I. Hegel and Rousseau’s immanence of the state

Rousseau was the first thinker to delimit the bourgeois, a form of subjectivity particular to modern society. But it was Hegel who first assigned to the bourgeois a sphere of life in the form of civil society. Both thinkers were also confronted with the question of how to transform the bourgeois into the citizen, and how to develop a true state out of the state of war which the bourgeois inhabits. Where they differ is how they resolve this problem of the passage from individual to political freedom.

For Rousseau, the bourgeois represents an unfortunate product of modernity. The bourgeois is not whole because he constantly floats between the two worlds of nature and society. In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau describes the process of socialization as a trap in which natural man acquires more needs than nature provides him (DI: 167).Footnote ¹ The acquisition of needs results from mutual comparison between individual members of society. These excess needs are constantly multiplied by amour-propre, deforming natural passions and placing our will into relationships of dependence on other private wills. The modern world of the bourgeois represents the pinnacle of this development, since we are as much dependent on other wills to satisfy our increased needs as we are antagonistic to them. The solution to this problem is to abolish our amphibious existence and establish immanence.Footnote ²

The immanence of social life is presented in The Social Contract. Rousseau argues there for an aliénation totale of life into the community. In order to achieve this the bourgeois should ‘unreservedly’ renounce all his natural rights and give himself completely (SC: 55) to the community by submitting to the ‘supreme direction of the general will’ (EE: 460). This submission would ‘substitute law for man’ as private wills, which in turn would stabilize needs in a state of equality of legislation and subjection (EE: 85). What a human being needs under the general will would be relative to what other individuals as equal citizens need. Dependence on self-imposed law would replace ‘dependence on men’ (85) as private wills, bringing duty and passions into accord.

Sparta is for Rousseau the ideal community because it regulated desire by expelling excess needs, binding it to the demands of the life of the state. The Spartan mother who scolds her slave when told that her sons have died in battle represents a product of successful socialization. ‘“Base slave, did I ask you that?” “We won the victory.” The mother runs to the temple and gives thanks to the gods. This is the female citizen’, writes Rousseau (EE: 40), a being that passionately puts her sons as citizens before her sons as members of the family.

However, Rousseau was aware that there were many obstacles to achieving state-instituted immanence in modernity. The world he admired was dead. Hegel also knew this. The reason why Sparta and other such communities of antiquity could sustain themselves was because the will—which plays a central role in Rousseau’s republic—could not freely manifest itself. Instead, as Hegel argues, the will was from the outset determined to what society prescribed to it.

Even the ‘beautiful democracy’ of Athens, Hegel writes, still looked for criteria for its decisions in objective references such as oracles or the flight of birds (PR: §279A, 321). Modernity, on the other hand, knows that all decisions flow from the free will. If this is the starting point of modernity, then the passage to a republic modelled on ancient principles will necessarily appear problematic. As Patrick Riley points out, Rousseau ‘got himself into a paradox of insisting on the willing of the essentially non-voluntaristic politics characteristic of antiquity’ (Riley Reference Riley1970: 87). The general will, in other words, is a paradoxical concept. But although there is a paradox inherent in the concept, Hegel does not abandon it.

For Rousseau, the creation of the citizen necessitates the disappearance of the bourgeois, who is amphibious by definition. As opposed to this, Hegel seeks to bring a unity to the two subjectivities in which both the bourgeois and the citizen will be preserved. This means that the spheres that the two subjectivities occupy have to be brought together. Before the emergence of the republic, man, for Rousseau, occupies a state of war comparable to Hobbes’s war of all against all (SC: 54). This state is characterized by the primacy of passions and individual desires colliding against each other. The passage from the state of war into republican life takes place, as Deleuze/Guattari point out, at a ‘zero hour’ (TP: 81). There is no development, but a shift from one to the other dimension. What private man takes away from nature are his passions and what he gains in the state are duties, but the question of how passions can be made to submit to the guidance of the general will remains insufficiently resolved in The Social Contract. This is where the infamous compulsion ‘by the whole body’ often comes into play (SC: 58). In a hypothetical situation in which 10,000 individuals were virtuous enough independently to acknowledge the general will as their own, such compulsion would be no different from any other predicated on a contract—it would protect the integrity of the body effectuated by it. But because, as Hegel argues, we must proceed from ‘what is’ (PR: Preface 21), the state of war populated by the bourgeois cannot be cancelled out in order to posit a ‘state as it ought to be’. This ought would make compulsion antagonistic to what is and therefore to the formation of Rousseau’s republic itself. Compulsion would take on a form that would go against the idea of passionate engagement with the community. In Hegel’s case, the presupposition of what is necessitates that the gap between passions and the state be bridged by appropriating the ‘state of nature’, i.e., the state of war, into the political state. The result of this appropriation of war is civil society as a distinct sphere within Hegel’s ethical life. The second step after this appropriation takes place is to make the general will a logical development of the state of war.

