Deleuze, Guattari,

and the “Politics of Sorcery”

Joshua Delpech-Ramey
There is an entire politics of becomings-animal, as well as a politics of
sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the
family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead, they express minoritar-
ian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always
on the fringe of recognized institutions, groups all the more secret for
being extrinsic, in other words, anomic. If becoming-animal takes the
form of a Temptation, and of monsters aroused in the imagination by the
demon, it is because it is accompanied, at its origin as in its undertaking,
by a rupture with the central institutions that have established them-
selves or seek to become established. (A Thousand Plateaus, 247)

The plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete forms. There-

fore all becomings are written like sorcerer’s drawings on this plane of
consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for them…
The only question is: Does a given becoming reach that point? (ibid.,
251)

On the first page of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Hork-

heimer define the project of the Enlightenment in no uncertain terms. Its
goal, they write, was to liberate the world from magic. The devastating
success of the Enlightenment, they argue, is the ironic “technologization”
of reason: having begun by setting the liberating power of critical insight
against the power of myth, the Enlightenment ends with the reduction of
reason to a set of techniques for the domination of the material world--a
set of reinforcing principles that mythologize industrial productivity as
the consummation of human creative power.1 On this account it might
seem that to liberate reason and selfhood from its imprisonment in forms
of technique, it would be imperative that the objects of thought not be prima
facie reducible to the Enlightenment’s conception of “objectivity.” If the
objectivity of objects, for the Enlightenment, consists in those features of
the natural world that the human mind can universally manipulate, and
if in fact, as Adorno and Horkheimer argued, this notion of objectivity
actually inhibits rather than liberates reason, it might seem that to renew
reason philosophy would have to take account of dimensions of objects
not reducible to objectivity.2 If the Enlightenment arbitrarily and disas-
trously reduced reason to formulas of technique, and did this in order to
liberate the world from magic, might we not once again, to overcome the
crisis of the Enlightenment, have to allow for the possibility of a magical
rapport with the world?

8 © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2010

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

Deleuze, Guattari, and the “Politics of Sorcery” 9

This is not a possibility Adorno himself entertained. In Minima

Moralia’s “Theses Against Occultism,” Adorno derides the parlor games
of mediums and spiritualists, and argues that in fact nothing better shows
the utter capitulation of reason to brute material fact than the submission
of the mind to commands from the phlogiston of the spirit world. As
Adorno bluntly puts it, “the veiled tendency of society towards disaster
lulls its victims in false revelation, with a hallucinated phenomenon. In
vain they hope to look their total doom in the eye and withstand it” (239).
The horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft can be read as figuring the problem
Adorno perceives here. In Lovecraft’s fiction, despairing scientists,
weary journalists, and other exhausted savants of the technodrome find
themselves seduced by mysterious chthonic forces, lured into delirium
and awful death by “eldritch” feralities that fascinate, seduce, and finally
destroy the mind.3 The fascination exerted by Lovecraft’s “Thing” or “En-
tity” would be, from Adorno’s perspective, nothing but a kind of obscene
obverse of having one’s mind pulverized by the routine and technocratic
bureaucratization of reason. Instead of the banal horror of reporting
daily to the boss, one must submit to an utterly alien idol imbued with
uncanny, maleficent power.
For Adorno any contemporary fascination with the occult must be
read as a symptom of the deadlock of the Enlightenment. Such fascina-
tion indicates, for Adorno, the failure of Enlightenment to liberate us fully
from magic, and is a sign of the ongoing crisis caused by that incomplete
liberation, the primary symbol of which is the ability of fascist forma-
tions of power—currently in the guise of global capitalist hegemony—to
evade criticism precisely through a “magical” use of reason, a use that
pretends that the objective conditions of human oppression are a mandate
from Beyond, a Destiny of the Market,* to which we must submit as if to
astrological Fates.
One of the provocative aspects of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work in
the Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes is that occultism appears to carry
a valence exactly opposite to that which Adorno gives it. And between
the two quotations from A Thousand Plateaus that form the epigraph to
this paper, critical readers and critical theorists impressed by Adorno’s
way of thinking can find all the elements that have caused suspicion
about the genuine viability of Deleuze and Guattari’s political agenda.
Here we have what seems to be a perverse or even fetishistic promotion
of renegade and nomadic groups; an obscure affirmation of dehumanized
subjectivity (animality and monstrosity), even more obscure references
to occult knowledge (sorcerer’s drawings), and finally what seems like a
wildly utopian hope of sheer escape, the finding of a “way out” of society
or even of the world. Perhaps Peter Hallward was correct in claiming

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

10 Joshua Delpech-Ramey

that Deleuze’s philosophy is fundamentally escapist, and leaves us no

real basis for a critical engagement with the present moment.
In what follows I will attempt to show that while Deleuze’s (and
Guattari’s) politics is unquestionably utopian, this utopianism has noth-
ing to do with escapism, but is the basis of a critical engagement with the
present. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s mode of immanent critique is
linked to the possibility of founding identities and collectivities which,
because inherently relational and constantly in a state of becoming, can-
not be the subject of straightforward modes of representation, whether in
ontological or political discourse. I will argue that sorcery is an important
reference point for such a politics precisely because of the inherently re-
lational character of the intensified affects, experimental semiotics, and
alternative power structures sorcery calls into play. In this way I hope to
indicate how it might be that precisely in this most esoteric or spiritual
of models we can discover rudiments of resistance to the present, and
perhaps even reverse Adorno’s appraisal of the status of occultism in
capital times.

