File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/d-g_Jan.96, message 49


Date: Tue, 9 Jan 1996 15:14:01 -0500
From: aden-AT-user1.channel1.com (Aden Evens)
Subject: Re: Anti-Oedipus, inter alia


This message, the continuation of a conversation I was having with Andrew,
didn't get to my mailbox in one piece, so I assume it didn't get to other
mailboxes in one piece. The stuff about the unconscious at the end is what
was garbled before, so . . .

Andrew wrote back:

>Perhaps I
>could check whether or not I've got "it": if desire desires non-identity (or
>non-interruption), then desire seeks to return always to the BwO (is this
>D's interpretation of Nietzsche's "Eternal Return"?). If so, then are
>interruptions (desiring-machines) the equivalent to the Nietzschean "Will to
>Power"?

It is frightening to see written back to me in your words what I wrote
before in mine. What you say seems to be just what I said, but to see you
write it makes me feel so didactic and overcommitted to a certain reading.
Can you hedge a little bit and make it more vague, so I will be more
comfortable?????

As far as the Nietzsche stuff goes, D's 'interpretation' of e.r. varied
from book to book, but in the book, _Nietzsche and Philosophy_, his reading
is something like what you suggest. There he calls e.r. a "selective
ontology" which transmutes or revalues the whole world, tearing asunder
identity and making an affirmation of everything. However, this Dionysian
post-e.r. world of affirmation is not presented as a limit, nor does it
have the somewhat dark character of the BwO. As a limit, the BwO can play
the paradoxical dual role of being both the possibility of freedom and the
necessity of death. Affirmation is not as paradoxical in itself (for the
death of humanity is the birth of the Ubermensch), though perhaps
affirmation bears a paradoxical relation to the reactive world in which
Nietzsche claims that we live.

>I appreciated your characterization of the BwO as a "sort of primordial
>virtuality", and have tried to understand this in terms of: "Body" =
>flow/hylé; "without organs" = without interruptions. Would this be an
>accurate understanding?

Makes sense to me, but remember that it operates as a limit.

>Another aspect of my lack of comprehension is why D&G would posit an
>unconscious as a system, when they evidently question most other structures
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