Datasets:

DarkDeleuze

/

dd

like 0



Introduction

Summarizing his deeply idiosyncratic work, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes writing about others as a sort of buggery or immaculate conception that is the result of taking an author from behind and giving him a child (N, 6). Deleuze is still quick to distinguish his project from outright falsification. He strictly limits himself to what an author actually says; he attends to a thinkers shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions to give him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous (N, 6). More than thirty years after making these remarks, Deleuze now has plenty of little monsters of his own—rootless rhi-zombies, dizzying metaphysicians, skittish geonaturalists, enchanted transcendentalists, passionate affectivists. My aim is to give him another child that shares his last name: Dark Deleuze.

Deleuze once told a friend that a worthwhile book performs at least three functions: polemics, recovery, and creativity. In writing the book, the author must reveal that (1) other scholarship commits an error; (2) an essential insight has been missed; and (3) a new concept can be created. You will find all three is this book. First, I argue against the canon of joy that celebrates Deleuze as a naively affirmative thinker of connectivity. Second, I rehabilitate the destructive force of negativity by cultivating a hatred for this world. Third, I propose a conspiracy of contrary terms that diverge from the joyous task of creation.

Picking out a particular strain of thought: scholars of new materialism turn to realist ontology by way of Deleuzes metaphysics of positivity. The basis for the realist side of Deleuze is perhaps best evinced by his biography. Those who knew Deleuze consistently note his firm commitment to joyful affirmation and his distaste for the ressentiment of negativity. Beatifying this sentiment, Deleuze has been used to establishing a whole canon of joy. In the canon of joy, the cosmos is a complex collection of assemblages produced through the ongoing processes of differentiation. The effect of the Joyous Deleuzes image of thought is a sense of wonder, accompanied by the enjoyment of creating concepts that express how the world really exists.

A different Deleuze, a darker one, has slowly cast its shadow. Yet this figure only appears when we escape the chapel choir of joy for the dark seclusion of the crypt. Emerging from scholars concerned with the condition of the present, the darkness refashions a revolutionary Deleuze: revolutionary negativity in a world characterized by compulsory happiness, decentralized control, and overexposure. This refashioned Deleuze forms a countercanon out of the perfused negativity of his concepts and affects. On the level of concept, it recognizes that negativity impregnates Deleuzes many prefixes of difference, becoming, movement, and transformation, such as de-, a-, in-, and non-. On the level of affect, it draws on Deleuzes talk of indiscernibility, concealment, the shame of being human, and the monstrous power of the scream. The ultimate task of this approach is not the creation of concepts, and to the extent that it does, Dark Deleuze creates concepts only to write apocalyptic science fiction (DR, xx–xxii).

Timely Connections

Michel Foucault half-jokingly suggested in 1970 that perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian (Theatrum Philosophicum, 885). It is easy to see how boosters have used this phrase to raise the profile of Deleuze, who was far less popular than Foucault or Derrida during the initial reception of poststructuralism in America. But what if it is a subtle jab? Foucault makes the remark in the same breath as a reference to Pierre Klossowski, a crucial member of the secret society Acéphale, which helped revive Nietzsche in France when others too easily dismissed the thinker as fascist. Historically fitting would be an insult to Nietzsche, who proudly proclaims the untimeliness of thought acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come at the beginning of his essay on the uses and abuses of history for life (Untimely Meditations, 60). As a major French interlocutor of Nietzsche, Deleuze uses this exact same phrase on untimeliness in the opening pages of Difference and Repetition—the very book that Foucault was reviewing when he made the comment. Bearing out the implication by mincing another Nietzschean phrase, then perhaps Foucault was accusing him of being timely, all too timely.

What would make Deleuzes thought especially timely? Critics such as Slavoj ?i?ek accuse him of being a poster child for the cultural excesses of postmodern capitalism (Ongoing ‘Soft Revolution). A recent round of denunciations underwritten by a mix of wonderment and red-baiting exclaim, The founder of BuzzFeed wrote his senior thesis on the Marxism of Deleuze and Guattari!, adding to a long list of guilty associations—the Israeli Defense Force reads A Thousand Plateaus!, Deleuze spouts the fashionable nonsense of pseudoscience! Deleuzes defenders are correct to dismiss such criticisms as either incomplete or outright spurious. Yet there is a kernel of truth that goes back to an old joke—a communist is someone who reads Das Kapital; a capitalist is someone who reads Das Kapital and understands it. Saying the same about Deleuze: there is something absolutely essential about his work, but it would not be best to take it at face value. The necessity of taking another step beyond Deleuze avant la lettre is especially true when both capitalists and their opponents simultaneously cite him as a major influence. The exact rapport between Deleuzes thought and our time thus remains a puzzle for us to solve. Does the problem arise because certain readers act like doctors who participate in death penalty executions, who follow protocol to make a perfectly clinical diagnosis, only to help administer a set of drugs condemned by their field? Or is there something about his prescription that only exacerbates our current condition?

Ours is the age of angels, says French philosopher Michel Serres (Angels, a Modern Myth). Armies of invisible messengers now crisscross the skies, tasked with communication, connection, transmission, and translation. As inspiring as they may seem, they also compel us to embody their messages in word and act. Click, poke, like. We feel the nervous prick of incoming missives that set us in a feverish state until we address the incoming text message, reply to the overdue e-mail, or respond to the pending friend request. These everyday behaviors show that the seemingly modern world of commodities has not stolen our sense of wonder—we are as divinely moved by media as we once were by angels. Marx, who, in Artauds phrase, has done away with the judgment of God, shows that this mystical character of the commodity is capitalism and also its most popular trick. Let us then follow Marxs old mole in the search of history, moving from the heavens to the underground. Refusing to sing the hymns of the age, Deleuze and Guattari made a crucial declaration in 1991 as the Iron Curtain crumbled and the first commercial Internet service providers came online: We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. . . . We lack resistance to the present (WP, 108).

Dark Deleuzes immediate target is connectivity, the name given to the growing integration of people and things through digital technology. Acolyte of connection and Google chairman Eric Schmidt recently declared at the World Economic Forum that soon the internet will disappear as it becomes inseparable from our very being (it will be part of your presence all the time) (Business Insider). This should raise suspicion. No one should ever take futurologists at their word—technology progresses with the same combined and uneven gait as all other types development. Yet the numbers behind Schmidts claim are hardly a matter of dispute. Five billion new people are slated to join the Internet in the next decade, and the Internet of things has motivated individual users to integrate a vast array of online-enabled devices into their everyday lives. Even if they do not fully realize his dreams, they still make up the substance of Googles government of things and the living.

Many traditional concerns have been raised about connectivity. Almost all use the conservative voice of moral caution. A band of Net Critics warn that technology is developing more quickly than our understanding of its effects. Popular media, the great screen of the collective unconscious, materialize fears about runaway technology. There is a whole string of Asian horror films that depict cursed media objects ruining our lives (Ringu, Pulse, Phone, One Missed Call, White: The Melody of the Curse). The usual cottage industry of romanticizing life without technology now suggests that cell phones make us lazy, while circulating ideas on how to get on a social media diet. Some philosophers, such as Bernard Stiegler, even say that technology is stealing our precious insides. Behind these suggestions lurks a drive to get back to our roots.

The mad scientist criticism of technology misses the mark. The trouble is not that myopic technicians have relentlessly pursued technical breakthroughs without considering the consequences (forgive them, for they know not what they do; ?i?ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 28). The antidote for such ignorance would just be a small dose of ideology critique. Alternatively, technology has not exceeded humanitys capacity to manage it—if anything, Foucaults insights (the analytic of finitude, biopower) suggest that humanity influences its own future more than ever before (DI, 90–93). The problem is, they know perfectly well what they are doing, but they continue doing it anyway!

Philosophically, connectivity is about world-building. The goal of connectivity is to make everyone and everything part of a single world. The cases made for such a world are virtuous enough—Kantian cosmopolitanism wants perpetual peace, Marxist universalism demands the unity of theory and practice, and Habermas would have us all be part of one great conversation. Yet connectivity today is determined far more by people like Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, who demonstrates the significance of Deleuzes argument that technology is social before it is technical (F, 17). Trained as a counterterrorism expert, Google poached Cohen from a position at the Department of State, where he convinced Condoleezza Rice to integrate social media into the Bush administrations diplomatic tool kit (Rice, No Higher Honor, 305). In a geopolitical manifesto cowritten with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt, The New Digital Age, Cohen reveals Googles deep aspiration to extend U.S. government interests at home and abroad. Their central tool? Connectivity.

