July 5, 2007
In the conclusion to his book Deleuze, Marx, and Politics, Nicholas Thoburn says:
Paolo Virno (1996d: 189) expresses a common sentiment about the state of current political thought and practice when he writes, 'If nobody asks me what political action is, I seem to know; but if I have to explain it to somebody who asks, this presumed knowledge evaporates into incoherence.' This is a problem, but it is not a wholly new one. Indeed, inasmuch as it is in the nature of politics to have an openness to virtuality, to potential, and to undetermined worlds, a certain amount of uncertainty, if not 'incoherence', is one of its central features. Nevertheless, politics is necessarily subject to a form of ordering " a stratification of forms and potential around the question 'what is to be done?'" since it is an attempt to call forth other worlds through concrete engagement with the intricacies of the present. At the other pole to that of 'incoherence', the problem is that such ordering and engagement has so often occurred through regimes of truth and certainty that it has been characterized as much by dogma and ressentiment as by experimentation and creation.
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