Buldòzer, pala carregadora i retroexcavadora

As has often been noted, the dominant ideas of Deleuzian philosophical thinking fi lter through his corpus in different ways at different stages in his career, and to link ideas on, say, internal and external causality or immanence or expression to Deleuze and sex in a more general pattern and process requires that these transitions are taken into account.

Questions of consistency and improvisation, of repetition and differ-ence in the Deleuzian corpus, are then, central to any estimation of this use. Deleuzian thought, it is often asserted, for example, and however it changes or evolves, is consistently both a materialist and an immanen-tist philosophy. It is philosophy of surfaces that fl ow and intersect and mingle and drift and reconnect through and across a perpetually evolv-ing zone that Deleuze and Guattari describe in a variety of ways, and indeed generate through the images thus selected for those descriptions.

These movements or expressions and their media might be described through images of planes or machines or assemblages, for example, or a myriad of conceptual objects which move across or connect the

‘plateaus’ that Deleuze and Guattari borrow from Gregory Bateson in the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia to illuminate and to confi gure their unique method of philosophising. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari are notorious for the proliferation of images deployed in their arguments and their constant mutations and mutilations of sense, paralleling their underlying concern with the generation of multiplicities itself. But what is always crucial to their writing is that all this diver-sity of image and idea invariably defi nes a unity at the same time as it explores multiplicity, understood plurally as an infi nite set of multiplici-ties that at the same time characterise the individuated unity of self or world or cosmos. These are materialising multiplicities in which ‘each individual is a multiplicity, and the whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 254).

Accordingly, the word, the musical note or cadence or rhythm, the idea, the image, the monument, the swarm, the pack, the house, number, spectral registers, the movement of incorporeals, sense, nonsense, friend-ship, virtuality, materiality, the swerve, love, sex, and, of course, materi-alisation itself, express aspects of a single voice in which extensity is, in effect, intensity and all phenomena are folds in the fl esh of being. This, it could be said, is the core of Deleuzian materialism.

Deleuze is also frequently affi rmed as the philosopher of entities that might not immediately be associated with materialism per se, at least not in its more conventional denotations, whether realist, Marxist, empiri-cist or teleological. Here, for example, we encounter notions of larval selves prior to individuation, of the virtual dimension and its cognates such as the body without organs or machinic phyla, of the aionic, the incorporeal, of sense, expression, force and, of course, of the plenum void of desire which permeates the texts Deleuze wrote with Guattari and the politics they attempted to understand as synonymous with desire. Deleuze, as has been mentioned, is also as much a philosopher of surfaces, as he is of creativity, and in this, his neo-Nietzscheanism is pretty much true and constant, albeit interrogative. To read Deleuze as a philosopher of surfaces, is not, of course, to read him superfi cially in regard to this apparent distinction between materialism and notions of incorporeality/virtuality, as has been done somewhat notoriously and recklessly by Slavoj Žižek in his Organs Without Bodies (Žižek 2004). Indeed, as Claire Colebrook has argued, this Deleuzian concern with apparently spectral or non-material agencies such as, for example, incorporeals or phantasms or pre-individuated larval selves or the aionic dimension of time itself, is a concern primarily with the question of genesis, and specifi cally genesis within, through and from matter rather than anything external to matter (Colebrook 2009: 20). In this sense, it is important to understand Deleuze as a philosophical monist for whom matter is variously a mode or expression or process of assemblage and in which bodies, however abstract their formulation, subsist, persist and exist in a material world in which they are forever commingling and interacting with other bodies. But while these comminglings and copulations and partings and repetitions and singularities may well indicate a process of infi nite multiplicity as constituent of movement, they do so under the aegis of a univocity which, while not mentioned directly by Deleuze after a certain point in his career, is the condition and determination of the kinds of genesis that we humans associate with the pleasure, pain, desire, control, abandonment and the power of sex.