When connectivity is taken as a mantra, you can see its effects everywhere. Jobseekers are told to hop on to the web (While your resume can help you get the interview for a new job, a fully optimized LinkedIn profile can bring you more business, more connections, and can increase your professional reputation!). Flat hierarchies are touted as good for business management (Power is vertical; potential is horizontal!). And the deluge of digital content is treated as the worlds greatest resource, held back only by unequal access (Information wants to be free!). As perverse as it sounds, many Deleuzians still promote concepts that equally motivate these slogans: transversal lines, rhizomatic connections, compositionist networks, complex assemblages, affective experiences, and enchanted objects. No wonder Deleuze has been derided as the lava lamp saint of California Buddhism–so many have reduced his rigorous philosophy to the mutual appreciation of difference, openness to encounters in an entangled world, or increased capacity through synergy.

Instead of drawing out the romance, Dark Deleuze demands that we kill our idols. The first task is negative, as in Deleuze and Guattaris schizoanalysis, a complete currettage—overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place (AO, 311). Put more modestly, the first step is to acknowledge that the unbridled optimism for connection has failed. Temporary autonomous zones have become special economic zones. The material consequences of connectivism are clear: the terror of exposure, the diffusion of power, and the oversaturation of information. A tempting next move would be to criticize Deleuzian connectivists as falling behind the times, having not recognized their own moment of recuperation. Yet such an accusation would only prepare the ground for a more timely intervention. Dark Deleuze does not take up the mantle of prophetic guruism or punctual agitprop. As a project, it instead follows Deleuzes advice to create untimely vacuoles of non-communication that break circuits rather than extend them (D, 175). The point is not to get out of this place but to cannibalize it—we may be of this world, but we are certainly not for it. Such out-of-jointedness is a distance. And distance is what begins the dark plunge into the many worlds eclipsed by the old.

Hatred for This World

We need reasons to believe in this world, Deleuze demands (C2, 172). We are so distracted by the cynicism of ideological critique that we too easily dismiss the real world as an illusion. The problem is exaggerated even more now that we mistake knowledge for belief, a confusion fed by growing databases of readily available information. He asks us to relink with the world as a matter of faith, to believe in something even as transient as the fleeting sensations of cinema (C2, 169–173). Although his suggestion is not wrong, it is incomplete. In his haste, Deleuze forgets to pose the problem with the ambivalence found in all his other accounts of power—how affects are ruled by tyrants, molecular revolutions made fascist, and nomad war machines enrolled to fight for the state. Without it, he becomes Nietzsches braying ass, which says yes only because it is incapable of saying no (NP, 178–86). We must then make up for Deleuzes error and seek the dark underside of belief. The key to identifying what lies beneath begins with the path of belief, but only to pursue a different orientation. So start with a similar becoming-active that links up with the forces that autoproduce the real. But instead of simply appreciating the forces that produce the World, Dark Deleuze intervenes in them to destroy it. At one time, such an intervention would have been called the Death of God, or more recently, the Death of Man. What is called for today is the Death of this World, and to do so requires cultivating a hatred for it.

Deleuze refutes the image of Nietzsche as a dour pessimist. Flipping that image on its head, Deleuze argues that Nietzsche is an unparalleled thinker of affirmation. But in doing so, even Deleuzes masterful pen cannot erase the many moments of negativity that impregnate Nietzsches work. Deleuze thus turns his eye to Nietzsches moments of creation, as exemplified in a passage from the fifty-eighth aphorism of The Gay Science:

How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out the origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts as real, so-called reality. We can destroy only as creators.—But let us not forget: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new things.

Dissatisfied with Nietzsches implied goal of destruction, Deleuze inverts the phrase into destroy in order to create (DI, 130). This formulation appears over and again in his work. To name a few places: in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari say that capitalism destroys what came before to create its own earthly existence, a process of three tasks whereby the first is negative (destroy!) and the second two are positive (create! create!). Deleuze later argues that the painter must first destroy prior clichés before creating a new image (FB, 71–90). And in their final collaboration, Deleuze and Guattari scold those who criticize without creating as the plague of philosophy (WP, 28).

There is something disarming about the sincerity of Deleuze and Guattaris definition of philosophy as the art of constructing concepts (WP, 2). Yet it feels odd in an era full of trite invitations to being constructive: if you dont have anything nice to say, dont say anything at all, if constructive thoughts are planted, positive outcomes will be the result, or, simply, be constructive, not destructive. The simple if–then structure of these self-help maxims is more than logical; it discloses a transitive theory of justice. Just as the meek will inherit the earth, it promises the just deserts of construction. Good things come to those who are constructive! How far this is from Marxs ruthless criticism of all that exists (Letter to Arnold Ruge). Now that advertisers claim to be the most creative of all creatures on earth, it is time to replace creativity as the central mechanism of liberation.

Deleuze would have hated todays images of creativity—there is a great violence in comparing the fabrication of concepts to any happy means of construction; concepts are friends only to thought, as they break consensus (WP, 4–6, 99). Concepts are not discovered but the result of a catastrophe, Deleuze and Guattari say, from turning away, tiredness, distress, and distrust (6–7). True thought is rare, painful, and usually forced on us by the brutality of an event so terrible that it cannot be resolved without the difficulty of thought. As such, we must quit treating concepts as some wonderful dowry from some wonderland to understand the hard, rigorous work that goes into their creation (5).

Productivism is Dark Deleuzes second object of criticism (connectivism being the first). It may be possible to distinguish concept creation from productivism, for the latter is commercial professional training that aspires for thought only beneficial from the viewpoint of universal capitalism (WP, 14). Maintaining such a distinction is difficult—in an age of compulsory happiness, it is easy for construction to be conflated with capitalist value, the empty promises of democracy, or just plain helpfulness (106–8). To that end, productivism distinguishes itself with two formal principles: accumulation and reproduction. First, productivism manages political conflicts through a logic of accumulation, as seen in the full mobilizations of World War II as well as in Stalins and Maos dreary attempts to outproduce the capitalist world system. Second, productivism limits production to reproduction, as capitalism attempts to do, by initiating only those circuits of production that operate on an expanding basis (what Lenin called imperialism). The significance of the critique of productivism is that it expands the grammar of power beyond what is beholden to accumulation or reproduction.

Dark Deleuze does not philosophically quibble with creation. But it is easy to get drowned out by those who praise Deleuze for his joy. The difficulty with joy is that it lies in the slippage between metaphysics and normativity. Michel Serres, for instance, remains steadfast that Deleuzes death must have been an accident because he felt that suicide was not in Deleuzes character or philosophy (Flint, Michel Serres Angels). Such liberties may be authorized by the term itself, as it comes from Spinozas Ethics, in which the line between the two is blurred. Joy surfaces as the feeling of pleasure that comes when a body encounters something that expands its capacities, which are affects said to agree with my nature, to be good or simply useful (S, 239). To end the story here (though some do) would reproduce a naive hedonism based on inquiries into subjects and their self-reported affective states. Spinozas theory of affects is not an affirmation of a subjects feelings but a proof of the inadequacy of critique. Affects are by-products emitted during the encounter that hint at a replacement for recognition or understanding as the feedback loop to indicate if knowledge was sufficient. But there are innumerable forms of knowledge, many of which invite stupidity or illusion. What characterizes Spinozas adequate knowledge is its ability to create something new—it is that knowledge then becomes identical to the construction of reality (138). This is why Spinoza says that God = nature; knowledge-as-God is defined as that thought which increases the capacity to make actions flourish in the natural world (I think, therefore I am active) (WP, 31). The implication is that critique is not effective in its own right, no matter how loudly it proclaims its truth. The only adequate knowledge is activity.

Deleuze corrupts the holism of an already heretical Spinoza through an old atomist proposition: the relation between two terms produces an independent third term. (Sometimes the relations of two bodies may agree so well that they form a third relation within which the two bodies are preserved and prosper; S, 239; H, 101). This is how Deleuze builds his metaphysics of positivity—all elements stand alone without recourse to (Hegelian) opposition, contradiction, or identity. Deleuze and Guattaris line of flight conceptually embodies the Nietzschean notion that things are not wholly dependent on their context of production. For them, anything that has gained its own internal consistency is free to travel outside its place of origin. They even define art this way—as impressions that have congealed enough to become their own mobile army of sensations (WP, 163–64). Deleuze and Guattaris contemporaries share this insight, most notably Foucaults strategic reversibility of power relations (History of Sexuality, 92–102) and Althussers aleatory materialism (Philosophy of the Encounter). For Foucault, the reversibility of power is illustrated in homosexuality, which is first created as a medical category of sexual perversion but grows into a whole way of life that spoke on its own behalf. For Althusser, the underground current of capitalism is made up of various noncontemporaneous elements always in a process of becoming-necessary that gels at certain felicitous moments, while the singular importance of each haunting contingency simultaneously reveals the systems unstable horizon. Atomism thus shows how the world supplies the materials for its destruction.

