The masochistic quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Deleuze and Guattari to transversal poetics with(out) Baudrillard
pp. 83-123
in: , Transversal subjects, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau sweated, urinated, defecated, and ejaculated. He produced and reproduced. According to the "schizoanalytic" theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, he was a desiring-machine, an autonomic process of production and more production that works, breaks down, and immediately starts up again. But we are inclined to postpone discussion of Rousseau's production until after inspecting the factories. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire acts independently of, and from, social and economic demands: it is both subject and object of desire; it is processes of desiring-production, and not acquisition, creativity, or lack. One cannot define desire against something outside of its self-reactive system, for such a formulation would irrevocably subject desire to an internal-external organizational dualism. Although desiring-production functions in continual interaction with and contrary to forces of attraction and repulsion, it is constituted neither by an impulsive naturalism nor by a compulsive constructionism. Desiring-production is not directed toward a specific purpose predicated upon a natural organization of the cosmos; rather, it strives for intensive singular states. The ongoing production of desire, itself the constituting expression of desire, is machinically enabled through couplings, the bringing apart and together of more forces in the formation of assemblages, whether experienced positively and/or negatively.