Introduction
For Deleuze:
Political Economy, Materialistic
Dialectics and Speculative Philosophy
"Perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian": this
well-known statement by Michel Foucault today appears to be confirmed
by the overall development of contemporary thought. The philosophy of
Gilles Deleuze is irrefutably in the spotlight today. Many theoretical
movements emerging in recent years have proclaimed Deleuze to be their
predecessor and inspirer. The critique of all transcendental instances, the
abandoning of dialectical mediation, and the joyful affirmation of an un-
limited immanence have become a literary topos within contemporary
philosophy and beyond.
However, is not this popular version of Deleuzianism a philosophy of
yesterday? It seems that a number of objections against Deleuze's thought
have pointed to this in recent years. On the one hand, despite its radical
rhetoric and the influence it has exerted on left-wing (primarily anti-glo-
balist) politics, this philosophy of immanence appears virtually indiscern-
ible from the ideology of late capitalism, with its own utopian horizon.
This explains the increasing rejection of Deleuze among authors associ-
ated with the Marxist tradition and a modern rethinking of materialistic
dialectics. They identify his philosophy either with a cynical justification
of the political status quo or with a mystical escape from real and acute
problems.
On the other hand, many representatives of the speculative turn con-
sider Deleuze's thought to be a striking example of correlationism—a
standpoint that asserts the impossibility of conceiving the Absolute with-
out its “domestication” by one or another human faculty. In this regard,
for the new speculative thought that proclaims the possibility of a new
Absolute and new truth, Deleuze's philosophical legacy also serves as a
ballast that must be thrown off the ship of modernity together with all
philosophy after Kant.
However, Deleuze's philosophy is worth fighting for. It cannot be re-
duced to the ideology of late capitalism and contains within itself the pos-
sibility for alternative interpretations that reveal the paradoxical ties of
Deleuze's ideas with materialistic dialectics, as well as with analyses of
political economy. Similarly, it can be reduced neither to a semi-mystical
vitalism — which equates existence with the flow of life formation — nor
to the philosophical critique of culture, and its treatment of the problems
6
Introduction
posed by cinema, literature, and psychoanalysis. This issue presents an
array of interpretations of Deleuze's philosophy, all of which tease its rev-
olutionary kernel out from an either mystical or cynical shell.
In the first section of the issue, Andrew Pendakis, Guillaume Collett,
and Daniel W. Smith raise a question concerning the political significance
of Deleuze's philosophy. Continuing the long tradition of Marxist criti-
cism, Pendakis links Deleuze's ontological reflections on the “middle”
with politics on the other side of the opposition of the right and left. This
allows the author to argue that appealing to Deleuze's philosophy in pur-
suit of an ontological justification for left-wing politics is an ill-conceived
strategy.
The subsequent article by Collett argues against the tradition of the
Marxist critique of Deleuzianism. This tradition insists that Deleuze does
not sufficiently distinguish politics as an autonomous field and ultimate-
ly always subordinates it to philosophy. In contrast to this, Collett con-
tends that Deleuze's philosophy is trans-disciplinary and therefore can
No. 1
only exist within politics and not vice versa.
Daniel W. Smith also addresses politics within the context of De-
leuze's philosophical legacy. His historical and philosophical analysis
shows that Deleuze's critique of libidinal (Freud) and political (Marx)
economy is necessarily rooted in a Spinozist affirmative ontology, which
imbues politics with a more democratic character.
The articles of Andrew Culp and Alexander Pogrebnyak are dedicated
Vol. 7 (2019)
to the renewal of political economy attempted by Deleuze and Guattari.
Culp associates the possibility of such a renewal with the fact that De-
leuze and Guattari create an idiosyncratic critical anthropology of capi-
talism. Political economy, seen through the prism of anthropology, allows
Culp, firstly, to abandon the (post-)operaist identification of the driver of
revolutionary development with productive forces and, secondly, to jus-
tify the need for the transition to an anarchist theory of "revolution from
the outside.”
Pogrebnyak emphasizes the uniqueness of Deleuze and Guattari's in-
terest in political economy, as contrasted with the general opposition of
politics and economy that is characteristic of modern left theory (Balibar,
Rancière, Badiou). Tracing the origins of Deleuze and Guattari’s political
economy to the marginalism and Fourierism of the nineteenth century,
he interprets marginalism in the utopian revolutionary sense, as distinct
from the right-accelerationist reading proposed by Nick Land.
Yoel Regev, Ksenia Kapelchuk and Anton Syutkin conceptualize the
relationship between Deleuze's philosophy and materialistic dialectics.
Regev sees Deleuzianism as a development of Althusserian materialistic
dialectics. While in traditional Marxism the object of materialistic dialec-
tics is reduced to practice,and to the "givenness of the non-given" in post-
1968 left theory, Deleuze, according to Regev, makes possible a non-re-
7
duced understanding of this object. Such an understanding should help to
avoid the political failures that have befallen previous iterations of mate-
rialistic dialectics.
The common perception of Deleuze as an anti-dialectical thinker is
also refuted by Kapelchuk. She demonstrates that in a number of his
works, Deleuze does develop a dialectical philosophy, albeit not one of the
Hegelian type. If Slavoj Žižek carries out the Hegelian interpretation of
the Deleuzian philosophy, Kapelchuk, entering into a debate with Žižek,
prepares the ground for a future Deleuzian interpretation of Hegel's dia-
lectic.
In Syutkin's article, Deleuze's philosophy constitutes a field of con-
frontation between materialistic dialectics and neovitalism. Although
Deleuze is criticized by materialistic dialecticians (Badiou, Žižek) and re-
mains a source of inspiration for neovitalists (Grant, Bennett), Syutkin
insists on the paradoxical proximity of Deleuze precisely to materialistic
dialectic. In particular, Deleuze’s theory of the subject — as constructed
around the concept of contractualization — goes far beyond neovitalist
problems. Working with the dialectical dimension of Deleuze's philoso-
phy, according to Syutkin, can prevent its depoliticization.
Nikita Safonov and Nikita Sazonov place Deleuzianism within the
context of speculative philosophy. Safonov sees Deleuzianism as the basic
theoretical wellspring of contemporary sound studies. It is Deleuze who
enables sound researchers to go beyond a positivist understanding of
technology and a phenomenological description of sound that binds
sound to the human. In this sense, Safonov's essay is a sketch for a De-
leuzean speculative “sound thinking.”
In his essay, Sazonov examines modern speculative thought through
the prism of meteorology and photography. He considers the philoso-
phies of Deleuze, Meillassoux, and Laruelle as theories of light (flash)
piercing the dark. Exceptional attention to light, however, is fraught with
the danger of philosophy’s relapse into metaphysics or ideology, which in
turn encourages the author to develop an “anti-manifestational” project
for avoiding this possibility.
Editors of the issue: Anton Syutkin, Yoel Regev
