By Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod

I would like here to present the political dimensions of Deleuze’s critique of Hegel: the critique of the concept of recognition; the critique of the State; the critique of history. These three dimensions are present as early as 1962, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, but as regards the critiques of the State and of history, they are considerably expanded and developed in his joint work with Félix Guattari, notably in The Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

If these critiques are interesting, it is not because of what they might directly teach us about the limits of Hegel’s social and political philosophy: the German philosopher’s thought is too mediated and involves too many intermediaries when Deleuze refers to it – in particular, for political questions, Alexandre Kojève – for us to believe that they address Hegelian thought directly. Nevertheless, opposition to Hegelianism, however caricatural it may be, constitutes a powerful tool for Deleuze (and Guattari) in thinking about politics and consequently allows us to formulate problems which, for some, are undoubtedly still our own today.

Having discussed Deleuze’s reading of Hegel, I will show how Deleuze and Guattari’s political categories can be understood as responses to Hegelianism and enable us to discuss issues that remain essential for us today.

From epistemological critique to ethical and political critique

It should be noted that the starting point of Deleuze’s anti-Hegelianism is primarily epistemological and ontological. Alongside Bergson, in the 1950s, Deleuze essentially criticised Hegel for having misunderstood being and for having developed flawed concepts to grasp reality. It is only with the 1962 work on Nietzsche that the critique shifts to the practical realm and takes on ethical dimensions which, after May 1968, in his joint work with Guattari, would become directly political. This evolution of Deleuze’s anti-Hegelianism does not imply any rupture between theoretical and practical questions: as we shall see, it is important to fully understand what he criticises Hegel for from an epistemological and ontological perspective if one is to truly grasp what is at stake in his ethical and political critique.

In the two texts Deleuze devoted to Bergson in 1956, which would culminate in the book on Bergsonism in 1966, the critique focuses on the negative categories of opposition and contradiction, which constitute a flawed way of conceiving difference; with Difference and Repetition, in 1968, it is enriched by a rejection of the foundation that introduces into contradiction a teleology orienting difference towards identity. How are we to understand these criticisms levelled at Hegelianism?

If opposition and contradiction are poor concepts for thinking about difference, it is because they overlook the small differences, the subtle nuances of being, which is composed of a multiplicity of positive variations. Admittedly, the strength of Hegelian philosophy lies in having conceived a movement of difference, a self-determination of the concept that allows for the introduction of processuality and differential relation into being: being is not substance; it is relation and process, that is to say, it is becoming and difference. To conceptualise this, in the Doctrine of Essence, Hegel explains that being is determined by negation; what something is only makes sense in relation to what it is not: a man is not a chair, is not a tree, is not the sky, and so on. What I am is determined by what I am not. Hegel shows, however, that this determination is enriched when we move to opposition and each term internalises its opposite: a man is defined by the fact that he is not a woman, and vice versa, so that each opposing term is defined by its opposite (A and B) and only makes sense because it is contradictory to itself (A is defined by non-A). The opposition of opposites internalises negation and renders being contradictory to itself. But contradiction is not here what renders the meaning of being inconsistent; rather, it is what grounds it. This is why the Doctrine of Essence makes the foundation the truth of difference understood as contradiction.

The entire process of enriching meaning, from simple diversity to opposition and contradiction, is thus teleologically oriented towards the foundation, which Deleuze understands as an identity that internalises difference and neutralises it, rendering it, as it were, harmless. Opposition and contradiction are merely differentiations of a concept that remains identical to itself despite its determination: for example, man and woman define each other reciprocally and thus bear contradiction within them, but this contradiction is simply the differentiation into opposing ‘species’ of the human ‘genus’. From this perspective, the wild and nomadic difference of being completely eludes the concept: all the nuances that might inhabit being between the two opposites are left aside; the entire spectrum of variations between ‘man’ and ‘woman’ disappears in favour of a differentiation of the generic universal between two perfectly identified and clearly delimited opposites. The anarchic difference to which Deleuze appeals has no place in such a framework.

It is important to recognise that Deleuze’s political critiques of Hegel re-enact and extend these theoretical objections onto a practical stage.

