Is a philosopher’s suicide a ‘historical’ event, whose proximity can be measured chronologically by anniversaries? A quarter of a century has passed since Gilles Deleuze ended his life from the window of his Paris apartment. He was suffering from an acute respiratory ailment for years and had recently had a tracheostomy. There was nothing dramatic about his end: no suicide note, no statement to the world. A few months earlier, his conversations with Claire Parnet, held on condition that they will be aired only after his death, were telecast in what was perhaps his only appearance on television. When permitting this, he said: “Considering my actual state, it is a little bit as if I were already gone.” His voluntary exit from the world a few months later, far from a complaint or lament, seemed like an act of affirmation, expressed as the flight from a life which was no longer alive.
Twenty-five years later, Deleuze has perhaps become more of a contemporary for us than when he was alive. He was of course known and read in the Anglophone world, but much less than his peers Foucault, Derrida or Lacan. The English translations of some of his major works appeared only in the late eighties or early nineties. In India, despite small pockets of close readers, Deleuze’s books did not initially sync well with the then-prominent idioms of reading and thinking. His early radical monographs on Hume, Kant, Nietzsche and Spinoza seemed too academic; his major philosophical works like Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense recondite; and Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, jointly authored with Félix Guattari, wild, too far out from the terms of discourse that shaped debates about society and politics in Indian universities and intellectual circles. An encounter with Marxism or postcolonial politics—the principal gateways for political reanimation of contemporary western thought in India at that time—which was possible to an extent in the case of Foucault and Derrida, proved difficult with Deleuze. This situation has changed over the past decade: new work in the humanities in India has been increasingly turning to Deleuze and drawing on his work on cinema and society, on becoming and affect.
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Perhaps we are now learning to read Deleuze in relation to our fraught present. The pivot of this turn to a new legibility might be a short essay he wrote in 1990, titled Post Script on Societies of Control. What is striking about these few pages is the way they charted out, ahead of their time, the lineaments of power in contemporary societies and showed how the tools of analysis developed in earlier contexts needed radical rethinking. The modern world of capitalist discipline, Deleuze proposed, was giving way to something else: we were at a point of exit and at the threshold of something new. Deleuze’s point of departure was his old friend Michel Foucault’s well-known analyses of capillary forms of disciplinary power in the modern West. Central to this were institutions such as schools, hospitals and prisons, and modern discourses of knowledge, which operated very differently from the direct repression of sovereign regimes in earlier times.
According to Deleuze, Foucault was not just the theorist of modern disciplinary power; he was also the first to suggest that this mode of power was on its way out. Indeed, in his lectures at Collège de France in the late seventies, Foucault had gone on to investigate the emergence of new forms of power—governmental and biopolitical—which had populations and not individuals as their target and where the economy and the living existence of people became direct concerns. Interestingly, Deleuze did not use terms from Foucault’s late lectures to name these new formations. Instead he chose the word “control”, which he took from William S. Burroughs but, in his usual style, extended beyond its sense in the original. Burroughs was interested in the “limits of control”, especially mind control, and in showing how control mechanisms reach an impasse when they are successful and when there is little left to control. What interested Deleuze were the specific ways in which control worked: its techniques, conduits and effects. Unlike institutions like the prison and the school, with their enclosed structures of surveillance and normalisation, control worked by opening up everything, seeping in everywhere and effecting a constant, decentred modulation.
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Networks of data and communication formed the vital arteries of control societies, a prescient insight for 1990. Instead of the “order words” of discipline, it is the “password” that becomes important now, determining access and exclusion. Deleuze cited Guattari’s hypothetical picture of “a town where anyone can leave their flat, their city, their neighbourhood, using their (dividual) electronic card that opens this or that barrier; but the card may also be rejected on a particular day, or between certain times of day; it doesn’t depend on the barrier but on the computer that is making sure everyone is in a permissible place, and effecting a universal modulation.” This is familiar to us now: advances in communication and the expansion of cell phones and computers, once hailed as a vital element of modern democratisation, have turned into instruments of an unrelenting surveillance. And participation in digital networks is no longer a matter of choice: to secure one’s essential needs and basic rights one increasingly requires it, even in countries marked by a deep digital divide, like India.
Gilles Deleuze.
Digital communication technologies and our understanding of them have long outgrown this short essay written three decades ago, but Deleuze was among the earliest to assess the challenge this transformation poses to our political imagination. Schooled in the conjunction of closure, confinement and oppression, we are used to seeking our freedoms in openness, in tropes of unconstrained expansion. But the control societies of our present do not seek closure; they thrive best in open spaces. It is not in silence, but in the proliferation of speech that they find their sustenance. Each time we make a phone call, access a website, post on social media or like a video, networks of control incorporate us into their entrails.
