What is Deleuzean Political Philosophy?

Was Deleuze a political philosopher or does his work, including the books coauthored with Guattari, offer a Deleuzian political philosophy? Deleuze himself clearly thought so. In a 1990 interview with Antonio Negri, “Control and Becoming,” he commented that “Anti-Oedipus was from beginning to end a work of political philosophy” (Deleuze 1990, 230; 1994, 170). Others disagree. A recent survey of the secondary literature by Jeremy Gilbert identifies two recent books which answer these questions with a resounding “No”: Philippe Mengue’s Deleuze et la question de la democratie (2003) and Peter Hallward’s Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (2006). In fact, both Mengue and Hallward waver between denying that Deleuze is a political philosopher and asserting that he is the wrong kind of political philosopher. Gilbert summarises their respective conclusions in the following terms: “Deleuze is a mystic, a nostalgist for elitist modes of avant-gardism which have no purchase on the present, at best an implicit conservative whose romanticism leaves no scope for rational calculation or collective action” (Gilbert 2010, 10).