Is the thought of Gilles Deleuze secretly linked to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s declaration: “I am an anarchist’? Has anarchism, for more than a century and a half, been secretly Deleuzian? In the guise of a playfully unorthodox lexicon, sociologist Daniel Colson presents an exploration of hidden affinities between the great philosophical heresies and “a thought too scandalous to take its place in the official edifice of philosophy,” with profound implications for the way we understand social movements.
“In a creative and yet precise way, Daniel Colson brings together two lines of thought — philosophy from Spinoza to Leibniz — and anarchism from Proudhon to the present day. At their intersection he discovers an affirmative and expressive anarchism that rejects all forms of resentment and negativity. This is anarchism as joy and empowerment rather than sadness and accusation.” — ‘lodd May, author of The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism
“Colson’s Lexicon is an inspiring resource for conceptualizing anarchism: it offers new, exciting paths for exploring anarchism with French thought and French thought with anarchism.” — Iwona Janicka, author of Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism
“Offers a line of thinking that connects disparate thinkers ranging from Proudhon to Simondon to Nietzsche to Deleuze... What emerges ts a radical challenge to the insistence on dialectic resolution, to occult left teleologies, and to the certainty that past anarchists have nothing to say to contemporary anarchists” — James Martel, author of The Misinterpellated Subject
Daniel Colson is a professor of sociology at the Université de St.-Etienne in Lyon. He is the author of Trois Essais de Philosophie Anarchiste: Islam, Histoire, Monadologie (2004) as well as several studies of French labor history.
Jesse Cohn is an associate professor of English at Purdue University Northwest. He is the author of Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics (2006) and Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848-2011 (2014).
ISBN 978-1-57027-342-4
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A LITTLE PHILOSOPHICAL LEXICON OF ANARCHISM FROM PROUDHON TO DELEUZE
Daniel Colson
Translated by Jesse Cohn
A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze Daniel Colson
Translated by Jesse Cohn
ISBN 978-1-57027-341-4
Cover design by Haduhi Szukis Interior layout by Margaret Killjoy
Released by Minor Compositions 2019 Colchester / New York / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.
Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia www.minorcompositions.info | minorcompositions@gmail.com
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CONTENTS
Preface: The Translation Manual................ceeceee 1 Jesse Cohn
PCa yp alnanndee dao med a wiene ones d anaenesee 19
Picci ecu aa tases lata ree awes 26 e saeeaaanet beeen 23 A priori/a posteriori — Action (practice) - Active minorities — Affinitary (affinity groups) — Affinity (elective affinity) - Affirmation - Alienation - Alliance - Altruism - Analogy (homology) - Anarchism of the right - Anarchism — Anarchist chemistry — Anarcho-syndicalism — Anarchy - Anguish — Anti-authoritarian/anti- power — Anti-something — Anti-speciesism ~ Apeiron — Appetites — Application —- Arrangement (collective arrangement) - Association/disassociation — Autonomy
Balance — Base (horizontality) - Becoming — Being - Beyond one’s own limits
(beyond what one can do) — Body (human body) - Bombs — Boss - Brain
Capital - Capture — Care for the self - Causes - Chaos — Chaplin - Charge of nature — Christian anarchism (religious anarchism) — Circumstances — Class (social, sexual, generational, etc.) — Class struggle — Classification — Collective (social) — Collective beings - Collective reason (public reason) - Common concepts — Common sense/good sense - Commons (common project, common arrangement) — Communication — Commutation — Components = Composed unity - Composition - Concept — Conformism — Consciousness - Constraint - Contract - Contradictions, contradictory — Contrariety — Convention — Core — Culture - Cynicism
Daoism - Death - Definition - Dependency - Desire — Determination - Determinism — Devil (diabolic, demons) — Dialectic — Differences — Dignity — Direct - Direct action — Direct democracy — Direction of the conscience — Disassociation — Discipline (self-discipline) - Domination — Dualism — Duty of memory
Economy - Effectiveness - Ego - Elan vital — Emancipation (affirmation) - Encounters — Ends/means - Energy — Entelechy — Entity — Equality - Equilibrium of forces — Eternal Return — Eternity - Ethics - Evaluation - Evanescent (transitory) — Event - Experience - Experts (scientists) -— Expression — Exterior/interior (external/internal, extrinsic/ intrinsic)
Federalism — Feedback [rétroaction] — Focal point (focalization) - Fold - Force (collective force, collective being) — Fractiousness — Free will - Freedom — Friends of our friends
Genealogy - General (and insurrectionary) strike - General assembly - Generosity - Gesture - Given moment - God - Good sense - Good/bad [bon/mauvais] — Good/evil [bien/mal] — Government - Great Evening -
Groups (groupings) — Guilt
Hagiography — Herd — Heteronomy — Hierarchy — Hinter-world — History —
Homology — Horizontality - Humanism
Idea — Ideal (utopia) - Identity — Ideomania — Idiosyncrasy - Imaginary - Immanence — Immediate — Imperative mandate — Imperceptible — Implication (altruism) — Implicit — Impotence/powerlessness [impuissance] — Impulse — Indefinite — Indeterminacy/Indeterminate — Indignation — Indiscernibles — Individual — Individuation — Instinct — Insubordination — Insurrection — Integral pacifism — Interior (internal) — Inner world - Interval — Intimate (intimacy, intimate circle) — Intimate being [étre intime] (eternity) — Intuition— Irrational
Joy/sadness — Judgment — Justice — Justification
Ly Weteee ween ceaee snake oeeaean bus ohebneeeetew el Labor — Laboratory —- Lack - Leader - Liberalism - Life (evanescent) — Limitlessness of the limited — Limits — Localism - Locking horns [Prise de tétes]
IVA cides Hat aebeNew end SewenGe wasn d see ansedeecweunla? Main front/second front — Manual/intellectual - Mass (masses) — Master/ slave - Matter — Mediation - Midst of things - Milieu (libertarian milieu) - Militant - Mobility - Monad — Monism (pluralism) - More than oneself - Movement (becoming) - Multiple — Multiplicity - Multitude
IN ag Sins ae ath tee ae eeaneedeeneeceueewesauneees loo Natural laws —- Naturalism - Nature - Necessity (freedom) - Negation - Neoconfucianism — Neoliberals [libertariens] - Nodes of forces - Nomad - Nomos — Non-violence
Os sea eae cae die eOetne deeded sae hereakeeeeemewecss 163
Objective — Objects - One (unity) - Oppression —- Order (system) - Organization — Other (the other) — Outside/inside
ee eee ene tee ne Oe ee re renee eee ee | o Particular — Passage to the act — Past — Patriarchy — People — Person (personalism) — Point of view — Perspectivism (perspective) - Perversion — Pity — Place/site — Plane of immanence (plane of consistency, plane of composition) — Planes of reality (plane of composition, worlds) — Plastic force - Platform, platformism - Plenitude — Pluralism (libertarian pluralism) — Plurality — Political commissar ~— Political vitalism — Positive anarchy — Possession (property) — Possibilities — Potential — Power [pouvoir] — Power (collective power) [puissance/puissance collective] — Power of the outside — Practical sense — Practice — Preindividual — Private/public — Pro-feminist - Prodigality — Project - Propaganda by the deed — Property — Pro-something — Psychopathic — Public confession — Put to death
Ricisceessecccdaduscvevewncuimenesmessecvenseaw 203
Raison d’étre — Reaction — Refusal — Relation of forces — Rational — Relativism - Rendering of accounts - Repetition — Representation (representative democracy) — Repugnance - Repulsion - Reserve of being — Respect - Responsibility — Responsible — Ressentiment — Resultant — Revocability — Revolt — Revolution - Revolutionary syndicalism — Right wing/left wing — Right/law (contracts, conventions) — Rupture
S Gusaeeuenneseaeseuaueecesaneceanereeuteareeneeele Sadness/joy - Science - Scientific laws (causes) — Scientists - Secession - Secrecy/transparency Selection — Self - Self-criticism - Self-discipline - Self-improvement - Self-management (self-government) - Self- sufficiency - Sensibility — Sensitivity - Separatism [non-mixite] — Serial dialectic — Series (seriation) — Servants of the people (of the State or any other so-called “higher” cause or authority) — Sexuality — Signification — Singularity - Situation - Slavery/freedom — Social - Social bond - Social Explosion — Social Revolution — Solidarity - Solitude - Species activity - Spontaneism - Spontaneity (spontaneity of action) — State - Statistics (mathematics) — Stoppage - Subject (revolutionary subject) - Subjectivity — Subversion — Suffering - Superabundance - Symbols (signs) - Syndicate (revolutionary) — Synthesis, synthesism (platform, platformism)
Vewseudeeeecaes ccanasee ae ce aeers ans oeceeseteeer a? Temperament (idiosyncrasy) — Tension — Terrorism — Theory/practice — Thing - Time - To be separated from oneself — To do all that one can/To go to the limits of one’s capacity — To risk one’s life — To the whipping post! - Tools/ weapons ~ Totality/totalitarianism — Tradition — Transcendence — Transduction ~ Transindividual — Transparency — Trust
UF 2 s.dcainadiaccpaldek Vache eee beat han eae eoesewanel or Unconscious — Unity — Universal — Universal causality - Univocal being - Utilitarianism — Utopia
WV cadinaaceh tae haa Raa Ga 6 eae eh een teeaetnee lol Vanguard — Vengeance - Violence — Virility — Vital — Voluntarism — Voluntary servitude
Wy) cae bamedeewensen bce tereeeeceeb ere sareeuewuebes 200 War (warlike) - Weapons - Will — Will to power - Worker (workerism) - Worker separatism — Worlds (plurality of worlds)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
DantEL Cotson THANKS J.-P. E., C.V., AND Y.C. IN MEMORY OF MaRIE- Louise Marsella.
Jesse Cohn would like to thank Daniel Colson (for permission, but even more for an education), Ronald Creagh (the best mentor I could have asked for), other participants in the Lyon symposium (John Clark, Francis Dupuis- Déri, and our gentle host, Alain Thévenet), Nathan Jun (for helping me to learn Colsonian French), Corinne Dupont (for encouraging me to listen to more voices, to be a better relais), Mark Mellor and Arabella Bond (the best unwitting patrons of this enterprise), and not least, Stevphen Shukaitis (for his infinite patience), Margaret Killjoy (for her lovely design work), and Karen Alderfer (who is largely responsible for the readability of the book in your hands). Even what hurt ultimately helped.
PREFACE: THE TRANSLATION MANUAL
‘The way that the media and courts have framed the “Tarnac” events...and the State’s efforts to criminalize the most radical currents and turn them into “terrorist organizations”... demonstrate their inability to understand movements that also radically escape their own logic.
— Daniel Colson!
Understanding anarchism in its own terms means that whenever we understand it in terms that look odd or irrational, it is our understanding that must first be questioned... We must indeed understand the language of anarchism. However, making sense of anarchism, as of any other movement, ultimately means interpreting it in terms that we understand. We need to find a translation manual.
— Davide Turcato?
L
IN ONE OF THE DARKEST MONTHS OF AN EXCEPTIONALLY DISMAL 2017, A crowd of students, along with a group of “black-clad protesters wearing masks,” prevented a scheduled speaking engagement on UC Berkeley’s campus by Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right troll best known for instigating campaigns
1 Colson, “Histoire et actualité du sujet révolutionnaire,” Réfractions 25 (Fall 2010): 25-26. 2 ‘Turcato, Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889-
1900 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 10. 1
2 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
of harassment against women. To defend the community against what they had identified as a fascist recruiting event, they broke windows and lit fires until the announcement came that Yiannopoulos had fled.' This Black Bloc action drew criticism not only from the media — who reliably described it as an irrational, violent assault on “free speech” — but also from renowned feminist theorist Judith Butler. While noting that “violence and nonviolence are terms that are already twisted by the frameworks in which they appear” (indeed, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, in which she has long participated, has been labeled violent’), she warned against thinking of violence in instrumental terms, as a mere means to an end:
What might at first seem to be a mere instrument to be dis- carded when its goal is accomplished turns out to be a praxis, a means that posits an end at the moment it is actualized; the means of violence posits violence as its end. In other words, through making use of violence as a means, one makes the world into a more violent place, one brings more violence into the world.
Moreover, although she acknowledged that we face “a crisis in democratic politics” — an increasingly pervasive and well-founded belief that elections do not adequately reflect or translate the will of the people — Butler argued that the Black Bloc’s action “only compounds the sense of hopelessness and skepti- cism about the possibility of practicing democracy, when that is precisely what we need most: the exercise of judgment, freedom, and power within the sphere of politics that can activate the true majority to drive Trump and his crew out of office.” Finally, she underlined the irony of the fact that the smashed windows belonged to the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union. Why hadn't the Black Bloc, “a group of mainly white men emphatically able-bodied...
1 Madison Park and Kyung Lah, “Berkeley Protests of Yiannopoulos Caused $100,000 in Damage,” CNN.com (February 2, 2017). A year later, Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (2017), concluded that the Black Bloc action largely achieved its goal. It not only denied a platform to Yiannopoulos in Berkeley but also made hosting him a far less palatable proposition to other venues, subsequently fearful of property damage and bad publicity. See Bray, “Antifa vs. Milo Yiannopoulos: Who Won?” Salon.com (January 31, 2018).
2 See, e.g., Cary Nelson’s suggestion that “BDS and Hamas are conceptually and political- ly linked” (“The Problem with Judith Butler: The Political Philosophy of the Movement to Boycott Israel,” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 16, 2014), or, more bluntly, Alan Dershowitz’s BDS: The Attempt to Strangle Israel (Prager University, July 14, 2014).
Preface: The Translation Manual 3
[thought] in advance about how painful it would be for many people to wit- ness an attack on the building on campus that symbolizes and honors the struggle for civil rights?”
Months later, at a conference not far away in Oakland, Joshua Clover offered a pointed rejoinder to Butler. For Clover, the problem does not only lie in the fact that the act of breaking a window is represented as “violent,” that our electoral systems do not (and cannot) represent “the people,” or even that resistance to white supremacist fascism is being represented as somehow identical to what it resists. The problem is also that discourses like Butler’s tend to reduce all action to representation, and that this reduction is already oppressive. Butler’s discourse turns the Black Bloc into a signifier of whiteness and the building into a signifier of blackness. In this gesture, a material reality of glass, steel, and capital is transformed beyond recognition and the material practice of denying fascism a place in public life is rendered unintelligible.
For the span of a generation now, anarchism has been a widespread and visible form of radical politics in the U.S., but the same arguments around it have circulated in almost unchanging form ever since the Black Blocs’ debut before the mediatized public gaze in Seattle 99. A number of scholars have tried to suggest, in various ways, that such representations carry a fundamen- tal misunderstanding of anarchism — a misunderstanding that reproduces the prejudices of the liberal model challenged by anarchism.’ In this liberal model, political life unfolds within a polis, a space within which only one thing must ever occur: civil discourse, the free exchange of words among citizens reason- ing with one another about the common good. Force can only enter into this space either (illegitimately) as a menace to this unceasing circulation of signs or (legitimately) as the restoration of the order that permits this circulation. This model cannot account for the often violent operations by which the pub- lic sphere was constructed nor how the power exercising “legitimate” violence arrived at legitimacy in the first place. It also fails to anticipate how fascism can gain a foothold in the liberal polis, representing its exercises of force as the legitimate exchange of signs (“free speech”) and its opponents as the agents of illegitimate force (“violence”). In this way, liberals have been persuaded to
1 Judith Butler, “The Big Picture: Protest, Violent and Nonviolent,” Publicbooks.org (Oct. 13, 2017).
2 See, for instance, Don Herzog, “Romantic Anarchism and Pedestrian Liberalism,” Political Theory 35.3 (2007): 314-15.
3 See UTA Editorial Committee, “Behind the Mask: Violence and Representational Politics,” Upping The Anti 11 (Nov. 2010); David Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007), 365-66; A.K. Thompson, Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2010), 113.
4 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
allow fascists access to the theaters of the U.S. polis as their right and to expel anarchists as invaders utterly alien to it.
Within this context, Daniel Colson’s lexicon is especially welcome. Drawing inspiration from Deleuze’s rejection of the dualism between “signification” and “force,” linking this to Proudhon’s proto-pragmatist insight that “the idea is born from action,”! Colson sets forth the elements of an understanding of the world that is thoroughly opposed to the liberal model that relentlessly severs ideas from actions, signs from forces, “the ‘good’ law-abiding protestor” from “the ‘bad’ terrorist element.” It is from this radically monist and immanentist perspective that the anarchist action can be understood and meaningfully eval- uated. Here, then, is a “translation manual” such as has been called for.
2.
Released just days before the clash in Berkeley, Iwona Janicka’s Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism: Solidarity, Mimesis and Radical Social Change makes a provocative and persuasive case for reading the work of Judith Butler (among others) as providing “a more suitable theoretical structure to understand con- temporary anarchism in practice.”* Indeed, Butler’s critique of the Black Bloc action invokes a concept central to anarchist ethics: the rejection of the kind of utilitarian calculation in which an ideal, ultimate goal located in the future justifies any action, no matter how sordid, in the present. The positive corol- lary of this refusal is prefigurative practice, the attempt to enact the desired future in the very struggle to produce it: “For libertarian thought and prac- tice,” as Colson puts it, “the end is necessarily contained in the means.”4 Nor is Butler unacquainted with anarchists or anarchism. Many anarchists have praised Butler’s contributions to queer theory? and she has attested an interest
1 See Colson’s entry for “Manual/intellectual.” Thompson, Black Bloc, White Riot, 35.
3 Iwona Janicka, Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism: Solidarity, Mimesis and Radical Social Change (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 161.
4 See the entry, “Ends/means.” The general embrace of a prefigurative principle by anarchists does not make it a completely “decontested” concept for anarchists (Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach |Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998], 5). For a contemporary anarchist interrogation of the concept, see Uri Gordon’s “Prefigurative Politics Between Ethical Practice and Absent Promise” in Political Studies (22 June 2017): 1-17. However, Gordon's genealogy of “prefiguration” seems to render it a dubious concept only insofar as (in some conceptualizations) it appears to presuppose the kind of “mastery over time” that Colson’s conceptualization explicitly rejects.
5 See, for instance, Lucy Nicholas, “Anarchism, Pedagogy, Queer Theory and Poststructuralism: Toward a Positive Ethical Theory, of Knowledge and the Self” Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective
Preface: The Translation Manual 5
in anarchism for several years now,' participating in a high-profile conference at the New School for Social Research in 2011, “The Anarchist Turn,” at which she spoke on the questions raised by the pro-Palestinian Israeli organization Anarchists Against the Wall. Yet, as we can see from confrontations like the one at Berkeley, most anarchists do not regard property destruction as violent, nor do they interpret the principle of prefiguration as prohibiting violent re- sistance to oppression. Where, in this process of translation, has the misunder- standing arisen?
Butler’s most concrete engagement with anarchism (as a movement and not as an abstract theme) also takes the form of a question about translation and translatability: while “there are anti-Zionist anarchists in Israel. ..[whose] work and contributions should be gratefully received,” she suggests that “the lexicon for understanding the problem of Palestinian oppression may well dif- fer in Palestine and in Israel.”* In other words, even if Palestinians might well have reasons of their own to be suspicious of statist projects, the question of “whether anarchists can or should support the Palestinian national struggle if that struggle is for a state of their own” seems unavoidable, and this appar- ent “impasse” raises an even larger question about how distinct and disparate struggles can connect up with one another.’ For Butler, this question can only be answered through an unending Hegelian labor of “cultural translation,” a process for which the anarchists appear to be too impatient.* However, she does not stop to ask whether this question of intersectional struggle — the cen- tral question of post-1960s radical theory, in fact — might already have a place in the anarchist tradition.
Reading in the margins of this tradition, Colson draws considerable inspi- ration from a seemingly insignificant reference in the Eighth Study of Pierre- Joseph Proudhon’s sprawling magnum opus, De /a Justice dans la Révolution et
Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, ed. Robert H. Haworth (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 242-259 and Lena Eckert, “Intersexualization and Queer-Anarchist Futures,” Queer Futures: Reconsidering Normativity, Activism and the Political, ed. Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Beatrice Michaelis, and Eveline Kilian (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 51-66.
1 See Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 160-63 and Jamie Heckert and Judith Butler, “On Anarchism: An Interview With Judith Butler,” Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power, ed. Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson (New York: Routledge, 2011), 103-130.
2 Butler, “Palestine, State Politics and the Anarchist Impasse,” The Anarchist Turn, ed. Jacob Blumenfeld (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 208.
3 Ibid. 215-17. Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2000), 20.
6 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
dans I’Eglise, which has yet to appear in a complete English translation. There, in a critique of the 17"-century rationalist philosophers, Proudhon suggests that, while the questions that preoccupied them (e.g. “whether or not mat- ter is divisible ad infinitum” or “[w]hether or not there are truly souls”) were merely speculative, their questions concerning free will and necessity could be rethought in practical, political terms.’ Thus, even if we don’t ascribe any lit- eral reality to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s notion of “monads” — infinitesimal, indivisible atoms of existence, each one incapable of being modified from the outside, which nonetheless move together in coordinated ways — we can take this as a model for thinking through questions of individuality and collectivity, autonomy and cooperation, or, in more contemporary parlance, agency and structure. This passing reference to Leibniz’s monadology, Colson observes, is writ large in Deleuze (particularly in The Fold), where — as reformulated by the sociologist Gabriel Tarde — it is elaborated into a “neo-monadology.”* Synthesizing Proudhon, Deleuze, and Tarde, Colson elaborates “[a] concep- tion of a world based on the spontaneity of beings, a world in which every- thing comes from within,” which is nonetheless a world where, as Tarde puts it, “everything is a society...every phenomenon is a social fact.”°
At first, this might seem to be merely a strange embellishment on the more familiar notion that what we have taken to be unified, intact categories or enti- ties (like “humanity,” “women,” or “self”) are actually heterogeneous compos- ites (in Deleuzian terms, “assemblages”). However, Colson is interested in the more seemingly mystical aspects of monadology: ifa monad has “neither doors nor windows,” no way of receiving or emitting signs, how does it communi- cate and coordinate its movements with all the other monads? In other words, Leibniz’s strange ontology poses epistemological questions, questions “on the
1 Proudhon, De Ja Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Eglise, vol. 3 (Paris: Riviére, 1930-5), 408, trans. my own.