Becoming-Sorcerer
Becoming, for Deleuze and Guattari, is neither the immanent mode
of existence ultimately transcended by the Platonic Ideas in which they
participate, nor is it the form of oppositional mediation in which Hegel
saw the reason of history’s ruse. “Becomings,” generally written in the
agrammatical plural, are the multiplicity of experiential states in which
lines are blurred between human consciousness and animal awareness,
between biopsychic life and the nature of matter itself. What the authors
have in mind, in general, are processes of transformation that issue in
strange, uncanny, or even fantastic hybrids: the stuff of fictions, and sci-
ence fictions, that tell of inconceivable life forms, the “eldritch feralities”
of H.P. Lovecraft’s lore. But becomings abound also at the interstices of
speciation and phylogenetic variation, even when such mutants exists only
in rumors of werewolves, the legends of vampires, tales of she-wolves
and ape-men. For Deleuze and Guattari, becomings accrue at the van-
ishing point where history and legend meet, at the twilit horizon where
monstrosities of fiction reveal dynamics that translate the most profound
facts of biopsychic life.
In becomings, borders between the sexes and the species, groups
and individuals, matter and mind grow indiscernible, imperceptible. Yet
such becomings are not vague, and involve definite thresholds. Deleuze
and Guattari in fact identify a series of thresholds in becoming: becoming-
woman, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-intense. As
one can observe in the ordering of this series, the movement of becoming
is quite specific: it is a movement away from the stereotypically “male”

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

Deleuze, Guattari, and the “Politics of Sorcery” 11

ego, fixated on its isolated body, paranoid about its fragile identity, us-
ing its reason to defend itself against the world, toward the more supple
and supine flesh and less dualistic mind of “woman,” further toward the
instinctual immanence of the animal, into an inhabitation of the depths of
vibrational and energetic patterns verging on the white noise of chaos. In
literature and anthropology, reports abound of sorcerers who are capable
of traversing and operating upon this line of increasing intensity through
which the human being ecstatically finds itself capable of powers and
affects outside the normal range.4
Although becoming seems to involve the recuperation of atavistic
traits, Deleuze and Guattari call becomings “involutions” rather than
regressions, and claim that such involution is always creative (A Thousand
Plateaus, 238). What “becomes” is not an archaic form, but a new dyna-
mism. But this dynamism is not a power that belongs to an individual.
It is inherently relational. Becoming forms new lines between at least
two series (of sexes, species, people groups, packs of animals). These
anomalous lines are composed when “blocks” of affects and percepts are
distributed so as to create passages or thresholds across which such affects
are shared: wolf-man and spider-woman are not so much the hideous
protagonists of fiction as they are figures of inconceivable yet very real
modes of communication and activity involving imperceptible yet effec-
tive modes of life. The elusiveness of the identity and the individuality
of such modes-in-becoming are crucial. What matters most, perhaps, in
becoming, is that affects and percepts are not attributes of determinate
subjects, but transversal traits that pass beneath assignable identities.
This is why Deleuze and Guattari say that becoming is its own subject, or
rather a subjectivizing or desubjectivizing power (ibid., 240). Becoming is
an event, an unnatural participation (ibid.) that is not at all imaginary, even
if the entities involved are not in any ordinary sense real.
Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the
absence of a term that would be the animal become. The becoming-
animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being
becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even if
that something other the animal becomes is not. This is the point to
clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but also
that it has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in
another becoming of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms
a block, with the first. This is the principle according to which there
is a reality specific to becoming (the Bergsonian idea of a coexistence
of very different durations,” superior to “ours,” all of them in com-
munication). (ibid., 238)

What becoming reveals is ultimately a secret unity in nature, one that

is discovered not through concrete analogies (comparisons of life forms
or behavioral patterns), but at an abstract compositional level. At this

