1 Political Normativity and Poststructuralism: The

Deleuze often referred to his work with Guattari as philosophy and sometimes even as political philosophy. This is puzzling for many political philosophers, since normative questions about the justification, nature and limits of political power or the principles of a just society are largely absent from their collaborative writings. They only discuss the institutional forms of political power in passing and always from the perspective of a global theory of society founded upon concepts of desire, desiring-machines and the different kinds of assemblage described in A Thousand Plateaus. They are less interested in the justification or the capture of State power than in the qualitative changes in individual and collective identity that occur alongside or beneath the public political domain: what they refer to as micro as opposed to macro politics. Against the background of their machinic social ontology and their preference for minoritarian movements defined in opposition to majoritarian forms of social control, it is surprising to find them referring to ‘becoming-democratic ’ as one of the contemporary form