2 Both Leibniz and Tarde are, in an irony Colson and Deleuze readily acknowledge, arch-au- thoritarians: as Deleuze remarked in his lectures on Leibniz, “He is the philosopher of order, even more, of order and policing...He only thinks in terms of order.” And yet, Deleuze notes, it is this very rage or “scream” for order that propels Leibniz into “the most insane concept creation that we have ever witnessed in philosophy” (Deleuze, “Cours Vincennes” [April 15, 1980], trans. Charles J. Stivale, Webdeleuze: Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, accessed February 10, 2018.) Once monadology is freed from “the divine mortgage” of a God who guarantees harmony, Colson argues, “[i]t is transformed from a conservative justification of (divine) order into a subversive conception of this order, into an emancipatory necessity: the necessity of constructing, in a radically immanent manner, the best of all possible worlds that Leibniz believed to be already present” (Colson, Trois essais de philosophie anarchiste: Islam, histoire, monadologie [Paris: Léo Scheer, 2004], 91-92, trans. my own).
3 See the entry for “Focal point.”
Preface: The Translation Manual 7
terrain of knowledge.”! As Colson writes elsewhere, an anarchist neo-monadol- ogy proposes a different way of thinking, for instance, about how works of fic- tion may relate to a seemingly quite distinct reality, how events in the present may relate to a seemingly irretrievably lost past. It proposes a way of knowing that consists in “‘finding’ oneself in the other and finding the other in oneself as already there...being oneself and an other, or rather all the others.””
Colson’s summary of his neo-monadology, in Trois essais de philosophie an- archiste: Islam, histoire, monadologie (2004), may be helpful here. Leibniz de- duces that, while each monad is windowless, “this connexion or adaptation of all created things to each and of each to all, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and, consequently, that it is a per- petual living mirror of the universe.”* Similarly, in neo-monadological theory, each being is intrinsically connected to all the others:
Every being possesses in itself the totality of that which exists, the totality of possibilities, but from a certain point of view, from a “perspective” that belongs to it. In other words, each be- ing is at once radically singular, different from all the others in the singularity of its point of view and, at the same time, similar to them, “completely” similar to them, one might say, since like them it contains in itself the totality of possible perspectives, even if only from a certain point of view. To put it another way, in the neo-monadological approach, reality must be en- tirely thought [quoting Jacques Rivelaygue] “on the model of the subject,” starting from a “subjective substrate,” an infinite multitude of forces and subjective and singular points of view, each of which can rightly claim to have access to the totality of that which exists.‘
In this model, since “the relation... between beings is actually an internal re- lation,” we can engage in collective action “without translators or translation,” without the mediation of vanguard intellectuals or the direction of central committees.” Rather than seeking to transcend differences in the overarching unity of the “universal” or to reduce all struggles to a single category (class, gender, race, ecology, etc.), forces engaged in social struggles can link up with one another, in Félix Guattari’s words, along “[a] trans-monadic axis, one of
Colson, Trois essais, 87, trans. my own. Colson, Trois essais, 42-43, trans. my own. Leibniz, The Monadology, trans. Robert Latta (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 56.
Colson, Trois essais 87, translation my own.
Wd WO NY
See the entry for “Secrecy.”
8 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
transversality.”’ In this way, an infinity of divergent forces might nonetheless find a queer kind of commonality — a “stranger unity,” as Deleuze puts it, “that can only characterize the multiple.”?
As abstract and speculative as this neo-monadology may seem, it suggests a distinctive way of thinking about issues as concrete as the encounter of Palestinian and Israeli activists at a military construction site in Bili’in: how do seemingly disparate and even dissonant movements, groupings, and identities link up in ways that are strong enough to challenge the forces of domination? In forming these links, how can we avoid falling back into another kind of utilitarian means-ends calculation — what Colson calls “the mechanical game of politics in which it is always a matter of defining others...and classifying them as friends or enemies on the chessboard of power so as to conquer or defend them, depending on one’s interests and strategy”?? How, in fact, do we determine who are our “friends” (and not solely “friends of our friends” or “enemies of our enemies”)? What kind of social reality and political value can be ascribed to identities, to what is often derisively called “identity politics”?
In a move similar to Butler’s, Colson proposes the Proudhonian concept of “analogy” as an alternative to the kind of reductive strategic analysis in which every form of power must ultimately be tracked back to a single source (so that, for instance, women’s oppression is treated as an epiphenomenon, to dissolve spontaneously once “the contradictions of the existing order or system” have been resolved or at best as a subsidiary question to be addressed after the defin- itive revolution, “deferred to the end of time”): if Church, State, and Capital produce similar effects of power, this is not because they are identical nor because they form a single indissoluble structure. But where Butler emphasizes the non-identity at the core of “analogy” — a primary difference that prohibits “the presumption that one group’s suffering is /ike another’s” — Colson suggests that not only is the “analogy” between forms of oppression useful, but that we find a world of possible “affinities” among the oppressed, the very logic “[by] which libertarian forces are linked to one another.”*
All of this can help us to imagine how, in the absence of a single overarch- ing logic of struggle, an infinity of different struggles might nonetheless find a queer kind of commonality, Deleuze’s “stranger unity.” Analogy and affinity
1 Félix Guattari, “Ritornellos and Existential Affects,” trans. Juliana Schiesari and Georges Van Den Abbeel, The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 167.
2 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 158 (modifications my own).
3 See the entry for “Friends of our friends.” Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 128. See Colson’s entries for “Analogy (homology)” and “Affinity (affinity
groups, elective affinity).”
Preface: The Translation Manual 9
can prepare us to understand, for instance, how it is that in the world-his- torical year of 2011, Egyptian students in Tahrir Square, reaching across the “trans-monadic axis,” could greet protesting unionized workers in Madison, Wisconsin with expressions of joyous recognition and how the occupation of Tahrir came to be “mirrored” in Zuccotti Park. Perhaps we could say that this retrieves the subversively universalistic slogan of classical humanism, “nothing that is human is alien to me,” but without humanism’s normalizing burden: nothing is alien to me.
Under these assumptions, Colson’s neo-monadology lends to anarchism another way of avoiding the lethal dichotomies in which radical theory so of- ten becomes trapped: not only unity/difference, universal/singular, structure/ agency, and theory/practice, but also monism/pluralism, self/other, subject/ object, idea/matter, natural/mechanical, human/nonhuman. ‘These are also among the foremost targets of Iwona Janicka’s book.
3:
Daniel Colson first published his Petit lexique philosophique de l'anarchisme de Proudhon a Deleuze in 2001, the same year Saul Newman published From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power. What has since come to be called “postanarchism” is often thought of as a hybrid of poststructuralism and anarchism: anglophone theorists rereading “classical anarchism” through the corrective lenses of “French theory.” While often in- structive, many of these attempts to read “from Bakunin to Lacan” have been to some degree unsatisfying for a number of reasons.
First, in large part, English-language works of postanarchism have not been deeply informed by the historical experience of anarchism. Relying on a few key thinkers taken as anarchist counterparts to Marx and Engels, as filtered through certain dominant interpretations of those thinkers’ texts, the anglo- phone postanarchists have too often been content to ignore a plethora of other anarchist voices (including the voices of women, non-Europeans, and anybody from the post-World War II generations), as well as the distinction between what theorists write and what militants do.
The first error gives rise to a second. The anglophone postanarchists have almost all read the anarchist tradition as founded on a variety of humanism, a Rousseauian faith in the goodness of “human nature.” This interpretation comes largely from the sedimented readings of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin (and sometimes Stirner) laid down in past generations by non-an- archist scholars who could scarcely believe that anything else would permit a rational person from expecting something other than a Hobbesian war of all against all to appear in the absence of the State. In fact, those who have attend- ed to the ways in which anarchists actually act together are well aware that they
10 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
assume human behavior to be a complex product of culture and context as well as nature. Why bother, otherwise, to create practices of federation designed to protect local autonomy from encroachments from above or directly dem- ocratic gatherings of delegates bound to their base assemblies by imperative mandate on pain of immediate recall? If anarchists really believe that “nature” is a sufficient source of order, why have they paid so much attention to fine points of organization? Why would believers in innate goodness place such emphasis on education and ethics? But these questions don’t arise at all if one’s understanding of anarchism is confined to a glance at Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid or Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own.
Embarrassed by what they take to be “classical” anarchism’s commitment to humanism, the anglophone postanarchists have tended to ignore the actual theo- retical resources in the tradition and have chosen instead to reinterpret postmodern theories as already implying an anarchist politics. This allows them to pull post- modernism away from its reformist interpretations, to reinscribe it within the con- text of May ’68. However, they often fail to fully distinguish their interpretation of postmodernism from relativist interpretations. If Foucault insisted that power and knowledge travel together, some postanarchists seem to assume that disrupt- ing claims of knowledge could be tantamount to dispersing the effects of power. Postanarchist practice, then, looks like a game of abstractions, an academic exer- cise: “The struggle for liberation,” Andrew M. Koch announces, “has the character of political resistance to a process of semantic and metaphorical reductionism that serves the interests of control and manipulation.”' Postmodern anarchism engages in a “symbolic assault upon the semiotic fortresses of modern political economy,” aiming at “the overthrow of the Law as an epistemological category,” writes Lewis Call.’ The subject of this “resistance,” this “assault” (the term “revolution” has van- ished), is defined in terms of thinking and knowing (epistemology) rather than in terms of being and doing (ontology and ethics). The result is sometimes hard to tell apart from what liberal philosopher Richard Rorty approvingly called “textualism”: “In the last century there were philosophers who argued that nothing exists but ideas. In our century there are people who write as if there were nothing but texts.”
Colson, however, has done more than translate a 19th-century tradition into the terms of a 20th-century discourse. Rather, in his Little Philosophical Lexicon, anarchism illuminates poststructuralism, putting postanarchism on an entirely different footing. The difference might be belied by the parallel lan- guage of Newman's “from Bakunin to Lacan” and Colson’s “from Proudhon to
1 Andrew M. Koch, “Poststructuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 23.3 (1993): 348. Lewis Call, Postmodern Anarchism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 5. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 139.
Preface: The Translation Manual 11
Deleuze.” Where the former is really organized as a march, chapter by chapter, from the anarchism of Bakunin (read as insightful but immature, burdened by humanism, not yet equipped with the radical tools of psychoanalysis and deconstruction) zo the poststructuralism of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and Lacan, Colson’s book presents no such narrative. Taking advan- tage of the generic architecture of “dictionaries and handbooks” (by way of a slight “parody”), it presents us not with an array of definitions that would have the pretension of being complete and authoritative (see the introduction and the definition of “Definition”), but with a rhizome — a centerless network of interrelated nodes between which meaning can be transmitted in multiple directions. This rhizomatic structure allows for a much more open-ended and multilateral relationship between anarchism and poststructuralism (and oth- er instances of subversive and illuminating thought, including, significantly, non-Western voices), so that it is not only a matter of reading Deleuze as the inheritor of Proudhon, but we are also allowed to reread Proudhon through a Deleuzian lens.
In this way, Colson begins to do for Proudhon (and Bakunin, Coeurderoy, Déjacque, Michel, Makhno, Pouget...) what Marxist scholars like Antonio Negri have long since done for Marx. Where Negri gives us, in the title of his book, a Marx Beyond Marx (1979), Colson produces a “Proudhon beyond Proudhon,” a creative reinterpretation that demonstrates its loyalty to the sub- versive spirit of the founding texts by turning them against themselves — or, in Colson’s Deleuzian terms, by demonstrating their potential to “go beyond their limits,” to be “more than themselves.’ Negri helped reopen a discussion of the relevance of Marxism by rereading Marx’s work in a postmodern mode, ie. “in the margins” and “against the grain.” Reading Marx “in the margins” meant taking on an incomplete, transitional work, Zhe Grundrisse, that had previously appeared as peripheral to the Marxian corpus and showing that it deserved attention in its own right, that it was not merely a preparation for or an incomplete version of a more canonical works. Reading “against the grain” meant reinterpreting Marx’s text in opposition to certain received ideas about what “Marx” meant and did, e.g. that Marx was an “objectivist and de- terminist” thinker for whom the scientific analysis of economic development ultimately precluded workers’ subjectivity, spontaneity, or choice of histori- cal direction. Instead, Negri finds grounds for reading Marx as a thinker of workers’ “subjectivity” and self-activity, so that Marx retroactively becomes a prophet of Negri’s “autonomy” — a concept that has almost no place in Marx’s conceptual armamentarium. Likewise, where Proudhon failed the test of his own radical ideas, lapsing into misogyny and bigotry, Colson allows his best concepts (e.g. “collective force,” “collective reason,” and “resultant”) to serve as
1 See the entries for “Limits” and “Limitlessness of the limited.”
12 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
a kind of immanent critique, making Proudhon go “beyond his own limits.”!
At the same time, Colson allows us to radically reassess the meaning of post- structuralism, to redescribe it in terms of genuinely anarchist concepts. This translation takes place perhaps most profoundly through the Proudhonian tri- ad of “collective being,” “collective force,” and “collective reason” (see these entries). If, as Murray Bookchin complained, relativist interpretations of post- modernism tend to produce a privatized experience of the world, a kind of subjectivism without a subject in which emancipation appears as the freedom to imagine that one is free,’ the Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism te- stores its properly social dimension: emancipation entails dreaming, to be sure, but it is a collective project. I do not know how consciously Colson set out to do this, but his book also does much to rescue Deleuze and Guattari from the “accelerationist” elements of their thought, according to which advanced capitalism is already doing the work of undoing itself — almost a parodic exag- geration of similarly teleological elements in Marxism. We find no celebration here of the privatized fashioning of self-images or the liberatory potentials of consumerism. Nor is there any room for textualism: “All that I attempt to ‘say’ in this Lexicon,” as Colson has remarked elsewhere,
consists precisely in, on the one hand, never separating ac- tion and idea, force and signification, and on the other hand, never privileging the one to the detriment of the other... This Deleuzian position is at the heart of militant libertarian dis- course itself, at the heart of the concept of direct action, and of course at the heart of the concept of propaganda by the deed, a major concept of the emergent anarchist movement, a concept at once practical and theoretical, demonstrating in itself what it affirms: the indissociable character of action and idea, force and significance.’
Here, Deleuze’s creative appropriation of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics plays an important role. Just as Spinoza proposes a “parallelist” ontology — an account of reality for which “thought” and “extension” (or, more famously, “God or Nature”) are just two aspects of the same thing — so both Proudhon and Deleuze sidestep the reductionist question that has bedeviled Western thought from its very beginnings, the question of whether ideas or matter are more real.
See, for instance, the entries for “Monad” and “Labor.”
2 Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1995).
3 Colson, “Réponse de Daniel Colson & Eduardo Colombo,” Réfractions 8 (2002): 144
(trans. my own).
Preface: The Translation Manual 13
This, in turn, clears the ground for a distinctively non-vanguardist understand- ing of the relations between theory and practice.’
What emerges from this reconstruction of Proudhon via Deleuze and of Deleuze via Proudhon is a kind of anarchism (or postanarchism) that is recognizably true to itself, of a piece with its historical development, while also standing apart from some of our most durable received notions about it. It is not solely or even primarily a critical stance, a “negation of the nega- tion,” definable in terms of a list of oppositions, ultimately determined by the very oppressive forces that it would like to overcome; it is profoundly affirmative, “the affirmation of the multiple, the unlimited diversity of be- ings and their capacity to compose a world without hierarchy, domination, or forms of dependence other than the free association of radically free and autonomous forces.”*
4.
Of course, the definitions in any “brief” lexicon cannot claim to be definitive. For instance, one might ask about the significance of many omissions. Colson’s selection and evaluation of anarchist thinkers has proven contentious:? entire currents such as primitivism do not even merit mention, and while the book testifies to an enormous respect for the legacy of revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism, class-struggle anarchists will doubtless take issue with the discussions of “Class,” “Movement,” and “Organization.” Furthermore, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari are represented here,* yet Jacques Lacan — the terminus of Newman’s postanarchist narrative and a key referent for contem- porary radical philosophers — is conspicuously absent.
Indeed, Colson can be classed among the harshest critics not only of the “Lacanian left” but of an entire genealogy of radical thought indebted to a cer- tain reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. A number of other anarchists have recently elaborated parallel critiques of what Richard J. F Day identifies as “the politics of recognition” and what Andrew Robinson calls “the politi- cal theory of constitutive lack” at the heart of the works of Ernesto Laclau,
See the entry for “Theory/practice.”
2 See the entries for “Anti-something,” “Emancipation (affirmation),” and “Anarchy.” See the entries for “Selection” and “Evaluation,” as well as Eduardo Colombo’s critique, “Lanarchisme et la philosophie: A propos du Petit lexique philosophique de Vanarchisme de Daniel Colson,” Réfractions 8 (2002): 127-41.
4 As well as Michel de Certeau, Giorgio Agamben, and, not without controversy, some of the stranger sources for Deleuze’s ontology: not only theists like Leibniz and Spinoza but also the largely apolitical Gilbert Simondon and the virulently avti-anarchist Gabriel Tarde, a
magistrate and criminologist (see Colombo, “Lanarchisme et la philosophie”).
14 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
Chantal Mouffe, Alenka Zupanéi¢, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek.! Hegel’s concept of desire as marked by a quest for “recognition” in the form of a strug- gle for domination between warring subjectivities (the famous “master-slave dialectic”), since imported into Lacanian theories of subjectivity as such, im- plies that the kind of “transversal,” egalitarian, horizontal order to which an- archism aspires is, in fact, impossible. “[I]t is one thing,” Graeber remarks, “to say that the quest for mutual recognition is necessarily going to be tricky, full of pitfalls, with a constant danger of descending into attempts to dominate or even obliterate the Other. It is another thing to assume from the start that mutual recognition is impossible.” Colson is far more blunt: “[I]n the theory of desire as lack, the encounter with the other becomes impossible.”?
While Janicka notes that Butler’s thought, too, is strongly marked by Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, Butler is sharply critical of Lacanian theory (“a kind of ‘slave morality,” as she brands it in Gender Trouble) for its tenden- cy to hypostasize “lack” into a new quasi-mythic foundation.‘ And although Colson may dispute the need for any privileged “translators” to mediate be- tween monads, he does not deny the “essential role” of signs in permitting the formation of “much vaster collective beings...able to ‘translate,’ in the field of signs and language, the ‘modalities of action’ that these collective beings contain.” Indeed, both Butler and Colson are wary of the “trap[s]”* posed by signs that are permitted to “congeal,” to become “sedimented and reified”® into rigid constructs, “conferring absoluteness upon what is created by human beings.”’ Butler and Colson share an interest in questioning and undermining “the regulatory practice of identity itself” as a primary form of reification: the identities “woman” and “homosexual” for Butler and “working class” or even “anarchist” for Colson.’ Moreover, they share an approach to undoing
1 David Graeber, “Consumption,” Current Anthropology 52.4 (August 2011): 494; Richard J. E Day, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 18; Andrew Robinson, “The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique,” Theory & Event 8.1 (2005).
Graeber, “Consumption,” 494.
See Colson, entry for “Lack.”
A OD
Janicka, Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism, 26-7; Butler, Gender Trouble, 72; Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 201-2. Colson, entry for “Symbols (signs).”
Butler, Gender Trouble, xxi, xxiii.
Colson, entry for “Symbols (signs)”
oN NAW
Butler, Gender Trouble, 32; Colson, entries for “Class (social, sexual, generational, etc.),” “Movement,” and “Anarchism.” The parallels are really striking: “Any politico-ideological force that claims to found its own existence and the significance of its struggle on the be-
lief in an all-powerful first principle at the origin of that which exists — a foundation that
Preface: The Translation Manual 15
this appearance of fixity, one that perhaps signals their mutual proximity to Tarde. The corollary to Tarde’s declaration that “everything is a society” is that “society is imitation”: Tarde’s monads, Janicka writes, “have a tendency to as- sociate and ‘to associate always and everywhere means to assimilate, that is, to imitate.””' Through what Butler calls “subversive resignification” and what Colson calls “libertarian repetition,” they discover not the tragic inevitability of humanism but “an infinite capacity to interpret and reinterpret the signifi- cation of events and facts.””
Given the many affinities and intersections between the Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism and the works of a leading feminist theorist, it is all the more surprising — and disappointing — that references to feminism here are both infrequent and sometimes strikingly misinformed. Francis Dupuis-Déri observes that while Sébastien Faure’s Encyclopédie anarchiste (1934) includes an entry on “feminism,” the Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism \acks such an entry.’ Instead, an empty header for “Pro-feminist” leads to the entry “Pro-something,” in which Colson expounds on the familiar dangers of ac- tivism driven by white straight male guilt. This phantasmatic feminism finds
justifies its struggle (God, State, Capital, Patriarchy, etc.) — merely participates in the power of what it pretends to combat,” writes Colson (entry for “Class”). “The mobilization of iden- tity categories for the purposes of politicization always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes,” writes Butler (Gender Trouble, xxvi). Both emphasize that identities are effects rather than causative origins — in Colson’s terms, e aval (“downstream,” the product or consequence of something else, a posteriori) rather than en amont (“upstream,” foundational or a priori): “[T]he foundational categories of sex, gender, and desire [are] effects of a specific formation of power...designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin” (Gender Trouble, xxix). Or, as Colson puts it, “For libertarian thought, the great cleavages that run through and structure our societies (workers/bourgeoisie, men/women, young/old, Whites/Blacks, urban/rural, high/ low, in/out, left/right, dominators/dominated, etc.) are not at the origin of the numerous relations of force and domination that comprise our lives. They are, on the contrary, the effects of the ensemble of these relationships” (entry for “Class”).
Janicka, Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism, 96.
2 Butler, Gender Trouble, xxxi; Colson, entries for “Repetition” and “Eternal Return.” Dupuis-Déri, “Lanarchisme face au féminisme: comparaison France-Québec,” Le sexe du militantisme, ed. Olivier Fillieule and Patricia Roux (Paris: Presses de la Fondation natio- nale des sciences politiques, 2009), 198-99n10. In fact, volume two of Faure’s anarchist encyclopedia features two entries on “féminisme,” one by Jean Marestan and the other by Madeleine Pelletier; see Encyclopédie anarchiste (Paris: Librairie internationale, 1934), vol. 2, 804-5. Both the Encyclopédie and Colson’s lexicon can be faulted for inadequate attention to
questions of racism, ableism, and other important modes of oppression.
