Deleuze & Guattari, Zizek on Arendt (More from Brennan)

Catherine Driscoll catherine.driscoll at arts.usyd.edu.au
Thu Jan 9 00:35:42 PST 2003


Quoting Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>:


> More from Brennan:
>
> Also at issue is the question of whether the theoretical legacies of '68
> were really an adventure or exploration of new possibilities or only a
> conservative redoubt where thinkers huddled with eyes fixed on the
> past.55 One of the most striking aspects of Deleuze and Guattari's
> powerful evocations is the extent to which their strange and wonderful
> prose is studded with archaisms, allusions to medieval metallurgy, the
> fratres of primeval tribes, the autonomous craftsmen dotted along the
> pristine hills, the Spinozist God hovering over the world's molecules
> like a benign shepherd, the glorious nomadism of the Crusades.

Bah -- also to Robert DeNiro, William Burroughs, Virginia Woolf, city streets, militarism, feminism, eggs, and the Pink Panther. Among myriad others. What is the point here? WHoever Brennan is has selected out of the admittedly noteworthy breadth of reference in these works those elements that suit a point. The list they provide has very different functions and points of entry into those texts. Ignoring that is proof enough that any accusation based on the list is spurious.


> Is this
> antiquarianism merely a coincident element in the toolbox, or does it
> signify a special relationship to the past itself? In times as dark as
> these, such lines of flight are, perhaps, increasingly attractive, but
> they appear less comforting in a pact with thinkers such as Arendt,
> whose ideas are inseparable from cold war America, or Schmitt whose
> legal theories consciously emboldened Nazism. One is reminded of Slavoj
> Zizek's recent cogent comments on the Arendt revival: "This elevation of
> Arendt is perhaps the clearest sign of the theoretical defeat of the
> Left -- of how the Left has accepted the basic co-ordinates of liberal
> democracy (`democracy' versus `totalitarianism,' etc.), and is now
> trying to redefine its (op)position within this space."56

Excuse me and... what? What was the link again. He says it reminds him of X and so there's a significant connection? Spare me.


> It might be
> said that, as a matter of intellectual convergence, a Deleuzian leftism
> is less a neo-Marxist revamping than an old-fashioned anticommunism.

In what sense? I mean it. Let's say I think "is it neo-Marxist revamping or not" a significant question to ask of these texts -- what exactly is Brennan's argument here?


> The
> genius of capitalism, one might well conjecture, is that it can create
> such allies in this costume. Anticapitalist in impulse, but
> theoretically inoculated against the war of maneuver in all its forms,
> the new Italians project themselves into a futurology that largely
> reinvents and reinvigorates capitalism's dominant clichés.

OK. How, exactly, I mean in an actual argument rather than set of assertive allusions, is "Deleuzism" reinvigorating capitalism's dominant clichés?

Catherine

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