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
2 - Vacuoles of Noncommunication: Minor Politics, Communist Style and the Multitude
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
Remarking on the place of Deleuze's thought in contemporary political circles, Slavoj Žižek has recently suggested that: ‘Deleuze more and more serves as the theoretical foundation of today's anti-globalist Left’ (Žižek 2004: xi). This situation, however, is not cause for celebration on Žižek's part. Following Alain Badiou, Žižek argues that the current leftist reading of Deleuze is little more than an anarcho-desiring cliché that is ultimately complicit with the postmodern orientations of contemporary capitalism. Indeed, he writes that: ‘There are, effectively, features that justify calling Deleuze the ideologist of late capitalism’ (Žižek 2004: 185). This assessment is not quite of Deleuze in total, but of a ‘popular image’ of Deleuze; an image formed of a certain Marxism, a particular reading of Deleuze's ontology, and an aspect (albeit a key one) of Deleuze's own work – a Deleuze ‘guattarized’ in his work with Guattari (Zizek 2004: 20). It is evident that for Žižek a prominent manifestation of this popular image of an anti-globalist Deleuze is Hardt and Negri's Empire, where there is a clear meeting of Deleuzian figures of becoming, multiplicity, control and so on, with Marxian formulations of labour, capital and communism. Though Žižek initially endorsed Empire on the dust-jacket as a ‘rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time’, he now sees it as a ‘pre-Marxist’ work that conceals ‘its lack of concrete insight’ in ‘Deleuzean jargon of multitude, deterritorialization, and so forth’ (Žižek 2001: 192).
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- Information
- Deleuze and the Contemporary World , pp. 42 - 56Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006