In his Ethics, Spinoza, the philosopher of joy if not of sex per se (indeed, in his concept of vanitas he seems to indicate that all sensual pleasure can only lead to a form of post-coital tristesse), makes the liber-ating assertion that no one has hitherto laid down the limits to the body and what the body can do. For Deleuze, of course, Spinoza is the phi-losopher both of joy and of an implicit univocity, the one phiphi-losopher toward whom the reader experiences Deleuze asserting a certain and consistent humility. Indeed, as Deleuze is willing to assert in Dialogues:

it was Spinoza more than any other that gave me the feeling of a gust of air that pushes you on the back each time you read him, a witch’s broomstick that he mounts you atop. We have not begun to understand Spinoza, and I myself no more than others. (Deleuze and Parnet 2006a: 12)

This gesture of humility on Deleuze’s part, and his imagery of the witch’s broomstick,⁶ summons up a picture of a Spinoza markedly dif-ferent to that of more traditional accounts of author of the Ethics and the Tractatus Politicus. It is an image that conjures up the scintillating zig-zag path of creative thought, the lightning path of the sorcerer that Deleuze and Guattari describe in What is Philosophy? and elsewhere as transversality or transversal thinking – a system of lines of fl ight and creativity that criss-cross the univocity of Being so as to enable and bring to actuality new assemblages, new concepts, new affects and new inter-minglings and cominter-minglings of bodies. What is essential to this inscrip-tion across and within Being for Deleuze is that it is always a product of immanent, rather than emanative or transitive causality. It is the imma-nence of the Scholastics on God and creation, in which the universe is immanent to the deity, is an aspect or mode of the deity, rather than emanative as in, say, Plotinus or his followers, or distinct as in other tra-ditions. And from this immanent causality within the univocity of Being emerge difference and multiplicity, which for Deleuze will always be a becoming of affi rmation and composition, in the spirit of Nietzsche and Spinoza, rather than negation or decomposition.

Accordingly, if for Deleuze Spinoza represents an enigma in which univocity and affi rmation, positive and singular conceptions of desire, combine with the production of difference, multiplicity and the possi-bilities of the transversal, the question of what bodies are capable of is central to both his rereading and to his subsequent refl ections on sex and sexuality, both alone and with Guattari. At the heart of these refl ections lies the principle of univocity exploding into difference and multiplicity through excess, adapted from a selected strand of philosophy includ-ing, most notably for Deleuze, Lucretius, Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche, and criticised most notably by Deleuze’s near contemporary, Alain Badiou, who takes the title of his infl uential critique of Deleuze from the fi nal, ecstatic, Spinozan-Nietzschean declaration of Difference and Repetition:

A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings:

on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess – in other words, the difference which displaces and

disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return.

(Deleuze 1994: 304)

What Deleuze derives from Spinoza and puts to work in this passage and elsewhere is signifi cant for sex and orgasm, as are the chronological changes that take place in his expression of these derivations and adap-tations, whether singly or with Guattari, throughout his oeuvre. Deleuze is particularly intrigued by Spinoza’s observation that we have no idea as yet what a body might be capable of, and what encounters between bodies mean or express. For Spinoza, a body is not fi xed and stable entity, but a constantly changing relationship of parts and movement, Accordingly, when two bodies meet, as Hardt paraphrases a letter from Spinoza to Henry Oldenberg:

There is an encounter between two dynamic relationships: Either they are indifferent to each other, or they are compatible and together compose a new relationship, a new body; or rather, they are incompatible and one body decomposes the relationship, just as a poison decomposes the blood.

(Hardt 1993: 92)

And, as Deleuze notes from Spinoza’s observation, ‘A body’s structure is the composition of its relation. What a body can do is the nature and limit of its power to be affected’ (Deleuze 1990b: 218). The univocal expression that enables such movements, encounters and affections is, of course, Spinoza’s notion of conatus, the force of self preservation and increase that drives all material and non-material change. Pleasure, pain and desire in human beings are all explained in reference to conatus in the section of the Ethics that deals with affects or emotions. Before we arrive at emotions and sex, however, in Spinoza’s monistic system there is a single substance with infi nite attributes, but these attributes are only infi nite in God as God is necessarily infi nite, human beings have no access to infi nite attributes whatsoever, but only to two: thought and extension. Thus mind and body, rather than being distinct as in Descartes, are two attributes or aspects of the same, and whatever happens to one will be paralleled in the other, whether as particles or matter in the body or ideas in the mind. Changes of will or intellect or conatus are thus paralleled on a physical level and the body’s activi-ties and experiences on the mental level, these activiactivi-ties or drives being identical aside from our perspective in relation to them. When it comes to emotions, Spinoza explains these as ‘arising from modifi cations of the mind/body by which its power of activity is increased or diminished, together with the cognitive correlates of these modifi cations’ (Barbone and Rice 1997: 266). These affects are classifi ed as pleasure, pain and

desire, or laeititia, tristitia and cupiditas from which all other affects are derived. Thus (in Samuel Shirley’s translation), Spinoza establishes his defi nitions as follows:

Desire is the very essence of man in so far as his essence is conceived as determined to any action from any given affection of itself.

