Deleuze, Tarde, and Molecular Politics

The provided text is an excerpt from a scholarly paper by Julius Telivuo, titled "Deleuze, Tarde and Molecular Politics," which discusses the political and social ontology in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, focusing on the concept of micropolitics. The author explains that Deleuze, along with Félix Guattari, rejects traditional views of community and instead uses a microscopic perspective to analyze the socio-political sphere, prioritizing concrete, non-conscious social processes over molar representations like class or gender. A significant portion of the paper is dedicated to discussing the influence of Gabriel Tarde’s microsociology, which emphasizes social phenomena as the result of individual-level processes like imitation, opposition, and invention. Ultimately, the paper argues for understanding communality through immanent, pre-individual processes (molecular flows), contrasting them with the static, conscious, and representational molar structures while also introducing the concept of a line of flight as the potential for radical change.