The powers of the outside, a component of Deleuzes thought largely driven underground, offer an additional escape. First, there is this books key pivot point: Deleuze and Guattari establish in Anti-Oedipus the autoproduction of the Real, which is a passive process that occurs largely beyond human understanding. Confusing metaphysics for politics, many Deleuzians parrot this production as a positive end unto itself. Yet a return to a politics worthy of the name communism demands the opposite, as the greatest system of autoproduction is capitalism, which throws billions into abject poverty, wages horrific wars of devastation, and subjects humanity to a growing matrix of social oppression. Appeals to the frailty of life only obscure the issue even more. To say something rather controversial, though well established by ecologists decades ago: life will survive us. All human concern for the world is ultimately selfish anthropocentrism, for it was never life that was at risk (the combined detonation of all the worlds nuclear weapons would be like a warm summer breeze to Gaia, I once heard), just the worlds capacity to sustain humans (Luke, Ecocritique; Stengers, In Catastrophic Times). Second, the way forward is to invite death, not to avoid it. Deleuze and Guattari suggest this in their reworking of the death drive. Similar sentiments are echoed in the punk ethos of no future, which paradoxically realizes that the only future we have comes when we stop reproducing the conditions of the present (Edelman, No Future). So let us stop romanticizing life and wish a happy death on calcified political forms, no-good solutions, and bad ways of thinking.

We must correct Deleuzes error: failing to cultivate a hatred for this world. It begins with the ambivalent joy of hatred—What my soul loves, I love. What my soul hates, I hate (F, 23; ECC, 135). Or to echo Proust, we must be harsh, cruel, and deceptive to what we love (P, 92). It is not even that Deleuze never mentioned hatred in a positive light; in fact, he often praises Nietzsches sense of cruelty and taste for destruction (DR, 53). Deleuze was too often overtaken by a naive affirmation of joy, and as such, he was unable to give hatred its necessary form. His image for the future resembles too much of the present, and those who repeat it have come to sound like a parody: rhizomatic gardens, cooperative self-production, and affirming the affirmative of life. Against those maxims, the Dark Deleuze is reborn as a barbarian depicted in Rimbauds season in hell: Im of a distant race: my forefathers were Scandinavian; they slashed their sides and drank their own blood. I will make cuts all over; Ill tattoo myself, I long to be as a hideous Mongol: youll see, Ill scream in the streets. I want to be mad with rage. . . . I dreamt of crusades, of unrecorded voyages of discovery, of republics without history, wars of suppressed religion, moral revolutions, movements of races and continents (A Season in Hell). Barbarian hatred is not to be indiscriminate, but it does not follow from a science of judgment. In fact, it is what is left after having done away with judgment (of God, of Man, and even of the World). Hatred is the ambivalent complement to love and, as such, can easily evade a decline into ressentiment. For ressentiment is just as much a depreciated image of love, as demonstrated by the Christian God who loved this world so much that he introduced the moral judgment of the ascetic ideal. In the end, hatred will prove to be just as important for the Death of this World as it was for the Death of God and the Death of Man.

From the Chapel to the Crypt

There are those who have hitherto only enlightened the world in various ways; the point is to darken it. Some speculate that humans first pondered the ways of the world under the brilliant light of the heavens. On that vast celestial stage, the gods played out great dramas of arts and culture. This cosmos also inspired the earliest sciences of mathematics and astronomy, which wove the many constellations into a single tapestry. As the light of the stars became cycles and then detailed calendars, so came the dawn of time.

A more modern story begins in 1609, when, upon hearing news of the Dutch invention of the telescope, Galileo created his own. Almost immediately, Galileo was peering into the dark quadrants of the moon and illustrating its angle of illumination. These discoveries would lead him to loudly endorse heliocentrism—replacing God with a new light at the center of the universe. Galileo curiously flaunts the rules of astronomy in his lunar record, as he does not date each ink wash according to its time of observation, nor does he make a photorealistic reproduction of the moons landscape (Gingrich and van Helden, From Occhiale to Printed Page, 258–62). Centuries of critics have tried to determine the source of Galileos inaccuracy. Johannis Hevelii, the father of stenography, wondered if Galileos instruments were too crude (Selenographia sive Lunae Descriptio, 205). Others suggest that he may have been too overtaken by the excitement of discovery (Kopal, The Moon, 225). But what if Galileo chose not to view the moon mathematically but philosophically? He was less concerned about its angles of illumination as an astronomical object than about what his telescopic perspicillum revealed about it as a cosmological concept. His styling of the moon reveals a way of seeing far more appropriate to baroque visual argument than to geographic measure. Galileos ink washes demonstrate the baroques beautiful convergences. Referring not to an essence but rather to an operative function, Galileos moon unfurls in the collision of multiple points of view as darkness and landscape meet in its leaping shadows (L, 3). More importantly, he marks a transition driven by the force of divergences, impossibilities, discords, dissonances (81). In a world no longer illuminated by the light of God, Galileo paints many possible borders between worlds in a chromatic scale so as to be irresolvable from the lens of any one camera set to a single angle (81). How, then, does one continue Galileos journey to the far side of the moon? By refusing divine harmony and instead conspiring with divergent underground worlds.

The most immediate instance of lightness, connectivism, is the realization of the techno-affirmationist dream of complete transparency. The fate of such transparency is depicted in Fritz Langs Metropolis. In it, the drive for complete communicability elevates transparency in the false transcendence of a New Tower of Babel. Deep in the shadows of the Lower City labors the working class, enslaved to the machines that automation promised to eliminate. Only in the catacombs does the secret rebellion commence. But instead of ending in Langs grand Hegelian mediation, it would be better to listen to the Whore of Babylon in Metropolis, who says, Lets watch the world go to hell. Such an untimely descent into darkness begins with a protest: lightness has far too long been the dominant model of thought. The road there descends from the chapel to the crypt.

Crypts are by their very nature places of seclusion. Early Christians facing public persecution fled to the underground catacombs below Rome, where they could worship in secret (Essay upon Crypts, 73–77). Early basilicas contain crypts as a second church under their choirs, featuring a vaulted ceiling, many columns, several aisles, and an altar (Lübke, Ecclesiastical Art, 24–25). Some great churches even included a second crypt dedicated to a particular saint (26). At times, when sacred objects are of special interest, crypts of especially renowned saints have inspired mass pilgrimages (Spence-Jones, Early Christianity and Paganism, 269). Deleuze notes that these spaces fold in on themselves, simultaneously expressing the autonomy of the inside and the independence of the façade as an inside without an outside or an outside without an inside, depending on how you approach it (L, 28). Looking at El Grecos great baroque mannerist painting The Burial of Count Orgaz, we are given the choice. Above the great horizontal line, a gathering of saints ascends to the height of Jesus, whose own ascension grants the heavens eternal lightness. Below, a communion of cloaked, pale men crowd together to lay the count to rest under a dark background illuminated only by torchlight. The painting reveals the baroque truth of knowledge: for ages there have been places where what is seen is inside: a cell, a sacristy, a crypt, a church, a theater, a study, or a print room (L, 27–28). So beyond the association of crypts with rot and death, it is a projection of subterranean architectural power.

From the crypt, Dark Deleuze launches a conspiracy. It is fueled by negativity, but not one of antimonies. Following Freud, negation is not a necessary by-product of consciousness. The lesson to be drawn from him is that negation is finding a way to say no to those who tell us to take the world as it is. To this end, the path forward is Deleuzes nondialectical negation, the contrary, which operates as the distance between two exclusive paths (LS, 172–80). Klossowski identifies the goal of the conspiracy as breaking the collusion between institutionalized morality, capitalism, and the state (Circulus Vitiosus). He then shows how Nietzsches laughter can be used as an experimental instrument to dissolve all identities into phantasms. A number of commentators have tried to rehabilitate the conspiracy on the basis of an esoteric/exoteric distinction, whereby exoteric discourses are the mere public face to a deeper paranoia whose desire is concealed in an esoteric code. To the extent that it is true, in his book Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Klossowski warns that the esoteric tradition must be avoided because it demystifies only in order to mystify better (131). The point is not to replace angelic messages with arcane ones. This raises an important question: what is an appropriately cryptic language? Deleuze and Guattari note that the man of war brings the secret: he thinks, eats, loves, judges, arrives in secret, while the man of the state proceeds publicly (TP, 543–44). Fortunately, in our conspiratorial world of phantasms, one does not hold a secret but instead becomes a secret. Even if she ends up spilling everything, it turns out to be nothing. Why? The secret first hides within dominant forms to limit exposure, yet what it smuggles inside is not any specific thing that needs to evade discovery. Rather, it is a perception of the secret that spreads under the shroud of secrecy: perception + secret = the secret as secretion. Conspiracies do not remain limited to a few furtive missives; their creeping insinuations are part of a universal project to permeate all of society (TP, 286–89). The best conspiracy is when it has nothing left to hide.

