Between Desire and Pleasure

PLATEAUS • NEW DIRECTIONS IN DELEUZE STUDIES Series Editors Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook

‘Frida Beckman has written an undoubtedly provocative account of the Frida Beckman uneasy relations, even points of tension and contradiction, between feminist and queer conceptions of sexual pleasure and the deterritorializing philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari. This book successfully opens sexuality out to new conceptions and new forces that link it directly to the most pressing political questions of today.’ Elizabeth Grosz, Duke University

Explores the political, cultural and conceptual significance of sexual pleasure BETWEEN DESIRE AND PLEASURE: A DELEUZIAN THEORY OF SEXUALITY How is sexual pleasure inscribed into conceptions of the body, gender, health and of the human? Conversely, what constitutes its role in the construction of such notions? And, most importantly, how can it contribute to an expansion of what they mean?

Mapping both historical and contemporary configurations of the sexual body along with its functions and sensations, Frida Beckman identifies disabling conceptions and constructions of pleasure while also searching for the possibility of claiming sexual pleasure as a constructive and politically enabling notion today. In the face of the way in which Deleuze’s theory of desire builds on a rejection of the usefulness of pleasure, this book works to construct a Deleuzian theory of sexuality that is inclusive of pleasure.

Frida Beckman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. She is the editor of Deleuze and Sex (2011).

Cover image: The Internal Clitoris ISBN 978-0-7486-4592-3 Edinburgh

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Plateaus – New Directions in Deleuze Studies ‘It’s not a matter of bringing all sorts of things together under a single concept but rather of relating each concept to variables that explain its mutations.’ Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

Series Editors Ian Buchanan, Cardiff University Claire Colebrook, Penn State University

Editorial Advisory Board Keith Ansell Pearson Ronald Bogue Constantin V. Boundas Rosi Braidotti Eugene Holland Gregg Lambert Dorothea Olkowski Paul Patton Daniel Smith James Williams

Titles available in the series Dorothea Olkowski, The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible): Beyond Continental Philosophy Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, translated by Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton Simone Bignall, Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History Sean Bowden, The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity Aidan Tynan, Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms Thomas Nail, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze Guattari and Zapatismo François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event with The Vocabulary of Deleuze edited by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, translated by Kieran Aarons Frida Beckman, Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality Nadine Boljkovac, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema Daniela Voss, Deleuze and the Transcendental Conditions of Thought

Forthcoming volumes:

LeRon Shults, Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism Janae Sholtz, The Invention of a People: Art and the Political in Heidegger and Deleuze Visit the Plateaus website at www.euppublishing.com/series/plat BETWEEN DESIRE AND PLEASURE A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality

Frida Beckman JohnnyCarbon:Users:JohnnyiMac:Public:JohnnyiMac JOBS:13962 - EUP - BECKMAN:BECKMAN 9780748645923 PRINT

Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF

www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 4592 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4593 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8229 4 (epub)

The right of Frida Beckman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Contents

Preface vi

Introduction: The Body without Orgasm 1

1 A Nonlinear History of Sexuality: Deleuze with Foucault 16 2 Psychoanalysis Unhinged: Deleuze with Lacan, Klein and Reich 30 3 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body 45 4 Orgasmic Feminism 70 5 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing 98 6 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm 120 7 Capitalism and Sexuality 145

Epilogue: Swedish Sin, or the Importance of Remaining Curious 170

Bibliography 179 Index 189 JohnnyCarbon:Users:JohnnyiMac:Public:JohnnyiMac JOBS:13962 - EUP - BECKMAN:BECKMAN 9780748645923 PRINT

