For a Political Gilles Deleuze

What Deleuze is possible today? Or, in this particular instance, what Deleuze can be constructed from sixty-two pieces, a chronologically conveyed cast of prefaces, pamphlets, letters, and interviews? The hand of the editor is decidedly absent, except in a detailed set of footnotes, and source notes. Due to the lack of a preface or an introduction, the source notes assume variations on this role, giving each text to a context. The pieces are ordered without the intervention of thematics, a decision that was made because it “would have jibed with the previous collection Negotiations,” thematically ordered by Deleuze, and Two Regimes of Madness and its companion piece Desert Islands (1953–1974) are not books that Deleuze had in any way conceived.¹ The question “What Deleuze is possible today?,” as a result, opens itself up: it is the task of Deleuze’s readers to combine his texts in whatever way they wish, in order to make him function. For Deleuze and Guattari, “May ‘68 did not take place” because “the event is itself a splitting off from, or a breaking with causality . . . an unstable condition which opens up a new field of the possible.”(233) What is most enabling about collections such as these is their splitting off from Deleuze’s thought as book, where even A Thousand Plateus, Deleuze and Guattari’s bona-fide “rhizome book,” threatens to be circumscribed: digested and understood. In the chronological collection form, Deleuze’s thought emerges as a series of events, intensities with several ends that beg to be recontextualized and reactivated.

Marked as it is by the “Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents” brand, Two Regimes of Madness calls to mind the little black books that inaugurated the series in the early eighties, books which, lacking in footnotes and metacommentary, had their place “in the pockets of spiked leather jackets as much as on the shelves.”² By the time that Mille Plateaux was translated into English in 1987, Semiotext(e) had already published three of its chapters, two in the form of these little black books,³ and another in a 1977 special issue of the journal Semiotext(e), an issue devoted to Anti-Oedipus during the year that it was to appear in English, sporting, on its first page, a picture of a lone protestor launching a large rock towards an indecipherable building.⁴ Although the new format for the Foreign Agents series (large white books with extensive footnotes and sourcenotes) renders explicit the American academy’s embrace of the French Nietzscheans, this history remains a backdrop for the book. The opportunity remains, then, to consider Deleuze in the role of interventionist, teasing out the potential embodied in his forging of both conjunctive and disjunctive relations.

Deleuze’s interventions regarding Antonio Negri’s political imprisonment, two of which are found here, provide an appropriate entry point: the arguments which he makes in Negri’s defense are centered around the “two regimes” that are announced by the volume’s title. As such, they illustrate the applicability of his and Guattari’s mapping of semiotic regimes to the analysis of social formations. Using Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx as his backing, Deleuze argues that Negri, whose work was being denounced by his judges as “mediocre” and “trivial,” is indeed “an extremely important Marxist theoretician.” What’s more, if the judges are so interested in Negri’s status as a writer, they should take a look at Marx Beyond Marx, in which they would find a thinker who could in no way be aligned with the violent and terroristic practices he was being accused of instigating (unless, of course, he was a double agent “being bribed by the police”).(173–174) Even in this short and extremely context-specific letter we see how “semiotization” and “subjectification”⁵ are at the heart of Deleuze’s manner of thinking through things. In a very practical example, Deleuze presents a Negri who...