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This book explores relationship between American literature and globalization and how this equation has fluctuated and evolved over time. In addition to works of fiction or poetry that are organized explicitly around particular conceptions of place, the book considers how a wide range of texts are informed implicitly by other kinds of geographical projection, of the type found in cartography and other forms of mapping. It argues that the connection between American literature and geography, far from being something that can be taken as natural, involves contested terrain. The book also examines how the United States has moved from a national phase to a matrix of transnationalism and relates it to the idea of deterritorialization first broached in 1972 by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and how this move toward a transnational infrastructure has manifested itself in American literature.

This final chapter reconsiders the famous set‐pieces of the ‘Sphinx and the Chimera’ and the ‘être la matière’ epiphany closing the text by close attention to real ‘monsters’ of Antoine's imagination now that the Devil and Hilarion have left him to his solitary human condition. By arguing that Antoine equates to a Cuvier pitched against Saint‐Hilaire (and his theories of teratology) in the famous ‘querelle des analogues’ of 1832, the chapter investigates for the first time how the two famous sections above and the ‘parade of the monsters’ mesh with Cuvier's wide‐ranging contributions to comparative anatomy and palaeontology. The chapter thus identifies and reconstructs ‘real’ imaginary monsters (fossils), and adds science intertexts—Humboldt's Cosmos for example—to Flaubert's famous library for the first time. Further contemporary scientist interlocutors aptly replace Saint‐Hilaire and Laplace as the final (reference) matter of the chapter, the contributions of the Pouchets to theories of spontaneous generation and micropalaeontology.

This section is a mock dialogue between Humanist, who speaks for human recognitions, appreciation of the art-object, sympathy, rational balance, and Post-Humanist, who speaks for exploded virtualities, a mixture of Artaud, Deleuze and Guattari, and contemporary ecological thinking. Together they offer different takes on the ontology and ethics of playworlds and playlife, and how such things can speak to our own possibilities.

The long history of state funerals in France might have camouflaged the new direction given to the celebration once the republicans controlled the Third Republic. The continuous governmental denial that these ceremonies were anything more than a simple tribute of the nation to its loyal servants also made them seem identical to their predecessors of the Moral Order and the Second Empire. What are the indicators that the state funerals were, indeed, more than simple tributes paid to the loyal servants of the nation, and began a new departure in relation to those of previous regimes? The most evident indicator is the list of the persons to whom that honour was given; additional indicators are the manner of the celebration and the unofficial statements of the republicans concerning the ceremonies. This chapter looks at the state funerals of French politicians including three presidents: Adolphe Thiers, Léon Gambetta, and Félix Faure. It also discusses the unsuccessful official proposals for the transfer of great men to the Panthéon.

Her latest feature to date, Zama, is a groundbreaking achievement. This chapter argues that Martel’s adaptation of Di Benedetto’s novel turns the modernist text into a postcolonial vision of the past that radically reimagines the position of women, slaves, and indigenous populations. Combining both meticulous research and a stunning artistic imagination, Zama provides a representation of the colony that refutes most North American and European productions while also exceeding efforts by contemporary Latin American filmmakers. Building on, and exceeding previous thematic concerns and stylistic preferences, the film must count as one of the most accomplished and complex films of the 21st century.

This chapter explores if Anti-Oedipus is a May '68 book. It is legitimate to say Anti-Oedipus is a May '68 book providing it is understood that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were not ‘soixante-huitards’ or May '68ers, and that their view of those events was quite different from the students and workers who put up barricades in the streets and tore up pavements in search of the beach underneath. Deleuze and Guattari argue that it was precisely the example of Algeria that makes it clear that politics cannot be reduced to an Oedipal struggle. The principal thesis of Anti-Oedipus is that revolution is not primarily or even necessarily a matter of taking power. Thus, it is appropriately described as a May '68 book.

