The Metaphysics (or Phantasma) of Desire

Since the 21st century might be Deleuzian “we” (in the sense that “I” is a multiplicity of many “Is” = “we”) would do well to submerge ourselves in the fluid production of desire.

Desire is not a relation between terms – the desire of the subject and the absent object which the former lacks. Desire is creation. All life is desire, a flux and flow of positive difference and becoming, a full series of productive connections…Desire is more and other than human life …Desires are not images we have of what we lack; desires are positive events – including all the perceptions and sensible encounters of all bodies. Once we free desire from representation, once we see desire as the act of the body itself and not the representation or wishful hallucination of an act, then we can also free desire from the human. Humans, as speaking beings, are no longer the sites for desire.

Desire is creative evolutionism, the construction of assemblages, the chaotic flows of production. And it is important to de-personalize and de-sexualize it. Sexuality is one flow that enters into conjunction with others in an assemblage. It is not a privileged infrastructure within desiring assemblages, not an energy able to be transformed or sublimated into other forms.

Desire is not a process whose goal is dissolution in pleasure. It is the construction of a plane of immanence in which desire is continuous in a process in which everything is permissible and possible.

In that Deleuzian sense, it seems “we” cannot put any distance to it, as you wish Yusef. Nor can we “make” desire. Not even surrender is possible, much less resistance. “We” are desire – in the most universal, affirmative life-enhancing meaning of the concept. It is a warm world.

Subsumption and Repression

If there was a "me" and if there was a "my desire" everything would be a lot easier.

I would sit myself down next to my upwelling desire and let it pour over me and then carry me away to do and to be all the things I could do and be.

However things went, good or bad, painfully or pleasurably, I wouldn't have to think about it. I would have what I desired, I would do what I desired, and I would be what I desired.

Sorry, Charlie.

“I” don't have an “I” and “I” don't have "my desire."

I am worked and reworked and then worked again, and I do believe that "my" pursuit of "my" desire and "my" pleasure is the purest form of "my" slavery, subsumption, and repression.

“I” am subjected to “my desire”, and this is not a statement of ascesis or morality or renunciation of the senses or the self.

I don’t want to talk about desire and I definitely do not want to effervesce about it.

I want to problematize "desire" – I want to throw up obstacles to it and create distances from it.

Desire is making desire, not having it.

I am coming to think that both "repression" and "subsumption" are conditions of being unable to make desire.

A Universal which is Particular and Sensuous

The idea, for me, is to get behind the symbols. But, no! There is nothing “behind” the symbols. If I am to have any satisfaction at all, it will be found within this symbolic realm, filled as it is with pain, suffering, injustice, hardship, ugliness, and omnipresent bestiality.

But, then….Can I hope to change the symbolic realm, modify it so that it is more to my liking?

We do receive a world…It comes to us pre-packaged, and it is given. The real question is whether we want to take this world, and if not, on what grounds we could refuse it, and on what strength we could wish for something better. If we refuse this world which comes to us laden with the conventional and the dead weight of the past, with its soul-vampirism, and its threadbare thoughtlessness, is there an assurance that what we’ll build up out of our refusal will be something more and something better, that our refusal is motivated by more than ugly ressentiment and infantile regression?

I am answering these questions through my recourse to Nietzsche’s parable of the bird of prey and the tender lambs.

Now, as I’ve tried to point out, the symbols involved here are atrocious. It is nearly impossible to think in Nietzsche’s symbolic terms without thought becoming weirdly mired in the horrors of human history which are embedded: the Nazi eagle, the Christian lamb; the male attacker from heaven – Zeus’s thunder bolt—the female earth which is struck; the bird of prey as the act, the tender lamb as what is acted upon; bird of prey aggression opposed to tender lamb passivity; and so on and so forth…I wish I could catalogue all of these symbolic relationships, but perhaps they are as extensive as human culture itself.

Also, as Orla has pointed out, there is the strong conjuration of the aristocrat as the bird of prey and the hapless and pathetic peasant as the tender lamb; it intrigues me to remember that aristocrats were falconers, and in the last important hereditary aristocracy in the world, Saudi Arabia, they still are.

I have to think Nietzsche, working from within the great German philological tradition, was not unaware of what he was dredging up with this choice. I am asserting, as strongly as I am able, Nietzsche’s intent in this choice is to intervene, scramble, and in a sense destroy this symbolic order he has received—he delves into this infantile and fantasy-laden symbolic order which is CHARACTERISTIC of what the human being has been, and he smashes it wide open and thereby offers a potentiality for maturity.

My contention is that this is a sensuous maturity, a powerful knowledge, not only a symbol-receiving but a symbol-creating maturity, which re-establishes contact with the body, rather than negating such, as our enlightenment heritage has demanded, with all the dire implications for autonomy, let alone health. Sensuous maturity post-enlightenment has meant little more than sensuous renunciation; powerful knowledge is a kind of oxymoron if power has retained its political meaning; we've had symbol homogenizations - have we had any symbol creation any time recently?

Change is bodily; sundered from the body, the mind can't change anything. Vis a vis the symbolic, the mind must simply accept what's there. There is no inspiration, no conviction, just obedience to whomever or whatever has retained a connection to the body, even if that connection was made hundreds of years ago. I believe it was- the aristocrats had this connection. The aristocrats are long gone. Desire is aristocratic. Desire is long gone.

Permanent Chaos - The Ejaculation of Concepts

Philosophy lives in a permanent crisis. The plane takes effect through shocks, concepts proceed in bursts, and personae by spasms. The relationship between the three instances is problematic by nature.

We cannot say in advance whether a problem is well posed, whether a solution fits, is really the case, or whether a persona is viable. This is because the criteria for each philosophical activity are found only in the other two, which is why philosophy develops in paradox. Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like "Interesting, Remarkable, or Important" that determine success or failure.

...What is naturally uninteresting? Flimsy concepts, what Nietzsche called the "formless and fluid daubs of concepts" - or, on the contrary, concepts that are too regular, petrified, and reduced to a framework. In this respect, the most universal concepts, those represented as eternal forms or values, are the most skeletal and least interesting. (D&G: What Is Philosophy?, p. 82f)

Let's recognize Nietzsche's imagery of birds of prey and lambs as skeletal.

Bird of Prey Articulation

I give you the universe.
I take it away.
I give you the universe.
I take it away.
I give you the universe.
I take it away.

I give you the universe.
I take it away.
I give you the universe.
I take it away.
I give you the universe.
I take it away.

I give you the universe.
I take it away.
I give you the universe.
I take it away.
I give you the universe.
I take it away.

I give you the universe.
I take it away.
I give you the universe.
I take it away.
I give you the universe.
I take it away.

Image: Kurt Stallaert.