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

12 Joshua Delpech-Ramey

level of abstraction—accessed not by detached observation, but through

initiatory ordeals—the bodies and minds, organs and organisms of dis-
crete individuals are not static or final terms in an evolutionary series, but
are the incarnation of vibrational or wave states--vectors that intersect as
pure materials that enter into various combinations, forming a given or-
gan and assuming a given function depending on their degree of speed
or slowness. Speed and slowness, movement and rest, tardiness and
rapidity subordinate not only the forms of structure but also the types
of development . . . there is a pure plane of immanence, univocality,
composition, upon which everything is given, upon which unformed
elements and materials dance . . . a single abstract Animal for all the
assemblages that effectuate it. (ibid., 255)

When Deleuze and Guattari grant to the mind (and the body) the
ability to access these hidden recesses of cosmic composition, they draw
upon the Bergsonian definition of the human as a unique contraction of
a multiplicity of cosmic potentials. For Bergson, mind is primarily intu-
ition, and only secondarily calculation or rationalization.5 For Bergson,
rationality is not as basic to human progress as is the affective range
upon which reason draws. In Bergson’s view, it is the human ability to
contract a multiplicity of affects that enables the mind to recapitulate the
constitutive elements of the cosmic whole in new and unforeseeable ways.
Cognition is thus only a particularly controlled form of a frenzy that would
otherwise be the overwhelming presence of the infinite reserve of creative
potential, the Whole of the past virtually present to each passing moment.
Society is “rational,” for Bergson, in the sense that it is built upon a par-
ticular selection from the virtual whole. It is selection that is the poetic or
religious act of institution.6 Whereas authority figures in society enforce
the particular contraction that society is, mystics, for Bergson, expand
the aperture of human awareness in order to enter into communication
with other levels of duration--states in which the energies of the virtual
whole can be given new shape. As Deleuze summarizes it in Bergsonism,
It could be said that in man, and only in man, the actual becomes ad-
equate to the virtual. It could be said that man is capable of rediscover-
ing all the levels, all the degrees of expansion [détente] and contraction
that coexist in the virtual Whole. As if he were capable of all the frenzies
and brought about in himself successively everything that, elsewhere,
can only be embodied in different species. Even in his dreams he
rediscovers or prepares matter. And durations that are inferior to him
are still internal to him. Man therefore creates a differentiation that is
valid for the Whole, and he alone traces out an open direction that is
able to express a whole that is itself open. Whereas the other directions
are closed and go round in circles . . . man is capable of scrambling the
planes, of going beyond his own plane as his own condition, in order
finally to express naturing Nature. (106)

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

Deleuze, Guattari, and the “Politics of Sorcery” 13

What Deleuze and Guattari see in the sorcerer is a particularly con-

densed ability to “go beyond” the normal plane of development. This
sense of coming from beyond, or from a time out of mind, accounts in part
for why we hear of the power of sorcery in tales. A tale is neither history
nor myth. Tales are stories of the anomalous, of what is said to occur long
ago and far away: too archaic (and arcane) for history, too foreign to be
integrated into a cosmogonic pantheon or totemic classification.7 Yet, as
Deleuze and Guattari point out, an-omalie in French is used to refer to the
“abnormal” or that which goes against the rules, when in fact the word
is derived from a Greek noun that designates the coarse, the rough, the
unequal. While the abnormal indicates divergent characteristics within
a group, the anomalous is the cutting edge, the edge of “deterritorializa-
tion” of the group itself. What is anomalous is not that which is outside of
the group or divergent within it, but that individual who forms a porous
border between the group and its Outside. Ahab’s inhuman zeal is derived
from his secret alliance with the exceptional whale--the extreme case of
whale, Moby-Dick, who seems to have crossed the threshold between
animal and all-too-human motives, just as Ahab has become monstrous
and inhuman in his pursuit.
Somewhere “between sacrifice and series, totem institution and
structure,” between the imaginary and the symbolic, lies sorcery, captured
neither in myth nor in history, but in legends, in tales of power. In A Thou-
sand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari mention only one sorcerer by name,
and that one is the subject of a tale: Don Juan, master (real or imaginary)
of Carlos Castaneda.8 Writers in general are called sorcerers because they
write not for but before or in the presence of the animal. “Writers are sor-
cerers,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “because they experience the animal
as the only population before whom they are responsible in principle”
(A Thousand Plateaus, 240). What is important about the relation between
writers of fiction and animals is not that writers sympathize with animals
or identify with them. It is not as if writers attempt to advocate for, let
alone represent the interests of the animal kingdom. What matters is that
the fascination animals exert on certain writers serves to establish a ritual
or ceremonial ground on which occult exchanges of affect take place.
The exchanges are “occult” because although it is clear that an exchange
is taking place, it is not clear what is being exchanged, or even when or
why. The German Romantic Hofmannsthal becomes fascinated by a pack
of dying rats, and the disturbance or disruption this produces in his soul
forms an “interstice” through which this “people” are given voice—not
that Hofmannsthal speaks for the rats, but his fascination with the rats
sends him, as a writer, into a becoming-rat that simultaneously directs the

