Contemporary Authors

• Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 2012
• The Figure of the Migrant Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 2015
• Theory of the Border Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2016

Library of Congress Online Catalog 1. Returning to revolution : Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo LCCN 2012551901 Type of material Book Personal name Nail, Thomas. Main title Returning to revolution : Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo / Thomas Nail. Published/Created Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, c2012. Description xi, 202 p. ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780748655861 (hbk.) 0748655867 (hbk.) CALL NUMBER JC491 .N26 2012 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. The figure of the migrant LCCN 2015007378 Type of material Book Personal name Nail, Thomas, author. Main title The figure of the migrant / Thomas Nail. Published/Produced Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2015. Description x, 295 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780804787178 (cloth : alk. paper) 9780804796583 (pbk. : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 014834 CALL NUMBER HM1136 .N35 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. Theory of the border LCCN 2016003957 Type of material Book Personal name Nail, Thomas, author. Main title Theory of the border / Thomas Nail. Published/Produced Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2016] Description x, 275 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780190618643 (hardcover :acid-free paper) 9780190618650 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 9780190618667 (updf) 9780190618674 (epub) CALL NUMBER JC323 .N34 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ONLINE CATALOG Library of Congress 101 Independence Ave., SE Washington, DC 20540 Questions? Ask a Librarian: https://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-contactus.html

• global center for advanced studies - https://globalcenterforadvancedstudies.org/member/thomas-nail/

  Thomas Nail
  Professor
  Institute Of Critical Philosophy

  Thomas Nail is currently Assistant Professor at University of Denver, Colorado. He teaches and researches in the areas of European philosophy, political philosophy, environmental philosophy. His work engages the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and Alain Badiou—and uses them to understand recent political events, such as revolutionary struggles, border and migration politics, and environmental resistance. He bases his research on activism with migrant research organizations, along with anti-war, anti-poverty, and social and environmental justice movements. He is working on two major research projects: the first is Figure of the Migrant, to be published with Stanford, which aims to define the political philosophy of the migrant based on the figure of the citizen. The second, Between Deleuze and Foucalt, is funded by Purdue University and includes a book project—edited and co-edited with Nicolae Morar and Daniel W. Smith–as well as a conference by that same name. It also includes a 2014 journal issue in Foucault Studies, titled “Foucault and Deleuze: Ethics, Politics, Psychoanalysis”, co-edited with Morar and Smith, and a transcription and translation of Gilles Deleuze’s audio course lectures on Michel Foucault (1985-1986) as part of a grant from Purdue in collaboration with the Université de Paris VIII and published on La Voix de Deleuze.

• U OR - http://philosophy.uoregon.edu/2013/02/16/thomas-nail-accepts-tenure-track-position-at-university-of-denver/

  Thomas Nail accepts tenure-track position at University of Denver

  UO Alum Thomas Nail (PhD 2011) has accepted a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver specializing in European philosophy, political philosophy, environmental philosophy, and philosophy of migration. He is currently a Post-Doc and Director of Post-Doctoral Faculty in Migration and Diaspora at the University of Denver. The aim of his research is to apply the insights of recent European thought to contemporary political events. He will teach graduate and undergraduate level courses in his area of specialization at the University of Denver.

  His first book, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo, was published in August, 2012 with Edinburgh University Press and his next monograph titled The Figure of the Migrant is currently under contract with Stanford University Press. He is also currently editing a collection of essays with Daniel Smith and Nicolae Morar titled Between Deleuze and Foucault. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Philosophy Today, Theory & Event, Parrhesia, Deleuze Studies, Foucault Studies, and elsewhere. A complete list of publications can be downloaded at: du.academia.edu/thomasnail

• critical legal thinking - http://criticallegalthinking.com/2015/06/30/on-destroying-what-destroys-you-an-interview-with-thomas-nail/

  On Destroying What Destroys You: An Interview with Thomas Nail
  by Jose Rosales • 30 June 2015

  Thomas Nail is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). His publications can be accessed at: udenver​.academia​.edu/​T​h​o​m​a​s​N​ail

  HostisOne may see the aims of Hostis* and feel a tinge of moral discomfort when it begins to ask questions regarding the status of migrants, of refugees, and of exiles,[1] if only for the very reason that there remains some commitment on our part to the idea that to be content with a politics of recognition and a strategy of representation perpetuates the illusion of emancipation when all that can be achieved is Statist inclusion. In other words, once recognition as political strategy is exhausted, the very people who are indexed by this representation are left wanting. In this same vein, then, we might say that the question of representation, recognition, and the figure of the migrant forces us to go one step further⎯to say that “the real content of the demand ‘citizenship papers for all!’ could also be formulated as: everyone must have citizenship papers so that we can all burn them.”[2] How does your concept of “migrant cosmopolitanism” deal with the potential merits and many shortcomings of this exhaustive and truncated application of Statist inclusion?

  Historically, there have been numerous figures of the migrant. For example, the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat are four major kinds of migratory figures. For me, the figure of the migrant is not a class or identity; it is a vector (a position in motion). As such, anyone can move into and out of it as territorial, political, juridical, and economic factors change. This position is one defined by the primacy of movement and can be formulated in the following way: the figure of the migrant is the political figure who is socially expelled or dispossessed as a result, or as the cause, of their mobility. The migrant is the collective name for all the political figures in history who have been territorially, politically, juridically, and economically displaced as a condition of the social expansion of power.

  Migrants are the true movers of history and political transformation, but this does not mean their movements are immune from cooptation by states, capital, or other forms of expulsion. In fact, it is their captured motion that is the very condition of social power in the first place (slavery, serfdom, waged labor, and so on). In this sense I think it is too simplistic to say that all of their movements are either antistate or reformist, in part because the difference between reformist acts and revolutionary acts is not an essential or formal one, it is a contingent and material one. An act is revolutionary when it results in revolution. Burning passports may or may not be revolutionary; it depends on the collective effects.

  However, what is interesting to me about the figure of the migrant is that it has produced some pretty incredible collective effects that are completely outside territorial, statist, juridical, and capitalist circuits of social motion (slave and maroon societies, vagabond collectives, workers communes, and so on). If we want to think seriously about the possibilities of some kind of social organization distinct from the reactionary forces of territorial nation-states and capitalism, then we should start with those historically invented by migrants. Cosmopolitanism is the name often taken by the reactionary forces of states toward “including” migrants. This is not the worst thing that could happen, but it also does not accurately describe the tendency of what I am calling “migrant cosmopolitanism” to create nonexpulsive social structures outside such structures of representation.

  Do you see “migrant cosmopolitanism” as something distinct from more reformist and liberal notions of seeking the inclusion of, and the granting of rights to undocumented persons? The occupation of the Saint Bernard church, which you have thought a lot about and which lasted from June 28 to August 23, 1996, strikes one as being something more than a politics of recognition. You also mention the No One Is Illegal migrant justice group based in Toronto as embodying the subversive and more radical aspects of the struggles around immigration, political refugees, and exiles. Obviously the tenacity of these struggles came from their level of self-organization and their ability to gain various forms of popular support, both materially and symbolically. What is it about these examples of migrant struggles that point beyond the shortcomings of a type of liberal approach to piecemeal reformism?

  What is so exciting to me about these movements is that they are not just asking for rights, they are demanding the abolition of citizenship altogether in a very specific way: by creating autonomous communities open to anyone regardless of their status. The slogan “Status for All” can be interpreted in two ways: “Everyone who lives here should have legal status within the juridical nation-state” or “If everyone has status, no one has status.” The latter is consistent with No One is Illegal’s demand for the abolition of nation-states and borders. Universal status undermines the territorial and national aspects of the state, and therefore undermines the state tout court. I have written elsewhere about the details of their Solidarity City campaign in Toronto.[3] The aim of this campaign is to bypass the state altogether and organize migrants, social service providers, and allies into mutually supportive relations, regardless of status. Another example I have written about in Returning to Revolution is the Zapatistas.[4] The Zapatistas are indigenous people in Mexico expelled from their land. As migrants in their own country, they have decided to not simply demand rights from the state or migrate to the United States, but to build autonomous communes with their own nonexpulsive social structure.

  Between 2008-2010 there was some publicity around the notion of migrant struggles taking up the idea of “demanding the right to stay home.”[5] This idea of trying to force a situation on the State where migrants don’t have to leave, don’t have to live the vicissitudes of migration itself also strikes us as something of interest, primarily for two reasons. First, the demand is situated in terms of an initial refusal to migrate, the demand to not be forced to live the life and fate of migrants moving from the global south to the global north; and second, because this initial refusal also refuses what capitalism has increasingly gained ahold of, namely, public imagination and a people’s way of investing and/or desiring a certain future. As Guattari said, “In my view, this huge factory, this mighty capitalistic machine also produces what happens to us when we dream, when we daydream, when we fantasize, when we fall in love, and so on.”[6] So this initial refusal of being forced into the life of a migrant also acts as a refusal of investing in a future that coincides with whatever capitalism codes and reformulates as a desirable life for everyone⎯moving to a Western country, living a suburban lifestyle, replicating the heteronormative narratives found in Hollywood/Blockbuster cinema in one’s own personal life, or what have you. Simply put, this “demand for the right to stay home” fights at the level of “forms-of-life,” and not simply at the level of Statist recognition of certain rights. What, if anything, has your work on these issues helped you clarify for yourself and others regarding this difference between struggling for State inclusion versus struggling for a ‘form-of-life’? Or do you perhaps find this distinction unhelpful, outdated, conceptually ineffective, and so on?

  This is a great example and I deal with it at more length in The Figure of the Migrant.[7] But in short, let me make two points. First, the “right to stay home” is a migrant movement and not the rejection of migration. Most folks involved in this movement are people who have already been expelled from their homes at one point or another. “The right to stay home” could just as easily be called “the right to return home” since most are already migrants. Take for example the millions of Mexican migrants in the United States who would much rather be back home in Mexico with their families. Or think of the millions of indigenous people around the world who are being expelled from their land by the capitalist accumulation of agricultural land. Even if they are not yet territorially expelled, they are already juridically, politically, and economically expelled from their social status in order to facilitate their geographical displacement. Even if some people are allowed to stay, what does this mean if everything around them has been destroyed by mining companies, monocrop farms, hydroelectric dams, and so on. One can become a migrant even if it is only the environment that changes.

  Second, the idea of a migrant social movement around the right to stay or return home is a very old one. This strategy was the invention of the ancient figure of the migrant: the barbarian. The ancient world (Sumer, Greece, Egypt, Rome) is absolutely filled with slave revolts by captured barbarians, only a fraction of which were recorded in any detail, unfortunately. The primary demand of almost all of these revolts was the same: to return home or find a new home. In fact, this is the etymological meaning of the world “revolt” in the context of mass slavery: to return home. There is a fascinating reason why this becomes the dominant form of counterpower in the ancient world. For me this is less an issue of “form-of-life” than the “form-of-motion” proper to the migrant.

  In Means Without End, Agamben presents the refugee as a figure of the threshold. Agamben’s other chosen figures are quite tragic, the most famous being Bartleby and the muselmann of the camp. This is all to say that theoretical takes of the refugee routinely associate them with the power of incapacity. We’re curious about why popular media seems all too ready to also characterize them in this way. Most high-profile news events, such as the recent migrant boat disasters in the Mediterranean, depict them as helpless. What is the form of power you find most useful in your analysis?

  Ah, yes. Agamben has this great line in his essay “Beyond Human Rights” that is very inspiring to me. He says, “It is even possible that, if we want to be equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, we will have to abandon decidedly, without reservation, the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.”[8] It’s too bad he never followed up on this claim. I agree with the spirit of his point but I disagree about the content and method of this claim. This quote is one of the reasons I wanted to write The Figure of the Migrant. Agamben is on the right track, but he does not see the refugee as only one among many other figures of the migrant as I do, and therefore as part of a much larger philosophical project focusing on political motion and migrant counterpower.

  But to your question: The refugee is an ancient figure of the migrant related to the barbarian. The two emerge at roughly the same time in history in the context of widespread slave revolts. Only when there is barbarism and slavery can there be the escaped slave who seeks asylum. The refugee (from the Latin word fugere) is the one who reflees: first being forced to flee one’s homeland as a captured slave, and then having to flee one’s captor in favor of the refugium, or ἄσυλον (asulon, asylum). But the political limit of the figure of the refugee is that it does not follow the same imperative to revolt or “return home” as with barbarians like Spartacus, the Goths, and others who tried to fight their way to freedom. Instead, the refugee remains tied to the refugium. In this way the refugee was simply bound to a new master: the god, temple, and priests that managed all the first refugee asylums for escaped slaves in the ancient world.

  Of course, I do not want to say that this means all refugees are helpless! My point is simply that the political figure of the refugee has a long genealogy that is still active today and tends to imply in its genealogy someone who is simply looking for a new master, a new nation-state, church, or refuge. Nation-states prefer dealing with this figure and would like to keep this historical meaning. Compare this to the refugee’s historical twin, the barbarian! The barbarian is wild, chaotic, destructive, mobile, active, powerful, and so on: the destroyer of civilization. Historically, the barbarian is to be feared and the refugee is to be pitied by the gods. On this point I am against Agamben and on the side of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Hardt, Negri, and many of the anarchists of the nineteenth century: we need a new barbarism.

  Hostis is quite inspired by migrants’ penchant for burning down the detention centers in which they are held captive. High-profile events include riots where inmates have taken over or destroyed large parts of facilities, as in Texas, Australia, and across the EU. Most political commentators have nothing positive to say about these events, though sometimes a litany of abusive practices come to light. Hostis is happy to celebrate these moments as a collective demonstration of the anarchist principle “destroy what destroys you.” What do you see in this insistent desire to rebel?

  This brings us to another figure of the migrant: the vagabond. The masterless men and women of the Middle Ages (serfs, peasants, beggars, witches, rogues, and so on) significantly developed the migrant art of rebellion in its strictly etymological sense: turning back in direct violence. Since barbarians are kidnapped from their home, their counterpower is related to their desire to return home. All violence is a means to the ends of escape. While barbarian slaves could potentially escape the limits of their empires, by the Middle Ages there were fewer and fewer places left to flee outside the jurisdiction of some lord or another. Thus, vagabonds increasingly began to directly confront authority from within, by rebelling. This is not to say that there were not also raids or revolts of some kind, or that direct violence was missing from raids and revolts in previous ages, but simply that during the Middle Ages the primary goal of most migrant counterpower was less about supplies (raiding) or radical escape (revolt) than about direct assassination, political murder, burning, revenge, and desecration from within society without the goal of leaving it. Today the figure of the vagabond persists in migrant attacks on detention centers, the burning of passports, squatting, theft of electricity, property destruction, violent battles with police, and so on.

  To hazard a deceptively straightforward postcolonial question: what does the migrant tell us about ourselves?