This chapter reports the contribution of molar entities and molecular populations in human history. Legitimacy is an emergent property of the entire organisation even if it depends for its existence on personal beliefs about its source. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari sometimes show that there are indeed only two levels, the micro or molecular, corresponding to the individual person, and the macro or molar, corresponding to society as a whole. They introduced territorialisation and coding to explore the influence that an emergent molar entity has over its components. Fernand Braudel's three-volume work is a systematic critique of the idea that capitalism was ever a society-wide system, let alone a worldwide one. On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari remain under the spell of the bankrupt political economy of Marx.

This chapter argues that it was Gilles Deleuze's argument in favour of intensive quantities — against Henri Bergson's rejection of this notion in Time and Free Will — that provided the way for Deleuze and Félix Guattari to situate a human history beyond humanity. Deleuze and Guattari also present a direct criticism of the ‘despotism of the signifier’. Their distinction between capitalism as a virtual tendency or created whole existing alongside effected parts and capitalism as an actual body is the key to their universal history. Their commitment to a passive, materialist and virtualist vitalism supports their historical claims and results in distinct methodological imperatives. Additionally, they produced a history that elaborates the genesis of individuals and their social relations, and that regards forces not as relations among quantities, but as the production of quantities through relations. The ideas determining the radical historicism of Deleuze and Guattari are then explained.

This chapter explores how to read Gilles Deleuze's texts in relation to one another and in relation to the problems and concepts they appear to share. The Logic of Sense presents one of the most detailed accounts of the incorporeal realm of becoming and the pure event to be found anywhere in Deleuze. In Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense and What is Philosophy?, Deleuze cites the same passage from Charles Péguy's Clio. In the first two texts, the passage is used to support the idea that there are two levels or dimensions of time. What is Philosophy? refers to the same passage in support of a different thesis. Deleuze and Félix Guattari's conception of history depends on the outline according to which virtual movements find expression in actual historical processes. They developed concepts that express the virtual dynamics of historical and other kinds of event.

This chapter describes Gilles Deleuze's early work on David Hume. Deleuze and Félix Guattari's call for a theme of problematising history is also elaborated. It discusses the problems of the Scottish Enlightenment that are inseparable from the current situation, problems that may allow for the creative transformation of the unquestioned actualities of daily life. Hume's discussion of identity occurs at a crucial point in the Treatise. Hume attempted to carry his thought beyond everyday actualities. It then explores how a Deleuzian historical ontology could be employed to understand intellectual and cultural change. Deleuzian problematising history begins with concepts as solutions in order to move towards the virtual fields and problems that are inseparable from the functional concepts and representations; and it is this virtual field that makes new work possible — that is, the mapping and representational work of functional concepts.

Karl Wittfogel points to a vital part of geohistory: the management of water leading to what is called hydro-bio-politics. In line with this, this chapter reviews the ontology and politics of water. For Gilles Deleuze and for Félix Guattari, being is production. Being as production is symbolised in A Thousand Plateaus by the slogan, ‘the world is an egg’. An interesting illustration of the interplay of re- and deterritorialisation in the concept of ‘Hypersea’ is shown, in which the environment of life on land is the deterritorialised sea. A notion of geo-hydro-political physiology underlies that of the organism. The politics is also regarded as physiology: the body politic as a body, a system of material flows. Wittfogel mentions that aridity is the key to the connection of stratified societies and irrigation. It is also noted that the State has no monopoly on hydro-bio-politics.

This chapter proposes to re-evaluate ‘becoming’ as a political strategy intended to destablise patriarchal and capitalistic structures of domination. It also uses Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's notion of the rhizomatic character of all identities to investigate the relation between masculine self and cannibal other, while simultaneously using their concepts to reconstruct the history of becoming. It then illustrates the rhizomatic character of hegemonic white male masculinity and engages in the kind of feminist intellectual project Elspeth Probyn and Elizabeth Grosz called for, the project of ‘making queer all sexualities’. Deleuze and Guattari regard violence as an inherent part of the creation of both tribal and despotic societies. Violence was perceived to be an inherent part of a ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ male sexuality. Several aspects of Deleuze and Guattari's denial of the possibility of ‘becoming-man’ are finally emphasized.

