Politicising Deleuzian Thought, or,

Minority’s Position within Marxism

Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc University Toulouse-Le Mirail

Translated by Daniel Richter

Abstract
This text provides an analysis of the Deleuzian theory of minorities. Its
hypothesis is that this theory produces a double effect of interpellation:
upon a materialistic reading of the philosophy of Deleuze, and upon
the theoretical and political heritage of Marxism. Concerning the first
aspect, the thesis of an actual multiplication of ‘becomings-minoritarian’
reopening ‘the question of the becoming-revolutionary of people, at
every level, in every place’, has to be referred to the Deleuzo-Guattarian
analysis of the conjuncture – namely, to a diagnosis of the global
capitalist system’s dynamisms and the contradictions they produce in the
social, juridical and political institutions of national States. Concerning
the second aspect, I confront the adversities faced by minorities with
the schema of the classes struggle, and I examine certain links (of
continuation and integration, but also differentiation) between the
processes of ‘proletarianisation’ and ‘becoming-minoritarian’, that is to
say, between two ways of problematising the collective subject of a
revolutionary politics of emancipation. Finally I assert that the concept
of ‘becoming-minoritarian’ makes of the possibility of an unprecedented
internationalism the way to a renewal of the two concepts between
which the horizon of modern political thought extends, and around
which the tradition of political liberalism and thinkers of a revolutionary
politics have never ceased to confront one another: autonomy and
universality.

Keywords: Deleuzian politics, minorities, the State, global capitalism,

social struggles, universalism, internationalism
120 Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

I. Writing in Minor/Reading Deleuze Politically

The question of minorities touches at the heart of Deleuze’s political

thought, taking place as it does where the category of the ‘political’
becomes in every way problematic. This is true from several points of
view: from the point of view of the political meanings of this category
in the progression of Deleuze’s work; from that of its effective political
implications (in the forms of theoretical instruments of decoding of the
relations of social forces, of location in these relations, of prescriptions
of intervention or simple tactical indicators); and from that of the
manner in which one defines what it means to ‘read politically’. Here
we must often hesitate between the first two points of view, which are
perhaps never entirely dissociable but which do not overlap unless thus
coerced – in other words, between a hermeneutic of the political, and a
theoretical practice with political effects. It is certainly not a coincidence
that the terminological series minority–major–minor begins to form the
base of a specific conceptual work, in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
in 1975, about a literary experience which for Deleuze and Guattari
directly poses the theoretical and practical question of ways of writing
and reading (they will draw conclusions on this the following year in
their theory of the book, Rhizome). In the first place, minorities are not
thought of as ‘objects’ of reflection, nor as ‘objects’ of historical, political
or sociological knowledge. Rather, they are positions and processes
interior to a practice of writing (in this case literary), processes interior to
language which condition a creative transformation of collective regimes
of enunciation. Of course these processes themselves recall social and
historic coordinates: upheavals of frontiers and migratory dynamics
linked to the history of imperialism, the evolution of multinational
empires, annexationist movements and creations of States, territorial
redrawings and populational displacements resulting from revolutions
and from the end of the First World War which will make of minorities,
following the formula of Arendt, a ‘permanent institution’ throughout
the juridico-political structure of the nation-state.1 And for Kafka
himself we recall the status of the Czech Jewish minority throughout
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the decline of this Empire and the rise of
nationalist struggles, the sociolinguistic circumstances of this minority
in the Prague of the beginning of the century. These circumstances
were characterised by the coexistence of three languages. Lingua franca
German was the official language of administration, business, culture
and university. Czech was the vernacular language of most of the
population, characterised by an increasingly conflicting relation with
 Politicising Deleuzian Thought 121

German domination. Finally, Yiddish was spoken by some of the Jewish,

mostly Germanophone population and scorned by Czechs and Germans
alike (Wagenbach 1967: 65–71). What is most important for Deleuze
is the impact that such complex circumstances will have upon the
domination of a major language. When the hegemony of a major
language is established, there are always tensions and conflicts at work
within it; correlatively, the language is permeated by creative initiatives
and all sorts of vectors involved in an immanent politicising of its
enunciation (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 23–7; Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 101–5).
In this sense, the Deleuzian theory of minorities appears first in
the problematising of the endogenous conflict which weakens every
system of ‘majority’ from the inside. These ‘systems of majority’
are characterised by the hegemony of a normative ensemble which
both determines the social inscription of practices, conducts and
human multiplicities, and manages regimes of expression and subjective
positions in which groups and persons are individualised. It is
within these regimes that interests, demands, memberships, distinctions,
recognitions and identifications are articulated (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 105–6). From this standpoint, the norms of the language imposed
as the ‘standard’, along with the norms of discursive practices in force
in an institutional fabric, do not compose one hegemony among others.
They compose rather the hegemony that all the others presuppose and
by which they are reproduced. But the German of Prague for Kafka – the
language of political, economic and cultural power – is not imposed as
a major language without being simultaneously affected by multiple
vectors of transformation which bear witness to effects produced on
the inside of this language by geographical movements and human
migrations, relations of social forces, displacements and destabilisations
of the geopolitical balance of powers. The German language had already
been deterritorialised from its economic domains and its commercial
functions by the development of English as the new language of
exchange. It had also been transformed in bureaucratic spheres by the
administrators of Hapsburg established in Prague who transformed
aristocratic German into unheard of variations. German thus became
especially suited for ‘strange and minor uses’ for recently urbanised
Czech and Jewish populations – ‘this can be compared in another context
to what blacks in America today are able to do with the English
language’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 17) – such as that ‘inextricable
mixture of German and Czech’ which forms Kuchelböhmisch, or that
‘sort of Germanized Yiddish’, Mauscheldeutsch (Wagenbach 1967: 79).
122 Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

