Notes on: Dyal, M. (nd). Deleuze, Guattari, and the New Right. http://www.counter-currents.com

Dave Harris

[Gripping critique of the usual readings of Deleuze as a nice liberal, traced back to his admiration of Nietzsche and critique of Plato. I have problems as ever, with whether Deleuze endorsed this stuff on the 'genealogy of morals',say, or was trying to expound it accurately via indirect free discourse. I agree with the general scepticism that Deleuze is really an ally of 'postmodernist' lliberals. I am alarmed by some of the interpretations, say of 'deterritorialisation' in this -- but it is an excellent argument]

Part one
The origin is Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morality, the critique of morality and the 'omnipresence of ressentiment and bad conscience' [no page numbers] and how we must break with reactive forces through affirmation, based on force and desire. We must think critically and break with modernity, by implication. D and G show us that this must be radical, even 'nonsensical', and they have this in common with the New Right, 'the band of loosely conjoined thinkers', who also draw on Nietzsche and his critique of morality as something natural, something explained by Jewish slave revolts, grounded in ressentiment.

Origins can be found in the Counter–Enlightenment, although this risks normalising the Enlightenment and its principles of 'reason, humanity, and equality; and subsequent denial of the ontological power and legitimacy of antidemocratic thought'. Nevertheless Counter Enlightenment thinkers consist of Nietzsche, Heidegger, de Maistre, Sorel and Julius Evola [pass]. And D and G. And Foucault. All 'wage war against reason, freedom, democracy, and humanism' and find tyranny and reaction in them. The Right confused things by opposing modernity on behalf of the aristocracy, and the anti-colonialists like Cabral and Fanon attacked the Enlightenment [impertinently for Dyal] without noticing the influence of Nietzsche.

Modernity attacked by French academics, however was different, and had to be dealt with. Baudrillard turned it into 'an easily assimilable attack on Ronald Reagan's America', Foucault and Lyotard attacked 'governmentality, power and metanarratives;', and this was mistaken to be somehow related to the problems of wage slaves. Derrida took on the value and meaning in Western literature 'without the slightest inkling of how it undermines [his] own cushy authority'.the revolutionary potential of this thinking was diffused, however, hijacked and used to attack instead '"white privilege," "racism," and "patriarchy"'.

However, the real promise of a reconciliation between these ilberal tendencies on the left, and traditional Rght critics is the New Right — both oppose modernity and Enlightenment, and both originate in Nietzsche. Both differ however in terms of the liberal state and how to rehabilitate a pre-modern form of life. The New Right (NR) only offers a utopian 'ethno-organic' state and some pre-modern pre-Christian European lifeforms. Post-modernists scarcely do better and simply borrow from the Classics and have not created a proper new narrative. D&G are more informative.

Their social background is interesting [petty bourgeois, fascist and anti-Semitic families although G supported the resistance and eventually Trotskyite politics]. Both developed 'in the shadow of phenomenology and the structuralisms of… Saussure...Levi-Stauss and ...lacan' all of which 'refused to differentiate between democracy and fascism'and sought instead 'to "dissolve the conception of Western man that made both possible'.

D's politics were always 'subtle and seemingly inconsistent', and confined to philosophy, however, aimed at nonstate philosophers, aiming to critique the '"bureaucracy of consciousness"', opposing anything that could be codified by the state, searching, operating through individual and collective codes for a ground for desire, active forces located in the body, instinct and human life. All his mates were bourgeois Marxists or phenomenologists 'whose experiential nature (it just so happens, evidently) is perfectly compatible with the terms and conditions of the modern bourgeois form of life', but he turned to Hume, Bergson Nietzsche to look for fragilities and overlooked alternatives.

The image of thought is an immanent plane, pre-philosophical presuppositions. It is quite different from the bourgeois notion of thought which is a natural human capacity possessed of a goodwill and a moral nature, with a natural affinity with the truth, and with a simple process of recognition. This leads to nice harmonious coordination of the human faculties in grasping a single object and in producing the thinking subject. That this should be selected as the model of thought, even of philosophical thought represents a betrayal, a deep complacency, and incapacity to criticise.