There is an affective dimension to our conspiracy. Pessimism becomes a necessity when writing in an era of generalized precarity, extreme class stratification, and summary executions of people of color. The trouble with the metaphysics of difference is that it does not immediately suggest a positive conception of alienation, exploitation, or social death. To the extent that those who affirm difference and its intensifications do make such violence thinkable, it appears as the consequence of deprivation. As a result, they cannot explain the simultaneous connection–separation of a body alienated from their own powers. Such joyousness makes no place for Marxs theory of exploitation in which one class systematically extracts profit by expanding the capacities of another. The conspiracy offers a way out. On the affective level, it takes the ambivalence of hatred to grasp how ones own capacities are the yoke of his oppression. On the level of strategy, it takes deep, labyrinthine paths to develop a cryptography. To do so myself, I reenact Winstons trips to the shallow alcove of his apartment in 1984 to keep our own illicit diary of slogans. This is how I learned to find my own way to say down with big brother and If there is hope, it lies with the proles (181). This is because the ultimate task of Dark Deleuze is but a modest one: to keep the dream of revolution alive in counterrevolutionary times.

The conspiracy Dark Deleuze is a series of contraries. Contraries are not poles, which are dialectical opposites that ultimately complement each other. To distill a central argument from Deleuzes magnum opus Difference and Repetition, philosophy has (to its detriment) taken the nature of thinking to be the establishment of equivalence or logical identity between two terms (59). As such, contrasts must avoid relating terms on the basis of a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imagined opposition, or a perceived similitude (138). Deleuze summarizes this argument in an interview: It was Lévi-Strauss, I think, who showed you had to distinguish the following two propositions: that only similar things can differ , and only different things can be similar (N 156). There is a second reason for avoiding opposites: opposites imply a golden mean whereby the optimal place is found somewhere in between each extreme. Such middling compromise is the greatest tragedy of Deleuze and Guattaris rhetorical presentation of what appear to be dualisms (smooth/striated, molar/molecular, arborescent/rhizomatic) in A Thousand Plateaus. The unfortunate effect is a legion of noncommittal commentators who preach the moderation of the middle. In response, we must contaminate every last one of those conceptual pairs with a third term that arrives from the outside. Deleuze and Guattari set the example in how they reimagine Dumézils tripartite state as two opposing poles besieged by a third term that arrives from the outside. Such a reformulation would more closely follow Deleuzes atomism of two terms relating through the production of an independent third term. To make the stakes clear: we are told in A Thousand Plateaus that the state is made of two opposing poles, one liberal and one authoritarian, that in fact work in a complementarity not dissimilar from the dialectical logic of determinate negation—this is the model of relation that must be avoided at all costs (for more, see the section Difference: Exclusive Disjunction, Not Inclusive Disjunction) (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna). This is why Dark Deleuze contrasts dark to joyous and not dark to light or joyous to sad. Each contrary is a forking path, an alternate route for every instance one is tempted by affirmation.

Listed in what follows are the contrasting terms. In the column on the left, I list a series of tasks. Across each column I have placed two contrary approaches, one joyous and one dark. The association each term has to its contrary is purely incidental. Each terms contrariness is not given, as if one implied the other—I propose dark terms simply on their ability to unexpectedly usurp the operations of their contraries. Contrary approaches should be taken as mutually exclusive, as they are independent processes each meant to fulfill the given task without recourse to the other. What makes them dark is the position of exteriority from which the irregular forces of darkness attack the joy of state thought. The foreignness of relation is why each pair of contrasting terms is notably imbalanced.

My ultimate purpose is to convince readers to completely abandon all the joyous paths for their dark alternatives. The best scenario would be that these contraries fade into irrelevance after Dark Deleuze achieves its ostensible goal: the end of this world, the final defeat of the state, and full communism. It is far more likely that various aspects of darkness will be captured along the way. Like any other war machine, a dark term is defeated when it isomorphically takes on relations or forms of its joyous counterpart. So it is worth uttering a cautionary note from A Thousand Plateaus: even when contrary, never believe that darkness will suffice to save us.

The Extinction of Being

The Task: Destroy Worlds, Not Create Conceptions

The conspiracy against this world will be known through its war machines. A war machine is itself a pure form of exteriority that explains nothing, but there are plenty of stories to tell about them (TP, 354, 427). They are the heroes of A Thousand Plateaus—Kleists skull-crushing war machine, the migratory war machine that the Vandals used to sack Rome, the gun that Black Panther George Jackson grabs on the run, and the queer war machine that excretes a thousand tiny sexes. Each time there is an operation against the state—insubordination, rioting, guerilla warfare, or revolution as an act—it can be said that a war machine has revived (386). War machines are also the greatest villains of A Thousand Plateaus, making all other dangers pale by comparison (231)—there is the constant state appropriation of the war machine that subordinates war to its own aims (418), the folly of the commercial war machine (15), the paranoia of the fascist war machine (not the state army of totalitarianism) (230–31), and, worst of them all, the worldwide war machine of capitalism, whose organization exceeds the State apparatus and passes into energy, military–industrial, and multinational complexes to wage peace on the whole world (387, 419–21, 467).

Make thought a war machine, Deleuze and Guattari insist. Place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside (TP, 376–77). Two important inventions follow: speed and secrecy. These are the affects of the war machine, its weapons of war, which transpierce the body like arrows (356, 394). The resulting violence is not so vulgar as to encourage blow-by-blow bloodletting or a once-and-for-all immediate killing but institutes an economy of violence whose hatred is unlimited and therefore durable. The war machine engages in war along two poles: one forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe, while the other draws a line of flight for the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space (422). Deleuze and Guattari would prefer to promote the connectivist line by saying they make war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something else (423). But today, that path leads to collusion with capitalisms drive toward creative destruction (Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, 87). This is certainly not lost on those in Silicon Valley who spread the mantra of disruptive innovation. We can thus take heed of Deleuze and Guattaris warning against treating terms as having an irresistible revolutionary calling (387). It is time to accept Nietzsches invitation to philosophize with a hammer, rendered here in the voice of Krishna: I am become Time, the destroyer of worlds. We must find an appetite for destruction that does not betray Deleuze and Guattaris abolitionist dream. This takes the progressive, anxiety-ridden revelation that destroying worlds is just another way of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine by other means (385, 417, 372).

Make the whole world stand still. Indeed, it may be the only way to think the present in any significant sense. To be clear: the suspension of the world is not a hunt for its conditions of reproduction or a meditative rhapsody of sensations (DR, 56). It is thought that treats the world as if struck by an unspecified disaster, where the best friends you have left are your own ideas. This is not the banal disaster movie, whose ambitions are usually limited to teaching us what are the bare essentials to survive. Writing the disaster is how we break free from the stifling perpetual present, for the present carries with itself a suffocating urgency. The present imposes material limits. To it, the past and the future are the empty form of time, and they must endure the complications of having a body to become part of the present (LS, 146–47, 165). The past and the future exist in their own right only through representation—the former in history as the present memorialization of things passed and the latter in the yet to come as the projection of an image of the present (147). Such re-presentation is why the future appears with the distinct impression that we have seen it all before (Flaxman, Fabulation of Philosophy, 392). The productivist sees the event of thought as an eminently practical reorientation toward the present achieved while generating a new image of the future (WP, 58). In contrast, those learning to hate the world must short-circuit the here and now to play out the scene differently. While still being in this world, they turn away from it. This is the life of characters so agitated that they force the world to stand still—Dostoyevskys Idiot, the head of Kurosawas seven samurai (TR, 317–18). Against bleating urgency that there a fire, theres fire . . . Ive got to go, they insist that everything could burn to the ground but nothing happens, because one must seek out a more urgent problem!

There are those who say that we already have one foot in utopia; but would it not be more suitable to say that we have both feet firmly planted in a present slouching toward dystopia? Deleuze and Guattari call on utopia in their search for a new people and a new earth (WP, 99). They look to Samuel Butler, dissecting his Erewhon as a simultaneous now-here and no-where (100). Yet a closer examination of his novel reveals utopia to be a farce. While not exactly a dystopia, the utopia Erewhon is a comic satire of the British Empire. The narrator is a crass traveler with settler colonial dreams who catalogs the strange ways of Erewhon—in chapters 10 and 11, he outlines how they punish the sick (convicted of aggravated bronchitis) and sentence the misfortunate to hard labor (ill luck of any kind . . . is considered an offense against society) but nurture financial transgressions with medicine (taken to a hospital and most carefully tended at the public expense). Beyond being an object lesson in reading footnotes, Deleuze and Guattaris reference to Erewhon demands an attention to the exact configuration of conceptual devices (dispositifs) and how power flows through them. Link thought with its epoch, they suggest, begin with a survey to identify whatever forces are already circulating and then work with them—connecting up with what is real here and now in the struggle against capitalism, relaunching new struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed (100). They warn of proud affirmation as the guise of restoration that opens the door to transcendence, such as appeals to truth, right, or authority (100). For Butler, Erewhon summons neither a new people nor a new earth but is instead a field guide to negate everything he finds intolerable in his present. Utopia becomes the map to transform the now-here into the no-where.