Civil society, writes Hegel, at first ‘affords a spectacle of extravagance and misery as well as of the physical and ethical corruption common to both’ (PR: §185, 222). This echoes the corruption described in the Discourse on Inequality, which results from passions and excess needs colliding against each other. Hegel follows Rousseau in his observation that this state creates relations of mutual dependence and repulsion. The exploded drive for recognition leads to a general system of domination and subjection that at first has no other trajectory but coercion and external necessity. The only commonality emerging at this point is an abstract one, burdened with a contradiction between individual freedom and bondage to others. However, in distinction to Rousseau, Hegel also recognizes an internal positive quality in this corrupting and destructive state. The secret to this positivity lies in the ‘liberating’ role of corruption caused by passions. What passions and excess need to corrupt are pre-existing heteronomous relationships.

Rousseau and Hegel are in agreement that the multiplication and diversification of needs change our social being, e.g., our taste, capacity for judgement or our independent opinion. But these transformations for Hegel also presuppose what is or pre-given, heteronomous relationships that Rousseau either ignores (since his state appears as an original, a-historical creation) or, when not ignoring, has to ‘compel’ in order to achieve political socialization.

An example is the difference in how Rousseau and Hegel treat the family in relation to the state. Whereas for Rousseau, political socialization would have to reorganize in some degree the natural relations in the family,Footnote ³ for Hegel the family is disorganized through civil society, which ‘intervenes between the family and the state’ (PR: §182A, 220). With the appearance of civil society ‘the immediate unity of the family has disintegrated into a plurality’ (§184A, 221), releasing it from economic pressures that perpetuate heteronomous relationships between family members (e.g., the son must not inherit the father’s trade), individualizing them both. Before father and son enter into a relationship as two members of the state, they first step into a relationship as two members of civil society. At the same time, since the family is freed from economic and political pressures it can now become organized around its own principle of freedom—love—instead of marriage being ‘made a means to other ends’ (§162A, 202). In this sense, the contradiction present in the concept of the general will—that it contains both an element of manifest free will as well as the demand to will the universal—has its source in the very object of Rousseau’s critique—civil society. The contradiction is contained in the fact that civil society brings us into the position of viewing ourselves as independent individuals, endowed with a free will, but also conscious of the fact that our individuality is dependent on a whole that transcends our individual selves. The split between individuality and universality effected at the level of civil society brings about this self-consciousness that would remain obscured in the family (§184A, 221). For example, the passion of love becomes a principle of ethical life only when individuals become independent from their families and unburdened by the necessity to prolong the blood line or build alliances. At the same time, this passion finds its own self-limitation in the other in whom I seek validity and with whom I create a whole larger than myself (§158, 199). Civil society therefore acts as an abstract and imperfect general will, as ‘all-round interdependence’, or an ‘external state’ and ‘the state of necessity’ (§183, 221), as a result of which it provides for a developmental passage to the general will proper. Consequently, the dependence between individual wills created in mutual recognition should not be immediately framed as a dependence on law, since it is through free-flow mutual recognition that we become capable of imposing a law on ourselves. Mutual dependence of the bourgeois should lead into the dependence on law. Before the general will appears in its purity, passions must first emerge as a destructive and corrupting element, and civil society where ‘waves of all passions surge forth’ (§182A, 221) must intervene in its disorganizing function in order to ‘clear out’ natural contingency and prepare the stage for aliénation totale. This is consistent with Hegel’s general understanding of the passions’ internal logic: ‘Thus the passions of men are gratified; they develop themselves and their aims in accordance with their natural tendencies, and build up the edifice of human society; thus fortifying a position for Right and Order against themselves’ (Hegel Reference Hegel2001: 42) . But Hegel is aware that when left to their own devices passions would yet again lead us into caprice and heteronomy. They ‘respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them …’ (Hegel Reference Hegel2001: 34). The social mechanisms of recognition present in the family and civil society would break down under the pressure of the disorganizing principle of freedom if not for their sublation into the state.

The state-form of mutual recognition takes place through the passage of love and self-interested individuality into what Hegel calls political disposition, the habitual self-determination through which I recognize that all my passions can be preserved only in so far as they are politically articulated. Because passions must be released in their particular aims and goals, the general will must contain them. But since passions can function in society only when they are limited by the universal, they themselves seek validity and recognition in the general will. I do not only will as a citizen in immediacy, directly willing my individual form of the citizen and the common that sustains it. Instead I will a multitude of social relations engendered through my individuality before sublating my world in the state. All of these forms of willing are predicated on the fact that I know ‘that my substantial and particular interest is preserved and contained in the interest and end of an other (in this case, the state)’ (PR: §268, 288). In this sense, the general will becomes the condition of my family and bourgeois interests because it politically articulates and structures my passions. At the same time the general will becomes an end in itself because these particular interests cannot be preserved without their sacrifice to negativity (§324, 360). Political disposition is my own subconscious and conscious knowledge of that fact.

Therefore, the destructive tendencies that mutual recognition engenders must be accorded their proper place within the state in order for the state itself to appear. The passions of the bourgeois must be released in their excessiveness in order for the state to negate and preserve them by structuring their force.

The very content of what the bourgeois wills has its source in ethical life, but without the force of passion it remains inactive and sterile. Excess passions provide the force to counter this inactivity, which would otherwise remain heteronomous. But without integration into the general will, the fabric of society would break down under the pressure of passions, dissolving into natural violence.

