TASA 2003 Conference, University of New England, 4–6 December 2003

Deleuze and Guattari’s Political On-

tology of Desire

Mark Bahnisch
Sessional Lecturer in Sociology
School of Humanities and Human Services
Queensland University of Technology
Beams Road, Carseldine Q 4034
AUSTRALIA

Tel: 0421910542
Email: m.bahnisch@qut.edu.au

Abstract
Social theory remains haunted by the spectres of Marx (Derrida, 1994). While in
full agreement with Derrida that these spectres can and should not be exorcised,
this paper argues that social theory must avoid maintaining the desire to conjure
the spirit of a universal subject of history, and of an overcoming of history through
a subject-object equivalence. Rather than search endlessly for the elusive subject
of modernity, social theory would benefit from a sociology of hope which avoids both
the traps of the logic of identity and equivalence and the denial of difference but
also the political paralysis which can result from a hypostasisation of identification
as a basis for political action. It is the contention of this paper that the thought of
Deleuze and Guattari is useful to social theory for opening up possibilities for new
narratives of political action. The paper first considers briefly the politics of French
theory’s appropriation. Next, the paper synthesises Feminist readings of
Deleuze/Guattari which are particularly attentive to the political possibilities of
their thought. Finally, the paper stages a confrontation between Deleuze/Guattari
and Marx to suggest other ways of seeing than through the lens of class. Thus, the
contribution of Deleuze/Guattari to a political ontology of desire is first established
and lines of possibility for an application of their work to the theorisation of the
politics of late capitalism are sketched. Though these thoughts are very preliminary
and form but part of a larger research project, it is hoped in this way to suggest the
potential of Deleuze/Guattari for a social theory of late modernity open to different
lines of flight.

The politics of appropriating French theory

The politics of which theorists have come to be included in the canon of An-
glo-American postmodern theory make a fascinating story. Unlike thinkers
such as Derrida, Kristeva and Foucault (to name but a few), Gilles Deleuze
Bahnisch – Deleuze and Guattari 2

and Felix Guattari have not been readily assimilated into English speaking
scholarship. The first edited collection on Deleuze’s work appeared in 1994
(Boundas & Olkowski, 1994). Deleuze and Guattari’s thought has resisted
the easy appropriation and domestification of French poststructuralism into
North American literary studies and the Humanities (Bertens, 1995).
Deleuze’s work on the cinema, and minor literatures, however, has ensured
him an audience in Anglophone Cultural Studies. There is little on
Deleuze/Guattari in social theory to date, thought (1999) briefly considers
their concept of ‘societies of control’. The political and philosophical implica-
tions of Deleuze/Guattari’s thought are only now coming to be recognised.
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was one of France’s most prominent postwar phi-
losophers. His collaboration with Felix Guattari (1930-1992), a radical psy-
choanalyst, produced important texts such as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand
Plateaux [1980] (1987). Their work, originating out of a political desire to
think the political and philosophical consequences of May ‘68 (Deleuze,
1995), had a wide ranging impact in France. What is Philosophy?, for in-
stance, occupied the French best seller lists for months (Deleuze & Guattari,
1994). Perhaps one reason why their thought has been resisted by Anglo-
phone philosophy and political thought is the rigorously philosophical na-
ture of their project of thinking difference (Patton 1996). Although their
work is sometimes difficult to read (but stylishly written), it presents no more
challenges than a reading of Derrida, for instance. But Deleuze and Guattari
cannot be identified with the refusal of metaphysics or the deconstruction of
Western logocentric philosophy (Deleuze 1995, p. 136). Rather, they see phi-
losophy as involving the creative invention of concepts which capture becom-
ings rather than static essences (or being). They seek to think difference and
desire positively in order to uncover the political stakes of Western philoso-
phy (Patton, 1996; Olkowski, 1999). Their philosophy resists a textualist
appropriation partly because it refuses to oppose discourse to materiality,
and partly because of its consciously political engagement with philosophies
of the Same. Finally, Deleuze and Guattari reject the identification of desire
with lack which is constitutive of so much of ‘postmodern’ thought influ-
enced by Lacan and Kojeve’s reading of Hegel.

