The contemporary crises of neoliberal economics have given rise to a series of popular uprisings around the world. These revolts have sparked a type of demand that points to an unusual kind of struggle. The so-called ‘struggles of desire’, often led by feminist, indigenous and ecological movements, call for a change in modes of existence. However, a strange paradox of causes and effects emerges. Faced with the apparent inconceivability of a world beyond the tentacles of the capitalist economic rationality, the assemblage of the myriad minority groups mobilising around the world is becoming one of the primary threats to market stability and a growing danger for liberal democracies. In this context, current far-right social and political movements claim to have been called to stand up for the ‘common good’ against the threats of those who, presumably, persevere in the pursuit of their own interests. This article will address the multifaceted nature of the problem in three parts: first, by examining the so-called prevailing political realism; second, by analysing the question of community and the defence of the common good; and, finally, by exploring the emergence of minority becomings that go beyond the apparent fight for recognition of egalitarian rights brought up by contemporary minority movements.
Gilles Deleuze asserts that he made his ‘move into politics’ influenced by three key figures: Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Elias Sanbar. This article focuses on the implications of Guattari and Sanbar in this transition. Its hypothesis posits that Deleuze's shift aligns with an anti-colonial approach. The article will explore three episodes: first, in Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari push the clinic to its limits, identifying the process of racialisation through the extrapolation of metropolitan categories onto the colonies, as well as the consequences of Frantz Fanon's notion of the impediment of the unconscious; second, when they reference Samir Amin in A Thousand Plateaus to analyse the transnationalisation of capitalism, breaking down the interplay between minorisation and majorisation movements and considering the implications of colonisation's substitution; finally, the article will examine What is Philosophy?, where Deleuze and Guattari address the process of Europeanisation. Additionally, it discusses his two books Cinema 1 and 2 and cinema classes, alongside his collaborative work with Sanbar, particularly the expression ‘missing people’, which the article connects to Third World cinema and the Palestinian cause.
Vaslav Nijinsky's infamous 1919 St. Moritz recital and his notebooks, published as The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, often are read as symptoms of the dancer's progressive mental illness. At the same time, however, they perform what Nijinsky calls chuvstvo (feeling), a configuration of affects in the Deleuzian sense of the term. Opting for an affective rather than a symptomatic reading of the 1919 recital and Nijinsky's writings, this article adapts key concepts of schizoanalysis (becoming, desiring-machine, body-without-organs) to deconstruct Nijinsky's performance as becoming-intense, while advocating a molecular approach in studying dances of crises in effect. The preliminary goal of the study is to outline how the dancer and eyewitnesses perceived the forces that drove the performance and the dancer's relationship with the audience. Based on these accounts, the main part of the analysis configures Nijinsky's dancing as a solitary desiring-machine producing a body-without-organs (which he calls God Nijinsky) that radiates chuvstvo. As such, the recital becomes a case for dance theory mapping the rhizomes of kinetic becoming. By looking at Nijinsky's St Moritz dance and his writing via Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the article argues for a nuanced and non-reductionist approach to any dance of crisis; a symptom perhaps but, in any case, an expression of life's dynamism and complexity.
In Foucault’s work, power often appears too totalising and resistance too vacuous. Many cite Foucault’s later turn towards the self’s relation to itself as a more adequate concept of resistance. This reading misses a central Foucaultian concept: force. By following Deleuze’s account of how Foucaultian force grounds the distinction between power and resistance, I argue that both are types of forces, such that resistance is not reactionary to power, but primary to, and hence foundational for, power. Moreover, subjectivity is not principally resistant. Rather, as a capacity of all forces, subjectivity can be implicated in both power and resistance.
