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January 12, 2007
From Contretemps a seminar by Deleuze on 26 March 1973 entitled Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire-Pleasure-Jouissance). After talking briefly about multiplicities, and a theory and practice of multiplicities (an assemblage of lines taken as a rhizomatic whole,which replaces the old substance that endured beneath accidental changes) Deleuze turns to desire.
Desire is problematic in philosophy as to desire the world and to know its meanings and structures have seemed conflicting enterprises. With Spinoza we have a theory of "striving" (conatusimmanentiae ) to persevere in their own Being (vis inertiae). In Anti-Oedipus desire is argued to be productive. For Deleuze desire produces reality --produces multiplicity and constructs an assemblage.
In the seminar he says:
What I have been saying since the beginning amounts to saying that thinking and desiring are the same thing. The best way to avoid seeing or to refuse to see that desire is thought, that the position of desire in thought is a veritable process, is obviously to link desire to lack. Once desire is linked to lack, one is immediately in the domain, one has already assumed the basis of dualism. But today I would like to say that there are more underhanded ways of reintroducing lack into desire, either through the Other, or through dualism. Here, so-called Western thought is constructed from the relation between desire and pleasure, a completely rotten (pourrie) conception.
He then talks about the malediction of desire, which is a proclaiming of evil against some one; a cursing. Thus psychoanalysts speaking of desire just like priests, under the guise of the great wailing about castration, which for Deleuze, is a kind of enormous and frightening curse on desire.
To say that jouissance is not pleasure, that it takes part in a kind of system, which, in order to simplify it, I would present as a circular conception of desire in which, at the bottom, there is always the same starting postulate—and it is true that Western philosophy has always consisted in saying: if desire exists, it is the very sign, or the very fact, that you are lacking something. Everything starts from that. A first welding of desire-lack is brought about; from there, it goes without saying that desire is defined as a function of a field of transcendence; desire is desire for what one does not have; that begins with Plato, it continues with Lacan. This is the first malediction of desire, it’s the first wayto curse desire...
In a tradition that reaches from Plato to Lacan and beyond, desire has been understood as negative, abyssal, a lack at the level of ontology itself (this was most clearly articulated in Hegel's understanding of the lack [of the object] of desire being the necessary condition for the maintenance of desire), a lack in being that strives to be filled through the (impossible) attainment of an object. Desire, according to Hegel, is the incessant human effort to overcome external differences, a project to become a self-sufficient and self- conscious subject.
If the first malediction is desire-lack then the second malediction of desire is pleasure-discharge---a matter of calming desire for a moment, and then the malediction will begin again. And then it will be necessary to call it up again, and then it’s the conception of pleasure-discharge, as illustrated in Reich’s protest against Freud, where retains this conception of desire-discharge, which he thematizes in the theory of the orgasm.
If I remember the Freudian conception of desire refers to unconscious wishes, bound to indestructible infantile signs, organized as phantasy. That implies that psychoanalysis limits desire to imaginary fantasies.But I thought hat In Anti-Oedipus, for example, desire is from the start argued to be productive. but it was spredeteremined (repressed?) by the Oedipal triangle of mommy-daddy-child.
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