Abstract

The essay revisits Deleuze and Guattari’s complex relation to Marxism, which it seeks to capture under the name para-Marxism, by way of a close reading of plateau n? 4 of A Thousand Plateaus, which criticizes the mainstream conception of language and draws on Lenin’s pamphlet on slogans. This close reading leads to an account of the articulation of the Deleuze and Guattari machine with the Marxist analysis of language, to be found, for purposes of comparison in Lukacs’s Ontology. The conclusion is that Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of language is an intervention within Marxism: they take to its limit the anti-humanist position defended by Althusser – not so much a flight away from Marxism as a line of flight within Marxism.