To Believe In This World, As It Is

Immanence and the Quest for Political Activism

Bibliographic Data

ID5772506
AuthorsKathrin Thiele (0000-0002-2767-1424, Utrecht University, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume4
IssueSupplement
Publication date2010-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueDeleuze Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1750-2241 • E-ISSN: 1755-1684
PublisherEdinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3366/e175022411000111x
OpenAlexW2125634948
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited13

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari make the claim that '[i]t may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion.' What are we to make of such a calling? The paper explicates why and in what sense this statement is of exemplary significance both for an appropriate understanding of Deleuze's political thought and for a most timely conceptualisation of politics in a world so clearly defined by immanence, and nothing but immanence. I argue that Deleuze's rigorously constructive approach to the world is not beyond politics, as some recent readings have declared (e.g. those of Badiou and Hallward). Rather, we have to appreciate that in Deleuze and Guattari's demand for a 'belief in this world' the political intersects with the dimension of the ethical in such a way that our understanding of both is transformed. Only after this 'empiricist conversion' can we truly think of a Deleuzian politics that does justice to a plane of immanence 'immanent only to itself

Deleuze and Guattari · Dialogical self · Empiricism · Epistemology · Immanence · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Law · Marxism and Critical Theory · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

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