The end(s) of immanence in the anthropocene: militarized ecologies and the future of Deleuzian thought

Abstract

Two features bear down fundamentally on our current historical occasion: structures of security, and breakdowns of planetary ecosystems. This essay argues that Deleuze is not only tracing a “geophilosophy” (that is, a nonhuman-centered theory of history that includes a geohistory of the planet) that moves from nomadic through State and finally through neoliberal forms that extend beyond the power of the State, but that he is also moving toward a theory of “control” that can teach us a great deal about the rise of the security society and its relation to the anthropocene. More specifically, this essay argues that philosophy is at a moment when the stakes of Deleuze’s conceptualizations of “immanence” have changed. This change hinges on the ecological circumstances of the twenty-first century – a set of conditions considerably underway, involving a course unlikely to change in time to reverse the seriousness of the situation (due in part to the supremacy of a self-destructive international neoliberal politics). The essay concludes by more sharply defining the workings of security in relation to immanence in the anthropocene.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• security
• immanence
• anthropocene
• climate change

Notes

1. Deleuze uses this term in his essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control” to describe the post-State locomotion of capitalism. See Deleuze, 1992.

2. It is a question if they ever were understood and engaged by humans as interrelated systems in the modern history of thought since the Enlightenment.

3. This was the year of the full publication of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, and the year that the Department of Defense began to publish documents directly naming climate change a threat to national and global security.

4. One wonders if this kind of philosophy would include the first planetary life forms, which existed for some 3.5 million years before any dramatic change toward what we consider to be life today. Would it also include proto-life forms? Or viruses? Or even something like the movement of tectonic plates?