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

14 Joshua Delpech-Ramey

rats into a nameless and yet distinct becoming-other, a becoming-written

of the rat in which, as Hofmannsthal put it, the “soul of the animal bares
its teeth at monstrous fate” (ibid., 240).
At the center of sorcery, and of writing-as-sorcery, are fascinations in
which one is overwhelmed by or possessed of certain affects: Ahab’s ob-
session with the white whale, H.P. Lovecraft’s doomed heroes who travel
in search of the nameless Thing; Castaneda’s bid for power. These fascina-
tions do not reflect merely human affects of love, joy, rage, or sorrow, but
express intensities or vibrational oscillations that expose, within affects
and their intensification, an uncanny interconnection or “Interkingdom”
(ibid., 242) where all organisms are composed by the same fundamental
forces. Sorcerers have affinities for animals and packs of animals because
a sorcerer’s power inheres in the relations that are possible for her to ac-
tivate between herself and the animals. What is important is not that the
sorcerer identifies with a snake or a crow, but that in the process of relat-
ing to those animals, the sorcerer is able to activate powers in herself that
would otherwise be blocked by the fixations of the self upon the self. “For
the affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the power
of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel” (ibid.).
The knowledge that such affects produce is a peculiar sort of
knowledge. It is knowledge of what Deleuze and Guattari identify with
operations on a cosmic plane of consistency, a plane where forms intersect
and enter into zones of indiscernability with one another. Knowledge
of such a plane is inseparable from actions taken on that plane. In the
composition of a Southern Italian folk dance, the Tarantella, such knowl-
edge is embodied in the movements of those who have been bitten by
spiders. The dancers convulse and writhe in spider-like fashion in order
to cure themselves (through perspiration) of the spider’s bite. What is
formed in the dance is a hybrid, a virtual entity that is neither human
nor spider, but a composition-in-convulsion, an impossible crossbreed, a
hybrid whose identity and reality is virtual. Sorcerers both result from
and produce such “unnatural participations”: wolf-men, spider-women.
These hybrids are sterile (ibid., 241). They do not reproduce, but spread
through catastrophes and epidemics, through contagions such as “dancing
mania,” a phenomenon in medieval Europe in which large groups danced
and writhed uncontrollably until exhausted (probably caused by eating
rye infected with Clavicepsis purpurea, a psychoactive fungus). Sorcerers
invite and attempt to use such states because it is here, with all the at-
tendant risks and dangers, that genuine knowledge of nature is found:
“unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the
kingdoms of nature” (ibid. 241).

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

Deleuze, Guattari, and the “Politics of Sorcery” 15

Anomaly and Group Formation

Sorcery involves packs or bands (ibid., 239). Such groups as hunt-
ing societies, secret societies, and mercenary groups, are formed around
affects that are too intense to be integrated into families or states. The
pack or band haunts the woods, roams the borders, lives between villages
(ibid., 246). Likewise, groups of sorcerers are always at the borders, the
fringes, and on the frontier. They do not enter society through contracts
or through filiations, but though infection or “contagion,” as when the
alliance of two different families results in the production of werewolves
or vampires. Deleuze and Guattari here cite the work of Edward Leach,
who had demonstrated that “the sorcerer belongs first of all to a group
united to the group over which he or she exercises influence only by al-
liance: thus in a matrilineal group we look to the father’s side for the
sorcerer or the witch” (ibid.). As Deleuze and Guattari already explored
in Anti-Oedipus, the precursor to A Thousand Plateaus, there is a great deal
of tension between filiations and alliance as types of social bonds. Filia-
tion, through blood, seems to have a concrete basis. But alliance through
pact is abstract: it has its basis in contract or agreement—it is not obliga-
tion or connection transmitted through blood, but agreement “bound”
through words or signs or gestures. The power that such tokens have
is mysterious, elusive, evasive, “fetishistic,” which is why sorcery often
appears when alliances are formed. The sorcerer is constantly accused of
deception or sedition, of betraying the interests of society, the family or
the state. And there is always an attempt by society to corral or break the
sorcerer, to re-integrate her and confine her to a social role (as shaman,
medicine-man, etc.) “in order to break them, reduce them to relations of
totemic or symbolic correspondence” (ibid., 247-248).
Anthropological studies of sorcery show it to be a vastly complex
phenomenon. These complexities are contemporary as well as ancient:
there is evidence of the power of sorcery in contemporary life from West
Africa to Haiti and Peru. Scholars such as Michael Taussig have explored
the complexities and ambiguities of sorcery, especially the tension between
the healing magic of shamans and the destructive power of sorcerers.9 The
legitimacy and value of sorcery remains the subject not only of intense
debate, but also the cause of real terror and real healing. The danger and
chaos associated with sorcery, and the general hostility and suspicion in
which sorcerers are held among many people groups might argue against
the notion that Deleuze and Guattari would seriously advocate a politics
of sorcery. And we have to take seriously the charge of “orientalism”
that would dismiss the idea of politics of sorcery out of hand. It might
seem all too easy to accuse Deleuze and Guattari of sensationalizing and

