Populism and grandeur: From marx to arafat

At the end of his life, Gilles Deleuze famously mentioned that his last book was to be called 'Grandeur de Marx'. While it is unlikely that he ever started to actually write such a book, its title reminds us of an outspoken political text of Deleuze entitled 'The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat'. The aim of this contribution is to explore and define this concept of grandeur. After some initial remarks on 'Deleuze's aristocratic posture' and its supposedly problematic relation to actual politics, my strategy will be to develop two paradoxes, the paradox of health's intrinsic relation to illness and the paradox of glory's intrinsic relation to shame, and then relate both paradoxes to the ethical imperative of Stoicism that grandeur lies in becoming worthy of the event. I conclude with some brief reflections on what could be the grandeur of Marx.

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