deleuze – objet (a)

deleuze queering

Colebrook, Claire. “Queer Vitalism.” New Formations, 68, Spring 2010. 77-92.

In contemporary discourses of the subject, such as Judith Butler’s, one must subject oneself to enabling and recognisable norms. To be recognised by, and with, others requires some determined personality. But those necessary norms and figures of personhood are at odds with the act, performance or event which brings them into being. On this account, personhood comes into being through moments or decisions which are perceived only after the event as the outcome of a performance that must be posited as having been. We do not see, live or intuit performativity itself, only its effects. A politics and vitalising imperative follows: do not be seduced by normativity. Recognise that the self who is performed and recognised is at odds with the less stable – one might say ‘queer’ – vital self who acts (who ‘acts but is not’).

This ‘man in general,’ according to Deleuze and Guattari is achieved historically and politically by unifying complex differences into some single figure.

The same applies to ‘woman,’ ‘lesbian,’ ‘trans-sexual’ or – in some cases – ‘queer.’ If the latter term denotes a group of bodies who seek recognition on the basis of their relation to, or difference from, other bodies then ‘queer’ forms a majoritarian mode of politics: a political force that reduces difference for the sake of creating a political subject group.

If, however, ‘queer’ were to operate vitally it would aim to signal the positive potentialities from which groups were formed: there could only be lesbian women because certain differences are possible (such as sexual difference, and difference in orientation), but that would then lead to further and further difference, not only to each individual but within each individual.

Minoritarian politics moves in the opposite direction from recognition and aims to maximise the circumstances for the proliferation and pulverisation of differences.

hallward colebrook deleuze

Deleuzian Politics? (more excerpts click here)

Claire Colebrook: For me the most tortured situation I face as a white Australian is this: we have an indigenous people, and actually it would be an act of violence for them to form a collective body because it is only a fiction of the West that there is something like an ‘Aboriginal community’. It would be like them referring to Japan and the UK as ‘the West’: it has about as much individuation as that.

So on the one hand you have a body of people trying to enter the political debate, but the condition for them doing that at the movement is to remove all of their capacity for collective individuation, and I think this just goes back to one of the questions which was on the value of communication and consensus in politics. Either you say ‘this is great because there’s a differend‘, or you have to find a means of political communication that don’t rely on the formation of a ‘collective will’. I think that is the only way that it’s going to work because otherwise one is imposing a model of individuation that I think have as much political purchase and right as Rousseauist traditions of a general will.

Peter Hallward: My own country Canada has a roughly similar history, as you know, but still in some sense when you talk about something like the relationship between white Australia and the indigenous, however multiple and fragmented that term ‘indigenous’ is (and it’s equally so in Canada, perhaps even more so), you can still say, I think, that there is enough of a structured conflict between these two general groups to make sense of it as a conflict.

Claire Colebrook: You can’t remove the molar: that’s why for a certain point in the political debate, you’re always going to have a gathering together for a body, but that also has to remain completely provisional and completely open to the multiple forms of individuation which might constitute it.

Peter Hallward: Completely open and completely provisional — who has an interest in that? In my experience, if you talk to people who are engaged in labour struggles — for example trying to organise a group of immigrant workers in California — or to people who are fighting to strengthen the social movements in Haiti or Bolivia, what they constantly say is: “we are too weak and what we need is some form of continuity and strength, and our enemies are constantly trying to bust it up, to break it up, to fragment it, to divide us, to make it provisional, to reject any kind of consolidation of the instruments that we need to strengthen our hand.”

Nicholas Thoburn: But even then there are variable articulations. It’s complex isn’t it? Such collectivities don’t derive from a general notion of their specific coherence — they emerge in response to a particular problem or a particular event — so I don’t see how your examples are at all in opposition to a Deleuzian understanding of the formation of collectivity as imminent to its situation.

tuhkanen critique of butler

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Performativity and Becoming” Cultural Critique. 72, Spring (2009): 1-35.

