Dominic:
>What I do oppose is displaced libido, self-mortification (and mortification
>of others) where the ultimate, disavowed purpose is the enjoyment of
>cruelty.
More extreme version of an enjoyment of melancholy which is attractive in
the aching gap of humanity lost or whatever?
I’d avoid actually plugging into “vitalism” - as a set of positions it soon
becomes boring – But the anti-vitalist is still on the side of forces;
thanks for talking about Burroughs as it reminds me I should go back to read
more of him
Of course anything which supposes a pre-existing life essence is a project
which has lost its problem from the start – Am I That Living Thing? -
But to work with a concept – say, Spinoza’s conception of the body as a
complex relation of movement and rest - & then catalogue what the body can
do, living, and find that the catalogue erupts within discursive frames - is
not to presuppose an essence – E.g. in an ethnography I’m reading called
Inside Clubbing , the chapter on habitus and knowledge in the flesh quotes
one clubber talking about anal sex:
“I really enjoy it now, but I used to be really squeamish about it. I used
to feel dirty and a bit slutty and feel a bit uncomfortable with the whole
thing, even though I knew there was nothing wrong with it. I knew it wasn’t
immoral, but for a long time it still felt immoral. I felt like a dirty
girl, which had its own thrill, but was also really dull because those
feelings didn’t match my ideas and that was frustrating. Now I’ve done it
enough to experience it positively; it feels good. my partner and I enjoy
it; he doesn’t think it’s dirty or weird or anything, so I feel comfortable
with it. I know it’s not wrong in my head and my gut feelings have stopped
trying to disagree with me.”
Physical, mental, emotional constructs changing at different strata &
speeds; the switchboard of reward-punishment being re-wired through force of
will. Instead of *mechanistic*, I’d just talk about style.
Out of all the possible tags to be extracted from Deleuze, what a pity that
rhizome, nomad, fold have taken on, but not noology… It might result in more
Teilhard de Chardin floating about and less going back to Hegel’s adventures
of consciousness. I think Deleuze’s account in his Foucault monograph is
a good deal more subtle than you say – The microphysics of power acting on
that which has an inside etc. – Though if you think he basically re-writes
F, which is sort of his procedure in all his History of Philosophy
monographs, have you tried his one on Hume! Your characterisation would fit
more easily to what others have extracted from Foucault through a filter
named Deleuze, specifically Hardt and Negri’s multitude etc.
Edmund
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