Consequently, in distinction to Rousseau, mutual recognition in Hegel engenders a multitude of social forms within which the bourgeois can thrive. Mutual recognition is a phenomenon predicated on emancipated individual wills capable of entering into independent, social relationships with each other. Rousseau utilizes this process in the form of the contract to establish the state. However, the state as imagined by Rousseau has a tendency completely to absorb mutual recognition. For example, the eye that excites amour-propre becomes the eye of the citizen, not of any private individual, whereas inequality becomes permissible in so far as those we look up to are examples of citizen virtue. Passions are in this way immediately devoted to animating the state (Rousseau Reference Rousseau2005: 174–79; Reference Rousseau1999: 22). However, from Hegel’s standpoint Rousseau lacks the mechanisms of a sufficiently independent civil society that would allow it to bring forth a general will through its own internal trajectory, and instead Rousseau has frequently to resort to ancient mechanisms of producing a citizen (see SC: 76–79). In seeking to bring about an accord between the individual and general will, Rousseau often ends up pitting one against the other. He will achieve a unity in Émile, where education comes into foreground as the main path to becoming a citizen. However, the success will come at the cost of the republic, whereas mutual recognition will remain under the direction of the educator, more protected from the world than let loose to engender its own.Footnote ⁴ For Hegel, as opposed to preserving private interests without mediation in the figure of the citizen—who then has a continual tendency to become antagonistic to them (cf. SC: 126)—mutual recognition must establish an independent sphere of social bonds between individual wills, which would preserve and realize their interests that only then can find their ‘concretion’ and condition in the recognition of the individual by the state. In recognizing the citizen, the state also recognizes all his particular bonds engendered through mutual recognition. Consequently, instead of wise legislation or the ancient ideal of education, Hegel makes civil society into a competitive agoge through which man becomes citizen.

In this regard, the integration of the bourgeois into the state achieves two things. In the first instance, it gives the general will an object beyond the common interest in accord with the individual because conflicting and contradictory private interests are now sublated into the common good. At the same time, the disorganizing moment of the bourgeois and the multiplication and diversification of needs serve the general will by breaking down entrenched social relationships that impede on the citizen’s capacity to will the universal and the state’s ability to totalize society. Instead of mutual recognition being constrained by presupposing (or compelling) a harmony between the individual and the general will, the process permanently takes place at the level of society, giving private wills their own independent social space, thereby sublating and preserving the processes found in the ‘state of nature’ into the state. As a result of this, the bourgeois ceases to be the half-natural, half-socialized instance of subjectivity and becomes always already fully socialized because it is integrated into the ethical life as a constitutive moment of being a citizen. In this way, Hegel achieves Rousseau’s original intention—aliénation totale of life into the community,Footnote ⁵ and an immanence of the state that now also preserves conflict-ridden relations between private wills as an engine of its reproduction.

II. Deleuze/Guattari and Rousseau’s immanence of desire

During the semester of 1959–60 Deleuze held a lecture course on Rousseau. Throughout the lectures Deleuze understands Rousseau’s oeuvre as an attempt to heal the ‘rupture’ between the individual and the species, between man as a moral being and the corrupting effects of society (Deleuze Reference Deleuze1960: 62–63). Rousseau’s concept of nature, according to Deleuze, expresses ‘a genetic element, heavy with potential, with virtualities’ (1960: 51). What Rousseau identified as the two natural gifts of man—amour de soi and pitié—‘are a state of passion as long as their virtualities are not developed’ (51). These two principles present us with ‘virtual sociability’ (51). Nature is the immanent ground of sociability, a plane of immanence in which ‘power and desire’ are in balance (9).

A more direct appropriation of Rousseau takes place in Anti-Oedipus. In this work, Deleuze and Guattari ‘make no distinction between man and nature’ (AO: 4). Nature is not one of the poles of schizophrenia, but a process of production. Desire is the virtual, genetic element of social relations, which actualizes the natural as immanent to itself. As such, desire is ‘Rousseauistic’ (AO: 112). This Rousseauistic conception of desire becomes clear in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the relationship between surplus and lack [la manqué]. Rousseau’s natural man is characterized both by love of self as a form of self-sufficiency devoid of social lack, as well as perfectibility or the capacity to transform itself in its species- and social-being, thereby introducing ‘surplus’ in relation to its natural form. Nature presents us with a paradox because it is both surplus-producing and devoid of lack, something which is echoed in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire as a ‘process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it’ (TP: 154). The universal history of Anti-Oedipus, as with Rousseau’s history of society from Discourse on Inequality, is a result of accidents and contingencies that eventually ‘deform’ desire by inscribing on it ‘causations, comprehensions and expressions that no longer have anything to do with its real functioning’ (AO: 338–39). According to Rousseau, society multiplies our needs, leading us to fall into master-slave relationships. The original equality of man to its species becomes disturbed when representational categories such as higher-lower, better-worse, beautiful-ugly, etc., expel desire from its immanence and plunge it into a battle for mutual recognition. Similarly, for Deleuze and Guattari social production functions by ‘creating, planning and organizing’ lack (AO: 28). Savagery regulates desire by coding lack and destroying surplus. Despotism installs a two-tier system of intrinsic coding and an overcoding, transcendent state that consumes surplus. Capitalism, finally, is the clearest expression of what Rousseau terms society in general—a system that does not function through codes that obscure the productive nature of desire, but through an axiomatic that removes surplus by re-investing production, making the ever-increasing multiplication of needs an essential element of its functioning.

