Communism After Deleuze: (Deleuze and Guattari Encounters)

This new reading of Gilles Deleuze forges a link between his early and later works by decoding his hidden agenda for communism. Encoded in the idea of 'the Third World', Deleuze used his concept of communism as a bulwark against fascist politics and the liberal political economy. Inspired by May 68 and its aftermath, these concealed interpretations of Marx are now tacitly forgotten but can unlock a deeper understanding of Deleuze's political project. Often regarded as an apolitical philosopher, the challenges that Deleuze mounted to structuralism are easy to overlook. By reinvigorating the communist aspect of his political project and linking his ideas to Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee reveals Deleuze's objective: to rescue Marxism from the dogmatic status quo and revive its political agendas. This major undertaking situates his ideas alongside and sets out a new framework for reading the significance of Marxist thought in postwar France. Ultimately, this new understanding of Deleuze's critique of global capitalism opens up his vision of materialistic politics as a means of shaping the people and the proletariat of the future.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Deleuze and Minor Communism 2. Deleuze and Structuralism 3. From Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus 4. Faciality, Ritournelle, and the Urstaat 5. Deleuze's unwritten Marx 6. Conclusion: How Do We Recognise Deleuze's Communism?

About the Author :
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a professor of cultural studies at the School of Global Communication and a founding director of the Center for Technology in Humanities at Kyung Hee University, Korea.

Review :
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee casts the much-debated issue of Deleuze's proposed book on Marx in a completely new light. His rich and wide-ranging discussion develops the audacious hypothesis that Deleuze's Marx book already exists in virtual form, implicit in the series of his philosophical encounters with post-war French Marxism. Lee identifies the many points at which Deleuze departs from the Marxism of his time, in both its official and its oppositional (Althusserian) varieties, while remaining within its conceptual and aspirational field. He argues that, insofar as it is aligned with 'becoming-revolutionary' and committed to bringing about new earths and new peoples, Deleuze's conception of philosophy bears witness to another, minoritarian Idea of communism. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the political dimension of Deleuze's philosophy. In this highly anticipated exploration of Deleuze's engagement with Marx, Marxism, and the “missing people” of today's Global South, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee delivers a compelling reinterpretation of communism for the 21st century. At a moment when the world is once again grappling with the resurgence of fascism, authoritarianism, and ressentiment, Lee carefully reconstructs what Deleuze called the "Grandeur of Marx" for our current reality. Drawing not only on Deleuze's own work and his collaborations with Guattari, but also on the legacies of Althusser, Balibar, and Glissant, Lee offers a timely and revitalizing Deleuzian Marxism that all of us are desperately in need of. An indispensable book not only for those who are interested in Deleuze, not only for those who sense the urge for a revival of Communism, but also and above all for those who want to get a deeper insight into the global mess we are in today. In short, it is a book for all those who want to THINK. - In his construction of a minor Red Deleuze and Guattari, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee resurrects the revolutionary impetus of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical project vis-à-vis a molecular Marxism and a polymorphic Third World. The result is a radical recasting of Deleuze and Guattari's own emphasis on politics as preceding being. In this incisive and committed study Alex Taek-Gwang Lee invites us to rethink the political implications of Deleuze's philosophy as a way to reinvigorate the idea of communism. In his new reading Deleuze's heretic take on Marx – conditioned by the dismal experience of state socialisms, the disillusionment of the aftermath of May '68 and an engagement with Third World movements – offers new perspectives of a “minor communism” that could circumvent the impasses of the traditional leftist pieties. It is well known that Deleuze, at the end of his life, was planning to write a book on Marx's greatness, and the present book gives us an inspiring idea of what this unwritten book may have looked like – not as a reconstruction of a past project but as an opening for the future.