  Well, for one, we are all becoming migrants.[9] People today relocate to greater distances more frequently than ever before in human history. While many people may not move across a regional or international border, they tend to change jobs more often, commute longer and farther to work,[10] change their residence repeatedly, and tour internationally more often.[11] Some of these phenomena are directly related to recent events, such as the impoverishment of middle classes in certain rich countries after the financial crisis of 2008, subsequent austerity cuts to social welfare programs, and rising unemployment. The subprime mortgage crisis led to the expulsion of millions of people from their homes worldwide, 9 million in the United States alone. Foreign investors and governments have acquired 540 million acres since 2006, resulting in the eviction of millions of small farmers in poor countries; and mining practices have become increasingly destructive around the world, including hydraulic fracturing and tar sands. This general increase in human mobility and expulsion is now widely recognized as a defining feature of the twenty-first century.[12] “A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration.”[13]

  However, not all migrants are alike in their movement.[14] For some, movement offers opportunity, recreation, and profit with only a temporary expulsion. For others, movement is dangerous and constrained, and their social expulsions are much more severe and permanent. Today most people fall somewhere on this migratory spectrum between the two poles of “inconvenience” and “incapacitation.” But what all migrants on this spectrum share, at some point, is the experience that their movement results in a certain degree of expulsion from their territorial, political, juridical, or economic status. Even if the end result of migration is a relative increase in money, power, or enjoyment, the process of migration itself almost always involves an insecurity of some kind and duration: the removal of territorial ownership or access, the loss of the political right to vote or to receive social welfare, the loss of legal status to work or drive, or the financial loss associated with transportation or change in residence. For all these reasons, the migrant is becoming the political figure of our time.

  – Summer 2015

  *Hostis is a journal of negation. Fed up with the search for a social solution to the present crisis, it aspires to be attacked wildly and painted as utterly black without a single virtue. Hostis Issue 1: Cruelty is available from Little Black Cart. It is currently accepting submissions on the topic of “Beyond Recognition.” More information can be found at incivility.org.

  [1] For instance, in the CFP for issue 2 we begin by asserting the following: “Seeking recognition is always servile. We have little interest in visibility, consciousness raising, or populist pandering.”
  [2] Tiqqun, Untitled Notes on Immigration
  [3] Thomas Nail, “Building Sanctuary City: No One is Illegal–Toronto on Non-Status Migrant Justice Organizing,” Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action no. 11 (2010): 149–162.
  [4] Thomas Nail, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
  [5] See David Bacon’s 2008 article ‘Immigration and the Right to Stay Home’ (http://www.alternet.org/story/92639/immigration_and_the_right_to_stay_home) & his 2010 piece ‘All Over the World, Migrants Demand the Right to Stay Home’ (http://inthesetimes.com/article/15793/all_over_the_world_migrants_demand_the_right_to_stay_at_home)
  [6] Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolutions in Brazil
  [7] Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
  [8] Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights” in Means Without Ends (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 16.
  [9] With the rise of home foreclosure and unemployment people today are beginning to have much more in common with migrants than with certain notions of citizenship (grounded in certain social, legal, and political rights). “All people may now be wanderers”: Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 87. “Migration must be understood in a broad sense”: Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization, and Hybridity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000), 2.
  [10] World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2005: Section 3 Environment, Table 3.11, http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=141.
  [11] International annual tourist arrivals exceeded 1 billion globally for the first time in history in 2012. World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), “World Tourism Barometer,” vol. 11, 2013, http://dtxtq4w60xqpw.cloudfront.net/sites/all/files/pdf/unwto_barom13_01_jan_excerpt_0.pdf.
  [12] I use the word “expulsion” here in the same sense in which Saskia Sassen uses it to indicate a general dispossession or deprivation of social status. See Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 1–2. Many scholars have noted a similar trend. For an excellent review of the “mobilities” literature on migration, see Alison Blunt, “Cultural Geographies of Migration: Mobility, Transnationality and Diaspora,” Progress in Human Geography 31 (2007): 684–94.
  [13] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 213.
  [14] Bauman, Globalization.

• other journal - http://theotherjournal.com/2016/11/28/kinopolitics-figure-migrant-interview-thomas-nail/

  Kinopolitics and the Figure of the Migrant: An Interview with Thomas Nail
  By Thomas Nail & Zachary Thomas Settle

  November 28, 2016

  In his recent book, The Figure of the Migrant, philosopher Thomas Nail highlights the migrant—the figure expelled from his or her home country—as the political figure of our time. In his insistence that these figures should reframe our entire understanding of political theory, Nail’s work is both pressing and revelatory. In this interview, he discusses his recent work, speaking about the role of the migrant in the contemporary political landscape, the implications of that figure on our methods of theorization, and the ways in which migrants are constructively disruptive within our North American context.

  The Other Journal (TOJ): In your recent book, The Figure of the Migrant, you argue that the figure of the migrant is the political figure of our time. You go on to analyze and question the foundational principles of the contemporary moment that gives rise to the migrant, and you speak of the migrant as a broader category of migratory figures, each of which are expelled from the dominant social order. This expulsion grounds, you argue, the figure of the migrant as the true motive force of social history.1 Will you elaborate for us on your use of the term figure of the migrant? What characterizes such a figure, and what are the different ways in which you see that figure being employed in the global situation?

  Thomas Nail (TN): The migrant is the political figure who is socially expelled or dispossessed, to some degree as a result, or as the cause, of their mobility. We are not all migrants, but we are becoming migrants. At the turn of the twenty-first century, there were more regional and international migrants than ever before in recorded history. Today, there are over one billion migrants, and each decade the global percentage of migrants and refugees grows. Political theory has yet to take this phenomenon seriously. In The Figure of the Migrant, I argue that doing so requires political theory to alter its foundational presuppositions.

  Unfortunately, to go through an analysis of the four major figures of the migrant in the current global situation is too big of question to answer here, but I have written on it recently in Public Affairs Quarterly, the Stanford University Press blog, and the History News Network.2 In the book, I narrow this down to a case study of US-Mexico migration. The nomad is the name of the migrant expelled from the territory, the barbarian is the name of the migrant expelled from political status or citizenship, the vagabond is the name of the migrant expelled from the juridical order, and the proletariat is the name of the migrant expelled from the control over the economic process. Each has its moment of historical emergence, and each continues to coexist in the present and gives us a helpful framework for understanding contemporary migration.

  TOJ: In the introduction to your book, you argue that developing a political theory of the migrant that refuses to consider the figure as a failed citizen requires analyzing the figure according to its own defining feature: movement. This notion grounds your broader methodology and framework of kinopolitics, as you define the history of the migrant as one of social motion.3 Will you elaborate for us on your understanding and employment of this notion of movement and how that relates to your broader investigation of kinopolitics?

  TN: Kinopolitics is the politics of movement, from the Greek word kino, meaning movement. If we are going to take the figure of the migrant seriously as a constitutive, and not derivative, figure of Western politics, we have to change the starting point of political theory. Instead of starting with a set of preexisting citizens, kinopolitics begins with the flows of migrants and the ways they have circulated or sedimented into citizens and states—as well as emphasizing how migrants have constituted a counter-power and alternative to state structures. In short, kinopolitics is the reinvention of political theory from the primacy of social motion instead of the state.

  It is because of the way that migrants move or don’t move that they pose such difficulty for political theory and sedentary societies. In my book, I took this so-called exceptional attribute of motion and flipped the existing frameworks on their heads, interpreting motion as the primary feature of social life. Instead of looking at fixed subjects and objects, the book looks at “flows and junctions”; instead of looking at states and institutions, the book looks at “regimes of circulation.” As it turns out, societies themselves are not, as they are often treated, static entities of fixed members but continuous circulations of metastable social flows. So I started with the migrant and ended up needing to build a new political theory to fit it. I think this method has produced some interesting and original conclusions.

  TOJ: In the second part of The Figure of the Migrant, after sketching out your theory of the migrant, you employ a radicalization of Karl Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation, originally found in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.4 This notion, which you describe as “expansion by expulsion,” serves to highlight the conditions through which the migrant is produced. You write that social expansion, as an exclusionary movement grounded in depriving one of social status, “is not simply the deprivation of territorial status (i.e., removal from the land); it includes three other major types of social deprivation: political, juridical, and economic.”5 Will you expand on that notion a bit, reflecting on your understanding of expansion by expulsion as it includes these different forms of social deprivation?

  TN: The kinetic theory of expansion by expulsion is this: all hitherto existing societies have been able to expand—territorially, politically, juridically, economically—only on the condition of some kind and degree of prior social expulsion. The migrant is the figure of this expulsion. Marx was the first to identify this phenomenon with respect to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but my thesis is not limited to this instance alone. Every major social formation has done something kinetically similar. The process of dispossessing migrants of their social status (i.e., expulsion) in order to further develop or advance a given form of social motion (i.e., expansion) is not unique to the capitalist regime of social motion. I can’t go into all four historical figures of the migrant here, so I will give just two short examples of the nomad and the barbarian.

  We see this process of expansion by expulsion at work in early Neolithic societies whose progressive cultivation of land and animals (i.e., territorial expansion) would not have been possible without the expulsion (or territorial dispossession) of a part of the human population: hunter-gatherers, whose territory was transformed into agricultural land and who were themselves transformed into surplus agriculturalists for whom there was no more arable land left to cultivate at a certain point. Thus, social expulsion is the condition of social expansion in two ways: an internal condition that allows for the removal of part of the population when certain internal limits have been reached (the carrying capacity of a given territory, for example) and an external condition that allows for the removal of part of the population outside these limits when the territory is able to expand outward into the lands of other groups (e.g., the hunter-gatherers). In this case territorial expansion was possible only on the condition that part of the population be expelled in the form of migratory nomads who were forced into the surrounding mountains and deserts.

  Later, we see the same logic in the ancient world, whose dominant political form (i.e., the state) would not have been possible without the expulsion (i.e., political dispossession) of a large body of barbarian slaves kidnapped from the mountains of the Middle East and Mediterranean and used as workers, soldiers, and servants so that a growing ruling class could live in luxury. The social conditions for the expansion of a growing political order (including warfare, colonialism, and massive public works) were precisely the expulsion of a population of barbarians who had to be depoliticized at the same time. This occurs again and again throughout history. Each time, the regime of motion changes as does the figure of the migrant.

  TOJ: I’m really intrigued by your understanding of the center—for example, the territory, state, or law—and its complicity in maintaining conditions by which the figure of the migrant is not only made possible but is also determined as the new norm. You point to Guy Geltner’s work on the topic, in which he argues that the expansion of the juridical sphere required the management and capture of vagabonds in the early formation of the modern state.6 Will you reflect for a bit on the ways in which the development of contemporary structures of law, state, border/territory, or free-market were developed in conjunction with the maintenance of migrants?

  TN: This is a fascinating history that reveals the circular dictum of all juridical regimes: more laws produce more crime, and more crime requires more laws. Starting around the thirteenth century, peasants across continental Europe and Britain were expelled from their land through the abolition of customary laws, land tenure, and the introduction of land rent. Later, in sixteenth-century Britain, the privatization of peasant land for sheep grazing displaced tens of thousands of people. Throughout the West, the problem of migratory vagabonds or so-called “masterless men” was an enormous security threat. In order to deal with it, all kinds of new laws, officers, institutions, and so on were “needed” to lock people up, force them to work, transport them back and forth, and so on. An entire administrative apparatus began to emerge at this time that we call the early modern state. There is a long and interesting story here, but the conclusion is that the origins of the early modern state are tied directly to the expulsion of migrant vagabonds from their land. Without this expulsion, the prison apparatus and its proto-state correlates would have been entirely superfluous to the level of criminal mobility.

  Something similar is still happening today in the West. The stricter the immigration laws, the more migrants are in violation of them; thus, criminal statistics reveal the “need” for harsher laws because of the “increase” in immigration violations. Migrants are a constitutive part of a juridical feedback mechanism that requires for its expansion the legal expulsion of a migrant population. I am not saying this is the conscious plot of some evil politicians—well, maybe Trump, but I hesitate to call him a politician—it’s structural. It is part of the fundamental kinetic structure of juridical power.

  TOJ: In your analysis of certain forms of migrancy, you argue that within pedetic motion—the motion of the foot defined by autonomy and self-motivation—lies the possibility for new forms of kinetic power that pose alternatives to social expulsion.7 Your analysis revolves around the movement of the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat. What are the possibilities for social transformation made available in these alternative forms of movement, and how are they modeled in these varying forms of migrancy?

  TN: That’s a big question that takes up the whole third part of the book. In my work, I try both to do an analysis of the dominant forms of power in the West but also to study the forms of counter-power that emerge alongside them. The latter is decisively more difficult because history is so often written by the victors. The history of slave societies, maroon societies, communes, worker organizations, and other counter-powers has been systematically destroyed and rewritten, which makes it all the more important to gather and reinterpret what remains and to preserve what is currently being produced. So many times in my research I hit dead ends because of a lack of any primary documents or even secondary work on the topic of migrant counter-power—especially older forms of slave revolts and maroon societies that the Greeks and Romans systematically wrote out of history. Studying counter-power is hard. With the dominant forms of power, the problem is too much material to cover; with counter-power it’s the opposite. And one reason we lack a good philosophical response to this problem is that philosophers tend to privilege written texts and achievements over material histories—and therefore, we unwittingly accept the bias of the victors. Philosophers write critiques of the dominant systems, but we lack a robust history of resistance.

  In the book, I have tried to highlight these counter-powers, tracing some of the kinetic connections between non-state societies and the kind of dominant social motions that characterize them. These motions are, roughly, continuous oscillations, waves, and pressure. They are kinetic phenomena that are defined primarily by their pedetic motions. In social history, each figure of the migrant uses all three motions but also invents its own dominant counter-power tactic. Briefly, the nomad is associated with the development of the raid; the barbarian, the revolt; the vagabond, the rebellion; and the proletariat, resistance. Each type of tactic says something about the dominant type of kinopower it confronts and about the types of empirical alternatives created.

  TOJ: In the fourth part of your book, you sketch out a theory of contemporary migration. You begin by explaining that migration has become increasingly complex and nuanced in the twentieth century and that the factors motivating these varied forms of movement range from economic deregulation and neoliberal development to technological transportation and communication. You argue that these social changes have given rise to a new form of hybridity in global migration, such that no singular theory will be sufficient in itself.8 By redeploying the historical forms of social expansion by expulsion articulated earlier in the book (i.e., centripetal, centrifugal, tensional, and elastic forces), you diagnose historical, alternative forms of kinopolitical counter-power in contemporary migration. Will you discuss this theory of contemporary migration a bit for us?

  TN: That was a pretty good summary. The process of expansion by expulsion and the figures of the migrant today are not new. They are a mixture of the processes and figures that have emerged historically and now mix together in new combinations. One consequence of this is that the study of migration in political theory needs to have a better grasp of the historical formations that constitute it. The empirical points may change, but the relations or forms of social motion repeat.

  Most scholars write about migration as if it were a new area of study. Even when they talk about global migration, their studies usually only go back to the nineteenth century and they tend to focus on 1970s ideas of globalization, as if migration had never been global before that. This again may have to do with an overprivileging of written materials, texts, and statistics. Before the nineteenth century, there were far fewer statistics about migration; there were fewer books about migration; and there was almost no “scholarship” about migration. It is much easier to do scholarship that relies on other scholars in your area than to put together a synthetic history based on archeological, anthropological, and historical documents prior to the scholarly standardization of texts that emerges in the nineteenth century, and therefore, there is a real amnesia in the academy on the role of migrants in shaping our current and historical sociopolitical culture.

  Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 1 and 7.
  See Nail, “Migrant Cosmopolitanism,” Public Affairs Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2015): 187–99, https://www.academia.edu/11784019/Migrant_Cosmopolitanism; Nail, “The Barbarism of the Migrant: Mexican Immigrants to the United States Face a Stigma that Stretches Back to Ancient Civilization,” Stanford University Press Blog, September 2015, adapted from The Figure of the Migrant, http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2015/09/the-barbarism-of-the-migrant.html; and Nail, “The Hordes Are Banging on the Gates of Europe?” History News Network, October 25, 2015, https://www.academia.edu/17427414/The_Hordes_Are_Banging_on_the_Gates_of_Europe.
  Nail, Figure of the Migrant, 3 and 21.
  Ibid., 24.
  Ibid., 35.
  Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A Social History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
  Nail, Figure of the Migrant, 125.
  Ibid., 179.

• U of Denver - http://www.du.edu/ahss/philosophy/faculty_staff/nail_thomas.html

  Faculty & Staff
  Thomas Nail

  Thomas Nail
  Thomas Nail

  Associate Professor
  Sturm Hall 261
  2000 E. Asbury Ave.
  Email: thomas.nail@du.edu
  Web: Academia.edu / My Website / Twitter
  Critical Theory at DU: Website / Facebook
  Areas of Expertise/Research interests

  European philosophy
  political philosophy
  environmental philosophy

  Current Research and projects

  I am currently working on two major research projects.

  The first is a series of books on the philosophy of movement. So far in the series I have published The Figure of the Migrant with Stanford University Press and am in the final stages of the second volume titled Theory of the Border. At least three more books are planned for the series and are in various stages of completion.

  The second is on the relationship between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and includes several sub-projects:

  a book project—edited co-edited with Nicolae Morar and Daniel W. Smith— titled, "Between Deleuze and Foucault;"
  a journal issue of Foucault Studies titled, Foucault and Deleuze: Ethics, Politics, Psychoanalysis, co-edited with Nicolae Morar and Daniel W. Smith;
  a conference/workshop—organized with Nicolae Morar and Daniel W. Smith—titled "Between Deleuze and Foucault," held at Purdue University Nov. 30 - Dec. 1, 2012; and
  a transcription and translation of Gilles Deleuze's audio course lectures on Michel Foucault (1985-1986) as part of a grant from Purdue University, in collaboration with the Université de Paris VIII and published on La Voix de Deleuze.

  For more information on these projects, visit our website, Between Deleuze and Foucault.
  Professional biography

  My work draws on contemporary European philosophy—especially the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and Alain Badiou—and uses it to understand recent political events: revolutionary struggles, border and migration politics, and environmental resistance.
  Education

  PhD, University of Oregon
  MA, University of Oregon
  BA, University of North Texas
  Publications

  Monographs.

  Theory of the Border (Oxford University Press, 2016).
  The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, 2015).
  Interviewed by Critical–Theory.com (2015)
  Reviewed by Etienne RP on Amazon.com
  Reviewed by SilentTrends.com
  Review Roundtable in PhænEx 11, no. 1 (2016): 141-162.
  Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo (Edinburgh University Press, 2012)
  Reviewed by Nathan Jun in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2013).
  Reviewed by Nathan Widder in Foucault Studies 18 (2014)
  Interviewed by Critical–Theory.com (2013)

  Edited Books.

  Between Deleuze and Foucault (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)

  Edited Journal Issues.

  Foucault and Deleuze Foucault Studies 17 (2014).

  Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles.

  A Tale of Two Crises: Migration and Terrorism after the Paris Attacks, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Vol 16, Issue 1, (April 2016): 158–167.
  Alain Badiou and the Sans-Papiers, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 20:4 (2015), 109-130.
  Migrant Cosmopolitanism, Public Affairs Quarterly, 29.2, (April 2015): 187–199.
  Zapatismo and the Global Origins of Occupy, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 12 no. 3 (2013): 20–35.
  Deleuze, Occupy, and the Actuality of Revolution, Theory & Event 16.1 (2013).
  Translated into Turkish as "Deleuze, işgal ve Devrimi'nin Güncelliği," in Gezinin Yeryüzü Kardeşleri , trans. Sinem Ozer, ed. Sinem Ozer (Istanbul: Otonom Publishing, 2014).
  The Crossroads of Power: Michel Foucault and the U.S./Mexico Border Wall, Foucault Studies 15 (2012): 110–128.
  Violence at the Borders: Nomadic Solidarity and Non-Status Migrant Resistance, Radical Philosophy Review 14, no. 2 (2012): 241–257.
  Translated into French as "Violence aux frontières," in Frontières, trans. Hélène Clemente (Paris: Éditions D-Fiction, 2014), forthcoming.
  Constructivism and the Future Anterior of Radical Politics, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 1 (2010): 73–94.
  Reviewed by Davina Cooper in Jotwell: Equality (2011).
  A Post-Neoliberal Ecopolitics? Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo, Philosophy Today 54, no. 2 (2010): 179–190.
  Expression, Immanence, and Constructivism: 'Spinozism' and Deleuze and Guattari, Deleuze Studies 2, no. 2 (2008): 201–219.

  Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters.

  Revolution and the Return of Metaphysics in Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics (Lexington Books, 2013): 207–223.

  Invited Articles.

  The Barbarism of the Migrant, Stanford University Press, 2015.
  Michel Foucault, Accelerationist, An und für sich, 2015.
  Political Theory of the Mask, The Medes, 2013.
  Migrant Cosmopolitanism, e-International Relations, 2013.

  Interviews.

  The Figure of the Migrant: An Interview with Thomas Nail, Critical-Theory.com (2015)
  Migration—Crisis or New Normal?: An Interview with Thomas Nail and Alison Mountz, The Accidental Geographer, (2015)
  On Migrant Politics: An Interview with Thomas Nail, Hostis: a Journal of Incivility, Issue 2, June 2015.
  Zapatismo 20 Anos Depois: Bate papo com Thomas Nail, A Internacionalista [The Internationalist], December, 2013.
  On Deleuze and Zapatismo: An Interview with Thomas Nail at Critical-Theory.com (2013).
  Building a Sanctuary City: No One is Illegal–Toronto on Non-Status Migrant Justice, Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action 11 (2010): 149–162.

  Translations.

  Quentin Meillassoux, History and Event in Alain Badiou, Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy 12 (2011): 1–11.

  Transcriptions (ed).

  Gilles Deleuze, Lectures de Cours sur Michel Foucault 1985-1986, La Voix de Gilles Deleuze.

  Book Reviews.

  The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Re-Press, 2011) Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman eds. Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy 3 (2012): 40.
  Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (Columbia University Press, 2010) François Dosse, Foucault Studies 14 (2012): 218–222.
  Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century (AK Press, 2008) Chris Spannos, ed. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 20, no. 4 (December 2009): 112–114.
  Deleuze and Environmental Damage: Violence of the Text (Ashgate Publishing, 2006) Mark Halsey, Environmental Philosophy 3, no. 2 (2006): 64–66.

  Popular Press.

  The Hordes are Banging on the Gates of Europe? History News Network, 10/25/15.
  The Politics of the Mask, The Huffington Post, 11/12/13.
  Child Refugees: The New Barbarians, Pacific Standard: The Science of Society, 8/19/14.

• critical theory - http://www.critical-theory.com/deleuze-zapatismo-interview-thomas-nail/

  Theory and Theorists
  On Deleuze and Zapatismo: An Interview with Thomas Nail
  October 6, 2013 Eugene Wolters 1 Comment

  Thomas Nail is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Denver. His most recent book is “Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo” from Edinburgh University Press. You can read the first fifty pages of that book here.

  Professor Nail spoke with Critical-Theory.com to discuss his recent book and the role of academics today.

  returning to revolution thomas nail

  CT: You title your book “Returning to Revolution.” What did you mean by this, and why should we discuss Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo together?

  TN: The meaning of the word revolution is already “to return.” From one perspective political revolutions come and go, succeed or fail. From another perspective however, the appearance of each revolution marks only part of a continual process or sequence of historical transformation. Revolutions, to take an image from Deleuze, are like chains of volcanic islands. On the surface they appear as discontinuous and spontaneous, but deep underwater they are part of the same volcanic “hot spot.” The series of islands produced by this “hot spot” are simply the effect of the movement of a tectonic plate floating across the surface. Each eruption is the return of the “hot spot,” but it is not a repetition of the same because the top plate has shifted. Each island is singular. Each islands creates something new (a new earth, if you will). In this same way, revolution is a differential return

  Zapatismo is the volcanic “hot spot” of our time. It is the source of a new revolutionary chain of islands that began in the mid 90s. Or rather, it is the first island in the chain that reveals to us the defining features of this new volcanic flow. The intersectional analysis of power, prefiguration, participatory politics, and horizontalism are four of the most defining characteristics of revolutionary struggles of the last 20 years. The appearance of these tactics in the Alter-Globalization Movement, the World Social Forum, the Indignados, the Occupy Movement, and much of contemporary radical organizing, can all be traced back to the influence and inspiration of the Zapatistas in the early 90s (as I have argued in a recent essay, “Zapatismo and the Global Origins of Occupy”). Of course, the Zapatistas were not the first to use these strategies, as Nathan Jun points out in his review of Returning to Revolution at NDPR. Anarchists have used them in some form or another since the 19th century. The important difference, however, is that until the mid to late 90s, these tactics have never been the predominant tactics of global revolutionary struggle (as David Graeber argues in “The New Anarchists”). Today they are, grâce à Zapatismo.

  Deleuze and Guattari were two of the first philosophers to theorize the emergence of this sequence. While Subcomandante Marcos was organizing indigenous peasants in the jungles of Chiapas in 1983, Deleuze and Guattari had just published A Thousand Plateaus in France in 1980. Without directly influencing one another, Deleuze, Guattari, and Marcos were part of the same prefigurative volcanic process. Slavoj Žižek, for example, argues that “Deleuze more and more serves as the theoretical foundation of today’s anti-global Left” (Organs Without Bodies: xi). Although, for Žižek, this is a bad thing, his observation is correct. If we want to understand the theory behind these four political strategies that I argue define the current revolutionary sequence, Deleuze and Guattari’s work is one of the most important places to look. Again, they are not the first to theorize these sort strategies, but they are perhaps the single most influential for the current sequence leading up to people like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose best-selling trilogy (Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth) is undoubtedly, to quote Žižek again, “the communist manifesto for the 21st century.”

  CT: What is Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of revolution?

  TN: Just as Zapatismo developed the four practical strategies I mentioned above (the intersectional analysis of power, prefiguration, participatory politics, and horizontalism), so Deleuze and Guattari developed four theoretical strategies that define the current revolutionary process. Since the definition and analysis of these four practical and theoretical strategies are basically the four main chapters of the book, I will try to be brief.

  For Deleuze and Guattari, this new revolutionary sequence is no longer defined by the traditional definitions of revolution: the capture of the state, the political representation of the party, the centrality of the proletariat, or the leadership of the vanguard. The central question for Deleuze and Guattari is different. The question is how to establish revolutionary institutions which are neither spontaneist nor bureaucratic, but “constructivist.” By “constructivism,” Deleuze and Guattari do not mean what is traditionally understood as “social constructivism” in sociology and philosophy, namely, that revolutions are by-products or “social constructs” produced by human minds, language, institutions, historical contexts, cultural values and so on. Such theories presuppose what needs to be explained in the first place: mind, society, culture and history themselves.

  Rather, a constructivist theory of revolution simply means a theory of revolution that is neither pre-constructed in the form of the party or state nor de-constructed in the form of some vague affirmation of ontological difference. In their theory, a revolutionary institution is something that moves beyond “local and occasional struggles,” but at the same time does not end up reproducing the bureaucracy, hierarchy, and authoritarianism of the classical party organization or the state. Deleuze and Guattari set out to create the political concepts needed to understand a political body that is more lasting and organized than an ephemeral riot or protest movement, but not as organized as a political party or state. In the book I isolate the four main concepts that I think really crystallize this theory: historical topology, deterritorialization, consistency, and nomadism.

  In each chapter these concepts are contrasted with the two main theoretical enemies of the book: the politics of difference and the politics of representation. In other words: spontaneity and the state. One could even connect this same problem up with the historical debate between anarchists and Marxists, or today, between Deleuzians and Badiouians. Thus, another way to read Returning to Revolution would be as a full-length defense of a constructivist Deleuze against those who admire or disdain him for his supposed political affirmation of pure difference. I have also applied this “third way” elsewhere to understanding the Occupy movement: “Deleuze, Occupy, and the Actuality of Revolution.”

  CT: What is so Deleuzian about the Zapatistas?

  TN: One might just as easily ask “what is so Zapatista about Deleuze and Guattari?” I do not want to argue that we should use Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy to interpret, explain or understand the Zapatistas, as some scholars have done, any more than I want to argue that we should use the Zapatista uprising to legitimate, ground or justify Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy. This approach not only presupposes a privileged foundationalism of theory over practice, or practice over theory, but also risks perpetuating a long legacy of Eurocentrism and theoretical imperialism. My aim in writing this book was not to use one to interpret the other, but to set up a parallel series between two sequences, which were neither influenced by one another nor of the same type. My aim was to show that theory and practice equally lay the foundations for a new revolutionary sequence. I draw a parallel (not an equivalence or interpretation) between the practical and theoretical aspects of four key strategies that define this new sequence.Speaking schematically, in the political field the Zapatistas develop the practical strategies of 1) an intersectional analysis of power, 2) prefiguration, 3) participatory politics, and 4) horizontalism. In the philosophical field Deleuze and Guattari develop the theoretical strategies of 1) historical topology, 2) deterritorialization, 3) consistency, and 4) nomadism. Again, these are not equivalences. Theory and practice are two different sides of the same four strategies.

  CT: In your book, you outline 3 criticisms of Deleuze: Political ambivalence, virtual hierarchy, and subjective paralysis. Can you briefly describe those? Do you find any of those criticism compelling or conversely, utterly wrong?

  TN: One way to keep revolutions from turning into bureaucratic parties or new states is to redefine revolution as the process of “transformation as such.” In other words, to ontologize it in something like an “[affirmation of] Difference in the state of permanent revolution,’ as Deleuze says in Difference and Repetition (75/53). The problem however, is that if we define revolution as pure transformation or pure potentiality, as many Deleuzian’s have, such transformations may provide a new non-representational space of liberty, or they may just as easily create a sort of power vacuum that allows for even harsher state policies or new capitalist market forces. This is the criticism put forward by theorists like Badiou, Zizek, Bruno Bosteels, and Peter Hallward. And I think it is partially right. Or it is at least right to critique what Éric Alliez calls the “clichéd-reading of Deleuze limited to a spontaneist apology for ‘deterritorialisation’” (“Deleuzian Politics,” 185.)

  I must admit, I find the concept of deterritorialization put forward by Deleuze (before A Thousand Plateaus) to be politically insufficient. This is why most of the textual support for this criticism, and the other two as well (from Badiou, et al), all come from Deleuze’s pre-A Thousand Plateaus writings. In A Thousand Plateaus however, four different types of political change (deterritorialization) are distinguished that are quite important: (1) “relative negative” processes that change a political situation in order to maintain and reproduce an established situation; (2) “relative positive” processes that do not reproduce an established situation, but do not yet contribute to or create a new situation; they are ambiguous; (3) “absolute negative” processes that do not support any political situation, but undermine them all; and (4) “absolute positive” processes that do not reproduce an established political situation, but instead create a new one. The concept of deterritorialization is probably the most under-treated and misused concept in Deleuze’s whole political philosophy. Thus, one of the original contributions of Returning to Revolution is that it spends an entire chapter treating these four types of deterritorialization and their political consequences—without falling prey to the critiques of Badiou and company.