1/ Recognition. When Deleuze tackles the concept of recognition in Nietzsche and Philosophy, discussing the master-slave dialectic, he does so by considering that recognition concerns not only the intersubjective relationship – being recognised by others – but also established values (the recognition of values such as money, honours, power, reputation, etc.). The question of recognition thus seems to imply that those who seek social recognition do so in the name of values which are not themselves called into question but are, on the contrary, legitimised by the demand for recognition. It is undeniable that it is here Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of the Hegelian dialectic that guides Deleuze’s interpretation. Not only does Kojève’s reading impose upon the Phenomenology a struggle for recognition that is not truly found there – Hegel clearly separating the moment of the ‘pure concept’ of recognition from the moment of its failure (the struggle for recognition that results from its denial and leads to domination) – but he also turns the issue of recognition into a ‘struggle for prestige’: one fights to gain social prestige, to become the one who is socially valued, to become, in a sense, the new master. In Nietzschean terms, the Hegelian struggle for recognition is the struggle of slaves who harbour resentment against their masters and who would like to take their place.

Very explicitly, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, but also in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze takes aim at the Marxist idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the notion that political struggle must involve the seizure of power, without truly questioning our conception of power, of politics, and the fact that society must be organised and planned by a coercive power (a state bureaucratic apparatus, as in the USSR). One might also consider other examples that Deleuze does not explicitly mention but which also seem to correspond to his conception of the struggle for recognition: in particular the suffragist struggle for women’s rights, integrating women into a liberal legal order that pre-exists them and which is not in itself transformed by the extension of the right to vote (in which respect Deleuze would echo the criticism Beauvoir directs at the suffragists in *The Second Sex*: having integrated women into the existing order rather than having transformed that order). Thus, in the struggle between men and women, or in the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the struggle is antagonistic; we are dealing with opposing social groups, but ultimately the opposition and contradiction are resolved within a foundation that is common to the conflicting social groups and which is not called into question as such (the transcendence of centralised power, the liberal legal order).

We can also see that this opposition between women and men, or between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, presupposes clearly identifiable social groups and leaves little room for the diversity of ways of being a man or a woman or neither, nor for the diversity of subjectivities that do not fundamentally identify with the proletarian class or the bourgeois class – Deleuze and Guattari were particularly sensitive to the criticism of the PCF and the trade unions by the feminists of the MLF and the homosexuals of the FAHR, who did not identify with the proletarian struggles of the time (which they saw as sexist and homophobic). Here, one must consider the new political subjects that emerged in the 1960s and around 1968 (students, feminists, homosexuals, people of colour or the colonised…) to make sense of what Deleuze means when he asserts the need to transcend the usual frameworks of thought in order to conceive of the new political subjects in struggle. From this, we can see that the purely theoretical issues of the critique of Hegelianism find their extension in the practical sphere.

2/ As regards the question of the State, it clearly follows on from what has just been said about recognition, for we ultimately understand that what poses a problem for Deleuze is the embedding of struggles for recognition within a state framework understood as a locus of power and the rule of law (which *A Thousand Plateaus* translates, following Dumézil, into the two heads of sovereignty: the king-magician and the priest-jurist, force and law, power and legitimacy or legality). The politics that Deleuze and Guattari call for is aimed neither at changing the law nor at seizing power: in short, it is not a politics oriented towards the state.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, the criticism levelled at Hegel on this point is not particularly interesting: Hegel emerges between the lines as the philosopher of the Prussian state, an official philosopher who defends the powers that be. In A Thousand Plateaus, the critique is much more subtle and nuanced, for whilst Deleuze continues to regard Hegel as a theorist of the state, he acknowledges Hegel’s merit in having rejected the question of the state’s genesis. We know, in fact, that Hegel, in The Philosophy of Right, rejects both an ideal genesis of power (the social contract) and a real genesis (violence and the right of heroes who create history) (PPD, § 258): what legitimises the state is its internal structure, its rational organisation, and not an external cause. In order to found society, the state must be founded on nothing other than itself. This is not to say that it does not have its place in a philosophy of history oriented towards an improvement of constitutional forms; but the Idea of the State does not present itself as historical, otherwise it could not fulfil its function of holding the social body together. The State presents itself as eternal and divine, as not resulting from the arbitrariness of individuals and their actions.

