'To Believe In This World As It Is': Immanence and the Quest for Political Activism

Abstract

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari make the claim that ‘[i]t may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion.’ What are we to make of such a calling? The article explicates why and in what sense this statement is of exemplary significance both for an appropriate understanding of Deleuze’s political thought and for a most timely conceptualization of politics in a world so clearly defined by immanence, and nothing but immanence. I exemplify that Deleuze’s rigorously constructive approach to the world is not beyond politics as some recent readings (e.g. Badiou/Hallward) declare. Rather, we have to learn that in Deleuze and Guattari’s demand of a ‘belief in this world’, the political intersects with the dimension of the ethical so that our understanding of both become transformed. Only after this ‘empiricist conversion’ can we truly think of a Deleuzean politics that does justice to a plane of immanence ‘immanent only to itself’.