Abstract

This text provides an analysis of the Deleuzian theory of minorities. Its hypothesis is that this theory produces a double effect of interpellation: upon a materialistic reading of the philosophy of Deleuze, and upon the theoretical and political heritage of Marxism. Concerning the first aspect, the thesis of an actual multiplication of ‘becomings-minoritarian’ reopening ‘the question of the becoming-revolutionary of people, at every level, in every place’, has to be referred to the Deleuzo-Guattarian analysis of the conjuncture – namely, to a diagnosis of the global capitalist system's dynamisms and the contradictions they produce in the social, juridical and political institutions of national States. Concerning the second aspect, I confront the adversities faced by minorities with the schema of the classes struggle, and I examine certain links (of continuation and integration, but also differentiation) between the processes of ‘proletarianisation’ and ‘becoming-minoritarian’, that is to say, between two ways of problematising the collective subject of a revolutionary politics of emancipation. Finally I assert that the concept of ‘becoming-minoritarian’ makes of the possibility of an unprecedented internationalism the way to a renewal of the two concepts between which the horizon of modern political thought extends, and around which the tradition of political liberalism and thinkers of a revolutionary politics have never ceased to confront one another: autonomy and universality.

Keywords: Deleuzian politics, minorities, the State, global capitalism, social struggles, universalism, internationalism

Writing in Minor/Reading Deleuze Politically

The question of minorities touches at the heart of Deleuze's political thought, taking place as it does where the category of the ‘political’ becomes in every way problematic.