The counter image was first found in the previously neglected Nietzsche. There was no rational Cartesian subject but competing wills, instincts and forces. Bourgeois values were to be critiqued, including 'truth, faith, and morality'. Smoothed out spaces are turned back into 'frontiers and labyrinthine streets where new movements and distributions become possible'. This pushes to the absolute limit, saying that we must radically convert the whole process of valuing rather than just pursue simple oppositions. This means that even radical critics of modernity must escape the ressentiment they still reproduce as long as they stick with bourgeois thought, and he specifies 'psychology history metaphysics and morality'which is still contaminated with the spirit of revenge. We need to consider not values but 'ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate'. [Is this still Deleuze? He cites Nietzsche and Philosophy, 35 ]'There are things that can only be sensed, felt or conceived, values that can only be adhered to on condition of "base" evaluation, "base" living, and "base" thinking [he means high and low, noble and base] [my problem is whether this is Deleuze or just indirect free discourse again. Dyal sees it as the '"capstone"' of D and G, and the thing that gets closest to New Right thinking].

Part two The Affect of Ttruth
Deleuze says that truth affects the comfort of uncritical thought, but we must become–revolutionary. We get there through 'the trans-evaluation of logos', found in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. We need to pursue a quick detour 'against [Platonic] transcendence and divine judgement'.

We can simplify logos to mean 'word, reason, or law'. The logocentric world is structured and ordered. Nomos is an arrangement that does not rely on 'organisation or permanent structure'. It was rooted originally in ancient Greece in pastoral land without enclosures or property, space without precise limits.

Logos is a foundation of traditionalism and 'ethno-statism' in New Right thinking in the USA, although it has now been relegated to anarcho- fascist fringes, promoting 'ethics, local tribalism, and irreducible particularity and difference'.

For D, the differences are seen best when comparing Kant and Nietzsche. Kant examines doubt and untruth but leaves rationality, but Nietzsche takes the opposite approach and sees problems as forcing critical thought. The European NR draws from both, in trying to draw an ethical basis from the pre-modern past. Nomos is most useful to undermine the logoi of Western modernity [citing De Benoist], drawing on the idea of loose organising principles stressing 'heroism, manliness, greatness and peoplehood', defined locally. Plato rejected these ideas as unreliable and irresolvable and preferred logos as moral law, which persisted until Nietzsche: there there is a need to move thought beyond the law, creating new values by reviving the opposition between nomos and logos.

Nietzsche sees Socrates and Plato as symptoms of decay and Hebrew disintegration. Dialectics represents 'the defeat of nobility by plebeian ressentiment [in The Problem of Socrates]. Rationality tyrannises the instincts through morality. We need to move to Zarathustra and the creation of a true world, through the rejection of illusions. Diff and Rep can be seen as representing a companion to this journey — logocentric Being is also a moralistic illusion. Platonism in particular has to be combated.

In this combat, logos is attacked for the sake of nomos to preserve the complexity of life and avoid negation and ressentiment. It runs through Cartesian thought and its presuppositions, and the whole notion of a relationship between Idea, copy and simulacrum. We have to get to a new idea of thought 'based on the new thoughts of the image', not a matter of an opposition between essence and appearance, but rather one between image and simulacra. Plato wanted to push this distinction [in order to preserve the philosopher's role in guaranteeing the genuine] and to reduce the threat of simulacra, but in the process, he condemns '"the state of free oceanic difference (or affirmation in Nietzsche's language)"' (D and R). [The genuine] is to be based on establishing definite authority, a transcendent one, 'essentially introducing divine judgement into philosophy', but this transcendence must be 'injected into [philosophy] from a religious, moral, and political attack on difference'.

