Between Church and Statem
What charity and delicate precision those Frenchmen possess! Even the most acute-eared of the Greeks must have approved of this art, and one thing they would even have admired and adored, the French wittiness of expression.
—Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow 214
Reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather, it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its literary force.
—Deieuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipur
When encountering Gilles Deleuze’s writings, I cannot help thinking back to the signs that flash warnings to Harry in Hesse’s Steppenwolf. “Magic T‘heater,” “Entrance Not for Everyone,” “For Madmen Only,” “Price of Admittance Your Mind.”1 Entering Deleuze’s texts is for many people a frightening, indeed, even an overwhelming experience. Yet if we follow the trajectory of Deleuze’s thought on Nietzsche, we see it moving from a more or less traditional philosophical exegesis in his 1962 text Nietzsche. and Philosophy2 to a self-conscious utilization of Nietzsche for purposes other than an explication de texte. Appreciation for this development can make Deicuze’s work much more accessible, particularly for the Anglophonic audience that is only now beginning to widely embrace his writings. In what follows, I will comment only briefly about his early text, focusing my attention instead on his later work in an attempt to show how certain Deleuzian and Nietzschean ideas intersect and work with one another. Ultimately, I will argue, the critique of AntiOedipus can be sketched in terms of the ways it follows an analytic pattern elaborated nearly a century earlier by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals, the text that Deleuze and Guattari, called “the great book of modern ethnology.”3
Deleuze’s Nietzsche. and Philosophy is an excellent study that played a large role in generating the interest in Nietzsche’s thought in France that we see during the sixties and seventies.4 In this text, Deleuze directs himself against what he regards as a misguided attempt to strike a compromise between the Hegelian dialectic and Nietzsche’s genealogy. Where Hegel’s thinking is always guided by the movement toward some unifying synthesis, Nietzsche, in contrast, is seen to affirm multiplicity and rejoice in diversity.5 Deleuze comes to view the entirety of Nietzsche’s corpus as a polemical response to the Hegelian dialectic: “To the famous positivity of the negative Nietzsche opposes his own discovery: the negativity of the positive.”6 Focusing on the qualitative difference in Nietzsche between active and reactive forces, Deleuze argues that the Übermensch’s mastery is derived from her or his ability to actively negate the slave’s reactive forces, even though the latter may often be quantitatively greater. In other words, whereas the slave moves from the negative premise (“you are other and evil”) to the positive judgment (“therefore I am good”), the master works from the positive differentiation of self (“I am good”) to the negative corollary (“you are other and bad”). There is, according to Deleuze, a qualitative difference at the origin of force, and it is the genealogist’s task to attend to this differential and genetic element of force that Nietzsche calls “will to power.”7 Thus, whereas in the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave, the reactive negation of the other has as its consequence the positive affirmation of self, Nietzsche reverses this situation: the master’s active positing of self is accompanied by and results in a negation of the slave’s reactive force.
Showing the impropriety of reading Nietzsche as a neo-Hegelian dialectician and offering the first French alternative to Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, the text Nietzsche and Philosophy occupies an important place in the development of post-structural French thought.8 While one can learn a great deal by reading this text, I find Deleuze’s later texts, written in collaboration with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, more interesting, albeit more difficult, insofar as they seem to operate outside of the discursive practices of traditional philosophy. That is to say, these later texts move beyond those organizing rules that govern what can and cannot be said within philosophy insofar as they acknowledge the political and libidinal dimensions inscribed in every philosophical gesture.