16 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
an echo in the entry for “Rendering of accounts,” a ritual supposedly prac- ticed by unnamed “currents emerging from North America” in which “each rebellious force” is required to “immediately subordinate itself to one that is more dominated than itself, to ‘render account to this other, to act and think ‘under its supervision.””' If this seems, at best, like a caricature of the “political correctness” denounced by conservatives, it may reflect the relatively slow and difficult uptake of feminist and anti-racist discourses in a French anarchist mi- lieu that, according to Dupuis-Déri, is still strongly influenced by the “univer- salism” of French “republican discourse.”* Perhaps it also reflects the gendered biases of Colson’s source material: what can be expected if one tries to write an article about “Sexuality” that only cites Spinoza (whose Political Treatise de- clares that “women have not by nature equal right with men”) and Proudhon (who speculated that it might be wise to “put woman in seclusion,” since she could be only “courtesan or housewife”)? Even if he denies any “anatomical or discursive” foundation to masculine power, when Colson insists that “virility, in the libertarian sense of the term, is unrelated to the categories of gender and sex, a symbolic expression for “affirmation” and “force,” it is hard to take this at face value, nor can we avoid hearing an echo of the Proudhon who wrote that “genius is...the virility of the mind, its power of abstraction, of generaliza- tion, of invention, of conception, of which the child, the eunuch, and woman are equally deprived.”
To be fair, North American anarchists often complain — in good as well as bad faith — about the readiness with which discussions can devolve into an “Oppression Olympics,” a rhetorical contest in which relative lack of privi- lege can be converted into a kind of “subcultural capital.” Even if they never amount to the authoritarian “rendering of accounts” Colson depicts, anar- chist social practices of “holding people accountable” for oppressive behav- iors, as Laura Portwood-Stacer notes, “can easily be mistaken for (or actually devolve into) self-righteous moralism and arbitrary boundary policing.”® All
Colson, entry for “Rendering of accounts.”
Dupuis-Déri, “Lanarchisme face au féminisme,” 193, 196.
Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise and a Political Treatise, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), 387; Proudhon qtd. in Jenny d’Héricourt, A Woman’ Philosophy of Woman; Or, Woman Affranchised: An Answer to Michelet, Proudhon, Girardin, Legouvé, Comte, and Other Modern Innovators (New York: Carleton, 1865), 84.
4 Proudhon, De la Justice, 4.197.
5 Abbey Volcano, “Police at the Borders,” Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, ed. C. B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012), 34; Laura Portwood-Stacer, Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 60.
6 Portwood-Stacer, Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism, 90.
Preface: The Translation Manual 17
of this, however, coexists alongside the survival of a wide array of oppressive behaviors in the anarchist milieu, from microaggressions and manipulation to racism and rape. Indeed, Colson is right to observe that “[t]raditional di- visions...and practices of submission to extrinsic authorities” — including all the vicious hierarchies of gender, race, sexuality, ability, and more — “contin- ue to operate within the actions that seem to be the most peaceful and free.”! All the more need, then, for “continually discussing and modifying the most minute relationships,” for a continuous evaluation of and experimentation with “the most tenuous realities and relations, the thousands of ways of liv- ing and working, of eating and getting dressed, of loving and learning, of giving birth and aging.””
Would it be perverse to read Colson’s text as calling for precisely the kind of internal scrutiny in which anarchist collectives are currently engaged? According to Colson, a certain “prickliness,” “sensitivity,” or even “hypersen- sitivity,” “a vigilant attention to the diversity and the nuances of...relation- ships,” “an obsession with details,” and “a kind of exaggerated democracy” is in fact proper to any anarchist movement worthy of the name, as a continuous practice of evaluation aimed at ensuring “autonomy and respect to the forc- es that it associates.” “[L]ibertarian self-management,” he writes, “is always placed under the sign of tension..., of conflict, and of an unstable balance that must be constantly sought.”* And Colson identifies a crucial guarantee of this “balance,” of internally egalitarian relations, as the right and capacity of indi- viduals and groups to break away from associations and federations, to form parallel or autonomous collectivities: “The demand of the women’s movement for separate associations,” he writes, is entirely in keeping with the “founda- tional demand of the anarchist project...[and with] the need to constitute an infinity of radically autonomous collective forces charged with proving con- cretely, through experimentation with the various methods of association and disassociation, their effectively emancipatory character.”4
Ultimately, the Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism prefigures the kind of feminist rereading and appropriation that might be made of the Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism itself. Perhaps an astute reader of Judith Butler would be well positioned to “open [it] up to the infinity of the possibil- ities and significations that [it] contains” so that it can “[go] beyond its own limits,” as Colson’s text seems to prophesy:
Colson, entry for “Hierarchy.” Colson, entry for “Common notions.”
3 See the entries for “Sensitivity,” “Class (social, sexual, generational, etc.),” and “Self-management.”
4 Colson, entry for “Separatism.”
18 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
It is in this sense that the misogynist Proudhon can nonetheless enable us, a century and half later, to think and perceive the nature and the value of women’s emancipatory movements, as well as the affirmation and meaning of their most radical fem- inist currents.”’
Here, then, is the promise of this book: it is open to resignification, to translation. You are the translator now.
a “FIND EACH OTHER,” urged the Invisible Committee in The Coming Insurrection (2009), finding an echo in a call for action against the inaugura- tion of Donald Trump: “Find your friends and accomplices.” If, as anarchists, we are aware that “the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the excep- tion but the rule,’ that does not prevent us from being seized with horror at the present world crisis, at the ways in which it mirrors the dark years of a globally ascendant fascism in the last century, but also at the ways in which it is unprecedented, as the fundamental processes of life on Earth are rapidly coming undone even while technological advances open up new possibilities for domination. In this situation, the need we have to find our friends is great. So is the need for the arts of association and assembly, experimentation with and evaluation of relationships, described by the Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism.
May it be a useful tool in your hands. May it modify you — and may you modify it.
Colson, entry for “Multiple.”
2 Invisible Committee, 7he Coming Insurrection (New York: Semiotext(e), 2009), 97; “Seattle Call for Autonomous Action on #J20,” Its Going Down (24 Dec. 2016).
3 Walter Benjamin, M/uminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 257. For a poignant Colsonian reading of Benjamin's essay, see Daniel Colson, “Lange de histoire,” Monde libertaire 1377 (18-25 Nov. 2004).
PREFACE
ANARCHISM, OWING TO ITS COLORFUL AND SOMETIMES CRUEL HISTORY, THE extremity of its demands, and the marginality or folkloric character of its pro- tagonists — but also owing to the nature of its most theoretical texts — has never truly been recognized within Western philosophical and political thought. It was not until the second half of the 20" century that the radicality, coher- ence, and immediacy of its social and theoretical implications finally had a hope of becoming visible. By this time, the reference to anarchism had been transformed bit by bit into a half-remembered curiosity, a negligible, more or less sympathetic reference to which the youth must sometimes pay tribute. It is not to itself that anarchism owes this possibility of a new and perhaps first legibility, of a redoubling of an immediate and implicit experience and perception. As its principal theorists so often affirm, it owes this primarily to the outside: the outside of the events that, for a short time, from Shanghai to Paris, from Washington to Berlin or Tokyo, swept over and shook up so much of the world during the ’60s and ’70s, but also the outside of a contemporary thought seemingly unrelated to historical anarchism, referring to Nietzsche more often than to Proudhon, to Spinoza more often than to Bakunin or Stirner, while at the same time helping, in a subterranean but undeniable man- ner, to restore meaning to a political and philosophical project that had been forgotten before it was even able to express what it contained. This, at least, is what this lexicon intends to establish: to show how the Nietzscheanism of Foucault or Deleuze, the rereading of Spinoza or Leibniz that these thinkers permit, and the current rediscovery of Gabriel Tarde, Gilbert Simondon, or Alfred North Whitehead not only give new meaning to libertarian thought (for example, the texts of Proudhon or Bakunin) but also take on new mean- ing from within libertarian thought. In this way, perhaps, this encounter helps make possible the anarchism of the 21“ century.
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20 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
Viewed from the perspective of the richness of the experiences of the lib- ertarian movements in all their implications, this lexicon is limited in its ob- jectives. It contains no history and it does not provide any information on individuals, currents, or organizations. It does not address the events that, for nearly a century (from the European insurrections of 1848 to the Spanish Revolution of the summer and autumn of 1936),' constituted the living real- ity of anarchism. It does not do away with the necessity of reading those ac- counts and testimonies that best allow us to perceive the meaning of this real- ity: James Guillaume’s L7nternationale, for example, or Voline’s The Unknown Revolution, Abel Paz’s Durruti in the Spanish Revolution or Alexandre Skirda’s Nestor Makhno.* Even within the limits it sets for itself, this lexicon remains provisional and susceptible to a great number of additions and corrections. In its brevity, it has but one aim, which can be summed up in four points: 1) to demonstrate the possible (and paradoxical) theoretical coherence of a move- ment that resolutely calls for anarchy; 2) to show how, after its long eclipse, the theoretical revival of this movement during the second half of the 20" century returns to its origins; 3) to make visible the secret affinities that, from the perspective of this movement, link philosophers and theorists as seemingly disparate as Spinoza, Leibniz, Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Tarde, Nietzsche, Bergson, Foucault, Simondon, and Deleuze, among others; 4) to bring to light a perception of the world and of reality analogous to libertarian practices and experiences, a perception necessary to the development of these practices and experiences, yet which they sometimes rather badly lack.
Some practical counsel for the reader: any genuine lexicon, however limit- ed, is a labyrinth with many possible entrances. In libertarian thought, none of these entrances can claim to occupy a privileged place, play a foundational role, or serve as a first principle. It is, therefore, not essential to rely on the arbitrary order of the alphabet and to begin — out of indifference or habit — with the letter “A.” On the contrary, all are invited to choose the entries that best suit them, perhaps because they feel a particular and intuitive affin- ity with such-and-such a word or such-and-such an idea, or because certain ideas already constitute a particularly important crystallization of their way of
1 What Hans Magnus Enzensberger quite aptly terms “anarchy’s brief summer” (Anarchy’s Brief Summer: The Life and Death of Buenaventura Durruti, trans. Mike Mitchell [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018}).
2 Voline (V.M. Eichenbaum), Zhe Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921, trans. Holley Cantine and Fredy Perlman (Detroit: Black and Red, 1974); James Guillaume, LYnternationale, doc- uments et souvenirs (1864-1878) (Paris: Editions Gérard Lebovici, 1985); Abel Paz, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution, trans. Chuck Morse (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006); Alexandre Skirda, Nestor Makhno — Anarchys Cossack: The Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine, 1917- 1921, trans. Paul Sharkey (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004).
Preface 21
thinking, feeling, and perceiving. The index at the end permits this choice. You may want to begin — and to return — there. However, by way of your relation to these suggested concepts, they will also have affinities and correspondences that bind them to one another. This allows for a gradual reading, an approach in which proximity is no more to be respected than the alphabetical order or the demands imposed by the logical imperatives of deduction. From this, two consequences follow. Both are closely related to the nature of the project un- derlying this lexicon as well as to the methods of its construction:
1. Each definition is self-contained and may be read alone, meaning that the commentary on any word may reiterate certain references and quo- tations that illuminate and explain it without fear of redundancy.
2. Generally, each entry will also refer to several other entries (indicated in italics in the text) that you might want to or should consult next. These are connections made by the author of this lexicon and that aided in the development of this text, concerning which a few more pointers are needed.
First note: these references to other entries (often placed between parenthe- ses) are sometimes included in the very text of the definitions, at the moment when they meet with or brush up against other possible expositions. These references may also be at the beginning of each entry. Placed between paren- theses, they are arranged in rough order of increasing difficulty, opening onto a possible sequence and course. The paths that constitute this lexicon are thus manifold. Some of them are steeper, rockier, and more difficult (as well as more abstract) than others, but generally, they all attempt to communicate with one another (if you find otherwise, please notify the author), either di- rectly or by analogy and internal affinity (see these terms). If the air becomes too thin for those who take these paths, they can beat an immediate retreat and take an easier one.
Second note: many of the terms that mark these paths (approximately a quarter) are not accompanied by definitions. In anticipation of potential expo- sitions that are present in a more or less latent fashion within other definitions and expositions or linked to them, these usually just point the way. This leaves it to the reader to flesh these terms out, to make a different choice about the importance to be granted to them, to privilege those that best suit them, to develop for themselves the possibilities that they contain, and to give them definitions that would then justify new bifurcations, new sequences.
A third note, therefore: each reader can thus imagine many other passages that are not yet opened. One may also become irritated with the insistent character of these signposts and refuse to follow the directions they propose or be astonished by the absence of a great number of entries that seem possible or
22 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
essential. One is free to clear one’s own path through this selection of libertar- ian discourse. One can also build oneself another lexicon — a parallel lexicon — or one that explores other territories, that is capable of composing other possible worlds.
One last important note that follows from the previous: the peremptory or di- dactic tone adopted here — that of dictionaries and handbooks — is obviously a parody, one that is dictated by the grammar of the genre, as Nietzsche and Léo Ferré! would say, and intentionally so. Anarchism, because it has no Academy, qualifying exams, pope, high priests, or central committee, authorizes anyone to speak on its behalf. But the absolute subjectivism proposed within this lexi- con is in no way the justification a kind of relativism that refutes, for its part, the importance here attached to the concept of affirmation (see these terms). It is merely, so to speak, the internal and subjective condition of the definition of anarchy suggested by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this “stranger unity that can only characterize the multiple.””
1 Translator’s note: Léo Ferré (1916-1993) was one of the most well-loved poets and singers of the French chanson tradition, as well as a lifelong anarchist militant. 2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 158 (trans.: modifications my own).
A priori/a posteriori [amont/aval] (see eternal return, tradition, chaos, entele-
chy, past).
Action (practice) (see tools/weapons, movement, and symbols/signs). “What can we expect from man? — Only one thing: acts.” “Reflection, and consequently the idea, arises in man from action, not action from reflection.”! “The condi- tion par excellence of life, health, and force in organized beings is action. It is through action that they develop their faculties, that they increase their energy, and that they attain the fullness of their destiny.”* These remarks by Proudhon go to the heart of the libertarian project.’ Anarchism refuses idealism and its primacy of theory (“think before you act!”), which entrusts to scientists, ex- perts, words, and reasoning the prerogative of dictating what must be done, thought, and desired, so as to continually rein in our acts and desires, all the better to subject them to the order of signs, ranks, and hierarchies. The liber- tarian conception of action thus refers to two principal standpoints:
¢ A standpoint that could be described as epistemological or critical, con- sisting in a refusal to separate things and signs, forces and significations, acts and reasons to act, laws or precepts and their applications. This standpoint diagnoses this separation as one of the principal sources of domination: the capacity of certain forces to separate others from what
1 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l'Eglise, vol. 3 (Paris: Riviére, 1930), 71-72. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, La Guerre et la paix (Paris: Riviére, 1927), 53.
3 “In nature, all is movement and action: to be means nothing more than to do” (Mikhail Bakunin, “Considérations philosophiques sur le fantéme divin, sur le monde réel et sur Phomme,” in Cwvres, vol. 3 [Paris: Stock, 1908], 384).
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24 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
they are capable of by binding them in the snares of language, law, and principles or in the trap of lying words that pretend to stand in for the things of which they speak (see representation and State).
¢ A standpoint that pertains to the very nature of the libertarian project. As the most common philosophical definition of this word indicates, “action is the operation of a being regarded as the product of this being itself and not of a cause external to it.”' In this sense, action is the expres- sion of a project based on the autonomy of beings, on the refusal of any being’s submission to or dependence on another. It is also in this first sense that libertarian thought can be compared to Nietzsche’s.* Because it is an affirmation of beings in what constitutes them as free beings sole- ly subject to their own self-determination, action is not only opposed to discourse and signs, it is also opposed to reaction (see this term), to that passive form of action in which one is content to react to the action of others (see ressentiment and guilt). And it is in this sense — as the decisive criterion of all that makes us act (actions and reactions, affirmations and negations, activity and passivity) — that libertarian action poses the question of emancipation and posits its necessary conditions.
Active minorities (see core, midst of things, direct action, and intimate). A concept from revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism. Not to be confused with the authoritarian concept of the “vanguard” specific to the Marxist parties (in their Leninist or Trotskyite versions), which claim to be able to see farther, higher, deeper, and more from the outside than the great majority of the ex- ploited — thanks to their possession of theory — and therefore to have the right to steer the exploited on their path to emancipation (see alienation). The active minorities of revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism think and perceive themselves as the particular expression of a possibility (see this term) within a favorable and potentially revolutionary milieu, but one that is varied in its forms of expression, organization, and struggle and that may always be
1 André Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, 15" ed., vol. 1 (Paris: PUF, 1985), 19-20.
2 The entirety of this brief lexicon hopes to show in a sufficiently convincing way, in spite of the many and radical differences, a profound affinity between Nietzsche and the principal theorists of anarchism. If one must justify this link by a reference that is at once extrinsic and intimate (see this term), see the memoir published in 1906 in which Franz Overbeck, one of Nietzsche's few close friends, not only lengthily demonstrates, in the most explicit manner, the connections that may exist between Nietzsche and Stirner (whom the former read), but also “the greatest possible affinity” between Nietzsche and Proudhon. Cf. Franz Overbeck, Souvenirs sur Nietasche, trans. Jeanne Champeaux (Paris: Editions Allia, 1999), 59-65.
A 25
composed differently, according to other possibilities (corporatist, reformist, nationalist, reactionary, etc.). While initially appearing on the terrain of ac- tion (see this term), active minorities present themselves neither as an external model nor as agents of a theoretical knowledge that would authorize them to direct or to lecture to others. While selecting from within their lived experi- ence the forms of and reasons for struggle perceived by them as the most radi- cal or revolutionary, active minorities attempt to act by contagion or imitation, to involve others by expressing within their own practices a relation to the world and others that is potentially present in an infinity of other situations and may be repeated with greater power. In this sense, according to the model of crystallization proposed by Simondon, active minorities, in the libertarian sense of this concept, can only appear in a “pre-revolutionary” context, in “a state of supersaturation...in which an event is really ready to occur,” an event able “to traverse, animate, and structure a varied domain, increasingly varied and heterogeneous domains,” “to propagate” throughout them.’
Affinity (affinity groups, elective affinity) (see trust, commons, association, repug- nance, repulsion, and analogy). A concept from ancient chemistry recovered in modern times by Goethe and Max Weber to theorize human relations, which plays an essential role in the representations and practices of the libertarian movement. “We group ourselves only by affinity!” exclaims Charles d’Avray in his song “Le Triomphe d’anarchie.” Contrary to what one might believe, libertarian affinity is not of an ideological nature — except insofar as such-and- such a shared program or platform implies more profound “affinities” between those who subscribe to it. In love as in politics (such as libertarians conceive of it), affinities between militants on this or that position or plane of reality (community life, association for a technical task, or, historically, the small ac- tivist groups of the FAI’ in the working-class districts of Barcelona, etc.), in- volve temperaments, various forms of sensibility, various qualities of character, and the various ways in which these can be composed with others. We always change according to the beings, the situations, and the things that we associate ourselves with for some length of time (a car, a companion, an automatic rifle, or a suburban house, for example). Each association selects in us and in others particular qualities and predispositions, which are sometimes unsuspected and often surprising. This is why nobody is capable of knowing or envisaging what he or she can do, for good as well as for bad. Association is the art of bringing about good encounters and avoiding bad ones, thereby mobilizing in one- self and from oneself new, untapped resources that are affirmative rather than negative, charged with life rather than death. This presupposes a great deal of
1 Gilbert Simondon, LYndividuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 53, 54, 63. 2 The Iberian Anarchist Federation.
26 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
finesse, flair, and practical sense, which circumstances and the crudity of the schemas and roles imposed by the current order generally make very difficult. An example of affinities which were fruitful in their contents and their effects: the “intimate circles” in which Bakunin never ceased to participate. A much more questionable example of affinities (both on the theoretical and practical level): the Nechayev-Bakunin association or the militarization of the militias in Spain in 1937.
Affirmation (see emancipation).
Alienation (see lack, desire, and appetite). Separated from that which they are capable of by an oppressive and damaging external order, unable to discover in themselves the infinite resources that they contain, collective forces are led to try in vain to to fill the /ack (see these terms) caused by this distortion, to desperately seek a remedy for their powerlessness in the exteriority of other beings (see exterior/interior). Whether this identification with the other takes the form of love or hate, whether it takes place through the abject submission of the masses (see this term) to bosses and powerful persons or through the en- vious and hateful struggle that these figures inspire, or through the illusions of distance provided by negation and the dialectic, the collective being, separated from its own capacities, is dispossessed of itself. And it is in this sense that it can be said that one is alienated: one is entirely dependent on the other — friend or enemy — and exists only through the other. This is the case not only in one’s acts (see master/slave) or the image that one has of oneself, but in the very heart of one’s subjectivity (see this term). Alienation thus justifies two types of oppression, which are symmetrical even as they pretend to be opposed to one another: 1) the oppression of existing dominations, which can feed on the forces that they have captured and that identify with them; 2) the oppression of future dominatory orders fed by the impotence of those same forces that they claim to liberate, to which they deny any autonomy since, as alienated forces, they are said to depend entirely on a domination and a liberation ex- ternal to their being, external to what they are capable of doing by themselves. Marxists or Christians, revolutionaries or humanitarians, the servants of the people (see this term) — the spokespersons and defenders of the “poor” and the “oppressed” — are indeed (in the words of Proudhon concerning Marx) the “tapeworms” of emancipation (see classification).'
1 Translator’s note: in Proudhon’s diary entry for Sept. 23, 1847, he responds angrily to Marx’s publication of The Poverty of Philosophy, a book attacking Proudhon’s own Philosophy of Poverty: “Marx is the tapeworm of socialism” (Carnets, vol. 2, ed. Pierre Haubtmann [Paris: Riviére, 1974], 200).
