ABSTRACT
Introduction In the years since his death the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has become associated with the political ideal of the abolition of sovereignty. Of a human-social assemblage that, in refusing the call to unanimity, preserves its fundamental multiplicity, and that in the advance of its struggles eventually destroys all existing formations of sovereignty, thus creating the conditions for a stateless world. Certainly Deleuze rejected the kinds of false philosophy of unity on which the classical political ideal of sovereignty was founded. When it came, however, to confronting the political problems of his time he was insistent that a political theory and practice of the present required a new account of unity on which to advance its struggles. Substantial forms of political change, the vast historical cleavages and upheavals that his works were concerned with theorising, were underwritten by collective projects. The main question that motivated him was that of how, in the establishment of particular regimes of power, did new counter-strategic collectivities emerge? How, in turn, did such collectivities ‘embark on another kind of adventure, display another kind of unity, a nomadic unity, and engage in a nomadic war-machine’ (2002: 259). This was not merely a historical point for Deleuze. He thought it is as pertinent for the present as it was in the past. ‘The revolutionary problem today’, he argued,
is to find some unity in our various struggles without falling back on the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or State apparatus: we want a war-machine that does not recreate a State apparatus, a nomadic unity . . . that does not recreate a despotic internal unity.