In the remark that would become the closing entry in the nonbook published as The Will to Power, Nietzsche announced that the solution to the riddle of his Dionysian world was “This world is will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also will to power—and nothing besides!” (KSA 11:38[12]). He thereby issued a challenge to all future dualisms: it would no longer be possible for understanding to proceed according to a model that operated in terms of a simple binary logic.9 Opting for a polyvalent monism, Nietzsche’s announcement frustrates all subsequent dualistic attempts to divide and hierarchize the world neatly into dichotomous groups: good or evil, minds or bodies, truths or errors, us or them. The world is much more complicated than such dualistic thinking acknowledges, and Nietzsche’s announcement that all is will to power suggests the radically contextual, optional, and contingent nature of even those most “obvious” determinations and distinctions that are legitimated by appeal to a rigidly hierarchized metanarrative of binary opposition. It has been one of the tasks of the twentieth century to respond to the anti-dualistic challenge announced by Nietzsche’s will to power, and it is in this context that we should understand Deleuze and Guattari’s attempt to show the complicity between binary opposites that stands at the heart of their “magic formula ... PLURALISM = MONISM.”10
This semiotically condensed formula marks out one of the points of contact between the projects of Nietzsche and Deleuze. It applies as well to the project of Michel Foucault, whose work at many points intersects the work of Deleuze.11 When Nietzsche claimed that everything is will to power, he drew our attention away from substances, subjects, and things and focused that attention instead on the relations between these substantives. These relations, according to Nietzsche, were relations of forces: forces of attraction and repulsion, domination and subordination, imposition and reception, and so on. If there is a metaphysics in Nietzsche, and I am not at all sure that there is or that it is particularly helpful to view Nietzsche in these terms (as Heidegger did), then this metaphysics will be a dynamic, “process” metaphysics and not a substance-metaphysics, a metaphysics of becomings and not of beings. These processes, these becomings, will be processes of forces: becomings-stronger or becomings-weaker, enhancement or impoverishment. There is, for Nietzsche, no escaping these becomings other than death. The goal he advocates, therefore, is not to seek Being but to strive for the balance-sheet of one’s life to include more becomings-stronger than -weaker, more overcomings than goings-under.
When we look to the work of Deleuze and Foucault, we can see them making double use of Nietzsche’s will to power. Both Deleuze and Foucault engage in projects that reformulate traditional binary disjunctions between given alternatives in terms of a pluralistic continuum in which choices are always local and relative rather than global and absolute. Whether it be a continuum of desiring production or power-knowledge, the model they appeal to, explicitly or implicitly, takes the form of Nietzsche’s “monism” of the will to power, a monism not in Heidegger’s sense of will to power as Nietzsche’s foundational answer to the metaphysical question of the Being of beings, but in Deleuze’s sense of will to power as the differential of forces. This is to say, where Heidegger understood will to power in terms of a logic of Being, an onto-logic, Deleuze situates will to power within a differential logic of affirmation and negation that facilitates the interpretation and evaluation of active and reactive forces.12 Will to power thus operates at the genealogical and not the ontological level, at the level of the qualitative and quantitative differences between forces and the different values bestowed upon those forces rather than at the level of Being and beings.13 In going beyond good and evil, beyond truth and error, to the claim that all is will to power, Nietzsche attempted to think relationality without substances, relations without relata, difference without exclusion. And in so doing, his thought serves as a model for both Foucault’s analyses of power relations in the absence of a subject and Deleuze’s desiring assemblages conceived in terms of a logic of events.
In addition to using Nietzsche’s formal structure as a model, Deleuze and Foucault each seize upon what we might call the “content” of Nietzsche’s will to power, and together they offer expanded accounts of the two component poles: will and power. While French thought in general has been working for the past thirty years under the aegis of the three so-called “masters of suspicion” Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, we can understand Deleuze and Foucault privileging Nietzsche over Marx and Freud on precisely this point. Marx operates primarily with the register of power and Freud operates primarily within the register of desire. Yet each appears blind to the overlapping of these two registers, and when they do relate them, one is clearly subordinate to the other. Nietzsche’s will to power, on the other hand, makes impossible any privileging of one over the other, and his thinking functions in terms of an inclusive conjunction of desire and power. That is to say, for Nietzsche, “will to power” is redundant insofar as will wills power and power manifests itself only through will. In privileging Nietzsche over Marx or Freud, both Foucault and Deleuze recognize the complicity between the poles of will and power and, as a consequence, they can each focus on one of the poles without diminishing the importance of the other pole or excluding it altogether from their analyses. Thus Foucault engaged in a highly sophisticated analysis of power that, following Nietzsche’s example, focused not on the subjects of power but on power relations, the relations of force that operate within social practices and social systems. And within this analysis, will and desire play an integral role in directing the relations of power. Where Nietzsche saw a continuum of will to power and sought to incite a becoming-stronger of will to power to rival the progressive becoming-weaker he associated with modernity, Foucault sees power relations operating along a continuum of repression and production and he sought to encourage a becoming-productive of power to rival the increasingly repressive power of the pastoral.