It should have been an apocalyptic book, laments Deleuze, disappointed that the old style Difference and Repetition did not make apparent a key implication—he killed God, humankind, and even the world (xxi). The Death of God began long before Deleuze, who sees Feuerbach as completing it long before Nietzsche with the proposition that since man has never been anything but the unfold of man, man must fold and refold God (F, 130). Nietzsche identifies a different problem: that God was reborn in the form of Man. For Deleuze, it takes Foucault to establish the finitude of humanity—Man has not always existed, and will not exist forever—thus sealing its fate (F, 124). But to destroy the world . . . that is the truly heretical proposition. A small group of dissident Deleuze scholars have rallied around the slogan that there is no ‘ontology of Deleuze—Gregory Flaxman, Anne Sauvagnargues, Gregg Lambert, and François Zourabichvili, to name a few (Zourabichvili, A Philosophy of the Event, 36). The statement does not imply that ontology is an illusion, but criticizing those who build a Deleuzian system around a coherent ontology of the world is ill considered, as it fails draw a line to the outside—to incalculable forces, to chance and improvisation, to the future (Flaxman, Politics and Ontology, XX). Blazing such a path may require the extinction of the term ‘being and therefore of ontology, or in so many words, a destruction of this world (37). Deleuze and Guattari suggest as much when they propose to overthrow ontology (TP, 25). Summed up, this stance names the joyful pessimist Deleuze. Too restless to stop there, the Dark Deleuze broadens the coup de force into a fierce pessimism that shatters the cosmos.

The Subject: Un-becoming, Not Assemblages

Subjectivity is shameful—subjects are born quite as much from misery as from triumph (N, 151). It grows from the seeds of a composite feeling made from the compromises with our time: the shame of being alive, the shame of indignity, the shame that it happens to others, the shame that others can do it, and the shame of not being able to prevent it (WP, 108, 225). Existence is the result of a disaster, yet it says very little about us; it does not explain but rather must be explained. This is what makes shame one of philosophys most powerful motifs (108). The subject is always something derivative that comes into being and vanishes in the fabric of what one says, what one sees, resembling specks dancing in the dust of the visible and permutations in an anonymous babble (N, 108). This does not keep some from clinging to their shame. On this account, Deleuze has nothing but scorn for identity politics—we have to counter people who think ‘Im this, Im that . . . arguments from ones own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments (N, 11–12). Shame is our defense against these people, queer theorists remind us, and it must be put to work on them as a weapon—an affect that acts as a solvent to dissolve whatever binds it to an identity (Halperin and Traub, Beyond Gay Pride, 25). There are those who have worked to square identity with Deleuze (Donna Haraway, Tim Dean, Jasbir Puar, Édouard Glissant). Their theorizations only avoid the problem of shame to the extent that they make identitys many perforations into points of leverage and transformed differences into a million cutting edges.

For some, the world is made up of assemblages, and all assemblages are subjects. In no time, people, hurricanes, and battles all get addressed in the same register (as all subjects should be afforded proper names)! Although this is, perhaps, technically true, such assemblage-thinking misses the point—it reduces subjectivity to the name we use to pin down the sum of a bodys capacities (AT, 256–57). It sanctifies a bloodless world by cataloging the networks that make up its many attributes. This is why assemblage-modeling is a perfect fit in a world where capitalism produces subjectivity the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars (AO, 245). Further proof of its noxious conservativsm is arch-thinkers Manuel DeLandas and Bruno Latours dismissive rejection of Marxism. Fortunately, Deleuze already warned us by channeling Spinoza on the limits of adequate knowledge, in the often-repeated words that we do not know what a body is capable of (NP, 39). The phrase should not be read as an appeal to some evasive essence but simply as applying a principle of Deleuzes transcendental empiricism, which holds that the conditions of actual experience are not represented through empirical tracing (DR, 95, 221, 321). This is crucial, because philosophy is too easily thrown back into the transcendental illusions through the personal identitarian experiences built by self-centered habits of mind (DR, 207–8, 73, 119). The pitfall of run-of-the-mill empiricists is that even in the best-case scenario, when they step out of the perspective of the subject, they still reduce existence to conditions of reproduction or chart somethings degree of freedom. For us, then, the subject should be spoken about scornfully as simply the sum of a bodys habits, most of which are marshaled to evade thought.

The undoing of the subject is un-becoming. Deleuze withholds praise for the subject but does not deny it a place, unlike Althusser, who theorizes subjectivity without a subject (Badiou, Althusser, 58–67). But subjects are only interesting when they cast a line to the outside—in short, when they stop being subjects (with a double emphasis on being and subjects) (N, 99). This process is how Deleuze describes Foucaults subjectivization, which is not a coming back to subjectivity to rescue it but the disintegration of the subject as it evaporates into a field of forces where neither persons nor identities survive (N, 93). This is the secret to becoming, for it has nothing to do with subjects developing into more of themselves. Becoming is really a process of un-becoming. In what Elizabeth Grosz calls undoing the givenness of the given of Becoming Undone, un-becoming exercises undoing, a process that works to undo the stabilities of identity, knowledge, location, and being (210, 3). But in proposing undoing as an alternative to subjectivity, it is necessary to be specific about how to orient the process. While it is easy for an aesthete to indulge in the powers of the outside like a good after-dinner drink, letting loose, freeing up, and putting into play, undoing can fulfill the higher purpose of nursing a hatred for this world (55). For it is only when we locate something intolerable outside ourselves that we will leap beyond shame and transform paltry undertakings into a war of resistance and liberation (ECC, 125).

Existence: Transformation, Not Genesis

Philosophy has always maintained an essential relation to the law, the institution, and the contract (DI, 259). Foundations thus hold a special place in philosophy, with philosophers obsessively writing and rewriting the book of Genesis. It is Kant, the great thinker of the genetic condition, who finally turns the philosopher into the Judge at the same time that reason becomes a tribunal (WP, 72). Deleuze refuses to disown his own in the beginning. But for him, the movement of thought follows an explosive line whose genesis comprises problems manifest from imperceptible forces that disrupt habits of mind. Such thinking does not build a courthouse of reason whereby each advance in thought confirms more about what was already self-evident, as if developing an elaborate mirror of the world (N 38–39; DR 129). In contrast, the enemy Kant does something intolerable by creating a theory of law that diverts the ungrounding called thought, ending its journey to an unrecognized terra incognita (DI 58; DR 136). He does this by reversing the Greeks, making it so the law does not depend on the good like a material substrate and instead deriving the good from law—the good is that which the law expresses when it expresses itself (K, 43). Expressing their disapproval, Deleuze and Guattari draw a portrait of Kant that depicts him as a vampiric death machine feeding off the world (WP, 56). But even as Kant makes the law rational, he opens up a way out in the third critique through a synthesis that allows a free harmony of the faculties, though he is quick to betray it (WP, 32, 46, 100). Latching on to this furtive insight, Deleuze advances a mobile war machine in its place, to be used against the rational administrative machine of philosophers who would be the bureaucrats of pure reason (DI, 259). And in making thought into a siege engine, it gains the nomadic force of transformation. The key is to avoid founding a new order on a new image of world. Fortunately, we can follow the pure idea of Toynbees nomads who shed their habits so they do not have to leave their habitats.

Ontology: Materialism, Not Realism

Our appetite produces the real. But do not mistake the real for a simple projection—it is real through and through. I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desire, says the streets of Paris in 1968 (Anonymous, Graffiti). In response, Deleuze and Guattari say that the real is not impossible, on the contrary, within the real everything is possible, everything becomes possible (AO, 27). The only reason that we lack anything, they say, is that our social system deprives us of what we desire. On this account, our taste is not a correlationist yearning, as Quentin Meillassoux calls it in After Finitude, which would say that we are reaching for a thing-in-itself always outside the grasp of our perception. Yet this should not lead us to embrace the philosophical realism that connectivists apologize for as an attack on anthropocentrism. Things exist independently of perception, the realists assert to bring the Death of Man. But they forget that there is no such thing as either man or nature when there is simply the production of production itself (AO, 2). So while there is no man, nature also must vanish. Without treating the real as truly artificial, thought is regrounded as a theology of this world that plugs all the leaks to the outside.

