Christian Gilliam

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of ‘pure’ immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of ‘the political’; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or ‘micropolitical’ life of desire. He argues that here, in this ‘life’, is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately justifies the conceptual necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of ‘pure’ immanence are either apolitical or politically incoherent.

Recent developments in scholarly communication call for revisiting the effect open access e-theses (OAETs) have on future publishing opportunities. We investigated 23 university and commercial presses—with a focus on the arts, humanities, and social sciences—with regard to attitudes toward accepting OAETs for publication as monographs. The findings suggest that manuscripts that are revisions of OAETs are always welcome for submission or considered on a case-by-case basis by 47.8% of university presses, with a further 48.5% expressing a willingness to publish on the basis of substantial content revision.

The premise of this article is that the political import of Deleuze and Guattari’s “micropolitics of desire” has been obscured and as such remains underdeveloped. The micropolitics of desire is here reproduced to provide a Nietzscheo-Marxian critique of capitalism and resistive politics of the future. This entails an entirely different understanding of the nature of power and resistance, as compared to prevalent views. Power is not negative or anti-energy, but a socially productive force operating on, with and through the productivity of desire, delineating an immanent, quantitative and “fusional multiplicity” of a producing-production. Resistance is a matter of recomposing this producer-produced relationship in a manner problematic to and in excess of the very productive core of capitalism. In terms of praxis, this amounts to experimental practices that resonate into a viral though non-teleological “revolutionary-becoming”, delineating a form of a-systematic and post-identity resistance. The underlying thesis is that we must change our “desire”, before we can hope to change our politics.

In the current literature addressing the Foucault/Deleuze relationship, there is a clear tendency to either replicate and expand Foucault's oversimplified rejection of Deleuzian desire as already caught in a discursive trap or play of power; or to replicate Deleuze and Guat-tari's oversimplified reading of Foucault's dispositif, in which power and resistance are deemed opposed and thus understood via a structure of negativity. In either case, each thinker is accused of referring to an asocial or essentialist multiplicity, typically in the form of a real transcendence (positive Body), which is deemed 'inconsistent' with their post-structuralist yearnings. This article argues that there is in fact a real and enduring consistency between the two thinkers, which is to be found in the mutual use of an ontology of 'pure' or 'disjunctive' immanence – as derived from and developed through Nietzsche's method of genealogy – as a way to construe pow-er/subjectification, with pleasure/desire taken as the affective inside of this power. That said, the somewhat semantic difference between desire and pleasure being proposed does lead to a slight, though tangible, divergence in politico-ethical and practical possibilities. This article concludes that it is this divergence that should from the real basis of debate.

In conceptualising and arguing for the 'existential unconscious' in the works of Sartre, this article contends that all empirical acts of the self relate to the self's being-in-the-world as an original and a-volitional project of being. The inclusion of the unconscious makes for a dialectical approach to freedom as authenticity.

Existential Analysis 28.2: July 2017, pp. 351-361

It is typically held that Sartre is a thinker of transcendence, inasmuch as he retains a subject–predicate structure via intentional consciousness and ruptures an otherwise insular domain through his dialectic of the self. Against such interpretations, this article argues that in following the progression of Sartre’s thought, we will come to see a deepening engagement with, and development of, immanence in the spirit of Deleuze. Specifically, Sartre steadily develops a dialectic in which consciousness, while relating to an ‘outside’, is construed as also thoroughly embedded in that outside through the subject-body of the flesh and relations of desire. From this comes a conceptualisation of the in-itself and for-itself as simulacra or topological variations of a more primordial intertwining or fabric of univocal Being. In this sense, we are immediately taken away from the subject of social contract theory, insofar as this presumes an asocial self, and the notion of identity as the sine qua non of politics, insofar as this presumes the terrain of an inexplicable transcendent Other. This brings with it a take on politics that prefigures and is concomitant with Deleuzian micropolitics, while also serving to complement it through the retention of the ego as a practical function.

This thesis contributes to contemporary debates on the nature of immanence and transcendence in political philosophy by developing the political and micropolitical implications of a philosophical position committed fully to immanence. For many in the current debates who maintain that politics requires some notion of a political subject, philosophies of immanence are considered incapable of mounting an effective politics because they deny the antagonisms and ruptures considered necessary for such a subject. These perspectives often define immanence in terms of ‘complete inclusivity’ of differences, and often accuse it of eschewing emancipation and siding with some form of bourgeois ethics. Against these dismissals, this thesis argues that a philosophy of immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of the political, one that re-orients our understanding of the self away from a still dominant reliance on an idea of the subject. It achieves this by conceiving of the Other or the Outside not (pace philosophies of transcendence) in terms of an absolute but never present fullness or lack, but instead as a disjunctive fold that goes beyond the opposition of interiority and exteriority in favour of the idea of intensity. In this way immanence becomes the ontological centre of a different type of emancipatory politics.