In a similar fashion, Deleuze, both in his own studies and especially in his work with Guattari, has focused on the willing of power—desire. He, too, refrains from subjectifying desire while recognizing the intimate and multiple couplings of desire and power.14 In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze first linked the notion of desire with will to power, and the insight that desire is productive develops out of his reflection on will to power in terms of the productivity of both active and reactive forces. In Anti-Oedipus, he and Guattari introduce the desiring machine as a machinic, functionalist translation of Nietzschean will to power. A desiring machine is a functional assemblage of a desiring will and the object desired. Deleuze’s goal, I think, is to place desire into a functionalist vocabulary, a machinic index, so as to avoid the personification/subjectivation of desire in a substantive will, ego, unconscious, or self. In so doing, he can avoid the paradox Nietzsche sometimes faced when speaking of will to power without a subject doing the willing or implying that will to power was both the producing “agent” and the “object” produced. To speak of desire as part of an assemblage, to refuse to reify or personify desire at the subject pole, recognizes that desire and the object desired arise together. Deleuze rejects the account of desire as lack shared by Freud, Lacan, Sartre, and many others.15 That is to say, desire does not arise in response to the perceived lack of the object desired, nor is desire a state produced in the subject by the lack of the object. Instead, desire is, as it were, a part of the infrastructure:16 it is constitutive of the objects desired as well as the social field in which they appear.17 Desire, in other words, again like Nietzsche’s will to power, is productive. And as Nietzsche sought to keep will to power multiple so that it might appear in multiple forms, at once producer and product, a monism and a pluralism, so too Deleuze wants desire to be multiple, polyvocal.18 Nietzsche encouraged the maximization of strong, healthy will to power while acknowledging the necessity, the inevitability of weak, decadent will to power. Deleuze advocates that desire be productive while recognizing that desire will sometimes be destructive and will at times have to be repressed while at other times it will seek and produce its own repression. Analyzing this phenomenon of desire seeking its own repression is one of the goals of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, and we should not fail to notice the structural similarity between desire desiring its own repression and Nietzsche’s discovery in On the Genealogy of Morals that the will would rather will nothingness than not will.
To speak very generally, we can say that as Deleuze appropriates Nietzsche’s thought, will to power is transformed into a desiring-machine: Nietzsche’s biologism becomes Deleuze’s machinism; Nietzsche’s “everything is will to power” becomes Deleuze’s “everything is desire”; Nietzsche’s affirmation of healthy will to power becomes Deleuze’s affirmation of desiring-production. In the remaining few pages, I would like to suggest some ways Deleuze and Guattari model their critique of psychoanalysis on Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of Christian morality. The details of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalytic theory and practice and the relations between psychoanalysis and capitalism are far too complex to be addressed in a short essay. There is a certain method to the madness of their account, however, and it is clear that the author of the Anti-Christ has influenced the development of the argument by the authors of the Anti-Oedipus.
I will begin by providing a selective paraphrase of certain moments in the second essay of the Genealogy, where Nietzsche turns to the origins of guilt and bad conscience. These origins lie in the economic relation of creditor and debtor. The moral concept “guilt,” conceived as a debt that is essentially unredeemable, has its origin in the economic, legal notion of debt as essentially repayable. We see this in the origin of punishment, which as retribution emerges from the inability to repay the debt. Schuld, which translates both debt and guilt, is part of the strange logic of compensation that seeks to establish equivalences between creditors and debtors: because everything has its price and all things can be paid for, the debtors, having made a promise to repay, would offer a substitute payment of something they possessed: their body, their spouse, their freedom, even their life. Here Nietzsche locates the primitive intertwining of guilt and suffering: suffering will balance debts to the extent that the creditors get pleasure from making the debtor suffer. There is, for Nietzsche, a basic joy in the exercising of mascry, and, by making others suffer, the creditors thus participate in the pleasures of the masters.
