'Not in my name': Deleuze, Zapatismo and the critique of representation

Parliamentary Affairs

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 138-154

  Tormey, Simon ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 30344465021     PISSN: 00312290     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pa/gsj001     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. Versions of this paper have been read at the ECPR workshop on 'Representation' held in Edinburgh in March 2003, at the Nottingham Political Theory Workshop in April 2003 and 'Intensities' held at Trent University, Ontario in April 2004. I would like to thank the participants of each for their many comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Andy Robinson, David Stevens, Todd May, and three anonymous referees for their detailed comments on earlier drafts.
2. The primary sources for this paper in relation to the Zapatistas are Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos's writings, many of which are collected in Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, edited by Juana Ponce de León, Serpent's Tail, 2001.
3. A comprehensive digest of Marcos's communiqués - and those of the Zapatistas generally - is held on the Struggle website (http://www.struggle.ws/mexico.html).
4. See also J. Holloway and E. Pelaez, Zapatistal Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, Pluto, 1998
5. and G. Collier, Bastal Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, Food First Books, 1999.
6. See for example W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 131-51;
7. E. Laclau Emancipation(s), Verso, 84-106;
8. A. Phillips, 'Dealing with Difference: A Politics of Ideas or a Politics of Presence', Constellations, March 1994, pp. 74-91;
9. I. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, pp. 163-73.
10. Feminist theory is a noteworthy exception. See in particular the work of Dorothea Olkowski, Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti. Difference and Repetition is directly invoked in for example
11. D. Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, University of California Press, 1999.
12. Interest in Difference and Repetition has picked up markedly in Anglophone philosophy.
13. See for example K. Ansell-Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze, Routledge, 1999
14. and J. Williams, Gilles Deleuze's 'Difference and Repetition': A Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
15. Examples of 'suggestive' treatments of Deleuze's politics include W. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, University of Minnesota Press, 1996;
16. P. Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, Sage, 1996;
17. P. Patton, Deleuze and the Political, Routledge, 2000;
18. J. Protevi, Political Physics, Athlone, 2001;
19. and N. Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics, Routledge, 2004.
20. See also T. May, The Political Philosophy of Post-Structuralist Anarchism, Penn State University Press, 1994
21. and S. Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, Lexington Books 2001, both of which seek to situate Deleuze and Guattari's work in relation to anarchism and libertarian work. As is all too evident, Deleuze suffers like few other thinkers from the reductive tendency of contemporary scholarship to seek to contain through 'pigeonholing'. For Marxists he is an irredeemably 'postmodernist' thinker; for post-structuralists he is an 'essentialist' with an unhealthy taste for ontological and thus metaphysical theorising.
22. L. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, Cornell University Press, 1985.
23. G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Continuum, 1994, pp. 39-41.
24. Difference and Repetition, p. xx.
25. Difference and Repetition, pp. 50-60.
26. Difference and Repetition, p. 41.
27. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone, 1988, pp. 105-6.
28. A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 291-5.
29. A Thousand Plateaus, p. 106.
30. Difference and Repetition, pp. 41-2.
31. A Thousand Plateaus, p. 291, pp. 469-71.
32. We can note here that as a reading of Nietzsche's concept of the noble, Deleuze's version is contested. See, for example, I. Donaldson, 'Hierarchy and Ontological Dualism: Rethinking Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche for Political Philosophy', History of Political Thought, winter 2002, pp. 654-69. His claim is that Deleuze writes out the hierarchical element of Nietzsche's thought in the service of a 'democratic' and egalitarian reading. All we have space to note here is that Deleuze is not a democrat and did not claim to be one. Similarly, the egalitarianism on offer concerns equality as 'univocity', not as a distributive or political principle of the sort associated with the normative political theorising.
33. See Laclau Emancipation(s), chapter two.
34. T. Hobbes, Leviathan, Norton, 1997, pp. 96-7;
35. J.S. Mill, 'Considerations on Representative Government' in J.S. Mill, Three Essays, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 291;
36. see also J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edn, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 199-200.
37. A Thousand Plateaus, p. 471.
38. Protevi, Political Physics, p. 192.
39. Difference and Repetition, p. 36.
40. A Thousand Plateaus, p. 471.
41. One occasionally comes across statements such as: 'The Zapatista National Liberation Army will recognize the National Democratic Convention as the authentic representative of the interests of the Mexican people in their transition to democracy.' 'Second Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle' in Marcos, Our Word is our Weapon, p. 49 [emphasis added].
42. The Irish Mexico Group's pamphlet Chiapas Revealed contains a number of first hand accounts of the assemblies. It can be accessed at: http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/pdf/revealedl.html.
43. Marcos, Our Word is Our Weapon, p. 80.
44. This sentiment in which Marcos/Zapatismo is seen as a 'mirror' is forcibly expressed in the 'Opening remarks at the First Intercontinental Encuentro for humanity and against neoliberalism' in Our Word is Our Weapon, pp. 101-6.
45. Difference and Repetition, p. 53.
46. Marcos, Our Word is Our Weapon, p. 440.
47. Marcos, Our Word is Our Weapon, p. 114.
48. Marcos, Our Word is Our Weapon, p. 46.