CIAO DATE: 05/2011
Volume: 13, Issue: 4
December 2010
Whither Deleuze and Guattari: a critical introduction (PDF)
Earl Gammon, Julian Reid
Years ago at a workshop one of our colleagues, whose name we shall keep anonymous, claimed — to the amusement of the participants — that International Relations (IR) is where theory goes to die. Given the vicissitudes of intellectual fads that sweep through IR, one could, perhaps, be forgiven for condemning what appears to be the superficiality of the theoretical engagements within the field. From another perspective, though, this judgement could be considered unfair, and that the convergence of so many disparate theoretical interventions in IR is actually a testament to its growing vitality. Though many scholars now label themselves constructivists, this is quite a polyglot category that seems to indicate a movement beyond the contrived inter-school debates rather than the rise of a new intellectual hegemon
The European rescue, recommodification, and/or reterritorialisation of the (becoming-capitalist) state? Marx, Deleuze, Guattari, and the European Union
David J Bailey
This article argues that in drawing predominantly upon Marxist approaches, existing critical accounts of European integration suffer from the problem of economic determinism. While such accounts have enriched our understanding of European integration through their considerations of capitalism, they have nevertheless been unable to provide a feasible explanation for the relationship between the two processes (capitalism and European integration). The article argues for a turn to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, which provides insights into how we might consider the relationship between capitalism and political institutions while avoiding the depiction of one as determining of the other. In doing so, it argues that European integration can be understood to have overseen the re-centring of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the ‘capitalist axiomatic’, in the attempt by Europe's political elite to enable, represent, and repress the desire that constitutes the contemporary European social assemblage.
Oedipal authority and capitalist sovereignty: a Deleuzoguattarian reading of IR theory
Earl Gammon
Despite advancements in the theorisation of political sovereignty brought about by the engagements of critical international relations theory, there remain significant lacunae in our understanding of the reproduction of this peculiar configuration of social life. This article, drawing on the collaborative work of Deleuze and Guattari, seeks to provide a more robust theorisation of the subjectivities underpinning modern political sovereignty — here understood as capitalist sovereignty. It looks to their programme of ‘schizoanalysis’, which interrogates the unconscious libidinal investments of capitalist reproduction. Specifically, Deleuze and Guattari argue that a factitious Oedipal configuration of desire allows the sovereign flow of capital. This article gathers insights from schizoanalysis in elucidating a dynamic affective relationship between sovereignty and the territorial state. It also suggests the potential of schizoanalysis for reconceptualising world politics and contributing to emancipatory IR scholarship.
From The Twenty Years' Crisis to Theory of International Politics: a rhizomatic reading of realism
Sean Molloy
The idea behind this article is to employ a series of Deleuzo-Guattarian principles, primarily the concept of the rhizome, to the articulation and development of Realism as a theory of IR. The article makes the claim that using rhizomatics allows those interested in Realism to reconceptualise the relationship between Realism and Neorealism. The article argues that the publication of The Twenty Years’ Crisis by E.H. Carr and Theory of International Politics by Ken Waltz represent two ‘intense’ moments in the descent of Realism. The article argues that despite the attempted ‘territorialisation’ of Realism into the static, paradigmatic Neorealism, Realism remains a heterogeneous set of concepts. The territorialisation process has met with some resistance; for example, just as Waltz was trying to territorialise Realism, his theory was being deterritorialised by Richard Ashley. The article also examines James Der Derian's attempt to save realism by deconstructing it, advocating an ‘affirmative leap into the imaginary’. The article concludes that despite the Neorealist moment, attempts to splice together constructivism and realism provide evidence that Realism remains mutative, heterogeneous, open and vital.
Of nomadic unities: Gilles Deleuze on the nature of sovereignty
Julian Reid
This paper develops Deleuze's critique of the political ideal of sovereignty by examining his philosophy of nature. In their exultation of the ideal of sovereignty, traditional forms of political theory reflect only one aspect of nature. That is, its tendency toward unity. As such, they obscure what is most ‘true’ of nature, and what is most ‘true’ of peoples and individuals, which is their tendency toward multiplicity. While Deleuze's work has received significant attention in IR, the value of his philosophy of nature for the more concretely political problem of sovereignty is still to be fully realised. Beyond its under-representation in debates concerning political problems, Deleuze's work also suffers from misrepresentation. There is an abiding misconception of Deleuze as a theorist of the possibility of a ‘world without sovereignty’. This paper dispels that particular misconception by demonstrating Deleuze's attention to the necessity of the recurrence of the problem of sovereignty as a condition for an understanding of political agency.
Alongside global political economy — a rhizome of informal finance
William Vlcek
One contemporary issue confronting global finance is the nature and extent of its participation in and contribution to a global war on terror. To date, efforts have involved a variety of methods, including both an increase in the surveillance of financial transactions and the regulation of previously unregulated methods of financial exchange. This paper offers a conceptualisation of one informal value transfer method (known by its Arabic name — hawala) in the form of a rhizome, using the concept as developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. This paper argues that the ability of hawala to regenerate itself along multiple paths situates the procedure as a rhizome, and that standard methods for financial regulation fail to appreciate the crucial difference this regenerative ability makes for attempts at control and regulation. Consequently, the activity that the state is seeking to control will merely be displaced, to reform and regenerate itself yet again. To ground this argument in the present condition of the global political economy, the specific example considered is Al Barakaat, a transnational Somali firm that fell victim to the global war on terror in late 2001.
Interference: between political science and political philosophy
Garnet Kindervater
This article begins by asserting that scientific and philosophical fidelities among scholars of international relations provoke a logic of antinomy that is counterproductive to the discipline's goals of understanding world politics. Through a critical introduction to some major concepts in the collaboration between Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the article assembles a relationship between chaos — understood as the infinite speed of appearance and disappearance — and strategies of thought that developed to cope with impermanence. By tracing from an empirically unknowable ontology to how Deleuze and Guattari produce a constellation of dynamic concepts that spring from change at speeds exceeding human comprehension, I suggest that different strategies for producing knowledge (among them philosophy and science) can produce generative relays between them. The relays between different methods force an ‘interference’, a dynamic friction in which the different strategies are productive of new relationships, both between themselves and with the complexities of political phenomena. The result is more than a pluralist perspective wherein scholarship is produced in a range of ways according to individuated claims and methodological approaches to truth. Instead, this article points toward the productivity of difference itself.