A superior materialism constructs a real that is yet to come (TP, 142). It does not follow so-called new materialism, which is really just a new form of animism, but Marxist materialism as the revolutionary subversion of material necessity. Deleuze and Guattari find their superior materialism by exchanging the theater of representation for the factory of production. It is the materialism of Epicurus and the atomism of the swerve as the necessity of contingency (Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, 174). This permanent revocation of the fait accompli is at work in politics of destruction, which has too long been mistaken for deliberation but is instead exemplified by the war machines of popular insurrection whose success is registered by the streets themselves—consider the words of the Invisible Committee in To Our Friends: Like any specific strike, it is a politics of the accomplished fact. It is the reign of the initiative, of practical complicity, of gesture. As to decision, it accomplishes that in the streets, reminding those whove forgotten, that ‘popular comes from the Latin populor, ‘to ravage, devastate. It is a fullness of expression . . . and a nullity of deliberation (54). By showing the nondurability of what is taken as real, so-called reality itself, communist politics is a conspiracy that writes the destruction of the world.

Difference: Exclusive Disjunction, Not Inclusive Disjunction

Too much! is a potential rallying cry—too many products, too many choices, too much of this world! Instead, become contrary! Difference, for Deleuze, is the result of a disjunctive synthesis that produces a series of disjointed and divergent differences (LS, 174–76, 177–80). Importantly, these differences can be immediately brought together at a distance through resonance, globally coordinated, or contracted into a divergent multitude (172–76). Following the rule always perversify, Deleuze and Guattari propose including disjunctions in a mad mixture of world-historical, political, and racial content as a strategy for scrambling oppressive codes (AO, 15, 88–89).

Global capitalism quickly caught on. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have shown us how it rules over a virtual Empire of difference that eagerly coordinates a wide arrangement of diverging differences while also producing many more of its own (Empire, 44–45, 138–56, 190–201, 339–43). Capital is now indistinguishable from the exemplary subject, the schizo, who is voiced by Nietzsche in his wild claims to be all the names of history (AO, 86)! Power is now diffuse, and the antagonism of Marxs class war has been drowned in an overwhelming sea of difference. This development calls for a reorientation that entails learning how to become contrary. In the case of Dark Deleuze, the contrarian position is the forced choice of this, not that. Deleuze is perfectly happy to demand no possible compromise between Hegel and Nietzsche (NP, 195). Why not experiment with our own exclusive disjunctive synthesis that is limited, restrictive, and constrained? Hardt and Negri take their cue from those in the Global South who homogenize real differences to name the potential unity of an international opposition, the confluence of anticapitalist countries and forces (Empire, 334). A better response has been the terrifying screams of no that occasionally break apart its grand accords (Holloway, The Scream, 1). Though not demanding the suppression of difference, the problem of Empire reignites the necessity of conspiracy, the power of hatred, and the task of destroying worlds.

Advancing toward Nothing

Diagram: Asymmetry, Not Complexity

The ‘nothing (Heidegger), the ‘trace or ‘différance (Derrida), the ‘surplus always exterior to the totality (Levinas), the ‘differend (Lyotard), ‘the invisible (Althusser), and the ‘pariah (Arendt), ‘the jew (Lyotard), the ‘migrant (Virilio), the ‘nomad (Deleuze and Guattari), the ‘hybrid (Bhabha), the ‘catachrestic remainder (Spivak), the ‘non-being (Dussel), the ‘refugee (Agamben), and, most resonantly, the ‘émigré (Said), are the terms literary theorist William Spanos uses to describe the fleeting figures of the late twentieth century (Question of Philosophy, 173). Each term names a conflict between differences in kind, mapping lines of flight to the outside and those who dwell there. They speak of effects not equal to their cause. The generic term for this relation is asymmetry, which expresses difference as formal inequivalence. Asymmetry works to impede reciprocal relations and prevent reversibility. It diagrammatically starts by constituting two formally distinct terms as contrary asymmetry. It is maintained by concretely establishing a relationship of incommensurability between their sets of forces.

Complexity is snake oil in the age of singularity—everyone and everything is a unique snowflake, what relations they can establish is not predetermined, and what they can become is limited most by how well they apply themselves! Any criticism of complexity must take into account its three levels: complexity as a fact, complexity as a resource, and complexity as deferral. As a fact, it culminates in a flat ontology that stitches together difference into a strange alliance of philosophy and science (Delanda, Intensive Science, 46–47). Though offering some provocative insights, this flattening still often leads to a uniformization of diversity and equalization of inequality (DR, 223). As a resource, the labyrinthine structure of complex systems can both mobilize and impair forces. Such complexity multiplies paths, which stocks ones arsenal with either a range of new options (as in de Certeaus tactics) or a trap to bog down their opponents (Kafkas The Trial). It is this second aspect that contributes to the third dimension of complexity: deferral. A matters complexity has become a way to defer a sufficient answer (it is too complex for me to give a complete answer now . . .). The trouble with deferral is its collusion with capitalist time, which delays the arrival of the proletarian revolution (Balibar, Philosophy of Marx, 101). Just ask complexity progenitor Stuart Kauffman, who now speaks in a mixture of religious mysticism and computational entrepreneurship (Reinventing the Sacred; Kauffman et al., Economic Opportunity).

Deleuze outlines his case for asymmetry in Difference and Repetition. Everything we know is the work of a calculating god whose numbers fail to add up, he says (DR, 222). The effect is a basic injustice, an irreducible inequality, that is the world (222). If the calculations were exact there would be no world, Deleuze argues, that makes the world itself the remainder that is the real in the world understood in terms of fractional or even incommensurable numbers (222). This asymmetry is not meant as a refutation of the dubious hypothesis of the computational universe, though he does thoroughly show how the partial truth of energetics (e.g., the thermodynamics of entropy) is a transcendental physical illusion that should not be applied to the rest of the world (225, 229). The wider significance of asymmetry is an alternative to dialectics. A dialectical framing of gender, for instance, would establish an intrinsic relation between masculinity and femininity, hopelessly entangling each within each other. Extracted from dialectics, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker note in their media theory of the exploit that it is not simply that feminism is opposed to patriarchy, but that they are asymmetrically opposed; racism and antiracism are not just opposed but exist in a relationship of asymmetry (The Exploit, 14). The result is a formal mechanism for political antagonism that draws on the powers of the outside.

Asymmetry is ultimately a question of combat, even if it is formally established diagrammatically. Its best realization was the twentieth-century guerrilla. The guerilla demonstrates two things about asymmetry: first, each side is opposed in terms of its strategic imperatives, but second, as each side varies in orientation, it also varies in type. As Henry Kissinger writes about the American strategy in The Vietnam Negotiations for Foreign Affairs,

we fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape—to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance. (214)

Fact: while the United States was fighting a war, Vietnam was engaged in combat; one for domination, the other for freedom (ECC, 132–35). This is how Marxist struggles for national liberation raised formal asymmetry as a resource for world-historical proportions. Mao defeated the national army of China with guerrillas who move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea. Che helped Castros rebels flood the countryside so that they could spark a revolution that would eventually consume the cities. We must find ways to avoid complexity from deferring our own full guerrilla warfare (LS, 156–57).

Affect: Cruelty, Not Intensity

The story of a tyrant: finding his cruelty mollified, God burdens the world with infinite debt. Before him, memories were written on the body in a terrible alphabet so as never to forget them (AO, 145). This system was cruel but finite, which allowed it to form elaborate crisscrossing systems that warded off the centralization of power, such as potlatches (190). A paranoid despot arrives from the outside, as described by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality, installing history just like lightning appears, too terrible, sudden, with the founding of the state to redirect the horizontal lines of alliance up and toward himself. Finite is made infinite—everything is owed to the king (AO, 192). Against the infinite torture of unlimited debt, cruelty combats both history and the judgment of God with a writing of blood and life that is opposed to the writing of the book (ECC, 128). Cruelty returns as language written on flesh—terrible signs that lacerate bodies and stain them as the incisions and pigments that reveal what they owe and are owed (AO, 128). Only then does the eternal collapse into the finitude of our existence.

Ours is the most cruel of all worlds (DI, 108). Cruelty has a lighter cousin, intensity, which induces the event of individuation that affirms difference without resorting to extensions depth (DR, 233). The definition of intensity as felt has been the source of incredible confusion. Having reduced intensity to a special kind of feeling, practitioners of affect studies perform autoethnographies of the ineffable. This is quite peculiar given the antiphenomenology of Deleuzes transcendental empiricism, which is explicitly nonhuman, prepersonal, and asubjective. Instead of intensity as a strong feeling, cruelty more aptly describes the being of the sensible as the demons, the sign-bearers, who bring thought to us (266). Consider how Deleuzes Difference and Repetition opens with lightning streaking through the black sky and ends with all the drops of the world swelling into a single ocean of excess (28, 304). Toward the end, he tells us that history presides over every determination since the birth of the world (219). Even though it may not progress by its bad side, as Marx would have it through his critique of Proudhon, history is not any less bloody or cruel as a result (268).