This chapter locates the figure of Félix Éboué in the cultural politics of commemoration in Guyane. It offers a cultural history of the production of memorials to Éboué in Guyane (his birthplace) and beyond, assessing the role of these markers of national power in the local landscape. The chapter focuses first on the monument located in central Cayenne, produced at the instigation of a local committee and inaugurated in 1957, towards the end of the Fourth Republic. It then addresses the revival of 'memory' of Éboué and the renewal of his presence in Guyane which occurred during the 2000s. Instigated in part by Christiane Taubira, this culminated in the renaming of the only international airport in the Département — the key point of arrival and departure between Paris and Cayenne. The chapter concludes by asking how the vision of Guyane asserted in the act of ‘remembering’ Éboué has changed or been adapted in the twenty-first century.

This chapter argues that Deleuze's political philosophy can be understood as a contribution to and a departure from the concentrated debates on the issue of power which dominated the French intellectual scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Desire, rather than power, Deleuze and Guattari argue, should be the central plank in any meaningful account of contemporary politics. In an interview with Foucault published shortly before the appearance of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze makes his case for focusing on questions of desire rather than power by arguing that the manifestations and machinations of power are obvious. What is not obvious, he argues, is why we collectively tolerate it. The chapter argues that, for Deleuze, the central political question is the mystery of voluntary subservience. It shows how Anti-Oedipus provides a first and provisional response to this problem, which was to preoccupy both Deleuze and Guattari for most of the rest of their lives.

This chapter revisits Deleuze and Guattari's account of fascism to construct a conception of it appropriate to the advent of a new kind of fascism emerging in the US today. Unsettling Deleuze and Guattari's adoption of Virilio's notion of fascism as the ‘suicidal state’, it pays careful attention to the place of the fascist war machine and total war in the passage to global capitalism. As well as exploring the integrated libidinal, economic and geopolitical scales of Deleuze and Guattari's concept, the chapter takes their concept beyond its terminus in the cold war to consider the shared psychic formations of the German Freikorps and the US Christian fundamentalist right, and the place of Bush's new hot wars in global accumulation.

Through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this chapter further develops the idea of the gift as event, the giving of an existence that repeatedly and constitutively evades subjective identification. It is moreover this evasion that gives rise to politics, which is argued to consist in precisely the impossibility of identifying what it is that is given in the event. The second part of the chapter focuses on the elements of a Deleuzo-Guattarian reading of the (Maussian) gift economy suggested in Anti-Œdipus, and attenuates the long-standing and influential claim that Deleuze and Guattari naively romanticise archaic society, conflating the archaic gift economy with the aneconomic gift of the event. Referring to recent work in anthropology (e.g., Weiner, Strathern and Bourdieu), as well as to Nietzsche, it is argued that their reworking of Mauss and Lêvi-Strauss actually serves to illustrate the thesis that the political emerges in response to the gift, as an attempt to curb the prospect of an event that would jeopardise the metastability of society. The archaic gift economy becomes simply one way among several of forestalling the uncertainty, the instability that would coincide with the exposure to the event.

The book's final and most important chapter returns to the question of sacrifice, reposed through Derrida and Badiou in a way that shows how philosophers have gone simultaneously too far and not far enough in breaking with the philosophical tradition. Disdainful of the sacrifice seen by Hegel and Heidegger to incarnate the State, the sublime moment in which we fully receive the gift of the event, Nancy goes so far as to reject a link between sacrifice and politics. The impossible offering of existence means precisely that there can be no sacrifice, no privileged means through which to grasp and instantiate the event in the present. But this is to presuppose a pre-deconstructive concept of sacrifice, namely one that seeks to gain access to a privileged and transcendent ground. Returning not just to Derrida, but to Alain Badiou's critique of the ‘apolitical’ Deleuze, it is argued that sacrifice lies at the heart of politics, as another name for decisions that cannot simply be sublated by philosophy. Illustrative of the underlying sacrificial structure of politics is democracy, which consists above all in the impossible attempt to negotiate without pretence to sublation or a redemptive experience of political grace.