A 27
Alliance (see friends of our friends and association). The concept of alliance plays a great part in the history of the libertarian movement, from Bakunin’s International Alliance of Socialist Democracy to the active minorities of anarcho-syndicalism. It is, then, synonymous with the intimate circles (which are very often secret) founded on affinity (see this term). In this very partic- ular sense, this concept radically escapes the meaning generally given to the word “alliance” when it is used to indicate political, economic, or matrimonial agreements between States, parties, families, or enterprises (see friends of our friends). In this common sense of the word, for libertarian thought, “alliance” is opposed to association. If association allows the associated beings — through composition and affinity (see these terms) — to liberate the internal forces and possibilities that each of them contains, thus displaying and affirming the pow- er of that which exists, an “alliance” — whether political, military, or economic — is always a mere external addition of forces (families, parties, clans, nations, businesses), a utilitarian grouping according to the (equally external) exigen- cies or necessities of fear, domination, or profit.
Altruism (see implication).
Analogy (homology) (see also affinity and in the midst of things). A concept that Proudhon uses to theorize the common character of Capital, State, and Church: “Capital, the analogue of which, in the political order, is Government, has as a synonym, in the order of religion, Catholicism... What Capital does to labor and the State to freedom, the Church inflicts, in its turn, on intelligence.”’ Analogy is an important concept for understanding the logic and the nature of libertarian emancipation. In anarchism, the revolution is not primarily the product of the contradictions of the existing order or system, the dialectical product of this system, or its negation (see power of the outside). It is born from the outside of the currently dominant system, from what this system does not manage to enclose, from the infinity of possibilities that this system ignores, plunders, suppresses, and denies, the potential forces that always haunt this system with the fact that it is merely one possibility among an infinity of other possibilities (see anarchy).’ The libertarian movement is not born from the
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Confession d'un révolutionnaire (Paris: Riviere, 1929), 282.
2 On this relation between the inside and outside of systems, cf. the distinction suggested by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven F. Rendall [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011], 35-36), but also the way in which, as Alain Caillé explains, Claude Lefort refuses to consider “society as a flat and homogeneous space totally covered by the various systems without any remainder” (Alain Caillé, “Claude Lefort, les sciences sociales et la philosophie politique,” in La démocratie a Vceuvre. Autour de Claude
Lefort, eds. Claude Habib et Claude Mouchard (Paris: Editions Esprit, 1993], 63-64). (On
28 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
order that it refuses, even if this order is contradictory, but from the anarchic profusion of forces and possibilities that are alien to this order or from those that this system dominates and damages. To compose another arrangement from this profusion of forces, to select from among all the possible forces those that permit the free development of the others, to order or seriate these forces in such a way that none of them prevents the others from doing all that they are capable of: such is the nature and the ambition of the libertarian project. If affinity defines the experimental and subjective way in which libertarian forces are linked to one another, analogy helps us to think the logic that would be at once common to all of these forces and proper to each of them and that makes it possible to verify — by intuition and theoretical clarification — the validity of the reasons for uniting and the relevance of the affinity that guides this association. Affinity can always be established on false pretenses, and it often is, stemming from bad judgments or bad reasons (see common notions): for example, uniting against a common adversary, according to the principle (absurd from the libertarian point of view) that the enemies of our enemies are inevitably our friends. Analogy makes it possible to think the selection of the forces capable of embodying the libertarian movement. Because it is al- ways internal to these forces, however, it presupposes a great deal of finesse and practical sense. From a libertarian point of view, the forces closest to one another within the current order — those most alike in outward form or iden- tity — are not always the ones best joined together. On the contrary, in certain situations, it is sometimes most desirable and pregnant with emancipation for this libertarian association — based on a desire for and a logic of freedom and autonomy — to be with the most dissimilar and distant forces from the point of view of identity and appearances. ‘This is expressed, in certain circumstances, by the slogan “The police are with us!” and historically demonstrated by the union of the anarcho-syndicalists of Barcelona with the assault guards during the insurrectionary days of July 1936. It is in this sense that Proudhonian analogy makes it possible to understand, with Spinoza, how a plow horse and a racehorse, on a certain plane of reality (see this term), have less in common than a plow horse and a cow.'
Anarchism. The designation — in the classificational and identitarian register of the categories of the dominant order (Christianity, Marxism, liberalism, syndi- calism, feminism, etc.) — of the practices, ideas, movements, and organizations that identify themselves with anarchy. Anarchism thus has two faces:
this point, see Jacques Dewitte, “La mise en abyme du social: Sur la pensée politique de Claude Lefort,” Critique 635 [Apr. 2000]: 346-66.)
1 See Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 124.
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¢ Asa freely available title, commensurate with that which it seeks to ex- press, it is at the service of all those who recognize in it the best means of designating what they feel, what they experience, and what they desire. In this sense, because it applies to everything, anarchism has the pre- cious possibility of speaking of a project that is common to a multitude of situations, to an infinity of manners of understanding, perceiving, and acting. It is the best means of expressing that “stranger unity” of which Deleuze speaks “that can only characterize the multiple” (see mu/- tiplicity and localism).'
¢ Asa classificational category in the register of the dominant order, com- parable to many others and in competition with them, anarchism always risks negating the anarchy of which it is the theoretical and organization- al expression. Like its religious and political rivals, anarchism thus tends to give birth to institutions locked up inside their own identities — each possessing an interior and an exterior — with their rituals of induction, their dogmas, their police and priests, their exclusions, their schisms, their anathemas and excommunications. Anarchism transforms itself from the direct and immediate expression of multiple and different forces into an overarching entity, a symbolic power (Proudhon) analogous, in its own way, to all the great dominations (Church, Capital, State) that it claims to combat. In this manner, its original multiplicity tends to be transformed into a juxtaposition of sects or individuals struggling with one another because all of them aspire to command the totality of an overall project, which is reduced to a logo, a flag, or a business enterprise (see ideomania).
Anarchism of the right (see also neoliberals). An ill-tempered and acrimonious mode of being that, in being drawn to select reactive (see this term), often ma- cho and paranoid forces, continually risks giving rise to beings with bad diges- tion, incapable of revolt, pervaded by ressentiment, the nihilism of which refuses any affirmation. Contrary to what it is often thought to be (and regardless of disputes over whether it deserves the name of “anarchism”), right wing anar- chism (see this term) is not altogether foreign to certain currents and aspects of what is called the anarchism “of the left,” as shown by the most immediate militant behaviors, as well as, for example, the long and blind tolerance that certain currents of the libertarian movement expressed toward the anti-semite and man of ressentiment who was Paul Rassinier.* Examples of famous anar- chists of the right: the writers Céline and (at the end of his life) Léo Malet.
1 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 158 (trans.: modifications my own).
2 On this point, cf: Nadine Fresco, Fabrication d'un antisémite (Paris: Seuil, 1999).
30 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
Anarchist chemistry (see propaganda by the deed, passage to the act, focal point). The attentats and bombings of the years 1880-1890 gave anarchist action a lasting reputation as the violence of a desperate minority. Moreover, it is not certain that these attentats were not partly the product of two tendencies that are unacceptable from a libertarian point of view: 1) the utilitarian and me- chanical illusion that one can change the world order by attacking those who believe themselves to be its foundations or keystones, i.e., kings and heads of State; 2) ressentiment (see this term), in this case the ressentiment of the poor and weak against the rich and powerful, a ressentiment that, as a substitute for revolt (see this term), would blossom into the disgusting crimes of the so-called “Bonnot Gang” (see cynicism). This negative image of the attentats of the end of the 19 century must not, however, obscure their importance in relation to libertarian thought, particularly with regard to the manner in which the anarchist movement appropriates science and its technical applications. It is significant that it was a large international assembly of delegates issuing from the First International (the Congress of London, July 1881) — who had adopt- ed the modes of action previously theorized by the principal leaders of the an- archist movement (Kropotkin, Reclus, Malatesta, etc.) and who believed “that the era of a general revolution is not far off’ — were the ones who decided to study the technology and chemistry of bomb-making. Largely negative in their effects (causing the death of their authors and of their victims), the “explosive” character of the anarchist bombs would nevertheless symbolically convey the meaning of libertarian action and a libertarian manner of conceiving the world for half a century onwards. Indeed, instantaneous in its effect, charged with expressing all the aspirations of an irrevocable and final act, all the fears and hopes of an individual will (see this term) confronted with life and death, the anarchist bomb is directly charged (in its very materiality) with the idea of the “explosion” of the world order, of the radical recomposition of the elements that compose it. Foreign to modern conceptions of science and politics, anar- chist chemistry thus takes on meaning within the double register of metaphor and practical action. As both symbolic and real, it is charged with an infinite signification in which the local (see /ocalism), the individual, and the directly experienced furnish the visible referent for the revolutionary idea and desire, in which Science and Society, Technology and Social Transformation, Explosion and Revolution come to live together for a little while in the test tube of the dynamiter, in the manner of the /iwjia Daoists.' Like the “tradecraft” of the
1 The “dynamiters of the old world” (or “demolishers”) manufacture their own explosive products, and the majority of the anarchist journals of the time have a technical and scien- tific section devoted to this activity. On this point, see Jean Grave, Quarante ans de propa- gande anarchiste (Paris: Flammarion, 1973), 166 et passim, and Daniel Colson, “La science anarchiste,” Réfractions 1 (Winter 1997): 89-118.
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First International and the future syndicalism of direct action, anarchist chem- istry disregards the boundary between culture and nature, between ideal liberty and material necessity (see these terms). In alchemical fashion, it attempts to unite that which has been separated: humanity and nature, idea and matter, the purely utilitarian technical operation and the mystical concern with a rad- ical transformation of the world. Like alchemy, it attempts to compress space and time into a single, immediate act: space, in the minuscule operation of a mixture of nitroglycerin and fulminate of mercury capable, through their “propagation,” of transforming the order of the world and society from bot- tom to top; time, in the messianic certainty that the moment of the gesture corresponds to that of history, that the Revolution is near, that the hour of the Great Evening (see this term) has arrived.
Anarcho-syndicalism (see direct action, active minorities, movement, Great Evening, and general strike).
Anarchy (see power of the outside). The founding notion of the libertarian move- ment, which has lost its provocative, subversive, and theoretical sense with the passage of time, being little by little transformed into “anarchism,” a body of ideas and organizations often contrary to what the term “anarchy” originally meant in the writings of its first inventors: Déjacque, Coeurderoy, Proudhon, Bakunin, etc. Contrary to what is often believed, anarchy is not reducible to a utopian political model, deferred to the end of time: the absence of govern- ment. As is prefigured by its most pejorative common meaning and as is man- ifest in its erudite origin (the Greek meaning of the word an-arche), anarchy is first of all the refusal of any first principle, of any first cause, of any primary idea, any dependence of beings with respect to a single origin (which always ends up being identified with God).' Anarchy, as origin, goal, and means (see entelechy), is the affirmation of the multiple, the unlimited diversity of be- ings and their capacity to compose a world without hierarchy, domination, or forms of dependence other than the free association of radically free and au- tonomous forces (see multiplicity). In this sense, the concept of anarchy refers to two states of being, one prior and one posterior to what a being is capable of. First of all, the word anarchy refers to an a priori condition of things, to the blind chaos of forces and powers randomly encountering one another (see common notions and collective reason). Secondly, it refers to an a posteriori con- dition (if this distinction is still meaningful), in which anarchy is to be thought as the voluntary construction of new subjectivities, as the capacity of beings to
1 “The first cause has never existed, could never have existed. The first cause is a cause that itself has no cause or that is the cause of itself. It is the Absolute creating the Universe, pure spirit
creating matter, a nonsense” (Bakunin, “Considérations philosophiques,” Guures, 3:349).
32 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
express the power that they contain. This latter condition is what Proudhon will attempt to think, some time after the events of 1848, through the term positive anarchy, in the form of autonomous and contradictory or antithetical forces that struggle only to be recognized by one another and to associate with one another, rather than to resolve the difference that opposes them. These are an anarchic excess of forces and affirmations that — in seeking to establish association between mutually contradictory terms, to polarize one another in the manner of the two poles of an electric battery’ — settle, so to speak, for “seriating” their profusion, trying to discover and to construct what Bakunin
called the order of life. Anguish (see power of the outside).
Anti-authoritarian/anti-power. Anarchism is not first and foremost a political movement whose (very relative) originality would consist of opposing the State (along with the ultra-liberals; see neoliberals) or in denouncing “Power” as a mysterious essence incarnated in the State, the Law, or the domination of one class over another. Libertarian struggle operates from the interior (see this term) of the totality of relationships constitutive of that which exists, as dis- parate and minuscule as they may be. The qualifier “anti-authoritarian” serves to indicate the breadth of the anarchist struggle and project. This is why the libertarian movement, through its constant practice, can (in part) endorse the manner in which Michel Foucault renders an account of power, which we re- iterate here nearly word for word:
¢ Power is not primarily identified with the sovereignty of the State, with Law, with the principle or total unity of a domination.
¢ “Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations...
¢ “Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relation- ships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are the im- mediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations.”
¢ “Power comes from below.” It does not depend on an all-encompassing binary opposition between dominators and dominated, a duality that is
1 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Selected Writings of PJ. Proudhon, ed. Stewart Edwards, trans. Elizabeth Fraser, (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), 229.
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echoed from top to bottom, down to the depths of the social body (see system and determinism). On the contrary, it is the multiple relations of force in working life, in family life, in immediate relations (see this term) that are the foundation of and condition for the large-scale relationships of domination and that, through their intensity, make possible the ef- fects of conformity, homogenization, serialization, and convergence of relations. ¢ “Power relations are both intentional and non-subjective...[T]hey are imbued through and through with calculation...But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject...[nor of] the caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state ap- paratus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions.” “The rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed..., tactics which, becoming connected to one another, attracting and propagating one another, but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere, end by forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strat- egies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose ‘inventors’ or deci- sionmakers are often without hypocrisy.””
Anti-something (see pro-something). Anti-capitalism, anti-clericalism, anti-stat- ism, anti-militarism, anti-colonialism, anti-nuclear, anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, anti-anti-semitism, anti-productivism, anti-authoritari- anism, anti-sexism, anti-speciesism, anti-sizeism, anti-anti-dwarfism, an- ti-meatism, etc. Despite what this long (and not exhaustive) list might lead one to believe, anarchism is neither an ideological program nor a catalog of demands, generally negative, that would become elaborated over time into new rubrics and new moral and behavioral prohibitions. Anarchism is an affir- mative force that breaks the chains of domination through revolt only in order to better affirm, in the very movement of rupture, another possibility, another composition of the world (see these terms).
1 In this sense, libertarian thought radically dissociates itself from the analyses of certain cur- rents of the far left or those close to Situationism, analyses very often founded on the theme of conspiracies and hidden forces manipulating reality from the shadows.
2 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1990), 94 et passim.
34 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
Anti-speciesism (anti-speciesists) (see anti-something, suffering, utilitarianism, and rendering of accounts). In its history as a milieu (see this term), anarchism has always been linked to movements of particular ideas (naturism, vegetari- anism, pacifism, etc.) that sometimes develop into ideomanias (see this term and integral pacifism). This is the case with anti-speciesism, to give a more recent example. The anti-speciesist position, analogous to anti-racism or an- ti-sexism, can be formulated as follows: “Species is not an ethically relevant category, no more than gender or race. Anti-speciesists thus fight against speciesism, i.e., discrimination based on species.”! In its recognition of an- imal life, its refusal of the radical distinction between mankind and other species, its denunciation of a standardized and technologized violence and cruelty behind the scenes of our world, anti-speciesism echoes many aspects of libertarian thought. However, it also differs from libertarian thought in three important ways:
1. Anti-speciesism speaks of animal “liberation,” of “struggles” and a movement for animal liberation, a vocabulary and a conception of the action of beings common to a great number of other emancipatory movements. It is here that anti-speciesism is apparently, on the plane of words, nearest to the libertarian movement’s modes of expression while, at the same time, moving further away from them for a reason that could be formulated as follows: anarchism calls for emancipation, supports struggles for emancipation — all the struggles for emancipa- tion, as different as they may be — but on one condition: that this emancipation is the work of the interested parties themselves, of the forces that have need of liberation, through direct action, apart from any representative, any representation (see this term) claiming to speak in the name of others, to act for others, in the interest of others. How can animals emancipate themselves, liberate themselves? Such is the first problem that leads the anti-speciesists to differentiate themselves from the libertarian project. Like it or not, the anti-speciesists cannot help situating themselves as the animals’ “spokespersons” or “represen- tatives,” “representing” the animal cause and, at the same time, benefit- ing from this representation (see this term). Animals are neither slaves, nor women, nor proletarians, nor undocumented immigrants [sans-pa- piers], nor oppressed minorities. What distinguishes them is not a tran- scendent difference in nature. From the anarchist point of view, it is a practical, immediate, concrete, and singular difference. Minorities, women, the unemployed, workers, and sans-papiers can fight and
1 Yves Bonnardel and David Olivier, “Antispécisme: pour une solidarité sans frontiére,” La
Griffe no. 10 (1998).
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organize themselves directly, constituting collective beings and acting without intermediaries and representatives (see direct action). They can develop their own points of view by themselves, confronting the points of view of other forces. Animals cannot. They can do other things, an infinity that opens up a great number of possibilities in the relations that we maintain with them, as well as with all that exists. But they cannot struggle in the manner of women, the young, workers, or any other minority. This permits the anti-speciesists to reduce the existence of animals to human realities, to speak on their behalf, to translate what the animals are supposed to want, to subject them to interests and considerations that they cannot themselves affirm, and thus to profit from their silence, while forbidding themselves to acknowledge what this silence makes possible for human beings as well as for oth- er animals.’
2. ‘The second divergence follows partially from the first. Since the ani- mals do not speak and anti-speciesism is a movement of human beings alone, the anti-speciesists could be content to speak for themselves, to say why the animal cause is so important for them, to unfold the becoming-animal that they themselves contain. They could say what they experience in their relationships with animals, how they experi- ence it, and what this experience implies.* But anti-speciesism, as an ideological current, is not satisfied with this subjective standpoint, the only one that could, from a libertarian point of view, aspire to the emancipatory recomposition of that which exists, opening hu- man beings up to the totality of that which exists and thus to the other animal species. Faithful to the “human, all too human” interest that they take in defending animals, the anti-speciesists do not re- nounce the possibility of working out a general point of view that would give animals a human voice, in which the animals would have rights, a status recognized — under the same title as that of humans — as one of equality (see this term). But because this general point of view cannot be produced from the practical, immediate, and di- rect confrontation of all the interested parties — and, more precisely still, those most interested among the interested parties, the animals themselves (see common notions and collective reason) — the anti-spe- ciesists are obliged to appeal to a third party, a third point of view, a universal (see this term), objective, and transcendent point of view: a sort of Judge of the Peace, ethics committee, or divinity, as external
1 On this point, see Elisabeth de Fontenay, Le Silence des bétes: La philosophie a lépreuve de Vanimalité (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 2 In this regard, however, see David Olivier, “Le gotit et le meurtre,” La Griffe no. 13 (1999).
36
A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
to human subjectivities as it is to animal subjectivities but capable of saying or measuring what these subjectivities feel in an objective way and, according to this external measurement, pronouncing the equality of their rights (see law/rights). This third party, this Justice of the Peace or divinity, is utilitarianism (see this term), which assumes this role under the threefold aspect of a traditional morality (I must take account of the suffering of others, a suffering that I do not expe- rience), an objective science (I must be able to determine objective- ly who suffers and with what intensity), and a casuistry or political economy of morals (I must always be able to calculate with precision the best allocation of my acts and my resources within the framework of a general market of happiness and suffering).
The third and final great divergence between anarchism and an- ti-speciesism, which makes it possible to understand the first two: in its practical dimension, in its concern for animals, for their lives and points of view on the world, anti-speciesism may seem to call into question and destabilize what is commonly called “humanism,” this mixture of values and rights inherited from Christianity which — from property to the soul or spirit, to the State and morality — serves as a mask and a foundation for all sorts of relations of domi- nation and exploitation. But anti-speciesism goes at once too far and not far enough in its critique of humanism — too far on the surface, not far enough in depth. By highlighting the innocent, indifferent, and supposedly natural cruelty of the relations that bind human be- ings to animals, anti-speciesism indeed opens up the possibility of thinking differently about our world and thus of inventing radically new relations. But in order to do that, anti-speciesism would have to renounce the magical boundaries of humanism, its hegemonic and facile representations. It would have to renounce the tradition- al representations that make human beings separate, self-contained subjects equipped with powers, interests, and rights, concerned only to determine what they do or do not have the right to appropriate from the world that surrounds them, to determine who deserves the status of “subject,” who is worthy of “interest” (in both senses of this expression). Anti-speciesism does not renounce humanism but is content to extend it to some nonhumans, hence the outrage it inev- itably provokes and hence the nonsense of the discussions provoked by this outrage. The divine and sacred prerogatives of the Western white male having been extended to men of color, then to wom- en and children, the anti-speciesists now propose to extend them to certain animals, under the threefold patronage of law, morality, and science. Anti-speciesism does not destroy the limits and schemas of
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thought that, for anarchism, are at the foundation of relations of domination and exploitation. It is content to renew them by apply- ing them to a certain number of other living species. How do we put an end to the oppressive and absurd prerogatives of humanism? Such is the question that anarchism aspires to answer on the very terrain of the relations that we maintain with other living species. Such is the question that anti-speciesism does not answer.
Apeiron (see power of the outside). A Greek concept, simultaneously meaning ignorance and infinity. Used by Anaximander to think the indefinite and un- specified foundation from which the infinity of beings is perpetually born, the concept of apeiron — imported into modern thought by Gilbert Simondon in particular — is very close to the concept of anarchy and contributes to the thought of anarchy, as well.'
Appetites (see desire, force, repugnance, repulsion, and affinity). A concept used by Gabriel Tarde. It is synonymous with desire, but also indicates how other collective forces can be included in the will of each being (see monad and lack). If the encounters or the avoidances among beings are never subject to the mere chance of the coldly mechanical and extrinsic conceptions of quantum physicists (see common notions), it is precisely because each collective force existing at a given moment is marked, via its particular arrangement, not by the Jack of the other (see this term), but on the contrary, by the desire to encounter these beings — a desire corresponding to the possibilities that each one, from a certain point of view, contains with superabundance. This is why anarchism can endorse the formula of René Thom: “The famished predator is its own prey.”
