Deleuze and the Meaning of Life by Colebrook Claire;

Author:Colebrook, Claire;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Digital Death

For Deleuze and Guattari there is a drive to death, a counter-organic drive that is fully vital. Indeed, it is only when life is no longer bound to the organism’s proper functioning (only when, for example, one could detach seeing, thinking or touch from their composite form in the well-formed body) that one arrives both at life itself, and at philosophy’s proper domain. Vital forces do not spring forth from bodies and then become belied or perverted by systems; rather, there is a potentiality for systems – what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as desiring machines, or what might more generally be spoken of as ‘technicity’ – and it is that potentiality that both allows for and is limited by social machines. Capitalism and language take the potentiality for systematicity beyond bounded systems, both the bounded organism and the social machine of capital and language.

This freeing of the potential for differential relations from transcendent bodies stalls, however, in the modern oedipalism of the subject. There is no longer a despotic body outside exchange that will impede and ward off the tendency to capitalism. But this deterritorialization is reterritorialized on oedipal subjectivity. Not only does the subject experience the lack of law, sense or foundation as castration: it is precisely through the absence of God, foundation or authority that the subject becomes self-subjecting. This structure is apparent, even today, in both cultural studies and, more surprisingly, in many of the supposedly vitalist returns to life. Consider, for example, Judith Butler’s widely influential account of subjectivity as subjection. I have no being other than that which is achieved through performance, and performance is always the performance of some identity that is given to me by the heterosexual matrix. I become a subject by submission to norms that are not mine, and only have a sense of ‘mineness’ in that gap or distance between existing norms and an always unstable performance (Butler 2005, 23). The symbolic order occurs as an event of imposition and submission; and there is no law or foundation outside an ongoing, but always (in part) failed, subjection (Butler 1993, 13). The structure of subjectivity is essentially mournful, for in taking on the being that is granted to me by subjection to the symbolic order I must at once be other than, or have abandoned, those other potentialities that can be experienced only as lost (Butler 1999, 74). From Butler’s early seemingly linguistic emphasis on performatives and the symbolic order to later attentions to the visibility of the face, her work remains focused on the bounded organism: for whether one is constituted through subjection to the heterosexual matrix, or through submission to the address of the other, it is nevertheless a dyadic relation between (constituted, effected) self and intruding otherness – a relation of negation.

Further, Butler insists that it is this relation of subjection to an other (whose desire remains unknown and enigmatic) that will position the subject as always already attached to a signifying order. One’s being

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