Between Deleuze <badiou

the event

pp. 171-182

in: Jan Jagodzinski, Visual art and education in an era of designer capitalism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

When it comes to theorizing creativity "proper" "against the state," in Dennis Atkinson's terms, or against designer capitalism, in my terms, there are two very powerful complex and difficult positions that artists and art educators can draw from: that of Deleuze<Guattari and of Alain Badiou. Within the context of this chapter, I want to develop the tension between them that remains unresolved in any easy way. Both positions strongly critique representation and both have an ethico-political stance against capitalism. Badiou politicizes Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic developments in yet another direction than the (now) well-known writings of Slavoj Žižek. He retains the Hegelian dialectic as well as negation and remains a devoutly revolutionary leftist thinker. Deleuze<Guattari also engage in a nomadic "politics' against capitalism, although many of their ideas have been hijacked by both conservative and liberalist thinkers—especially their concept of the rhizome, which has become ubiquitous in many disciplines by being reduced to a synonym for nonlinearity. The subtitle of their two "political" books (Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus) is "Capitalism and Schizophrenia." One of the tensions, which I cannot follow in this chapter, is to what degree Lacanian<Žižekian psychoanalysis comes up short in relation to schizo-analysis, as they develop it, that addresses the asignifying molecular levels of libidinal flows.¹