Anti-Enclosures and Nomadic Habits: Towards a Commonist Reading of Deleuzoguattarian Nomadology

Abstract

The paper has several objectives linked to Deleuzoguattarian nomadology. After a brief reconstruction of the concept, it proposes a selective reading oriented towards commonist, autonomist and posthumanist tropes. In this reading, nomadism is understood above all as a movement of countering or resisting enclosures and sustaining vital relations with broadly understood commons. It also critiques certain tendencies, present in Deleuze and Guattari, which make such reading unobvious: abstraction, deterritorialization and postmodern Nietzscheanism. The second part of the article is an inquiry on habits, still from a Deleuzoguattarian perspective. It contests the traditional story about private property as a condition of the development of good habits and reveals an array of ‘nomadic habits’ outside of sedentary, bourgeois and capitalist models of social reproduction. It argues that such understood habits can be seen as the anthropological basis of commoning.