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Hence the paradox that Deleuze’s analysis presents before us: communication, which formed the cutting edge of resistance in systems of closure, has now become the very medium through which power is exercised. It is no longer easy to speak of unadulterated freedoms of expression: their very exercise, even at their minor, non-political threshold, will already make one an object of documentation and surveillance. The internet, which in the early nineties promised decentred virtual communities that flourish outside state control, has now become the happy hunting ground of state surveillance, marketing and even political manipulation, as Christopher Wylie’s recent chilling account shows. If intersubjective communication, the principal tool of defiance in earlier regimes, becomes the air that contemporary power fills its lungs with, where do we find our new weapons?
In a conversation with Antonio Negri, again in 1990, Deleuze said: “Perhaps speech and communication have been corrupted.… We have got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key element may be to create vacuoles of non-communication, circuit breakers, so that we can elude control.” The erosion and deactivation of the public sphere in recent years (now exacerbated to an unprecedented degree in the context of the pandemic) have prompted pleas for its restoration to some degree of incorrupt freedom. Deleuze thought that in control societies communication tends, by its very nature, to be permeated by money power; this is not an accidental feature that can be mended. But the system has its own inherent dangers: a passive danger (noise) and an active danger (piracy and viral contamination).
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Hacking builds on this active possibility, and seemed a promising weapon in countering secrecy, surveillance and proprietary control at the time of the emblematic WikiLeaks revelations ten years ago. It looks less so now, with states and private capital having caught up with such efforts. The battle is not over though: whistleblowing and revelatory exposures continue in the face of mounting legal and punitive assaults by many states the world over. In France, where Deleuze lived and wrote, the lower house of the parliament passed a Global Security Bill some days ago, which—if passed by the upper house and then enacted into law—would make the publication of photographs of police atrocities punishable, and major protests are currently on in Paris and several other cities, forcing the government to rethink this move.
What are Deleuze’s “vacuoles of non-communication”? His thought stresses creation, not communication. The question, for him, is not that of expanding the public arena of expression and representation, but about changing the rules of the game, inventing what he called new “space-times” which elude control mechanisms. This stance is prefigured in the intense short monograph on Kafka, which he wrote in collaboration with Guattari, and in the conception of “minor literature” advanced there. A minor literature, for Deleuze and Guattari, is written in a major language by a minority: Kafka wrote in German instead of Czech or Yiddish. It uses the major language in ways that disrupt and empty dominant and accepted idioms of articulation. This is closer to stammering rather than to an alternative, full voice. It is not Kafka who stammers in German though: he makes the German language stammer in his work; German is “minorised”—made to behave like a minor language.
This conception of the “minor” is not collapsible with numerical minority status and keeps some distance from projects of forging and securing identities, even as it remains invested in the force-field of majoritarian power and its extreme effects of dispossession. Deleuze’s brief, less noticed writings on Palestine may now speak to our present as never before. The question remains: what form will solidarities take without the anchorage of identities?
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Deeper still, there is the problem of resistance—perhaps the ultimate question of our times. Unlike the more traditional conception of power which thinks in terms of oppression and liberation, and even Foucauldian conceptions of power as a battleground where domination and resistance serve as key concepts, Deleuze’s thought does not seem to foreground the idea of resistance. This is not a pessimistic abandoning of opposition to power but locating it at the constitution of the social field. Society, for Deleuze, is primarily not structure, but lines of flight that move in all directions. This is countered by processes of territorialisation that erect structures and secure identities, creating nation-states, institutions, party formations and thought forms—like the psychobiography of the individual self—that seek to contain the flow of desire. The creation of lines of flight, forms of deterritorialisation, new space-times, becomes the task of the present, thus taking politics close to art and creation. Foucault in his preface to Anti-Oedipus called it “an introduction to non-fascist life”. Fascism has the power to mobilise people to plug into the structure of desire in a society. It is only through a different orientation of desire in society that one may have a politics that defies the molar reterritorialisation of Fascism. Deterritorialising lines of escape are intrinsic and not external to society; they keep opening themselves up in uprisings and revolts, in new ways of thinking and living.
At a time when many parts of the world see fascist desire on the ascent, habits of democracy recede into the past, and weapons of resistance turn into ruses for incorporation, might Deleuze offer new departures? His thought points to resources of invention and flight that have remained politically illegible when viewed through the dominant lenses of political thinking. Are the recurrent revolts and uprisings around us a wakeup call for thought? Does the domain of affect offer new possibilities for politics, to destabilise the self-assurance of populist authoritarianism? Can forms of non-fascist living be invented for our present? These questions confront us when we revisit Deleuze and his death now, as we stand in the middle of suicides that we do not yet know how to read, recognise or stand with—those deaths that perhaps call out to be witnessed as acts of refusal and, thus, of affirmation.
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Udaya Kumar teaches contemporary literary and cultural theory at Jawaharlal Nehru University
