Message from Ian Buchanan - Deleuze & Sex

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Onderwerp: Deleuze and Sex

A new proposed volume in
the Deleuze Connection series for Edinburgh University Press
(Series Editor Ian Buchanan)

Deleuze and Sex

Edited by Frida Beckman

”Making love is not just becoming as one,
or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand.”
(Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipe)

For Gilles Deleuze, sexuality has a central role in the production of thought, bodies, and becomings. True thought, he argues in Logic of Sense, is possible only when it is liberated from the notion of castration as transcendent law. Castration needs to be thought of, instead, as a crack, a fracture that does not produce a lack but a surface of thought, “projecting the entire corporeal surface of sexuality over the metaphysical surface of thought.” Sexuality, then, is linked closely to the possibility of immanence and thinking; the event of thought. If the transcendent law of castration results in a blockage of thought, it also results in the mastering and moulding of the sexual body into the molar notion of two sexes rather than the (pregenital) Harlequins cloak to which Deleuze compares it. The sexual surfaces of the libido are restricted, blocked, and reduced and thereby their flows are repressed “in order to contain them in the narrow cells of the type ‘couple', ‘family,’ ‘person,’ ‘objects.’”

However, the sexual body is seen to retain a revolutionary potential and sexuality is seen as a source of becoming; there is immense power in the thousand sexes of desiring-machines, in sexuality beyond the “all too human” idea of castration as absence, and in the multiplicity of surfaces that are opened up in its place.

This collection seeks to address the notion of sexuality, not so much as instinct but as creation, not so much as a transcendent mode of organization but as a revolutionary machine. It wants to know the potential of sexuality when liberated from genitality as well as antrophomorphic presuppositions. It is therefore interested in exploring areas such as for example sexuality and the machinic, sexuality and surfaces, and sexuality and animality. It asks about the ontology of sex and how we can begin to know of it when it is no longer captive to molar representations. Investigating the strengths and potentials but also the weaknesses and dangers that sexuality open for thinking, bodies, and becomings, it pursues the ethic, aesthetic, political, and philosophical dimensions of Deleuze’s work on sexuality.

Importantly, contributors should note that this edited collection follows on edited books in the same series focusing on Deleuze and Feminist Theory, Deleuze and Queer Theory, and Deleuze and the Body (forthcoming). While aspects of gender, queer, and the body will be likely, as well as welcome in this new collection, it is crucial that articles focus specifically on the possibilities of sexual practice in the revisiting of such issues.

Abstracts should be submitted electronically to the editor frida.beckman@engelska.uu.se no later than May 1st 2009. The proposed publication date is set in the fall of 2010.

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I sent Frida the (so far rather stupid) abstract:
« Two ‘layers’ may be discerned in human activity (as well in thinking as in motor action) which correspond to Deleuzian thought as opposed to Lacanian thought. These layers are anno 2009 even formulated in radical re-interpretations of quantum mechanics (Diederik Aerts, 2009). I called them in earlier work (Rosseel, 2008): Eros (the meeting of two bodies or bodily surfaces) and (forced) Labour, i.e. castration. Or in other words between Image and Word (as écriture). They correspond also to Saint Paul’s and the traditional Christian opposition between the Flesh and the Spirit (an opposition which is also present in the development of Confucian thinking in early China), and between poetic language and prose. Or in the pessimistic Pessoan “soul that will never find Me”. Eros is the body that is not mediated by the introjection of a social convened Law or classical Logics: it is “schizo”. It is energy as a desiring machine, canalized by the necessity of labour in a society of scarcity but never fully oppressed (this would mean physical death). As such sexuality (as Eros) is the fundament of all revolutionary activity (as manifested in ‘uproar’, ‘tumult’, charivari, carnival, in other words in every Feast or Glow), while (forced) Labour defines the practice by which Revolution is castrated in the way Jozef K is castrated in Kafka’s The Trial. Eros as freed sexuality can also be understood in terms of Walter Benjamin’s idea of the “Saved Night”. In this paper I propose a process by which, in some utopia, Eros and Free Labour are not opposites but allies. »