Artauds Theater of Cruelty gives shape to the way forward. He would be amused by the cinematic experiment of A Clockwork Orange. His theatrical cruelty targets those who see themselves as Alex—those who complain, I can no longer think what I want, the moving images-are-substituted for my own thoughts (C2, 166). The resulting theater is not for telling stories but to empower, to implant images in the brains of those powerless to stop it (174, 166). The cruel force of these images strikes something in the skull but not the mind (a nerve? brain matter?) (167). But the only thought it allows us to ponder is the fact that we are not yet thinking, that we are powerless to think the whole and to think oneself, a thought which is always fossilized, dislocated, collapsed (167). Cruelty here is a dissociative force, a figure of nothingness, and a hole in appearance good only for unlinking us from ourselves (167).

Organization: Unfolding, Not Rhizome

Enough with rhizomes. Although they were a suggestive image of thought thirty-five years ago, our present is dominated by the Cold War technology of the Internet that was made as a rhizomatic network for surviving nuclear war. The rhizome was a convincing snapshot of things to come, but Deleuze and Guattari left out a few things, most notably the question of movement. How does a rhizome advance, except in the crawl of the blob that slowly takes over everything? This is probably why connectivists have come to revere it—the alleged open ecology of the network specifies nothing except the bluster of its own inevitability. We know better than to think that a rhizome is enough to save us. Even something as rhizomatic as the Internet is still governed by a set of decentralized protocols that helps it maintain its consistency—the drawback being that these forms of control are diffuse, not immediately apparent, and difficult to resist (Galloway, Protocol, 61–72).

A contrary path: cast a line to the outside! These lines are found in folds, which are what connects a world where relations are external to their terms (H, 101). It is through the external bridge of the fold that a world where terms exist like veritable atoms communicates through their irreducible exteriority (DI, 163). More importantly, folding is movement. The inside is not erased from this world; rather, the interior is an operation of the outside (F, 97). Such in-folding is a structuration, the folding back on itself of the fiber to form a compact structure that transforms mere sedimentation into hardened strata (TP, 42). It is in this way that we can understand folding as a double-relation of force enveloping itself (and not of some forces relation to others) as found in inorganic life, biological evolution, art, and thought (N, 92). But folding only accounts for one moment in the rhythm of movement; it is complemented by unfolding—to unfold is to increase to grow; whereas to fold is to diminish, to reduce, ‘to withdraw into the recesses of a world (L, 8–9).

Although called joyous by some, the great unfolding sparks an experience of terror driven by the question, how far can we unfold the line without falling into a breathless void, into death, and how can we fold it, but without losing touch with it, to produce an inside copresent with the outside, corresponding to the outside? (N, 113). A boring biological example is an animals deterritorialization of its milieu by in-folding a function by way of an organ that enables it to escape to form new relations with a new outside, such as a tetrapods water retrainment, which enabled it to carry the sea with it on land. The most exciting version of unfolding operates purely in time. As a narrative device, unfolding builds tension until it suddenly bursts open like a spring (N, 151). Expectation, anticipation, climax, release. Modern Times is a masterful piece of unfolding. At a certain point (the moment Charlie Chaplin makes the board fall on his head for a second time), the film unfolds with the short-circuits of a disconnected piece of machinery (AO, 317). We cease to identify with the main character and instead envelop his events, surprises, premonitions, and habits. There is no more to unfold at dawn as the couple, seen from the back, all black, whose shadows are not projected by any sun, advance toward nothing (317). A line of telegraph poles on the left and pathetic trees on the right, the two fade into an empty road with no horizon—disappearing as they unfold into the void.

Unfolding operates through conduction, not communication—at least according to Jean-François Lyotard in Libidinal Economy (254–62). As a conductor of affects, unfolding does not build capacities through the accumulative logic of rhizomes, which changes through addition or subtraction. Unfoldings disconnection is not the dampening of power but the buildup of charges that jump across the divide. This operation is so vital that Deleuze elevates unfolding to the absolute of unfolding substance itself (S, 310). Yet this process always takes place through a body, which stands at the limit of wild unfolding. The body staves off the operation of vertigo that comes from chasing after the tiny and moving folds that waft me along at excessive speed (L, 93). Seen from its slower speed, we see that unfolding generates force. Consider Lyotards project of an invulnerable conspiracy, headless, homeless, with neither programme nor project, which begins by deploying a thousand cancerous tensors (262) across the bodys great ephemeral skin:

Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, hair, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set with lashes—but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit; as though your dressmakers scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestines alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the duodenum, or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its comers, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it. Spread out the bats wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. (1–2)

Though Lyotards account is compelling, we must remain more vigilant. For what is it that fuels capitalism if not the massive energy generated through the unfolding of bodies? This is what inspires the famous line of The Manifesto of the Communist Party, whereby the constant revolutionizing of the forces of production leads to an uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation summarized in the phrase all that is solid melts into air (chapter 1). But to be clear: communism is revolutionary because it too believes in the process of dissolution. Capitalism is to be criticized for falling short—it pairs the conductive power of unfolding with the rhizomatic logic of accumulation. A communism worthy of its name pushes unfolding to its limit.

Ethics: Conspiratorial Communism, Not Processual Democracy

Democracy should be abolished. Spinozist champions of democracy, such as Antonio Negri, consider Deleuze a fellow traveler. Some Deleuzians have even tried to smuggle democracy back into his metaphysics, some even pervert him into a liberal. Yet Deleuze lumps nothing but hatred upon democracy—summarized by his mocking of the phrases Everything is equal! and Everything returns! at the beginning and end of Difference and Repetition. Against the principle of equivalence implied in the first, he agrees with Nietzsche, who criticizes contract, consensus, and communication. Against the principle of continuity implied in the second, he agrees with Marx, who rejects the liberal proceduralism that underwrites rights as an obfuscation of power. More than enough ink has been spilled to support both of these positions. But to get the tenor pitch perfect, it is worth mentioning that Deleuze and Guattari viciously criticize democracy in their collaborations, usually by calling it the cousin of totalitarianism. They discuss democracy, fascism, and socialism as all related in Anti-Oedipus (261). In A Thousand Plateaus, they discuss military democracy (394), social democracy as the complementary pole of the State to totalitarianism (462), totalitarian-social democracy (463), and a poverty-stricken Third World social democracy (468). In What Is Philosophy?, they speak of Athenian colonizing democracy (97), hegemonic democracy (98), democracy being caught up with dictatorial states (106), a social democracy that has given the order to fire when the poor come out of their territory or ghetto (107), and a Nazi democracy (108), which all lead them to conclude that their utopian new people and a new earth . . . will not be found in our democracies (108). Together, they can be neatly summarized: no matter how perfect, democracy always relies on a transcendent sovereign judgment backed by the threat of force. Only twice is Deleuze caught with his pants down in regard to democracy, both in moments of pandering—once in a letter to Antonio Negris jailers that appeals through self-distance to everyone committed to democracy, and again when discussing Americas virile and popular loves in a brief paean to Walt Whitman (TR, 169; ECC, 60). All other democratic Deleuzes are the inventions of his commentators.

Deleuze happily embraces a Marxism so anti-State that it refuses the project of democracy. It is up to us to render his Marxism in darker terms than Rancière, who would rather break down the state through the democratic dissensus of aesthesis acting as the power of an ontological difference between two orders of reality (Dissensus, 180). Outright, darkness begins by subverting Negris joyous celebration of democracy, which offers a productivist composition of forces as both the conditions of and resolution to capitalism (Ruddick, Politics of Affect). If Negriism was true, the only thing left for us to do is to dump the bosses off our backs (Hardt, Common in Communism). But the balance of power is far too ambivalent to make the epochal declaration that a revolutionary subject, such as the multitude, has already been produced and merely needs to be found. Our mad black communism is not a reworking of Marxs universalism, which is the seamless unity of thought and action that can be found in productivist appeals to immanence as immediate and unmediated, that is to say, automatic (PI, 29; DR, 29). On this account, an a priori communism is too dangerously close to Kant (DI, 60). We have no use for the judgment of a communist natura, which comes from the Joyous Deleuzians confusion of metaphysics for politics. Neither automatic or automated, our communism is not tempted by the fully automated luxury communism of cybernetics, which is a temptation only from the perspective of control societies. Our communism is nothing but the conspiracy of communism (against ontology). It is the conspiracy to destroy the factory of production. As a conspiracy, communism is a war machine that turns the autoproductive processes of the Real into weapons for destroying any project built on metaphysical consistency. It targets the collusion between the creation of concepts and the reproduction of this world. In this sense, it wages a guerilla struggle against those who joyfully affirm the ontology of Deleuze. It is a conspiracy for at least two reasons: first, it has a penchant for negativity that makes its revolutionary force appear as a conspiracy against everything that the joyful take as a given; second, its inclination toward collective forms of asymmetric struggle sets it wholly at odds with scholarly common sense. It dares any communism worth its name to wage a war of annihilation against God, Man, and the World itself.