Feminist readings of Deleuze and Guattari’s ontol-

ogy of desire and becoming
Deleuze and Guattari’s work has been of interest to feminist theorists, par-
ticularly corporeal philosophers concerned to develop a positive ontology of
desire and becoming. Although there are epistemological issues for feminist
theory in utilising the thought of male theorists (Le Deouff, [1989] 1991;
Grosz, 1994), Deleuze/Guattari’s positive ontology of desire has recently
been a focus of an increasing number of feminist corporeal philosophers
(Olkowski, 1999). As always, feminist theorists are keenly aware of the po-
litical stakes of theory, and accordingly, these readings provide important
keys to the political and theoretical importance of Deleuze/Guattari’s phi-
losophy of difference. Deleuze/Guattari develop an ontology of becoming
which takes aim at Platonic representations of difference in terms of the

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Bahnisch – Deleuze and Guattari 3

same. Their project is to think difference as a primary category, and thus

repetition as a process of creativity (Deleuze, 1994). Repetition of difference
enables the creative development of subjectivity while repetition of identity
inscribes subjectivity within what Irigaray [1974] (1985: 11) has aptly termed
‘an old dream of symmetry’. The positivity of difference disrupts the system
of representation which produces identity based on ‘the qualitative order of
resemblances and the quantitative order of equivalences’ (Deleuze, 1994: 1).
It is not surprising, then, that feminist philosophers have seen exciting pos-
sibilities in Deleuze/Guattari’s political ontology (Grosz, 1994). This section
of the paper considers the important readings of Braidotti (1991), Grosz
(1994) and Olkowski (1999). I consider these readings for the way that the
texts analyse and mobilise the politics of Deleuze/Guattari’s ontology.
Rosi Braidotti’s work represents an important contribution to the develop-
ment of a political ontology of the subject and of sexual difference. In her
monograph Patterns of Dissonance, Braidotti (1991: 66) astutely highlights
the importance of Deleuze/Guattari’s work in undermining the assumptions
characteristic of Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and also of much modernist phi-
losophical and political thought. In her reading, their important insight is
resistance to the appropriation of the unconscious by psychoanalysis, as
well as their resistance to Cartesian notions of subjectivity. The psychoana-
lytical unconscious according to Braidotti (1991: 69) remains within meta-
physical thought with desire replacing reason as the entity enforcing norma-
tive closure. It is worth noting that Braidotti views psychoanalysis with a
certain ambiguity. On one hand, it correctly reveals the lack of equivalence
between reason and subjectivity. On the other, it seeks to reinscribe order
on the subject through Oedipalisation. Olkowski (1999) criticises Braidotti
for her debt to Lacanian thought, but she misses the nuances of the work
psychoanalysis performs in Braidotti’s text. The attraction of
Deleuze/Guattari’s work for Braidotti is their conception of the unconscious
as a ‘space of displacement and production’. This refutes the understanding
of desire as based in lack, which reflects the identification of the subject with
atemporal and non-embodied consciousness.
For Braidotti, the disembodied subject of both psychoanalysis and Cartesian
philosophy is a radically individualised subject, incapable of the affective ac-
tion which facilitates the becoming of political desires. The disembodied sub-
ject has had its body elided for a reason, to regulate its potentialities. A sub-
ject identified with reason or the action of drives is frozen in being, and inca-
pable of becoming. Freud identifies the unconscious with the inside of sub-
jectivity, and thus harnesses desire to the functions of organising and nor-
mative regulation. Deleuze/Guattari conceive of desire transcending the in-
side/outside hierarchy. This enables desire to be thought of in terms of the
circulation of affects among bodies. In other words, there is a space for col-
lective, political and ontologically temporal desires which are elided by both
psychoanalysis and Cartesian philosophy (Braidotti, 1991: 113).
Braidotti agrees with Deleuze’ insight that philosophical thought rests on
pre-philosophical presuppositions, which are its ‘non-said’ basis of represen-
tation. The equation of reason and subjectivity characteristic of Cartesian
thought rests on the pre-philosophical assumption of a certain conception of

