Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Treatise on Militarism
- 2 Vacuoles of Noncommunication: Minor Politics, Communist Style and the Multitude
- 3 1,000 Political Subjects …
- 4 The Becoming-Minoritarian of Europe
- 5 Borderlines
- 6 The Event of Colonisation
- 7 Deterritorialising the Holocaust
- 8 Becoming Israeli/Israeli Becomings
- 9 Affective Citizenship and the Death-State
- 10 Arresting the Flux of Images and Sounds: Free Indirect Discourse and the Dialectics of Political Cinema
- 11 Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics
- 12 The Joy of Philosophy
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
4 - The Becoming-Minoritarian of Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Treatise on Militarism
- 2 Vacuoles of Noncommunication: Minor Politics, Communist Style and the Multitude
- 3 1,000 Political Subjects …
- 4 The Becoming-Minoritarian of Europe
- 5 Borderlines
- 6 The Event of Colonisation
- 7 Deterritorialising the Holocaust
- 8 Becoming Israeli/Israeli Becomings
- 9 Affective Citizenship and the Death-State
- 10 Arresting the Flux of Images and Sounds: Free Indirect Discourse and the Dialectics of Political Cinema
- 11 Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics
- 12 The Joy of Philosophy
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
No notion is more contested in European politics and social theory than the sociopolitical space of the European Union (EU). The EU is a molar political entity that has become an internationally significant economic player, but it also offers a critical political vision that universalises its own concept of ‘civilisation’. As a progressive project, the EU constitutes an alternative to the aggressive neo-liberalism of the USA on a number of key issues (privacy; telecommunication; genetically modified food and the environment) and as an advocate of human rights and world peace. It is a project that is faced with a diverse set of contradictions.
On the one hand, Europe celebrates transnational spaces, but on the other hand, it is witness to the resurgence of hyper-nationalisms occurring at the micro-level. The cosmopolitan global city and paranoid Fortress Europe stand face-to-face as opposite sides of the same coin. In an attempt to bypass the binary of global versus local, and so as to destabilise the established definitions of European identity, I will narrate an alternative vision of Europe's ‘becoming-minoritarian’. The decline of Eurocentrism will be taken as a premise that points to a qualitative shift in our collective sense of identity. Contained within the progressive project of the EU are the seeds for a post-nationalist sociopolitical space, which is to say, putting it in more Deleuzian terms, the possibility of a radical ‘becoming-minoritarian’ is immanent to the sociopolitical space of the EU.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Deleuze and the Contemporary World , pp. 79 - 94Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006