Principles of Non-Economics: Capitalism and Subjectivity in Deleuze and Guattari’s Later Political Thought

If, in What is Philosophy?, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994 [1991]) claim that ‘The nonphilosophical is perhaps closer to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself’ (p. 41), and that philosophy ‘ needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs nonscience’ (p. 218), can the same be said of economics? This article explores this sense of the non-economic at the heart of the economic, in Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of capitalism, by tracing the relation, as they see it, between the capitalist axiomatic and the revolutionary war machine within post-war twentieth-century capitalism. The aim of such an analysis is to highlight the continuities, but also and especially the discontinuities, between the political analysis found in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and their work on neoliberalism and ‘control’ from the mid-1980s onwards, as well as the shifting relation between the economic/noneconomic in both sets of analysis.