Deleuze, Guattari, and the Coming Post-Neoliberal Age

It is with great pleasure and excitement that I announce that Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Post-Neoliberalism will be released on July 25th, 2024 by Bloomsbury. My contribution comes in the form of a chapter I wrote with my brilliant professor, mentor, and colleague Samuel Weeks. Our chapter, “From Deleuze and Guattari’s Interregnum to Our Own, or, How to Navigate the Coming Post-Neoliberal Age”, explores the biographical details of Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s life and how we might historicize them today in the wake of neoliberalism, an incipient movement of post-neoliberalism. We argue that just as Deleuze and Guattari witnessed the birth of neoliberalism in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, we are today witnessing a mutation dubbed post-neoliberalism. The collected volume is full of interdisciplinary articles exploring the concept of post-neoliberalism and offers new perspectives on modern political economy. Read our abstract below and follow the link to pre-order the book now!

How would Deleuze and Guattari interpret the signs of the incipient post-neoliberal age around us? They would have surely lauded the current moment of “pandemic Keynesianism” as a long-overdue departure from generalized austerity and monetarism – a program which, in their native France, dated from the mid-1980s. Of greater interest to them would likely have been the post-neoliberal experiments initiated throughout South America from the mid-2000s onward – in countries from Venezuela and Ecuador, to Bolivia and Brazil, and more recently, Chile. Yet, simultaneously, the pair would undoubtedly find bleak most of the developments of our emerging post-neoliberal age. Multinational corporations, which Deleuze famously likened to “a terrifying gas,” have only become more concentrated and monopolistic, penetrating further into still more realms of human existence, to say nothing of outer space or the genome of biological life. In politics, while neoliberalism’s fall has given rise to a handful of promising leftist movements – along the lines of those long supported by Guattari – the resulting political space has largely been occupied by openly illiberal, ultra-nationalist, and xenophobic politicians. Add into this volatile mix a climate crisis and global pandemic, which means that any shift to post-neoliberalism will bring with it even more confusion and precariousness. This begs the question: how would Deleuze and Guattari navigate our current interregnum? To undertake such a thought experiment, I propose that we look for clues in how the pair approached the main interregnum of their time: one that took them from the end of the Trente Glorieuses, to the election of Mitterrand, to the Maastricht Treaty, and finally the arrival of neoliberalism as a pensée unique. As such, this chapter details five episodes from Deleuze and Guattari’s political thinking and engagement from the above period that can serve as guideposts for our own uncertain trek into a post-neoliberal age. First, Deleuze’s mid-1970s calls for solidarity with Palestinians point to the continued and vital importance of aiding the struggles of the world’s many marginalized peoples. Second, the pair’s opposition to the 1977 extradition of lawyer Klaus Croissant, deemed a “terrorist” by the French authorities for his legal representation of West German RAF militants, is a call to defend those who suffer at the hands of a predatory state. Third, Deleuze’s unflinching late-1970s combat with the so-called Nouveaux Philosophes is an exemplar of how to denounce the “fake news” and pseudo-intellectualism in our midst. Fourth, in Mille Plateaux (1980), Deleuze and Guattari hint at some new and promising forms of political economy that could potentially find applications in the wake of neoliberalism’s slow death. Fifth, already in the essay “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle” (1990), Deleuze foretells the dominance that Big Tech has come to attain and, in doing so, makes calls avant la lettre for much-needed programs of societal democratization and anti-surveillance. Indeed, can the above examples from Deleuze and Guattari’s “late” thinking and engagement provide a potential way through what is likely to be the morass of postneoliberalism? 

Weeks, Samuel, “From Deleuze and Guattari’s Interregnum to Our Own, or, How to Navigate the Coming Post-Neoliberal Age”, in Deleuze, Guattari, and the Schizoanalysis of Post-Neoliberalism. Edited by Ananya Roy Pratihar, Saswat Samay Das, and Emine Gorgul, Bloomsbury, July 25, 2024.