The German learned by Kafka (following his father’s desire for him
to climb the social ladder), ‘this German taught by our non-German
mothers’, as he writes to Max Brod, resembles a fluid form with
irregular intonations, and is riddled with syntactical errors and semantic
fluctuations. It is not a minor language derived from or opposed to
the major language but rather a ‘minorisation’ of the major language
itself, whose resources Kafka could mine for another language capable
of sweeping away the narrative contents and their actantial schemata.2
Such an immanent politicising of the means of enunciation which the
Kafkan oeuvre, in its own historical conjuncture, allows to come to
light, is not to be confused with the struggles of national minorities,
nor does it figure there as an ideological instrument (in the sense
for example that the construction of a literary history may intervene
in the ideological struggle to impose the recognition of a national
identity). It is conditioned by historical processes which ‘minorise’ a
system of majority, or in other words, which subject the normative
constants of this system to variations or deviations not coded by
the system. It can only be actualised by a practical appropriation of
these processes by assemblages (agencements) capable of experimenting
with their potentialities for transformation. Even so, such practical
assemblages are necessarily linked to the aforementioned struggles, and
the Kafkan literary machine is itself adjacently connected to them in
a historic conjuncture which determines literary writing as decisive
in the formation of a collective conscience which does not yet exist
and thus remains uncertain. It is not so much a question of literary
history as of the actual creation of new forms of collective expression
and enunciation, in a historical milieu where the objective conditions
of such an enunciation are everywhere lacking outside of literature.3
We shall name ‘minor’ these enunciative creations (which are not only
literary, but political, theoretical or philosophical) that are capable of
creating a new language in a major or dominant language and, in
minorising it, forging ‘the means of another consciousness and another
sensibility’, striving to induce a becoming-revolutionary in the minorities
to which they are connected. The problem is then that of more precisely
determining the nature of this connection, for it conditions both the
structure of conflictuality potentially within every majoritarian system,
and the concept of the specific effectiveness, in such a system, of these
minor practices. These latter are enacted from within by the actual or
potential struggle of minorities. In other words, they occupy ‘positions of
minority’ in a discourse, in the sense used by Marxists who talk of ‘class
positions on the inside of the theory’. We will return to this analogy,
 Politicising Deleuzian Thought 123

which has its limits. We mention limits precisely because it is more than
an analogy: it is a profound problematic similarity. But we can already
reformulate the initial problem. In what sense would the analyses of
minorities conducted by Deleuze be themselves enacted from within by
such minoritarian processes? At what point does one find in Deleuze,
not only a political theory of minorities, or an interpretation of the
political signification of minorities today, but a possible politicising of
his thought which could be identified with his internal minor positions?
At what point could what Deleuze writes concerning ‘minor’ literary
enunciation serve for a political enunciation in Deleuze’s philosophy?
Or, to twist a formulation of Louis Althusser: in what sense could
Deleuzian philosophy claim to instantiate the struggles of minorities in
theory and political thought?

II. Minorities in the Becoming-Revolutionary of the

Actual Situation
This questioning cannot begin with considerations on ‘minorities’ or
‘becomings’ in general. Rather, they should start at the exact location
where Deleuze explicitly formulates his political diagnostic of the actual
situation. A double and significant location, in fact, in two texts which
echo and are connected one to the other: the penultimate paragraph of
Dialogues from 1977 (‘What characterizes our situation is both beyond
and on this side of the State. Beyond national States. . . ’), and the last
sections of the thirteenth ‘plateau’ which presents in 1980 the Deleuzo-
Guattarian theory of the apparatus of State (‘6. Minorities. – Ours is
becoming the age of minorities. . . ’). In fact nothing less than the locating
of this conjuncture seems capable of shedding light on certain factors
that are relevant for us here:

• The extension which is effectuated in Deleuze’s use of the term

‘minorities’, and correlatively its apparent dispersion in a work which
never attempts to subsume multiplicity under a principle of objective
or subjective identity, such as a State or a class.
• The formalisation, beyond the example case of Kafka, of the specific
conflictuality of minorities, which leads Deleuze to identify in the
actual multiplication of minoritarian sets the indication of a re-
emergence of a global revolutionary movement.
• The theoretical gesture, accordingly perhaps less paradoxical than it
appears, by which Deleuze makes of this becoming-minoritarian of
increasingly numerous social and cultural multiplicities the way to a
124 Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

renewal of the two concepts between which extends the horizon of

modern political thought, and around which the tradition of political
liberalism and thinkers of a revolutionary politics have never ceased
to confront one another: autonomy and universality.

