The Creative Force of Institutions: A Reply to Benoît Dillet's, Vanessa Lemm's, and Robert Nichols's Responses to "Three Paradigms of Political Ontology"

Abstract

First of all, I would like to thank the contributors Robert Nichols, Benoît Dillet, and Vanessa Lemm— together with the editors Cesare Casarino, Maggie Hennefeld, John Mowitt, and Simona Sawhney, indeed— for the intelligence and the commitment with which everyone commented on my essay. These comments identified not only the internal problems of the text but also pushed the argument well beyond the limits of this single text by opening problems and questions that both complicated and enriched it. I responded to some of these comments, especially in relation to Deleuze and Lefort, in the volume actually occasioned by the essay and similarly titled Instituting Thought. Three Paradigms of Political Ontology. The volume has been published in Italian by Einaudi, and it is currently in the process of being translated into English by Polity Press. As for Deleuze— whose ontologicalpolitical pathway from his earliest to his last writings I tried to analyze in this book— I have partially corrected an overly clearcut interpretation that, as presented in the essay, appeared to Dillet to flatten a more complex and articulated position. It is true that Deleuze’s oeuvre displays the trace of the negative, as a tone that is irreducible to an otherwise pervasive ontological euphoria. Many of his pages are marked with contours of death and destruction. But they also arise from or are traversed by the flows of desire. As Vanessa Lemm has keenly grasped, I experienced a theoretical shift with regard to my position in relation to Deleuze’s theory in general (and I do not deny it). The shift can be noticed when