Deleuze and Stirner: Ties, Tensions and Rifts

In this chapter, the author demonstrates the potential that a combination of Deleuze and Stirner holds for (post)anarchism. A critical reading of Deleuze’s depiction of Stirner in his work on Nietzsche opens up the possibility of combining their thought. The comparative analysis of Deleuze and Stirner goes beyond the work of Saul Newman and draws on Gabriel Kuhn’s application of schizo-revolutionary thought and minoritarian becoming to an anarchist, anti-fascist mode of existence, highlighting the strong links to Stirner’s creative nothingness and the self-dissolving, never-being ego.

From the Autochthonousphere to the Allochthonousphere: Escaping the Logics of Plantations and the Moving Target

Chantelle Gray van Heerden argues that plantation logics create a particular appreciative of the spatial coordinates of histories since the carceral, a kind of facialisation of power, is always reliant on binarisation and biunivocalisation. She argues that in order to bring about real change in the world, anarchism has to become imperceptible without invisibilising whitenesss. Drawing on Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, she invites the reader to reconsider the surface and the ground. This, she holds, can help us think about how to disrupt the spatial coordinates of the plantation and the racial violence it portends.

Deterritorialising Anarchist Geographies: A Deleuzian Approach

This chapter outlines a geography of historical anarchism (between 1871 and 1918) from three main ideas in which the authors bring together interdisciplinary contributions from geography and history, with a number of theoretical postulates from Deleuze and Guattari. The first examines the symbolic geography and imaginaries regarding anarchism; the second the militant migration and the connexions between groups around the world, analysed through anarchist newspaper records; and the third covers the prior two issues by contrasting capitalism expansion with anarchism expansion.

Deleuze and the Anarchist Tradition

In this chapter, the author draws on ideas from Michael Freeden’s theory of ideology to show that the so-called anarchist tradition is best regarded as a constellation of diffuse and evolving concepts rather than a bounded historical reality. This, in turn, allows one to distinguish between what he calls “anarchist” thought (i.e., thought that emerges within and in response to historical anarchist movements) and “anarchistic” thought (i.e., thought that emerges outside historical anarchist movements but is conceptually harmonious with various fundamental “anarchist” commitments).

Absolutely Deterritorial: Deleuze, Indigeneity and Ethico-Aesthetic Anarchism as Strategy

Andrew Stones accounts in this chapter for the ways in which relative and absolute deterritorialisation are used strategically by indigenous activists and theorists. In particular, he thinks about the relations between struggles ‘for’ freedom – or against the structure of domination – and struggles ‘of’ freedom – or struggles that take place within the structure of domination. Turning to examples of both anarchist and indigenous struggles in India, Africa and Australia, he shows how Deleuze’s concepts of ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ deterritorialisation offer concrete strategic resources for resistance to settler colonialism.

Crowned Anarchy-Anarchy-Anarchism – Countereffectuating Deleuze and Guattari’s Politics

In this chapter I propose that Deleuze and Guattari's work does in fact suggest an anarchist political sensibility; an anarchism that is able both to analyse and respond effectively to the conditions of the present and to propose and create something genuinely new. In fact, I argue, it is perhaps only anarchism - a life politics of anarchism that is the differenciation of anarchy as the becoming of the crowned anarchy and nomadic distributions of the virtual - that sufficiently responds to the full scope of the political philosophy Deleuze and Guattari developed throughout their lives, which is perhaps why so many anarchists have come to recognise aspects of their theories and practices in the active nihilism of joyful encounters.

‘Visible Invisibility’ as Machinic Resistance

This chapter discusses Deleuze, Guattari and anarchism in terms of contemporary anarchist praxis. Specifically, Christoph Hubatschke thinks about the politics of the face. In the wake of the events of 1968, Guattari, impressed by this extraordinary revolutionary upheaval, wrote a short text entitled Machine and Structure. In this text, Guattari introduced the notion of the machine for the first time in order to describe a new form of chaosmotic organising – a form of revolutionary politics without a party, without a specified programme and, most importantly, without representation.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?: Coming to Terms with Deleuze

In this chapter, the author narrates his extended encounter with Deleuze, explaining how he went from a fairly sharp mistrust of his philosophy to a place where, as Wittgenstein might have put it, he now no longer sees certain things as problems, but from a standpoint where some of the apparent “problems” were formerly thought to be. The ‘drama’ has roughly four acts.

Anarchy and Institution: A New Sadean Possibility

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the concept of anarchy in relation to that of institutions, both conceived of in a Deleuzian way of thinking. The starting point is the remark which Deleuze made about Sade in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1967), where Deleuze talks about the possible strategies to criticise law. According to Sade, law belongs to a second nature and depends on a principle which belongs, instead, to the first nature: this principle is anarchy, understood like an institution. Following Sade, Deleuze seems to understand the possibility to link the institution and anarchy and it is this connection that forms the basis of this chapter.

Micropolitics and Social Change: Deleuze and Guattari for Anarchist Theory and Practice

Paul Raekstad turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the molar and molecular. He argues that while these differ in nature or scale, this does not necessarily mean they differ in size or extension. Based on this argument, Raekstad examines and pinpoints a problem with vanguardist approaches to revolution which, he shows, is not a problem of organisation or unification as such, but of the kinds of organisation and unification that are required to go beyond capitalism and the State.