Preface

There is a tendency today to neglect the issue of sexual pleasure or even to surrender it in favour of a politics of asceticism. Sexual pleasure, it is argued, keeps us caught up in unproductive codes of sexuality in terms of liberation and repression, fuels the nihilism of enjoyment of capitalism and prevents us from recognising other more enabling modes of engagement between self and other. While this ‘anti-sex’ position, or impasse, opens new and possibly rewarding venues of exploration, it is the contention of this book that giving up sexual pleasure is, and perhaps always will be, premature. It is like giving up the fight. Like letting the big boy take your toys and letting him keep them because you know he will always try to steal them again or, to pursue a more mature metaphor, to surrender the flows of desire because they are repeatedly channelled in the service of social and political control. This book, therefore, is about the importance of sexual pleasure. It works to underline and explore, not so much the relevance of pleasure on an individual and personal level, but rather the political, cultural and conceptual significance of such pleasure. In the past decades, sexuality has been an important political question relating to issues such as the rights to and for various sexual identities and practices, sexual equality, sexual violence and abuse, reproductive rights and sexual health. Of course, sexual pleasure and its possibility, absence or role constitutes an integral part of many of these questions, but what about sexual pleasure in itself? How is it inscribed into conceptions of the body, of gender, of health, of the human and what, conversely, constitutes its role in the construction of such notions? And, most importantly, how can it contribute to an expansion of what they mean? Mapping both historical and contemporary configurations of the sexual body along with its functions and sensations, this book identifies disabling conceptions and constructions of pleasure at the same time as it searches for the possibility of claiming sexual pleasure as a constructive and politically enabling notion today.

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The present project started as an enquiry into Deleuze’s philosophy and his understanding of desire and pleasure specifically, and while this remains a key point, the issues of sexual pleasure that have emerged here are also of relevance much more generally. Readers interested, for instance, in the role of sexual pleasure in the historical construction of gender roles, or in how the reconfiguration of the contemporary body through biotechnological and biocultural discoveries affects our understanding of sexual pleasure, or in how sexual pleasure is claimed by commercial interests today may find this book illuminating. Hopefully, they will also find that a Deleuzian perspective, despite the fact that Deleuze himself is rather sceptical about the productive potential of sexual pleasure, may be useful to projects interested in pursuing the wide range of ways in which sexual bodies and pleasures matter. This project was conceived during my employment at the Department of English at Uppsala University where I was granted important research time to prepare the outline of this book. The main task of writing it has been funded by a generous grant from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). The process has also benefited from the warm welcome I received from the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University. I would like to extend a special thanks to three people who have been central to the production of the book as a whole. Gregg Lambert offered some crucial responses and suggestions in the early stages of its conception, Charlie Blake presented extensive feedback throughout the writing process and Claire Colebrook read and commented on the manuscript in its entirety towards the end. The individual chapters have benefited greatly from unstinting and stimu- lating responses from Ron Broglio, Eugene Holland, Mike Lundblad, Margrit Shildrik and Jami Weinstein. Parts of chapters in progress were presented at Deleuze conferences in Copenhagen in 2011 and in New Orleans in 2012 and I am grateful to the organisers of these conferences as well for the inspiring questions and comments I received from various participants. I would like to thank, also, Carol MacDonald and the rest of the team at Edinburgh University Press. I am lucky to have many generous and inspiring people in my professional as well as my private life. Issues of sexuality can be discussed from many different angles and this book has benefited from lively discussions, important suggestions and invaluable feedback, not just from colleagues, but also from friends and family. My mother, Yvonne, deserves especially warm thanks, not only because

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of her boundless support, but also for remembering the 1960s and for sharing it with me. Finally, I would like to thank Julia and Logan – may you always remain curious.

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If the sexual body is indeed historical – if there is, in short, no orgasm without ideology – perhaps ongoing inquiry into the politics of pleasure will serve to deepen the pleasures, as well as to widen the possibilities, of politics. (Halperin 1992: 261)