Difference is an ontological reality, 'as it essentially experienced' with no foundational ground or subject, no actual world to be represented in virtual images by privileged mental activity. Life itself is to be totally affirmed ['seen most clearly in the Eternal Return', apparently]. In Nietzsche, human life is created from the flow of experience, and that includes thoughts and ideas. For D ideas also extend and enhance experience, but not as some second-order product, more as an interaction 'multifarious flows of information time, ideas and images', forces rather than bourgeois thinking subjects. This is 'foundational to Deleuze's transcendental empirical metaphysics': we are talking not just about difference by degrees between similar objects which presupposes some unity between, 'but instead a difference–in–itself that is the world as it is perceived' [Bergson's notion of the second kind of difference, not difference in degree]. We don't create thoughts by pursuing resemblances, identities, oppositions and analogies as in Descartes, but rather we seek the '"particularity or singularity of each individual thing, moment, perception, or conception"', and avoid any bourgeois attempt to universalise and standardise.

Platonists try and distinguish between images that are trustworthy and those that lead to error, by distinguishing between the Idea and the simulacra, and this is to be policed by philosophers. It implies that the must be some amount of 'likeness, sameness, or identity' between the two, so that difference is subordinate to sameness, and grasped only through a representational relationship. Proper difference is rejected. It follows that there are 'processes of individuation [affecting humans] determined by actual and specific differences, multitudinous influences, and chance interactions. While racial groupings — one of the hallmarks of modern thought — fall by the wayside, please take note that inequality — perhaps the very basis of pre-Platonic thoughts — does not'.

D moves on to Descartes and Kant and extends the rejection of Platonism to consider the Cogito, as irreducibly derived from bourgeois notions of humanity, goodwill, recognition and so on. There are no independently truthful propositions [what Popper would call basic statements?], Since 'all knowledge is partial and open to revision' nor is there any universal rational system applying everywhere, a universal way of perceiving or remembering, having faculties of thought operating and so on — what Descartes and Kant call 'common sense'. Kant even suggests that this is some version of natural rationality, found in the developed forms in the Critiques.

Deleuze follows Nietzsche in arguing that 'no thought is free of sensation', that the cogito never escapes it but is always underpinned by in the form of 'a multiplicity of further conditions and causes'. This exposes the phoney universality of the thinking subject and its 'comical "common sense"'. Thinking is not the natural exercise of the faculties, nor is it directed by good nature and goodwill.

In this extension of Platonism we have an example of how difference returns,[ just as in the Eternal Return — only difference returns]. Difference is the only productive force in life. There is no beyond of representation. Instead modern understanding of human experience is 'fragile, narrow, self-serving'. We are held in check by current representational images of thought, but this also provides 'almost limitless number of opportunities for creation of thinking and acting beyond the modern bourgeois of order of life in a single day'.

Overall, all the philosophers so far have developed an illusion 'based on the comfort of imitation (representation) and the secure foundations of old values'. They need to be made to confront 'the reality of difference and becoming, a love of creation, an adoration of the abyss, and the necessity of creating new values'.

Part three The Search for Smooth Space

Building on the radical impetus of nomocentric thought can lead to implications for logocentric thought. The celebration of Nomos leads to more more criticism of state-sponsored thoughts and the repression of instinctual forces, and these are particular themes for the NR. There is some alignment with pre-Socratic Greek thought which itself preceded 'modern quantitative rationality [an odd bit about the unorthodox composition and function of the Olympian deities]

In Anti-Oedipus and ATP, Nomos and logos are the basis of oppositions between schizophrenia and paranoia, and smooth and striated space, and again NR thinkers can identify their project as 'the search for schizophrenia and smooth space'. This clearly involves a complete transvaluation of modern thought, and a search for 'exteriority' within the liberal state. It is a project that seeks to destroy modernity not just make it more inclusive and compassionate.

This is why NR thinking is excluded from the Academy and state thinking. The liberal state is repressive and destroys logos, Nomos and creativity. It only wants energy to turn into labour, in the form of 'universal bourgeois human energy', irrespective of whether it is white, black or Latino. Discrimination is outlawed 'only in the name of commerce'. Psychological development for individuals is only to optimise their economic value. Academic subjects are in its service, it offers suitable rewards and it makes sense.

