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Gilles Deleuze's Politics
Alain Beaulieu
occurs in the social fields from the start. We desire the construction of collective arrangements of enunciation, Deleuze maintains, long before we come to desire our parents: 'Dilire is world-historical, nothing to do with the family. It fastens on the Chinese, the Germans,Joan of Arc and the Great Mogul, Aryans andJews, money, power, and production. Not ~n momx:uy ~d da~dy at all' (N, 23). Deleuze and Guattari recognize the ment of Capitahsm, whIch favors society's economic values, in articulating the desire of the social field. However, they also denounce the despotic organization by which Capitalism administers the flow of monetary and material desires. Of course, desire flows in the Capitalist regime: there are deposits and withdrawals of money, lo~s and reimbursements, investments, production and sales, and so on. But thIS monetary fluctuation is always focused on the desire of more value. Psychoanalysis ignores the social nature of desire while Neo-Liberalism makes capital the only possible means of investing desire. ~t first, these ~wo critiques seem independent. However, Deleuze and Guattar~ are deno~nc~ng one single misunderstanding of desire. Indeed, psychoanalYSIs ~d CapItal~sm both play exemplary parts in the universal history of the repressIOn of desIre. Psychoanalysis and Capitalism have little nuance, as they are shameful and ~re足 defined means of channeling desire. Psychoanalytic therapy asks the patIent to confess a pre-existing CEdipal complex, whereas Capitalism 'pre-orients' desire to profit and consumption. Besides, we clearly recognize the defense of individualist values, which appear simultaneously in Capitalism's praise of personal affairs and the intimacy of the Freudian CEdipus. Capitalism produces many CEdipus who, in turn, feed Capitalism. This is why we cann~t s~eak of the repression of desire by one of these elements without also mentIOmng the crushing of desire by the other. . How can this repression be countered? This is one of the core questions Deleuze and Guattari ask in Anti-CEdipus. And this is their answer: To free desire/potentia, one has to identify the dark common denominator of psychoanalysis and Capitalism. And this common denominator, .which F~eu~ and Neo-Liberals have hid, is schizophrenia. Indeed, the schizophremc IS excluded from the Capitalist system and this also indicates the limitations of psychoanalysis. Par excellence, the schizophrenic is unable to find a place in the market economy and has an unconscious that is unknown to psychoanalytic theories. In other words, schizophrenic thought as a conceptual persona is not profitable for business and its delirium exceeds the scope o~ couch therapy. The schizophrenic persona corresponds perfectly to the untImely fi~ure that Deleuze and Guattari needed in order to develop a theory of the functIOning of desire that doubles as political thought. . . . Many interpretations stumble into nonsense by presentmg schizophremc desire-neutralized by Capitalism and psychoanalysis-as a clinical reality. This mistake can be avoided if we consider the Deleuzo-Guattarian
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schizophrenization of desire not as a medical state (the 'hospital schizo'), but rather as a process. In the AMcedaire (Letter D), Deleuze reminds the reader that he never encouraged the production of 'shadow men.' What interested Deleuze and Guattari is the way by which the schizophrenic persona experiments with the intensity and potentia of desire. Like a machine, the schizophrenic functioning of desire can fail and break down at any time. Mechanized desire takes into account this discontinuity of desire, which flows without any predefined form of organization. Mechanized desire is di~unctive by its leaps and unexpected and sudden ruptures. Thus, it is a vital force that does not heed any law of predefined meaning, including CEdipal signification and maximized profits, of course. This conception of desire involves an absolute deterritorialization that escapes the structuring and counter-productive repression that is characteristic of the psychoanalytic and Capitalistic representations of desire. Yet a danger remains: the reterritorialization of desire with the creation of a political state (i.e. the transformation of potentia into potestas).
Struggle Against the State
0,
Deleuze's condemnation of the Capitalist and democratic state is an extension of Marx's and Nietzsche's anti-state visions. From a Marxist standpoint, the state must be abolished because it only serves the interests of the bourgeois who wish to keep the proletarian class in chains. 5 Nietzsche breaks with the democratic regime because of its decadent Egalitarian ideal and dismissal of an emerging Superman able to create a new system ofvalues. 6 According to the universal history presented in Anti-CEdipus, the state, dominated by a sovereign, belongs to the past. This type of state does not have to be abolished simply because its end has already occurred. The Capitalist age gives way to an era of despotic regimes unified by a monarch figure. The universal is no longer represented by a supreme chief; it is now the market and its rules that dominate the universal (N, 172; WiPh, 106). However, the desire for the state does not disappear completely from Neo-Liberal regimes. It simply takes a new form, leaving room for something even worse than a sovereigndominated state. This most fearful something is the democratization of a despotism, the norms of which are dictated by the market. The sole tyrant of the former despotic regime now leaves room for a multiplicity of despotic entrepreneurs. Deleuze and Guattari see here the resurgence of the old desire of Urstaat, the supreme state: 'Decoded flows strike the despotic State with latency; they submerge the tyrant, but they also cause h~ to return in unexpected forms; they democratize him, oligarchize him, segmentalize him, monarchize him, and always internalize and spiritualize him, while on the horizon there is the latent Urstaat, for the loss of which there is no consolation.'7 The struggle