Both Deleuze and Guattari and also Rousseau formulate the problem in terms of the paradoxical nature of desire, which is productive and yet lacks nothing apart from any purpose whatsoever. Where they differ strongly is how they actualize this problem on the social plane. Rousseau’s solution in The Social Contract represents an attempt to reconcile, on the one hand, society and its tendency to create lack and, on the other, the immanence of life. As Rousseau informs us in Émile, the road to human happiness consists in ‘diminishing the excess of the desires over the faculties and putting power and will in perfect equality’ (EE: 80). The solution, therefore, is to bring power and will back into accord. In The Social Contract this is achieved through the socialization of desire and its equalization with the will. Society can re-actualize the immanence of desire by utilizing the capacity to formulate lack to subordinate needs to virtue. The ideal of Sparta, read through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari, would represent a society that expels surplus and banishes excess needs by forbidding luxury and coins, and subjecting social forms such as the family to the needs of the state. From this standpoint, Rousseau favours anti-productive solutions to the problem of ruptured immanence. Sparta is exemplary of a society that would ‘codify the flows of desire’, that will manage ‘to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channelled, regulated’ (AO: 33). But since coding for Rousseau should proceed through self-legislation, anti-production must be immanent to the system of needs and proceed from within society. The source of coding is not cruelty or fear, but virtue and the common triumph of citizens over their excess passions. In this regard, Rousseau also promotes in the clearest terms the idea of internalized law, of man as ‘legislator and subject’, and he is a representative of thought that favours the state that will ‘root man’ (TP: 24). Deleuze’s criticism of Hegel, that he seeks ‘to reconcile life with the State’ (Deleuze Reference Deleuze2004: 144) would then surely apply to Rousseau as well.

Although both Rousseau and Hegel stand for the idea of socialization that establishes the immanence of law and freedom as self-imposed necessity, there is an important distinction between them that is revealed when The Social Contract is related back to the Discourse on Inequality. Because The Social Contract attempts to reconcile power and desire, the underlying intention of the project is to approximate the accord between passions and faculties found in the natural state. The difference is that this accord must now be made at the level of society. What is the same is the call for an immanence of desire in both cases; what is different is that whereas the Discourse on Inequality presents us with the immanence of nature, The Social Contract establishes the immanence of the state. In both worlds, however, the bourgeois tends to disappear. Both paths toward immanence disorganize private man—one in the direction of natural simplicity, the other in the direction of the citizen. The necessity of this disorganization lies in the unrestrained private will, which is for Rousseau the source of domination (EE: 67–68); or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, modern man is an ‘expression of a subjective and private reterritorialization’ of despotism (AO: 304). Rousseau, along with Deleuze and Guattari, are in agreement that this form of subjectivity is maintained by transcendence.

Because Hegel provides the bourgeois with his own life-sphere in the state, as shown above, he is not amiable to any form of asceticism and views excess passions not only as a destructive but also as a meaningful force. But, at the same time, by giving private man space, he allows the discord between power and desire to stand. Private man is a citizen, both in so far as he identifies himself with the law, regarding the state as his own will, but also in his capacity of private man subject to a state in transcendence. This results in the duality characteristic of modernity, what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the ‘age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety … cynicism is the physical immanence of the social field, and piety is the maintenance of a spiritualized Urstaat […]’ (AO: 225). Human being is unequal in abstract mutual dependence, thrust into a whirlwind of civil society that disorganizes codes and creates master-slave relationships, as well as subjection to a state in transcendence. Desire is both liberated in its passions and limited by the citizen, leaving the human being split between its passions and duties, burdened by lack at the level of civil society and constantly guilty for not willing as a citizen ought to will. This becomes evident in Hegel’s understanding of political disposition:

What comes to our attention here is that the recognition constitutive of the citizen takes place between private man and the state. There is no we of the citizens, but the I of the citizen who is the state. The we of reconciliation cannot establish itself because the state itself is not ‘populated’ by citizens but by the organs of government, the parliament and the monarch. As a result, mutual recognition between individual wills ‘ends’ with civil society—the last instance of its manifestation producing a citizen by identifying the bourgeois with the state. This would confirm Rousseau’s original judgement on free-flow recognition always ending in relationships of inequality and domination. The consequence of Hegel’s synthesis of liberated mutual recognition and the general will results in recognition that produces a solitary citizen and a general will that remains transcendent.Footnote ⁶