D and G show how capitalism and desire work together, how desire is codified 'in order to produce bourgeois humans' and how humanity is also decoded or de-territorialised. For example all the old codes, myths and traditions are reduced to economic rationality. Desire is only for production, connected to lack. The liberal state provides 'comfort, safety and production' and these are 'easy investments for our instincts and desire'. The only potential for revolt lies in the excesses of the body, and the limits of modernity, which no regime change can extend. The first task is to create spaces or breaks, 'zones of schizophrenic bodily decoding' which makes state-sponsored thoughts and liberal humanism 'no longer functional'. These can be supplied by NR and other forms of Right revolution

Guattari's contribution is often neglected, but he played an important part in making Deleuze explicitly political. He remained a radical Trotskyite, defended Negri, supported Autonomists and so on. He 'combined Lacanian psychoanalysis with radical Marxian anticapitalism', trying to link the restless energy of desire. This 'came to fruition only after Deleuze imposed Nietzsche's vitalist naturalism'.

Both were inspired by the student uprising, and led Deleuze to think about concepts of difference and Nomos. Nomos is already a break with modernity, and serves as a political metaphor for 'spatial dynamics of thought and social organisation… Nomadic thought and behaviour' outside of the logos of state science and economic rationality. Difference leads beyond standardisation and logos, and upholds minorities. Becoming-minor is an active process of transvaluation of bourgeois life, and this is shared with the revolutionary Right, no longer seeking majority inclusion, wanting to escape from majority subjugation.

Desire is crucial as the locus of power on individuals. It is located in the infrastructure for Marxists, but it has positive and creative potential at least, as desiring machines connect together and connect desires with others, producing all sorts of relationships between wasps and orchids, social wholes and communities. Power needs to be expanded using desire. Forms that turn against life, like ressentiment in the bourgeois forms must be resisted.

AO focuses on the relation between the individual and capitalism, while ATP looks at the individual and the state. None of the concepts or examples are to be read metaphorically. The project shows how unconscious desire gets 'invested in economic social and political fields', in a machininc form. Oedipus is the classic form of repression and capitalism, detectable in the forms of savage,despotic and capitalist regimes, superabundant codes, a vertical organisation, codes pointing to the despot with infinite debt and causing ressentiment, striated space appropriated by the State. This prepares the ground for capitalism which reduces everything to the market, reduces all meaning [a first form of schizophrenia], and encourages 'purely abstract and global economic flows of capital', with all alliances and connections passing through money not people. The social field becomes an axiomatic, with no need for definition or any transcendent agent, or any particular meanings at all.

 It is still dependent on the state, however which still has to provide some way to motivate people and prevent challenges to 'the axiomatic life'. At this stage, D and G switch from discussing codes to discussing territories, and codification becomes territorialisation, decoding becomes deterritorialisation, and recoding becomes reterritorialisation. Desire is dealt with by hyper- consumption, still tied to capitalist production, of course, still creating an infinite debt.

So capitalism deterritorialises codes and meanings, and this does open the possibility of creating new values, only to be closed off by reterritorialisation by the capitalist axiomatic [everything is redefined in terms of surplus values and capitalist production]. This is a continual process, cyclic, as production needs to be maintained. The only constant feature is the nuclear family which offers 'a more private submission to the authority and sensibility of the bourgeois regimentation of life'.

D&G revive Nietzsche's notion that money is about debt and guilt as well as exchange and this is what makes capitalism particularly powerful. There is a need to create subjects [who will feel this debt and guilt] and this is the role handed to the state, which in turn draws upon the family, hence the Oedipus complex, and the whole domain of 'free will, choice, opinion, taste, aesthetics, and many more bourgeois justifications', supported by the leisure industry, advertising and so on.

