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Abstract
Deleuze's political philosophy underwent a marked change towards the end of his life. He embraced Foucault's conception of the nature of power in modern societies as a form of bio-power focused on control rather than extraction. This raises the question : what new forms of resistance are possible and necessary? Deleuze's answer is that Melville's Bartleby provides us with a model. The literary persona of the Idiot, as found in Dostoyevsky and Melville, represents a space of indetermination which amounts to the actualization of virtual potentiality and the condition of the emergence of an event. The political task is then to find ways of creating such spaces in modern democratic societies of control.
This article is about the last political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. I argue that there is an original and irreducible deleuzian political thought which appears at the end of his life. This change is clearly present in his theory of societies of control, with the political consequences this implies. These consequences are not often noticed because they run counter to what is expected from his so-called 'leftist' conception, and in general what to we understand by 'Deleuzism'.
The idea of control society is linked to Foucault. Deleuze wrote that this form of society is 'a new monster' that 'Foucault recognizes as being our near future'.1 Deleuze emphasizes the Foucauldian concept of 'bio-power' heading towards control. In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of Foucault and assumes the theoretical advance that the latter has proposed. In this way, Deleuze helps us to escape from a narrow and mean vision of capitalism. He opens up the possibility of a liberal reading of his own work. This is my own position, which I would like to develop further in what follows
1. Foucault and Control
The main goal of control government is to organise production, to manage life and not to decide for or against death, as does the power of sovereignty.2 Contrary to the repressive hypothesis, the power of control cannot be reduced to a negative mechanism, it does not consist in saying no, in declaring what is forbidden. Instead of withdrawing a part of the production or drawing blood, control implies a positive mechanism that aims to protect life, increase...