The notion of a plateau, or plateaus, is a suggestive one that stirs the imagination, or may even be felt in the body. The idea of a peak, or a number of peaks, around which intensities are built makes it almost too easy to allow oneself to make associations with some kind of graph of sexual excitation. Yet, the notion of a ‘plateau’, as Brian Massumi notes in his introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, must not be confused with direct sexual pleasure and release. Gregory Bateson’s détournement of the word, in a study on Balinese culture, is based exactly on the fact that he finds, in this culture, a libidinal economy that is decidedly different from ‘the West’s orgasmic orientation’ (Massumi 2004: xiv). The very point about a plateau, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use Bateson’s term, is that it maintains a quivering pitch of intensity that is not automatically finalised through a climax. A central characteristic of the plateau is that it does not release tension so much as it carries it forward. Rather than an orgasmic release, there is a perpetuation of energy through a ‘fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could exist’ (Massumi 2004: xiv). The relation between the notion of a plateau and an orgasm is central to the present study, for conceptual as well as cultural reasons. Conceptually, contrasting the plateau with the orgasmic reveals how absolutely central issues of sexuality are to Deleuze’s philosophy, even as they are rarely approached explicitly. Building a desiring ontology around the notion of a plateau rather than the idea of an orgasm not only opens up crucial questions of sexuality and desire, it also brings to the fore some of the most central aspects of Deleuze’s understanding of time and space, of subjectivity and

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bodies. The radical potential of time that he finds through Henri Bergson, the resistance to the idea of transcendent subjectivity that he finds, among others, through David Hume, and the reconsideration of bodies and forces inspired by Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche and against Sigmund Freud all relate back to the idea of rhizomatic connectivity of desire rather than individual experience of pleasure. At the same time, this contrastive difference also highlights a creative tension in Deleuze’s writing. To begin with, there is the tension noted by many, primarily feminist writers who, on the one hand, find the lack of materiality problematic, most famously perhaps Alice Jardine’s early response to the notion of becoming-woman as yet another instance of how the material reality of women is lost in a ‘whirling sea of male configurations’ (Jardine 1985: 207), and on the other, discover the political potential of rethinking the nature of the body altogether, such as, for example, Moira Gatens’s rethinking of the sex–gender distinction with the help of Deleuze’s understanding of univocity (Gatens 1996). Secondly, and as this book will argue, Deleuze’s distinction between desire and pleasure as a ground for a separation of the rhizomatic and the individual is problematic in so far as it is based on universalising preconceptions about its starting point. For example, we can only reject individual pleasure as territorialising if we simultaneously accept sedimentary notions about what individuality is. As a philosopher of individuation and larval selves, Deleuze typically does not accept such fixed ideas. Conversely, we cannot determine whether sexual pleasure must be discarded as territorialising or recovered as a creative force until we have explored more carefully the multiple natures of pleasure itself. Just as replacing a more conventional chapter structure with ‘plateaus’ in A Thousand Plateaus is a way of offering a new kind of rhizomatic book with alternative modes of connection, replacing the orgasm with desire, for Deleuze and Guattari, is ultimately about replacing the organism with the Body without Organs (BwO). Deleuze is quite vehement about the importance of moving away from the orgasm as a constitutive experience of the body and the subject. Look, for example, at how he connects ‘bad’ desire with the subject and the organism in ‘Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire-Pleasure-Jouissance)’. Here, he identifies three ‘maledictions’ that control desire – that desire means lack, that you can hope only for discharges and that you will pursue the impossible jouissance. These maledictions he situates in relation to the theory of statements. Desire as lack is linked to the way in which the subject is split by its