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Bahnisch – Deleuze and Guattari 4

the essence of human being (Braidotti, 1991: 72). For Braidotti, what is in-
spiring about Deleuze’ thought is his conception of subjectivity as material
and temporal, and thus open to difference and becoming. She approves of
Deleuze’ rejection of Hegelian dialectic, and his ‘redefinition of the embodied
subject in terms of desire and affectivity, situated… in time’ (Braidotti, 1991:
111).
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘bodies without organs’ are not sites of Oedipal
significations, but rather are the sites of multiple affective inscriptions coded
in different ways. Desire circulates through bodies, both those of humans,
and the social and political bodies which organise the libidinal linkages
between ‘the unconscious and political economy’ (Braidotti, 1991: 114).
Following Spinoza, Deleuze/Guattari conceive of the subject on ‘a molecular
model, an infinity of particles, attributes and modes of being’ (Braidotti,
1991: 115). The circulations of desire through the social machine can be
organised either to intensify the affects of molecularity or constrained
through the inscriptions and codings of molar rationality. In other words, a
minority consciousness which expresses the positivity of desires and the
universal will to become exists in tension with Oedipal and rational
organisations of the social field which seek to repress difference and inscribe
the Same on the bodies without organs (Braidotti, 1991: 115). Within a
capitalist deterritorialisation of the social body (the ‘socius’), there is a
necessary tension between the decoding of traditional resemblances and
identities, and the axiomatisation which seeks to reinscribe them on the
body without organs (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). Philosophy has
traditionally been complicit in the logic of resemblance and identity, which is
one side of the capitalist coin. So the stakes for philosophy are high indeed.
For Braidotti, philosophy must help, not hinder, our political choice to
reorganise the field of desire in order to facilitate the flows of positive affects.
We must create the conditions for the political becoming of difference which
is resisted by the hegemony of capitalist territorialisation of the flow of desire
and the complicity of psychoanalytic and philosophical inscriptions of the
subject within binary categories.
In Volatile Bodies, Grosz (1994: vii) wagers that subjectivity can be rethought
outside dualist oppositions of mind and body. It would not be surprising if
Deleuze/Guattari’s monist view of subjectivity were of help to her corporeal
philosophy. This is indeed the case, but Grosz astutely highlights some la-
cunae in their thought. Overall, though, she is favourable to their develop-
ment of ‘an ontology conceived quite otherwise’ which, following Spinoza,
undermines ‘the centrality of the subject and the coherence and effectivity of
signification’ (Grosz, 1994: 164). This ontology refuses to subject the body to
any regime of signification, rather viewing it positively in terms of what it can
do, in the vein of Spinoza and Nietzsche (Grosz, 1994: 165). Deleuze [1968]
(1990: 218) asks what are the potentialities of bodies and how can we know
these potentialities without pushing the limits of the body’s ‘capacity to be
affected’? These questions, for Grosz, clear the way for a positive corporeal
ontology, refusing to conceive of the body as separate from the non-human,
and centrally interested in its capacities, linkages and affects. The
Deleuzian body, for Grosz (1994: 165) desires. It desires not a fantasy to fill
a lack, but rather ‘an actualisation, a series of practices, bringing things to-