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

16 Joshua Delpech-Ramey

fetishizing the “other” in a politically and ethically irresponsible way,

glamorizing a fictional desire for something dark and unrealized in a
European or ersatz modern persona.
A contemporary person might have the impression, perhaps from
reading Castaneda or D.H. Lawrence or Lovecraft, that the politics of sor-
cery would be a radical individualism, an elitism par excellence. And one
can get the impression from Deleuze’s own comments, as well, that it is
somehow the creative individual who passes to the edge, who experiments
most intensely, who is drawn most deeply into that plane of immanence
harboring the potentials for intensive transformation required for, among
other things, sorcery and magic. Indeed, many of the characters Deleuze
uses to exemplify the proximity of life to an uncanny vitality approach the
intensity of immanence through illness, suffering, madness, exile, or social
rejection. Concerned political theorists such as Peter Hallward have thus
detected a politics of escapism at the root of Deleuze’s esoteric interests,
one that could encourage only breaks with existing institutions, and not
creative reinhabitation of them, and one that is ultimately nothing more
than affirmation of a kind of stoic courage to take one’s leave of ordinary
life.10 But there is much in Deleuze that resists this interpretation. Not
only do Deleuze and Guattari discuss sorcery specifically in connection
with problems of group formation and trans-individual processes; De-
leuze’s earliest writings on occult themes also show that, at least in his
mind, esoteric insights and occult powers are not ultimately the tools
of the renegade or the means of escape from the perplexities of human
institutions, but in fact have their ultimate significance precisely in the
creative rehabilitation of political institutions.

Mathesis: Knowledge of Life

This point can be made clearer by situating Deleuze and Guattari’s
elucidations of the politics of sorcery in the context of Deleuze’s own early
(and abiding) interest in esoteric knowledge. Esotericism had an impor-
tant place in modern philosophy, even if it had long been suppressed.11 In
particular, the esoteric idea of a universal science of all sciences, mathesis,
has an important provenance in modern thought. The dream of mathesis
occurs in Leibniz’s search for a “universal alphabet,” a hieroglyphic lan-
guage of all possible languages that would have made a total organization
of knowledge possible. Allison Coudert has shown decisively that Leibniz
was profoundly influenced in this regard by the Kabbalistic doctrine of
an unfallen Edenic language that could be discovered through divination
practices involving numerology and the Hebrew language.12 More gen-
erally, Michel Foucault argued in The Order of Things that the possibility
of representing each nature on the table of knowledge as a variable in a
universally applicable algebra was the animating principle of the entire

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

Deleuze, Guattari, and the “Politics of Sorcery” 17

“classical episteme,” its secret dream (71-76). By the 19th century mathesis
has gone underground or “esoteric” in search of connections “off” the
representable table of knowledge. Mathesis in the Romantic era becomes
constituted through symbolic rather than classificatory signs.
Deleuze’s essay, “Mathesis, Science, and Philosophy,” appeared in
1946 as an introduction to Jean Malfatti de Montereggio’s, La Mathèse, ou
anarchie et hiérarchie de la science.13 For Malfatti, a famous doctor as well as
esotericist, mathesis is the Romantic and vitalist culmination of medical
science. Mathesis represents not so much an encyclopedia as a mode of
intensified knowledge through which humanity can at once know and
heal itself. Malfatti presents mathesis as the reconciliation, necessary to
the schizoid modern mind, of the mathematical and metaphysical, or,
in a word, science and religion. Deleuze’s own gloss on mathesis is that
it is a kind of knowledge that, unlike either science or philosophy, does
not so much represent knowledge as it attempts to initiate the adept into
the life of knowledge. This is achieved through the internalization of an
elaborate symbolism such as the one Malfatti constructed using the Hindu
pantheon and numerology to represent fundamental cosmic dynamics.
Deleuze writes,
Unlike explanation, the symbol is the identity, the encounter, of the
sensible object and the object of thought. The sensible object is called
symbol, and the object of thought, losing all scientific signification, is
a hieroglyph or a cipher. In their identity, they form the concept. The
symbol is its extension, the hieroglyph its comprehension. Whereupon
the word “initiated” takes on its full sense: According to Malfatti, the
mysterious character of mathesis is not directed against the profane
in an exclusive, mystical sense, but simply indicates the necessity of
grasping the concept in a minimum of time, and that physical incarna-
tions take place in the smallest possible space—unity within diversity,
general life within particular life. At the limit, we could even say that
the notion of the initiate is rationalized to the extreme. If vocation
defines itself through the creation of a sensible object as the result of a
knowledge, then mathesis qua living art of medicine is the vocation par
excellence, the vocation of vocations, since it transforms knowledge itself
into a sensible object. Thus we shall see mathesis insist upon the cor-
respondences between material and spiritual creation. (“Mathesis,” 151)

