Goodbye To Repression - Hello To Creation

(The Gallic Deleuze in pensive, but - always- talkative mode.
Notice the fingernails that he never cut - are they singularities?)

Yusef, we are locked in the prison of “desiring one’s own repression” producing our own repression of the potentialities of flight lines and the creation of not only “escape concepts”, but liberating ones. We need to “emerge from our self-incurred immaturity” (thanks Kant).

Deleuzian chaotic flows of desire and the connection with other desiring machines will break down the walls and bars of the jail house. But first we must face our captors.

On the four walls of the prison are scribbled the names of Descartes, Freud, Marx, and Reich.

Descartes fooled us into believing that the “I” is a separate, intellectual entity. A cogito has a will to desire something, in this case repression.

Freud manipulated us into accepting unconscious motives. One is not his own master, but is lead to desire one’s own repression by the mysterious forces of the id, or by the internalized societal mores and obligations of the super-ego.

Marx taught us the reification of man as a result of the exploitation by the owners of capital. We came to “desire our own suppression” as the proletariat.

Reich localized our inner fascism and resulting masochism and diagnosed us as objects of suppression from which only the life force of orgasm could free us.

Only Deleuze - with a little help from Nietzsche - can liberate us.

In Anti-Oedipus D&G undertake an analysis of desire that is distinctly political. According to them, desire may fix on one of two alternatives. It may affirm itself, or it may choose power as its centre and the establishment of order as its purpose.

The failure of the imminent revolution in France in 1968 lies behind their analysis. The proletariat had failed to fulfil its historic role as predicted by Marx. Instead of claiming the freedom of the anarchic moment, people chose to re-establish the repressive order that had existed before. They “desired their own suppression”.

D&G found their answer in Nietzsche's Master-Slave relationship, and their entire analysis is strongly rooted in Nietzschean thought.

“Desiring one’s own repression” is the ressentiment of the slave mentality.

The "productive desire" of D&G’s analysis is, in fact, another form of Nietzsche's will-to-power.

The will-to-power of productive desire is balanced by a reactive desire for repression, the slave mentality. The controllers (priests, gurus, mystifiers of all sorts) turn the active strength of productive desire against itself and create the illness of guilt which accompanies any active expression of the will.

So, we are free – FREE at last – from the torment of “desiring one’s own repression”.

Power is not the repression of desire, but the EXPANSION of desire.

Desire opens us up to a new possible world…

Welcome.