Actually these ostensibly different aspects are intimately linked together.

At any rate, they must be, for the overlapping of a ‘becoming-
minoritarian’ and a ‘becoming-revolutionary’ not to be illusory, for
the affirmation of a ‘becoming-minoritarian of everyone’ not to be
reduced to a speculative formula empty of all effective content, and
for the very term ‘revolutionary’ not to conceal a political vacuity.
Bearing this in mind, we will put forward the hypothesis that the
emergence of the multiplication of minoritarian struggles, in the analysis
of the conjuncture which Deleuze carries out, takes over from class
struggle. This does not mean that it simply supplants class struggles, but
rather that it prolongs them while complicating their coordinates and
transforming their modes of realisation, but also interiorising certain of
their presuppositions and difficulties. This must be understood in at least
three senses, which will permit us to assess both the continuity and the
difference between the two forms of struggle.

1. Minorisation and proletarianisation in the State-form

Firstly, the factors related to the constitution of minorities are not
fundamentally different from the factors of proletarianisation. When
Deleuze and Guattari write that ‘the power of minority, of particularity,
finds its figure or its universal consciousness in the proletariat’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 472) it is in the first place because their concept
of minority redraws the demarcating line of the base of Marxist
communism and utopian communism. We find here a refusal to consider
the socioeconomic structure’s forces of rupture independently of the
contradictory dynamics by which the structure sustains these forces
within itself, and by which it at least partially conditions their forms
of crystallisation and effectuation. This is why they index their locating
of becomings-minoritarian upon the systematic dynamics of worldwide
capitalism, which proceed de facto to their real generalisation. Adhering
to the geo-economic and geopolitical axes of capital accumulation within
relations of unequal dependence between ‘Centre’ and ‘Peripheries’,
the following are considered by Deleuze and Guattari the principal
factors which engender minoritarian sets: decodings of alimentary flows
generating famine, decodings of populational and urban flows through
 Politicising Deleuzian Thought 125

the dismantling of indigenous habitats and urbanisations, and decodings

of flows of matter-energy generating political and monetary instability.
In accordance with the transformations of relations between constant
capital and variable capital in the countries of the Centre, the following
lead to the formation of ‘peripheral’ zones of underdevelopment within
the countries of the Centre itself: the development of a ‘floating’
and precarious labour force of which ‘official subsistence is assured
only by State allocations and wages subject to interruption’, and the
development of an ‘intensive surplus labor that no longer even takes the
route of labor’ but goes through the modes of life, the collective forms of
expression, the means of communication, circulation and consumption
and so on. These sorts of ‘internal Third Worlds’ or ‘internal Souths’
foment many new struggles in all the linguistic, ethnic, regional, sexist,
juvenile domains, but such struggles are always overdetermined by the
global system of unequal dependence (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 145–7;
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 468–9).
The global capitalist system ‘minorises’ as much as it proletarianises.
The difference between the two points of view will thus be all the
more pronounced. The Marxist notion of the proletariat entails a
triple consideration: its position within the structure of production,
determined at minimum by its dispossession of the means of production
and its insertion into the process of production as a pure, abstract
labour force; the big industry working population’s living conditions,
which involve not only the homogenisation of human misery, but
populational concentration and the appearance of forms of cooperation
which produce, within the ‘pores’ of industrial sites, unheard forms
of solidarity, of relationships and collective consciousness; the power
of becoming of that which thus tends to be constituted as a class, or
following the expression of Etienne Balibar, its transitional value. While
considering the surprising rarity within Das Kapital of the notion of the
proletariat – a notion which nevertheless condensed until then for Marx
all the implications of the ‘point of view of class’ – Balibar remarks:

Everything happened as if the proletariat as such had nothing to do with the

positive function that the exploited labour force carries out in the sphere of
production, in so far as ‘productive force’ above all else; as if it had nothing
to do with the formation of value, the transformation of surplus labour
into surplus value, the metamorphosis of ‘living work’ into ‘capital’. (Balibar
1997: 223)

