Abstract

Against those who wish to marginalise Deleuze's political relevance, this paper argues that his work – including and especially that produced before his collaborations with Guattari – is not only fundamentally political but also profoundly engaged with Marx. The paper begins by focusing on different possible strategies for contesting the claim that Deleuze is apolitical, attempting to debunk this claim by briefly considering Deleuze's work with Guattari. The bulk of the paper is concerned with a close examination of the appearance of Marx in both Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, establishing that the ‘pre-Guattari’ Deleuze was fully engaged with both politics and Marx and demonstrating that the concepts and arguments of the Marxist politics of the Deleuze–Guattari books can be traced back to Deleuze's own work. It is argued that an analysis of Deleuze's work on Marx is significant not only for deepening our understanding of Marx, but also for understanding the possibilities for Deleuzian politics.

Keywords: Deleuze, Marx, Nietzsche, philosophy, politics, social machines, capitalism

In some ways Deleuze's unfinished book on the Grandeur de Marx – the book that shortly before his death he announced he was working on (Deleuze 1995a: 51) – leaves us with a frustrating gap in our knowledge of his work: there is no text on Marx to compare with those on Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, and so on. On the other hand, it might be better to think of Grandeur de Marx not as some kind of missing key, but rather as an unnecessary distraction: speculation about the content of the lost book brings with it the risk of drawing attention away from the presence of Marx in Deleuze's published writings.