But desire is an unstable force and finds no actual joy in consumption. Codes are also constantly destroyed and deterritorialised, so the system itself is unstable. Desire needs to 'go to war with capitalism'. This is why schizophrenia can be a revolutionary process, if it develops 'as a radical opposition to statist paranoia'. Schizophrenic tendencies can be found at the macro level in the struggles between the needs of capitalism to create a single global market, and the state's need to preserve national boundaries [maybe. There is also the tension between use value and exchange value and welfare states in Offe?]. The state needs to preserve the capitalist axiomatic and pursues policies such as 'multiculturalism, security, and the prohibition against certain forms of violence'.

 At the micro level there are oppositions between forms of thought, which we can see with the nomadic war machine, which lies beyond the sovereignty or interiority of the state, and is found in nomadic tribes, or deviant social relations and methods of production. It is often schizophrenic and also revolutionary, and finds itself engaging in warfare against the state, trying to resist capture. The state tries to use sovereignty, logocentric thought and paranoid insistence upon codifying and territorialising to produce universal categories.

ATP shows how to make smooth space of images of thought, and how to show war machines and the lines of flight they might use. In one of their examples they cite Dumezil, ' a fascist philologist' [another one] [the ref is ATP 351 – 60] and Clastres who talked about the nationalisation of war machines to striate and domesticate them, which is how they disappeared from Europe.

There are still remnants, though. Nietzsche's thought is one example. Other examples include 'ultra localism' in the EU, resisting new forms of sovereignty in 'civil society' [does he mean Autonomism? [The reference is to Negotiations 177 – 82]. These at least call the sovereignty of the state into question. For Dyal, 'the NR, right anarchism and secessionism each point to a type of becoming-minor that can become-revolutionary', if it thinks of itself as a war machine. There is a line of flight beyond the bourgeois liberal human. D and G ignored these actual possibilities, although they stressed Nietzsche rather than Freud and Marx as a critic of modernity.

To tidy up some loose ends, What is Philosophy can be read as stressing the creation of concepts and affirmation again. As with Nietzsche, affirmation is 'the basis of a noble form of life' based on primary energy and intensity, has no need to justify its existence, is a transvaluation of ressentiment. Affirmation separates 'the "true Right" from the liberal Right, the liberal Left, and illiberal Left', even if this is not always apparent. It is necessary to want to create more than to destroy, to take a belief in the world, engender new possibilities, resist control. Quoting Deleuze '"We need both creativity and people"' [Negotiations again, 176]

Part four. A Commentary on Deleuze, Guattari and the New Right

He wanted to get NR to develop a more revolutionary stance rather than just a critique, thinking what is currently knowable becoming more radical in terms of its images of thought, and, pragmatically, using post-modern critique when necessary [and other critiques of bourgeois modernity]. [Later on, this is the reason for reading D&G, despite their leftist orientations] We should push it further, and see 'the bourgeois human as a form of imprisonment created precisely to eliminate particularity and variance amongst peoples' [more or less the last stage for Baudrillard as well].

The NR are the only possibility for revolt., via becoming–minor. This would also destroy all the other claims to become comfortable minorities as potential majorities, as in 'an inclusive and forgiving modernity'. This led him into hope 'that the Boston Marathon bombers had been white males' [a ref to a Counter-Comments blog] as a sign that something monumental had happened. When it does, the old minorities 'will be the only ones that think they gain from the continuation of liberal politics'.

Of course we can add Deleuze to the mix of philosophy, because he has clarified the critique of Hegel and Plato and the ethno state, and obviously revived Nietzsche and vitalism. This once reflected a divide within the NR, inhibiting its revolutionary tendencies because of its 'natural inclination' for order. Nietzsche is the main inspiration for rereading D and G, finding him 'seeping through every concept'. He's also been inspired by experiences of contemporary Italy in providing experiences of a pre-statist and thus post statist forms of life [autonomism or excessive regionalism?] because his earlier examples had always been limited to Native Americans.[The stuff on Italy is a bit obscure -- a certain J Schneider's history of unification looks like]

D's book on Nietzsche is the most explosive and radical work he has ever read. It focuses on the 'transvaluation of the form — and not just content — of thought', not just the transvaluation of values but the 'transvaluation of evaluation'; seeing ressentiment and bad conscious as the most fundamental categories of Semitic and Christian thought and thus of current thought. Nietzsche becomes the source of the revolutionary Right offering to destroy every aspect of modernity even down to the bodily level.

