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  • Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics
  • Marcelo Svirsky
Paul Patton . Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. 249 pp.

To traditionalist Politics departments, not to mention Oxbridge priests, it might be wise to say, "Nothing to be afraid of here, quite the opposite." But what began as timid experimentation with French poststructuralism has become already a torrent across the field. And without doubt, much of this fresh inundation owes its inspiration to the work of Paul Patton.

Patton's renowned works on Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze have helped to rescue political studies from a moribund imperial tradition. As he did in 2000 with his Deleuze and the Political, in Deleuzian Concepts, Patton [End Page 420] does it again: transforming a perplexed reading of Deleuze into a functional one that invites the reader to extend their philosophical experimentation with political concepts everywhere. The book is above all an operative manual that not only highlights significant aspects of Deleuze's contributions to political philosophy but also inaugurates new lines of research in the field. Unlike so many other studies inspired by Deleuzian philosophy, the book deploys Deleuze's and Deleuze and Guattari's abstractions in a line of "becoming applicable;" indeed, much of the force of Patton's account lies in the way concepts are brought to bear upon pressing political problems in specific geopolitical contexts, most notably in Patton's specific application of the "pure event" to the problem of colonisation (chapter five). Following a detailed breakdown of the internal dynamics of the Deleuzian event, within which the distinction between history and becoming is paramount (chapter four), Patton convincingly argues that juridical-historical events such as the Mabo v. Queensland case in Australia can be seen in terms of a "process of transition from one determination of colonial society to another" (2010, 116). Without falling into a precarious political enthusiasm, Patton stresses the most critical aspect of cases such as Mabo, namely their re-engagement with the problem of colonization in a way that opens up new possibilities for redefining and superceding the historical relationship between colonizers and colonized.

The mechanisms of evaluation that lie at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari's practical ethical commitment to unblocking the flows of desire are explicit throughout A Thousand Plateaus, even though, as Patton rightly states, they remain "equivocal and open-ended" (2010, 149). However debatable it may be as to whether Deleuze's interest in jurisprudence and the creation of new rights might be conceived as involving a "normative turn" (or perhaps just a quest for new philosophical-political targets), it paves the way for Patton to counter-effectuate "the democratic" as a critical concept for the evaluation of actual democracies and their submission to the global axiomatic of capital (chapters seven and eight).

Certainly one of Patton's most original contributions as a philosopher (Dan Smith [2003] has already noted that in his Deleuzian articulations Patton does not write just as a commentator) is to be found in the conceptual bridges he constructs between French poststructuralism and Anglophone liberal egalitarianism, in so doing announcing the end of their mutual exclusivity. In staging these encounters, Patton's approach involves neither a unidirectional insemination of the normative liberal tradition with Deleuzian dynamisms nor an attempt to invest liberal concepts with a Deleuzian glow. Rather, his major aim is to free both traditions from re-territorializing philosophical armatures by bringing their critical tools (and genealogies), as well as their oppositions and similarities, into transversal communication with one another. To use Agamben's vocabulary of resistance, Patton's exploration enriches philosophical reflection on the political by extracting concepts and perspectives from their hermetic scholarly milieus and re-engaging them in [End Page 421] a free use of philosophy. He plays, for instance, with the conceptual relation between Rorty's ironist pragmatism and Deleuze's antirepresentationalism and constructivism in order to stress the practical applications of philosophy to the problems of politics and of life. His stimulating discussion of the novel uses of language to redescribe the becomings of the world is another example (chapter three). As part of this idiomatic bridging, Patton leaves no room for confusion over "the manner in which...

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