  The other two criticisms follow the first. Badiou and Hallward both argue that by valorizing “pure virtual transformation,” that actual beings are devalorized in favor of other worldly potentialities (virtual hierarchy). This is one possible reading of Deleuze’s early works, but does not hold up for his work as a whole. The third criticism is that if Deleuze’s theory of subjectivity is defined only by its potential for transformation, it is stuck in a kind of paralysis of endless potential change no less disempowering than subjective stasis. Or, as Hallward says: Deleuze ‘abandons the decisive subject in favour of our more immediate subjection to the imperative of creative life or thought’ (2006: 163). I think this is true “if” Deleuze’s theory of the subject is nothing but pure fluctuation without any consistency. But it’s not. I develop a reading of “third person political subjectivity” in Returning to Revolution drawn from Deleuze and Guattari’s writings in What is Philosophy? and from the Zapatistas use of masks. I have written a short piece on the “Political Theory of the Mask” elsewhere as well. To conclude, all three criticisms, for me, are important for identifying some “bad” readings of Deleuze—even if the original intent of Badiou, et al. was to condemn Deleuze himself.

  CT: In your book you note that the standard definition of the Greek nomos changed. That is, it went from “I distribute” or “I arrange” towards nomos as “law” or “division.” How are these definitions different?

  TN: Deleuze and Guattari define the word nomos according to its etymological origins, as elaborated at length in the work of French historian Emmanuel Laroche in Histoire de la racine nem- en grec ancien (1949). There, Laroche argues that the Greek origins of the root ‘νεμ’ signified a ‘mode of distribution’ [moyen de distribution], not an allocation of parcelled-out or delimited land [partage]. ‘The idea [that nomos meant] law is a product of fifth and sixth-century Greek thought’ that breaks from the ‘original Homeric root νεμω meaning “I distribute” or “I arrange”’ (1949: 255 [my translation]). Even “the [retroactively] proposed translations ‘cut-up earth, plot of land, piece’ are not suitable in all cases to the Homeric poems and assume an ancient νεμω ‘I divide’ that we should reject. The pasture in archaic times is generally an unlimited space [espace illimité]; this can be a forest, meadow, rivers, a mountain side” (1949: 116 [my translation]).

  This is also quite clear from the Proto-Indo-European root *nem-, meaning, to assign, or allot. The nomadic steppe is thus first of all an occupied space, but one without division, segmentation, or fencing. On the steppe, space is continually re-alloted and re-assigned according to weather and grazing patterns, not by the fences of territorial societies. The meaning of nomos as “law” or “division” is a political invention of the Greeks that stems from their imperialist law, territorial divisions, and enslavement of the nomads and barbarians of the Mediterranean world. I think Laroche is right on here and Deleuze and Guattari are right to locate the roots of political anarchism in nomadism

  CT: You argue that the global solidarity with and from the Zapatistas is “not a matter of charity.” How can Americans engage in solidaristic action without reproducing colonial power relations?

  TN: One of the most interesting things about Zapatismo as an indigenous struggle is its universalism. They insist that anyone can be a Zapatista. Marcos, for example, says he ‘is gay in San Francisco, a black in South Africa, Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Isidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel . . . Marcos is every untolerated, oppressed, exploited minority that is resisting and saying “Enough!”’ (Our Word Is Our Weapon, 101–6). While the Zapatistas in Chiapas certainly benefit from the Fair Trade sale of coffee, boots, honey, textiles, and revolutionary tourism, they advise those in solidarity to make Zapatismo where they are at. That will look different from Chiapas. Marcos and the Caracoles are not the central command of the revolution. They are a point of resonance or inspiration for others elsewhere. They are a starting point for a kind of differential repetition. This is precisely why you see people still wearing Zapatista style ski masks at almost every global justice summit protest and Occupy rally around the world. They are doing what they can to make Zapatismo where they are at—even if they have never been to Chiapas. Again, the mask plays an interesting role in making the universality and collective subjectivity of Zapatismo possible. The mask allows for a shared anonymous universality which avoids all sorts of vanguardism and authoritarianism. Is this masked person someone from Chiapas, Marcos, Ramona, etc? Yes and no. The mask is not without its dangers, but universality is certainly one of its strengths.

  CT: You talk at length about the Zapatista encuentro. What is the encuentro, and why is it Deleuzian?

  TN: The Zapatista Encuentros were the first global anti-neoliberal gatherings and inspired the alter-globalization movement and World Social Forum. The purpose of the Intercontinental Encuentros was not to provide a revolutionary program or be a central command of the revolution. The goal was simply to provide a “bridge” or network across which all the world’s struggles against neoliberalism could connect with one another and take collective action.

  I would not say that the Encuentro was Deleuzian or that Deleuze was a Zapatista. However, I would say that the Encuentro is the practical expression of the same strategy Deleuze and Guattari write about in theory. That is, both are strategies to achieve a certain form of universality without political representation or hierarchy. The Encuentro’s were part of a practical strategy of horizontalism: an anti-authoritarian network of struggles communicating and acting together in global solidarity. We can see this today in the organization of the alter-globalization movement and in the Occupy movement, for example. Who was in charge of the Occupy movement? Everyone. This was the largest occupation movement in history and it had no leader. It was horizontalist.

  In theory, Deleuze and Guattari also propose a form of universality without political representation or hierarchy. They call it, among other names, nomadism: the form of undivided social distribution and solidarity. Nomadism, in contrast to the state, is a form of social distribution that is not aimed at political representation or hierarchy. Rather than dividing the people by nation-states, political status, etc. it sees the world as an undivided distribution of actual and possible solidarities. The Encuentro and other sites of solidarity for Deleuze are not sites of command or representation, but sites where an event is reinvigorated and redeployed. Annual gatherings, as Deleuze says, “do not add a second and a third time to the first, they carry the first time to the “nth” power” (1994: 8/1).

  CT: Marcos and the EZLN said Marxism was inadequate for dealing with indigenous population of Mexico. Is that to say that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is inadequate for revolution?

  TN: There is a quote attributed to Marcos that goes like this: “We are not a proletariat, our land is not your means of production and we don’t want to work in a tractor factory. All we want is to be listened to, and for you big-city smart-arses to stop telling us how to live. As for your dialectic – you can keep it. You never know when it might come in handy” (One No, Many Yeses, 29).

  I do not think this is a rejection of Marxism tout court, but rather a rejection of a certain kind of Marxism which viewed, and perhaps still views, indigenous struggles as backward and undeveloped. Indigenous peoples, the story goes, have not yet gone through the historical dialectical movement into industrial production and thus are not prepared for revolutionary communism. Indigenous peoples are still tied to a kind of primitive communism based on all sorts of backward notions of property and social organization.

  I do not think it follows from this that Deleuze and Guattari’s theories are necessarily more adequate as whole. Or maybe it depends on what we mean be adequate. If adequate means “accurate theory of,” then I would say “no,” but if it means “parallel expression of the the same strategy” then “yes.” At least with respect to this particular problem, Deleuze and Guattari’s Marxism is vastly more compatible with indigenous struggles like Zapatismo than with any kind of developmentalist, vanguardist, or dialectical Marxism.

  CT: What is an academic’s role in the revolution then? If Deleuze and Guattari are a parallel expression of a revolutionary strategy, how can Deleuzian scholars approach politics?

  TN: Theory and practice are heterogenous actions. One is not reducible to the other. On the one hand theorists should avoid “grounding” practice in theory and thus reducing practice to a mere exemplification or representation of theory. On the other hand theorists should also avoid offering mere critiques aimed at showing the “ungrounded” nature of all politics. I find the latter especially fruitless.

  For Deleuze and Guattari the relation between theory and action is like a relay between parallel series. Theory proceeds but its concepts can become rigidified into a dead ends (structuralism), practice can then intervene, pick up the baton, and move forward (May 1968) and vice versa. Theory does not cause praxis, nor does praxis cause theory: both are heterogeneous components constitutive of revolutionary strategy. The political analysis of revolutionary movements is thus never a question of representation or ‘speaking for others’, but one of finding concepts that can be used like helpful little machines in the strategic assemblage.

  Thus, intellectuals do not simply stand at the front and off to the side of revolutionary struggles as its representatives. They stand alongside revolutions armed with their own kinds of weapons: political concepts. As Deleuze says, “It’s not a question of worrying or of hoping for the best, but of finding new weapons” (Negotiations, 242/178). Sometimes the best weapons are new ideas and other times they are novel actions, but more often the best weapons are combinations of both. I think that the Book Bloc is an interesting way to express the weapon like character of ideas. Protestors make large cardboard shields with the covers and titles of books from Foucault, Fannon, Beckett, Marcuse, Subcomandante Marcos, etc. and use them to battle police in the streets.

  Theorists can be involved in political struggles in all sorts of ways. Foucault and Deleuze were active in the Groupe d’information de prisons in all sorts of ways that were not strictly theoretical (signing petitions, handing out surveys outside the jails, etc.). But the task of theory strictly speaking is to create concepts which will be useful or transformative for those engaged in political struggle. Returning to Revolution elucidates the strategic assemblage created by Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo in hopes that it might be useful or transformative for today’s struggles against neoliberalism.

  About Thomas Nail

  Thomas Nail is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. He is the author of Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and is currently preparing a monograph on the political philosophy of migration entitled, The Figure of the Migrant (under contract with Stanford University Press). His work has appeared in Theory & Event, Philosophy Today, Parrhesia, Deleuze Studies, Foucault Studies, and elsewhere. He is currently editing several works on the relationship between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault with Daniel Smith and Nicolae Morar: a book entitled Between Deleuze and Foucault; a special issue of Foucault Studies entitled “Foucault and Deleuze: Ethics, Politics, Psychoanalysis,” and a transcription/translation of Deleuze’s Lectures de Cours sur Michel Foucault 1985-1986. His publications, can be downloaded here.

• author's site - http://mysite.du.edu/~tnail2/Thomas_Nail/Home.html

  Thomas Nail is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. His research is in European philosophy, Political philosophy, and Environmental philosophy.

  The aim of his research is to apply the insights of recent European thought to contemporary political events like Zapatismo, migrant activism, the Occupy movement, and ecological resistance.

  Thomas Nail.
  Curriculum Vitae.
  Department of Philosophy
  thomas.nail@du.edu
  University of Denver
  du.academia.edu/thomasnail
  2000 E Asbury Ave., Suite 257
  mysite.du.edu/~tnail2
  Denver, CO 80208-0923
  17 Nov 2014
  Specialization.
  Competence.
  European Philosophy
  Environmental Philosophy
  Social and Political Philosophy
  Ethics
  Education.
  Ph.D.
  Philosophy, University of Oregon, 2011
  Ted Toadvine and John Lysaker (co-chairs), Colin Koopman, Forest Pyle.
  M.A.
  Philosophy, University of Oregon, 2007
  B.A.
  Philosophy, University of North Texas (Honors), 2001
  Academic Employment.
  Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Denver,
  2013–
  Director of Post-Doctoral Faculty in Migration and Diaspora, University of Denver, 2012–3
  Post-Doctoral Lecturer in Philosophy and Migration, University of Denver, 2011–2013
  Awards and Grants
  2015 Faculty Research Fund, University of Denver, $3,000 (
  university-wide competition)
  .
  2014-2015 Global Research Synergy Grant
  , Purdue University, $26,000. See below.
  2013-2014 Global Research Synergy Grant, Purdue University, $26,000. With Daniel W.
  Smith and Nicolae Morar to transcribe the audio lectures of Gilles Deleuze into French and
  host an international conference (www.cla.purdue.edu/deleuze
  ).
  2012 Andrew Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of
  Illinois Champagne-Urbana (
  declined to accept. Accepted DU Post-Doc instead
  ).
  2011 Fulbright Eco-Leadership Program Award (
  to provide organic gardening instruction and
  materials to low-income Latino families in Eugene, Oregon
  )
  .
  2010 George Rebec Prize, University of Oregon, (
  best essay written by a graduate student
  ).
  2010-2011 Leon Culbertson Scholarship, University of Oregon.
  2010-2011 Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics Dissertation Fellowship, University of
  Oregon (
  university-wide competition for stipend and tuition waiver
  ).
  2009 Fulbright Professional Development Program Award (
  for travel and presentation of research
  on the Solidarity City project
  ).
  2009-2010
  U.S. Fulbright Research Scholarship
  : “From Citizenship to the Solidarity
  City” (
  Invited by Université de Montréal, McMaster University, University of Guelph, and
  Concordia University).
  2009-2010 Visiting Scholar at the University of Toronto.
  2009-2010 Laurel Scholarship, University of Oregon (
  did not accept because of Fulbright
  ).
  1
  2008-2009 Clara Nasholm Scholarship, University of Oregon.
  2007-2008 University of Oregon Graduate Teaching Fellowship, English.
  2007 Postgraduate Course Certificate on Gilles Deleuze, University of Cardiff.
  2006 University of Oregon Graduate Research Award, French Study, Paris, France.
  2003-2006, 2008-2010 University of Oregon Graduate Teaching Fellowship, Philosophy.
  2001 Study Abroad Scholarship for language study in Germany, University of North Texas.
  2001 Student Ambassador of the Department of Philosophy, University of North Texas.
  2001 Oscar Aries Peace Scholarship by the Department of Political Science and Peace
  Studies, University of North Texas.
  2001 John Creuzot Scholarship, Department of Philosophy, University of North Texas.
  2000 Study Abroad Scholarship for language study in Mexico, University of North Texas.
  Refereed Publications.
  Monographs.
  •
  The Figure of the Migrant
  (Stanford University Press, forthcoming
  ).
  •
  Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo
  (Edinburgh University Press,
  distributed by Oxford
  University Press, 2012).
  Edited Journal Issues.
  •
  “Foucault and Deleuze: Ethics, Politics, Psychoanalysis
  ,
  ”
  Guest Editor, special issue of
  Foucault Studies 17
  (April 2014).
  Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles.
  •
  “Alain Badiou and the Sans-Papiers
  ,
  ”
  Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities,
  forthcoming, 2015.
  •
  “Zapatismo and the Origins of Occupy,”
  Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory
  , vol. 12
  no. 3 (Spring 2013): 20–
  35.
  •
  “Deleuze, Occupy, and the Actuality of Revolution,”
  Theory & Event,
  16.1 (2013).
  Translated into Turkish as “Deleuze, Occupy ve Devrimin Edimselli
  ğ
  i,” in
  Gezinin
  Yeryüzü Karde
  ş
  leri
  , trans. Sinem Özer, ed. Sinem Özer (Istanbul: Otonom Publishing,
  2014), 257–295.
  •
  “The Crossroads of Power: Michel Foucault and the U.S./Mexico Border Wall,”
  Foucault
  Studies
  , 15 (2013): 110-128.
  •
  “Violence at the Borders: Nomadic Solidarity and Non-Status Migrant Resistance,”
  Radical Philosophy Review
  15, no. 1 (2012): 241–257. Translated into French as “Violence
  aux frontières,” in
  Frontières
  , trans. Hélène Clemente (Paris: Éditions D-Fiction, 2014),
  forthcoming.
  •
  “Constructivism and the Future Anterior of Radical Politics,”
  Anarchist Developments in
  Cultural Studies
  1, (2010): 73–94.
  Reviewed by Davina Cooper in
  Jotwell: Equality
  (Winter 2011): http://jotwell.com
  •
  “A Post-Neoliberal Ecopolitics?: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo,”
  Philosophy Today
  54,
  no. 2 (2010): 179–190.
  •
  “Expression, Immanence, and Constructivism: ‘Spinozism’ and Deleuze and Guattari,”
  Deleuze Studies
  2, no. 2 (2008): 201–219.
  2

  Monographs.