Capitalism and schizophrenia shows the extent to which capitalism has undermined anything still primordial, but also reveals the possibilities for revolt and how to declare war against capitalism and liberalism, building on the 'vitalist impact' that we still possess, and that has been emphasised in capitalism and liberalism. We might have to destroy modernity first and it might take two generations before 'true revolt', but D and G argue that 'desiring production will change immediately' after bourgeois forms of life and point to 'the importance of derelict spaces and their role in our revolutionary potential and experience'. Derelict spaces, smooth space and nomadic war machines will offer social transformation, disrupting decoding and overcoding first, and the whole process of capture.

This is a threatening project in a way, but we must realise 'how much a conceptual sense making apparatus keeps us ensnared… "Enslavement"' [for D and G]' because we are reduced to pieces of the machine. We can celebrate 'moments of hesitation and confusion — wherein violence forces thought to think' and become active, affirmative. Violence [nice conceptual violence I think] seems necessary, but preferable to the childishness of negation and ressentiment.

However, the modern logos is obsessed with negation and limited by rejecting any force that will do it violence. The revolutionary Right has the potential to harness these forces and create smooth space, 'affirmative potentialities thought to become thinking'. However effective lines of flight away from liberal enslavement are not guaranteed. The new form of life must be created, subject to continual evaluation.

[He seems to have in mind continuous philosophical evaluation]. We need to constantly re-evaluate Hegel's notion of the state, for example, and how it might have led to the liberal state, and how pre-Christian pre-statist forms of life might be revived. Revolutionary Rightists already inhabit smooth spaces outside of the liberal equality machine but they need to pursue both questions and answers, to head towards becoming minor, to avoid being drawn back into liberal modernity, and this will involve further work on understanding the state, perhaps by rethinking anarchism.

There might be revolutionary potential in the concept of race and nation. 'Epistemically, race was created as a bourgeois project and was destroyed as a bourgeois project', but it has avoided this epistemological fate in reality because it comforts liberal racial minorities. It is confusing because multiculturalism is rejected by those that it apparently aims to help, but that is because, as NR thinkers correctly understand, 'the diminution of race discourse and racial knowledge and the commoditisation of ethnicity was only ever intended to deracialise one race'. This is why race remains a key concept for the North American NR, and why it finds itself forced to depend race and nation, almost alone among other New Rights 'as both progenitors and descendants of white racial nationalism'. [Lots of old Rights were racist and nationalist of course]

Really, 'race is the essence of logocentrism, seeking not only to bind the various humans into one universal family, but to quantify them as well'. However, it is now outlawed in state-sponsored thought and has shifted 'to a form of Nomos', ironically supporting 'those who stand beyond modern truth and morality' [he means in a bad sense presumably, those who want to attack law and order? This is a bad kind of ethno -Statism, the kind of BLM black run communities].

What we think of as primordial racial groups were once, in Greece, the basis of opposition to established Platonic political citizenship which is based instead on law and citizenship rather than 'kinship, blood, and likeness'. This relativises the conception of race [still further], and makes it coexistent with modern forms of political citizenship. Deleuze and Nietzsche seem to make the concept more radical by attaching it to the concept of Nomos, something organised horizontally, something even occupying a 'plane of immanence'.

Fichte introduce the concept of peoplehood as motherland, shared community and common culture, and then as nation. These conceptions might be 'seeing [their] last days' in contemporary Europe, but they still might persist 'more often than not in spite of the liberal state'. This inclusiveness underpinned a sense of order and defensive protection. The organic form of organisation and responsibility is shared by Deleuze and Nietzsche, and two blokes called Yockey and Evola.

