In an effort to reverse the "standard" presentation of the relations between Durkheirn and Tarde from the point of view of the birth of the human sciences ("scientific morality" versus the "psychologistic" tradition), this article attempts to understand the primary importance that Gilles Deleuze has ascribed to the "philosophy of Gabriel Tarde" ever since Diffe'lnce et repe'tition.

No abstract

In this article, we begin from the assertion that global war does not affirm itself as an imperial ordering power without `opacifying' every regulative idea of peace, which is thereby reduced to the status of a deceptive illusion. `Postmodern' peace, which is absolutely contemporaneous with war, is deduced from war in the guise of the `post-democratic' institution of a permanent state of exception, of a continuation of war by other means (externally as well as internally), and of a reduction of sovereignty to the imbalance of terror, in accordance with the principle of distinction that opposes friend and enemy. Once war, peace and barbarism interact with no rule other than the common sense of the unworldly squalor ( l'immonde), only Combat against War can destroy the sensorial evidence of a false social peace and open on to the construction of a World ( Monde) that is once again possible for the singularities that we are in common. Whence derives the character of social threat that marks out contemporary art (and explains the trials to which it is subjected) when it focuses on the mediatic world-image by putting to work a new transversalist aesthetic paradigm, exposing itself to the tearing asunder of the sensible in the over-exposition of peace to war. This could be art's new address, tracing its difference in a creative machination of affects that can no longer find support in any remembrance of the being of peace.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, revolutionary movements remained dependent on Leninist theories and practices in their attempts to grasp the new relationship between war and capital. Yet these theories and practices failed to address the global “cold civil war” represented by the events of 1968. This article will show that in the 1970s this task was not undertaken by “professional revolutionaries” or in their Maoist discourse of “protracted war” and its “generalized Clauzewitzian strategy.” Rather, the problem was addressed by Michel Foucault, on the one hand, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, on the other. Each produced a radical break in the conception of war and of its constitutive relationship with capitalism, taking up the confrontation with Clausewitz to reverse the famous formula such that war was not to be understood as the continuation of politics (which determines its ends). Politics was, on the contrary, to be understood as an element and strategic modality of the whole constituted by war. The ambition of la pensée 68, as represented by Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, was not to make this reversal into a simple permutation of the formula's terms, but rather to develop a radical critique of the concepts of “war” and “politics” presupposed by Clausewitz's formula.

No abstract