If Deleuze is particularly interested in this perspective, it is because he shares the view that the State has no genesis: it is an Idea which he calls Urstaat and which constitutes a tendency inherent in every society. In contrast to the Marxist analysis of the State, which roots it in relations of production, Deleuze takes up Pierre Clastres’s idea that the State constitutes a tendency inherent in every society, against which so-called ‘primitive’ societies have, moreover, fought: the State is, in a sense, virtually present at all times, but in stateless primitive societies it is averted through mechanisms that limit the power of chiefs. This is why the state only emerges once the coding of primitive societies – the set of customs and institutions that make life in stateless societies possible – gives way to the over-coding of a transcendent power, when the warding off of the state no longer functions. This transcendent over-coding appropriates all the codes of primitive societies but claims to have founded them: it claims to be the source of what holds society together, even though stateless societies manage perfectly well to exist without it without sinking into anarchy. The stroke of genius or the coup de force of the state is to present itself as necessary by claiming to be the foundation of the social: this is precisely what Deleuze acknowledges Hegel as having thematised, even though he judges the value of this state foundation of the social body quite differently from the latter. For whereas Hegel effectively believes that society would collapse if there were no state to hold the various components of the social body together, Deleuze believes that this is a subterfuge inherent to the foundation, the subterfuge of transcendence: the identity it guarantees to society by controlling differences is in reality guaranteed by force and by the illusion of a legitimate legal order, but it is by no means necessary.

This transhistorical tendency of the state, which Deleuze believes he can attribute to Hegel (though one could argue that this is, in fact, a rather unfaithful reading…), is central to the analysis of capitalism in *A Thousand Plateaus*. For Deleuze and Guattari reject the idea that capitalism could exist without the state or in opposition to the state. They assert that there is always a state on the horizon of capitalist societies: in Hegelian terms, one might say that civil society always needs the state, that it cannot exist without it, without its law and its violence. The analysis in A Thousand Plateaus aims to show that whilst it is true there is a global market that appears to transcend states, this global market can only function if it is realised in a pluralistic manner across different states. This takes two main forms: 1) in the East-West relationship between ‘democratic’ societies and ‘socialist’ societies (the Cold War), integration into the global market is necessary despite very different political forms; 2) above all, in the North-South relationship, it is understood that the developed centre requires an underdeveloped periphery to enable an international division of labour (and Deleuze and Guattari emphasise in this regard that this capitalist production of the Third World also ceaselessly produces internal Third Worlds and zones of underdevelopment and intensive exploitation within the so-called developed states of the centre themselves). In short, there can be no analysis of capitalism without an analysis of the state, and this is why the state, even when it appears absent, must always constitute an ahistorical or transhistorical tendency within societies.

3/ This brings us to the third criticism Deleuze levels at Hegel: the critique of history and historicism. Deleuze is one of those philosophers (along with Rancière, Badiou, Derrida…) who believe that politics does not play out within history, and this for several reasons which do not all carry the same weight but are complementary: a) determinism: history constitutes a predetermined chain of causes and effects that leaves little room for contingency; b) linearity: history constitutes a linear chronology that does not correspond to the way in which political movements intervene in history, when they resonate with past revolts and project themselves into a future that breaks radically with historical determinations (Deleuze opposes here the evolutionism of the nineteenth century, and it is sometimes difficult to know whether, for him, History is not reduced to this: a grand evolutionary philosophy of history); c) the scale of magnitude, for history is ‘molar’, it presupposes, according to Deleuze, broad periodisations, well-established social groups or classes, and clearly identifiable economic and political determinations; yet history thereby misses everything that plays out at a more ‘molecular’, more imperceptible level (everything that remains on the margins, invisible, leaving no trace in history). It is understandable that these reasons (determinism, linearity, large scale) might be equated with a reading—admittedly somewhat hasty—of Hegel’s philosophy of history.

d) But a fourth reason proves decisive and stands in stark contrast to the very meaning Hegel attributed to history: for whereas the German philosopher conceived of progress as the meaning of history, Deleuze considers (undoubtedly closer to Adorno in this respect) that the meaning of history is more that of catastrophe, or at least he considers that history is precisely the stage where things go wrong. On this point, one may refer to the numerous texts in which Deleuze examines the failure of the American and Russian revolutions: revolutions that held the promise of emancipation (whether liberal or communist) but which went awry, which were a betrayal – see Critique and Clinic, Cinema 1 and 2, What is Philosophy?. For Deleuze, this betrayal is no accident; it is the very march of history that constitutes precisely the place where revolutionary creations fall back, become institutionalised, and then harden and turn into their opposite. History functions somewhat in Deleuze’s thought like Sartre’s ‘pratico-inert’: it is the place where creative freedom solidifies and freezes into its opposite.

