Deleuze and the Thousand Souths: From the ‘Move into Politics’ to the ‘Anti-colonial Turn’

Gilles Deleuze asserts that he made his ‘move into politics’ influenced by three key figures: Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Elias Sanbar. This article focuses on the implications of Guattari and Sanbar in this transition. Its hypothesis posits that Deleuze's shift aligns with an anti-colonial approach. The article will explore three episodes: first, in Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari push the clinic to its limits, identifying the process of racialisation through the extrapolation of metropolitan categories onto the colonies, as well as the consequences of Frantz Fanon's notion of the impediment of the unconscious; second, when they reference Samir Amin in A Thousand Plateaus to analyse the transnationalisation of capitalism, breaking down the interplay between minorisation and majorisation movements and considering the implications of colonisation's substitution; finally, the article will examine What is Philosophy?, where Deleuze and Guattari address the process of Europeanisation. Additionally, it discusses his two books Cinema 1 and 2 and cinema classes, alongside his collaborative work with Sanbar, particularly the expression ‘missing people’, which the article connects to Third World cinema and the Palestinian cause.