As if in the end this very term connoted nothing more than the
‘transitional’ character of the working class, or the manner in which
126 Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

the historically untenable character of capitalist accumulation (which

was already preparing the material conditions of ‘another transition
which would annul the preceding one’) was inscribed into the workers’
condition, an unstable state in relation to ‘normal’ social existence
(Balibar 1997: 222–3). In a strikingly similar vein, the Deleuzian notion
of minority seems firstly to involve a signified that remains problematic,
and secondly to indicate nothing other than the transitional vector of
a substratum which is fundamentally unstable, and even unassignable
(the ‘becoming-minoritarian of everybody’). However, no effacement of
the signifier results; on the contrary, the signifier’s proliferation is found
at all levels of the analysis between 1975 and 1980, a proliferation
which seems to challenge every attempt to reassemble their instances
and occurrences into a unitary form.
This is because minorities are nothing other than ‘proletarianised’
masses, but they are masses inasmuch as they are immediately formed
within institutional, social, juridical and ideological structures of
national States. Dissociated from a strictly economic determination of
the proletariat as well as from a strictly sociological determination
of the working class, the concept of minority records the State’s
process of socialisation, that is to say, the process through which State
power is incorporated into the social and institutional structures of
the capitalist formation. We could thus call ‘minorisation’ that internal
distance, in the process of proletarianisation, between that which is
expropriated of all social power throughout the structure of production,
and that which is partially (and unequally) reintegrated into the liberal
State-form, through social and political rights, statutory and symbolic
recognitions, organs of representation and delegation. Consequently,
the notion of minority involves an irreducible multiplicity, which is
neither soluble in the sketch of a contradiction between capital and
labour, nor in the supposed homogeneity of workers’ conditions. The
minoritarian sets recall, in their very constitution, the variability of
national frameworks and of State apparatuses which manage these
sets, which partially integrate them, and which conflict with them in
multiple ways. This multiplicity depends on 1) the variability of States’
positions within the international division of labour and the unequal
integration of their interior market into the global market (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 461–2); 2) the variability of political structures and
regimes fluctuating between social-democratic and totalitarian poles,
namely between institutional and juridical integration of minorities
as ‘subsystems’, and exclusion ‘outside the system’ of minorities
subsequently abandoned to repressive State violence (Deleuze and
 Politicising Deleuzian Thought 127

Guattari 1987: 462–3); 3) the correlative variability of the forms and

degrees of development of minoritarian struggles; 4) the variability of
the types of political manipulation of minorities. We know at least two
functions of such a manipulation: the instrumentalisation of immigrant
workers in order to repeat the classical process of forcing producers
into competition and sowing dissension into the working class (Noiriel
2005: 108–22); the ‘displacement’ of social conflicts onto ‘cultural’
norms – regarding place of residence, ethnicity, linguistic or religious
criteria, generational relations, sexual conducts, etc. – all norms which
ostensibly seem without relation to the norms of economic exploitation.
But these norms are sources at once of objective representations and
modes of subjectification, so that the conflicts thus displaced onto the
cultural terrain pose in turn sundry problems for the State (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 257–8).

2. Autonomy of minoritarian struggles

This difference between proletariat and minorities is not only theoretical.
It has as a practical correlate the renouncement of a presupposition
put forward in Marxism since The Communist Manifesto: the idea
of a trend towards simplification of the antagonism supposed to
oppose, increasingly clearly and inevitably, ‘two great diametrically
opposite classes’, bourgeois and proletarian.4 If the notion of minorities
reactivates for Deleuze and Guattari the problem of the relation between
the capitalist social machine and the politicising of forces capable of
shattering it, this very notion does not at all seem to guarantee a
unified base, or a potentially unifiable subject, such as an objectively
determinable class in which the possibility of a collective awareness
and the work of its political construction could be localised. This is a
difficulty which is above all political, and is the correlate of the one
just mentioned which expressed (and constantly risked being concealed
by) the thesis of the underlying simplification of the antagonism of
the two social classes. In a way, this thesis clearly expressed the
necessity of the construction of a proletarian politics outside of the State-
form, while worker struggles forced the bourgeoisie to be recomposed
as a class inside of the State. And yet, this thesis simultaneously
tended to misjudge that same necessity. Indeed, complemented in
Marxism by an underestimation of capitalism’s inventiveness and the
suppleness of institutional and State frameworks capable of developing
the capitalist relations of production, it led to the conception of the
relevant theoretical and practical problems as fated to be spontaneously
128 Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

resolved by the infallible historic evolution of the mode of production.5

These problems are those of an autonomous politics of revolutionary
movement, that is to say, the invention of original forms of organisation,
but also of culture, thought and practices, capable of maintaining the
asymmetrical character of conflict, and thus of creating within the
revolutionary process the immanent conditions of a politics which would
not be modelled on the forms of bourgeois politics or the practices of
capitalist State power. Not only do minoritarian struggles encounter
in turn this problem of the political autonomy of the revolutionary
movement, but they confront it in an even more direct fashion, precisely
because the minoritarian sets are immediately constituted in the State-
form.