Yockey sees race as a '"spirituo- biological community"', producing culture, a 'nomocentric understanding of race', even while flirting with the notion of biological racial stocks. This led him to abhor liberalism and its triumph in American political theory, always showing an affinity for the Enlightenment and thus 'the quintessential lapdog of capitalism'.

For Deleuze, Nomos is a weapon to oppose standardisation in modern liberal politics especially its racial logocentrism that produces standardised workers, marketizing and mobilising human beings. Race has never rung true for many European people as a result [not even in colonialism?].

In Italy we find 'extreme local particularity… Communities that are still defined organically… Extreme heterogeneity and difference' and the 'imposition of a racial, or even national, model', which includes the National soccer league created by fascism to unite the peninsula, common language and skills provision at the expense of local Artisan traditions and vernaculars. 'People in Rome — more than a large conglomeration of villages than iconic global city — often discuss the State as an occupying force'. [and the Mafia?]

The American NR might turn to the notion of Nomos not logocentrism based on the 17th century. It's just that American racial thought has never been able to draw on smaller organic forms of community, but only with liberal notions of race. At the same time, stressing race as a revolt against modernity 'does act as a war machine' and 'white racial consciousness is a break with modernity… A line of flight beyond what this world needs from us', but it is 'better off as Nomos than as logos' [in other words not to be asserted like black human rights in the courts?]

We should not see ourselves as areas of the liberal West, but take a minoritarian position like other dissidents. We must end liberalism and the bourgeois form of life and dissolve the state. The state has nothing to do with freedom and autonomy but instead overcodes and controls every element of power that we have. The bourgeois form of life is based in ressentiment and bad conscience ['Hebraic ascetic denial and persecution of life' ].

We should even stop defending against terrorism and immigration because that helps weaken the state and people's confidence in it. 'Anything that creates disharmony, disillusionment, discouragement, and disgust is our friend'. We should support '"massive non-institutionalised disruptions like riots, attacks on property, unruly demonstrations, arson, theft and the open defiance of established institutions"' [quoting an anarchist, Scott, here]  we should follow Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil to welcome the destruction of Europe, even accelerate and applaud it.

Revolutionary strategies include:
(1) sidle and straddle

The glories of the people of Europe will survive and be liberated with the fall of the West. It follows we should mobilise against globalisation, uniting to attack the banks and other symbols of multinational capitalism, as fascist and communist dissidents both did in Athens and Rome. Even the liberal left should be our allies. Fighting many spaces. Logos will be necessary at sometimes and others Nomos, both fascism and anarchism, 'head long assault and camouflage'

(2) camouflage

Everyone is assumed to be involved in the global marketplace, but the Italians use 'there Nomocentric particularity to resist, generalisation and globalisation. A wide range of people unite against corporate driven immigration and the expansion of control over civic spaces. This should be extended in America 'by involving more and more types of people in our struggle. Groups like 'Counter-Currents and Attack the System' should be supported, despite ideological differences, as a strategic matter to keep our enemies off balance. Points of contact with others will provide vitality.

(3) derelict spaces

Zones of exteriority should be created within the state, 'temporary autonomous zones — or nomadic camps' to encourage '"psychic nomadism" or cultural disappearance from the sovereignty of the state'. The NR has already done much 'to liberate whiteness from the liberal understanding of being bourgeois… Acting as a derelict bulkhead against liberal truth and morality'. Derelict spaces can be 'words, thoughts and philosophies… Virtual spaces… Also… Geographical and physical spatial as well'. We aim not just to disconnect from the world but transform it.

(4) stop the world/start the world
First we must disconnect the circuits that link stimuli and habitual responses for standardised actions, via the NR. Such deterritorialisation can go on at different speeds as long as we keep moving towards restarting world.

Conclusion

This piece was written to introduce D and G to NR thinkers. Their work is provoking and their leftist orientation problematic but they can be read 'revolutionarily, that is, with what their concepts mean to us right now'. If we do so 'their Leftism becomes as irrelevant as someone's Rightism. The only thing that matters in our of war is whether or not it helps us achieve victory'.

back to Deleuze page