lenin’s essay “What is to be done?”; the actualization of the virtual
is never accorded the character of creation.
27. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), 171.
28. In this respect, Anti-Oedipus proposes the alternative of psychotic collapse
and revolutionary becoming. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti Oedipus, 341.
29. Ibid., 382.
30. Ibid., The theme is present right from the outset of the book.
31. Ibid.,153, translation modified.
32. Ibid., 162.
33. This is not strictly true of “The Exhausted,” but precisely because it is at
once what both draws together and separates politics and art.
34. Deleuze, “May 68,” 235: “The population of Longwy cling to their steel”,
etc.
35. And like the Bolcheviks after 1917, liberals today deplore the archaic Rus-
sian mentality (except that instead of forced reeducation, we have the most
policed form of IMF-orchestrated misery).
36. Cf. respectively, Deleuze, “May 68,” and “The Exhausted,” 168..
Aarons and Doyle | “Deleuze and the Possible: on Involuntarism in Politics”  171

37. Notably in Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel
W. Smith (New York: Continuum, 2003), 60—after having precisely asked how
to free ourselves from clichés, how to erect a figure that would not be a cliché.
38. In French, “sur-vie” plays off la survie (‘survival’, but also ‘afterlife’), while
the split prefix (sur-), emphasizes excess, as is heard in the English term ‘sur-
plus.’ —Trans.
39. Both the notion of clichés and the theme of the Idiot surface at the end of
Deleuze, Movement-Image, 189–92, and are elaborated afresh in the Time Image,
167, 176–177.
40. Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, cited in Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,
152.
41. On the relation between the sensory-motor schema, the cliché, interest and
obedience, see Movement Image, 209, and Time Image, 20–21.
42. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 130.
43. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(New York: Zone Books, 1991), 98.
44. Ibid.
45. Deleuze, Time Image, 219; Essays Critical and Clinical, 88.
46. Proust and Signs, 41, 116; Difference and Repetition, 93–95 and 173–192.
47. Cf. Chapters 7 and 8 of Deleuze, Time Image, especially 215
48. cf. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 150. —Trans.
49. “It is difficult to be a traitor; it is to create. One has to lose one’s identity,
one’s face, in it. One has to disappear, to become unknown.” Deleuze, Dia-
logues, 45.
50. Deleuze, Negotiations, 51.
51. Ibid., 123.
52. Deleuze, Time Image, 19 translation modified.
53. Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus, 105–106 and 469–471 (becoming-minoritarian
and the power of problematization).
54. Deleuze, “May 68,” 235.
55. See Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 84–90. This requirement, that of a
collection of lateral, federative, non-hierarchical, and non-representative liai-
sons, which make up a revolutionary movement with “multiple centers,” ani-
mates all of Deleuze’s remarks in his conversation with Foucault in L’arc no.49.
English translation: “Intellectuals and Power,” in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands
and Other Texts, 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e),
2004), 206–213.
56. Deleuze, Time Image, 168–173.
57. Ibid., 170.
58. Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, 28.
59. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 320.