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Bahnisch – Deleuze and Guattari 5

gether or separating them, making machines, making reality’. Conceiving de-

sire in this way disrupts the binary opposition between thinking subject and
object of thought. Deleuzian materialism is a materialism that resists an
epistemological separation between the real and representation. It refuses
representation: desiring machines produce the real and are themselves the
real (Grosz, 1994: 268).
For Grosz, Deleuze/Guattari’s work has real political possibilities. The
minoritarian mode criss-crosses the molecular becomings of subjects with
the molar axiomatics which organise the social within the limits of
capitalism. Molecular becomings can disrupt the fixity of molar unities such
as class, race, sex which restrict the potential affects of bodies (Grosz, 1994:
172). At first sight, this refusal to privilege categories such as class or sex as
unified categories resisting the hegemonisation of the social may seem to go
against any progressive politics. But, on reflection, Grosz (1994: 173)
believes that this political ontology can be used to render ‘more complex the
nature and form these oppressions take’. This destabilisation of identities
inherent in the refusal of representation dereifies the real and releases
affects and forces otherwise essentialised in the duplication of the world
through the Real and its representation (Grosz, 1994: 181).
The merits of Olkowski’s monograph on Deleuze, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin
of Representation (1999) are many. She does not mistake ‘his categories for
those of more orthodox theorists’, as Mullarkey (1997: 445) argues many of
his readers do. Not least of the book’s merits is her thorough review and cri-
tique of other feminist readings of Deleuze. For the purposes of this paper,
though, the central key point to be taken from her analysis is the anti-
representationist nature of Deleuze/Guattari’s thought. Olkowski develops
her reading based on Deleuze’ text Difference and Repetition (1994), his doc-
toral thesis published in 1968. This is a foundational text for subsequent
theorising by Deleuze and Guattari, and critiques the representational logic
of resemblance deriving from Aristotle. In this logic, ‘specific difference de-
termines difference only in the identity of the concept in general, while ge-
neric difference is no mare than analogy’ (Olkowski, 1999: 20). Olkowski
correctly follows Deleuze in concluding that this logic acts to ‘erase difference
as a concept and as a reality’. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994:
36-37) contrasts this logocentric ontology with one based on space, on a no-
mos where being distributes itself. This ontology of multiples replaces the
negation of difference characteristic of the (epi)phenomenological dialectic,
with difference as an affirmative concept. He argues that (1994: 55):
…difference is an object of affirmation; that affirmation itself is multi-
ple; that it is creation but also that it must be created, as affirming dif-
ference, as being difference in itself. It is not the negative that is the
motor. Rather. There are positive differential elements which deter-
mine the genesis of both the affirmation and the difference affirmed…
Those who bear the negative know not what they do: they take the
shadow for the reality, they encourage phantoms, they uncouple con-
sequences from premisses and they give epiphenomena the value of
phenomena and essences.

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If it is the case that much contemporary political theorising about difference

has its origin in the Hegelian dialectic of the negative, then Olkowski (1999)
is astute indeed in pointing to the consequences of Deleuze’ ontology for the
politics of difference and identity. Olokowski has powerfully argued the sig-
nificance of the stakes of representation.

