What does it mean today to speak of intensities in the domain of political philosophy? The intensive, says Deleuze, is the untimely. To be untimely, for Deleuze, is the essential task of philosophy, its paradoxical intensity – and on this point, I am in total agreement with him. But still the question must be raised – what is it to be untimely today, in our postmodern situation? That is the point.

In order to open a space for reflection on these questions, I would like to examine the difficulty and the problem that Gilles Deleuze encounters when he discusses the birth of philosophy. To understand the sense in which democracy presents him with a problem, I will specify his own philosophical context. In fact, I propose to take a certain distance from Deleuze's political philosophy, but my intention is not at all to invalidate or to devalue it; I maintain that his is among the few capable of helping us to understand our present. My objective is to circumscribe a political attitude that I qualify as being arrogant towards democracy – rather than anti-democratic. This attitude has been widespread in France in the ambience that followed May 1968, and continues to be among us in the intellectual world of the human sciences and, particularly, philosophy. This attitude strikes me as lacking untimeliness – at times, even as harmful and not justified by the principles that lie at the foundations of the Deleuzian philosophical system of the multiple.