The thesis presents its argument by tracing out a lineage of immanence through the work of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze. Together these thinkers present a ‘spectre of immanence’ that counters Slavoj Žižek’s proclamation of a ‘spectre of the [Cartesian] subject’ haunting contemporary thought. Proceeding this way, the study shows how a common thread of immanence unites these four thinkers, informs their relations to one another (in terms of what each one picks up and discards from his predecessors), and unifies them in a shared attempt to reconceptualise the terms by which the political is thought. In this way, the theme of immanence acts as the primary catalyst or dark precursor to their thought as a whole. Though presented as an evolutionary chronology in the sense that it outlines a series of progressive moves from Sartre to Deleuze, the lineage the thesis establishes also works by way of a number of productive misreadings each thinker makes of the others. In this respect, the lineage accords with Nietzsche's comparison of the thinker to an arrow shot by Nature, that another thinker picks up where it has fallen so that he can shoot it somewhere else: each arrow is taken up in part through a misunderstanding, or at least a strained understanding.

The aim of this paper is to explore the often-neglected role of difference within the French tradition of phenomenology, and the way this prefigures the notion of difference underpinning the micropolitics of Foucault and Deleuze. As opposed to retaining the notion of an intentional relation between nomination and the thing, wherein one breaks with the expressive sovereignty of the All-One of immanence or understands difference in oppositional terms, I provide an alternative reading of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as sharing a project of immanence through the ontology of the flesh. That is, against both positivist and negativist conceptions of being, which conceive being as an objectivity posited before a subject and about which the visible can spread, the ontology of the flesh posits a world of degrees, distance, depth and difference, wherein the identities of being and nothingness are seen as simulacra, the result of a primary variation of relations. Although lacking a substantial theory of force, it is evident that such a position bares resemblance to a Deleuzian/Foucauldian notion of life, wherein conscious activity is no longer referred to a being, but rather posed in ‘a life’, carrying with it the events and singularities that are simply actualised in subjects and objects. In this way, the employment of the existential self signifies a ‘practical function’.

With the rise of neuroscience as a dominant and respected science, there is an eagerness on the part of philosophers dealing with consciousness to validate their respective approaches with ‘science’, so as not to be confused with mystics, transcendentalists, or theologians and thus end up being left out of the materialist dominated hegemony within academia. This is of course understandable given the huge challenges such research presents to the philosophy of mind and consciousness. To ignore them would indeed be equivalent to burying ones head in the sand. Certainly there have been previous attempts by notorious Sartrean’s (such as Hazel Barnes) to enter Sartre into a dialogue with neuroscience. However it is coming increasingly common to find that such approaches, not just in Sartre studies, have cherry-picked certain ideas in order to vindicate their respective philosophies, without proper consideration.

As such this paper seeks to examine the extent to which neuroscience undermines, reinforces, reconfigures or outright rejects Sartre and how reliable such research is, through surveying the various neuroscientific theories of consciousness. Certainly we must not forget that neuroscience, as with all science, relies on philosophical intuitions and metaphysical principles. Thus as tempting as it may be to vindicate Sartre through coaxing his philosophy in scientific jargon, we must stay open, attentive and philosophical in our deliberations.

Critically through exploring the neuroscientific challenge in such a way, the paper argues three things: first that as far as the neural-correlates of consciousness (or indeed the scientific explanation of it) is concerned, the jury is still out. Thus the demand that Sartre (or Sartreans) must scientifically prove intentional consciousness is unreasonable and absurd; second, the one theory to actually and completely undermine intentional consciousness - the classical computational or functionalist approach – has become increasingly untenable. Despite encountering the hard problem of consciousness, it is generally agreed that the subjective, qualitative and intentional feel of consciousness are real properties. In this way the phenomenology underpinning Sartre’s theory of consciousness has remained relevant (at times presenting itself as neurophenomenology); third, despite not knowing the exact cause of consciousness, neuroscience and neurophenomenology certainly has found some rather interesting things regarding neural networks, memory, perception and embodiment that certainly do require consideration if the Sartrean is to remain relevant. To this extent I consider Varela’s ‘enactive’ model and Damasio’s ‘somatic markers’ hypothesis. The third point is crucial for our understanding and development of Sartre’s dialectic of the self. It is the nature of embodiment that truly presents a challenge to ‘absolute freedom’ and negation.

Maps the context and development of immanence and micropolitics, from Sartre to Deleuze, via Merleau-Ponty and Foucault

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of ‘pure’ immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of ‘the political’; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or ‘micropolitical’ life of desire. He argues that here, in this ‘life’, is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake.
Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately justifies the conceptual necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of ‘pure’ immanence are either apolitical or politically incoherent.

"In his deft study, Gilliam provides a lineage of French philosophy from Sartre to Deleuze that grounds a conception of immanence increasingly employed within contemporary political theory.　 Beginning with the way Sartre’s philosophy moved increasingly towards a kind of ontological immanence, he shows how this thought is taken further in Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the flesh, Foucault’s micropower relations, and Deleuze’s concepts of disjunction, folding and desiring-production.　 In this way, Gilliam shows how immanence is necessarily cashed out in an understanding of politics as micropolitics." -


Prof. Nathan Widder


Professor of Political Theory


Royal Holloway, University of London