Application (see utilitarianism). Because, in its eyes, the meaning, value, and determination of things are always internal to the beings, the situations, and the events themselves, anarchism refuses any notion of “application,” this partic- ular subjection of acts and practices to a first principle, an extrinsic judge or measure, in a relation in which it is always precisely a question of “applying oneself” to a task, answering to a taskmaster, doing what /e asks you to do as he requires (see rendering of accounts).
1 Simondon, LYndividuation psychique et collective. 2 René Thom, “Morphologie et individuation,” in Gilbert Simondon: Une Pensée de lindivid- uation et de la technique, ed. Gilles Chatelet (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 101.
38 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
Arrangement (collective arrangement) (see collective beings).' A Deleuzian term. This word allows us to avoid the biologizing presuppositions of the concept of organization. Arrangement is the mode of composition of a collective being that determines the quality of its desire and its degree of power and autonomy. From this point of view, any collective being or collective force is an arrangement.
Association/disassociation (see collective). As the analyses of Simondon and Proudhon allow us to demonstrate, associations and the collective force that corresponds to them are never merely the sum of the individuals who associate such as they exist at the time of this association. They always function on the basis of what is not yet individuated within these individuals (see individua- tion), on the basis of the more-than-themselves or the indeterminate that they contain and that justifies their wi// to join others, to create a new being, and thus to exceed their own limits as individuals such as they exist at a given mo- ment. In this sense, because it mobilizes forces that are not yet individuated, one never knows what a new being is capable of — for good or for bad. Any association requires many experiments and many past experiences of associa- tion, but also a certain intuitive finesse, an attentiveness to those new forces and potentialities that each association mobilizes within ourselves.
From a libertarian or emancipatory point of view, three kinds of forms or methods of association and disassociation between collective forces (see this term) can be considered, all of which are marked by positivity, by occupying the register of affirmation.
1. A force can avoid other forces, avoid bad encounters, encounters that cause sadness and thus a diminution of its power. Because it has
1 Translator’s note: the French word agencement, as used (very frequently) in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is generally translated as “assemblage.” However, as Jasbir Puar notes, this is an “awkward” rendering, bordering on mistranslation, because it sug- gests something more solid or static than agencement requires (Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess’: Intersectionality, Assemblage, and Affective Politics,” EZPCP: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Jan. 2011, http://eipcp.net/transver- sal/0811/puar/en; see also John Phillips, “Agencement/Assemblage,” Theory, Culture & Society, 23, nos. 2-3 [2006]: 108-109). In common usage, agencement may refer to nothing more permanent than the configuration of furniture in one’s living room or the placement of notes in a song (J. Macgregor Wise, “Assemblage,” in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. Charles J. Stivale [Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005], 77, 79). It seems to me that as used by Deleuze and Guattari and particularly as used by Colson, the term might be better rendered as “arrangement” in order to connote the open-endedness of a process (see also Graham Livesey, “Assemblage,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, rev. ed., ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005], 18-19).
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everything in itself (see monad, autonomy, and potential), a force can always choose — briefly or for a long time — the greatest solitude, rely- ing only on itself, on the possibilities that it contains, while waiting for better times, other encounters, other situations, other events (the only things that can actualize these possibilities), in a kind of hibernation or, more colorfully, like a “spy” in deep cover or a “virus” that has gone “dormant.” The real thus contains an infinity of forces that have withdrawn into themselves, into their own capacities, limiting external relationships to a minimum or to specific planes of reality (see this term) ~ whether voluntarily or out of necessity — but that are pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, both for good and for bad (see these terms). And this is what permits Spinoza to say that nobody knows what a body is capable of, what each force is capable of, what each of us is capable of within a given situation or arrangement (see body).
2. A force can also be entangled in relations of domination and depen- dence and choose to liberate itself through revolt (see this term) from the bonds that link it to other forces, bonds it perceives as relations of oppression (see direct action). Any revolt (a strike, an insurrection, a teenager running away, or the falsely negative formula of Melville's Bartleby: “I would prefer not to”) is, as Michelle Perrot puts it, a “beau- tiful escape,”” a rent in time and in the fabric of things (see stoppage), a moment when indeed everything becomes possible.
3. Always fleeting, this emancipatory rift or fissure can thus create the conditions for an emergence of new forces and a recomposition of the relationship between forces, a third method of association and disas- sociation. Liberated from the bonds of subjection, from the limits im- posed on them by an order that is extrinsic to what they contain, the forces in revolt can freely join other forces and, thanks to this associ- ation, go to the limits of their capacity — beyond the limits heretofore imposed on them — by giving rise to more powerful forces through this association, by composing through this association another world entirely devoted to affirmation, to power, and thus to freedom (see these words, but also balancing of forces).
Autonomy (see omos, nomad, scientific laws, and monad). A term recurring within libertarian and anti-authoritarian movements (from “the autonomy of syndicalism” to the “Autonomists” of the ’70s). Contrary to its pseudo-erudite
1 Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, Scholium to Proposition 2, in Spinoza: Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Inc., 2002), 280-82.
2 Michelle Perrot, Workers on Strike: France 1871-1890 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
40 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
definition, autonomy does not indicate the capacity of a being to give itself its own laws, to subject what constitutes it as a being to legal forms of which it can imagine itself to be the master. In the common sense of the word (see /aw/ rights), all law is external and forms part of the relations of domination, in- cluding those “laws” that are called “natural” — as Gabriel Tarde demonstrates — in Leibniz’s vocabulary, when he offers “to explain natural laws...by the tri- umph of certain monads [see this term] who desired these laws,...imposed these forms, subjected to their yoke and levelled with their scythe a people of monads thus subjugated and made uniform, although born free and original, all as eager as their conquerors to dominate and assimilate the universe.”! In libertarian thought, all law is singular, specific to the nature of each being — a conception that Bakunin formulates as follows: “Each thing contains its own law, i.e., its particular mode of development, existence, and action, within itself [emphasis in original]” (see entelechy).’ It is in this sense that anarchist au- tonomy refers to the forces constitutive of beings, to their capacity to develop in themselves the totality of the resources that they need in order to 1) affirm their existence and 2) associate with others and thus to constitute an ever more
powerful force of life.
Avant-garde (see active minorities).
1 Gabriel Tarde, Monadology and Sociology, ed. and trans. Theo Lorenc (Melbourne: re.press, 2012), 27. 2 Bakunin, “Considérations philosophiques,” Cuvres, 3:352-354.
Balance. A Proudhonian term borrowed from the accountancy of his time. See
balancing of forces.
Balancing of forces (see struggle, autonomy, limits, dialectic, hierarchy, and ten- sion). A Proudhonian concept according to which “society must be thought of not as a hierarchical system of functions and faculties, but as a system of free forces balancing each other.”! In libertarian thought, every force seeks to go to the limits of its capacity, i.e., beyond the limits imposed on it by an external and dominatory order (see these terms). But each force also has its own limits, limits intrinsic to that which constitutes it. This is due, on the one hand, to the fact that it is always a singular force, different from all the other forces (see these terms), and on the other hand, paradoxically, due to the fact that each force, by virtue of what constitutes it, is always capable of more than what its singularity or its individuation (see these terms) initially allows it to do. Following Proudhon, who here appropriates Leibniz’s vocabulary, one could say that each force is a monad or a composite of monads, inwardly possessing all that exists. This possession is the basis of a force’s autonomy, its possibility of affirmation as a free force, sufficient unto itself, but only from a certain point of view and through a certain quality of power (see these terms) that constrains it and that it must exceed. In the vocabulary of Gilbert Simondon, one could say that, as a singular being, as an individual, the drama and uncertainty of any existing force are due to the fact that it is always capable of more than what it is: “The individual is nothing but itself, but it exists as superior to itself because it contains within itself a more complete reality not exhausted by the process of individuation, which remains new and potential, animated by potentials...
1 Proudhon, Selected Writings of PJ. Proudhon, 59. 4
42 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
the individual does not feel alone in itself, does not feel limited as individual to a reality that would be merely its own.”' From this double modality of the existence of forces — as absolute singularities, as inwardly possessing all the potentialities of that which exists — arise the three questions that form the foundation of the libertarian project: 1) the importance of the modalities of encounter between forces, the methods of association or disassociation (see these terms) that, at a given moment, bind or separate beings; 2) the autonomy of each force and thus the possibility for each to break from any association, in the name of the totality of that which exists; 3) the perpetual possibility for col- lective beings to attempt to create another mode of the composition of forces, the better to express all the power of the real.
It is within this conception of beings that it is possible to approach the Proudhonian concept of the balancing of forces.” Any force immediately gives rise to its contrary (see also fractiousness) as a resistance to the imperialism of its singularity, as an affirmation of the limits inherent to its point of view, as the other of that which it afirms. Many examples could be provided here. The affirmation of the necessary solidarity of forces within a larger power directly corresponds to the affirmation of the autonomy of these forces and the pos- sibility of their seceding from or revolting against the bonds that link them at a given moment and for the purposes of a given action (see hierarchy). The assertion (all too “assertive”) in a given situation of the exigencies of a par- ticular plane of reality (see this term) — whether economic, physical, military, romantic, administrative, etc. — directly corresponds to the different and thus immediately contrary (or opposed) affirmation of the more or less circumstan- tial or immediate exigencies of one or several other planes of reality.? Contrary to the Hegelianism that some attribute to Proudhon (in order to reproach him
1 Simondon, L’ndividuation psychique et collective, 194.
2 Perhaps it is here that Proudhon radically distinguishes himself from another possible Nietzsche, a Nietzsche who, according to Deleuze’s inverted and broadened formula, would no longer encounter Spinoza and Leibniz, would have no further possibilities of association with them. On a (debatable) interpretation of Nietzsche’s conception of force in terms of simple relations, thought apart from all subjectivity, apart from the constant imbalances, and especially apart from the constant struggles for domination, cf. Wolfgang Miiller-Lauter, Nietzsche, physiologie de la volonté de puissance, trans. Jeanne Champeaux (Paris: Editions Allia, 1998), and Pierre Montebello, Nietzsche, la volonté de puissance (Paris: PUB 2001).
3 If one has once participated in a collective enterprise, even a short-lived one, one knows from experience this ceaseless struggle between the contradictory needs that arise in any col- lective work, that it is always a question of evaluating, seriating, and prioritizing them, and that the attempts of sociology to relate them to a limited number of regimes of justification
or determination are in vain.
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for not having understood it), in no way do these contradictions arise from a dialectic: first of all because of the anarchy of their manifestation, but also be- cause they are completely foreign to the negation and synthesis that form the basis of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics.
Let’s begin with negation: in the libertarian conception of contradictions, the contrary or opposing force has nothing to do with the negation of the force that elicits or polarizes its existence. Rather, it is the singular affirma- tion of what this force excludes or damages through its singularity, at a given moment and in a given situation. Contradiction, for Proudhon (both in his thought and in his writings), is always an anarchic overflowing of forces and affirmations that — in seeking to oppose one another at every point, to polarize one another — are content to “seriate” their profusion, to try to discover and construct an order within the anarchy of the real (see serial dialectic, positive anarchy, and tension). The submission of one collective being to another — as a limitation of its power — as well as the destruction of one being by another — as a loss of power or sometimes, more positively, as a condition for the emancipa- tion and recomposition of forces and of the relations that link them (see rebel) — is always the immediate horizon of the relations between contrary forces, the most probable effect of their meeting. But this loss of power, which generally follows the confrontation between opposed forces — even in moments of strug- gle and revolt and even when, in the libertarian conception of revolution, these confrontations are imagined as being as brief as possible (see Great Evening, general strike) — is exactly what Proudhonian anarchism attempts to abolish through its conception of the seriated balancing of contrary forces, in which “forces do not struggle for even a moment except to recognize themselves, to control themselves, to confirm and classify themselves.”!
From this comes a second fundamental difference between the libertarian conception of contradictions and that of the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic. Within emancipatory movements, the opposition between two forces does not have to be resolved either by the victory of one over the other or by the syn- thesis of both (a “synthesis” of which the State, the Capital, the Church, and all the other absolute, dominatory, and overarching powers are the inevitable manifestation). They must be “balanced,” Proudhon tells us, not in order to contradict one another, but so that they may be extended as far as possible: “I had shared Hegel’s belief? that the two terms of the antinomy, thesis and an- tithesis, were to become resolved in a superior term, synthesis. But I have since come to realize that just as the two poles of an electric cell do not destroy each other, so the two terms of the antinomy do not become resolved. Not only are
1 Proudhon, La Guerre et la paix, 134. 2 ‘That is, up to the System of Economical Contradictions (Systéme des contradictions
économiques, 1846).
44 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
they indestructible, but they are the very motive force of all action, life, and progress. The problem is not to bring about their fusion, for this would be death, but to establish an equilibrium between them — an unstable equilibri- um, that changes as society develops.”' Paradoxically, in achieving a momen- tary balance, two forces or two series of contrary forces are not neutralized. On the contrary, through the zension (see this term) and thus the instability of this balance, they can liberate the infinite power that they contain and that their contradictory encounter contains. They can make it possible to surpass the limits of their points of view and the determinate characters of their singular powers, enabling the emergence of other forces, other associations of forces, the relations of which they must then also learn how to combine and balance so that yet other forces can be born, ad infinitum. The composition of a world that would make it possible for each force to do all that it is capable of, to deploy all the power that reality contains, thus requires an entire practice of selection and experimentation (see experiment) with good and bad contradic- tions, good and bad associations. At which moments and for how long, in a given arrangement, must collective beings agree to subject themselves to the balancing, to the tension or ranking (see hierarchy) of the relations that connect them in a given context, in order to obtain certain effects of power? At which moments must they imperatively break off their association, creating others, in order to prevent one of them from imposing its domination in a lasting way, to prevent circumstantial hierarchies from becoming “petrified” (as Bakunin puts it)?? How can we balance the multiple components so that each quality, each possibility of a force and its associations with other forces, can be fully expressed, can do all that it is capable of? What are the little oscillations, the imperceptible reminders of autonomy within the tiniest interactions, that make possible a range of complementarities, on a given plane of reality and at a giv- en moment, without which these interactions might turn into tyranny? What overall relations must the various collective arrangements maintain so that none of them can impose itself on the others, so that none of the forces within these arrangements can subject the others to its point of view and its desire, for example in the name of external relations? How can we evaluate, at every mo- ment, the quality of the relations between forces, the affinities or enmities that draw them together and pull them apart? Which collective reasons or common notions are necessary to this evaluation, to the establishment of trust between different or contrary forces, making it possible to perceive and think “the oth- er,” to perceive and think the discrepancy and plurality of beings? So numerous are the problems that libertarian practice attempts to solve. Furthermore, for
1 Proudhon, Selected Writings of PJ. Proudhon, 229. 2 Mikhail Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism, trans. G.P. Maximoff (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1953), 259.
B 45
solving these problems, the balancing of forces constitutes the touchstone, since, beyond its own effects (on the planes of equality, autonomy, power, and thus freedom), it constitutes the concrete sign of the capacity of libertarian and emancipatory forces to escape their own limits, to select good contradictions, and thus to express all the possibilities that these forces contain — possibilities that only an agreement with other forces, contrary to them, can liberate.
Base (horizontality). In the functioning of organizations and associations — both those formed around the working class and others — the concept of the “base” plays an important part, in particular in the event of conflict (“let the base decide!” “return the leadership to the base,” “give voice to the base,” etc.).' This call to the “base” has always had a libertarian connotation, provided that one sees clearly that it constitutes only the first steps of a movement (often quickly stifled) and a rupture (see this term) in which the word “base” would no longer need to be used. A base always presupposes a “summit,” a higher authority for which it would form the base or that would be supposed to express the wish- es of the base, to execute its will. In anarchism, there exists neither base nor summit, but the absolute horizontality of a multiplicity of autonomous and sovereign collective beings entering into relations directly, without overarching authorities to coordinate them. In this sense, base and horizontality are the spatial expression of the idea of equality (see this term).
Becoming (see movement, eternal return). For libertarian thought, as Bakunin writes, being is identified with becoming: “To be real...is to become...: i.e., movement always and eternally resulting from the infinite sum of all the par- ticular movements down to the infinitely small, the totality of the mutual actions and reactions and the ceaseless transformations of all the things that appear and disappear in turn.”” This is a conception that one finds at the heart of Gilbert Simondon’s thought when he explains that “becoming is a dimen- sion of the being, not something that happens to it following a succession of events that affect a being already and originally given and substantial.”?
1 Translator’s note: the term “base” is not widely used in English-language anarchist discourse, but a similar problematic arises around expressions such as “from below” (e.g., Bakunin’s “spontaneous movement from below” (Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism, ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff [Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2002], 200). See Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 48-9, for parallel reflections on “‘top’ and ‘bottom’ imagery” in anarchist dis- course and Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006) for the many resonances of “horizontality” (vi, 3).
2 Bakunin, “Considérations philosophiques,” Guures, 3:345.
3 Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford
46 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
Being (see intimate being and one). Beyond its limits (beyond what one can do) (see limitlessness of the limited).
Body (human body) (see person, subject, brain, sexuality, and power of the outside). “[N]obody as yet has determined the limits of the body’s capabilities: that is, nobody as yet has learned from experience what the body can and cannot do, without being determined by mind, solely from the laws of its nature insofar as it is considered as corporeal...[We] do not know what the body can do, or what can be deduced solely from a consideration of its nature.”! In libertarian thought and its manner of conceptualizing collective forces (see this term), the concept of “body” applies to all beings, whatever they may be, whatever their degree of spontaneity (see this term) and their power to affect or be affected. But it is precisely because human beings have a great capacity to be affected and to affect other beings — and consequently, through their activity, to give birth to ever more vast, complex, and powerful collective forces” — that the human body takes on particular importance within a process of emancipation that calls on the power of nature as a whole, which the body carries with it (see this term and power of the outside).
As a “composite of powers,”’ a “composite of spontaneities”* (see this term) like any other collective force, the human body is multiple. Once again, as Proudhon explains with regard to the person (see this term), “What is it, in- deed, that we call a person? And what does this person mean when he says, ‘me’? Is it his arm, his head, his body, or his passion, his intelligence, his talent, his memory, his virtue, his conscience? Is it any of his faculties? [emphasis in original].” > Or, as Nietzsche puts it: “We are richer than we think, we have in the body wherewith to make many persons, we take for ‘character’ what
Kwinter, in Zone Vol. 6: Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 311. Spinoza, Ethics, 280-81.
2 “[I]n any organized or simply collective being, the force that is its resultant is the freedom of that being, so that the more this being, whether crystal, plant, or animal, approximates the human type, the greater will be its freedom, the greater the range that free will shall have. In man himself, free will manifests itself all the more energetically as the elements that generate him by their community are themselves developed in power: philosophy, science, industry, economy, law” (Proudhon, De la Justice, 3:433).
3 Proudhon, La Guerre et la paix, 128.
“Man can be regarded as a composite of spontaneities that are linked to one another, but each of which, by the effect of circumstances, solicits him from its own side” (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Economie, bibliothéque municipale de Besancon, 2863 [74]).
5 Proudhon, De la Justice, 3:172.
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belongs only to the ‘person, to ove of our masks... We deceive ourselves when we judge a man according to isolated acts: such acts warrant no generalizations [emphasis in original].”! A plurality of “minds,” of “forces,” “souls,” and “wills to power,” the human body — particularly in its brain, the supposed seat of its consciousness — is a “node of forces” (using, this time, the vocabulary of Tarde) that transmits “impulses that come from afar and are intended to travel afar.”’ This is why the human being must detach itself from its self in order to liberate the power that it contains. It must liberate itself from the convenient illusions of its conscience and of the ego, wherein the dominant order finds the best means to reproduce itself (see self-discipline, responsibility, ego). By opening up to the other that it contains — to the apeiron, the power of the outside that its body carries in itself — the human being breaks up its ego, only to gain a “lucid- ity that was more vast” and a “new cohesion”:* “From this point on, Nietzsche would no longer be concerned with the body as a property of the self but with the body as the locus of impulses, the locus of their confrontation.”’ By expro- priating the “ego,” in becoming other, the human being restores “thought to these ‘corporealizing’ forces (impulses),” to the se/fof which Nietzsche speaks, from which alone “every creative force, every evaluation” can spring, the “Se/f” that “exists in the body only as a prolonged extremity of Chaos.”®
How is a new body created? How can the human body give itself a new cohesion, an emancipatory unity, and thus liberate, by means of its points of view and its acts, the power of the world that surrounds and traverses it? Such is the question posed by libertarian emancipation. In the world we inhabit, this unification of the body was for a long time ensured by the bonds of reli- gion, by God or his substitutes, by submission and obedience to God and the very particular order guaranteed by the figure of God. And it is undoubtedly Christianity as conceived and practiced by Saint Paul, through the concept of the “resurrection of the body,” that most thoroughly unified and confined what the human body is capable of by subjecting it to “faith,” by subjecting
1 Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1884), 26 [370], qtd. in Didier Franck, Nietzsche and the Shadow of God, trans. Bettina Bergo and Philippe Farah (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 128.
2 On this point, see Franck, Nietesche and the Shadow of God, especially 135.
See Jean Milet, Gabriel Tarde et la philosophie de histoire (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 172: “The case of the human being is particularly significant. Its body, and particularly its brain, are mechanisms for the transmission of psychic impulses that come from afar and are intended to travel afar.”
4 Onall of this, cf. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 30 et passim.
5 Ibid. 30-31.
Ibid. 33.
48 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
the multiple wills of the human body to a single will, that of God, who gives it a new body. In opposition to the anarchy of the forces that constitute us, for which each force, each will, “wants something different and is inevitably opposed to all the others,” for which “the body is no longer...exclusively what I am but also what I have, and that to which I am connected” (see possession), theology thus put forward the governing principle of God, the unification of the various human wills in “their common submission” to God and to an external power that the various figures of authority both embody and trans- mit.' How do we “get rid of God” (as Bakunin puts it) and of the narrow and coercive order that he founds and guarantees? How do we give human beings a new body, a body that would liberate all the powers it contains? How do we invent methods of association and a balancing of forces and of wills that allows them to do all that they are capable of? Such are the questions that anarchism attempts to answer.
Bombs (see anarchist chemistry).
Boss (see /eader and hierarchy). The external domination of one collective being over others, guaranteed by an oppressive order or based on simple violence. Anarchism hates bosses.
