ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the political-theological parallels between Discordianism and the philosophical argument contained in Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968). Discordianism is a spoof religion pairing adolescent zeal for bathroom humour and double entendre with profound adaptations of Daoism, Buddhism, Thelema, and anarchism. Deleuze (1925–1995) was an idiosyncratic French process philosopher, celebrated for his unusual approaches to metaphysics and empiricism as well as his development of ‘schizoanalysis’ with Félix Guattari. This chapter considers the parallels between Discordian thought and Deleuze’s early philosophy regarding the entanglement of gender and theology, and examines their heretical efforts to disassemble the ideological borders projected by neoliberal and neo-imperial state apparatuses emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Deleuze and the Discordians gesture provocatively towards the emancipatory potentials of a feminine theology and dissimulate its necessity to their overarching projects. The chapter contextualises their thought in relation to Cold War political philosophy and ‘accelerationist’ philosophies inspired by Deleuze’s later work with Guattari. This is in order to argue that a creative, open-ended, feminine, and feminist theology is a promising resource for theorists committed to eschewing the ‘neo-reactionary’ movements with which the label of ‘accelerationism’ is increasingly associated.