The situation in Rousseau is no different at first, because mutual recognition functions primarily between the individual will and the state. However, because the individual should devote himself fully to being a citizen, and the state should therefore be nothing but the citizens themselves, the general will is not transcendent but remains internal to the citizen’s soul. This means that the state is not distinct from the place that the citizen occupies, and the decision that brings about a law is commensurate with free will, which in turn is commensurate with desire, meaning that power and desire are in accord. One could then argue that although Rousseau’s citizen is constituted by subjection to the law, because man is fully a citizen the word ‘law’ has a tendency to become superfluous. This is why ‘the state which is thus governed needs very few laws’ (SC: 134) and ‘there is no kind of fundamental law, and cannot be any, not even the social contract, which is binding on the people as a body’ (57). To paraphrase Rousseau’s argument about force (48), the word ‘law’ adds very little to desire, since desire finds its immediate expression in a legislative and, when necessary, political decision.Footnote ⁷ This is why Reinhart Koselleck points out that, in his quest for the true state, Rousseau ‘unwittingly unleashed a permanent revolution. He was looking for the unity of morality and politics, and what he found was the total state, that is to say, the permanent revolution in the guise of morality’ (Reference Koselleck1988: 163). The second qualification of The Social Contract— that it contains a permanent revolution—retains the link to the Discourse on Inequality and the idea of the immanence of life, because it is here that desire remains unburdened by law.Footnote ⁸

Anti-Oedipus follows this line of thought. Deleuze and Guattari ask in the book what place a formation of power could reserve ‘for desiring-production’ and ‘in what forms the conciliation between the regime of desiring-production and the regime of social production’ could be brought about (AO: 380). The problem Deleuze and Guattari are concerned with is of the relationship between the two regimes of life and social production. The underlying intention of bringing these two regimes into accord is the same as Rousseau’s. The difference is that Deleuze and Guattari reject both the state and morality as paths to an immanence of desire. Although Rousseau discovered the paradox of life—the absence of lack and its simultaneous social and surplus-producing character—in The Social Contract he seeks to abolish this paradox by internalizing anti-production in the form of self-legislation (virtue). Excess desire is removed and primacy is given to internalized power that regulates needs to conform them to the faculties of the community. But this method of returning power and desire into accord goes against the very insight into the productive nature of life and, more pertinently, into the nature of present society which functions by liberating desire and setting the flows free. Putting the proverbial genie back in the bottle in an age when desire is liberated would require either that private man renounce his thirst for despotism through virtue (not likely) or an immense project of coercion that would lead the state to subjugate society (much more likely). For Deleuze and Guattari, if desire is inherently surplus-producing, then it always remains ‘explosive’ and ‘revolutionary’ in relation to any limits placed on it (AO: 116).

The solution then cannot be to bring power and desire into accord by subjugating desire. Instead, the other direction must be taken by giving primacy to desire over power and by ‘subjugating social production’ (AO: 380). This would represent a ‘reversal of power’ (380) between desire and social production, which would provide passion’s primacy over its social representation in interests. In distinction from Rousseau, who abolishes transcendence by reformulating the mutual dependence of individual wills as a dependence on an immanent law, Deleuze and Guattari abolish this dependence by disorganizing the individual, reformulating relations of desire in exteriority. In both cases power and desire are in accord: in Rousseau’s case, by anti-production as virtue subjugating desire; in Deleuze and Guattari’s case, by desire subjugating formations of power. The common trajectory toward absolute immanence makes both alternatives aspects of one and the same project. This is why even in The Social Contract, where man is a being of the state constituted by law, there is a tendency toward statelessness and an absence of law. Deleuze and Guattari’s work ‘activates’ this aspect of The Social Contract by going back to the Discourse on Inequality and rethinking the relationship between the two regimes of production in favour of desire.

In both aspects, however—absolute immanence of law and pure immanence of life—the despotic trajectory of mutual recognition becomes suspended. John Russon’s evaluation of Deleuze and Guattari’s desire as lacking ‘a natural trajectory of growth toward a reconciled experience of inter-subjectivity, or what Hegel calls “mutual recognition” or “Spirit” (Geist), which is itself an experience of shared, objective world’ is correct (Russon Reference Russon2013: 168). The reason for this is that, from Deleuze and Guattari’s standpoint, reconciliation takes place only at the level of transcendence, leaving desire burdened with the ‘abject fear of lacking something’ (AO: 27), and that inter-subjectivity is not the direction in which Deleuze and Guattari wish to take desire, instead opting for de-subjectification and disorganization of private man towards molecularity. What they have in common with Hegel, though, is that insofar as they seek to accord desire and social production through desire itself, they do consider its destructive effects in positive terms. But instead of making this destruction subservient to reconciliation in the state, they seek to release this force out of the system of needs and against the state, because ‘what exists in fact is not lack, but passion’ (AO: 27). Their intention is to economize anti-production in order to accommodate desire, not the other way around, which means that any focus on an objective world that would pacify conflict must give way to a conception of the world as indifference of nature and society.