When he turns to modern cultures, Nictzsche observes that punishment now appears no longer as the result of the human desire for pleasure and mastery but instead as the consequence of God’s judgment Ashamed of his instincts for cruelty, modern man has to invent free will to justify suffering: punishment now appears as deserved because one could have done otherwise. The “moral” function of punishment is thus to awaken the feeling of guilt, and it is supposed to function as an instrument to create bad conscience. To this account, Nietzsche offers his own “original” account of the origin of bad conscience: bad conscience is a serious illness contracted when human beings first entered into a community. It is, says Nietzsche, analogous to, or perhaps a repetition of, the fateful event that confronted sea animals when they were compelled to become land animals: in each case, all previous instincts were suddenly devalued and suspended. Anticipating the Freudian model of tension-reduction, Nietzsche claims that the inability to discharge their instincts leads these instincts to be turned inward. This “internalization [Verinnerlichung] of man” (GM II:16) says Nietzsche, is the origin of “bad conscience” as the instinct for hostility, cruelty, joy in prosecuting and attacking, the desire for change and destruction all are inhibited from being discharged and are instead turned against the possessor of these instincts. Bad conscience, that uncanniest of illnesses, Nietzsche concludes, is man’s suffering of himself.
In an analytic move that clearly inspires Deleuze and Guattari’s materialist psychiatry, Nietzsche links this psychological account of bad conscience to the origin of the state as he offers an account of the establishment of society from out of the “state of nature,” which echoes the tale told by Hobbes much more than the myth told by Locke or Rousseau. Bad conscience does not originate gradually or voluntarily, but all at once. This change is initiated by an act of violence: the institution of the state. The state is a violent, tyrannical, oppressive machine, created by those unconscious, involuntary artists and beasts of prey—the conquerors and masters who impose form on nomadic, formless masses. Lacking bad conscience themselves, it originates through these masters making latent in others the instinct for freedom (the “will to power”), which, when repressed and incarcerated, can only be turned against itself. In other words, while masters and artists are able to vent their will to power on others, the weak can only vent their will to power on themselves.
Bad conscience, Nietzsche tells us, is an illness as pregnancy is an illness (GM II:19), and he concludes the Second Essay by exposing this illness’s progeny to be Christian morality and the Church. As society evolved, the creditor/debtor relation took the form of a relation between the present generation and its ancestors: we pay back our ancestors by obeying their customs. Our debt to our ancestors increases to the extent that the power of the community increases. Ultimately, our ancestors are transfigured into gods and, in successive generations, this unpaid debt to our ancestors is inherited with interest. As the power of the community increases, the divinity of the ancestors also increases. With Christianity, Nietzsche sees what he calls a “stroke of genius” in the eventual moralization of debt/guilt and duty, as the Christian God, “the maximum god attained so far,” is accompanied by maximum indebtedness. Christianity’s stroke of genius was to have God sacrifice himself for the guilt of humanity. By sacrificing himself for the debtor, the creditor both removed the debt and made the debt eternal and ultimately unredeemable. The origin of the Christian God is this mad will to guilt and punishment, this will to a punishment incapable of becoming equal to the guilt. This new guilt before God results in the complete deification of God as holy judge and hangman, at once man’s infinite antithesis and the ultimate instrument of his self-torture (GM 11:22).
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals shows the ways in which the ascetic priests, in the form of the founders of Christianity and the ideologues of science, have constructed an interpretation of the modern world in which they are made to appear essential (cf. A 26). Deleuze and Guattari argue that the psychoanalyst is the “most recent figure of the priest”19 and throughout Anti-Oedipus their analyses of the practices of psychoanalysis parallel the practices of Christianity as analyzed by Nietzsche. Like the early priests, psychoanalysts have reinterpreted the world in a way that makes themselves indispensable. The whole psychoanalytic edifice is constructed on the basis of the Oedipal drama, and the primary task of psychoanalysis is to successfully Oedipalize its public. Nietzsche showed how much of Christianity’s practice requires convincing its adherents of their guilt and sin in order to make tenable its claim of redemptive power. Deleuze and Guattari take a similar approach, developing at length the ways in which the psychological liberation promised by psychoanalysis requires first that it imprison libidinal economy within the confines of the family. To Nietzsche’s “internalization of man,” they add man’s Oedipalization: Oedipus repeats the split movement of Nietzschean bad conscience that at once projected onto the other while turning back against oneself, as the unsatisfied desire to eliminate and replace the father is accompanied by guilt for having such desire. They view psychoanalytic interpretive practices as no less reductive than the interpretations of Nietzsche’s ascetic priests. Just as Nietzsche priests reduce all events to a moment within the logic of divine reward and hment, Deleuze and Guattari’s psychoanalysts reduce all desire to a form of familial fixation. Like Nietzsche’s ascetic priests, psychoanalysts have created for themselves a mask of health that has the power to tyrannize the healthy by poisoning their conscience. Where Nietzsche notes the irony of the Christian God sacrificing himself for humanity out of love, Deleuze and Guattari ironically chronicle the various expressions of the psychoanalysts’ concern for their Oedipally crippled patients. The ultimate outcomes of these ironic twists also parallel one another: where Christianity’s self-sacrificing God makes infinite its adherents guilt and debt, psychoanalysis creates its own infinite debt in the form of inexhaustible transference and interminable analysis.20