Brain (see body and monad). Gabriel Tarde asserts that “living bodies are ma- chines,” albeit composed of elements — “carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, etc.” — that “contain hidden psychic elements.”* And this is why, especially in the human being, the “body,” and “particularly its brain, are mechanisms for the transmission of psychic impulses that come from afar and are intended to travel afar.”® A seemingly strange conception, an intuition that is perhaps poorly explained, but one for which certain developments in cognitive science open wide vistas.‘
1 Franck, Nietzsche and the Shadow of God, 58. For a slightly different analysis, cf. Klossowski, Nietasche and the Vicious Circle, 23 and et passim. Qtd. in Milet, Gabriel Tarde et la philosophie de Uhistoire, 172.
3 Ibid. For a first approach, cf. Georges Vignaux, Les Sciences cognitives: Une introduction (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1992).
Capital (see God, State, neoliberals, class, and utilitarianism). Capture (see domination, planes of reality, symbols).
Care for the self (see implication).
Causes (see scientific laws).
Chaos (see possibilities, anarchy, apeiron, power of the outside, body). A Greek concept, used by Hesiod to describe the original state of the world — a world subsequently endowed with an order, with completely differentiated beings (the “cosmos”). In the modern and libertarian use of the word, chaos ceases to refer to a temporal origin, transcended by a linear and temporally oriented process of becoming. On the contrary, it constitutes the ever-present substrate of all the possibilities that reality contains. In this sense, chaos is synonymous with Anaximander’s apeiron and, as the common usage aptly perceives, with the anarchy that justifies the existence of the libertarian movements, not a4 posteriori [en aval] as a remote objective to come, but a priori [en amont] (if this distinction is still meaningful) — an a priori without temporal depth, an a priori which is always present (see these terms). As many libertarian texts demonstrate, from Coeurderoy and Proudhon to Bakunin (see power of the outside), the anarchy or chaos to which anarchism bears witness is not at all synonymous with the arbitrary — this arbitrariness which serves as the illusory foundation of all utopias — but, on the contrary, with necessity (see this term) — a necessity that comprises the sole foundation of anarchist freedom precisely because it expresses all the power of that which exists. Once again, it is from this point of view that anarchism can be compared to Nietzsche, in spite of
49
50 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
the many and fundamental differences that separate them, especially when he explains how “the total character of the world, by contrast, is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order.”!
Chaplain (see direction of conscience, rendering of accounts). Representative of a church or a religion (all the great religions have their chaplains) charged with seeing to it that collective beings are correctly subjected to the standards and values of an external or transcendent collective authority. Under the name of “political commissar,” authoritarian communism was happy to recover from religious institutions a practice and apparatus of inspection that had long ago proven its effectiveness. The force of contemporary capitalism undoubtedly lies in its capacity — after the already promising experiments of the guardian angel and especially of the “conscience” (see responsibility, discipline) — to base the economy on an organization of external control (and a rather cumbersome one at that) and to transform the chaplains and political commissars of other times into an internalized superego. In this way, through an intimate identifi- cation with the law of the market, each individual is his or her own chaplain, his or her own commissar, his or her own representative in the order of the market, his or her own judge of what it is best to do or not to do, to hope for, or to be satisfied with.
Charge of nature (see indeterminacy). Concept used by Gilbert Simondon to indicate the power of the outside (see this term) that every collective being con- tains. The charge of nature is another word for anarchy. For this reason, an- archism, in the myopic view of its detractors, may look like an absolute and especially dangerous naturalism (see this term). Indeed, libertarian thought refuses to divide reality into two radically distinct substances (see dualism): matter and mind, body and soul, nature and culture. This is why it rejects all the presuppositions and frameworks of so-called anthropology — as if human realities could be distinguished from radically different “nonhuman” realities! As Proudhon affirms, the human composite does not differ in any respect from any other composition, from all that constitutes nature, except in degree of power: “The living human being is a group, like the plant or the crystal, but to a higher degree than those others; it is all the more alive, sensitive, and sentient to the degree that its organs, secondary groups...form a more exten- sive combination.”* Like Gilbert Simondon, anarchism does not consider the
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 109. On the importance of “left Nietzscheanism” for libertarian thought, cf. Michel Onfray, Politique du rebelle: Traité de résistance et d'insoumission (Paris: Grasset, 1997).
2 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Philosophy of Progress, trans. Shawn Wilbur and Jesse Cohn (n.p.:
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expression of human specificity and its full flourishing to consist in our being distinguished from nature. On the contrary, it consists in the capacity of hu- mans to find within themselves and outside of themselves — since their “inside” is only a fold of the outside (see this term) — the nature from which they issue, even if their provisional and reductive individuation prompts them to regard it as an external environment to be exploited and dominated (see subject).
Christian anarchism (religious anarchism) (see Great Evening). As curious as it might seem, there exists or has existed a Christian anarchism (formed main- ly around the work of Tolstoy). However, this bizarreness is only apparent. Indeed, the anarchist theory of the composite character and nature of collective forces (see these terms) makes it possible to understand that a given being or reality contains much more than what has been assigned to it by a crude and extrinsic spatial classification of political and ideological confrontations and hatreds. Therefore, anarchism can at once be violently distant from Christianity —as from any religion — and intimately close to certain dimensions of religious practices and perceptions. As global and universal experiences, inscribed from their very beginnings in relation to a non-alienated world,' religions have not only given rise to churches, dogmas, sacred texts, and obligations (alimentary, ritual, moral) that tend to separate collective forces from what they can do and to subjugate them to external powers that damage them. ‘They retain in themselves and in a certain number of their practices (even in the most au- thoritarian monotheisms) a relation to the world (generally indicated by the term “mystic”’) that is immanent to reality and the possibilities that reality
LeftLiberty, 2009), 23 (trans.: modifications my own). This position can also be found in the work of Gabriel Tarde (Monadology and Sociology, 28 et passim) and in that of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari when they explain: “even when they are nonliving, or rather in- organic, things have a lived experience because they are perceptions and affections” (What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], 154).
1 What Gilbert Simondon calls “the primitive magical unity,” this “vital connection between man and the world, defining a universe that is at once subjective and objective prior to any distinction between the object and the subject, and consequently prior to any appearance of the separate object” (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove [Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016], 177).
2 For a reevaluation of the connections between anarchism and mysticism, cf. Onfray, Politique du rebelle. This is why anarchism can endorse the “Dreyfusard mysticism” of which Charles Péguy speaks, “a step toward the culmination of three mysticisms: Jewish, Christian, French” (Charles Péguy, Notre jeunesse [Paris: Gallimard, 1933], 63). On Christian mysti- cism cf., in particular, Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1995).
52 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
contains and that attempts — by circumventing priests, dogmas, rites, and all the authorities claiming to speak in the name of the divine — to express direct- ly, without intermediaries, the forces and possibilities that the existing order denies (see direct action).
Circumstances (see event, arrangement).
Class (social, sexual, generational, etc.) (see anti-authoritarian, power, possibil- ities). Anarchism distinguishes itself in two ways from the very numerous Marxist or Marxian analyses that, for many decades, have been commonplace in the discourses of workerism, third-worldism, feminism, etc. on the left or far left.
For libertarian thought, the great cleavages that run through and structure our societies (workers/bourgeoisie, men/women, young/old, Whites/Blacks, ur- ban/rural, high/low, in/out, left/right, dominators/dominated, etc.) are not at the origin of the numerous relations of force and domination that comprise our lives. They are, on the contrary, the effects of the ensemble of these relationships, effects that then come to bear on local confrontations, traverse them, bind them, place them in a series (see this term), and give them meaning. As Foucault and Proudhon have shown, large-scale dominations are the hegemonic effects of a multitude of immediate and minuscule interactions, which continually sustain these dominations and furnish them with the force and intensity that they need in order to reproduce themselves and to pretend to be the origin of their own power (for Foucault’s analyses, see anti-authoritarian). In libertarian thought, neither State, Capital, God, Patriarchy, nor any other metaphysical divinity is ei- ther a cause or an origin; they are resultants (see this term). Any politico-ideologi- cal force that claims to found its own existence and the significance of its struggle on the belief in an all-powerful first principle at the origin of that which exists —a foundation that justifies its struggle (God, State, Capital, Patriarchy, etc.) — merely participates in the power of what it pretends to combat. Whatever its size, it can only constitute a body of priests, police officers, professors, and scientists, an authoritarian apparatus aspiring, in its turn, to profit from the illusions of despotism, to rob the dominated of their right to struggle and of the possibility of struggling everywhere they find themselves, to prohibit them from becoming the masters of their own struggle (see alienation). The spontaneism, the localism (see these terms), and the sometimes small size of libertarian struggles are often badly misinterpreted, reduced to a kind of exaggerated democracy, an obsession with details, a hypersensitivity, a dispersal of demands: in short, indulgences or distractions from the clash of the Titans undertaken by serious militants and organizations (conscious of their duty and, above all, of their knowledge) against Capital, the State, the Church, Patriarchy, or any other overarching or structural power. On the contrary, the spontaneism, localism, smallness, immediacy, and
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heterogeneity of libertarian struggles, far from being wasteful indulgences, are the expression of another perception of reality, other methods of action, the only ones able to oppose and, perhaps, even put an end to relations of domination.
To this first difference between anarchism and Marxism with respect to classes (social, sexual, generational, racial, or other), it is necessary to add a sec- ond, which arises in part from the first. Because they depend on a multitude of power relations and not on a first principle or a determining totality, because they are in a continual state of flux that never corresponds to a phony and illusory historical determinism, because they combine with a great number of other constantly changing relations of exchange and domination, no class relations of any kind can ever claim to found the existence of a revolutionary class, a class subject of emancipation (“workers,” “youth,” “women,” “Blacks,” etc.), no matter how oppressed this class may be. Since they are the resultants of changing relations, but also because they are closely dependent on the dom- ination that is essential to them and that defines their being at a given moment (see emancipation), dominated classes contain only an emancipatory possibility, depending on a great number of conditions. These include their power to re- volt and especially their capacity to compose a greater power (see this term) in combination with other forces and with all that escapes the relations of domi- nation that define them (see stoppage and analogy). In short, the position of the dominated is in no way the sufficient guarantee or source of the emancipatory possibility of a world without domination (see this term).
Class struggle (see master/slave, dialectic, and class).
Classification (see analogy and series). Because it calls for becoming and movement and because, with Bakunin, it defines nature as “the sum of actual transfor- mations of things that are and will ceaselessly be produced within its womb,”’ libertarian thought is opposed to any classification, which is inevitably exter- nal, reductive, and oppressive. For this reason, Proudhon (like Gilles Deleuze and others) can, within the framework of the natural sciences, take the side of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire against Cuvier: “Yes, as Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire says, all the animals of creation are evolved from one another; otherwise they would not form genuses and species. And what the error made by Cuvier, the king of classification, demonstrates, is that in claiming to refute the theory of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, he contradicts himself; outside of the unity of generation, the orders, classes, genera, species, varieties, no longer have a raison d étre; like the constitutional regime, it is a fiction of the mind, a chimera.”
1 Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 53. 2 Proudhon, Economie, 2863 [104]. For Deleuze’s references to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, cf.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 45, 254. Translator’s note: historian of science
54 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
Collective (social). For Proudhon, every collective is an individual and each in- dividual is a collective, a “composite of powers.”! But it is undoubtedly Gilbert Simondon who best enables us, from a libertarian point of view, to think this reality of the social or the collective via three great propositions.
First proposition: “the individual,” in the psychological or traditional sense of the word, like any other form of individuation, is always more than itself (see more than oneself, balancing of forces, genealogy, limitlessness of the limited). A paradox that Simondon formulates as follows: “The individual is nothing but itself, but it exists as superior to itself because it contains within itself a more complete reality, one that the process of individuation did not exhaust, that remains new and potential, animated by potentials...[T]he individual does not feel alone in itself, does not feel limited as an individual to a reality that would be merely itself.””
Second proposition: this more-than-itself of individuals is at the founda- tion of the collective. In other words, the collective is not the sum of individ- uals, the consequence of individual strategies, or a contract that individuals make with one another. It is not an association of individuals (what Simondon calls the “interindividual”). It arises, on the contrary, from the more-than-itself of individuals, from what, strictly speaking, is not them (as individuals; see subject): “Collective consciousness is not constituted by the union of individ- ual consciousnesses any more than the social body is derived from individual bodies. Individuals contain something that can become collective, but that is not already individuated in the individual.’ “The collective is an individua- tion that unites the natures contained by several individuals but that is not contained in the already-constituted individuations of these individuals; this is why the discovery of the signification of the collective is at once transcendent and immanent with respect to the anterior individual.”
Third and final proposition: this preindividual reality of individuals from which the collective individual arises is being thought as becoming, the apeiron, Nature, the indeterminate, the limitlessness of the limited. In this sense,
John Tresch offers some useful historical context for Proudhon’s engagement with the Cuvier-Geoffroy debate. As alluded to in the passage Colson quotes here, Proudhon sided with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s proto-Darwinian vision of life as continually evolving in re- sponse to “the circumstances in which it developed” as opposed to “Cuvier’s view of four fixed ‘embranchements,” an unchanging taxonomical schema (326). See Tresch, “The Order of the Prophets: Series in Early French Social Science and Socialism,” History of Science 48.3- 4 (2010): 315-342.
Proudhon, La Guerre et la paix, 128.
Simondon, Individuation psychique et collective, 194.
Ibid. 195.
Ibid. 197.
Br WD NHN
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the collective individual, like any individual, is also more than itself. It, too, contains the indeterminate and the preindividual charged with potentials, with new problems to be resolved in new forms of individuation and through a movement of eternal return to being (see this term) in which historical time, novelty, and the future always proceed in reverse, in advance [en amont] of what, in traditional anthropology, constitutes the basis of beings and individu- als: the adventures, the wills, and the histories from which they seem to emerge.
Collective beings (see collective force, arrangement, and planes of reality).
Collective reason (public reason) (see especially common notions and theory/ practice, but also representation, expression, symbols/signs, and entelechy). A Proudhonian concept. For anarchism, reason does not exist in itself, in the heaven of ideas or logical imperatives. Dependent on language and on signs, reason is always the expression of the relationship between beings or collective forces. To be strictly accurate, there is only one reason: the reason of things or beings and of the relations that bind them. It is in this sense that Proudhon writes, following his readings of Leibniz — even if only to draw back before a thought too “bold” (and undoubtedly too gradualist [évolutionniste] in his eyes) — that “intelligence is everywhere, latent or conscious...: intellect sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, reasons in the man. Why would it not also reason in humanity?”' It is also in this sense that Gilbert Simondon carries out his critique of language, of the human-all-too-human, when he explains that “it is not language that creates signification’; rather, “signification” is anterior to language: “if there were no signification to support language, there would be no language.”
With Deleuze and Guattari (and following Spinoza), one could say that all reality has two distinct and yet indissociable aspects: a discursive aspect, the world of expression, language and signs; and a “machinic” aspect, the world of contents, the body, reality, and forces.* Because of this, collective reason is the other side of collective force, both distinct and indissociable from it.‘ “The act and the idea are really inseparable,” Proudhon writes (see action).’? Even
Proudhon, De la Justice, 3:267. Simondon, Individuation psychique et collective, 200. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 88.
“The organ of the collective reason is the same as that of the collective force: it is the group
Bm WO NHN
assembled for labor, for study; the company, whether industrial, scholarly, or artistic; acad- emies, schools, municipalities; it is the national assembly, the club, the jury; any meeting of men, in a word, formed for the discussion of ideas and inquiry into questions of right” (Proudhon, De la Justice, 3:270).
5 Ibid. 2:298.
56 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
when it claims to be “pure,” reason is always the expression of an arrangement of forces, an arrangement that this very pretension to purity always marks as an apparatus of domination and oppression. In such a case, reason is always a “State reason [raison d’Etat],” which points back to the State itself, to the Church, to Capital, or to the illusions of that little State called the “ego”: the illusions of individual reason and free will, the foundations and transmitters of domination, everywhere the “absolute,” on whatever scale, aspires to substitute itself for the relations constitutive of reality. As Proudhon explains, anarchism proposes to “purge” ideas of all that is absolute, “to reveal the reason of things,” “to determine, by means of historical observation and the study of social trans- actions, the relations or the reason of human acts without mixing in any- thing of the human absolute, much less anything of the superhuman absolute, whatever names these might take: angel, archangel, domination, principality, throne, community, Church, council, Parliament, cathedral, personality, prop- erty, etc., up to and including the head of this incommensurable hierarchy, the Absolute of absolutes, who is God.”! Reason is always “collective” because it is the expression and point of view of an arrangement of forces. But because any arrangement secks to go to the limits of its capacities, as seen from the limits of its own point of view, of its particular composition of forces, its raison d étre tends to transform itself into an absolute and an illusion, to want to subject other forces, external to and constitutive of its being, to its own desire and point of view (see totality/totalitarianism). Only encounters and clashes with other forces, a recognition of their otherness, and the discovery of the power that this encounter induces when it is transformed into association can make a collective force aware of the collective and relative character of its raison détre, as well as the collective character of any reason. That is when reason, like daw (see daw/rights), can be transformed into the expression of an increasingly pow- erful and free arrangement of forces, revealing to itself its character as resultant (see this term), becoming a true “public reason,” when, founding itself on the “greatest contradiction” (see balancing of forces), it gives itself “for organ, the greatest possible multiplicity.”
Common notions (see collective reason and practical theory). A term employed by Spinoza. The importance of this term for a libertarian reading of this philoso- pher has been demonstrated by Gilles Deleuze. What has always, historically, separated anarchism from Marxism is well-known. In place of a revolution- ary project that tasks politics with accomplishing human emancipation and assigning meaning to the numerous concrete interactions and events of the reality it proposes to transform by translating them into the register of political
1 Ibid. 3:248. 2 Ibid. 3:270.
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classifications, identities, and injunctions (right/left, proletariat/bourgeoisie, appearance/reality, friends/enemies, etc.), anarchism has instead affirmed two stances:
1. A refusal of politics’ claim to represent (thus to enclose, define, and denature) all other realities within its partisan, symbolic, and offi- cial forms.
2. A binding (and thus an infinite extension) of the forces of emancipa- tion to the totality of those lived realities, things, and situations that are the most immediate, the most everyday. These are those realities called social and professional, individual and inter-individual, romantic, eco- nomic, artistic, etc., which enlist the totality of the relations that hu- man beings can establish among themselves and with things: their ways of eating, working, loving, treating animals — the most minute of the relations and practices of living that constitute that which exists.
Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza helps us to think this project and these eman- cipatory practices, to redouble and intensify them through thought, in a man- ner that can justly be called libertarian. The originality of this reading could be summed up as follows: to show how knowledge obtained through the senses, through affects and signs — this confused and erroneous knowledge, dominat- ed by prejudices and imagination, which so often plunge us into anger, love, hatred, ressentiment, and finally enslavement — can also constitute the starting point of an adequate knowledge of the world and a means (in fact, the only means) of our emancipation. In place of an idealistic or political interpretation of Spinoza, which entrusts the liberation of human beings to the mere faculties of reasoning or to a “political” imagination purged of its “natural” origins, the libertarian reading of Spinoza posits a contrary movement toward emancipa- tion, a movement rooted in the power of the Nature from which humanity emerges and that never ceases to act within us, to our benefit as well as to our misfortune, for our oppression and our emancipation.
For Deleuze’s Spinoza, it always a matter of acting on the level of existence itself, in the obscure constitution of the real, “at the deepest level of the obscure mixture of bodies,” as Deleuze tells us, where the “combat between servitudes and liberations” unfolds.” For Deleuze, it is true that the signs and affects of
1 For a more detailed treatment of these questions, cf. Daniel Colson, “Limagination spi- noziste et Pidée d’émancipation,” in Les Incendiaires de limaginaire, ed. Alain Pessin and Mimmo Pucciarelli (Lyon: ACL, 2000) and “Anarchist Readings of Spinoza,” trans. Jesse Cohn and Nathan Jun, Journal of French Philosophy: Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Frangaise 17 no. 2 (Summer 2007): 86-129.
2 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco
58 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
existence are inadequate ideas and passions that bind human beings to the domination and illusions of the first kind of knowledge, which are particularly opposed to the notions of the second kind, those “adequate ideas from which true actions ensue.”! However, as “dark precursors,” these signs and affects are nonetheless the condition of human emancipation in two senses: 1) they are what assures the production of concepts, by “selection of the passional affects, and of the ideas on which they depend,” through the experiences of joy and sadness, augmentation and reduction of the power to act;” 2) the concepts, once produced, are what ensure the lasting emancipatory power of the signs and affects of existence by embodying them, by preventing them — at the price of “an inexpiable affective combat in which one risks death” — from falling into the hands of the Despot and the Priest, those “terrible ‘judges’ of life.”? A “pas- sional struggle” in which “signs confront signs and affects clash with affects,” this selection and construction within the most intimate moments of lived experience of the world in which we want to live is always “the very condition” for human liberation.*
How do we pass from the confusion and tension of lived situations and re- lations to what Proudhon calls a collective reason (see this term)? This would be a reason that never loses its connection to the forces that produce it, that does not autonomize itself into an external and dominatory authority, a reason that would be the expression and point of view of an emancipatory arrangement of collective forces. By means of common notions, answers the Deleuzean Spinoza: notions shared by at least two bodies (collective beings, in Proudhon’s vocabulary) that have the capacity to select “ideas” compatible with the forc- es and beings that encounter and associate with one another. Gradually and through increasing involvement [implication], these notions move from being merely “common to” two beings to increasingly general and universal notions, to a recomposition of the totality of that which exists, constituting “a world that is increasingly wide and intense.”
It is undoubtedly here — from this perspective of common notions — that the Deleuzean Spinoza is closest to the libertarian movement. He is close to its
(New York: Verso, 1997), 146. 1 Ibid. 143. The traditional interpretation of Spinoza distinguishes between three kinds of knowledge: knowledge of the first kind, sensory knowledge, confused and erroneous; knowledge of the second kind, rational knowledge, which makes it possible to reconstruct the logic of things and events; and finally, knowledge of the third kind, an intuitive knowl- edge that gives access to the essence of things and their relations. Ibid. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 145, 144. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 126.
