Abstract

It is well known that Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of fascism emerges out of the problem of affect, in particular the problem of what Spinoza called the ‘sad passions’—fear, anger, envy, etc. Without doubt, the sad passions drive the fascisms of contemporary politics. But Spinoza’s alignment of sadness with political tyranny and his ethical prescription that sad passions be transmuted by reason into joyful affects is complicated in a number of crucial ways across Deleuze and Guattari’s solo and collaborative works. In particular, passion (or pathos) appears to be fundamental to subjectivity and even to thought itself. The genesis (or ‘genitality’) of thought requires the subject ‘thinking its own passion, and even its own death’ (Difference and Repetition, p. 266). This in turn can be related to what I will call Deleuze’s ‘destructivism’ and what he and Guattari call ‘the passion of abolition’. Contrary to what is generally argued, destruction is not simply the great danger that the creative line of flight must confront and avoid but is fundamental to Deleuze’s conception of philosophical critique itself. This is made clear in complex arguments from Nietzsche and Philosophy, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, and Difference and Repetition. In A Thousand Plateaus, fascism is identified with the line of flight turning against itself and becoming a destructive passion, but this is distinguished from the emancipatory destructions of the nomadic war machine, ‘which invents the abolitionist dream and reality’ (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 385). This paper challenges the image of Deleuze as a philosopher of creation and of Deleuze and Guattari’s political theory as a pure constructivism.