What is, I think, the most interesting transformation of Nietzsche’s analysis is the way Deleuze and Guattari adapt Nietzsche’s link between the rise of Christianity and the rise of the state to their discussion of libidinal and political economy. They want to introduce desire into the social field at all levels, and this prompts their critique of psychoanalysis. Freud could only view libidinal social investments as subliminal, and he interprets all social relations as desexualized representations of unconscious desire. Likewise, when sexual relations do appear in the social field, they are interpreted by Freud as symbolic representations of the Oedipal family. Deleuze and Guattari want to liberate desire from its enslavement within the theater of representation, and they reject the reductive familialism that sees the family everywhere while it obscures all relations of wealth, class, gender, race, status—in other words, all social relations outside the family. Because social production is libidinal and libidinal production is social, they claim it is a mistake to desexualize the social field.
The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: in the way that a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; in the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused.21
Revising both Marx and Freud, Deleuze and Guattari conclude that insofar as desire is constitutive of the social field, “social production is desiring-production under determinate conditions.”22
Deleuze and Guattari “replace the theatrical or familial model of the unconscious with a more political model: the factory instead of the theater.”23 The question of desire is one not of dramatic familial representation but of material production, which is to say, a political question. This is the point at which they replace psychoanalysis with schizoanalysis or, as they put it, this makes clear the need to “schizoanalyze the psychoanalyst.”24 Psychoanalysis has failed to recognize that the successful Oedipalization of its public depends upon the phenomenon discussed earlier of desire desiring its own repression. For Deleuze and Guattari, the discovery of this phenomenon is associated first and foremost with Wilhelm Reich,25 who refused to explain fascism in terms of the false consciousness of the masses. Instead, Reich formulated an explanation that takes the desires of the masses into account: “they wanted fascism” and it is this perverse manifestation of desire that must be explained. For Reich, the explanation comes in terms of the pleasures of exercising authority that are vicariously experienced by the “little man‘s” identification with the “Führer.”26 Deleuze and Guattari’s account of this desire, along with their fascination with the relation of the officer to the machine in Kafka’s “Penal Colony” and their analyses of psychoanalysis, leads them to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Here, in Nietzsche’s account of the will to nothingness as preferable to not willing and in bad conscience choosing to make itself suffer rather than relinquish the pleasure in making suffer, they locate their answer to Reich’s question of the link between psychic repression and social repression in the libidinal economy of fascism. Where Reich saw desire activated through a passive identification of the masses with their fascist master(s), Nietzsche saw the ascetic desire to make itself suffer as perverse but fundamentally active and ultimately positive—through this perverse desire, as he notes, “the will itself was saved’ (GM III:28).
From their observations of Reich and Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari draw the following conclusion: desire is productive, it must be productive, and it will be productive. If a social field does not allow for desire to be productive in nonrepressive forms, then it will produce in whatever forms are available to it, even those that it recognizes to be socially or psychically repressive. Like Nietzsche’s will to power, Deleuze and Guattari claim, desire must be analyzed locally, relative to the social field in which it operates. There can be no global, universal, or totalizing judgment concerning desire. As Nietzsche’s GM III analyzed the concrete practices of the ascetic priests in terms of the enhancement and impoverishment of will to power, Deleuze and Guattari continue to question political and psychoanalytic practices in terms of productive and repressive libidinal capacities. Investigating the shared genealogy of church and state in terms of the diverse manifestations of desire and power, Deleuze and Guattari show themselves to be among the philosophers of the future to whom Nietzsche addressed his writings, philosophers who, appropriating Nietzsche’s description of an earlier generation of French philosophers with whom he identified, create “real ideas ... ideas of the kind that produce ideas” (WS 214).