The power of minority, of particularity, finds its figure or its universal

consciousness in the proletariat. But as long as the working class defines
itself by an acquired status, or even by a theoretically conquered State, it
appears only as ‘capital’, a part of capital (variable capital), and does not
leave the plan(e) of capital. At best, the plan(e) becomes bureaucratic. On the
other hand, it is by leaving the plan(e) of capital, and never ceasing to leave
it, that a mass becomes increasingly revolutionary. (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 472)

The problem of the political autonomy of a new revolutionary move-

ment is even more crucial for Deleuze and Guattari, since it condenses
their evaluation of the ambivalent success of the worker movement.
On the one hand, it succeeded in imposing a class duality and social
antagonisms which brought the proletariat out of its state of minority,
in the specific sense of a subsystem integrated into the new ‘industrial
system’, as the Saint-Simonians would say. On the other hand, it proved
itself less and less capable of calling into question its own class identity
(and its ‘universal class’ identity, destining it to establish a transitional
new hegemony), whereas the political and union apparatuses, which
were supposed to materially incarnate it, tended to be incorporated into
the State-form as organs of conflict regulation within the social State,
or as ‘driving belts’ within the domination of a totalitarian bureaucracy
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 255–7). This is the source of Deleuze and
Guattari’s suspicion regarding the struggles of minorities internal to
institutional, juridical and political structures of the State, and the reason
for their insistent criticism of the aim of conquering the majority as a
‘simple’ displacement of hegemony.6 In the first part of this assessment,
they seem to reactivate familiar critiques of Parliamentarianism and
reformism. In the second part, they seem to replay a vague libertarian
 Politicising Deleuzian Thought 129

impulse. The Deleuzo-Guattarian analysis is, however, more complex

because it engages the internal contradictions of the modern State: this
latter develops within its national framework the capitalistic relations
of production; but these relations are made necessary through an
enlarged accumulation and reproduction process, which passes through
a worldwide division of labour and a transnationalisation of capital
movements. As simultaneously instruments of capital valorisation
and the management of systematic disequilibria and crises, the State
institutions concentrate within themselves all the contradictions of the
process of accumulation. They also negotiate for better or for worse
its social repercussions according to both the degree of socialisation
of their political, economic and juridical apparatuses and the level of
corresponding social struggles. For as much as the minoritarian sets
are themselves taken up in the variable combinations of institutional
integration and repression, and for as much as they take part in these
contradictions internal to the State, their struggles cannot fail to take
place inside of it. ‘Their tactics necessarily go that route’, at the most
diverse levels: ‘women’s struggle for the vote, for abortion, for jobs;
the struggle of the regions for autonomy; the struggle of the Third
World; the struggle of the oppressed masses and minorities in the
East or West’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 471). And what is more,
these struggles inside of the juridical, political and economic institutions
of States are not only tactically inevitable but strategically necessary.
They are necessary to generate pressure and to influence the conditions
in which the State develops within its own order the relations of
production of global capitalist accumulation. This runs contrary to the
mystifying representation of a capitalist system which simply and purely
transcends States. These struggles interior to the institutions of the
State are necessary to exacerbate the distance between the constraints
of global accumulation and the impotence of States to ‘regulate’ their
repercussions, whether those be economic, social, cultural, ecological,
etc. This in turn runs contrary to the no less mystifying representation
of an omnipotent technocracy (such a representation contributes to
the simplifying reduction of every struggle within the State to a
‘récupération’ which could only be avoided through some isolated
regional struggles renouncing all global strategy and all exterior support)
(Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 145–6; Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 463). But
henceforth, in this very movement within the State, these minoritarian
struggles reveal themselves simultaneously as ‘the index of another,
coexistent combat’ which, directly or indirectly, puts into question the
global capitalist axiomatic itself and the State-form as such.
130 Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

It is hard to see what an Amazon-State would be, a women’s State, or

a State of erratic workers, a State of the ‘refusal’ of work. If minorities
do not constitute viable States culturally, politically, economically, it is
because the State-form is not appropriate to them, nor the axiomatic
of capital, nor the corresponding culture. We have often seen capitalism
maintain and organize inviable States, according to its needs, and for
the precise purpose of crushing minorities. The minorities issue is instead
that of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of constituting a war
machine . . . whose aim is neither the war of extermination nor the peace of
generalized terror, but revolutionary movement (the connection of flows, the
composition of non-denumerable aggregates, the becoming-minoritarian of
everybody/everything). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 472–3)

