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THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AS "UTOPIA" IN DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

N. Tosel

Abstract

Deleuze and Guattari, in What is philosophy? (1991), expose their Image of Thought; they consider that it is possible to think through three disciplines: Philosophy, Science and Art. In all this structure there is no trace of Politics: why is it absent? We cannot try here to make a "Marxist" distinction between theory and practice, thinking that Philosophy, Art and Science are part of the thought and therefore of the theory, while Politics is placed on a different level, which would be that of action and practice. Thinking in Deleuze and Guattari is act, it means to face the chaos, it means to experiment; their constructivism removes all doubt on the fact that Thought and Action can be given on two totally distinct plans. Politics is therefore, according to Deleuze and Guattari, within the Thought, and since it cannot be located either in science or in art, in my opinion it is entirely ascribable to Philosophy. However, Philosophy and Politics cannot completely identify themselves. In fact they do not identify themselves even in Deleuze and Guattari: Philosophy is creation of concepts; Politics is within Philosophy because it is also creation of concepts, but the difference between the two disciplines lies in the type of concepts that they create. The concept says the event - this is its nature and remains unchanged whether we speak of philosophical concept or political concept; the difference lies rather in the type of event being announced. In fact, Philosophy says the event that is in becoming, it says the "actual", to use a term dear to Foucault, and the becoming and the actual are distinguished from past and present, but also from future. In fact in What is philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari write that only when a utopian element is present, then Philosophy becomes political and carries to the maximum degree the critic of its age. So the becoming is doubled: there is an actual becoming, which is the specific object of the philosophical concept, and then there is a becoming that looks to the future, which is the basis for the political concept. Politics can connect Philosophy with its time, and can produce a critique of the present only because Politics looks beyond this present and has in mind a better future and "a new people and a new earth "- as Deleuze and Guattari say - and this is its Utopia. So it is worth asking if to make political philosophy today may mean creating new concepts, which contain this utopian element, that is, concepts that privilege the dimension of the future, in addition to that - specifically philosophical - of the becoming.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2014/b31/s11.112

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