For example, her description of Antigone as “the limit without which the symbolic cannot be thought” or the “unthinkable within the symbolic” might seem to be referring to the real, yet she goes on to identify Antigone’s position as possibly embodying an “alternative symbolic or imaginary” (Antigone’s Claim, 40) and, immediately afterward, turns to Lacan’s second seminar to criticize his totalizing theory of the symbolic law (41–42; see also 47). Arguably, this conflation of different stages in Lacan’s work forces (or allows) her to ignore Lacan’s divergence from a structuralist understanding of a system (see also Penney, 19).

Relevant here is Shepherdson’s suggestion that “the ‘real’ can be understood as a concept that was developed in order to define in a clear way how there is always an element that ‘does not belong’ within the structure, an ‘excluded’ element which escapes the law, but which can nevertheless be approached in a precise theoretical fashion.” Consequently, “psychoanalysis is not in fact committed to the ‘law’ in the manner of classical structuralist thought” (“Intimate Alterity,” paras. 13, 24).

In No Future, Lee Edelman argues that, rather than making good on its claim to conjure up from the tragic heroine’s tomb a radical challenge to the protocols of symbolic legitimation, Butler’s rendering of Antigone “returns us, instead, to familiar forms of a durable liberal humanism whose rallying cry has always been, and here remains,‘the future’” (105–6). For Edelman, such seamless domestication of the real to symbolic meaning is symptomatic of the inherent failure of futurity to be evoked in terms of anything but what he calls “reproductive futurism” (2 and passim). In the figure of the Child, politics premised on futurism “generates generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the end of enabling change, but, instead, of perpetuating sameness, of turning back time to assure repetition” (60). In this schema of enabling the future to unfold as a reassuringly recognizable continuation of the present, queers are “stigmatized as threatening an end to the future itself” (113). Given the unquestioned reflex of seeing “every political vision as a vision of futurity” (13), Edelman’s exhilaratingly counterintuitive argument that queer respond to its stigmatization with a kind of an answer of the real, with an embrace of its status as an embodiment of “the arbitrary, future-negating force of a brutal and mindless drive” (127), has a strong appeal. If there are reasons to resist this appeal, they must come from the fact that queer theory may not yet have come to grips with the specificity of the consequences of its paradigmatic groundings.

I would propose that, because of the Butlerian paradigm on which much of queer theory has developed, the question of becoming, of futurity’s claim on our thinking, may not yet have been adequately posed.

With Deleuze, for example, we must ask whether futurity as becoming is reducible to breeding, in the sense in which fag slang uses the term to signal the mindless, mechanic, and (in Foucault’s terms) docile reproduction of the same. Edelman writes:

“the true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of queer sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse and patient negotiation of tolerances and rights, important as these undoubtedly are to all of us still denied them, but in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends” (16).

While not precisely disagreeing with Edelman, I would ask whether we have quite exhausted the question of futurity before we abandon it. To do this, we may want to shift our paradigmatic perspective such that our grounding assumptions are defamiliarized and our concepts—here the question of becoming—are necessarily rethought. Such a shift, I propose, would allow us to see that the futurity of performative politics may constitute only a partial understanding of what Deleuze, for example, sees as becoming.

deleuze immanence

May, Todd. Gilles Deleuze: an introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.

What is an ontology of immanence? Its first requirement is the univocity of being: “expressive immanence cannot be sustained unless it is accompanied by a thoroughgoing conception of univocity, a thoroughgoing affirmation of univocal Being.” The substance of being is one and indivisible. There are no distinctions to be made into different substances, different layers of substance, different types of substance, or different levels of substance. All hierarchy and division is banished from ontology. The term “being” (or “Being”) is said in one and the same sense of everything of which it is said. Without univocity, transcendence will inevitably return to haunt the construction of any ontology (34-35).

Emanation is an example of the haunting of ontology by transcendence. One starts with a single substance, God. He is univocal. There are no distinctions among its substance. One can imagine that it could emanate itself and yet remain univocal. That would be expressionism. In the medieval tradition in which the concept of emanation arises, however, that is not what happens. In order to preserve the transcendence of God, emanation introduces the twofold distinction into substance: God is different from what is emanated, and higher. No matter how close the created comes to the creator, there must remain an ontological gap between them, a distance that allows for the superiority of the creator because of its transcendence (35).