  The Figure of the Migrant

  Stanford University Press | Amazon.com (2015).

  Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo

  Edinburgh University Press | Oxford University Press | Amazon.com (2012)

  Reviewed by Nathan Jun in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2013).

  Reviewed by Nathan Widder in Foucault Studies 18 (2014).

  Interviewed by Critical-Theory.com (2013).

  Edited Books.

  Between Deleuze and Foucault

  Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2016.

  Edited Journal Issues.

  Foucault and Deleuze: Ethics, Politics, Psychoanalysis

  Foucault Studies 17 (2014).

  Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles.

  Migrant Cosmopolitanism

  Public Affairs Quarterly, 29.2, (April 2015): 187–199.

  Zapatismo and the Global Origins of Occupy

  Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 12 no. 3 (2013): 20–35.

  Deleuze, Occupy, and the Actuality of Revolution

  Theory & Event 16.1 (2013).

  Translated into Turkish as “Deleuze, Occupy, işgal ve Devrimi'nin Güncelliği ,” in

  Gezinin Yeryüzü Kardeşleri, trans. Sinem Ozer, ed. Sinem Ozer (Istanbul: Otonom

  Publishing, 2014).

  The Crossroads of Power: Michel Foucault and the U.S./Mexico Border Wall

  Foucault Studies 15 (2012): 110–128.

  Violence at the Borders: Nomadic Solidarity and Non-Status Migrant Resistance

  Radical Philosophy Review 14, no. 2 (2012): 241–257.

  Constructivism and the Future Anterior of Radical Politics

  Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 1 (2010): 73–94.

  Reviewed by Davina Cooper in Jotwell: Equality (2011).

  A Post-Neoliberal Ecopolitics? Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo

  Philosophy Today 54, no. 2 (2010): 179–190.

  Expression, Immanence, and Constructivism: ‘Spinozism’ and Deleuze and Guattari

  Deleuze Studies 2, no. 2 (2008): 201–219.

  Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters.

  Revolution and the Return of Metaphysics

  Deleuze and Metaphysics (Lexington Books, 2014): 207–223.

  Other Publications.

  Invited Articles.

  The Barbarism of Migration

  Stanford University Press Blog, 2015.

  Translated into Greek as “Η βαρβαρότητα της Μετανάστευσης”

  republished in Karouzo: a Place for the Arts, 2015.

  Michel Foucault, Accelerationist

  An Und Für Sich, 2014.

  Post-Anarchism & Pre-Anarchism

  Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 2014.

  Migrant Cosmopolitanism

  e-International Relations, 2013.

  Political Theory of the Mask

  The Medes, 2013.

  Interviews.

  On Migrant Politics: An Interview with Thomas Nail

  Hostis: A Journal of Incivility Issue 2, June, 2015.

  Republished at Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, 2015.

  Republished at Copyriot, 2015.

  Zapatismo 20 Anos Depois: Bate papo com Thomas Nail, A Internacionalista

  [The Internationalist], December, 2013.

  Building a Sanctuary City: No One is Illegal–Toronto on Non-Status Migrant Justice

  Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action 11 (2010): 149–162.

  Translations.

  Quentin Meillassoux, History and Event in Alain Badiou

  Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy 12 (2011): 1–11.

  Transcriptions (ed).

  Gilles Deleuze, Lectures de Cours sur Michel Foucault 1985-1986

  La Voix de Gilles Deleuze.

  Book Reviews.

  The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism

  (Re-Press, 2011) Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman eds.

  Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy 3 (2012): 40.

  Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives

  (Columbia University Press, 2010) François Dosse

  Foucault Studies 14 (2012): 218–222.

  Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century

  (AK Press, 2008) Chris Spannos, ed.

  Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 20, no. 4 (December 2009): 112–114.

  Deleuze and Environmental Damage: Violence of the Text

  (Ashgate Publishing, 2006) Mark Halsey

  Environmental Philosophy 3, no. 2 (2006): 64–66.

  Popular Press.

  The Politics of the Mask

  The Huffington Post, 11/12/13.

  Child Refugees: The New Barbarians

  Pacific Standard: The Science of Society, 8/19/14

• critical theory - http://www.critical-theory.com/the-figure-of-the-migrant-an-interview-with-thomas-nail/

  Books
  The Figure of the Migrant, an Interview with Thomas Nail
  December 1, 2015 Eugene Wolters 0 Comments

  We recently spoke with Thomas Nail, an associate professor at the University of Denver, to talk about his recent book “The Figure of the Migrant.”

  In it, Nail develops a theory of what he calls kinopolitics and argues that the migrant has become the “political figure of our time.”

  “Rather than viewing migration as the exception to the rule of political fixity and citizenship,” his publisher writes, “Thomas Nail reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place.”

  Eugene Wolters: You develop a theory of kinopolitics, or the politics of movement. Could you briefly describe what this means, and why it’s important?

  Thomas Nail: This is the one of the more technical aspects of the book, so I would like to just say briefly, for those who have not read it, what the main motivation and thesis of the book is before we get into kinopolitics.

  The thesis of The Figure of the Migrant is that the migrant is the political figure of our time. At the turn of the twenty-first century, there were more regional and international migrants than ever before in recorded history. Today, there are over 1 billion migrants—and each decade the global percentage of migrants and refugees grows. Political theory has yet to take this phenomenon seriously. My work argues that doing so requires political theory to alter its foundational presuppositions.

  This is what The Figure of the Migrant does. If we take the figure of the migrant as a primary or constitutive figure of politics, it requires more than a mere accommodation of this figure into the existing frameworks of liberalism, Marxism, multiculturalism, and so on. It requires a whole new theoretical starting point that does not begin with stasis and the state, but with the more primary social movements that constitute the state, as well as the social alternatives that arise from those same movements.

  Instead of starting with a set of preexisting citizens, kinopolitics begins with the flows of migrants and the ways they have circulated or sedimented into citizens and states— as well as how migrants have constituted a counter-power and alternative to state structures. In short, kinopolitics is the reinvention of political theory from the primacy of social motion instead of the state.

  Eugene: What inspired you to start theorizing social movement and kinopolitics?

  Thomas: Well, I wanted to write about the central importance of the migrant in contemporary politics, but when I started doing the research it seemed that the migrant was always being theorized as a secondary or derivative figure. Across several related disciplines—Geography, Philosophy, Anthropology, and Political Science—the migrant was treated as an exception to the rule of already existing theoretical frameworks. What I wanted to show was that the migrant is not the exception, but rather the constitutive condition of contemporary politics. Right now, I think political theory has this backwards. Migration is historically constant—sedentary societies are the exception to this rule, not the other way around. So in order to theorize the migrant along these lines I had to invent my own theoretical framework.

  The more I read the more I started to realize it was not just the migrant as such that was being treated as secondary, but it was because the migrant moved that it posed such difficulty for political theory and sedentary societies. So I took this so-called exceptional attribute of “motion” and flipped the existing frameworks on their heads—interpreting motion as the primary feature of social life. So instead of looking at fixed subjects and objects, the book looks at “flows and junctions;” instead of looking at states and institutions, the book looks at “regimes of circulation.” As it turns out, societies themselves are not, as they are often treated, static entities of fixed members, but continuous circulations of metastable social flows. So I started with the migrant and ended up needing to build a new political theory to fit it. This method has produced some interesting and original conclusions.

  Eugene: You describe situations many people view as static – like residency in a certain area—as a “junction” within a flow. What is the political importance of re-classifying things like citizenship, residency, etc. in terms of social flows?

  Thomas: One political importance of this move is to undermine the hierarchical notion of the social inferiority of movement, which is made quite explicit in Aristotle’s Politics and taken up as a given throughout political history. Contemporary anti-immigrant politics still rely, as they have historically, on the idea that those who move to the territory are not, or are not fully, members of that society. By showing that society and its various figures are all continuously constituted by social motion and migration, I hope to undermine the bogus notion that some people move and others stay and that social policy can be based this false idea. Movement is not good or bad—everything moves—the question is how.

  The consequence of this seemingly simple point that everyone moves is the need for a typology of the regimes of motion that distribute people and things. In other words, I try to show how social motion is constitutive of the various social categories that arbitrarily relativize motion into territorial, political, juridical, and economic orders or regimes. Territory, for example, is not a fixed thing—it is a continual process shaped by a number of different material flows that move inward, centripetally, toward a center and disperse at the periphery, creating the conditions of a territorial hierarchy. But if it is true that social sedentarism is the product of social motion, the arbitrary nature of territorial expulsions are exposed for exactly what they are: arbitrary and illegitimate.

  Eugene: What influence does Deleuze have on this work? It seems some of the language is similar, yet references to Deleuze are few and far between.

  Thomas: I thought someone might ask me this. The short answer is that Deleuze was the first to make a really important historical connection between the physical phenomenon of turbulence, or pedetic motion, and the social phenomenon of nomadism. He and Guattari started working through this idea in their chapter on “nomadology” in A Thousand Plateaus, to great influence and effect.

  However, the problem with Deleuze and Guattari is twofold. First, they wrongly follow the typical definition of the migrant as a figure that simply moves between two pre-established fixed points. This is just an empirically wrong definition for two reasons: 1) there are no fixed social points, only regimes of circulation; and 2) real historical migrants almost never follow this kind of movement. Their movement is almost always associated with a qualitative transformation of society to some degree, not just a quantitive or extensive translation from point to point. Furthermore, it is rare for a migrant to move only once; most migrants move multiple times in a system of relays or circulations.

  Second, Deleuze and Guattari spend one of the longest chapters of A Thousand Plateaus on only one historical figure of the migrant: the nomad. It’s a great chapter, but historically speaking, the nomad is really only the dominant name or figure of the migrant for a certain limited period of time, after which the figures of the barbarian, vagabond, and proletariat, are more significant. Deleuze and Guattari clearly reference these other figures as “heirs to the nomad,” but they do not give them the same kind of treatment as they give to the nomad. The consequence is that people have tended to fetishize the nomad.

  Despite these differences, Deleuze and Guattari remain general influences for me alongside other theorists of movement like Lucretius, Marx, and Bergson. The Figure of the Migrant is not a Deleuzian theory of migration or a book on Deleuze’s theory of nomadism. At the end of the day, the theoretical framework, the theses, and historical method are original to my own project.

  Eugene: You say “the migrant is the political figure of our time.” Why now more so than other historical periods of mass movement and expulsion?

  Thomas: The migrant is the political figure of our time for two reasons. First, quantitatively, there are just more migrants on the planet: over one billion and rising! Even as a percentage of the world population, more and more people are becoming migrants. Second, qualitatively, the 21st century is the century in which all the previous types of social expulsion and migratory resistance have reemerged and become more prevalent than ever before. This contemporary situation allows us to see what had previously been obscured: that the figure of the migrant and its expulsion has always been the true motive force of social history. Only now, in a world of such dramatic movement and expulsion, are we in a position to recognize and trace out this historical trajectory and its cosmopolitan potential.

  Eugene: I thought your re-reading of history in terms of vagrancy and expulsion was fascinating. Would you like to briefly discuss the connection between expansion and expulsion in the kinopolitical model?

  Thomas: The major thesis of the book is that the migrant is the political figure of our time, but there are two minor theses that support it. First, as I mentioned, is the thesis that the migrant requires a new movement-oriented theoretical framework to analyze it; and, second, is the thesis that social expansion has always been predicated on the social expulsion of migrants.

  This second thesis is a kinopolitical radicalization of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation. However, the process of dispossessing migrants of their social status (expulsion) in order to further develop or advance a given form of social motion (expansion) is not unique to the capitalist regime of social motion. I can’t go into all four historical figures of the migrant here, so I will give just two short examples of the nomad and the barbarian.

  First, we see this process of expansion by expulsion at work in early Neolithic societies whose progressive cultivation of land and animals (territorial expansion) would not have been possible without the expulsion (territorial dispossession) of a part of the human population: hunter-gatherers, whose territory was transformed into agricultural land and who were themselves transformed into surplus agriculturalists for whom there was no more arable land left to cultivate at a certain point. Thus, social expulsion is the condition of social expansion in two ways: an internal condition that allows for the removal of part of the population when certain internal limits have been reached (carrying capacity of a given territory, for example) and an external condition that allows for the removal of part of the population outside these limits when the territory is able to expand outward into the lands of other groups (hunter-gatherers). In this case territorial expansion was possible only on the condition that part of the population be expelled in the form of migratory nomads, forced into the surrounding mountains and deserts.

  Later, we see the same logic in the Ancient world, whose dominant political form (the state) would not have been possible without the expulsion (political dispossession) of a large body of Barbarian slaves kidnapped from the mountains of the Middle East and Mediterranean and used as workers, soldiers, and servants so that a growing ruling class could live in luxury. The social conditions for the expansion of a growing political order (including warfare, colonialism, and massive public works) were precisely the expulsion of a population of Barbarians who had to be depoliticized at the same time. This occurs again and again throughout history. Each time, the regime of motion changes as does the figure of the migrant.

  Eugene: What do you think about the European refugee crisis?

  Thomas: Europe’s current crisis is that it is increasingly forced to choose between its pretensions of liberal democracy—based on the idea of universal equality—and the fact that its provision of those rights is absolutely limited by territorial, political, legal, and economic borders. The real crisis is that one cannot have both. Thousands of years of history have demonstrated this thesis, but the 21st century will force us to realize it.

  What is happening right now in Europe demonstrates precisely my thesis that this will be the century of the migrant. The international nation-state system (UN) and now the infra-national nation-state system (EU) are unable to accomodate the figure of the migrant. What we are witnessing today in the brutal deaths of refugees coming to Europe via boat and Mexican migrants is the demonstration of this failure.

  The historical connection of contemporary migrants to the larger historical figure of the migrant has been explicit in the media. In the UK, the Guardian recently published an editorial comment on Europe’s crisis that ends by describing refugees as the “fearful dispossessed” who are “rattling Europe’s gates.” Although unfamiliar to some, others will know that the phrase “rattling the gates” refers to a very specific historical moment: the Barbarian invasion of Rome.

