Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 16:29:17 EDT From: Karen Ocana <CXKO-AT-musica.mcgill.ca> Subject: delirium Gonsalves delired (amongst much else): [...] >I am not meaning to pick on Goodchild but pursuing this path because I think >it leads us to the central problem of C&S: Just what the hell is the BwO and >how pragmatic or functional a concept is it? Is it, as it is for a certain >incarnation of Artaud, a denial posing as an au-dela? This is what Goodchild >suggests : >> it is understood that desire escapes power, and the bwo is desire >C&S suggests something quite different, that it is desire that produces the >social, that desire's sado-masochistic investments of the image-machine-scene >perpetuate power: "Desire produces, its product is real" (AO 26). Desire and >the BwO are not above anything. That is a metaphysaical gesture. Desire is >the disease and not an unproblematic cure: [...] Desire is problematic. As a problem, it is a multiplicity. Like any good problem, it is also paradoxical. Hence it can be both a disease and a cure, or better, a passion and its remedy ... as in "amour hereos" or lovesickness, from the Neoplatonic or courtly love tradition. One feigns lovesickness, _finge te infirmum_, as a strategy (as does Calixto in Fernando de Rojas' tragicomedy, _La Celestina_) of erotic delirium, supposedly in order to be cured, but first in order to suffer, as much as inhumanly possible. One feigns lovesickness but becomes lovesick at the same time. It is a feigning which fails and becomes rea by virtue of its intensifications. Becoming-mad is the sine qua non of desire. Of desire-passion. Passion (read suffering, read joy) is its own reward. This is the outside of oedipus. It is the outside of ordinary reason, the anti-socia of the socius. It has its own reason -- the drama of the delirium of reason. Which spreads by contagion (via the ministrations of the go-between/medianera, the 'celestial' witch who lives outside of the village, up the river by the tanneries). She has a pharmacy of remedies (and is a midwife) ... to incite passion, to heighten it, deepen it, prolong it, to cure it, as one tans a hide, to make it brilliant. The solution of passion is to make it go to its limits. It returns on its own. Excremental oedipus is either life lived without intensity... or the residue of lives lived intensely. Desire is power as potency, the power of bodies to affect and be affected &c &c &c and creates power effects which escape. Power is not monolithic. And desire is always implicated and complicated in regimes. The BwO is a technical term of schizoanalysis. As is Oedipus. One is an honorific, one is derogatory. This is a partisan view. Absolute? Vodka ------------------
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