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4 - Political Affinity and Singular-Universal Solidarity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2013

Thomas Nail
Affiliation:
University of Denver
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Summary

Clearly, a revolutionary machine cannot remain satisfied with local and occasional struggles: it has to be at the same time super-centralized and super-desiring. The problem, therefore, concerns the nature of unification, which must function in a transversal way, through multiplicity, and not in a vertical way, so apt to crush the multiplicity proper to desire.

(Deleuze 2004: 278/199)

Introduction

While the theory of a participatory body politic developed in Chapter 3 may have been able to account for the practical and theoretical reality of a third type of political body, it failed to understand on what basis such revolutionary bodies would be able to connect to one another and assemble a larger global alternative to neoliberalism. If the conditions of revolutionary political bodies are singular and non-representational, on what basis can such heterogeneous political conditions share a common affinity or belonging? To what degree can this inclusive model of political participation, argued for in Chapter 3, be practically extended into a worldwide revolutionary movement? Does one condition or body politic simply swallow another in larger and larger spheres of participation, or do they exist in parallel?

Defined as the connection between two or more heterogeneous political conditions, what I am calling revolutionary political affinity confronts two dangers. On the one hand, it risks being synthesised into a single global condition under which heterogeneous conditions can communicate, but only as particular elements under a larger representational condition (the affinity of citizenship within nation-states, the unequal/vertical affinity between allied and axis nations and so on).

Type
Chapter
Information
Returning to Revolution
Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo
, pp. 152 - 180
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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