  In Europe, French presidential frontrunner Marine Le Pen said at a recent rally that “this migratory influx will be like the Barbarian invasion of the 4th century, and the consequences will be the same.” Even when their rhetoric is veiled, sometimes even when they claim to support the migrant population, much of the rest of Europe and its media have now uncritically adopted the same “dangerous waters” metaphors used by Romans and almost every other imperial power in history who have described their migrants as “fierce waves,” “influxes,” “storms,” “surges,” and “floods.” Even the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, has described the refugees as a “great tide” that has “flooded into Europe” producing “chaos” that needs to be “stemmed and managed.” “We are slowly becoming witnesses to the birth of a new form of political pressure,” Tusk claims, “and some even call it a kind of a new hybrid war, in which migratory waves have become a tool, a weapon against neighbors.”_ This is not neutral terminology. It has a historically specific and kinopolitical origin.

  Now, with the attacks in Paris, borders are being closed and migrants are being scrutinized and even scapegoated, just as they were after 9/11. This blatantly wrong attribution of terrorism to Syrian refugees exposes the real anxiety of Western politics: uncontrollable migrancy and the failure of the nation-state.

  Eugene: What questions do you hope to take up in the future? Are you working on any other concepts, books, papers, etc?

  Thomas: I have already completed the next book, Theory of the Border, which was written in tandem with The Figure of the Migrant, but could not be published in the same volume since the two together would have been over 700 pages long. The reviews have been very positive and the book is now forthcoming next year with Oxford University Press.

  Theory of the Border further develops the kinopolitical framework and uses it to analyze the political history of social division. The final section of the book offers a close study of the kinopolitics of the US-Mexico border. Where The Figure of the Migrant presents a kinopolitics of the political subject, Theory of the Border presents a kinopolitics of the political object: the material and technical apparatuses that direct social circulation. Therefore, Theory of the Border also performs a similar kinopolitical inversion. Instead of looking at borders as the products of societies and states, it looks at states and societies as the products of the mobile processes of bordering.

Nail, Thomas. The figure of the migrant
E.R. Gill
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1239.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Nail, Thomas. The figure of the migrant. Stanford, 2015. 295p index afp ISBN 9780804787178 cloth, $85.00; ISBN 9780804796583 pbk, $24.95; ISBN 9780804796682 ebook, $24.95

53-3727

HM1136

2015-7378 CIP

Nail (philosophy, Univ. of Denver) focuses on numerous ways that social and political developments can be viewed as a history of migrants. He begins with kinopolitics, or the theory of social motion. Those expelled from land, such as eviction with the enclosure movement, are nomads; those expelled from politics, judged to lack reason and ability to speak the language, are barbarians. Vagabonds are those expelled by laws, such as laws that punish homelessness, not for people's actions but as a state of being. The proletariat comprises those expelled from the economic means of production through the elasticity of the workforce under capitalism. Nail then addresses migrations between Mexico and the US through the lens of kinopolitics. Mexican land reforms have nationalized land and favored foreign investment in ways that have dispossessed millions and rendered them migrants. Correspondingly, US immigration policy has encouraged a view of these migrants as barbarians who negatively impact the culture, as naturally inferior, and as properly politically disenfranchised. Nail concludes that migration is not derivative within a static framework but is primary to a history of society. Nail's book is a novel approach to history and political theory. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--E. R. Gill, Bradley University

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gill, E.R. "Nail, Thomas. The figure of the migrant." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1239. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661858&it=r&asid=93526ae68da0069dbafa69b2bd84221d. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661858

Gill, E.R. "Nail, Thomas. The figure of the migrant." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1239. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA449661858&asid=93526ae68da0069dbafa69b2bd84221d. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.

• silent trends
  https://silenttrends.com/2015/10/12/some-thoughts-on-thomas-nails-figure-of-the-migrant/
  Word count: 887

  Some Thoughts on Thomas Nail’s ‘Figure of the Migrant’
  October 12, 2015Habits and Routines, reviewgeography, history, migration, movement, review

  A few weeks ago I saw on Stuart Elden’s Progressive Geographies blog that Thomas Nail’s The Figure of the Migrant was being released in early October. I snapped it up as soon as I could.

  Nail’s Figure of the Migrant attempts to provide a counter-history of the migrant by prioritizing movement. Most historical accounts of tourism, vagabonding, migrancy, and refugees begin with the assumption that populations tend to be localized and stable; migrant movement, in this traditional reading, is then read as an accidental offshoot of how humans tend to communalize. Migrants are nothing more than “failed citizens”. This state-first, migrant-second approach views in purely negative terms. And so Nail attempts to re-read that history from a positive point of view.

  To do that he offers a new theoretical scaffolding, what Nail calls “kinopolitics”. This “social theory of movement” begins with the assumption that human groups function first and foremost as “flows,” that is, as a continual movement (think hunter-gatherer strategies). From there he layers concepts that explain how bustling energy of human flows become ordered and controlled: by junctions (“redirection of a flow”) and “circulation” (connections of junctions into “larger curved path”). It’s only when junctions & circulations manage flows in accordance with ancient power centers (such as temples, later palaces) that flows territorialize the earth and its resources, domesticating Nature and other homo sapiens. Emerging territories are sustained in turn by “centripetal” (circulating resources towards the center) and “centrifugal” (expelling unwanted detritus outwards) energies.

  According to Nail, this territorial ordering is what produces the migrant, which varies over time but remains the expelled other. The centripetal concentration of agricultural communities expel a certain untamed percentage to beget the nomad; empire begets the barbarian; feudal power begets the vagabond; and modern liberalism (market-driven governments) begets the proletariat. That’s not to suggest each migrant figure only appears at that circumscribed historical period. Nail interprets refugees as contemporary barbarians, for example.

  What lends the quatrain a common leitmotif is that, due to carefully orchestrated expansions and circulations, a remnant is forced to flee. Although the migrant isn’t helpless. Nail pointedly argues the movement is a mixture of compulsion and self-direction (ancient migrants expelled from middle eastern agricultural communities, for example, strategically headed for the steppes, establishing a nomadic way of life). But either way this mixture is enough to separate, e.g., the vagabond from the tourist.

  Yet it’s in these finer details that I start to wonder whether Nail might need to be supplemented with a theoretical framework that’s used to working with theological traditions. The Figure of the Migrant is all about movement. The first historical instantiation of the migrant is the nomad. And yet there’s an entire theological tradition devoted to mythic expulsion that Nail never even hints at. He does refer briefly to Yahweh’s preference for the nomadic Cain rather than the agriculturally-minded Abel; but this allusion only draws attention to the fact that the original mythic expulsion–Adam and Even from the garden–is never explained in “kinopolitical” terms. Furthermore, the most famous polity from the medieval period–Augustine’s City of God as a floating ark moving precariously towards a higher world—doesn’t seem to have a place within the dualism Nail sets up between migrant flows (such as nomads on the steppes) and territorial concentration (such as ancient Sumer). Perhaps Nail would argue that the ark, like the city, is spherical with centripetal circulations; but the Church body within the ark isn’t setting down roots on terra firma. If anything it’s supposed to launch off at some point. Doesn’t Stuart Elden’s The Birth of Territory show that the medieval City of God departs from Roman territorialization? How would Nail account for this body politic that fits somewhere between Roman and feudal territory?

  And the most common figure representing movement in the same period–the pilgrim–doesn’t appear in The Figure of the Migrant. In Denise de Rougemont’s Love and the Western World, pilgrims and their chivalrous offshoots are driven more by compulsion than by choice. This seems to align them more with vagabonds than tourists. Where do the otherworldly and (sometimes) anti-territorial movements of non-expelled figures belong? Do pilgrims “become migrant” if they occasionally work against centripetal forces?

  In other words, what seems to be missing in Nail’s otherwise amazing contribution to geographical studies is a fine-tuned scale that accounts for anti-territorial movements that fit somewhere in between “good citizens” and “migrants”. There’s certainly space in his account for such figures, but The Figure of the Migrant leans towards an either-or scenario. Either migrants challenge the status quo or everyone else resides contentedly as a peaceful citizen.

  As with most dualisms, the payoff is normative: by suggesting one is either a citizen or an excluded migrant, Nail valorizes the latter as the secret to civilization that needs to be recovered. Migrants are Deleuze’s universal minority that flees entanglement and stasis.

  – Nail, Thomas. The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: SUP, 2015. Ebook.

• LSE Review of Books
  http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/01/31/book-review-theory-of-the-border-by-thomas-nail/
  Word count: 1563

  Book Review: Theory of the Border by Thomas Nail

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  In Theory of the Border, Thomas Nail looks at the constitutive role played by different types of border regimes – fences, walls, cells and checkpoints – in constructing societies across history as part of his broader ‘kinopolitics’ centred on movement, with focus on the Mexico-US border. While this wide-ranging book offers less a theory of the border than a taxonomy based on historical, largely European border regimes, Alex Sager nonetheless welcomes it as an ambitious, rich and suggestive work that has much to offer political theories of migration.

  Theory of the Border. Thomas Nail. Oxford University Press. 2016.

  theory-of-the-border-coverFind this book: amazon-logo

  Borders define our lives. Private property rights protect our homes from unwarranted intrusion. Roads and sidewalks facilitate movement and set limits on where we are permitted to go. Security checkpoints mark entrances to government buildings or airports. Authorities allow passage or exclude and detain by inspecting drivers’ licences, passports and social security cards. Barbed wire fences and maritime patrols redirect migrants who lack the documents that would allow them to pass freely through authorised routes. For too many people, cell walls detain them until their prison sentence ends or a judge decides their asylum hearing. These borders are constituted by laws, police, judges, bureaucrats, social customs, symbols and physical barriers.

  Despite – or perhaps because of – the ubiquity of borders, they are poorly understood and surprisingly difficult to define. In his ambitious and wide-ranging Theory of the Border, Thomas Nail seeks to provide a systematic theory that spans territorial, political, juridical and economic borders. It is part of a larger effort to establish a ‘kinopolitics’ – a theory of movement. It complements The Figure of the Migrant, Nail’s important attempt to construct a political theory in which the migrant, rather than the citizen, is the integral figure. Theory of the Border investigates the nature of borders that arise through processes of expansion and expulsion.

  Theory of the Border is divided into a theoretical chapter outlining the types and functions of borders, a philosophical history of the border and a detailed application of the theory to the US-Mexico border. Nail understands borders as processes of social division that constitute, and are simultaneously constituted by, our societies. Borders are not static, but rather move as a result of political conflict, economic and juridical reforms as well as resistance from migrants and changes in the physical environment. Their function is not simply exclusion and inclusion, but also redirection and circulation. Borders expel, expand, bind and delimit.
  theory-of-the-border-image-3Image Credit: US-Mexico Border (Brooke Binkowski CC BY 2.0)

  Nail locates each type of border power – the fence, the wall, the cell and the checkpoint – in a historical period in which it emerged or dominated. Yet, he also qualifies his account, admitting that all of these types may be present in some form in earlier periods and that they often co-exist.

  Nail defines fences as holes in the earth filled with vertical stones or wooden stakes that date from around 10,000 BCE. Under ‘fences’, he includes corrals, palisades and monuments. Their function is centripetal, directing flows from the periphery toward the centre. Some of the earliest fences were graves or tombs to which the living would periodically return. Neolithic kites funnelled wild animals toward hunters or herders. Fences did not require centralised power. Instead, they provided the conditions for early cities (c.3000 BCE) to consolidate resources with walls. Walls, defined as stacked bricks, provided defence for cities, allowing them to resist conquest and to redirect resources for warfare and trade. Nail understands ‘bricks’ as any material produced through standardisation, including people, so that ‘walls’ include not only citadel walls, but soldiers, military grids, siege towers, roads and ports.

  Cells, in turn, emerged in Europe during the medieval period to divide and link individuals. Under ‘cells’, Nail includes rooms in monasteries, prisons, hospitals and asylums as well as passports, timetables and letters that establish identification and jurisdiction. Finally, checkpoints emerged during the modern period with the rise of statistics to allow for inspection at any point at any time. These include police patrols and spies, private property and national borders as well as informational checkpoints that gather, classify and analyse data.

  These middle chapters offer many insights – but how do these varied types of borders and their functions hang together? The border technologies Nail categorises under fences, walls, cells and checkpoints have intriguing similarities, but also crucial differences. A kite and a monolith may both involve placing vertical objects in holes in the ground, but one allows hunters to herd animals to their deaths while the other guides travellers or preserves collective memories through communion with ancestors. Siege towers allow soldiers to breach citadel walls; roads are useful for war and policing, but also for trade. Passports mark national membership. Prisons confine and punish segments of the population defined as deviant.

  When we move from Nail’s broad categories to an analysis of specific technologies, the processes of exclusion, inclusion, consolidation, selection and redirection do not map in any straightforward way onto his four categories. In fact, Nail does not offer a theory of the border, at least insofar as we understand theories as offering explanations or predictions. Rather, what he provides is a taxonomy of different types of border technologies that he derives from his understanding of different (mostly) European historical periods. His book gives little guidance for determining when these technologies will emerge, what will motivate them, who they will target and how they will combine.

  The limits of his analysis become apparent when he applies his theory to contemporary borders using the US-Mexico border. Nail classifies technologies used by the US as fences, walls, cells and checkpoints. He notes that the US-Mexico border technologies do not only include or exclude, but also redirect movement through customs inspections and through detention and deportation. Their purpose is to slow and halt securitised flows (e.g., of illegalised migrants) while simultaneously facilitating economic flows. The effect of increased border enforcement has counterintuitively resulted in more immigrants in the US territory. Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids can occur anywhere. They combine with immigrant detention and deportation to discipline and deter migrants through collective punishment, ensuring that those who remain are docile workers.

  Sometimes Nail’s analysis provides striking analogies. The crosses covering the US-Mexico border wall to mark the deaths of migrants recall Neolithic graves lining roads, though it is unclear if they have the same meaning or function. Nail compares the US-Mexico border to a ‘two-thousand-mile desert kite’ in which ‘migrants are expelled from their homes and centripetally funneled by a fence structure into a chosen pit for extermination (by dehydration or hypothermia), capture (by the Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue Unit, BORSTAR), or accumulation (into the United States)’ (173). Nonetheless, most of his insights are independent of the theory elaborated in the middle chapters.

  Finally, the book’s neglect of agents that construct and contest borders is striking. For example, Nail writes that ‘the border is the result of a negotiation between states and even between states and nonstate forces’, and that ‘the US-Mexico border remains an open and disputed nexus between territorial, state, legal, and economic forces, irreducible to one side or the other’ (168). Nonetheless, these chapters are curiously silent about the role of Mexican agents – or, for that matter, people on the US side of the frontier. This is partly a result of the decision to tackle the discussion of migrants and their resistance to border controls separately in The Figure of the Migrant. Still, what are the roles of politicians, employers, migrant rights groups, border enforcement agencies, police forces and community associations? Borders are the ambiguous, fluctuating, accidental and ephemeral consequences of many people’s actions. Some of these actions are intentional, but with unforeseen byproducts. Other effects of borders are neither intended nor imagined. Any attempt to theorise borders is incomplete without taking into account how people both succeed and fail in constructing their communities by establishing borders.

  None of these remarks should detract from the significance of Nail’s project. Theory of the Border remains a rich and suggestive work that opens avenues for future research that may very well set the agenda for the political theory of migration.

  Alex Sager is Associate Professor of Philosophy and University Studies at Portland State University. His edited collection The Ethics and Politics of Migration: Core Issues and Emerging Trends (Rowman & Littlefield International) appeared in October. He blogs at https://alexsager.blogspot.com/ Follow him on Twitter: @aesager. Read more by Alex Sager.

  Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.

• Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
  http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/37356-returning-to-revolution-deleuze-guattari-and-zapatismo/
  Word count: 1740

  2013.02.07
  Thomas Nail
  Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo

  Thomas Nail, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, 216pp., $105.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780748655861.
  Reviewed by Nathan Jun, Midwestern State University

  A little more than twenty years ago the last vestiges of Soviet communism were crumbling and Western intellectuals were triumphantly announcing the end of history. Looking back at that era, it seems amazing that the spirit of revolution ever returned at all, let alone as quickly as it did. Within a decade of the fall of the Berlin Wall the alter-globalization movement was gaining momentum around the world, following close on the heels of the Zapatista uprising in 1994. Revolutionary activity continued in fits and starts throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century and set the stage for the Arab Spring in 2010 and Occupy Wall Street in 2011. Throughout this period many academic philosophers, with a few notable exceptions, remained distracted by decades-old debates, seemingly oblivious to the changes taking place around them. It is, therefore, extremely refreshing to read Thomas Nail's Returning to Revolution, a work of academic philosophy which boldly takes up "the return of a new theory and practice of revolution" -- the theory and practice inherent in fifteen years' worth of revolutionary movements and events frequently overlooked in mainstream philosophical circles.

  As Nail correctly notes in his introduction, traditional liberal and Marxist strategies such as "the capture of the state, the political representation of the party, the centrality of the proletariat, or the leadership of the vanguard" (1) have not only failed repeatedly over the course of the last century but have been largely surpassed by other strategies. Despite this fact, few philosophers have paid these developments the attention they deserve. On the contrary, many Anglophone philosophers continue to operate within a fundamentally liberal framework while practitioners of "Continental philosophy" remain uncritically indebted to the old hermeneuts of suspicion. In an effort to remedy this situation, Nail aims "to map an outline" of recent political developments "by drawing on the theory and practice of two of [their] main inspirations: French political philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and . . . the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico" (1). (Here a fair warning is in order: Nail draws extensively upon technical aspects of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy that could very well prove incomprehensible to novice readers. The book is not recommended for those with anything less than advanced familiarity with and understanding of Deleuze and Guattari. For purposes of the present review, I will try my best to avoid technical jargon and focus instead on the book's general aims, purposes, and methodology.)

  Nail's outline of the revolutionary return is guided by four questions:

  what is the relationship between history and revolution? What is revolutionary transformation? How is it possible to sustain and carry out and sustain the consequences of a revolutionary transformation? And how do revolutions connect with one another to produce a new form of worldwide solidarity? (2)

  In response, Nail attempts to provide a "philosophical clarification" of four contemporary revolutionary strategies -- namely, "(1) a multi-centered diagnostic of political power; (2) a prefigurative strategy of political transformation; (3) a participatory strategy of creating a body politic; and (4) a political strategy of belonging based on mutual global solidarity." The four chapters of the book examine each of these strategies in turn by placing them in dialogue with the thought of Deleuze and Guattari and the practice of the Zapatistas. Although Nail is certainly not the first to draw upon Deleuze and Guattari in an effort to understand contemporary politics, his approach in so doing -- which he calls "constructivism" -- is importantly distinct.

  Indeed, one of the book's most important achievements is demonstrating how "constructivism" functions as an alternative to other approaches in Deleuzian political philosophy such as those of Paul Patton and Antoni Negri/Michael Hardt. Where these philosophers have understood Deleuze and Guattari's thought in terms of the static categories of liberal representationalism (Patton) or else the indeterminacy of pure becoming (Hardt and Negri), Nail's constructivist approach shows how Deleuze and Guattari can provide concrete strategies for revolutionary intervention. Like Marx, he is not content to describe the revolutionary turn; rather, he wants to show how the revolutionary return can be sustained over time and made to bear fruit.

  In his first chapter, Nail discusses what he calls "the multi-centered diagnostic of political power." Conventional political philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism trace the origins of power to a unitary locus, which in turn generates a unitary conception of political means and ends. In orthodox Marxism-Leninism, for example, the economic base is the ultimate engine of political, social, and economic power (and, by extension, exploitation), which in turn presents the revolutionary transformation of the economic base as an ultimate political end. Within this framework, strategies for intervention are judged in terms of their conduciveness to achieving this end ("the end justifies the means"). Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's theory of historical topology and the Zapatista's practice of "diagnostic suffering" (38), Nail contends that political power emanates from multiple sites, none of which constitutes a "foundation" for the others. What is more, multi-centered emanations of power can and often do intersect with one another in novel and unpredictable ways, giving rise to new forms of power in the process (64-5).

  For this reason, it is inadvisable, if not altogether impossible, to pursue "one-size-fits-all" strategies for political intervention (75). Political ends cannot be unambiguously articulated "within the absolute limits and borders of political representation" (96) -- that is, as singular and unchanging concepts which provide a stable frame of reference for devising political means. Instead, as Nail discusses at length in chapter 2, political strategies work by disclosing what is possible in response to shifting configurations of power on the ground. Means prefigure ends, operating through what Deleuze and Guattari call "absolute positive deterritorialization":

  a kind of transformation that not only escapes the absolute limits and borders of political representation, but also connects up to an increasing number of other absolutely positive deterritorialized elements whose ultimate collective aim is the immanent transformation of the present intersection of political processes through the prefigurative transformation of a new world (96).

  For Deleuze and Guattari, "deterritorialization" may be understood as the emergence of possibilities which create (or are capable of creating) change. "Absolute positive deterritorialization" refers to the emergence of macro-level possibilities (i.e., ends) which are generated by the intersection of various micro-level possibilities (i.e., means). The localized, experimental practice of creating alternatives discloses what is globally possible -- it demonstrates the kinds of new worlds which can emerge "from within the shell of the old." Drawing again on several examples from the Zapatistas, Nail demonstrates what prefigurative practice looks like on the ground (100-6).

  In chapters 3 and 4, Nail discusses two additional strategies -- viz., participatory politics and the creation of mutual global solidarity -- which are intimately linked to the multi-centered diagnostic of power and prefigurative politics. Appealing to Deleuze and Guattri's concept of "consistency" as well as to the Zapatista practice of "leading by obeying" (mandar obedeciendo), Nail conceptualizes the political community (i.e., "the body politic") not in terms of static categories of identity (e.g., citizens, the working class, etc.) but as "a participatory set of conditions, elements and agencies engaged in a maximal degree of mutual and direct transformation" (146). The body politic emerges immanently within local and participatory struggles; "it is . . . an unambivalent commitment to more than just change as such: it is the creation of specific new elements and agencies" in response to shifting iterations of power. Participation is the process through which these iterations are identified and, accordingly, new possibilities for political transformation are formulated and pursued. Chapter 4 considers how local participatory bodies can "connect to one another and assemble a larger global alternative to neoliberalism" (152) through the cultivation of mutual solidarity.

  Although Nail's analysis of contemporary revolutionary movements is extremely well-argued and thought-provoking, his overall approach is not entirely novel -- a fact which he fails to acknowledge. As early as 1989 (and again in 1994), Todd May argued that Deleuze and Guattari, along with Foucault and Lyotard, provide the best theoretical framework (which May terms "poststructuralist anarchism") within which to analyze and understand contemporary revolutionary movements. Although May doesn't discuss the Zapatistas -- the Zapatista uprising having taken place the same year as the publication of The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism -- a subsequent book (Gilles Deleuze, 2005) uses the example of the Palestinian liberation movement to make a case similar to Nail's. The fact that May is not discussed in Returning to Revolution is, in my view, a shortcoming.

  Furthermore, I think Nail overstates his case somewhat in claiming that the "revolutionary return" is an altogether "new" phenomenon. In point of fact, each of the four revolutionary strategies he discusses (multi-centered diagnosis of political power; prefiguration; participatory political organization; and mutual global solidarity) can be found in varying degrees in the writings of various nineteenth and early twentieth century anarchists, to say nothing of actual historical interventions such as the Spanish Civil War. As I argue at length in Anarchism and Political Modernity (2011), the theoretical and practical trajectories which Nail (and, for that matter, May) observe in recent French philosophy and contemporary revolutionary practice were already on display more than a century ago in the historical anarchist movement. It is somewhat surprising to me that Nail, a scholar of anarchism himself, appears to ignore anarchism in his book. I would like to know how, why, and to what extent Nail believes the contemporary "revolutionary return" differs from earlier (and similar) revolutionary movements such as anarchism.

  Notwithstanding these modest misgivings, I believe that Return to Revolution is extremely well-done, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the theoretical and practical underpinnings of contemporary revolutionary movements. The book is compellingly argued and extremely well-researched, and Nail does an excellent job of explaining difficult concepts with clarity, rigor, and precision.

  WORKS CITED

  Jun, Nathan. Anarchism and Political Modernity. New York: Continuum, 2011.

  May, Todd. Gilles Deleuze. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

  _________. "Is Poststructuralist Political Theory Anarchist?" Philosophy and Social

  Criticism 15:2 (1989): 275-84.

  _________. The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. University Park,

  Pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

• foucalt studies
  http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/4672/5105
  Word count: 4291