2 Introduction: The Body without Orgasm enunciation. This split separates the subject of enunciation from the subject of the statement in the same way as desire as lack introduces a deficiency in the subject itself. Desire as pleasure, that is, the type of momentary pleasure/discharge found in the orgasm, is found on the level of the subject of the statement (Deleuze 2001: 102). Pleasure is seen to relieve desire temporarily in a sort of jump-start fashion that is never grounded in the subject itself. If the first two maledictions of desire keep the subject either separated from or in an uneven struggle with desire, the third malediction does place desire with the subject of the enunciation. Jouissance acknowledges the irreducibility of desire to pleasure but continues to place it on a level of transcendence and thus as impossible to attain. The problem with all these forms of pleasure, Deleuze argues, is not only that they offer transcendent and unproductive modes of desire, but also that they fix the subject, turn it into an organism and submit it to the cogito (Deleuze 2001: 106). These types of desire, in other words, not only remain out of reach for the subject, they also function to fix the subject and the organism through transcendent modes of capture. Perhaps Deleuze is too hasty in determining the nature of pleasure and orgasm in order to be able to reject them. Undoubtedly, he takes as his starting point an Oedipal and distinctly patriarchal definition of pleasure. The idea of the orgasm as a release that brings the contentment of an end-point is clearly coloured by Freudian ideas as well male experience. Perhaps his denunciation of pleasure and the orgasm is only local in the sense that what he rejects is simply the Freudian conception of these, that is, the same ‘analytic imperialism’ that at least partly caused his and Guattari’s refutation of the Freudian understanding of desire. The question is, then, if he ends up giving in to the blackmail that he and Guattari themselves recognise in Freud, noted, for example, in relation to infantile sexuality. ‘The Freudian blackmail’, they write, ‘is this: either you recognize the Oedipal character of infantile sexuality, or you abandon all positions of sexuality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 100). In the case of infantile sexuality, they do not give in to this pressure (even though their understanding of children’s sexuality has been recognised as problematically gendered (see, for example, Driscoll et al. 2011), but in the case of the orgasm, we need to at least ask ourselves if they in effect end up guilty of the same crime as their philosophy is passed on to us. Either you recognise the Oedipal and masculine character of sexual pleasure and orgasm (in order to reject them), or you abandon all such positions. Whether we can put it this strongly or not remains

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to be seen, but for now, we can identify the need to revisit the distinction between desire and pleasure and not accept the valorisation of desire at the expense of the orgasm without caveats. The orgasm and its relation to pleasure and desire constitute this book’s central focus of inquiry. Deleuze’s entire desiring philosophy, it argues, is based on certain presuppositions. These presuppositions constitute the grounds for his unnecessary denunciation of the orgasm as a creative force. As Elizabeth Grosz shows, ideas of the orgasm as an end, as a culmination or conversion towards death or dissipation, are based on a male model that has informed the idea of all erotic pleasure. This is an important point, not only because this connection between orgasm and death is the cause of prevalent cultural visions of women’s sexuality as nonhuman, as voracious, predatory and castrating, but also because it excludes other models of orgasm as invested in the body in its entirety and as a mode of transubstantiation (Grosz 1995b: 203). This exclusion, I would argue, is absolutely present also in Deleuze’s work, and in order to work through questions of sexuality and desire in Deleuze it is therefore valuable, if not necessary, to devote some time to the problematic relation between the plateau and the orgasm, and thereby to the relation between desire and sexuality in Deleuze’s work. Deleuze’s complaint, in a nutshell, is that pleasure and the orgasm are caught up in psychoanalytic and economic structures that fix the subject within an economy of lack. The discharge associated with orgasmic pleasure is but a deplorable and ultimately unsatisfactory end-point. If we follow Deleuze and Parnet’s advice, however, and turn the notion of lack on its head, we should also get an overturned conception of pleasure and orgasm. Lack, in this anti- psychoanalytical mode, ‘refers to a positivity of desire, and not the desire to a negativity of lack’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 91). Such lack, as Paul Patton explains it, exists only as the silences and pauses in a piece of music, that is, as a constitutive part of the whole rather than as something impossible to attain (Patton 2000: 70). This positioning of lack is suggestive of a specific understanding of ontology. To begin with, of course, the refusal to consider lack as a constitutive part of the subject points to an immanent rather than transcendent philosophy. The placement of lack as a pause or silence in music indicates that lack, rather than leaving being in search for a beyond, locates being, or rather becoming, as an assemblage of tones which are inclusive of the pauses between them. Secondly, this reversal of the psychoanalytical understanding of lack also reverses the tempo-