Initiates to mathesis would stand not in abstract but in concrete rela-

tion to vital dynamics such that symbolic knowledge would be de jure an
operative power to transform life, and, paradoxically, symbols would de
facto be the set of transformations to which life itself is immanent. What
is mysterious about mathesis, about the peculiar visionary and healing
powers it would provide, has to do with the paradox of symbolic knowl-
edge, which is a knowledge of life coextensive with the power of life, or
as Deleuze puts it, a “science of incarnation and an incarnate science.”
Malfatti believed that mathesis was a closed system, that it had a
pure origin in Hindu intuitions, and that the goal of occult knowledge was

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

18 Joshua Delpech-Ramey

simply to unpack those intuitions. But Deleuze also notes that for Malfatti,
initiation is not elite but popular, since the significance of initiation lies, as
Deleuze puts it, in the importance of transmitting knowledge “in the mini-
mum of time.” As a doctor, Malfatti would have known the importance
of speed in the application of remedies. Occult knowledge, for Malfatti,
was nothing if it could not intensify and accelerate human healing. But
in order to achieve this speed, mathesis reverses the procedure of science.
A symbolism attempts not to explain the object through concepts, but to
see concepts as incarnate in objects. In a word, mathesis enables vision.
To facilitate vision, mathesis seeks to establish what symbols there are.
But rather than the prize of elites, mathesis is proposed as the
knowledge of everyday life. To quote “Mathesis, Science and Philosophy’:
. . . to believe that mathesis is merely a mystical lore, inaccessible and
superhuman, would be a complete mistake. This is the first misunder-
standing of the word “initiated” to be avoided. For mathesis deploys
itself at the level of life, of living man: it is first and foremost a thinking
of incarnation and of individuality. Essentially, mathesis would be the
exact description of human nature. (143)

Occult knowledge for Deleuze is intuitive knowledge of the individuat-

ing forces of life. This knowledge is “democratic” not in the sense that
it would be the subject of public discussion, but that it would symbolize
the elemental forces or affects that are the animating principles of those
debates. Mathesis, in other words, would be knowledge of what constitutes
the possibility of human collectivity. Thus initiation is “deployed at the
level of life, of living man.” The paradox is this: the knowledge most es-
sential to human life is not available on the basis of explanation, but rather
is incarnate in a series of symbols to which the possibility of explanation
attests. Mathesis does not eliminate the need for scientific explanation,
which uses symbols to express natural laws, or philosophical explanation,
which uses symbols to articulate logical and metaphysical concepts. But
mathesis, as a hermetic discipline, refers to the fundamental elements of
nature itself, such that those elements, as symbols, immediately impart a
power to act for the sake of life.
Mathesis is not a private quest for initiation, but a search for the
conceptual rudiments that might make it possible to forge new social
institutions.14 Deleuze’s interest in mathesis, as Robin Mackay puts it, is
in a principle that can guide and ground the creation of new social ritu-
als and new forms of cohesion and collectivity, of “integration.”15 And as
Deleuze puts it in another early essay, “the question is no longer about
transcendence, but rather about integration; the problem of society […]
is not a problem of limitation, but rather a problem of integration […] to
integrate sympathies” (Desert Islands, 19-21). Deleuze is explicitly inter-

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

Deleuze, Guattari, and the “Politics of Sorcery” 19

ested in mathesis to the extent to which it can energize a specific political

project: the formation of new social institutions.
What connects Deleuze’s vision of mathesis to the politics of sorcery?
By way of analogy: the sorcerer’s knowledge is to the pack or tribe what
the mathesis is to society.16 This knowledge of life is a simultaneous ap-
prehension and invention of alignments, connections, and ramifications
of human sympathies. It is the knowledge of how to prolong and sustain
individual powers in collective processes. Knowledge of such powers is
a knowledge of how to recreate existing institutions. For Deleuze, such
transformation occurs not by directly overthrowing an establishment, but
by creating hybrids or “monstrous” formations within pre-established
forms of exchange and already visible forms of power. When Deleuze
talks about a “way out,” he is not talking about an escape from politics,
but rather a release point at which the energies coagulated in a given set
of relations can exceed the limits of their possible meaning, taking on a
new direction in order to deepen symbiotic and synthetic possibilities.
If by sympathies in his early essay on “Mathesis” Deleuze means
precisely those occult affinities that are at once unconscious and hidden
in nature, but effective in symbioses such as those effectuated in sorcery,
then the significance of a “politics” of sorcery begins to become clearer.
The politics of sorcery is not an escapism, but an intervention. This in-
tervention is not on behalf of constituted individuals, but is for the sake
of imperceptible symbioses, new relations of force and unexpected flows
of desire.
But this is in no sense a politics of sheer diversion or nihilistic escap-
ism. Deleuze and Guattari point out that sorcery manages to integrate
sympathies on the basis of uncanny resonances and imperceptible con-
nections. These integrations are, at their summit, disjunctive, tending to
individuate rather than to obscure elemental participants. This is why, in
What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari speak of the people of politics
not as a people in need of recognition, but as a people to come: these
are the people that will be produced from experimentation, as hybrid and
anomalous forms of life.
For the race summoned forth by art or philosophy is not the one that
claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical,
nomadic, irremediably minor race . . . The artist or the philosopher is
incapable of creating a people, each can only summon it with all his
strength. A people can only be created in abominable sufferings, and
it cannot be concerned any more with art and philosophy. But books
of philosophy and works of art also contain their sum of unimaginable
sufferings that forewarn of the advent of a people. They have resistance
in common—their resistance to death, to servitude, to the intolerable,
to shame, and to the present. (109-110)