Deleuze offers ontological reasons for this: the movement from the creative virtual to the created actual is a dynamic of selection and organisation that is compelled to control and subjugate the transformative power of beginnings – the ‘normal’ life of a society cannot be that of the revolutionary moment; things must, of course, organise themselves and return to their normal course, but in doing so, all the risks of a pyramidal organisation of social order return. However, beyond ontological reasons, one cannot help but consider that Deleuze is a child of his time, that he is a philosopher of the Cold War and that he faces the two blocs, neither of which is more enviable than the other – the USA and the USSR – and yet both of which have a revolution at their origins. The failure of great revolutions is what Deleuze pondered throughout his life, and it is not the least significant aspect of his philosophy that makes him our contemporary – the failure of the Russian Revolution, in particular, undoubtedly still shaping what politics means to us today. The belief in historical progress found in Hegel has given way to a profound pessimism towards history, but one which, in Deleuze, does not imply political defeatism: it remains possible to believe in the world in order to bring about revolutionary becoming.

The political philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari

It can therefore be said that Deleuze’s critical engagement with Hegel enables us to address key aspects of his political philosophy. But what ‘non-Hegelian’ political philosophy results from this? We seek a politics that defies the State, escapes historical determinations and overturns prevailing norms by constituting ‘molecular’ groups and subjectivities that elude the major ‘molar’ categorisations (men/women, bourgeoisie/proletariat, etc.). The categories of becoming, event, war machine and nomad serve precisely to conceptualise this.

1/ If Deleuze contrasts becoming with history, it is first and foremost because we must conceive of events that escape historical determinations, that cannot be reduced to a series of causes and effects: in this sense, becoming is a term for contingency, and for Deleuze this contingency always arises from random encounters. Becoming occurs when heterogeneous elements connect in a manner that deviates from the established order of things, and beings become other than what they are. Becomings certainly have historical conditions, but these are negative conditions: they are not reducible to them. Similarly, the fact that becoming falls back into history is entirely normal and necessary, but this does not invalidate the irreducibility of becoming in relation to history. For becoming has its own coherence, its internal logic, its self-consistency, which gives it a sort of ontological self-sufficiency.

Take May ’68, for example: there is, of course, everything historical about the events, everything of which we can trace the history: the past causes, what took place in the present of the event, what resulted from it afterwards. But becoming refers to the way in which May ’68 constitutes a sort of reserve or ontological power that can connect with other events without any causal link (for example with the Paris Commune, like an echo across the centuries), and which will outlive itself: even today, someone may feel moved by the event; they may feel concerned and participate in its becoming to actualise its previously unseen potentials, without this being historically explainable.

What is truly beautiful about this conception of becoming in Deleuze is that it allows us to salvage something from revolutionary events: the French, American and Russian Revolutions, the Paris Commune, May 1968, etc. All these events are not only in the past, but they have failed to fulfil their promise of emancipation. This historical betrayal of the revolutions and the failures of the great uprisings of history do nothing to negate their potential, which survives beyond historical chronology. Great events do not die; one can always take part in them. Just as the French Revolutionaries drew on the Roman Republic and communicated the events to create something new, there is a way to ensure that events always survive beyond the betrayals or failures of history. The emancipatory potential, conceived as becoming, persists through the ages and can be reactivated, reinvested in, and inherited, somewhat like Walter Benjamin’s tradition of the vanquished. This is why Deleuze attaches greater importance to the revolutionary moment than to the outcome of the revolution: it is by no means a question of saying that only the moment counts in the revolution (there is no praise of the revolution as a ‘celebration’ in Deleuze), but of saying that what truly becomes immortal in the revolution is not simply its outcome. The Reign of Terror or the Gulags do not completely eradicate the virtual potentialities of the French or Russian Revolution.