4 Introduction: The Body without Orgasm rality that it suggests. If the doomed search for satisfaction indicated in more psychoanalytical accounts of desire is suggestive of linearity, the lack that Deleuze and Parnet point to is suggestive rather of a temporality that emphasises the reality and presence also of the silences between. Lack is not the beyond that desire strives for but is rather the in-between – the ‘and’ of connectivity. This lack is no longer lack in the psychoanalytic sense but a co-presence of different parts of the essential positivity of desire. If we follow through on this reversal of desire in the exploration of pleasure and the orgasm we can see very clearly how Deleuze’s rejection of the creative potential of the orgasm is based on the psychoanalytic conceptions of desire and lack, rather than on his own reversed and revised version. In an understanding of the orgasm as based on his reversed idea of lack, as this book explores, the orgasm would not be a deplorable temporary release in the futile striving for a missing whole. Rather, the orgasm may be positioned as part of the composition – be it the notes or the silences – and as such it indicates nothing but occupies a function in the machine of desire. This book delineates the nature of the relation between the plateau and the orgasm and between desire and sexuality as associated with the issue of temporality, but also with other conceptual as well as cultural problematics. It addresses the orgasm as a central focal point for many historical as well as modern debates about sexuality in general, and as a point of rejection in Deleuze’s philosophy in particular. While this introductory chapter focuses specifically on the tension between orgasm and plateau, the book as a whole inquires more widely into the relations and tensions between pleasure and desire, and between human and nonhuman sexuality as they appear in Deleuze’s writing. At the same time, it weighs his philosophical understanding of pleasure and desire against a number of contemporary as well as historical Western theories and representations of sexuality. The role of pleasure, Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus, is that of the negotiator between the subject and desire, a way for persons to ‘find themselves’. Unlike the associations with a temporary escape that come with the ‘petite mort’, orgasm, for Deleuze and Guattari, becomes nothing but ‘a mere fact, a rather deplorable one, in relation to desire in pursuit of its principle’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 173). But what happens to the role of sexuality in this context? What is the relation between sexuality and desire if pleasure is nothing but a lure that keeps us locked up within our own organisms? Looking back, the book inquires about the

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possibilities Deleuze’s work provides of reading sexuality through historical events such as, for example, the sexual revolution of the late 1960s. If ‘the history of a thing, in general, is the succession of forces which take possession of it and the co-existence of forces which struggle for possession’, as Deleuze argues through Nietzsche (Deleuze 2006b: 3), and Freud wrestles sexuality free from sheer reproduction, and Deleuze and Guattari wrestle it free from Freud, then one of my ambitions is not so much to wrestle sexuality free from Deleuze, but rather, to re-examine it through the creative tensions that Deleuze’s philosophy introduces. If we dare to think of sexuality as an active force, and I think that through Deleuze we do, we also need to bring this out in his work. Maybe there is a sense in which Deleuze’s understanding of sexuality itself suffers from a disarming separation of forces. On the one hand, immense and very important work has been done on Deleuze and Guattari in relation to desire and to plateaus, and to the body without organs. The possibility of building a desiring ontology that is completely different from the understanding of the sexes and sexuality as they have been claimed by Oedipal theories as well as societal and gendered politics has proven crucial to post-Deleuzian scholars interested in finding alternative and more productive ways of thinking about the nature of the body and its relations. On the other hand, this valorisation of desire has resulted in a problematic separation between desire and sexuality. In interpretations of Deleuze, sexuality has tended to be positioned alongside territorialised forms of the body, and thereby as a force that closes rather than opens the body to what it is capable of. In other words, sexuality is seen as a stratified form of desire. Look, for example, at how Philip Goodchild positions desire as ‘a “sexuality” which extends beyond gender relations, because it can relate entirely heterogeneous terms and territories, a multiplicity of sexes’ (Goodchild 1996: 41). Even if desire is a productive force, our understanding of sexuality is caught up in an unfruitful web of associations that, arguably, is reactive rather than active in that it remains cut off from its potential. More than that, such an understanding of sexuality is perfectly conventional. It is not very problematic, at least not since Michel Foucault, to suggest that sexuality functions as a means of cultural construction and political subjectification. As David M. Halperin puts it, for example, ‘sexuality represents a seizure of the body by an historically unique apparatus for producing historically specific forms of subjectivity’ (Halperin 1992: 261). The seemingly endless capacity for contempo-

