°Minor Politics and Inconclusiveness
S sent a link to a book I’ve looked forward to reading for awhile, Nic Thoburn’s Deleuze, Marx and Politics.** I skipped ahead [spoiler alert], but anyone who begins the conclusion with this quote from Jean-Luc Nancy: “a kind of broadly pervasive democratic consensus seems to make us forget that ‘democracy’, more and more frequently, serves only to assure a play of economic and technical forces that no politics today subjects to any end other than its own expansion” has me applauding. Which is to say, anyone who both insists on the inconclusiveness of politics and looks at the connections between democracy and capitalism has got to be worth reading.
I’m not sure how explicit the discussion in the book is of what might be called the ‘grounds of politics’ (a la Nancy, Keenan, others), but this is excellent stuff: “Rather than a deferral of political practice or the affirmation of a teleology, it [a minor politics] is a mechanism for the continual problematization of any notion that political practice achieves a full plenitude, that the people to come ‘arrive’. That is, by situating politics between the extremes of a ‘missing’ people and a ‘new earth’, minor politics seeks to develop an affective condition that is able to live with, even be nourished by, its incompleteness, its difficulties, and its ‘impossibilities’.” Joyous.
**A copy of Nic Thoburn’s Deleuze, Marx and Politics can now be found here.
very nice deleuzian take
me [May 13, 2005 @ 9:48 pm]