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

20 Joshua Delpech-Ramey

The people to come will not arrive, however, through debate, com-
promise, or litigations that would establish protective limits between
groups and share power among competing interests. For Deleuze and
Guattari, genuine multiplicities will be founded only through creative
forms of becoming that develop across groups and interests, and the po-
litical will expressed will be inseparable from an open-ended becoming.
The only question, as they put it, is whether a becoming reaches the point
at which desire can be sustained as expression--the disjunctive inclusion
of new life forms in the present.
What I have tried to argue here is that it is Deleuze’s interest in
sorcery, as explored with Guattari, that finally gives the details of how
this extraordinarily “cosmic” vision of human solidarity has, at least oc-
casionally, been put into practice. For the sorcerer models what it is—in
all its danger and exhilaration, potential for healing and capacity for
destruction—to become anomalous in the precise sense of an-omalie: on
the cutting edge of the unknown, the infinite. What Deleuze’s early essay
declares is that such becoming-anomalous is not rare but universal, insofar
as we are each related directly to an infinity of forces of which we are all
composed, if only unconsciously aware. Sorcery shows us how those have
fared who have had the ordeal of access to the plane of composition that
diagrams the forces crossing our nature with that of others. The politi-
cal question is not how to limit, contain, or govern sorcerers, but how to
activate the power of sorcery that crosses each of us. We do not yet know,
as Spinoza taught, what such an anomaly—at once multiple and singular,
individual and universal—might yet be able to do. If Deleuze and Guat-
tari are right to point us to sorcery as a “way out” of the present that is
also profoundly a way into genuine solidarity and communication, then
Adorno’s condemnation of occultism can be read as concealing as much
as it reveals about our situation.17 For if to indulge in the fantasy of occult
powers is to abandon the hope of gaining real power against the present
age of capitalism and administration, at the very least we must recognize
that capitalism itself seems to be the one form of sorcery we all tacitly
believe in, and the increase of capital thus the only remaining criteria for
what counts as a genuine becoming.18 Perhaps the occultists, with their
recognition of “higher powers,” are the genuine realists, after all.
Rowan University

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

Deleuze, Guattari, and the “Politics of Sorcery” 21

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott.
London: Verso: 2005.
Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, South Bend: Notre Dame, 1977.
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Tomlinson and Habberjam. New York: Zone, 1990.
-----. Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974). New York: Semiotext(e), 2003.
-----. Gilles Deleuze, “Mathesis, Science, and Philosophy,” Collapse III (Falmouth: Urba-
nomic, 2007).
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Hurley, Seem, and Lane, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 1983.
-----. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987.
-----. What is Philosophy? Trans. Tomlinson and Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York:
Random House, 1970.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.
Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Lovecraft, H. P. H.P. Lovecraft: Tales. Ed. Peter Straub. New York: Library of America, 2005.