An earlier version of sections from this paper were presented in October 1988, at Northwestern University at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and a subsequent version was presented to the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Washington, Seattle. Most of the written text of this paper, published as “Between Church and State: Nietzsche, Deleuze, and the Critique of Psychoanalysis,” in International Studies in Philosophy 24, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 41–52, was revised as part of the chapter on Deleuze in my Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructural ism (New York: Routiedge, 1995).
For translations of Nietzsche’s works, I use Kaufmann and Hollingdale’s GM and WP; and Hollingdale’s WS.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). One of the few critics to discuss this work in the context of French poststructuralism is Vincent P. Pecora, in “Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Post-Structuralism,” Sub-Stance 48 (1986): 34–50. Although largely critical of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, Pecora is, I think, correct in indicating the formative role played by Deleuze’s replacement of “‘le travail de la dialectiyue’ by the play of ‘difference”’ in the emergence of poststructuralism (36).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 190.
This can be seen in the two surveys of recent French philosophy to be translated into English from the French; see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), esp. 187–90, and Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. Mary Schnackenberg Cattani (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 68–71. For a further discussion of Nietzsche’s French reception, see my Nietzsche’s French Legacy.
See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 197.
Nietzsche and Philosophy, 180.
Nietzsche and Philosophy, 50.
The importance of Nietzsche in Deleuze’s thought and poststructuralist French philosophy is one of the leading themes of Ronald Bogue’s fine introductory text Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989); see, in particular, his concluding comments, 156–63.
I have addressed Nietzsche’s critique of binary, oppositional thinking in much greater detail elsewhere, particularly in relation to Derrida and deconstruction. See “Genealogy and/ as Deconstruction: Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault on Philosophy as Critique” in Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy, edited by Hugh J. Silverman and Donn Welton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 193–213, “The becoming-postmodern of philosophy,” in After the Future: Postmodern Times and Places, edited by Gary Shapiro (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 99–113; and the chapter on Derrida in Nietzsche’s French Legacy.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 20.
I wish to bring in Foucault at this point because I think it helps to understand the complex relations between the careers of Foucault and Deleuze in terms of their mutual alliances with Nietzsche.
See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 49–55.
Cf. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 220: “Heidegger gives an interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy closer to his own thought than to Nietzsche’s.... Nietzsche is opposed to every conception of affirmation which would find its foundation in Being, and its determination in the being of man.” I address and criticize Heidegger’s interpretation of will to power in some detail elsewhere; see my Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation (New York: Routledge, 1990), 53–73.
See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Literature, translated by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 56. Although I have linked Foucault with power and Deleuze with desire, I do not intend these linkages to be in any way exclusive. In fact, as further evidence of the rhizomatic connections between the careers of Deleuze and Foucault, we can here note that Foucault in 1972 credited Deleuze for being the first to thematize the question of power: “If the reading of your books (from Nietzsche to what I anticipate in Capitalism and Schizophrenia) has been essential for me, it is because they seem to go very far in exploring this problem: under the ancient theme of meaning, of the signifier and the signified, etc., you have developed the question of power, of the inequality of powers and their struggles.” (“Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977], 213–14.)
This tradition goes back at least as far as Plato, who argues in the Symposium (200a-d) that one who desires something is necessarily in want of that thing. I discuss the Deleuzian critique of “desire as lack” in more detail elsewhere: see my “Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze: An other discourse of desire” in Hugh Silverman, ed., Philosophy and the Discourse of Desire (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 2000), 173–85.
See the discussion of this point in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 348.
We might put this point another way and, using Benveniste’s distinction, say that desire occupies both the place of the subject of the utterance (sujet d‘énonciation) and the subject of the statement (sujet d’énoncé).
Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 57.
Anti-Oedipus, 108–12, 269, 332–33. See also A Tbousand Plateaus, 154.
Cf. Anti-Oedipus, 64–65.
Anti-Oedipus, 293. (Translation altered slightly.)
Anti-Oedipus, 343.
Gilles Deleuze, Interview in L’ilrc 49, 2nd ed. (1980), 99. See also Anti-Oedipus, 55.
Anti-Oedipus, 365.
See Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (London: Souvenir Press, 1970).
Cf. Reich, 63ff.