At this second more profound level, according to Deleuze and Guattari,

the autonomy of a revolutionary politics of minorities passes primarily
through a critique of the two ‘cuts’ or two boundaries by which the
national State codes its social multiplicities. This coding is nothing
but the formation of the nation as ‘the very operation of a collective
subjectification’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 456), which minorities
always more or less internalise but under necessarily conflicting
conditions: a) a national/extra-national boundary, which tends to make
of minorities (usually immigrant minorities, but also potentially every
minority, whatever their criteria of segregation) interior foreigners;
b) an individual/collective boundary, which inscribes in the structure
of the ‘major’ national subjectivity a private–public division which is
particularly problematic regarding the subjective position of minorities.7
The isolation and thus the ‘communitarianisation’ of minoritarian
struggles proceed through these two boundaries. They form the double
bind of a State strategy of differential and unequal integration into the
national community and identity. They permit the State to confine their
demands to the private sphere as only relevant to strictly individual
problems, or else to tolerate their collective impact and political
significance on the condition that they do not begin to connect to
international coordinates or other exterior minoritarian sets. If the actual
becoming of the world determines the emergence of ‘a universal figure of
minoritarian consciousness as the becoming of everybody’, it is not by
conquering the majority that this is accomplished. Neither is it realised
by burying oneself inside of one’s minority, one’s particularism, which
is only a breeding ground for marginalism. ‘It is certainly not by using
a minor language as a dialect, by regionalizing or ghettoizing, that one
becomes revolutionary; rather, by using a number of minority elements,
by connecting, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen,
 Politicising Deleuzian Thought 131

autonomous becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 106) – a becoming

which then passes necessarily through transversal connections between
various struggles, in a national and international space. This is a
strategic line and a criterion of evaluation. Minorities are certainly
not revolutionary in themselves. But the problem remains that of an
evaluation immanent to the very struggles they engage in, to the practical
‘style’ of these struggles, to the modes of existence which they suppose,
to the problems which they enunciate and the demands which they make
(or to the utterances which they more or less consciously interiorise). The
base criterion of such an evaluation is their variable aptitude to join with
other struggles, to connect their problems to others which may be very
different regarding interests and group identities – ‘a constructivism, a
“diagrammatism”, operating by the determination of the conditions of
the problem and by transversal links between problems: it opposes both
the automation of the capitalist axioms and bureaucratic programming’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 473). In all these ways, the true effect of
minoritarian struggles in the actual conjuncture – namely at the moment
when Deleuze can affirm that ‘our age is becoming that of minorities’
and that this tendency of the present reopens ‘the question of the
becoming-revolutionary of people, at every level, in every place’ – is not
communitarianism, according to an already republicanised conception
of minorities throughout a universal incarnated in the État de droit or
the Rule of law. It is rather a new internationalism which excludes the
State-form. Its task would be to construct a ‘minoritarian universal’
that would express both practices of universality which are more
effectively real than the universality of the national-capitalist State, and a
composition of power at least as powerful, confronted with the capitalist
system, as the historic worker movement.

3. The minoritarian universal within the becoming-revolutionary

How are we to understand such a universal, ‘the minoritarian becoming
as universal figure of consciousness?’ At the very least, the revolutionary
workers’ movement could claim, even at the price of countless self-
delusions, a real underlying universality, correlative with the historic
movement of the concentration of capital resuscitating from itself its
most profound negativity: a new collective subject, a bringer of a
universal interest, a precursor of a society itself universal, liberated
from private property as principle of particularisation and antagonistic
division of the social field. We mean, of course, a society without
class. What remains certain is that the minorities must not only
132 Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

surmount their own particularisms, but shatter the previously mentioned

double boundary, being both interior (private/public) and exterior
(national/international), which allows the functioning of the national
coding of minoritarian sets. But this task does not consist, for Deleuze, in
renouncing the element of the ‘particular’. This element in fact remains
crucial in order to valorise a mode of formulation of social, economic
and political problems that is capable of thwarting their bureaucratic
administration by the State.8 But this prevents at the same time the
projection of a unification of the minorities into the identity of a
collective subject – whatever name one gives it, classical (people), modern
(proletariat), postmodern or again classical (multitude). . . How then are
we to conceive of a ‘minoritarian universal’ which would be constructed
by and within a revolutionary process taking up the contradictions of
the actual capitalist world, and that yet does not entertain the fantasy of
the messianic universality of a new subject?
Such is ultimately the problem condensed by the Deleuzian
formulation of a system of domination resting upon, and reproducing
itself through, the distinction majority/minorities. Recall that this
formulation takes place within a semiology of collective identities, that is
to say, within a questioning regarding the logical and semiotic operations
by which are distributed social states defined by rules of identity
assignations of individuals and groups, rules of categorisation of their
conducts and utterances, or in sum, by norms of disjunctive inscription
(Pierre Bourdieu would say ‘distinction’) of social multiplicities:
Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other way
around . . . A determination different from that of the constant will therefore
be considered minoritarian, by nature and regardless of number, in other
words, a subsystem or an outsystem . . . But at this point, everything is
reversed. For the majority, in so far as it is analytically included in the
abstract standard, is never anybody, it is always Nobody – Ulysses – whereas
the minority is the becoming of everybody, one’s potential becoming to the
extent that one deviates from the model. There is a majoritarian ‘fact,’ but
it is the analytic fact of Nobody, as opposed to the becoming-minoritarian
of everybody. That is why we must distinguish between: the majoritarian
as a constant and homogeneous system; minorities as subsystems; and the
minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 105–6)

