Is it possible to answer the question of politics in the work of Deleuze, without going through desire and its variants? Deleuze's work spans twenty-six publications, authored by him or written in collaboration with the psychiatrist Félix Guattari. In these texts, Deleuze deals with the thought of Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Foucault, with the writings of Kafka, Proust, Sacher-Masoch, with Francis Bacon's painting, and with cinema and theatre. Politics, however, because only traces and indices of it exist in his texts, seems to be permanently put to question. At first sight, it is not even clear that there is, in his work, a political thematic – if by ‘political thematic’ we understand the organisation of the polis. We find no political treatise and no political programme to analyse or to comment upon. And if we look at the political orientation of the philosopher, it does not appear to be particularly fecund – its main traits are very basic: Deleuze travelled little, had never been a member of the Communist Party, had never been a phenomenologist or a Heideggerean, did not renounce Marx, did not repudiate May 1968 (Beaubatie 2000: 263).

On the other hand, Anti-Oedipus, the subtitle of which is Capitalism and Schizophrenia, deals with fundamental political themes. In it, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the state, the war machine, revolution, minorities as well as molar and molecular structures. The question of fascism is analysed in it and a universal vision of history is proposed.