Deleuze's Political Ethics: A Fascism of the New?

• Published in: Deleuze & Guattari Studies 2016-02, Vol.10 (1), p.85-99
• Main Author: Evans, Fred
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Ethics; Fascism; Heterogeneity; Philosophy and Religion; Political ethics
• ISSN: 1750-2241; 2398-9777; 1755-1684; 2398-9785
• DOI: 10.3366/dls.2016.0213

The cosmology of Deleuze and Guattari emphasises the new. I raise the question of whether this emphasis cancels out two other political virtues, solidarity and heterogeneity, and thereby amounts to a fascism of the new. I reply that what Deleuze and Guattari say about cosmological unity and difference suggests that they can avoid this negative designation. I support this conclusion by considering their statements on ethics and politics and by translating their cosmological philosophy into the more immediate ethico-political context of the alloplastic stratum. The latter effort is abetted by elaborating the two thinkers' use of the term 'voice', for example, in Deleuze's statement that Being is the 'single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple ... a single clamour of Being for all beings' or in the two authors' notion of a 'constellation of voices' that makes up the 'molecular' or 'unconscious' collective assemblage of enunciation. This elaboration is pertinent because political ethics is essentially which voices are heard, and which not, or at least their relative levels of audibility in the alloplastic regime. I further clarify this treatment of Deleuze and Guattari's political ethics by linking it to the idea of parrhesia , courageous speech and hearing.