Mob WO bd
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critique of science, when, as Bakunin remarks with regard to matter (see this term), it considers that “a common nature, a common character does not exist in itself, by itself, apart from the distinct and real things or bodies to which it is attached.”' He is close to the way in which the libertarian movement conceives of association, federalism, and what it calls relations of affinity (see this term). He is close to its taste for experimentation, even of the strangest and riskiest kinds. He is close to its will to base its existence on the free association and dis- sociation of the forces that compose existence at a given moment, starting with the most tenuous realities and relations, the thousands of ways of living and working, of eating and getting dressed, of loving and learning, of giving birth and aging, of continually discussing and modifying the most minute relation- ships, and thus refusing to identify them with any fixed and final representa- tion. Instead, they are continually evaluated according to the sole criterion of how each being feels at a given moment, according to its internal composition and its constitution in conjunction with other beings, therefore as a common “idea” and project.’
Where do common notions come from and how do they function? To put it another way: how, for the Deleuzean Spinoza, can existence and experience allow human beings to free themselves from error and sadness, from the dom- inations that, internally and externally, chain them to their own misfortune, prevent them from thinking for themselves and from deploying their power to act in a very different world? Through association and experimentation, Deleuze tells us: “The common notions are an Art, the art of the Ethics itself: organizing good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, ex- perimenting.”* This art of the Ethics never ceases to operate within the most immediate experience, every day, from the place where fate has thrown us, from the (fortunate and unfortunate) chance encounters that life imposes on us from the beginning (those of family, sex, social background, skin color, culture, country, and nationality), in which “signs refer to signs as effects re- fer to effects, following an associative chain that depends on the order of the simple chance encounter between physical bodies [emphasis in original]”.* As the Ethics attempts to demonstrate, we can cease to subject ourselves to these chance relations and encounters — the outcome of mere circumstance — and in- stead seek relations and encounters on the basis of happy affects and passions.
Bakunin, “Considérations philosophiques,” Guuvres, 3:351.
2 “The interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior” (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 125). For an approach to libertarian conceptions of associ- ation, federalism, and affinity groups, cf. Claude Parisse, Les Anarchistes et Vorganisation (Lyon: ACL, 1989).
3 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 119.
Deleuze, Essays Clinical and Critical, 143.
60 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
To do this, we have only to experimentally “select” the beings and associations that suit us, that increase our joy and our power to act: “[f]rom a random encounter of bodies, we can select the idea of those bodies that agree with our own and give us joy, that is, that increase our power... There is thus a selection of the passional affects, and of the ideas on which they depend, which must liberate joys, vectorial signs of the augmentation of power, and ward off sad- nesses, signs of diminution. This selection of the affects is the very condition for leaving the first kind of knowledge, and for attaining the concept through the acquisition of a sufficient power [emphasis in original].”!
Association and selection. Through this twofold process, the associated forces can then form “common notions,” composing ever newer relations, increas- ingly broader and more intense, involving more and more possible beings, in pursuit of a total recomposition of that which exists. The world in which human emancipation takes place then ceases to be a plane of organization or development — even if such a plane were infinite.’ It ceases to be a plane of ap- propriations or captures.’ As a plane of composition and association on which there is no end to experimentation with the effects of encounters between ever different and ever new forces, between possible associations, it is transformed into a plane of immanence (see this term), “always variable,” “constantly being altered, composed and recomposed, by individuals and collectivities.”4
Common sense/good sense (see experience). Libertarian thought rejects the pre- tensions of the science that claims to break with common sense and ordinary experience — like the thought of Durkheim and Bourdieu, as well as that of Lenin, Althusser, and other pretenders to epistemological rupture — in order to dictate the meaning of one’s life, the destiny and the determinisms that shape it, from an external position. Anarchism affirms, on the contrary, the capacity of collective beings to possess in themselves, from a certain point of view, the totality of meanings of that which exists, that is to say, its possibilities (see com- mon notions and collective reason). For anarchism, the point of view of science is only one point of view among others, whose self-satisfaction, fatalism, and pretensions to exteriority and superiority are the surest sign of its oppressive, damaging, and damaged character (see power). However, with Whitehead, lib- ertarian thought is not therefore to be confused with good sense, that mixture of clichés and received ideas that is always charged with persuading collective forces to surrender to the cynicism of the existing order (like Professor Ramsay
Ibid. 144. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 128. Ibid. 126. Ibid. 128.
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in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse).' Present in the most ordinary judg- ments as well as “in the most ambitious theoretical statements” (and thus in science itself), good sense aspires to put each thing in its place within a world order that has been fixed once and for all. By contrast, common sense, the “insistent murmur” under “the authority of theories” and clichés, in the “in- terstices of the authorized discourses,”” affirms the infinite power of invention, creation, and innovation of that which exists.
Commons (common project, common arrangement). The commons is the plane of reality (see this term) and of the existence — enduring or provisional, yet always revocable at any moment and in any way — that autonomous forces bring about by their association (economic, political, ludic, romantic, etc.). A union, a bookshop, a cooperative, a football team, or a romantic relationship are a common arrangement, creating a collective project and a collective being that is shared in common by all who freely join together to make it work. Any association or collective being resulting from this association is a different and more powerful being or force than those forces that, in joining, contribute to its existence. It relies entirely on trust, since each is free to unmake it when- ever he or she desires, in order to found another association that seems more appropriate or useful. The commons is never a terrain of struggle, an external framework that external forces would seize and fight over like a bone, a chair, or the wheel of a car. The commons is neither a setting (like a “common” wait- ing room or a gymnasium) nor a tool. While it is greater than the sum of the forces that constitute it, it is never external to them, since it comes from their association and does not exist otherwise. To associate (in love as in politics or in any other activity) is to agree to transform oneself within this association, it is to run the risk of becoming a different being (for better or for worse!). In this sense, all true association presupposes trust. Only the experience of the effects of such a transformation, tested and found to be good or bad, can lead one to withdraw from association. (Conversely, as one example among others of the subjugation and instrumentalization of collective beings emptied of all their own content and deprived of any autonomy, cf. the infiltration of the unions by the Communist Party shortly after the First World War.)
Communication (see mediation).
Commutation (see justice). A Proudhonian concept. Libertarian thought distin- guishes between two types of justice:
1 On this point, see also LE fet Whitehead, ed. Isabelle Stengers (Paris: Vrin, 1994), 12. 2 Ibid.
62 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
¢ A distributive justice that it rejects and fights against, which is exer- cised in an authoritarian fashion and originates from an overarching authority — the State, the court, the school principal or factory manager, God — who, through a judgment, distributes rewards and punishments according to merit measured from the outside by reference to some law, on a graduated scale from evil to good.
¢ A commutative and libertarian justice founded on direct exchange, on the equality of the things exchanged, on the equivalence of obligations and burdens, and on contracts or pacts of association or alliance (see these words and /aw/rights). This is a commutation internal to the be- ings’ association, excluding any third person or intermediary and any external authority.
Components. Collective beings or forces in their relations of association within a larger collective being or force.
Composed unity. Concept employed by Bakunin (at the same time as universal causality, nature, etc.) to think the totality of being (see multiplicity).
Composition (see association, balancing of forces, and serial dialectic). A Proudhonian concept borrowed from chemistry (along with the physical concept of equilibrium — see balancing — and the physiochemical concept of tension) to account for the manner in which libertarian forces associate and join with one another. This association may well take the legal form of a contract or internal regulation (see /aw/rights). Because it is a resultant and because it calls forth unsuspected resources from the collective beings that it associates, it deeply modifies the nature of these beings and is itself an entirely new being. Indeed, contrary to what a juridical vision of the world would have us believe, the relations and associations between beings (as well as the conflicts among them) are not external to that which constitutes these beings. Said associations implicate these beings entirely. It is within what is deepest inside themselves, within what is more-than-themselves, that the possibility is determined of truly revolutionary associations capable of mod- ifying the existing order from bottom to top, of containing another world (see intimate, affinity, analogy, intuition).
Concept. Opposed to definition (see this term). Conformism (see herds, mass, multitude). A form of equality in which it is a mat-
ter of resembling others so as to lose oneself in the uniform mass. Anarchism violently denounces this form of equalization in the name of an equality that
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is radically different because it is founded on the absolute difference and singu- larity of beings (see these terms).'
Consciousness (see person, ego, and body). Constraint (see necessity). Contract (see law/rights).
Contradictions, contradictory (see violence, balancing of forces, dialectic, and serial dialectic). The anarchy and plurality of collective beings or forces neces- sarily imply that they are bound to collide and clash with one another by the very fact of their differences and their will to increase their power rather than to remain as they are. Only practical sense, experimentation, revolt, and the art of avoiding bad encounters and seeking good ones, can teach us how to avoid the domination of one force over another and the suicidal struggle of forces among themselves, and above all how to favor the development of co/- lective beings that draw a greater power from the free association of the forces that compose them. Even in this case, contradictions are not just inevitable but desirable. They are both the sign of the freedom of the associated forces and the guarantee of the power and vitality of the beings resulting from this association — of their capacity to encompass and reorder all of the determi- nations of the real. Anarchist contradiction has nothing to do with Marxist (or Hegelian) contradiction. The concept of a “dialectical” development of nature and humanity is foreign to libertarian thought. For anarchism, there are bad and good contradictions: some contradictions kill and decrease the power to live, while others nourish and increase this power. It is necessary to avoid the first kind — to prevent them from occurring — and to carefully maintain the second kind without ever presuming to resolve them (see bal-
ancing of forces). Contrariety (see affinity).
Convention (see law/rights).
1 On the other hand, on the characteristics and effects of conformism among libertari- ans where it takes the guise of a mass movement (see this term), cf. Eduardo Colombo, Quelques réflexions sur les relations entre l'idéologie et la composition sociale du mouve- ment anarchiste,” in Composition sociale du mouvement anarchiste (Lausanne, Switzerland:
CIRA, 1972).
64 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
Core. Concept used by Monatte and the editors of the journal La Vie ouvriére' to define the small militant groups capable of galvanizing the trade unions from within, thanks to their “ardor” and taste for books. The revolutionary syndical- ist “core” is aligned with (in a more moderate register and in a period of low ebb) the active minorities of revolutionary syndicalism at their height and, in a more primordial way, with the Bakuninian intimate circles (see these terms).
Culture (see manual/intellectual).
Cynicism. The lasting effect of an aborted revolt that is transformed into nega- tion. It takes the form of a twofold ressentiment that is not content to disparage and devalue others, but which turns against the very being that experiences it. ‘The cynic is thus a man of ressentiment raised to the second power who, fortu- nately, for this very reason, generally eschews libertarian milieus.
1 Translator’s note: Pierre Monatte (1881-1960) was a French revolutionary syndicalist who founded La Vie ouvriere (Workers Life), the official journal of the CGT, in 1909. The anar- chist sympathies of his earlier life, which led him to participate in an international anarchist congress in Amsterdam in 1907, later gave way to Marxism. Jeremy Jennings notes that “La Vie ouvriere was built around a group or ‘noyaw’ of regular contributors.” See Jennings,
Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990) 146-48, 167, 75.
Daoism (see neo-Confucianism). The proximity between anarchism and Chinese Daoism is a commonplace in the historiography of China.’ It can be justified by a great number of historical and sociological observations in connection with peasant revolts, the individualism and nonconformity of the erudite Daoists, the sexual practices of this movement, its assertion of equality between men and women, its radical critique of language and hierarchy, its rejection of Confucian humanism as well as the official totalitarianism of “the Legalist school.” But it is on the terrain of philosophy (with which we are concerned in this little lexicon) that the homology between anarchism and Daoism is at the same time strongest and most implicit. Among the many possible translations of the Dao De Jing, the enigmatic text of Laozi, that of Bernard Botturi undoubtedly best expresses the proximity between anarchism and Daoism. See, for example, at the beginning of chapter 42: “The Dao gave birth to the Primordial Unity, the Primordial Unity gave birth to Heaven and Earth, Heaven and Earth gave birth to the Interval, the Interval gave birth to the ten thousand living things.”* Like Daoism, in its action as in its thought,
1 See, in particular, Wolfram Eberhard, A History of China, trans. E.W. Dickes (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 42 and 45; Isabelle Robinet, Taoism: Growth of a Religion, trans. Phyllis Brooks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Etienne Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy: Variations on a Theme, trans. H.M. Wright (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 158, 243 et passim; Jacques Gernet, Ancient China from the Beginnings to the Empire, trans. Raymond Rudorff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 118-19.
2 Lao-tseu [Laozi], Tao-té king: la Tradition du Tao et de sa sagesse, trans. Bernard Botturi (Paris: Cerf, 1983) (Translator’s note: while translations of the Dao De Jing are plentiful,
none available in English seem to echo Botturi’s adequately. Hence, this is a rendering of
65
66 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
anarchism never begins from existing identities (see this term), from what de- fines or distinguishes them within a given space and according to a given order, and thus from what inevitably opposes them to one another (alliance then being itself an effect of this opposition; see friends of our friends). It always arises from within the midst of things (see this term), in the interval, the only place in which an infinity of possibilities can emerge (the “ten thousand living things” of the Dao De Jing). Anarchism always tries to avoid the deadly trap of direct confrontations between entities distinct from and thus external to one another (see class, class struggle, power, and subversion).' It identifies itself with vast affirmative and emancipatory movements that subsist solely on their own power and their own development. It recurs continually within all that exists as the welling-up of forces of subversion (sometimes infinitesimal), as another possibility, and as the polymorphous condition of an emancipatory affirma- tion of the whole.
Death (see war/warlike, putting to death, and intimate being).
Definition (see classification). In libertarian thought, the definition is opposed to the concept. Whereas the concept emerges from the midst of things in order to bring to light and express focal points of meaning — the nodes of forces (see these terms) that can recompose the totality of that which exists — the defini- tion, as this word indicates, always attempts to fix things within preestablished limits, within a given framework, in order to try to articulate them in an ex- ternal fashion within a reductive and oppressive order. In place of the defini- tion, libertarian thought affirms the indefinite, the unspecified, the apeiron of Anaximander and Simondon, this reserve of being from which the concepts and conditions of a new world can emerge.
Dependency (see government and domination). The submission of a collective being to an external force that separates it from its own capacities and damages its power of subjectivity.
Desire (see will, collective force, power, appetite, lack, and alienation). The sub- jective and internal definition of force, of that which wants in it, equivalent to the Nietzschean will to power.’
Botturi’s French into English).
1 Precisely in the autumn of 1936, when the summer’s insurrection opposing the military coup was finally transformed into a civil war — a confrontation between two camps — the Spanish libertarian revolution definitively sealed its defeat, in reality as well as in idea.
2 Fora neo-Leibnizian approach to the link between force and desire, cf. Tarde, Monadology
and Sociology, 19. On the distinction between force and will to power, cf. Gilles Deleuze,
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Determination (see wi//). Concept employed by the libertarian movement in a sense close to that of will (as when one says that somebody is “determined,” that one shows “determination”). Despite what one might believe, libertarian determination is not opposed to the indeterminate (see this term). It is opposed to the concept of determinism insofar as, contrary to the latter, libertarian de- termination is entirely internal to the being that expresses it. It is the expres- sion of the power and the will (see these terms) that constitute this being at a given moment and in a given situation. It is in this sense that Proudhon can speak of the “power of determination.”
Determinism. A concept linked to domination, which posits beings as entire- ly dependent on causes and conditions external to that which defines their subjectivity (see these terms). Libertarian thought opposes determination to determinism.
Devil (diabolic, demonic) (see power of the outside, symbols/signs). At the risk of worsening the image of a movement that is already identified with an- archy in the most commonplace sense of the term, most of the principal libertarian theorists refer frequently and positively to the figure of the devil and of demons — whether it is Bakunin’s “diable au corps,” the witch’s caul- dron of the affinity groups and secret societies,* or Proudhon’s glorification of Satan, the chief of the rebellious angels, the adversary of God: “Come, Satan, come, you who are calumniated by priests and kings, that I may kiss you, that I may clasp you to my breast! Long have I known you, and you have known me too. Your works, blessed of my heart, are not always
Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 49 et passim. On the (contestable) contestation of this interpretation and the issues in this debate, see Paolo D’Iorio, “Les volontés de puissance” in Mazzino Montinari, “La volonté de puissance” wexiste pas, trans. Patricia Farazzi and Michel Valensi (Paris: Editions de lEclat, 1996), 119-191; Miiller-Lauter, Nietzsche, physiologie de la volonté de puissance; and Montebello, Nietzsche, la volonté de puissance.
Proudhon, De la Justice, 3:375.
2 Cf, among many possible examples, Bakunin’s letter to Jean-Louis Pindy of January 11, 1873 in connection with Elisée Reclus: “He does not have all the diable au corps that one could wish. But it is a matter of temperament, and a man can do no more than he can” (CEuvres completes, vol. 7 [Paris: Champ libre, 1979], xxxi).
Translator’s note: Diable au corps (“devil in one’s flesh”) is “Bakunin’s favourite expression to describe unbounded revolutionary energy and initiative,” Max Nettlau explains (“The Sight of Nature and the Works of Man, and Practical Life, These Form the College in Which the True Education of Contemporary Society Is Obtained,” in Elisée and Elie Reclus: In Memoriam, ed. Joseph Ishill [Berkeley Heights, NJ: Oriole Press, 1927], 200).
68 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
beautiful and good, but they alone give meaning to the universe and pre- vent it from being absurd.”!
While the anarchist opposition between the devil and God offers a model that will sound familiar to everyone (in a manner that is undoubtedly too explicit or violent), it obviously has nothing to do with religion. As Didier Franck demonstrates elsewhere in connection with Nietzsche,’ it has to do with a radical and general ontological position in which the expression “the devil in one’s flesh” employed by Bakunin ceases to be a lighthearted peda- gogical remark (as in the Countess of Ségur’s “good little devils”;? see body). In opposition to the person of God as guarantor of the unity of the human body — and thereby the unity of a totally “humanized,” universally ordered world without any “remainder” — anarchism affirms a world freed from the “bonds” of logos, as well as those of religion. In this world, what Nietzsche calls “the time of anarchy”* would correspond to what Proudhon calls the “anarchy” of the “powers” constitutive of the human being, in which “all of nature’s sponta- neities, all the fatal instigations of Being, all the gods and demons of the uni- verse converge.”® Varuna and Mitra, the magician-king and the priest-judge, the despot and the legislator, the gods of the bond and the pact, are opposed by Indra, the warlike god, the god of “pure and immeasurable multiplicity,” the god of “the ephemeral” and “metamorphosis,” the god who “unties the bond just as he betrays the pact”® (see war/warlike). The sym-bolic of order and domination that binds and attaches is opposed to the anarchist dia-bolic that breaks and separates’ (see direct action), affirming the autonomy of beings, making possible associations of an altogether different nature.
Dialectic (see emancipation, master/slave, contradiction, and balancing of forces). Confronted with the ordering of representations (see this term), their will to fix the future and to waste the power of that which exists by enslaving it to the pet- tiness of their interests, the dialectic pretends to introduce movement (see this term), both in thought and in reality. But as Deleuze has shown, the dialectic
1 Proudhon, De /a Justice, 3:433-434. For a clarification of the enigmatic character of the essential role that Proudhon confers on Satan in the significance of the universe, see power of the outside.
2 Franck, Nietzsche and the Shadow of God.
Translator’s note: Sophie Rostopchine, the Comtesse de Ségur (1799-1874), was famous for
her moralistic children’s books, including Un Bon Petit Diable (A Good Little Devil, 1865).
Friedrich Nietzsche qtd. in Franck, Nietasche and the Shadow of God, 174.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Contradictions économiques, vol. 2 (Paris: Riviére, 1923), 253.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 352.
On this distinction and this etymology of the word “devil,” cf Gilbert Hottois, Simondon et
la philosophie de la “culture technique” (Brussels: De Boeck Université, 1993), 125.
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— whether it calls itself idealist or materialist, Hegelian or Marxist — is always a “false movement,” an “abstract logical movement,” that is to say a “media- tion” (see this term and direct action).' Unlike dialectical thought, libertarian thought rejects all mediation in favor of struggling directly and immediately, both in reality and in thought. In this way, from the perspective of thought, the libertarian project can recognize itself in the philosophical tendency of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard: “to put metaphysics in motion, in action...to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts” (see passage to the act). Indeed, as Deleuze writes, thinking — like art, revolt, and all emancipatory struggle — does not mean “propos[ing] a new representation of movement; represen- tation is already mediation. Rather, it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs for mediate representations” (see direct action).’ It is in this sense, following Déjacque this time, that thought and writing, too, can be replaced by propaganda by the deed (see this term): “This book is not written in ink at all; these pages are not leaves of paper at all. This book is made of steel folded in octavo and loaded with fulminate of ideas. It is an authoricidal projectile that I hurl in a thousand copies upon the pavement of the civilized. May its shards fly far and mortally pierce the ranks of the prejudiced. Let the old society crack down to its very foundations! This book is in no way a piece of writing; it is an action...[I]t is forged of heart and logic, of blood and fever. It is a cry of insurrection, a ringing of the alarm bell with the hammer of the idea, which resounds in the ear of the popular passions... This book is hatred, it is love [emphasis my own].”°
Differences (see contradictions, point of view, multiplicity, equality, and indis- cernibles). Following Leibniz (and his theory of indiscernibles), anarchism (from Stirner to Bakunin) affirms the absolute singularity of beings.* In the libertarian conception, the identity of a being is not defined in an external and objective way by its limits and the place that it occupies in space and time. This is a police perspective in which it is always a question of pinning things down, knowing where they are (address, nationality, age, profession), being able to “locate” them (see /ocalism) and thus to control them. Identity is inherent in each being, in its raison d étre (its reason for being itself rather than something
1 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 8. Ibid. (trans.: modifications my own).
3 Joseph Déjacque, A bas les chefs! (Paris: Champ libre, 1971), 86-87.
4 “Ownness...is my whole being and existence, it is I myself” (Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, trans. Steven T. Byington [New York: Benjamin R. Tucker, Publisher, 1907], 206).
70 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
else) and in the singular force that gives it existence at a given moment (see these terms).
