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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Anti-Oedipus as a work of ethics? « Previous | |Next »
March 14, 2006

In this post I mentioned that one characteristic of the Anglo-American reception of French philosophy is that it interprets Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus as a work of ethics.

The source for this interpretation is Foucaaut. In his 1977 introduction to the English translation of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault called the book a work of ethics, perhaps the first such (French?) reflection on ethics in a generation. Foucault went on to say that in his judgment Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the most insidious dimension of fascism: the way in which men and women willingly enslave themselves to fascist modes of being.

If I remember the context of this reception of the "philosophy of desire" is that it was seen as a superceding of Freudo-Marxism; as a going beyond the earlier efforts of the Frankfurt School (eg., Adorno) that had updated Marx with Freudian insights. Anti-Oedipus also launched a deep critique of many of the foundations of psychoanalysis. The reception of the "philosophy of desire" was linked to, and a part of, sexual counter-culture and the women and gay liberation movements. Desire was interpreted as a "flow" or flux a continuous, nonpersonal, and uninterrupted "flow . Into the flow come "machines." They interrupt the flow. Those "interruptions" "condition" and shape the flow, and are thus in fact part of the flow itself.

Is this a libertarian celebration of unfettered desire? A valorizing of desire's rebellion against conservative normative constraints (of the law and morality) in general? A celebration of subversive" pleasures in a 1970s Anglo-American culture whwose mode of being was still negatively Puritan? Is there more to the ethics than this liberrarian interpretation?

A suggestion.

There is a pragmatic, embodied ethics that focuses on particular bodily relations and their affects. A body' action can be thought of as becoming reactive (bad) or becoming active (good)–in relation to the specific assemblage or relationships it forms with other bodies and the specific affects it enables. The way to evaluate whether the becoming is bad or good is to judge whether a particular assemblage or moral code harms or enhances each body’s life force; in other words, whether it increases or reduces each body’s power to act and its potential to go on forming new relations, creating new flows of desire and new becomings.

An embodied ethics of this neo- Nietzschean sort aims to reduce life destroying assemblages and foster ethical, life-enhancing assemblages by opening up the flow life (desre) to difference (variation) and multiplicities.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:21 PM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

To be entirely frank: the "pragmatic, embodied ethics" interpretation seems fairly straightforward.

The libertarian interpretation, by contrast, sounds to me like the work of someone who hasn't read Anti-Oedipus and wouldn't know what to make of it if they did. Is the libertarian, "let's party like it's 1999" interpretation the dominant intepretation in Anglo-American circles?

If so, that lowers my estimation of those circles, even though that's where I live.

I've read the libidinal-historical materialists -- Deleuze and Foucault -- and the Frankfurters -- but my academic training is in philosophy. I don't talk about this stuff with my colleagues, who for the most part are analytically trained, and I tend to avoid literature departments, where most of the people usually don't have the background (Kant, Husserl, Heidegger) to understand where Deleuze and the others are coming from.