Notes

1. Here I am not interested in whether Adorno and Horkheimer’s characterization of the

Enlightenment, and of modernity, is complete or comprehensive. I am only taken here
with their notion that whatever the Enlightenment amounts to, it sets a particular form
of the universal validity of reason in direct opposition to a magical rapport between the
mind and the world, since such rapport, being local, occasional, and itinerant, neces-
sarily subverts the demand that truth claims be open to repeatability and verifiability
by all reasonable citizens of an ideal universal community of minds. Other studies of
the rise of modern science and modernity generally have shown the importance of the
opposition of modern rationality to magical thinking, especially the monumental studies
of Koyré, From The Closed World to the Infinite Universe (New York: Harper, 1958), and
Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Trans. Wallace. Cambridge: MIT, 1983).
2. I am not assuming here any special definition of objectivity, but rather simply gestur-
ing toward the fact that objective knowledge is opposed to magical knowledge by the
overwhelming popular and philosophical drift of the Enlightenment.
3. See especially Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” in H.P. Lovecraft: Tales. Ed. Peter Straub.
Library of America: 2005).
4. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari are particularly interested in the powers of sorcery
as exemplified by the medicine men in the Ndembu healing rituals observed by Victor
Turner. In Section 4, “Psychoanalysis and Ethnology,” of Part 3, “Savages, Barbarians,
and Civilized Men,” Deleuze and Guattari uphold the strategies of medicine men as
superior to those of clinical psychoanalysis. This has to do with the ways in which
a genuine multiplicity of desire, above and beyond all familial and Oedipal drama, is
brought into play in order to effect a cure of psychic and social illness (in this case, an
heir to a chieftainship who has been prevented by sorcery from ascending to his right-
ful place). The cure is done through a kind of improvised group analysis that involves
mythology, fetish objects, reports of various family members, speech of the subject
himself Such a sorcery, or counter-sorcery, amounts to an exercise in that intervention

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

22 Joshua Delpech-Ramey

Deleuze and Guattari call schizoanalysis: an analysis not of the neuroses and psychoses
of subjects, but of the “schizzes” or fragments of decoded desire organized in a given
social field. Schizoanalysis involves “the destruction of the expressive pseudo forms
of the unconscious, and the discovery of desire’s unconscious investments of the social
field. It is from this point of view that we must consider many primitive cures: they
are schizoanalysis in action” (Anti-Oedipus. p. 167).
5. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, (Trans. Tomlinson and Habberjam, New York: Zone Books,
1988), pp. 13-35.
6. Bergson suggests that it is, paradoxically, the extraordinary powers of the individual
mystic that grounds the possibility of collective life, since it is the mystic that founds
society with “the unanswerable word” in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion , p. 295.
7. Here Deleuze and Guattari follow Duvignaud, who in L’anomie: Hérésie et Subversion
(Paris: Ed. Anthropos, 1973) had hypothesized that “anomalies” are accounted for in
archaic cultures not as degradations or distortions of myth (or even in multiple versions
of myth) but in tales. Tales of lands far away or times lost to memory escape the annals
of history, but also subverting the certainty of the mythic order, since myth is always
meant to assign powers to legitimate lines of familial descent (as in the genealogical
myths of Hesiod, Homer, the Mahabharata, etc.).
8. There is a great deal of controversy around the status of Castenada’s narratives. It is
not at all clear whether his books are records of trips taken to Northern Mexico or are,
on the other hand, fictions spun from visionary experiences that did not involve those
travels or even the mysterious Don Juan. For an excellent contemporary discussion of
the complexities, see <http://www.realitysandwich.com/shamans_and_charlatans_as-
sessing_castanedas_legacy> and <http://www.realitysandwich.com/burning_down_
halls_academia_with_castaneda039s_knowledge>
9. See Michael Taussig, Shamanism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987).
10. See Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London:
Verso, 2005).
11. Newton’s writings on alchemy, for instance, far outnumber his works on physics.
12. Allison Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995).
13. The text was published by Editions Griffon d’Or in 1946 with Deleuze’s introduction.
“Mathesis, Science, and Philosophy” was republished in Collapse III (Falmouth: Urba-
nomic, 2007).
14. <http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/history/news-events/malfatti.php>
15. Collapse III (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007), pp. 26-28.
16. Deleuze’s early work, such as his 1956-1957 hypokhâgne lecture course at Lycée Louis le
Grand, Qu’est-ce que fonder? [What is Grounding?] as well as Empiricism and Subjectivity
shows a consistent attention to this theme. See http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/
texte.php?cle=218&groupe=Conf%E9rences&langue=1
17. It is arguable that Adorno, while critical of contemporary occultism, considered authentic
and archaic magic as itself an ensign of a genuine relation to reality. While magic was
“bloody untruth” (as he puts it in Dialectic of Enlightenment), it nevertheless was not that
fantasy of wish-fulfillment to which it was reduced by Freud. As I have tried to show
in “Lost Magic: The Hidden Radiance of Negative Dialectics” (forthcoming, Radical
Philosophy Review, 2010), there are a number of aspects of the practice “constellation” in
Negative Dialectics that seem to identify parallel if not outright homologous structures
in primitive magical thinking and negative dialectics. This uncanny resonance has to
do, I argue, with what Mauss identified in magic as an inherently experimental, ever-

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010

Deleuze, Guattari, and the “Politics of Sorcery” 23

shifting, and open-ended relationship between magical desires, methods, and materials,
a relationship that is never one of the direct imposition of will upon inert matter any
less than conceptual thought ever captures or directly conveys the truth of reality in
negative dialectics.
18. For this line of thinking on capitalism and globalization see Isabel Stengers and Phillipe
Pignarre, La Sorcellerie capitaliste (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).

SubStance #121, Vol. 39, no. 1, 2010