Deleuze/Guattari will eventually abandon the idea of ‘subjugated social production’ from Anti-Oedipus, distancing themselves from any large-scale social actualizations of the immanence of life. But the idea of conflict having no precedent in recognition remains very much a feature of their work, most notably in the concept of the ‘war machine’. The war machine is ‘of a different origin, is a different assemblage, than the State apparatus. It is of nomadic origin and is directed against the State apparatus’ (TP: 230). There is discontinuity between the war machine and the state because, similarly to Rousseau, the passage between the two takes place only at a ‘zero hour’. The reason for this is that the war machine ‘in no way has war as its object’ (TP: 229). Deleuze and Guattari inherit Rousseau’s idea that war does not have a natural, pre-qualified form.Footnote ⁹ This means that neither of them is constrained by inter-subjective and contradictory forms of conflict. As a result of this, Rousseau can reformulate the war of all against all into a common struggle of the citizenship against the excesses of their desires. Their virtue is a ‘force. There is no virtue without struggle. There is none without victory’ (Rousseau Reference Rousseau2003: 281). The privatized inter-subjective conflict is redirected into conflict between two distinct forms of subjectivity: the citizens against themselves as bourgeois.Footnote ¹⁰ Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, relate conflict back to the resistance-engendering forces of desire that not only precede but expand the institutionalized, inter-subjective war by extricating desire from its privatized form. From this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari’s focus is on a conflict that opens up society to contingency and chance. It is neither a conflict that seeks to regulate and re-channel desire (Rousseau) nor an inter-subjective conflict that is mediated towards reconciliation (Hegel). Instead, conflict emerges from desire’s resistance, which subverts established totalities toward multiplicity, into immanence as exteriority as opposed to an interiority of the objective world.

Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari achieve two things in relation to Rousseau. The first is that instead of attempting to resolve the paradox of production not predicated on lack, they seek to exploit it. Society is a problem and primacy is given to problem-creating desire and to paradoxical conflict that requires neither redirection nor resolution. From this standpoint, notions such as decadence, sickness, disorganization and so on, become positive qualities. The second thing is that they utilize disorganization not to convert private man into a citizen, but to establish lines of flight along which desire differentiates itself. Their project can be interpreted as an attempt to reformulate Rousseau’s original immanence of life in terms of society, as opposed to establishing a state as an alternative immanence. Since they do not share Rousseau’s sentiment that ‘reorganization of society cannot suffice since it is tainted in its principle’ (Deleuze Reference Deleuze1960: 12), they do not strive to reformulate it from the standpoint of the state to reach the indifference of the two, but to turn desire’s social and differentiating nature against any pacification or reconciliation in transcendence.

III. The problem of political immanence

Hegel as well as Deleuze and Guattari are thinkers of immanence. Their focus on immanence, particularly in relationship to their political thought, has direct links with Rousseau’s project. They move in opposite directions when it comes to which aspect of Rousseau they prefer—either immanence of law or that of life. At the same time, Hegel and Deleuze and Guattari share ideas that diverge from Rousseau. These ideas concern the status of conflict in their works. Both thinkers view desire’s conflict-producing character in positive terms. They reject the anti-productive asceticism Rousseau embraced in The Social Contract and seek to make conflict internal to the concept of immanence. Since politics has a role to play in the construction of immanence, this acceptance of conflict also changes how Hegel and Deleuze and Guattari differ from Rousseau in their thinking on politics.

For Rousseau, a political body emerges when full inclusion of the individual in the state takes place and when the general and individual will become one. Mere aggregation of private interests is not the same as an association of wills that come to form a political body (SC: 53). Hegel is of the same opinion: a society that would find its highest expression in civil society could not be a called a political body. However, because Hegel’s state must provide a whole sphere for recognition and preservation of the interests of the bourgeois, the meaning of politics shifts from that of simply following the general will to include, also, a mediation of the passions. Before political unity is established, the passions appear in a state of war at the level of civil society. Whereas for Rousseau these inter-private conflicts are reduced to a minimum and peace among citizens is established by them declaring war on themselves as bourgeois (as would-be helots and tyrants), in Hegel politics forges peace by mediating the conflicting passions of private men. This is why Hegel’s political disposition does not antagonize private interests for the sake of loyalty to my fellow citizens in a war of virtue, but always remains the internal certainty and trust that ‘my substantial and particular interest is preserved and contained in the interests and ends of an other (in this case, the state)’ (PR: §268, 288). Politics is therefore not only the sphere of established peace, but also represents a passage from the state of war into peace, adding a developmental element of negativity, contradiction and resolution.

This difference in the conception of the political body is mirrored in how Rousseau and Hegel view partial organizations within the state. Firstly, whereas Rousseau is distasteful of any ‘partial society within the state’ (SC: 67), for Hegel precisely the partial organs of civil society serve as channels for the articulation of interests that gain political unity at the level of the state. Secondly, whereas for Rousseau the immediate appearance of man as citizen seeks to minimize mediation (SC: 66) and representation, for Hegel the modern nation-state is necessarily a full-blown representative machine. On the one hand, politics in Hegel gains an extended sense that presupposes independent social processes not immediately equal with the state. On the other hand, and from Deleuze and Guattari’s standpoint, Hegel necessarily ends up thinking politics only in the register of what they term macropolitics.