6 Introduction: The Body without Orgasm rary capitalism to divest and reinvest in sexual practices and identities, Benjamin Noys has argued more recently, makes it well-nigh impossible to deregulate sexuality (Noys 2008: 105). Considering the fact that we want to recognise Deleuze’s philosophy as one of invention and production, it is surprising that this common understanding of sexuality as a social power has been allowed to persist, not because such an understanding should be denied, but because sexuality should also harbour the power to mean differently. This power is better recognised by Guattari than by Deleuze. Despite, or maybe because of, Guattari’s more direct political engagement and interactions with the politics of sexuality, he finds a way of articulating the link between stratified sexuality and desiring machines, a way of identifying a potential line of flight in the midst of sexual subjectification. After the publication of ‘Three Billion Perverts: An Encyclopedia of Homosexualities’ – an issue of the journal Recherches that he edited on the topic of homosexuality – he was accused of ‘affronting public decency’ and, as Gary Genosko notes, was repeatedly harassed by the police (Genosko 1996: 7). The trial that followed, Guattari insisted, was political. Desire, if allowed to open up to the world rather than be repressed by it, is no longer destructive (as, for example, the desire fuelling fascism) but creative. Importantly, the possibility of expression of ‘social desire’ needs to be opened up beyond resource to representatives. New and direct expressions of desire are crucial if we are to escape the dominant order and ‘build another world’ (Guattari 1996a: 192). What is central here is that Guattari, by linking this potential revolution of desire to homosexuality, makes a clear link between abstract desire and sexual practice. Homosexuality, which comes to play an important role also in his writing with Deleuze, is a site of potential ‘important libidinal disruptions in society – a point’, Guattari writes in his notes for the defence of his publication, ‘of emergence for revolutionary, desiring-energy from which classical militantism remains cut off’ (Guattari 1996a: 186). Even if Guattari distinguishes between sexuality and desire, his articulation of their interconnection is helpful in that it potentially ties the revolutionary aspect of desire to sexual bodies and behaviours. Guattari further clarifies the link between sexuality and desire in an interview with George Stambolian, where he argues that ‘Once desire is specified as sexuality, it enters into forms of particularised power, into the stratification of castes, of styles, of sexual classes’ (Guattari 1996b: 204). He suggests that a sexual liberation of groups such as,

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for example, homosexuals or transvestites does not in itself constitute a liberation of desire since the groups themselves include repressive systems (Guattari 1996b: 205). He thereby problematises and com- plicates what Noys later comes to see as a ‘valorization of sexuality and desire as sites of resistance’ by post-structural philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari who, Noys argues, employ the movement of desire to posit sexual liberation as a mode of political critique (Noys 2008: 105). With Guattari’s clarification it becomes easier to see how sexuality is implicated by political structures, whereas the flows of desire predate such structures. As the case of homosexuality and ‘Three Billion Perverts’ suggests, Guattari sees sexuality as invariably coexisting with structures – subjective, political, social – that are actualised and thereby limited at the same time as sexuality is also seen to harbour the potential of ‘libidinal disruptions’. Guattari suggests less of a polarisation than Deleuze, as he provides a distinct understanding of what sexuality is and what it can do, and thereby also enables a reading of sexuality that can be politically enabling. Sexuality is not just about individual, subjective pleasure but also about a social connectivity related to schizoanalysis. It is recognised as being caught up in the yarn of psychoanalysis at the same time as it can become part of the multiplicity and fluidity of schizoanalysis. Noys’s solution to the problem of what he sees as capitalism’s inevitable co-option of sexuality is a radical politics of asceticism, developed with the help of Foucault and Alain Badiou, which opts out of the contemporary ‘emblem of enjoyment’ which holds us prisoners in a truth of sexuality caught up between discourses of liberation and repression (Noys 2008: 113). With a refusal of the codes of sexuality comes the possibility of forming other and more politically enabling relations between self and other (Noys 2008: 113). Noys’s argument, which will be discussed further later, opens important potential for change. At the same time, it relies on asser- tions about Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of desire that may be debated. While they are certainly celebrated as technicians of desire, there is little in their philosophy to suggest a valorisation of the kind of sexuality that Noys critiques. Indeed, and as we will see, Deleuze’s critique of the deplorable subjective economy of sexual pleasure points rather to similarities with Noys’s own take on the importance of refusing sexuality. Where Noys suggests a rejection of a politics of pleasure in favour of a politics of asceticism, there is also a tendency, Dean notes, to simply neglect the politics of pleasure in post-Foucauldian theory.

