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7 - Giving Grace: Human Exceptionalism as Fascism
- Edited by Rick Dolphijn, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands, Rosi Braidotti, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
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- Book:
- Deleuze and Guattari and Fascism
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 19 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2022, pp 144-156
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Summary
Fasces, a bundle of rods held together in unity with a binding tie. Many rods, one goal, one focus, one force. The tie that looks internally towards the rods with a vision of the homogeneity and superiority of the collective as identical in value and in drive to power. The tie that looks externally to exclusion and a distorted perspective of all outside as difference and all difference as inferior. The basic tenet of division and division alone, with the aim being that the vision of the rods is the only valid one, that the fate of the outside should be in the hands of the collective unity because theirs is not simply the superior vision but the only valid and viable one. The outside is incapable of vision. The division not of some people against others, but of the social against the natural. Humans against the world. All anthropocentrism is fascism. All human exceptionalism is fascism.
In his preface to Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault demarcates seven tenets that we must adopt in order to live a non-fascist life. All seven tenets emphasise a jubilance in the loss of both power and ego that anti-fascism affords. This directly contradicts the maxim of Kraft durch Freude which affiliated leisure with work for the single vision of fascism, and also shows the insipid connection between fascism and contemporary capitalism where the production of the consumer self as a leisure activity is the forced labour of modern and postmodern subjectivity, a thoroughly joyless activity. Against the excesses, or accursed share, of contemporary capitalism where too much is what drowns the individual in the misery of perpetual demands for choice in the grooming of identity and development of ego, no matter how pop or PoMo (indeed the velocity of ego-transformation is part of postmodernity’s own challenge to joy), many turns to ethics are denigrated as privations denying humans their supposedly evolutionary but entirely arbitrary dominance of the Earth. From the feminist as killjoy, after Sarah Ahmed’s work (2017), to the rise of abolitionism (absolute veganism that refuses all interactions with non-human animals as exploitative), it seems the awareness that the enforcement of dominating human power is unnecessary is some kind of affront to the human’s undeserved place atop the hierarchical world of organisms.
10 - Encounters of Ecstasy
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- By Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin University
- Edited by Frida Beckman, Linköping University
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- Book:
- Deleuze and Sex
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 07 July 2011, pp 200-216
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Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form … He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire … In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one can not possibly wish it to cease, nor is one's soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it – even a considerable share.
(St Teresa of Avila 1957: 210)‘Sexual liberation is a mystification.’
(Guattari 1996: 56)One of Deleuze and Guattari's great contributions to the philosophy of post-metaphysical humanist subjectivity is premised on the shift from sexuality to desire, incorporating the inflections which catalyse subjectivity to connective intensifications, opposition to relation, individuation to becoming part of a pack. Projects of becoming, while not posited as oppositional to the non-becoming of a being, are underpinned with a certain jubilance, a vitalism in the liberatory nature of creative alliances with the unlike, a genesis mythical and non-restorable, which is configured instead as the immanent larval, and a future based on the opening of thought to the outside.
9 - Multi-Dimensional Modifications
- from PRACTICAL DELEUZISM
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- By Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin University
- Edited by Laura Guillaume, Aberystwyth University, Joe Hughes, University of Minnesota
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- Book:
- Deleuze and the Body
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 22 March 2011, pp 188-202
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Summary
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari posit that a concept comes from a problem. A problem is an impasse between two discourses. The problem describes the space-between, a refusal of the need for one discourse to colonise the other, a disagreement where creation is the resolution. Heavily modified bodies in Western culture offer a multiconceptual entity. They represent the impasse between philosophy (the need to create) and sociology (the need to reflect), between volition and fashion, between signification (modifications which symbolise, which mean something) and asignification (modifications which deterritorialise traditionally signified flesh), and between flesh and self (in what ways modifications de-gender and de-racialise the body). This chapter will explore the modified body as an in-between, a concept which negotiates and transgresses discourses of signified flesh and subjectivity to create a new concept of the body as liminal. These bodies allow us to navigate the plasticity of the regime of signification through which the body emerges – what Deleuze and Guattari call signifiation – and the concrete materiality of marked flesh, which involves actual pain. Bodily modified people share nothing as a ‘tribe’ except their status as in-between; thus the space they occupy comes to mean more than the essence of their being modified bodies.
Body and Skin
The most prevalent and obvious way in which modified bodies have emerged in discourse is as an object of analysis.
25 - Julia Kristeva
- from III - CINEMATIC NATURE
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- By Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin University
- Edited by Felicity Colman, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Book:
- Film, Theory and Philosophy
- Published by:
- Acumen Publishing
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 30 November 2009, pp 276-285
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Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) was born in Bulgaria, and moved to Paris for her doctoral studies in philosophy. In 1965 she became a member of the Tel Quel Group in Paris, important for their work on the production of writing as a political activity. In 1974 she was appointed Chair of Linguistics at the University of Paris. In 1979 she completed her training in psychoanalysis. Her published theory works include, Desire in Language (1969; English trans. 1980), Powers of Horror (1980; English trans. 1982), Black Sun (1989; English trans. 1992), Nations without Nationalism (1993), Time and Sense (1996), Crisis of the European Subject (2000), Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words (1999; vol. 1, English trans. 2001). Her works of fiction include The Old Man and the Wolves (1991), Possessions (1996) and Murder in Byzantium (2004). Kristeva's exploration of language as a fluid semiology accesses the chora or “woman's” space of the in-between to challenge and interrogate the arbitrary nature of language and the symbolic. By experiencing film through a semiotic navigation of corporeality, materiality and affect, the spectator opens up to the possibility of experiencing and encountering film differently, and thus the way film both informs and creates meaning can be used experimentally rather than reifying established power structures. Salient to the feminist semiotics, Kristeva's work on the abject similarly investigates the risks and revolutions of those elements of language, including the language of images, when they exceed boundaries, collapse borders and involute language with flesh, logic with bodies. Her work on semiotics and the abject thus can be used towards a feminist ethics of spectatorship.
8 - Unnatural Alliances
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- By Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Polytechnic University
- Edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni, University of East London, Merl Storr
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- Book:
- Deleuze and Queer Theory
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 30 January 2009, pp 134-149
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Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use as a key example of becomings becoming-animal. Becoming-animal involves both a repudiation of the individual for the multiple and the human as the zenith of evolution for a traversal or involution across the speciesist plane of consistency. Deleuze and Guattari delineate the Oedipal animal, the pack animal and the demonic hybridisation of animal, human and imperceptible becomings. Various commentators have critiqued and celebrated Deleuze and Guattari's call to becoming-woman. In his taxonomy of living things Aristotle places women at the intersection of animal and human, so becoming-animal as interstices raises urgent feminist issues as well as addressing animal rights and alterity through becoming-animal. This chapter will invoke questions such as ‘how do we negotiate becominganimal beyond metaphor?’, ‘what risks and which ethics are foregrounded that make becoming-animal an important political project?’ and, most importantly, because becoming-animal is a queer trajectory of desire, ‘how does the humanimal desire?’
Anthropomorphism can go either up or down, humanising either the deity or animals, but if the vertical distance is closed in any way, i.e. between God and humans or humans and animals, many are disconcerted.
(Adams 1995: 180)For on the one hand, the relationships between animals are the object not only of science but also of dreams, symbolism, art and poetry, practice and practical use. And on the other hand, the relationships between animals are bound up with the relations between man and animal, man and woman, man and child, man and elements, man and the physical and microphysical universe.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 235)