Macropolitics involves ‘well-determined aggregates or elements (social classes, men and women, this or that particular person)’ (TP: 196). It is ‘politics on a grand scale’ (TP: 204) which presupposes determined subjectivities and clear channels of conflict. The result is a ‘majority’ or rather the majoritarian models: the family man, bourgeois, member of this or that estate or corporation, citizen of a state, etc. In view of this, Rousseau’s political body in The Social Contract is no less a majoritarian construct. But because in Rousseau desire circumvents ‘well-determined aggregates or elements’, it directly invests political activity. The reason for Rousseau’s distaste for partial societies is that their presence would decrease the amount of differences from which a political decision would emerge. The ‘good decision’, writes Rousseau, emerges from ‘a large number of small differences’ (SC: 66). In other words, politics should presuppose an immediate affirmation of the multiplicity of votes. This is why, if partial associations must exist within the state, ‘their number should be increased’ (66). In any case, the point is to prevent any ‘large segments’ from impinging on a political decision. The decision itself is macropolitical because it is expressed in the state, but micropolitical in its origin because it tends to avoid any organization of the body, pushing for maximum differences even when internal organs are allowed by increasing their numbers. The consequence of this is that Rousseau’s citizen, in distinction to Hegel’s, does not so much deterritorialize social models in order to conserve them in the whole, but rather tends towards their disorganization. Whereas for Hegel to be a citizen means to be a member of society and as such always be already recognized as someone, Rousseau’s becoming-citizen tends to break down social models. This is why for Rousseau there is a stark distinction between social models and the figure of the citizen: ‘We have Physicists, Geometricians, Chemists, Astronomers, Poets, Musicians, Painters; we no longer have citizens …’ (Reference Rousseau1997a: 24).

As opposed to Rousseau and Hegel, Deleuze and Guattari do not follow the path of becoming-citizen. Instead they invent the figure of the nomad. In distinction to Hegel’s citizen, nomads do not preserve, but disorganize social models. They are, from this point of view, more closely related to Rousseau’s citizen. But, in distinction to Rousseau’s citizen, they remain at the level of micropolitical becomings. Nomads do not dissolve social models only to reterritorialize them onto the citizen, but instead reterritorialize ‘on deterritorialization itself’ (TP: 381). They wage war against despotism, not from the standpoint of peace, but from within the war machine itself. Their closest relation is to Rousseau’s natural man, because they express life that is not defined by a territory and a dwelling but with a direct link to the earth. The difference is that they band together in their becoming-animal as opposed to being solitary wanderers, and they are engaged in war instead of enjoying the indifference of natural tranquility. The reason for this is that whereas Rousseau’s natural man is blissfully ignorant of the slavery to come, nomads are not only aware; also, their war machine is ‘directed against the State-form, actual or virtual’ (359). Nomads in this sense place much more emphasis on desire’s productive nature and its struggle against capture than on its tranquil freedom from lack. However, both signify de-subjectified desire, which means that natural man and nomads remain sociable on a virtual level. ‘The regime of the war machine is … that of affects’, which are ‘the active discharge of emotion’ (400). The affect is not confined to the interiority of the subject or to a relationship between subjects, but signifies an active and open-ended force of socialization that precedes, dissolves and grounds subjects and their relations of debt. Natural man’s compassion (pitié), for example, is not a feeling of guilt experienced deep within the subject, but a gift that is as much capable of establishing a relation as it is singular.

Passions in the form of affects provide for an alternative political affirmation of life than the one offered in Hegel’s version of mutual recognition. The severed process of recognition and the need for subordination to a transcendent general will is what creates the transcendent citizen-despot and the sub-citizen in myself as a model of failure. The rabble in Hegel is drawn out of its citizen-form not by the mere fact of its members’ social status—this is the inevitable outcome of the social machine—but by self-incurred guilt and the ‘disposition’ coupled with their status. The rabble is guilty for inwardly rebelling ‘against the rich, against society, the government, etc.’ (PR: §244A, 266); it is guilty for lacking political disposition and for failing to compensate its lack with an expression of loyalty to the general will. A politics of passions ‘resolves’ this contradiction by replacing my debt of unconditional love to the state with an unconditional gift that releases socialization from its institutionalized and dispositional confines.

However, mutual recognition, which is the source of despotism and infinite debt, is also a source of finite debt-relations in Hegel. Mutual recognition is also a matter of family life, of two individuals or friends, in other words, of social relations in general, as it is an infinite relationship with myself as the transcendent citizen-despot. This makes a politics of passions both an emancipatory and a dangerous affair. Inasmuch as I can release myself from guilt in the direction of becoming-animal, without lacking recognition in the other, but becoming-other with no social images in front of me, so I can also succumb to a danger, turning the line of flight to ‘destruction’ and ‘abolition’ (TP: 229). In creating a trajectory away from guilt and privatized repression I may botch it, becoming Spartan half-way through in abandoning the position of private man, resulting in a monstrosity. I may become a privatized tower of self-legislation, undisturbed by others, enclosed in my own world and free from the burdens of guilt, empathy and anxiety, compensating the immanence of nature with an immanence of interiority. I can also perform a ‘sudden deterritorialization’ (334) that will rupture not only the circle of infinite debt but all relations of debt, even those that are exchangeable and finite. Instead of releasing desire not ‘bolstered by needs’, free of the ‘abject fear of lacking something’ (AO: 27), I may conquer my needs and become deaf to the needs of others, free myself from privatized repression and establish immanence by internalizing transcendence completely. Why go through the torturous process of recognition to attain a reconciliation that might just turn out to be another form of slavery? Why not reject all demands, expel these excess needs and all those who embody them? Why not punish those who make us guilty and impose models on us, instituting lack? Let passions subjugate interest against all social relations and models!