Pleasure is man’s transition from a state of less perfection to a state of greater perfection.

Pain is a transition from a state of greater perfection to a state of less perfection.

Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of external cause.

Hatred is pain accompanied by the idea of external cause. (Spinoza 1982:

142–4)

Having established these defi nitions with elegant geometrical simplicity, Spinoza then defi nes sexual desire as a subcategory of love, but in a way that brings in the idea of bodies very specifi cally. As Steven Barbone and Lee Rice have noted, however, English translations have tended to miss the centrality of the body in Spinoza’s assertion that ‘Libido est etiam cupiditas et amor in commiscendia.’ Their own rough translation from the French possibly gives the clearest idea of sense here, which is that lust is the mixing together or commingling of bodies. And while there are issues with precisely what is meant by such commingling, this is absolutely in keeping with what Deleuze fi nds so amenable in Spinoza, in that in thinking of mind and matter in terms of bodies, it is possible to build up aggregates and conglomerates of bodies in an infi nite variety of combinations, and the affects that bodies will have on one another, whether through touch or distance, love or hatred, violence or inter-course, can be envisioned as an aspect of a univocality in a constant process of composition and affi rmation under the aegis of conatus.

Deleuze’s modifi cations to the Spinozist system are, in this sense, not so much a transformation of that system as a series of amendments to deal with the problem of multiplicities and the confl ict he conceives between pleasure and desire.

Bodies are also an issue for a second thinker that Deleuze and Guattari make use of in Anti-Oedipus in particular – the post-Freudian renegade, Wilhelm Reich. Reich, a left Freudian,⁷ sexual communist, militant

‘orgast’ and, latterly, collector of orgone energy from the blue skies above Maine, USA, claims a special place here largely for the question he formulates, as contextualised for those whom Deleuze will sometimes describe as ‘the people to come’. This is the question originally posed by Reich to address the apparent anomaly of fascism in the 1930s – and

systematised in his main treatise on the subject, The Mass Psychology of Fascism – namely, the question of why the masses appear to desire their own oppression. Although Spinoza and Reich might at fi rst glance seem to be worlds apart in their philosophical orientation toward desire and hence sexuality and sexual expression, this apparent distance is one that can, nonetheless, usefully illuminate certain aspects of Deleuzian perspectives on questions from sex and sexuality to politics and political expression. For Deleuze and Guattari, if Reich was retrospectively often dismissed for his curious experiments with orgone energy, his earlier questioning of why the masses appear to desire their own oppression in its most extreme form in fascism, and his linking of sex with political economy, are central to the delineation of the univocal or immanent cau-sality that expresses itself in the multiplicities of sexual bodies in contact and anticipation. In contrast to Spinoza, Reich is a fi gure who can be praised accordingly for raising the appropriate questions in regards to sex and politics but not for the ways in which he attempted to deal with these questions and the problems they generated. For Reich, bringing together the fi elds of sex and political economy into a single frame also implies an equivocal delineation of them in which the latter represses the former through external causality, through a dualistic relation, rather than the internal causality that characterises Spinozan and Deleuzian desire. In addition, and because of the internal logic of his vision of sex and the body, Reich moves from a kind of genital quasi-monism in his early career to an energeticist dualism toward the end of his life; from a vision of pure orgasmic energy which he connects very closely to a Bergsonian élan vital via a creative deformation of the Freudian libido, to a later and decidedly Manichean stand-off between Cosmic Orgone energy (good) and Nuclear or atomic energy (bad). For the Deleuze and Guattari of Anti-Oedipus, this approach fails even to begin to satisfac-torily answer Reich’s own question, and, accordingly, they attempt to do so through elaborating a complex synthesis of Nietzsche, Melanie Klein, Bergson, Spinoza and a number of other thinkers (including, sometimes overtly and sometimes tangentially, literary fi gures such as de Sade, Masoch, Franz Kafka, Beckett, Antonin Artaud, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller) into a univocal notion of desiring-production. This is a notion which, borrowing from Spinoza specifi cally, works through a version of the Spinozan geometrical method reinscribed (at least in part through Deleuze’s somewhat eccentric reading of Riemann’s non-Eucli-dean geometry) as a machinic expressionism, so as to retain a monistic ontology that resonates through its parallelisms as multiplicity and the production of difference.