(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In the article "Anti-Oedipus – Thirty Years On", writes Eric Alliez that Deleuze believes there is "a becoming revolutionary which is not the same thing as the future of the revolution, and which does not necessarily need to go through militants". And we recall Foucault's remark in the preface to Anti-Oedipus: "What must one do in order not to become a fascist, even if one (and especially if one) believes oneself to be a militant revolutionary?" Resistance in Deleuze is of a different category (than the one we find in the militant Alain Badiou). But that is not to say that Deleuze's insistence on the creativeness of resistance detracts from the commitment that resistance is accompanied by.
Peter Hallward, for his part, analyzes a number of Deleuze's works in the light of, among others, Neoplatonism, Johannes Scotus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart and Jacob Böhme. The study is thorough and critical: Deleuze is a mystic who leads us out of this world, away from the current. According to Hallward, his philosophy gives us no resilience, no tools for concrete action in the world. Hallward questions Deleuze's philosophy of being as difference (difference) is practically applicable, if it is a philosophy that can shed light on the underlying forces, power, circumstances and decisions that govern the relationships between subjects, priorities, perspectives and political classes. Despite seeing that there are many indications that such a reading is legitimate, Hallward states that Deleuze's philosophy of difference does not relate to actual others or the existing world: "Deleuze offers few resources for thinking the consequences of what happens within the actually existing world as such". And he ends his analysis with a rejection of the resilience and impact that some of us have found in Deleuze: "Few philosophers have been as inspiring as Deleuze. But those of us who still seek to change our world and to empower its inhabitants will need to look for our inspiration elsewhere".
There is a lot at stake here. For the resistance we face Anti-Oedipus is an ontological force that cannot be reduced to activism.
Todd May has also pointed out how Deleuze seems to perceive direct resistance, that is concrete activism, as reactive, because it is necessarily a parasite on what it is opposed to. Nevertheless: The resistance we learn about in Deleuze is a resistance that is not parasitic, but, as we have seen, a resistance that precedes the event, the power and the object of the resistance. It is a question of a thought pattern or thought processes where the active political involves creating alternatives, in other words lines of flight that does not lead out of this world, but elsewhere within our world, within the current political situation. Bartleby's formulation is a good example here. For his part, May writes that what Deleuze seeks, especially in his collaboration with Guattari, are the movements under and across the dominant order of the current political situation, and he elaborates: "These movements destabilize the dominant orders, not through a direct negation of or challenge to them, but rather through the introduction of thought processes, modes of behaviour, types of organization and connections with other movements that undermine the dominant orders through their very existence."
It is a long way from here to Hallward's demand for concrete resistance. May writes that Deleuze's lines of escape (or lines of resistance) create a resistance to the dominant social order, a resistance that does not leave the social order, but instead seeks another place within it. And he adds: "What Deleuze theorizes is a line of flight that could be taken up by anybody or any collective, and whose trajectory constitutes a challenge to the social order".
Consensus, a bit unceremonious
The forms of dissent from critics of Deleuze and Guattari find their description in a humorous passage in Anti-Oedipus: "But it's like the story of the resistance fighters who wanted to destroy a light pole, and who placed the explosives so unbalanced that the pole jumped into the air, only to fall straight back into its own hole." For example, it seems that critics such as Alan Badiou and Jacques Rancière have been given Anti-Oedipus in the middle of the fleece. They are two Oedipalians who are not there for fun, who do not have Kafka's laughter or Deleuze's dry, almost English humor, and who also do not reach Guattari's conceptual production up to the knees. If resistance comes first, in Deleuze or Foucault, it comes before death anyway.
