The Question of Community in Deleuze and Guattari (I): Anti-Community

The Question of Community in Deleuze and Guattari (I):

Anti-Community

Introducing Anti-Community

What this paper seeks to do is to begin tracing the concept of community in Deleuze and Guattari. The question of community is an apparent gap in Deleuze and/or Deleuze-Guattari scholarship. Yet that gap is not surprising, if not understandable, for the question of community is after all barely inscribed as an emphatic foreground in their works, individual and collective, unlike those of Nancy's, Agamben's, Blanchot's, Bataille's, or Derrida's.¹ One could oppose this and cite Deleuze and Guattari's introduction to their What is Philosophy?, in which community, alongside friendship, is claimed to be the as if imperative thought of any philosophical inquiry. No doubt, the question of community is clearly articulated in that introduction. (The question of community, in fact, as this study will eventually elucidate, is there in Deleuze and Guattari. It is without doubt always already there.) But, in an exemplary unconceal-withdraw movement of the question of community in Deleuze and Guattari, the question of community quickly fades away like a forgettable shadow once Deleuze and Guattari proceed with the discussion of philosophy's artifactual task of concept-construction as the main theme of What is Philosophy? The shadow of community will only fleetingly reappear at the end of that text with the announcement of a "shadow of a people to come." Like the silence of a shadow then, the question of community is a silent problematic in Deleuze and Guattari, making it almost strange, if not estranging, to think the possibility of a future thought of community, or the possibility of a thought of the future of community, in relation to their philosophy. That, however, does not mean that we should henceforth commit to forgetfulness the concept of community in Deleuze and Guattari. What this paper is committed to do therefore is to unfold that silent problematic of community, singularly in Deleuze and Guattari, and also to unfold what that silent problematic reserves for the (future) thought of community. (Friendship, which undoubtedly supplements as another problematic for the thinking of community in Deleuze and Guattari, certainly calls for equal analysis. But I would like to reserve that task as a second paper to this study of community in Deleuze and Guattari.)

Here, I would like to take up the question of community, or perhaps the question of the apparent absence of community, in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, the second book that follows Anti-Oedipus. In A Thousand Plateaus, as in Anti-Oedipus, there is a movement of what I will call "anti-community." The word "community" is hardly articulated in both texts. And when Deleuze and Guattari do so, it hinges on the negative, as something that is anti-thought, something that thought should not regress to (hence my use of the term "anti-community"). For example, in A Thousand Plateaus, where what is argued for is unrestricted or non-striated movement, "community" is the form in which there is the danger of "run[ning] the risk of reproducing . . . the rigid" (228). Yet what remains as the critical concept in and to A Thousand Plateaus—the concept of nomadology—is undeniably already communitarian, for nomads, from which nomadology takes its image, are irreducibly tribal or of the pack, and hence already manifesting itself as of a certain communitarian force. And Deleuze and Guattari's apparent reservation to give nomadology's communitarian expression its full force can never erase that communitarian trace. How then does one approach the thought of community in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of nomadology? In other words, how does one think the idea of community in Deleuze and Guattari when there is an apparent absence if not resistance of it in their writing?

But let me interrupt those questions and speak first of the phrase "anti-community," situating it in a more general context...