Dignity (see equality, autonomy). The subjective perception of one’s own au- tonomy, of the equality of all beings, and of their right to do all that they are capable of:
Direct (see monad). Directness is opposed to mediation (see also direct action) and to representation (see this term). Libertarian thought is opposed to any notion of instrumentality, of neutral and objective tools and buffers entrusted with maintaining the bond between collective forces (see this term). For anar- chism, everything is a collective force, good or bad, transmitting oppression or emancipation. It is from the direct and immediate encounter (see this term) be- tween these forces and from the interior of what constitutes them that a world without domination can be born (see these terms).
Direct action (see propaganda by the deed, passage to the act, plastic force, and trans- duction). In a book on the work of the painter Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze explains how “painting directly attempts to release the presences beneath repre- sentation, beyond representation [see this term]. The color system itself is a system of direct action upon the nervous system.”' This is a practical and theoretical notion invented by revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism and a continuation of the earlier precedent of anarchist propaganda by the deed.’ In its libertarian sense, direct action embraces the totality of human activity in and relations with the world, from the social struggle to painting, from philosophy to manners. In a circumstantial way (but for anarchism, there are only circumstanc- es), the concept of direct action provides an essential key to understanding the nature of the libertarian project in the economic and social context of the early 20" century. Emile Pouget, one of the leaders of the French CGT? before 1914, gives it the following definition: “Direct Action, the manifestation of the work- ers’ strength and determination, shows itself in accordance with circumstance and setting, through acts that may well be very gentle, just as they might as easily be very violent. It is simply a matter of what is required. Thus, Direct Action has no specific form [emphasis my own].”*
1 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 45 (trans.: emphasis my own).
2 On the connection between direct action and propaganda by the deed, as well as their sig- nificance in the history of the anarchist movement, cf. Colson, “La science anarchiste.”
3 Translator’s note: the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail, or General Labor Confederation) was founded as a revolutionary syndicalist union confederation in 1895.
4 Emile Pouget, Direct Action, trans. Kate Sharpley Library (London: Kate Sharpley Library,
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As a plastic force (see this term) that opens to an infinity of possibilities — and therefore quite close to the concept of species activity in Nietzsche or Deleuze’s univocal being' — the experience that embodied the idea of direct action is closely related to the practice of syndicalism as conceived by anarcho- syndicalism. This is achieved through two broad operations, which take place successively or simultaneously:
1. First of all, a foundational operation. It is imperative that the revolu- tionary union free itself from the symbolic traps of law, representation, and negotiation through conflict and rupture (see this term). It must refuse to be the “intermediary,” the “chargé d'affaires of the workers’ interests.”* On the twofold plane of reality of the labor movement and of its relations to other social forces, it must refuse to be the “middle- man” who, by virtue of its status as “representative,” separates what it claims to connect, transforming the bond that it proposes into chains and hindrances, prohibiting any direct association or effective combi- nation of the “physical, intellectual, and natural forces” of the working class.* Refusing to unfold itself within the falsely rational, transpar- ent, and orderly theater of law and representation, the union must not only withdraw into the “irregularity,” the “diversity,” and the apparent “incoherence” of “working-class life,” but, adding fold upon fold, it must also include and implicate itself in its solitary intimacy as an “au- tonomous grouping.”* Because of this condition — the autonomy of its preserved intimacy and the concentration that it supposes — the union is capable, for its part, of perceiving and _focalizing (see this term), from
2003), 23 (trans.: modifications my own). Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 36 et passim.
2 Fernand Pelloutier, “Du réle des Bourses du travail,” in Jacques Julliard, Fernand Pelloutier et les origines du syndicalisme daction directe (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 41; and Pouget, Direct Action, 23.
3 Fernand Pelloutier, “Lorganisation corporative et l'anarchie,” in Julliard, Fernand Pelloutier, 407. A “bond-separation” that, following Guy Debord, Giorgio Agamben clarifies as fol- lows: “What hampers communication is communicability itself; humans are separated by what unites them” (Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 81). An affirmation that corre- sponds, almost word for word, to the declaration of the delegate from Séte to the interna- tional anarchist congress held in Geneva on August 13-14, 1882: “We are united because we are divided” (qtd. in George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements [Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986], 214).
4 Victor Griffuelhes, Le Syndicalisme révolutionnaire [1909] (Toulouse, France: CNT-AIT, 1977), 14.
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a certain point of view, a “working-class life that is too complex in its manifestations and details to be entrusted to the hands of inept lead- ers”! and also of “expressing” this “working-class life,” becoming the “tribune” and “echo” of the “worker’s intimate concerns.””
2. Asa “laboratory of economic struggles,” in Pelloutier’s words,’ a “living and vibrant agglomeration,” having “vitality” and “influence” corre- sponding to its “organism” for Pouget,* a new alchemical crucible of the social revolution for Griffuelhes,’ the union can then, on this con- dition, connect with and confront others, extend its singular intimacy to the totality of organized labor (other unions, cooperatives, various groupings, labor exchanges, trade or industrial federations, confedera- tions, internationals). By means of this association and confrontation, each union increases its own force, increases the intensity of its per- ception of working-class life and expands the acuity and richness of its point of view in order to finally “bring to light” the power of life thus created and accumulated, to “develop” it further, until the “supreme struggle that will comprise the revolutionary general strike.”®
Direct democracy. Direct democracy is opposed to representative democracy (see representation). It is generally identified with three principal procedures: 1) the sovereign general assembly gathering all the members of a given collectivity in order to decide on whatever concerns the life of this collectivity. This is done most often through common accord, the vote (with hand raised or by seeking the views of all present) serving to make known the points of view of those present and to enable a consensus; 2) revocable delegation, with any delegate subject to being replaced at any moment; 3) the imperative mandate, the dele- gate being unable to take decisions other than those that he has been mandated to take by the collectivity that delegated him, with any new problem needing to be submitted for the discussion of that collective. Paradoxically, because it is direct, libertarian democracy takes time. To function well, it requires of its par- ticipants a great number of other conditions (equality, affinity, trust, practical sense, etc.). The new means of communication (internet, mobile phones, pos- sibilities for small groups to coordinate themselves in an immediate way and
Victor Griffuelhes, L’Action syndicaliste [1908] (Paris: Editions syndicalistes, 1982), 15-16. Griffuelhes, Le Syndicalisme révolutionnaire, 29-30.
Ibid. 404.
Ibid. 8 and 4.
Ibid. 10.
Ibid. 30; Georges Yvetot, A.B.C. syndicaliste [1908] (Toulouse, France: CNT-AIT, s.d.), 39-40.
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at a distance, etc.) in part permit the resolution of those problems of slowness that pertained merely to the physical difficulties of meeting and coordinating. Thanks to the subversive appropriation [détournement] and judicious use of the new means of communication, the coordination of general assemblies, as well as the revocability and imperative mandates of delegates, can function in an almost immediate fashion, but one must not forget that the slowness of taking decisions also very frequently constitutes a requirement essential to libertarian practice.
Direction of the conscience (see chaplain and political commissar). An old Christian practice in which each being is supposed to subject its acts, thoughts, intentions, and most intimate perceptions and internal movements to the judgment of an external authority that, in the name of transcendent norms, is tasked with knowing, evaluating, and correcting this being, subjecting its pow- er to an external order. This Christian model for the subjection of collective forces found wide use in the practices and conceptions of Marxist revolution- ary movements. It is deeply inscribed in the cultures that are called Western, even in certain currents that claim to belong to the libertarian movement (see rendering of accounts).
Disassociation (see association).
Discipline (self-discipline). A constraint (see this term) that aims to subject col- lective beings to an order external to that which constitutes them. Discipline can be internalized by these beings (we then call it “self-discipline”), but only by disabling them, rendering them incapable of the movements that their na- ture makes possible — as when one says that someone has a stick up his ass [#/ a avalé un parapluie).
Domination. The composition of collective forces in which certain forces im- pose their own will on others, separating them from what they are capable of, subjecting them to a general order in which they are separated from themselves (see this term). Anarchism opposes all domination to the extent that it pro- poses a composition of free and autonomous forces (see autonomy) enabled to do all that they are capable of, a composition of forces that are all the more powerful because they refuse any negativity, any distortion of possibilities, any capture or cooptation of potential forces. This is why anarchism is close to the Deleuzean Spinoza: “But now it is a question of knowing whether relations (and which ones?) can compound directly [see direct] to form a new, more ‘extensive’ relation, or whether capacities can compound directly to constitute a more ‘intense’ capacity or power. It is no longer a matter of utilizations or
74 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
captures, but of sociabilities and communities.”’ How can collective forces compose themselves so as to form a superior collective force without damaging or oppressing some of them, respecting and preserving the totality of the pow- er that each contains? Such is the question that anarchism poses and attempts to answer.
Dualism (see monism).
Duty of memory (see eternal return).
1 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 126.
Economy (see statistics and neoliberals). References to the economy play a large part in libertarian discourse and thought, even, at times, decked out in its most mathematicized trappings: in the writings of Proudhon, for example, but also more generally in the polemical manner in which libertarian workers’ move- ments have always striven to resist the traps of politics, the State, morality, and religion. The adversaries of the libertarian movement have not missed the op- portunity to point out (not without reason) that this importance given to eco- nomics was not necessarily accompanied by a great competence on their part within this academic discipline, as can be seen in the coarse mockery to which Marx subjects Proudhon’s work, The System of Economical Contradictions.’ Indeed, in its will to recompose the totality of that which exists — as in the radicality of its critique — anarchism refuses to treat economics as a separate domain and science, detached from other aspects of life, through which eman- cipatory critique is obliged to pass in order to make its proposals credible. As the totality of this brief lexicon should make clear, anarchism is foreign to any notion of a program or proposals (see anarchy, exterior/interior, entelechy, etc.), as well as to any demand for it to justify itself before the courts of the existing order. The separation and hypervalorization of the economy — particularly in its mathematical representations, with their ambitions far exceeding their abil- ity to account for reality — constitute for libertarian thought the clearest sign of an oppressive and reductive order, founded on domination, the distortion and repression of our capacities, paid for by an infinity of suffering, waste, and loss of power. This can be seen, if we are willing to see it, in our own experiences and through our relations with others.
1 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847. 75
76 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
Effectiveness/efficiency [efficacité] (see ends/means, exterior, given moment, and utilitarianism). A utilitarian and party-political concept that defines the value of a being or an action with respect to an objective or an interest external to this being or this action. Anarchism is often accused of being ineffectual, but this is done in ignorance of the reasons for this apparent weakness, from the myopic and self-serving point of view of the codes and ledgers of the very order that anarchism aspires to transform from bottom to top. In opposition to the effectiveness of beings or their mechanical and external instrumentaliza- tion, anarchism proposes the consideration of that which constitutes beings by themselves and for themselves at a given moment and in a given situation (see these terms). In libertarian thought, the encounter and association between two beings can never be defined in an external way. It may be that one of them integrates a dimension of the other into its own plans and interests (slave and master, employee and company, people and leaders, etc.). Or it may be that the association of both takes its meaning from the beneficial effects that they bring to a third party (for example, the alliance of the petite bourgeoisie and the working class as the conjunctural condition of the Communist Party’s rise to power during the Spanish Civil War).
In opposition to tactical and strategic association defined by separate or external interests (the enemies of my enemies are my friends), anarchism pro- poses the affinitary encounter founded on an intimate and internal agreement (see these terms) — an agreement able to modify the nature of the associated beings and to increase their power.
Ego (see body and person). A subjective illusion, which masks the great diversity of the forces and possibilities that constitute us, thereby preventing us from giving birth to other subjectivities endowed with more power and thus more freedom (see these terms).
Elan vital (see vital/vitalism).
Emancipation (affirmation) (see anti-speciesism). In the libertarian project, eman- cipation is always considered in the form of an affirmation: an affirmation of radically different relations, of other modes of being that enable a more intense and freer life. The desire and will for emancipation often spring from a past or present situation or condition of oppression and domination. This can be a situation experienced negatively as unbearable or unacceptable, a condition (as a “slave,” “employee,” “housewife,” “soldier,” “child” subjected to the au- thority of his/her parents, etc.) in which the forces and identities capable of aspiring to another life are forged. These potentially emancipatory forces are thus thrice characterized by negativity and dependency with respect to domi- nation: 1) through the oppression they endure, of which they are products; 2)
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through their own struggles, which are always in danger of being confined to a mere refusal of oppression; 3) through the means (see this term) by which they undertake this struggle, generally molded and dictated by the demands of the struggle and, ultimately, by the enemy that is to be fought and destroyed. Thus this easily verifiable historical consequence: the eternally repeated victory of an oppression that, even in the event of an apparent victory by the oppressed, immediately returns via the means and identities that the oppressed have ad- opted in order to win. Thus the central question of the libertarian project, a question that is at once theoretical and practical: how do we transform this situation of a threefold dependence on the dominant into one of affirmative, autonomous forces, masters of that which constitutes them? How can the col- lective beings produced by domination transform themselves into subjects of emancipation? How can the means of struggle be made simultaneously into the ends of this struggle? (See entelechy and the fiercely debated question of whether “revolutionary unions” are merely a means of struggle or the adminis- trative organs of the society that they aspire to give birth to; the question of the militarization of the militias in Spain; the frequently misunderstood anarchist refusal of revolutionary “discipline,” hierarchical effectiveness, and, finally, the State, which always ends up being presented as the surest and most effective means of emancipating those whom it oppresses.) The libertarian movement believes in neither the mysteries and magic tricks of the dialectic nor divine providence (even dressed in the scientistic rags of “historical materialism”). From this point of view, liberation struggles are not automatically endowed with an emancipatory quality. Each must be evaluated individually, practically, in every last detail of that which constitutes them: in terms of the means that they employ, in terms of the will that animates them, and in terms of their capacity to affirm, from this moment forward, another world, opposed to all oppression and domination, present and future. It is, among other things, because it federates different and contradictory forces, each acting on their own plane of reality, that the libertarian movement can escape the traps of the relations belonging to each form of domination, relations produced by this very domination.
Encounters (see association, event, and situation).
Ends/means (see entelechy). Anarchism refuses the utilitarian and Machiavellian distinction between ends and means (the “ideal” end justifying the most re- pugnant or coercive means). In particular, it refuses the kind of mastery over time that this distinction presupposes (a long-term strategy operating through a series of manipulations and maneuvers in the short and middle terms). For libertarian thought and practice, the end is necessarily contained in the means. The final objective is entirely contained in the present moment. Not only does
78 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
this standpoint imply, historically, the anarchist refusal of the so-called “dicta- torship of the proletariat” through which the Party-State claimed to pave the way to the future happiness of the people at the price of the worst kinds of sub- jection. This standpoint also informs the most immediate militant practices (e.g., revocable delegation and the imperative mandate given to delegates [see direct democracy)). It implies, through these immediate practices, the refusal of what has long been the strategy of Marxism.
Energy (see tension). A term borrowed from physics that serves, in the revolu- tionary syndicalist and anarcho-syndicalist vocabulary, to define the quantity of force at the disposal of a collective being (see this term). This energy, the quantity of which varies according to the being in question, is not given once and for all. It depends on the nature of the composition of the being under consideration and its relations with other beings. The revolutionary syndicalist and anarcho-syndi- calist appeal to “energy” is a call to continually recompose the forces constitutive of collective beings (“individuals,” tradecrafts, unions, union federations) in a different way, to implicate them in a new arrangement (see this term) that is more powerful and less dependent on others (see autonomy), capable, as Deleuze explains, of “transcend[ing] its limits in going to the limit of its capacities.”!
Entelechy (see project, collective reason). An old philosophical concept, recu- perated by Leibniz and then by Proudhon (see collective reason), which makes it possible in particular to think the relationship between collective force, free- dom, and reason (see these terms).* As employed by Aristotle and then by the Scholastics, “entelechy” traditionally indicated a being’s state of completion (and thus of perfection). In this conception, it is the “goal” of the movement, like a “final cause,” that permits a passage from the “power” to do something to the “act” of doing it. In place of this static succession of “states,” in which the entelechy would designate the final state, Leibniz posits a dynamic model of movement. In his work, the term “entelechy” indicates a “tendency,” present from the beginning, that leads each being — through a process of “dilation” or “unfolding” — to discover what it can do, that which it has contained from the beginning of its constitution. This excludes all “finalism.” The “goal” (or “end”) is not what one tends toward, in an external fashion, as an external purpose, posterior to our action, and as a function of the illusions of conscious- ness, logic, or reason. Rather it is that which makes us act, prior to it, as will and desire, in the deepest and most obscure part of ourselves, according to the arrangement that constitutes us at a given moment.°
1 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 37 (trans.: modifications my own). 2 Proudhon, De la Justice, 3:267.
3 On the concept of entelechy in Leibniz, cf “De philosophiae emendatione et notione
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Entity. Concept used by Alfred North Whitehead, synonymous with thing and with being (see these terms).
Equality (see also autonomy, differences, base, hierarchy, limits, and balancing of forces). Libertarian equality is synonymous with autonomy, freedom, and bal- ancing. It has nothing in common with the abstract legal equality of democracy and human rights, which, under the guise of an abstract ideal, justifies all kinds of real hierarchy, domination, and inequality (as demonstrated by the machinations of its promoters). Nor does it have anything to do with the bar- racks equality (quite historically real) of authoritarian socialism, in which the vast majority of people, dominated by party leaders and State bureaucrats, are subjected to conformism and obedience. Against these false equalities, either illusory or imposed from the outside, anarchism affirms differences (see this term), all differences, the absolute singularity of each being in terms of that which constitutes it at a given moment (see indiscernibles). Anarchist equality is not an equality of measurement, an equality imposed from the outside. On the contrary, it is an equality based on the anarchy of beings, on their absolute autonomy, on the possibility for each of them to go to the limits of the aspira- tions, desires, and qualities of which it is capable at a given moment, according to the principle that “the smallest becomes equivalent to the largest once it is not separated from its own capacities” (see balancing of forces).' In this sense, libertarian equality is synonymous with autonomy and freedom. This requires libertarian forces to be capable of composing a world based on this autonomy and this freedom, on the refusal of any one being’s submission to another, on the unquestioned value of every revolt, whatever it may be, and on the im- mediate solidarity that this revolt evokes among those who are truly inspired, through that which constitutes them at a given moment, by this kind of free- dom (see these terms).
Eternal Return (see chaos, past, given moment, and power of the outside). An obscure and controversial concept within Nietzsche, but one that is important to understanding the nature of the libertarian project and, more particular- ly, its relation to time and history. The anarchist movement has often been reproached for its untimely character, its refusal of historical laws and deter- minations, of necessary stages. “We want everything, right now!” Such could
substantiae,” Opuscula philosophica selecta, qtd. in Gilles Chatelet, Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, trans. Robert Shore and Muriel Zagha (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 23; and Emile Boutroux, “La Philosophie de Leibniz,” in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, La Monadologie (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1991), 133n1 and 254-255.
1 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 37 (trans.: modifications my own).
80 A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
be the motto of the libertarian movement in the eyes of its blinder detractors with regard to its most intense moments of affirmation: from the general strike of the end of the 19" century to May ’68, including, in a more tragic way, the events of Munich in 1919, the Russian and Spanish revolutions, or the procla- mation of libertarian communism in a certain number of Andalusian villages during the winter of 1932. At times, it might appear that anarchism endorses the idea of progress, that illusion born in the 19" century, a casualty of the di- sasters of the following century. But in its practices as well as in the imaginary that accompanies them, anarchism’s relation to time has always been radically different from that of all “progressivisms,” whether revolutionary or bourgeois, material or moral. As the libertarian interpretation of Spinoza demonstrates, anarchism is foreign to a linear conception of time. The time to which it refers and that defines it is a multiple and qualitative time that has to do with the duration of beings, with that “reality of enduring things” of which Bernard Rousset speaks, and with the relations of composition, recomposition, and decomposition that increase, decrease, or destroy these existing things’ power to act.’ Here, the libertarian interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return helps to clarify the originality of the anarchist relation to duration and the order of things.
In their blindness regarding Nietzsche, Karl Léwith and, before him, Otto Weininger undoubtedly best illuminate the libertarian significance of the eter- nal return, albeit negatively and in spite of themselves.* What does Nietzsche add to the ancient and mythical conception of cyclical time?, wonders Léwith. Nothing, he concludes, if not an affirmation that is terrible within the context of modernity, since it amounts to a refusal of the irreversible and inescapable time bequeathed by Christianity. Thus, it is a refusal of the past and the future, the beginning and the end, a refusal of waiting and hoping, of the “sense” of history (in the double “sense” of the word “sense” [i.e., “meaning” and “direc- tion”]). For this reason, it is a refusal of all change, all progress, all possibility of anything new. “The teaching of the eternal return” as the repetition of the identical and as “the most extreme form of nihilism”:’ such is the interpretation suggested by Léwith and Weininger, an interpretation whose sole and distant libertarian echo would be the punk “no future” of the ’70s and ’80s. Everything
1 Cf Bernard Rousset, “Le réalisme spinoziste de la durée,” in L’Espace et le temps (Paris: Vrin, 1991), 176 et passim, and Colson, “Anarchist Readings of Spinoza.”
2 Karl Lowith, Metzsches Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). Otto Weininger (1880-1908). Léwith refers mainly to two of Weininger’s works: Sex and Character, trans. Ladislaus Léb (London: W. Heinemann, 1906) (German edition 1903) and On Last Things, trans. Steven Burns (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001) (German edition 1904).
3 Léwith, Nietzsches Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, 115.
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returns, in the manner of stars and universes that die and are reborn, without goal or completion. For Léwith’s Nietzsche, in the face of an absurd, alien world that utterly penetrates it (see power of the outside), the human being, crushed by the blind power of a nature indifferent to its own existence, would have to content itself with accepting its destiny. This would mean saying yes to this indifference and absurdity and thereby breaking with the lie of rationality and meaning with which human beings had so long aspired to invest their life, breaking definitively with the frustrations and illusions of humanism: the illusions of a properly human history capable of dominating the cosmos by means of religion, morals, science, and technology, of becoming its center, of humanizing it and giving it a meaning.
Quite incorrectly, Lowith and Weininger thus reproach Nietzsche and his conception of the eternal return with three things: 1) his naturalism and refusal to distinguish between humanity and nature, to recognize the transcendent and symbolic dimension of a human being created and interpellated by a God to whom humanity appeals that he may enter the world and pledge it to the story of its salvation; 2) his fatalism and refusal of free will, this freedom that obliges the human being to be responsible for his acts (see this term and guilty party) and to render an account of himself before his creator, before the courts, or before