It is only through the denial of that ontological gap, through the rigorous commitment to the univocity of being, that an ontology of immanence can be created. 35

The univocity of being threatens the Judeo-Christian conception of God by maintaining the equality of all being. For Deleuze, this is good news. If there is no longer a transcending God whose dictates we must follow or whose substance we must seek in our own lives to resemble, if there is no longer a transcending Other that can lay claim upon our faith or our behavior, then the door is open to an ontology of difference. Whatever our relation to the Spinozist God might be, it will
not be articulated in terms of following or subordinating or resembling. These concepts imply an identity to which our actions, thoughts, and beliefs must return rather than a difference that can give them play, draw them farther afield of themselves (35).

deleuze transcendence

May, Todd. Gilles Deleuze: an introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.

Foucault and Derrida teach us that if we think of our lives solely in terms of what appears to us, and if we think of what appears to us as exhausting our possibilities, we are already hedged in, already committed to conformism. Their response is to say that we ought to stop thinking in terms of ontology, at least in the analytic sense, because ontology teaches us that what appears to us is natural and inevitable. Things cannot be otherwise. Deleuze agrees with their diagnosis, but not with their cure. If the question is how might one live, the way to approach it is with another ontology, one that offers possibilities as yet undreamed of, one whose soil is far richer than those plants to which it has yet given rise (23).

Transcendence (boo, no good boo)

In the history of philosophy, a history dominated by the motif of transcendence, it is the transcendence of God that forms the longest legacy. But it is not the only one. Before there is God there are the Platonic Forms. The Forms stand outside human experience; they transcend the world, not only the experienced world but the world itself. (Difference, it turns out, transcends the experienced world but does not transcend the world itself. It is transcendent to our knowledge, but not to that which gives knowledge.) The role of the philosopher is to seek to understand the Forms. The philosopher seeks cognitive participation in them, wanting to grasp intellectually their nature and, ultimately, to mold the world in their likeness. The latter task belongs to the philosopher king: to apply the lessons of transcendence to this world. Philosophers are required as rulers for a just society because there is a transcendence to be understood and learned from. That is the lesson of the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic (27).

With these last considerations we can begin to glimpse the role of transcendence. It is to allow the universe tobe explained in such a way as to privilege one substance at the expense of another, to preserve the superiority of certain characteristics and to denigrate others. What is to be recognized as superior is not of this world: the infinite, the nonphysical, the unlimited, and the unity of a self-identity. But what is of more moment for Deleuze’s thought is what is to be denigrated: the physical, the chaotic, that which resists identity. Only that which submits to participation in the identity of the Forms, or that which follows the narrow dictates of God, or that which conforms to the conceptual categories of human thought is to be admitted into the arena of the acceptable. Physicality, chaos, difference that cannot be subsumed into categories of identity: all these must deny themselves if they would seek to be recognized in the privileged company of the superior substance (31).

What concerns Deleuze is not what Spinoza criticizes but the model of immanence he constructs in its stead. It is not that Spinoza has detailed the difficulties of transcendence that fascinates Deleuze. Rather, it is that Spinoza has successfully changed the subject, gone on to something else. He has done so by employing a concept that allows thinking to abandon
transcendence: the concept of expression (33).

There is a religious necessity pushing ontology into the arms of transcendence. Without transcendence, what do we make of God? In what sense is God superior to the creatures of this world, if not by being beyond them? God cannot compel us, cannot command our devotion, unless he transcends the boundaries of our world. Just as for Plato the Forms take their aura of superiority in being beyond the world of shadows that we inhabit, for the Judeo-Christian tradition God finds his luster in transcending the parameters of our universe. Spinoza is a heretic, but his heresy lies not in pantheism but in the denial of transcendence and in the construction of an ontology of immanence. It was for this that the Christ of philosophers was crucified (34).