  REVIEW
  Thomas
  Nail,
  Returning
  to
  Revolution:
  Deleuze,
  Guattari
  and
  Zapatismo
  (Edinburgh
  University
  Press,
  2012),
  ISBN:
  978
  ‐
  0
  ‐
  748
  ‐
  65586
  ‐
  1
  Thomas
  Nail’s
  book
  contends
  that
  we
  are
  witnessing
  the
  return
  of
  revolutionary
  theory
  and
  practice,
  but
  in
  forms
  no
  longer
  tied
  to
  a
  politics
  of
  representation
  and
  the
  goal
  of
  capturing
  the
  state.
  It
  is
  thus
  a
  return
  to
  revolution,
  but
  a
  return
  or
  repetition
  with
  a
  difference.
  This
  new
  revolutionary
  force,
  he
  holds,
  potentially
  offers
  the
  kind
  of
  pluralist,
  heterogeneous,
  and
  continually
  transforming
  politics
  needed
  to
  resist
  the
  global
  dominance
  of
  neoliberalism.
  It
  is
  not
  merely
  an
  oppositional
  or
  antagonistic
  politics
  that
  either
  recreates
  or
  finds
  itself
  absorbed
  into
  the
  structure
  of
  power
  relations
  it
  challenges,
  nor
  is
  it
  a
  nebulous
  and
  ultimately
  apolitical
  celebration
  of
  difference
  lacking
  concrete
  goals,
  solidarity,
  and
  direction.
  Instead,
  this
  politics
  concerns
  “the
  constructive
  ways
  revolutionary
  action
  takes
  on
  a
  consistency,
  a
  commitment
  and
  an
  organisation,
  and
  what
  forms
  of
  antagonism
  and
  relation
  it
  produces
  in
  a
  specific
  struggle”
  (19).
  At
  the
  level
  of
  both
  theory
  and
  practice,
  then,
  new
  strategies
  are
  emerging,
  and
  if
  philosophy
  were
  to
  follow
  its
  usual
  route
  of
  waiting
  “until
  a
  new
  political
  form
  of
  revolution
  had
  already
  come
  and
  gone,
  it
  would
  be
  useless
  in
  the
  formation
  of
  the
  revolutionary
  process
  itself”
  (1
  ‐
  2).
  Nail
  wants
  to
  avoid
  that,
  and
  so
  he
  aims
  to
  articulate
  the
  present
  in
  a
  way
  that
  can
  aid
  in
  the
  creation
  of
  admirable
  futures,
  advising
  his
  readers:
  “if
  you
  want
  to
  struggle,
  here
  are
  some
  strategies
  to
  do
  so”
  (181).
  To
  make
  good
  on
  this
  offer,
  Nail
  proposes
  to
  analyze
  the
  sources
  inspiring
  this
  “new
  revolutionary
  sequence”:
  the
  collaborative
  works
  of
  Gilles
  Deleuze
  and
  Félix
  Guattari,
  which,
  filtered
  through
  the
  best
  ‐
  selling
  works
  of
  Michael
  Hardt
  and
  Antonio
  Negri,
  have
  become
  the
  theoretical
  foundation
  for
  the
  anti
  ‐
  global
  Left;
  and
  the
  strategies
  of
  the
  first
  mass
  anti
  ‐
  neoliberal
  movement,
  the
  Zapatistas,
  whose
  influence
  can
  be
  seen
  in
  the
  Alter
  ‐
  Globalization
  Movement
  and
  the
  recent
  Occupy
  movements.
  While
  no
  direct
  connection
  exists
  between
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari’s
  writings
  and
  the
  Zapatistas’
  politics,
  neither
  one
  seeming
  to
  have
  in
  ‐
  fluenced
  the
  other,
  they
  can
  nevertheless
  be
  read
  in
  parallel
  in
  a
  way
  reflective
  of
  Deleuze
  and
  Foucault’s
  view
  of
  the
  theory/practice
  relation,
  whereby
  “a
  practical
  action
  will
  clarify,
  strengthen
  or
  specify
  how
  to
  take
  theory
  in
  a
  new
  direction,
  and
  vice
  versa”
  (7).
  This
  reading
  also
  demonstrates
  the
  parallel
  fates
  Deleuze,
  Guattari,
  and
  the
  Zapatistas
  have
  suffered
  inas
  ‐
  much
  as
  interpreters
  have
  failed
  to
  recognize
  each
  one’s
  “constructivist”
  turn,
  through
  which
  they
  move
  beyond
  vague
  promises
  of
  a
  better
  world
  and
  develop
  concrete
  alternatives
  to
  real
  ‐
  ize
  it.
  For
  the
  Zapatistas,
  this
  appears
  particularly
  from
  period
  after
  2003,
  which
  is
  often
  “misunderstood
  as
  ‘years
  of
  silence’
  and
  under
  ‐
  theorised”
  (29),
  while
  for
  Deleuze
  and
  Guat
  ‐
  Widder:
  Review
  of
  Returning
  to
  Revolution
  302
  tari
  it
  is
  found
  in
  the
  later
  works,
  A
  Thousand
  Plateaus
  and
  What
  is
  Philosophy?
  ,
  which
  have
  been
  largely
  ignored
  by
  critics
  and
  supporters
  alike.
  Constructivism,
  Nail
  holds,
  offers
  a
  method
  for
  “the
  creative
  diagnosis
  and
  assembly
  of
  heterogeneous
  elements
  into
  a
  plane
  of
  consistency”
  (21).
  Whereas
  the
  later
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari
  provide
  “the
  philosophical
  elabora
  ‐
  tion
  of
  these
  concepts,”
  this
  articulation
  is
  inadequate
  without
  “their
  common
  but
  parallel
  de
  ‐
  velopment
  in
  the
  realm
  of
  political
  practice,
  specifically
  with
  Zapatismo”
  (22
  ‐
  23).
  The
  book
  proceeds
  to
  elaborate
  four
  revolutionary
  strategies
  developed
  in
  parallel
  by
  Nail’s
  subjects.
  The
  first
  is
  the
  use
  of
  a
  complex
  and
  non
  ‐
  linear
  political
  history
  as
  a
  diagnostic
  of
  both
  the
  dominance
  of
  global
  neoliberalism’s
  statist
  and
  representational
  politics,
  and
  the
  dangers
  that
  can
  lead
  resistance
  and
  revolutionary
  politics
  back
  towards
  political
  representa
  ‐
  tion.
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari
  offer
  concepts
  and
  analyses
  of
  the
  coding,
  overcoding,
  and
  axio
  ‐
  matization
  that
  characterize
  both
  past
  and
  present
  representational
  political
  forms,
  while
  the
  Zapatistas
  offer
  a
  similar
  analyses
  of
  complex
  power
  relations
  that
  preclude
  any
  single
  front
  of
  political
  struggle
  and
  respond
  creatively
  to
  the
  juridical,
  statist,
  and
  market
  forces
  that
  contin
  ‐
  ually
  seek
  to
  appropriate
  their
  movement.
  The
  second
  strategy
  is
  a
  “prefigurative”
  one
  of
  po
  ‐
  litical
  transformation,
  which
  aims
  to
  build
  concrete
  political
  alternatives
  in
  the
  present
  rather
  than
  consign
  them
  to
  a
  vague
  future.
  This
  takes
  the
  form
  of
  a
  “future
  anterior
  [an
  “it
  will
  have
  been”]
  that
  functions
  as
  a
  new
  present
  moment
  within
  and
  alongside
  the
  other
  processes
  of
  political
  and
  temporal
  representation”
  (89).
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari
  offer
  four
  concepts
  of
  politi
  ‐
  cal
  change
  as
  “deterritorializations”
  that
  can
  be
  either
  positive
  or
  negative
  and
  either
  relative
  or
  absolute,
  with
  the
  last
  concept,
  absolute
  positive
  deterritorialization,
  breaking
  apart
  the
  el
  ‐
  ements
  of
  representation
  and
  rearranging
  them
  on
  a
  new
  plane
  of
  consistency.
  The
  Zapatistas,
  in
  turn,
  enact
  analogous
  deterritorializations
  in
  the
  practical
  political
  sphere,
  with
  their
  abso
  ‐
  lute
  positive
  deterritorialization
  being
  the
  creation
  of
  Juntas
  de
  Buen
  Gobierno
  (Councils
  of
  Good
  Government).
  While
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari
  theorize
  a
  new
  participatory
  and
  non
  ‐
  representational
  body
  politic
  (the
  third
  strategy)
  through
  the
  concept
  of
  a
  “concrete
  machinic
  assemblage”
  and
  the
  idea
  of
  a
  “conceptual
  persona”
  operating
  as
  a
  revolutionary
  subject,
  the
  Zapatistas
  establish
  autonomous
  municipalities
  and
  the
  revolutionary
  subject
  of
  the
  compa
  (partner/comrade)
  who
  leads
  by
  obeying.
  Finally,
  in
  relation
  to
  the
  fourth
  strategy
  of
  building
  global
  solidarity
  across
  diverse
  struggles,
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari
  offer
  a
  concept
  of
  nomadism
  as
  a
  political
  relation
  that
  distributes
  and
  connects
  differences
  transversally
  rather
  than
  hierar
  ‐
  chically,
  while
  the
  Zapatistas
  offer
  the
  practice
  of
  the
  Encuentro
  Intercontinental
  that
  has
  been
  a
  model
  for
  subsequent
  anti
  ‐
  neoliberal
  gatherings
  from
  the
  Alter
  ‐
  Globalization
  Movement
  on
  ‐
  wards.
  Though
  Nail
  holds
  theory
  and
  practice
  to
  have
  equal
  importance,
  he
  spends
  the
  majori
  ‐
  ty
  of
  his
  efforts
  on
  the
  theory
  side,
  with
  his
  most
  detailed
  engagements
  being
  with
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari’s
  texts
  and
  a
  range
  of
  their
  interpreters.
  But
  many
  of
  the
  work’s
  most
  disappoint
  ‐
  ing
  features
  are
  also
  found
  here,
  and
  these
  impact
  on
  Nail’s
  overarching
  aims.
  With
  respect
  to
  Deleuze’s
  earlier
  solo
  works
  and
  his
  first
  collaborative
  effort
  with
  Guattari,
  Anti
  ‐
  Oedipus
  ,
  Nail
  simply
  accepts
  the
  readings
  given
  by
  Alain
  Badiou,
  Peter
  Hallward,
  and
  Slavoj
  Žižek,
  who
  together
  portray
  a
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari
  who
  celebrate
  the
  “pure
  potentiality”
  of
  contingent
  change
  divorced
  from
  any
  attempt
  to
  enact
  concrete
  political
  organization
  (40),
  who
  uncritical
  ‐
  ly
  valorize
  lines
  of
  flight
  without
  providing
  any
  positive
  account
  of
  how
  new
  consistencies
  are
  Foucault
  Studies
  ,
  No.
  18,
  pp.
  301
  ‐
  304.
  303
  constructed
  (22),
  who
  undermine
  any
  basis
  for
  political
  subjectivity
  by
  “diffusing
  the
  self
  into
  an
  endless
  multiplicity
  of
  impersonal
  drives”
  (15),
  and
  who
  define
  revolution
  as
  radical
  only
  when
  it
  abandons
  actual
  relations
  and
  contexts
  (83
  ‐
  84).
  On
  the
  basis
  of
  these
  readings,
  Nail
  holds
  that
  Deleuze’s
  early
  ontological
  works,
  Difference
  and
  Repetition
  and
  The
  Logic
  of
  Sense
  ,
  are
  “not
  unhelpful
  or
  ‘pre
  ‐
  political’
  but
  wholly
  inadequate
  for
  retrieving
  a
  concept
  of
  revolu
  ‐
  tionary
  intervention
  based
  on
  the
  future
  anterior”
  (87),
  that
  Difference
  and
  Repetition
  itself
  “cannot
  offer
  a
  theory
  of
  concrete
  political
  typology”
  (108,
  note
  1),
  and
  that
  Anti
  ‐
  Oedipus
  ’s
  conception
  of
  revolution
  is
  “radically
  insufficient”
  (42).
  These
  characterizations
  of
  the
  early
  texts
  appear
  repeatedly
  throughout
  Nail’s
  book
  as
  he
  positions
  A
  Thousand
  Plateaus
  as
  the
  work
  that
  escapes
  them.
  But
  for
  many
  scholars
  in
  the
  field,
  Badiou,
  Hallward,
  and
  Žižek’s
  readings
  are
  not
  so
  much
  harsh
  and
  critical
  engagements
  with
  Deleuze’s
  earlier
  work
  as
  wild
  ‐
  ly
  inaccurate
  and
  seemingly
  willful
  misrepresentations.
  And
  there
  have
  been
  numerous
  pow
  ‐
  erful
  responses
  to
  them.
  Even
  Nail
  at
  times
  cannot
  bring
  himself
  fully
  to
  endorse
  their
  read
  ‐
  ings,
  but
  this
  does
  not
  stop
  him
  from
  using
  them
  to
  outline
  the
  dangers
  of
  political
  ambiva
  ‐
  lence,
  virtual
  hierarchy,
  and
  subjective
  paralysis
  that
  he
  says
  pervade
  both
  Deleuze
  and
  Guat
  ‐
  tari’s
  earlier
  work
  and
  the
  work
  of
  scholars
  influenced
  by
  those
  texts.
  Yet
  he
  does
  very
  little
  to
  support
  these
  controversial
  readings,
  offering
  no
  substantive
  reading
  of
  his
  own
  of
  the
  earlier
  writings
  and
  instead
  inferring
  those
  failings
  from
  brief
  engagements
  with
  the
  interpretations
  offered
  by
  various
  Deleuze
  scholars,
  such
  as
  Paul
  Patton,
  Daniel
  Smith,
  Brad
  Evans,
  and
  Jason
  Read,
  who
  themselves,
  I
  suspect,
  would
  in
  many
  instances
  probably
  feel
  Nail
  has
  misread
  them.
  A
  revealing
  moment
  comes
  when
  Nail
  highlights
  Antonio
  Negri’s
  view
  that
  Deleuze
  was
  unable
  to
  translate
  his
  ontological
  theory
  into
  a
  concrete
  politics.
  He
  writes:
  “Whether
  Negri’s
  criticisms
  are
  fair
  to
  Deleuze
  or
  not,
  his
  concerns
  articulate
  well
  the
  aim
  and
  challenge
  of
  the
  present
  work”
  (117).
  One
  can
  discern
  a
  similar
  lack
  of
  concern
  at
  many
  other
  points
  in
  Nail’s
  text
  over
  whether
  these
  other
  critical
  portrayals
  of
  the
  earlier
  work,
  and,
  by
  extension,
  his
  own
  portrayal
  of
  A
  Thousand
  Plateaus
  as
  some
  sort
  of
  corrective
  to
  them,
  are
  fair
  to
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari
  or
  not.
  This
  perhaps
  would
  not
  be
  a
  problem
  if
  Nail
  were
  able
  to
  maintain,
  as
  he
  explicitly
  in
  ‐
  tends,
  “a
  strictly
  political
  interpretation”
  (21)
  of
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari’s
  constructivism.
  That
  might
  allow
  him
  to
  isolate
  A
  Thousand
  Plateaus
  from
  the
  ontological,
  ethical,
  and
  aesthetic
  con
  ‐
  cepts
  that
  arguably
  play
  a
  greater
  role
  than
  any
  political
  concepts
  in
  Deleuze’s
  earlier
  works.
  But
  that
  move
  assumes
  that
  revolution
  can
  be
  treated
  in
  such
  limited
  terms
  as
  a
  strictly
  politi
  ‐
  cal
  phenomenon,
  which
  arguably
  flies
  in
  the
  face
  not
  only
  of
  a
  great
  deal
  of
  revolutionary
  the
  ‐
  ory
  and
  reality,
  but
  of
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari’s
  own
  constructivist
  text.
  Ironically,
  while
  admit
  ‐
  ting
  that
  he
  must
  construct
  their
  theory
  of
  revolution
  from
  fragments
  because
  “Deleuze
  and
  Guattari
  never
  wrote
  a
  book,
  or
  more
  than
  a
  couple
  of
  focused
  pages
  at
  a
  time,
  on
  the
  concept
  of
  political
  revolution”
  (2),
  Nail
  ignores
  many
  of
  their
  most
  important
  discussions.
  He
  has
  shockingly
  little
  to
  say
  about
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari’s
  concept
  of
  desire
  and
  the
  role
  it
  plays
  for
  them
  in
  revolutionary
  politics,
  and
  basically
  nothing
  on
  their
  views
  of
  the
  event
  of
  May
  1968
  that
  inspired
  their
  collaboration.
  Attending
  to
  these
  would
  have
  opened
  up
  numerous
  fronts
  directly
  related
  to
  the
  problem
  of
  political
  revolution,
  including
  ethical
  and
  aesthetic
  questions
  concerning
  how
  we
  must
  change
  not
  only
  our
  society
  but
  also
  ourselves,
  and
  ontological
  ques
  ‐
  tions
  about
  how
  we
  understand
  novelty
  and
  about
  how
  connections
  across
  heterogeneous
  Widder:
  Review
  of
  Returning
  to
  Revolution
  304
  differences
  are
  actualized.
  Where
  Nail
  does
  touch
  on
  these
  ethical,
  aesthetic,
  and
  ontological
  issues,
  he
  finds
  himself
  cut
  off
  from
  the
  very
  resources
  that
  could
  help
  him.
  When
  identifying
  the
  danger
  of
  microfascism,
  for
  example,
  he
  says
  nothing
  of
  where
  it
  comes
  from
  or
  how
  it
  can
  be
  avoided,
  yet
  those
  issues
  are
  precisely
  what
  led
  Foucault
  to
  declare
  not
  only
  that
  Anti
  ‐
  Oedipus
  is
  a
  book
  about
  ethics,
  but
  that
  it
  is
  about
  political
  ethics
  (for
  the
  militant
  who
  thinks
  he
  must
  be
  sad
  because
  what
  he
  is
  fighting
  is
  abominable).
  When
  addressing
  the
  question
  of
  how
  heterogeneous
  differences
  connect,
  he
  contends
  that
  there
  can
  be
  a
  “singular
  ‐
  universal
  solidar
  ‐
  ity”
  that
  “is
  never
  a
  complete
  unity
  [but]
  only
  a
  degree
  of
  identity
  ”
  (159),
  even
  though
  such
  a
  distinction
  between
  sameness
  and
  similarity,
  as
  Difference
  and
  Repetition
  shows,
  is
  essentially
  meaningless
  from
  the
  point
  of
  view
  of
  moving
  beyond
  representation.
  And
  when
  considering
  the
  quandary
  that
  “one
  cannot
  have
  a
  revolutionary
  subjectivity
  without
  a
  revolution,
  but
  one
  cannot
  have
  a
  revolution
  without
  subjects
  that
  bring
  it
  about”
  (131),
  he
  simply
  asserts
  that
  for
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari
  these
  come
  into
  being
  simultaneously,
  which
  is
  not
  only
  as
  inadequate
  an
  answer
  to
  this
  chicken
  ‐
  and
  ‐
  egg
  problem
  as
  it
  would
  be
  to
  any
  other,
  but
  also
  not
  in
  fact
  what
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari
  argue.
  Taking
  these
  “extra
  ‐
  political”
  dimensions
  of
  revolution
  seriously
  would
  have
  allowed
  Nail
  to
  address
  these
  problems
  more
  adequately,
  and
  would
  also
  have
  put
  theory
  and
  practice
  into
  a
  proper
  relation
  of
  productive
  tension.
  Despite
  his
  claim
  to
  have
  done
  that,
  Nail’s
  book
  never
  uses
  Deleuze
  and
  Guattari’s
  theory
  to
  interrogate
  critically
  the
  Zapatistas’
  practices,
  nor
  vice
  versa.
  And
  this
  very
  much
  limits
  the
  contribution
  his
  work
  can
  offer.
  By
  identifying
  re
  ‐
  cent
  revolutionary
  strategies
  in
  theory
  and
  practice,
  we
  are
  simply
  left
  with
  the
  theory
  and
  practice
  we
  already
  have,
  although
  a
  contribution
  has
  certainly
  been
  made
  by
  expounding
  them.
  Instead
  of
  saying,
  “if
  you
  want
  to
  struggle,
  here
  are
  some
  strategies
  to
  do
  so,”
  Nail
  per
  ‐
  haps
  should
  have
  said,
  “here
  are
  some
  strategies
  that
  have
  been
  used
  in
  struggle,
  now
  go
  in
  ‐
  vent
  your
  own.”
  That
  statement
  would,
  in
  keeping
  with
  Deleuze,
  Guattari,
  and
  Foucault’s
  po
  ‐
  litical
  spirit,
  not
  only
  offer
  support
  to
  the
  current
  revolutionary
  sequence,
  but
  to
  a
  “becoming
  revolutionary”
  needed
  to
  sustain
  it.
  Prof.
  Nathan
  Widder
  Royal
  Holloway,
  University
  of
  London
  Department
  of
  Politics
  and
  International
  Relations
  Egham,
  Surrey
  TW20
  0EX
  United
  Kingdom
  n.e.widder@rhul.ac.uk

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