Abstract

This article intends to show how, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s image of thought implies a notion of limit that, far from restricting its meaning or pointing out to a correct use of the term, signals the unfolding of a potency of thought that experiences and grasps the maximum intensity of a life. Departing from this limit-experience of thought, we propose to think the political as the unthought of the philosophy of politics. In order to understand the unthought of politics in the present, it is necessary to go through “the shame of being human” as formulated by Primo Levi and extended by Deleuze, well beyond the Nazi extermination camps, to the ways of living we are driven to by contemporary capitalism. Finally, shame as an experience of the intolerable in ourselves, as understood by Giorgio Agamben, serves us to account for processes of subjectivation and de-subjectivation of the societies of control, attending to a number of quotidian practices related to the use of drugs and to the development of biotechnology.