There’s a section in Sartre’s Notebook for an Ethics where, in a discussion of the slave’s violent revolt against their master, he notes that “Since slavery is the given order, freedom will be disorder, anarchy, terrorism.”¹ This is generalized in later pages, and can be distilled into the following formulation: for every order, freedom is disorder.

For Sartre, freedom is paradoxical because it is both ontologically prior to order (the very first order can only establish itself over and upon an already existing disorder or freedom), just as subsequently it appears to be coupled with order (each disorder and freedom always rises up against an established order). This is at once a familiar dialectical formulation (disorder and order unfold in perpetual contradiction), and yet the ontological priority of disorder suggests things may be more complex.

Both Foucault and Deleuze approach the question in a similar way but from a different direction. For both of these thinkers there is a creative poietics of life, a capacity to act and create which is synonymous with life itself, and it is this creativity which then makes power possible as lives are not only capable of acting but also can act upon one another, and thus dominate one another. While for Sartre we thus see a movement from disorder to order, for Foucault and Deleuze there is a movement from life to power.

This is why Foucault claims both that resistance precedes power (life, disorder, and freedom precede order), and that wherever there is power there is resistance (life, disorder, and freedom unfold against order). Writing on Foucault, Deleuze notes that “Life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its object … Is not life this capacity to resist force?,” and in his collaborations with Guattari he also uses the concept of the Urstaat, the idea that in every society there is always the potential to concentrate the creative forces of that society into a state.² Deleuze and Foucault might simply rephrase Sartre’s formulation in the following way: for every order, life is disorder.

These ways of thinking are helpful insofar as they help us recover life, freedom, and disorder as concepts from the way they’ve been recuperated by the present society. Thinking with Sartre, Foucault, and Deleuze allows us to critique the way in which almost all of what is recognized as freedom today—the freedom to vote in or out politicians, to buy and sell, to exploit, to carve off sections of the Earth for oneself as property, to destroy the ecological systems upon which life depends, to imprison or kill enemies of the state, etc.—are all actually not freedoms at all precisely because they are wholly aligned with the present order of society. We can also see how in our time there are even some lives who appear as forms of disorder simply for surviving and remaining alive, as those in Gaza are not given even the smallest place in the order of the world and thus are taken to be a disorder which must be completely erased. Solidarity with Palestine in this sense necessarily takes form as disorder.

Within this diagram, the wager of revolution is precisely that freedom and disorder can manifest themselves to the degree that the present order is overcome, clearing the way for freedom and disorder to dissolve and consolidate into a new, distinct order. Anarchy and insurrection differentiate themselves from revolution then by committing themselves totally to freedom and disorder, to the creativity of life which will always remain incompatible with all forms of order. Uncompromisingly taking the side of freedom in this sense doesn’t involve ridding ourselves of order in any definitive or final way, as order will always remain as a potential. The question of freedom rather concerns magnifying our capacity for disorder such that order is no longer capable of taking hold of it. In those moments, disorder and order no longer appear. There is only life.