As is well known, Deleuze and Guattari read Lenin on slogans in one of
the chapters of A Thousand Plateaus.^41 They are fascinated by the date of 4
July 1917, turning-point in the revolution. Prior to this date, a peaceful outcome
was possible and the slogan ‘All power to the soviets!’ was correct; thereafter,
only the violent overthrow of the Provisional Government could save the
revolution and the slogan had to be revised. In this they see an ‘incorporeal
transformation’, an effect of language, but a language endowed with a singular
performative power, which operates this turn. And their analysis goes much
further: the power of the slogan is not only performative, it is constitutive of
the class that it summons into existence. The First International’s stroke of
genius had been to extract a class from the masses by means of the slogan,
‘Workers of the world unite!’. Similarly, Lenin’s slogan extracts a vanguard,
a Party, from the totality of the proletariat. The slogan anticipates the political
body that it organises. And Deleuze and Guattari suggest that this analysis
concerns not only political language, but language in general, in that it is
always shot through with politics. The ‘regime of signs’ or ‘semiotic machine’
that they describe is a mixture of utterances (in this instance, order-words),
presuppositions (the actions that follow from order-words), and incorporeal
transformations (effected by the performative power, the power of nomination,
of order-words). These are the internal variables of the collective assemblage
of enunciation of which the order-word forms an essential part.
The context of their reading of Lenin is the critique of the dominant linguistics
and its postulates in the fourth plateau of A Thousand Plateausand, in particular,
of the first of these postulates, according to which language is informative
and communicative. This critique produces a series of concepts (force, machine,
minority, style, stammering), which I consider to furnish the outline of a
different philosophy of language, close to Marxism. We may therefore take
the reference to Lenin as a symptom (I shall return to this point).
The second reading of Lenin’s text, today totally forgotten, is to be found
in numbers 9–10 of an old publication, whose title at best causes a nostalgic
frisson, Cahiers marxistes-léninistes. The text, which takes up the whole of the
issue, is entitled ‘Vive le léninisme!’.^42 It is unsigned, but rumour at the time
attributed it to Althusser. We are evidently dealing with some lecture notes.
Whether they are from the hand of the master or dutifully collected by a
The Marxist Tradition • 99(^41) See Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 83.
(^42) See Cahiers marxistes-léninistes1966.