Masculinities and Desire by Marek Wojtaszek

Author:Marek Wojtaszek [Wojtaszek, Marek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General, Aesthetics, Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780429793691
Google: LcyGDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-02-06T03:45:48+00:00

To what can we resort to conceptualize anew our being? Rather than passively recognize ourselves in the mirror of established values, desire stimulates us to critically assess “the positivity of the negative,” and launch the movement of autopoiesis. “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are,” ponders Foucault (1988). Desire impels us to seek life beyond the human, life of the outside, life outside of ourselves, life replete with art and life as art, our artistic desiring creation.

It thus appears logical that if it is the negative, that is, the masculine subject, that has been a mode of imprisoning life (desire), it must be from within the masculine subject that new forms emerge. For Deleuze, then, the reactivism of the subject is overcome, not by denying the subject—the death or critique of the subject—but by affirming the subject as a virtual effect, and by multiplying movements of subjective virtuality (Colebrook 1999a, 131). For Deleuze, there is only immanent life-desire, productive and constructive; the subject is merely one way of actualization, or expression, of virtual desire. This totalizing, fascistic, gesture of the subject is nonetheless exposed to breaks and fissures. Deleuze states, “There will always be a relation to oneself which resists codes and powers; the relation to oneself is one of the origins of these points of resistance” (1998, 103). Subjectivity can never be limited to some stable unified ground of experience, thus subsumed under dominant ideological or moral codes. Rather, it must be affirmed as a process of immanent, immediate, imperceptible and inexorable construction. This is the basic meaning of transcendental empiricism—things do not appear to the subject, as a matter of fact, “[t]hings never pass where you think, nor along the paths you think” (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 3). In order to account for the conditions of real experience, transcendental empiricism does not copy from the empirical given, does not partake of representation; rather, it intuits its genesis in creative exploration and active experimentation.

There is no subject, but a production of subjectivity: subjectivity is to be produced when need be precisely because there is no subject … Subjectivity is not a formation of knowledge or a function of power … Subjectivation is an artistic operation which is distinguished from knowledge and power and has no part in them.

(Deleuze 2003, 154)

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