File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0312, message 63


Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2003 12:25:04 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: Re: deleuze - masochism


Lydia,

I'd always read Kafka as more on the sadistic side - but I suppose 
thinking about this that it's perhaps a matter of how and who you 
identify with in the text. Given that Deleuze is an anti-psychoanalytic 
thinker, more so than say Lyotard whose relationship to Freud may be 
questionning but essentially it is less rejecting. I think it is 
necessary to heavily 'theorise' if you are going to place Deleuze within 
the psychoanalytic framework. For example the use of the 'schziod' 
metaphor, (which is acceptable because of Guattari's work at La 
Bourde...), does construct substantial barriers to the use of Lacanian 
or Freudian analysis. (for example "Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse").

"A minority never exists ready-made, it is only formed on lines of 
flight, which are also its ways of advancing and attacking..." Becoming 
Minor is not just a matter of the proliferation of languages (the core 
understanding of which is a strange mixture of Hjemslev and 
Austin/Labov's linguistics) but the productive resistence to the major. 
The major being always defined against power... (social, economic and 
political). Consequently I don't think the overlay of psychoanalytic 
sadist and masochistic theories works in what is predominantly a social 
construction, whereas for example the use Melenie Klein makes of it 
especially in (for example) in her theorisation of the paranoid-schzoid 
position is a major advance in the understanding of how the human 
subject develops/is constructed.

Isn't the notion of minor and minortaurian directly related, as in being 
an obvious precursor to the multitude as proposed by Negri and 
Negri/Hardt ? Of course they are deeply undecidable (as Zizek points 
out) and consequently can be either nice: (deeply Communist (as Negri 
and Guattari would have it)) or nasty: (....) but the notion as such 
seems more to establish a line-of-flight away from power, in the sense 
of resistence. The recent resurgence of union power in the UK, as 
resistence mounts against the 3rd way, can be understood as a 
proliferation of 'becoming minor'.

So then my answer to your question is no.

I prefer the union example to the use of Don Delillo - I suppose because 
the question is - can Delillo be thought of as a minortaurian writer, 
isn't he rather someone who has always dreamed of becoming major ?

regards
steve



Lydia Perovich wrote:

> This year's Summer issue of the journal October was dedicated to Dada, 
> and going through some of those articles tonight I accidentally came 
> across a text by George Baker in which he analyzes Dada, esp. work of 
> Picabia, via Deleuze’s anti-Freudian elaboration of masochism.
>
> Deleuze completely (with one important hesitation) rejects Freud’s 
> continuum between sadism and masochism and interprets masochism as not 
> an enactment of the reception of the punishment from the Father but as 
> its reversal… as the whipping of the Father himself. What is it that 
> is being beaten in a man who is at the receiving end of the aggression 
> and finds pleasure in it? His 'likeness' with his father, his 
> belonging to a genus; the Father (or if you will, the Law that H/he 
> bequeathed) in his ghostly omni-presence.
>
> The whole of modernism is masochistic in this way, grants Baker, and 
> the whole of it is marked by this passage through self-annihilation in 
> order to be able to come to the other end self-generically reproduced. 
> Dada, however, is unique in many ways. First lesson to keep in mind in 
> the war against patriarchy is that a direct shattering of the Father 
> won’t do it for it always ends up in a resurrection, most often 
> through a sadistic reassertion (in sadism, there is indeed Daddy 
> around every corner, says Deleuze). Dada held the ground of consistent 
> masochism until the sadism of Surrealism took over the European 
> artistic scene.
>
> What Dada also did was to put Father (along with other 
> master-signifiers Language, the Phallus, and Money) directly back into 
> existential economies down from the throne of the invisible 
> regulators. At 'normal' times Father is normally (already) dead and in 
> his place there's the Law. What Dadaists did was to put this figure 
> back into circulation (in performances, writing, collages etc) which 
> paradoxically instead of reviving seemed to be weakening Paternity – 
> once Father was visible, present, in the exchange, even apparently 
> obeyed, He was also within reach.
>
> Baker partly agrees with critics of Deleuze’s utopian vision of 
> Masochism as politically naïve – Leo Bersani and Kaja Silverman point 
> out that Deleuze omits to acknowledge that the ultimate success of the 
> Sadistic position is inducing the victim to believe in a ‘liberation’ 
> and ‘pleasure’ of being a victim. Baker also says that indeed Dada was 
> a utopia too.
>
> In light of all this, and before I venture into Cosmopolis: how do we 
> think la littérature mineure and la langue mineure would figure here? 
> Kafka’s work is pretty Masochistic… to be bluntly political, do 'minor 
> language' and becoming-minor always entail a moment of 
> self-annihilation, of the killing-of-Father-inside, a Simone Weil 
> maneuver?
>
> L.
>
> And as a passage to DeLillo… Baker starts with Jean-Joseph Goux's 
> 'general equivalents' Language, the Phallus, the Father and Money as 
> the "master-signifiers that rule over the respective economies of the 
> sign, the object, the subject, and the commodity." DeLillo starts 
> Cosmopolis with a quote from Primo Levi about life in a concentration 
> camp: “Rat has become the universal means of exchange…”
>
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