2/ The other feature of becoming, as an aberrant connection of heterogeneous elements, is the radical disidentification it brings about. Indeed, for Deleuze, becoming constitutes an ontological process that shatters identities. Take, for example, a man’s becoming-woman. It implies the way in which a man transforms through contact with women, for instance through contact with the feminists of the MLF in the 1970s: this man loses the traits which, in our patriarchal societies, characterise masculinity (virility, insensitivity, economic success, etc.). The man becomes other than what he was and other than what society expects of him. But the woman, too, becomes other than herself. This is a point on which Deleuze never ceases to insist: there is no becoming-woman for the man without a becoming-woman for the woman herself. This is very easy to understand: the feminists of the MLF broke with what it meant to be a woman in French society at the time (a woman submissive to her husband, a housewife, a mother, etc.); they too entered into a becoming-other. So much so that becoming-woman is always a joint becoming of men and women: a shared participation in an arrangement that undoes identities to create new subjectivities that are more difficult to situate, assimilate or assign.

It is understandable that commentators might have drawn parallels between Deleuze and Rancière: the crux of becoming lies precisely in a process of disidentification and a new subjectivation. Becoming occurs when men and women no longer behave according to the prevailing norms of masculinity and femininity, or when workers no longer behave as workers are supposed to, but instead revolt and, for example, form alliances with students against the expectations of the authorities, as well as trade unions and communist parties (as in May ’68). In this sense, becoming is only possible for minorities, if ‘minority’ means a way of subjectivising oneself differently from the major established social identities – which are said to be ‘majority’, not in terms of numbers, but from a normative point of view.

3/ Becoming-minority thus stands in opposition both to traditional social codes and to the state’s overcoding that serves capitalism. But it would be a mistake to see this merely as a unilateral rejection of the institution. Ever since his early reflections, Deleuze has continually pondered the question of the institution. Very early on, he developed the idea that the institution does not arise from a social contract and does not depend on a state framework: he held the conviction that the social body possesses a spontaneity to create its own institutions immanently, without needing to pass through the transcendence of the state and the law. Deleuze echoes Clastres’ anarchist intuition: society exists in opposition to the state. This conviction is reflected in his collaborative work with Guattari, and one might consider that the concept of the war machine, in A Thousand Plateaus, continues Deleuze’s reflection on the institution immanent to the social body. From this perspective, the war machine would be a way of conceiving an institution of becoming-minority, a way of giving it substance.

From this perspective, the war machine is defined by Deleuze and Guattari as an abolition of vertical and horizontal organisation in favour of a transversal organisation. The pyramidal verticality of hierarchical structures is called into question in favour of an egalitarian and democratic organisation of the collective, but it is also the rigid, horizontal compartmentalisation of activities that is rejected in favour of the abolition of the rigid division of labour. The model of transversal organisation is the La Borde clinic, where Guattari practised and where activities were organised in such a way as to minimise the effects of hierarchy, and to ensure that people did not always do the same thing, that they did not specialise in a task in a compartmentalised and restrictive manner.

In this sense, the war machine revives a fundamental communist or anarchist aspiration: the rejection of the division of labour between manual and intellectual work, the demand that everyone share the work fairly and be as versatile as possible in order to share the arduous labour and toil equitably, and to make the most of the various human faculties without confining oneself to a specific activity (we recall Marx’s phrase in The German Ideology: ‘hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, tending livestock in the evening, and engaging in criticism after dinner, as I please, without ever becoming a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd or a critic’). From this perspective, one might say that Deleuze takes the ontological implications of communism or anarchism to their logical conclusion, emphasising that a rigid division of social labour constitutes a betrayal of the becoming of every being, since no person can be ontologically confined to a single category or a specific activity. One might even say that in his philosophy, Deleuze plays on the meaning of the statement regarding the abolition of property: what politically and economically signifies the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, ontologically signifies the abolition of fixed properties clearly attributable to beings. It is not without reason that Difference and Repetition speaks of a ‘crowned anarchy’ to denote ontological difference: here, a political sense of ontology and an ontological sense of the political intersect and complement one another.