It obviously follows that the majority has a content, since it is

constructed precisely by the hegemonisation of particular contents
corresponding to a given state of domination. If the majority defines an
empty universal, this simply expresses the fact that, once these contents
 Politicising Deleuzian Thought 133

are raised to dominant norms, these norms themselves seem constructed

less so that everyone will conform to them than to assess those who
don’t conform to them, and to identify and differentially categorise the
distances between them (and not simply between them and the supposed
identity fixed by the normative utterance). This is something that
Deleuze no doubt picked up from Foucault. The normative utterances
do not simply demand an identification or conformity (‘normalisation’).
They permit the recording of the different manners of behaving in
relation to this supposed interpellation (and which one also learns
afterward),9 to identify the different rather than to render it identical,
to assess and establish ‘deviance’ within a reproducible space of
distribution of the unequal, and to make of its so-called rectification
a means of reproduction of new imputations of deviance. In such an
operation of ‘inclusive exclusion’, the majority is the analytic fact of
Nobody, while the minority, constituted as a state by this very operation,
is the synthetic fact of some particular people, whatever their number be,
gathered into a subsystem and rendered countable and quantifiable by
dominant norms. Plenty of dialectics can henceforth be tied between the
universal and the particular in such a mechanism.10 And yet according
to Deleuze, the element of conflictuality, at once dynamic factor and
immanent principle of an other universality, comes from minoritarian
processes which are not defined simply by deviances, but by their
non-coded or unregulated character in the game of differences and
differential positions. This is not a sociological extrapolation. It is an
attempt at making way, within social theory, for a non-categorisable
reality which prevents the objective representation from closing itself off,
or furthermore (and this is effectively the same thing), which prevents
the social system from coinciding with the structure of disjunctive
relations which make of it a system of differential positions. Between
the positions, there are still subjective transpositional processes which
are entirely liveable and thinkable; between the identitary states, there
are always objective becomings which are positively knowable and
feasible. What is essential thus has to do with the specific effectiveness of
such processes. They work simultaneously against the empty universal
of the hegemonic norm and against the particularisation inclusive-
excluding of minority as subsystem. At the very least they can attain this
double efficiency if determined assemblages succeed in carrying out their
practical appropriation. Such are these ‘minor’ practices of which Kafka
had presented an example on the plane of literary enunciation. These
practices occupy a position of minority to weaken from the interior
the majority’s normative constants, but they simultaneously lead this
134 Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

minority itself into a transformation which frees it from its state as

subsystem. And such a transformation does not abolish its ‘deviance’,
but rather renders it dissipative, or undetectable, not assessable by the
major rule of the measure of distances and assignation of unequal
identities.11 This is why Deleuze writes that even a minority has to
become-minoritarian (‘it certainly takes more than a state’) at the same
time as it forms the ‘agent’ or the ‘active medium’ through which a
subject ‘enters a becoming-minoritarian that rends him from his major
identity’. As an active medium, minority thus becomes a vanishing
mediator within ‘two simultaneous movements, one by which a term
(the subject) is withdrawn from the majority, and another by which
a term (the medium or agent) rises up from the minority. There is an
asymmetrical and indissociable block of becoming, a block of alliance’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 291).
Supposing it is through the multiplication of these double becomings
that the ‘becoming-minoritarian of everyone’ can be constructed (that
is to say, through a universal process which involves no gushing
spontaneity of ‘Life’ or ‘History’), perhaps this point only remains
obscure because of two theoretical errors which compromise the politics
of minorities in Deleuze. And these are two political errors precisely
because they result from an overly ‘theoretical’, or even ontologising,
vision of Deleuzian thought. The first is when one speculates abstractly
upon ‘the’ becoming, outside of the couplings of always contextualised
becomings which make of them problems of collective experimentation
capable of rendering identity positions in reality abstract. The second
is the error of (theoretically) making of the multiple a given, in
being or in a transcendental structure, while it is (practically) only
effectively constructed by these dynamic couplings, in these connections
of asymmetrical becomings. ‘Before being, there is politics’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 203), since before ontology, there is strategy. It is the
constructions of alliances which decide both the type of multiplicity
which one promotes and the practices of identity which one invents
or reproduces. Certainly then we must give up the assumption that a
collective consciousness could only have as possible content a common
identity (be that identity of ‘objective interests’, problems or conditions),
to accede to a universal consciousness having for content a community
of becomings, that is to say, of interdependent transformations capable
of modifying in their turn the very form of the universal. Then we
must consider a universality of a process of relational inventions,
and not of an identity of subsumption; a universality which is not
projected forward in a maximum of identitary integration, but which is
 Politicising Deleuzian Thought 135

