From: "Zagreus" <zagreus-AT-libertysurf.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Carnivalic D&G
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 16:23:48 +0100


Dear Chris, Dear Anonymous,

Please forgive my delay in responding to your recent messages and the
questions they raise. This was due to the fact that in the period from
despatching September 4's mailing to resubscribing on Friday I wasn't in
receipt of any messages from the list, and was only alerted to the existence
of your replies through reading the gopher listings this morning. I wonder
if anyone else on the D&G List has experienced similar difficulties.

The disintensification of Deleuze and Guattari's writings we can attend to
in due course, but regarding Chris' comments concerning my characterization
of the problem, this point needs to be made: as opposed to stating that D&G
retreated from political engagement, my observation was rather that
'Capitalism and Schizophrenia' demonstrates no intention of speculatively
resuscitating the category of the political ('[S]chizoanalysis as such has
strictly no political programme to propose', 'Anti-Oedipus', p.380). Thus,
along with Lyotard before his sad descent into Wittgensteinianism and
Abrahamic monotheism, and in contradistinction to the ethical Marxism of the
Frankfurt School (with its emphasis on struggle, the human reclamation of
impersonal historical forces, and political revolution conceived as moral
revolution), Deleuze sees no need to downplay Marx's 'economism' and
correspondingly formulates tactics for accelerating Capitalism's vectors of
dissolution. In the light of this, the lame political gesticulations of the
later, 'polyclinical' works should give us cause for their critical
scrutiny.

In stating that Derrida works from a 'botched' reading on Schelling, my
intention was to suggest that, whereas Derrida extends Heidegger's account
of the conditions of simultaneous possibility and impossibility of a
philosophy of reflexive consciousness towards a strategy of defeat,
Schelling is already in possession of an entire microphysics of the
autoproductive energetic unconscious, underpinned by a rigorous conception
of intensive magnitude.

Derrida of his own admission (in his obituary article on Deleuze) lacks
these conceptual resources, with the result that for deconstruction (in the
absence of any notion of connective synthesis) notions such as the body
without organs and absolute immanence remain strictly incomprehensible.

Indeed the very thought of immanence no longer immanent to something else,
so central to Deleuze's metaphysics, could only be construed by Derrida as a
constitutively self-defeating pretension to the transcrescence of
transcendence.

Actually, the way you seized on that quip as simultaneously

i) utterly characteristic of an attempt to deconstruct Derrida, and

ii) the logocentric inscription of Derrida as Schelling's errant son,

still has me rather confused. I know that deconstruction's still held by its
proponents to be an incontournable aspect of post-Kantian critique, but this
is ridiculous.

I was also intrigued by your dismissal as a commonplace ("... genres appear
as the result of connective syntheses, sure. But what doesn't?") of the
reason I gave for Deleuze's eschewal of genre distinctions. Perhaps this is
because you still understand his critique as applying solely to
philosophical discourse, as opposed to actual immanent material processes,
but in any case it seems odd that you should persist in using terminology
that of your own admission is systematically ambivalent and therefore prone
to confuse the issue. In fact you immediately proceed to demonstrate this
danger by postulating a self-admittedly idealist suprahuman realm of
achieved genre-form.

And as for Anonymous' contention that deconstruction is to be
philosophically applauded for at least being propaedeutic, and that its
practitioners are set to descend on me for 'treat[ing] Schelling['s
writings] as absolute' (by which I think Anonymous really means
'definitive')... (!)

Michael Carr