Desire

Question 1

How does Plato take desire in his Republic?

Answer 1

Plato in his Republic takes desire as the opposite of reason, something to be controlled

Question 2

How does Deleuze conceive desire in contrast to Plato?

Answer 2

• Deleuze, by contrast, holds desire as a positive force; not a lack as usually understood but productive in nature
• Like labour, desire is actualised in the course of practice (Gao, 2013)

Question 3

How is desire defined by Deleuze?

Answer 3

Desire is defined simply by Deleuze as the production of reality: “desire produces, [and] its product is real” (AO: 26)

Question 4

What is the function of social representation?

Answer 4

• To separate desire from reality
• Inject so-called “needs” and scarcity and lack into a desire-reality relation (Holland, 2014)

Question 5

What is the result of the injection of so-called “needs, scarcity and lack into a desire-reality relation?

Answer 5

• Result of this is that individuals or groups come to believe consciously that they lack or need something
• Produced by desire itself but subsequently gets taken from them by social order

Question 6

What does Bataille argue The Accused Share (1988) about needs?

Answer 6

That needs, and utility get introduced into an economy that is itself characterised by super-abundance

Question 7

What do D&G explain about desire in AO in relation to Marx?

Answer 7

D&G explain in AO (p. 27):

“Marx notes [that] what exists in fact is not lack but passion. Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived from desire: they are counter products within the real that desire produces”

Question 8

What does desiring-machine pay attention to?

Answer 8

• Attention to the micropolitics that involves subterranean movements of individual and collective sensibility, affect and allegiance (Gao, 2013)
• Rather than macropolitics of social classes and institutions of political government

Question 9

How does desiring-machine change from AO to ATP?

Answer 9

Desiring-machine in AO changes to the more neutral ‘assemblage’ in ATP due to the persistent subjectivist misunderstanding of the former concept

(Massumi, 1992)

Question 10

D&G introduce a conceptual distinction between desiring-production and social-production?

Answer 10

• In order to take historical variability into account
  
  • The terms are two sides of the same coin
• “Social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions” (AO: 29)

Question 11

Why is psychoanalysis a strictly capitalist instiution?

Answer 11

• Because capital privatises reproduction in the private sphere at the same time that it privatises ownership of the means of production in the economic sphere
• They are separate spheres
  
  • Privatisation and segregation of production and reproduction into these distinct spheres

Question 12

How does Hollands (2014) compare Marx transformation of the bourgeois political economy to D&G’s psychoanalysis?

Answer 12

Similar to how Marx transformed bourgeois political economy into a revolutionary materialism by refusing the subordination of labour to determination by capital

D&G transform bourgeois psychoanalysis into revolutionary materialism by refusing the subordination of libido to determination by the nuclear family and the Oedipus complex

Question 13

What is schizophrenia?

Answer 13

The name D&G assign to desiring-production its absolutely indeterminate, free state

Question 14

How is desiring-production indeterminate?

Answer 14

Desiring-production by nature is indeterminate, but at the same time, subject to determination by social institutions and representations, which impose order, objects and aims on it

Question 15

How does capitalism foster schizophrenia?

Answer 15

Capitalism fosters schizophrenia as the free form of desire not only by segregating production and reproduction from society at large, but also by subjecting social life itself to the abstract quantification of the market, thereby freeing desiring-production from social coding

(Hollands, 2014)

Question 16

What does the BwO stage?

Answer 16

• Stages struggles of desire to escape determination and thus designates the human potential for freedom
• Simultaneously the locus of coding and decoding

Question 17

How does capitalism relate to the BwO?

Answer 17

• Capitalism unlike previous social forms tends to unleash free-form desire on the BwO and thus fosters widespread schizophrenia
• Hence the subtitle of AO

Question 18

How does BwO in its potential freedom appears only with capitalism towards the end of universal history?

Answer 18

• Opening the prospect of a post-capitalist market that finally subordinates social production to desiring-production (Hollands, 2014)

Question 19

What does desiring-production provide the immanent critera for?

Answer 19

“Desiring-production provides immanent criteria by which to judge the (in)adequacy of various historical forms of social production”

(Hollands, 2014: 58)

Question 20

What do D&G insisit in the name of desire?

Answer 20

That the unconscious operates according to constitutive synthesis in order to process experience in such a way to guarantee the free play of desire

Question 21

How does desiring-production serve as a revolutionary fulcrum?

Answer 21

• Serves as a revolutionary fulcrum for social critique as well as the critique and transformation of psychoanalysis into schizoanalysis (Hollands, 2014)
• Society itself must conform to the “logic” of the syntheses of the unconscious or else to be condemned to repression

Question 22

What does the schizoprehic desiring-production determine?

Answer 22

• The schizophrenic desiring-production will determine the conditions of social production instead of being determined by them
• Legitimate uses of the unconscious synthesis will prevail over illegitimate uses on the BwO

Question 23

How in ATP, does the BwO form the plane of consistency?

Answer 23

• Desire can over-proliferate like cancer; it can break loose and plunge into the void
• Utmost care is required for desire to occupy the BwO freely, without over-coagulating and becoming fixed, on one hand, and without becoming wildly chaotic, on the other

Question 24

How does the play of desire on the BwO operate as a different engine?

Answer 24

• The play of desire on the BwO operates as a difference engine, continually forming, deforming and reforming modes of passionate attachment to reality
• A dialectic of differentiation and capture exists
  
  • Desire on the BwO favours the moment of differentiation over the moment of contraction

Question 25

How does universal history get subjected to considerable irony in ATP according to Hollands (2014)?

Answer 25

• Apparently random and certainly achronological dating of the plateaus pokes fun at the one-dimensional linearity of the universal history propounded in AO
• Refers to D&G’s pronouncement of geography rather than conceptually historical