The emancipation of the passions from their representation in interests and confinement to the system of lack can also introduce the risk of desire turning ‘to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition’ (TP: 229). Deleuze and Guattari’s focus on fascism throughout their work is indicative of this danger. Fascism ‘involves a war machine’, what makes it ‘dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power’ (215). Fascism represents an expansion of conflict and a process of democratization that emerges from desire. But it is an anti-democratic democracy because it constructs a state that has one purpose: war. In accelerating towards immanence, desire may risk the danger of not only being ‘sealed in’ and ‘reterritorialized’ (229), but of forcing immanence, which could lead to the destruction of society.

This potential for destruction was already evident in Anti-Oedipus, where the question had to be asked whether ‘the reversal of power’ could take place ‘such that desiring-production subjugates social production and yet does not destroy it …’ (AO: 380). Although desire is not and cannot be asocial (116), and although Deleuze and Guattari are not antagonistic to ‘society’, there is certainly a potentially destructive element present in desire’s revolutionary nature—in the gap between the regimes—that allows resistance to not only abolish infinite debt relations but also—in this very process, suddenly and without warning, in the inability to achieve immanence—to present us with a total state. The state will not emerge as a result of an ideological mystification or a wrong political strategy. Instead, it will emerge as a ‘master stroke, executed all at once’, appearing ‘fully armed’ (217). The state will appear from a passage at a zero hour.Footnote ¹¹ The project of returning power and desire into accord—from whichever side—is laden with a dangerous paradox, because the project itself always remains a social affair of interests, demands and recognition. In desire’s call for immanence, a social construct might emerge that could force immanence by either internalizing transcendence fully, or worse, destroying everything that is not in accord with its representation of immanence.

Rousseau’s project of the ‘true state’ led him on the path of anti-production. On this path society tends towards statelessness by merging with the state, and power and desire are in accord by slowing desire down to a ‘state’. Although Rousseau sought to regulate the passions in order to make them the driving force of a non-despotic society, there is a danger inherent in the project, which is that of sealing ‘all possible lines of flight’(TP: 230), attempting absolute peace between citizens. This is what makes totalitarianism ‘quintessentially conservative’ (230). When self-legislation fails, virtue as war against excess desire can pass into war against desire itself, making the state antagonistic to all passions.

Fascism, on the other hand, emerges when passions escape their confinement to the interests of private man and engulf the social field. It represents a ‘cancerous body, rather than a totalitarian organism’ (TP: 215), a mass movement that speeds desire up, bringing it to its limits and constructing a state of permanent revolution, which has no other purpose but to destroy all models opposed to its representation of immanence. The promotion of desire and production carries the risks of calling forth not only an anti-social total state, but also a state that may retain the revolutionary trajectory of desire the speed of which can rip social life apart.

Both virtuous and revolutionary democracies are political projects against despotism. But since private man is not only a product of internalized despotism, but also of emancipated mutual recognition—endowed with conscience, diverse feelings of guilt and accompanying social relations—both politics can appear as a threat to democracy tailored to his needs. They can appear as a declaration of war that private man is not necessarily prepared to wage against himself. In this rejection of war against oneself, emancipation might eradicate precisely those features of modernity that sustain social life, either from a position of an external state (totalitarianism) or internally, in self-destruction (fascism). Hegel, who extends private man into a sphere of recognition and rights, limited democracy accordingly on both fronts. Deleuze and Guattari claim that ‘if there is one truth in the political philosophy of Hegel, it is that every State carries within itself the essential moments of its existence’ (TP: 385). This statement concerns Rousseau as much as it does Hegel, because it was with Rousseau that the state appeared for the first time ‘fully armed’. However, whereas Deleuze and Guattari, and Rousseau, establish a radical discontinuity between war and the political state, Hegel appropriates the war machine by framing conflict according to the subjectivity of the bourgeois, providing it with ‘reconciliation’ in the transcendent citizen. Hegel’s state does appear fully armed, but it appears as such under the conditions of a broader social existence which in turn relativizes the state. The appropriation and institutionalization of the war machine around private men leaves no room for either a virtuous democracy or a revolution. Certainly, because reconciliation never actually comes and instead becomes the law according to which the failures are judged, the state remains in transcendence, demanding infinite debt, leading resistance to seek other avenues in order to affirm life. But the emancipation of the war machine from the war into which it has been confined is not without its dangers—precisely because of its absolute exteriority. When war is declared on excess passions, the danger is that of absolute peace; when it is let loose against the state, the potential risk is the passions leading to a cancerous excess and destruction of society. In Hegel’s case, society is safe in so far as the bourgeois is woven into the state as an intrinsic element of its existence. His disorganization—as necessary as it is in the struggle against despotism—is not, however, without its own dead-ends.