"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
|
|
'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
|
|
|
Deleuze + Guattari: desire
« Previous |
|Next »
|
|
|
January 5, 2011
Desire Was Everywhere in the is a review of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives by François Dosse, translated by Deborah Glassman by Adam Shatz. Shatz says:
Like Marx in The Communist Manifesto, Deleuze and Guattari portray capitalism as a turbulent system whose revolutionary effects threaten its own need to reproduce itself. On the one hand, it dissolves rigid structures of authority and hierarchy (‘decoding’, they called it), generates new and transgressive desires, and presides over radical forms of what they called ‘deterritorialisation’, which could mean everything from uprooting people from the land to overturning the systems of belief to which they have been anchored. At its most extreme, they suggest, capitalism encourages a kind of generalised schizophrenia, a shatteringly intense fracturing of subjectivity. On the other hand, to survive it has to contain these effects through oppressive fictions like the nuclear family and psychiatry, which attempt to ‘reterritorialise’ desire: to put it safely back inside the home and to keep it there. The project of ‘schizo-analysis’, therefore, would be to harness revolutionary desiring machines that liberate desire from the family and Freudian psychiatry.
Desire, they admit, is not always good.. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused.’ The appeal of reactionary politics lay in its ability to neutralise the ‘deterritorialising’ effects of capitalism with ‘reterritorialising’ narratives of God and country.
Shatz says that the language of desire, multiplicity and all the rest is no longer the language of revolution. It is the language of cyberspace, and of neoliberal capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines, constantly seeking out new sensations, look a lot like today’s permanently distracted consumers and websurfers.
|
|
|
| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:18 PM | Permalink |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