programmed and reshuffled in a maximum of transversal connections

between heterogeneous systems; rather than a socio-logical universal
as genre, category or class, a tactical and strategic universal as an
indefinite dynamic system of practices of alliance, where the alliance
proceeds neither through integration of terms into a superior identity
that homogenises them, nor through mutual reinforcement of differential
identities, but through the blocks of asymmetrical becomings where a
term may become-other thanks to the becoming-other of another term
itself connected to an nth in an open series. In short, no longer an
extensive and quantifiable universality, but on the contrary an intensive
and unquantifiable universality, in the sense that subjects become in
common in a process where their identitary anchorages are dissipated, to
the advantage of that conception and radically constructivist practice of
autonomy required by a new minoritarian internationalism. ‘Minorities
from all countries. . . ’
It is not entirely contingent, historically speaking, that Deleuze comes
to occupy a position of minority in the political theory of the 1970s,
when the revolutionary workers’ movement tends increasingly clearly to
lose its major position through various struggles against the capitalist
system. The way proposed here was not a proposition to ‘Marxianise’
the Deleuzian theory of minorities, but to suggest rather that this
theory produces a double effect of interpellation, upon the reading of
Deleuzian philosophy as well as the theoretical and political heritage of
Marxism – and that, in pushing Marxism to (re)become ‘minoritarian’,
Deleuzian thought itself is disposed to become political and thus to
produce real effects.

Notes
1. See Arendt (2004: chap. 5).
2. See for example the analysis of the becomings in which Kafkaesque novels
carry their conjugal and bureaucratic duos away, their bureaucratic and family
trios . . . in chapters 6 and 7 of Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. On the
deformations undergone by the German of Prague, in semantic and syntactic
as well as phonetic levels, see also Wagenbach (1967: 77–82).
3. ‘Because collective or national consciousness is “often inactive in external life
and always in the process of break-down,” literature finds itself positively
charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary,
enunciation. It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of
skepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her
fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility
to express another possible community and to forge the means for another
consciousness and another sensibility’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 17).
136 Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

4. This thesis is in the heart of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto.
5. On these questions, we must recall the decisive analyses of Etienne Balibar in
La Crainte des masses, the chapters ‘La relève de l’idéalisme’ and ‘Le prolétariat
insaisissable’ (Balibar 1997).
6. ‘The response of the States, or of the axiomatic, may obviously be to accord the
minorities regional or federal or statutory autonomy, in short, to add axioms.
But this is not the problem: this operation consists only in translating the
minorities into denumerable sets or subsets, which would enter as elements into
the majority, which could be counted among the majority. The same applies for
a status accorded to women, young people, erratic workers, etc.’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 470).
7. A sign of minority is precisely this impossibility, or the extreme difficulties
objective as well as subjective, in interiorising the partition between individual
and collective dimensions. Precisely because the ‘minor’ subject is in an unstable,
marginal or precarious state in relation to the conditions of life and to the rights
of the majority, all events that come for the ‘major’ subjects within the scope
of an ‘individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) [joined] with other no
less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or
a background’, immediately reach on the contrary, for the ‘minor’, collective
and sociopolitical consequences. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 17–8, quoting
Kafka: ‘What in great [major] literature goes on down below, constituting a
not indispensable cellar of the structure, here takes place in the full light of day;
what is there a matter of passing interest for a few, here absorbs everyone no
less than as a matter of life and death’.)
8. ‘However modest the demand, it always constitutes a point that the axiomatic
cannot tolerate: when people demand to formulate their problems themselves,
and to determine at least the particular conditions under which they can receive
a more general solution (hold to the Particular as an innovative form)’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 471). See also Deleuze and Parnet (1987: 145–6).
9. Anti-Oedipus called such an operation ‘paralogism of displacement’ (see Deleuze
and Guattari 1983: 113–5).
10. See for example the evocative reading of Ernesto Laclau proposed by Slavoj
Žižek (Žižek 1999: Part II, chap. 4).
11. Deleuze’s preface to Guy Hocquenghem, L’Après-Mai des Faunes, is absolutely
emblematic on this point (Deleuze 2004: 284–8).

References
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Balibar, Etienne (1997) La Crainte des masses, Paris: Galilée.
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Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans.
D. Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet (1987) Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press.
 Politicising Deleuzian Thought 137

Deleuze, Gilles (2004) ‘Preface to Hocquenghem’s L’Après-Mai des faunes’, in Gilles

Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. M.
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Noiriel, Gérard (2005) État, nation et immigration, Paris: Gallimard.
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DOI: 10.3366/E1750224109000749