Assemblage or Totality? The Paradoxes of Political Organization in Hegel and Deleuze/Guattari

Abstract

Politics is always a question of organization. The par excellence political question—what should we do? —implicates the question of how we should organize. Whether implicitly or explicitly, political action presupposes agents who appear under distinct forms of organization—class or mass, individual or group, short-term or long-term, malleable or rigid, atomized or cohesive. However, organization also presupposes that agents can disorganize, both as a prerequisite for the emergence of new organization or in order to subvert the body politic. The question of organization, therefore, always appears together with the problem of disorganization. In this article I focus on two conceptual understandings of political organization and disorganization: Totality and Assemblage—central to the philosophies of Hegel and Deleuze/Guattari (subsequently referred to as