It is the concept of the nomad that bears and conceptually underpins this convergence of the political and ontology. In A Thousand Plateaus, the nomad is the conceptual figure who, single-handedly, encapsulates all the non-Hegelian orientations of Deleuze’s political philosophy that we have briefly surveyed. Nomads have no state and no history, at least from the perspective of a philosophy which, like Hegel’s, considers that there is no history other than the history of states. On the other hand, nomads are the inventors of war machines, according to Deleuze and Guattari: it is not that they wage war, but their form of life is destructive of the state and the rigid compartmentalisation (the striated space) that it imposes on peoples and territories. Indeed, nomads traverse the smooth space of the desert or the steppe without settling on a territory or a national identity: their very existence calls into question the necessity of the state, the idea that a state is needed to form a society; it is in this sense that nomads are the inventors of the war machine and that there is a potential for destruction within them.

The figure of the nomad, so disparaged by the philosophies of Hegel or even Kant, is thus re-evaluated to express the institutionalisation of becoming within war machines. But the nomad is not so much a historical figure as a mode of being, an ontological figure. It refers to the nomos, to which Deleuze has referred since Difference and Repetition to denote being without fixed property and a space without rigid division. Just as the nomad has no territorial claim on the territories he traverses, so too does the nomadic mode of being have no assigned ontological property: it ceaselessly becomes-other to constitute new political subjects on the margins of the state, capitalism and history alike.

Conclusion

To conclude, I would like to examine the relevance of the ‘non-Hegelian’ or ‘anti-Hegelian’ politics promoted by Deleuze and Guattari. I shall develop this inquiry by focusing in particular on a number of contemporary issues in political ecology, which provide a particularly good framework for discussing the relevance of certain Deleuzian theses today.

Firstly, one might consider that the refusal to regard political subjects as already constituted and perfectly identifiable resonates with current attempts to conceive of political subjects which, on the one hand, include non-humans alongside humans, and which, on the other hand, are always situated in specific places and environments. Even if one were to place greater emphasis than Deleuze does on the social class affiliation of subjects engaged in struggle, one must admit that the entry of non-humans onto the political stage compels us to conceive of a future for traditional class identity that must always take specific forms depending on situated struggles. That Deleuze linked minority-becomings to animal-becoming is a dimension of his thought that resonates with contemporary reflection on these issues. Today, we must conceive of political subjects linked to animals and to threatened habitats, which certainly raise questions related to social classes, but which also articulate these questions with other social and ecological modalities: for example, the alliance of intellectuals and farmers at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, which also includes in its collective bird species, cows, marshes, forests, etc. Deleuze and Guattari had sensed that our era needs, not to repudiate, but to enrich the class struggle by taking new political subjects into account. What is at stake here is the way in which class struggle, feminist struggles, anti-racist struggles, anti-speciesist struggles and ecological struggles can be articulated.

Secondly, regarding the critique of the state, it is certain that here too, the current resurgence of the theme of the commons in general, and environmental commons in particular, lends relevance to Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. What we are seeking today as an alternative to the capitalist appropriation of land and natural spaces is not merely state intervention, but the reaffirmation of the communal nature of living environments and the possibility of a reappropriation of natural environments by inhabitants attached to a place, to a territory. The reason for this is certainly that the state, historically, has favoured the capitalist exploitation of nature, but it is also that the ecological question compels us to consider the concrete relationship that individuals maintain with a living environment, whereas the state is necessarily centralised, removed from places of life and habitation – it is, in essence, ‘transcendent’, to use the words of Deleuze and Guattari. In opposition to the abstraction of the state’s relationship to the territory, the need to rethink the bond between a people and a land lies at the heart of Deleuze-Guattarian politics, and this is precisely a central issue today.

Finally, on the question of history, we also observe today strange forms of temporality that can be understood through Deleuzian concepts of becoming and the event. When we re-evaluate traditional forms of relationship with non-humans, whether past forms (communal systems) or non-Western forms (animism in Descola or Viveiros de Castro), we see aberrant forms of communication emerging and a future being invented through archaism: it is no longer the march of Progress but a new dialectic of temporalities that is taking hold, where the present plunges into the past to invent the future. This, too, is something conceivable with Deleuze and Guattari: the possibility of a link between the future and the past that does not follow classical historical logic but which would allow for the development of non-capitalist alternatives to nature.