Félix Guattari's lament that there is ‘no description of the special characteristics of the working class that established the Paris Commune, no description of its creative imagination’ conveys a sense of his concern with the affective, imaginary and libidinal properties and dynamics of political subjectivation (Guattari 1984: 35). The history of the workers' movement, Guattari contends, is populated by ‘mutant’ workers in ‘veritable wars of subjectivity’ (Guattari 1996a: 124). He has in mind the events of revolutionary upheaval – the 1871 Commune, October 1917, May 1968 – but the problematic of revolutionary subjectivity is one that pervades modern socialist, communist and anarchist politics. This problematic is that of the ‘militant’, of ‘militancy’, a figure that persistently returns as the marker – indeed, often the self-declared guarantor – of radical subjectivity across the spectrum of extra-parliamentary politics. One can think of militancy as a technology of the self, an expression of the working on the self in the service of revolutionary change. However, unlike the subjective correlates of the great revolutionary events, for Guattari this more prosaic aspect of radical practice is not altogether joyful.

This paper is a critique of the militant. In particular it seeks to understand the ways militancy effectuates processes of political passion and a certain unworking or deterritorialisation of the self in relation to political organisations and the wider social environment within which militants would enact change. To this end the paper traces a diagram or abstract machine of militancy, a diagram comprised of Guattari's cartography of Leninism and the model of struggle set out by the Russian nihilist Sergei Nechaev.