Deleuze and Guattari: capitalism as limit and de-

siring-production
I will now set out Deleuze/Guattari’s understanding of capitalism as limit.
This understanding cannot be separated from the parallel critique of psy-
choanalysis and philosophical subjectivity through schizoanalysis (Deleuze
1995). However, in the spirit of Grosz (1994), I am going to present my read-
ing of capitalism as limit as appropriate for the purposes of this paper. De-
sire is at the foundation of political economy, as Lyotard (1993) astutely ob-
serves with reference to Marx’ desire. Perhaps the clearest statement of their
position is in their late work What is Philosophy? but the basis of their theo-
risation is spelled out in Anti-Oedipus.
For Deleuze and Guattari (1983) what is interesting in capitalism is the
unique way in which it deterritorialises the flows of the socius. We have al-
ready seen above how with the birth of the State, there were previous reterri-
torialisations, periodised as the Barbarian Despotic Machine, the Ur-Staat
and the Imperial Machine. The Civilised Capitalist Machine is of a different
order entirely (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). In this capitalist social machine,
two key processes take place and constantly reproduce themselves. At the
same time as flows are decoded, workers are deterritorialised through consti-
tution as ‘free’ labour outside territorialised codes (223-225). What is sig-
nificant is that the process of rerritorialisation of the codes obscures a sig-
nificant difference in the concepts of money and labour in feudalism (228), a
difference also rigorously analysed by Foucault [1970] (1994). There are in
effect two types of money paralleling the two types of value uncovered by
Marx (229). Money as compensation for labour and money as capital are
quite different, although the conceptual distinction is elided. The difference
is one of potentiality: of what money can do as finance capital (234). Its
functionality is quite other than that of both industrial capital and wages:
capital can reproduce. It pushes the limits of deterritorialisation, a point ob-
scured by Marx’ equation of money with value realised through labour. So
what the capitalist social body (socius) can actually do is render labour
primitive again (224) through a constant decoding and overcoding (232).
The desire of capitalism (248) is to constantly recreate a civilisation where
capitalism is the limit of the socius (245) and it is ‘the surplus value of flux
which constitutes the system’ (234). Surplus value is the true axiomatic, the
foundational signifier of the desire of capitalist representation. But what is
the place, and what are the stakes of desire? How do Deleuze/Guattari re-
think desire, labour, class and sovereignty under capitalism?
Deleuze/Guattari’s understanding of capitalism as limit contradicts Marx’
view that the contradictions of capital’s reproduction expressed through the

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Bahnisch – Deleuze and Guattari 7

falling rate of profit would lead to its downfall. There are two reasons for this.
Firstly, Deleuze/Guattari (224) reject a universal history (based on necessity)
in favour of a contingent series of becomings where capitalism has become
(the only) true universal (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). Secondly, Marx has ig-
nored or elided the significance of deterritorialisation and the role of imagi-
nary capital as investment capital. The deterritorialisation process does not
just take place once (through primitive accumulation) but constantly, as the
process of globalisation and the new internationalisation of production at-
tests. Although Marx recognises this, he does not recognise the desire of
capital to constantly overcome limits. Nor does he perceive the seduction of
the desire for flows or the flow of desire (223-225), of the desiring machine of
capital and the decoding and releasing of affects and forces. Despite the fact
that Marx’ desire is in fact inscribed in his texts (Lyotard 1993). It is the
force of this desire that analyses of ideology miss.
For Deleuze and Guattari, there are no classes as such. Or rather, there is
only one class, the bourgeoisie (254). To make sense of this claim that there
is only one class, it is worth looking at what Guattari says about interests
and desire. Desire is not ‘some romantic luxury’ superfluous to interests
that ‘are merely economic and political. We think, rather, that interests are
always found and articulated at points predetermined by desire’ (Deleuze,
1995: 19). To suggest that the bourgeoisie is the only class is to argue that
the capitalist socius is filled to its limit with the decoding of flows, that there
is a desiring machine that axiomatises the flows through the machine of the
State (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 255). This axiomatic varies over time: there
is a Keynesian axiomatic, for instance (Jameson, 1997). Deleuze/Guattari
contend that the proletariat, in the Marxian sense, is merely the negative of
the dialectic movement that begins with the bourgeoisie. In this light, it has
no specificity of its own, it is spectral and must be called into being by politi-
cal action. If we do not accept the dialectical logic of representational
thought, what instead we will be looking for is ‘the decoded flows that free
themselves from this axiomatic’ (255). In other words, the becomings of mo-
lecular minorities are privileged over the monolithic and molar working class
that is the negative of the bourgeoisie. The political and theoretical question
is what desires can we produce? How can we set these desires to work? To
answer these questions with a definitive response would be to violently ne-
gate difference.

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Dr Lisa Adkins and Dr Craig Prichard for useful comments
on an earlier version of this paper.

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Bahnisch – Deleuze and Guattari 8

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