Breakdown, Destruction, Ruin

Speed: Escape, Not Acceleration

Deleuze and Guattaris accelerationism has been too tarnished to rehabilitate. The idea was hatched by Nick Land, who held a charismatic influence over the students of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick during the late 1990s. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattaris insistence on accelerating the process of capitalist deterritorialization to make a revolutionary breakthrough, Land instead suggests that the commodity system attains its own ‘angular momentum to become a one-way street impervious to interventions, as it is made up of cosmic-scale processes that are largely blind to human cultural inputs (Thirst for Annihilation, 80). For him, the accelerating speed of capital has only one possible conclusion: a run-away whirlwind of dissolution, whose hub is the virtual zero of impersonal metropolitan accumulation that hurls the human animal into a new nakedness, as everything stable is progressively liquidated in the storm (80). When he initially wrote this position, he left its significance open-ended, only later cashing it out through a neoreactionary project called the Dark Enlightenment. Land explains that the project is dark because he eagerly adopts a scary mixture of cognitive elitism, racist social Darwinism, and autocratic Austrian economics. He denounces leftists as theologians of the Cathedral founded at Grievance Studies departments of New England universities, whose appeals to antiracism, democracy, and equality are a type of authoritarian theology.

Commenting later on Williams and Srniceks The Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, Land gleefully accuses those leftists who speak favorably about capitals destructive forces as conditional accelerationists (Annotated #Accelerate (#3)). He says that they can only distinguish their position from his own by way of an empty moralism in no position to direct the process. There is perhaps some truth to Lands criticism of so-called Left Accelerationism as far as they endorse Maoist skepticism for tradition and enthusiasm for productive forces, a social democratic project for a new hegemony, or an intellectual mission of new rationalism—all of which seek to mitigate capitalisms destructive tendencies without outlining real steps to actualize its own future. To substantiate his case, Land argues that within capitalist futures markets, the non-actual has effective currency, which makes it not an ‘imaginary but an integral part of the virtual body of capital because it is an operationalized realization of the future, so while capital has an increasingly densely-realized future, its leftist enemies have only a manifestly pretend one. (Annotated #Accelerate (#2b)). The trouble then with either accelerationism is that neither takes the process far enough, which is to say, all accelerationism is conditional because it fails to surrender to the outside. As such, Land dresses his fascism up as an athleticism to hide the cowardice of defending the forces of this world, namely, the courthouse of reason, the authority of the market, and a religious faith in technology.

A truly dark path undoes everything that makes up this world. Deleuze and Guattaris proposal to accelerate the process follows from R. D. Laings clinical prescription for more madness in our veritable age of Darkness (AO, 131). He supports the mad in turning the destruction wrecked on them into a force of dissolution against the alienated starting point of normality. This is a method made for breaking with the inside, which turns in on itself when pierced by a hole, a lake, a flame, a tornado, an explosion, so that the outside comes flooding in (132). Such a break can go one of two ways: it can be a breakdown or a breakthrough (239, 132).

The best breakthrough is making a break for it. Deleuze is fond of repeating Black Panther George Jackson, who writes from prison that yes, I can very well escape, but during my escape, Im looking for a weapon (DI, 277). The phrase applies to far more than Jacksons literal imprisonment in San Quentin—what he really wanted was liberation from the American capitalist system of racial oppression, which is truly what killed him during his final escape attempt (eleven years into his one-year-to-life indefinite sentence for robbing a gas station for $70). The necessity of weapons should be clear. Even the most terrifying nomadic war machine is overshadowed by the state, which calls its operations keeping the peace (as documented by Foucault in his Society Must Be Defended lectures and beyond). Such violence has renewed meaning in 2015 as I write in the wake of a white supremacist massacre and as an outcry about racist police violence has finally started to generalize. Jackson stands as a reminder that a revolutionary line of flight must remain active; revolution is not a system-effect, though capitalism as a system leaking all over the place establishes the terrain for revolutionary escape (such as a propaganda system that can be infiltrated to attract outside conspirators or a legal system that provides lawyers who can smuggle subversive objects into controlled spaces) (DI, 270). The brilliant guerilla Che wrote the steps for one such dance, the minuet: the guerrillas begin by encircling an advancing column and splitting into a number of points, each with enough distance to avoid themselves being encircled; a couple pairs off and begins their dance as one of the guerrilla points attacks and draws out the enemy, after which they fall back and a different point attacks—the goal is not annihilation but to immobilize to the point of fatigue (Guevara, Guerilla Warfare, 58–59).

Escapism is the great betrayer of escape. The former is simply withdrawing from the social, whereas the latter learns to eat away at and penetrate it, everywhere setting up charges that will explode what will explore, make fall what must fall, make escape what must escape as a revolutionary force (AO, 341). The same distinction also holds between two models of autonomy: temporary autonomous zones and zones of offensive opacity. Temporary autonomous zones are momentary bursts of carnivalesque energy that proponent Hakim Bey says vanish, leaving behind it an empty husk when the forces of definition arrive (Temporary Autonomous Zone, 100). Deleuze and Guattari suggest, contrary to orthodox Marxists, that societies are defined by how they manage their paths of escape (rather than their modes of production) (TP, 435). As such, psychotopological distance established by temporary autonomous zones does not create a significant enough rupture to open into anything else and thus collapses escape into escape-ism. Tiqquns zones of offensive opacity are an improvement, as they oppose a wider web of cybernetic governance without packing maximum intensity into a single moment (Anonymous, De lHypothèse Cybernétique, 334–38). Opacity is its first principle, something they learn from the long tradition of autonomists and anarchists whose most militant factions would refuse all engagement with parliamentary politics, labor and unions, and news media. Offensive orientation is its second principle, though tempered by the famous line from The Internationale, la crosse en lair, with the butts of our guns held high in the air: knowing we can take the fight to the trenches, or even take power, but refuse it anyway. Tiqqun is well aware of the difficult history behind the state assassinations of the Black Panther Party and the Red Army Faction, so they know to resist militarization lest they become an army or be liquidated. The advantage of this strategic withdrawal is autonomy, especially as communism becomes its qualitative guide. Posing communism as oppositional self-determination, it takes the whole social apparatus of capture as its contrary—against any temptation to engage the social, for whatever resources offered, arises a demand to be met by a parallel space of communism.

Flows: Interruption, Not Production

The schizo is dead! Long live the schizo! Schizo culture appealed to a society seized by postwar consumer boredom. Cant we produce something other than toasters and cars? How about free speech, free school, free love, free verse! It is no exaggeration to say that the events of May 1968 were sparked by a Situationist intolerance for boredom (boredom is always counter-revolutionary, says Guy Debord; Bad Old Days Will End, 36). In the time since the 1972 publication of Anti-Oedipus, capitalism has embraced its schizophrenia through neoliberalism. The schizo has become the paraphilic obsession of Nietzsches last man. Its flood of more and more objects has subjects able to muster less and less desire, as seen in the Japanese Lost Decade of stagflation, when a torrent of perversions coincided with a suicide epidemic. The dominant feelings today are probably anxiety or depression (Plan C, We Are All Very Anxious). They are expressed as vulnerability in the pervasiveness of trauma, as a constant low-level distress, and through a generalization of contingency. Demonstrating the significance of this shift: go play outside is a breath of fresh air to the bored but fails to make the depressive budge. Neoliberalism turns the depressive into the paranoiac through a program of exposure, which unfolds the subject to reveal new surfaces to penetrate. Despite this, the negative project of the process of schizophrenia (collapsing a filthy drainage pipe) is as necessary as ever (AO, 341). But just as Lenin declared the revolutionary affirmation All the power to the Soviets! counterrevolutionary after a certain time, it is time to retire the slogan Liberate the flows!

Militant discussions of infrastructure, blockage, and interruption are refreshing—since the first free laborers threw a shoe in the machine, sabotage has been an important tactic of resistance. But with the elliptical dynamics of capitalism, which poses its own limits only to overcome them for a profit, interruptions cannot be an end unto themselves (230–31). Every economic system is a system of interruptions that works by breaking down (36–37, 151, 192). One needs to look behind the old social democratic criticism of productivism, even pollution, cigarettes, prisons, logging, napalm, and nuclear warheads are counted in the Gross Domestic Production, to see why (Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas). Antiproduction, which prevents specific realizations of value in a systematic way, is at the heart of production itself, and conditioning this production (235). Potlatch and ritualized warfare are indigenous means of antiproduction that prevent the hoarding that could lead to despotism (Maus, The Gift; Clastres, Society against the State). Aristocratic glorious expenditure made sure that everything was owed to the king (Bataille, Notion of Expenditure). Marx reminds us that capitalists dip into their own capital stock at the expense of expanded reproduction, but wasting money on the political–military–industrial complex guarantees the smooth advance of the system as a whole (235).