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While issues such as pain and injustice are thoroughly researched by philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, the issue of pleasure tends to be missing (Dean 2012: 477). Biopolitical theory, Dean suggests, does not neglect the question of pleasure because it is superficial or straightforward but, on the contrary, because it is so complex and difficult (Dean 2012: 478). While Dean’s article works to identify the problem of pleasure in Foucault, this book attempts to identify this problem in Deleuze. In the face of both Deleuze’s and Noys’s rejection of the constructive political potential of sexuality, and despite, or maybe because of, the unwillingness to address the complexity of pleasure in contemporary biopolitical theory, this book attempts to stage a productive theory of sexual pleasure through Deleuze. If we emphasise Guattari’s point about potential libidinal disruption and connect it, firstly, with a Spinozan interest in what bodies can do rather than in what they are, and secondly, with the Stoics’ understanding of all things as bodies, we may begin to enable a resurrection of the power of a sexuality in dissident col- laboration with, rather than in overt contrast to, desire. As Deleuze and Parnet show, the Stoics see qualities, breaths, souls, actions and passions as bodies that are compounded in various ways and inter- penetrate each other ‘as fire penetrates iron and makes it red, as the carnivore devours its prey, as the lover enters the beloved’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 62–3). All bodies are made of other bodies, we have bodies growing in our own, and in one sense this makes all relations incestuous and all feasts cannibalistic. From these constant collisions and interpenetrations, Deleuze and Parnet argue, incorporeal events arise, pure infinitives ‘to cut’, ‘to love’ that rest as a metaphysical surface. ‘Love is in the depth of bodies, but also on that incorporeal surface which engenders it’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 65). Sexuality, for Deleuze, must thus be linked to the virtual rather than to Oedipal desire. Arguably, however, sexuality is the most virtual and the most actual of occurrences. While it is everywhere, it is captured and allowed only to mean certain things. This is also true of Deleuze’s own philosophy of desire. If linking sexuality to the virtual enables a rethinking of the relation between body and pleasure, linking it to art further expands its territories. This would be art in Deleuze’s sense, that is, not as representation, but as the creation of affects and intensities, as an event that includes subject and object but that is irreducible to either on its own. This is also how Grosz understands art, which enables her to locate art in the erotic attraction of sexual selection. The art that

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occurs in sexual interaction is about affect, sensation and intensities extracted from chaos. From chaos, art extracts qualities, networks, zones of coherence and creates ‘temporary modes of ordering, filter- ing’ (Grosz 2008: 8). Art is about the creation of territories, the framing of a fragment of chaos that thereby becomes expressive. The territory combines a milieu (a concrete but temporary set of coordinates in space and time) with a rhythm (the connection of the body to the force and structures of life) to create a refrain – the movement that marks the return to a specific territory that is nonetheless dependent on the force of chaos from which it is separated (Grosz 2008: 20). Sexual territories, Grosz suggests, are marked by a rhythm and a refrain that exceeds the bare necessity of survival. Bringing up Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the Australian bird that creates a territory by arranging leaves underneath itself, but also adding her own example of how human beings construct territories by means of framing their bodies and homes, she argues that these activities are artistic – they exceed what is necessary for survival and create fields of affect and intensity that involve a becoming-other. Sexual expression is artistic because, apart from being temporary, it is also essentially excessive. That which is necessary for survival – exchange and reproduction – does not vouch for ‘the artistic impact of sexual attraction, the becoming-other that seduction entails’ (Grosz 2008: 7). On the contrary, the excessiveness that characterises the interplay of sexual interaction is art because its beauty is ‘of no use’ – ‘the frivolous, the unnecessary, the pleasing, the sensory for their own sake’ (Grosz 2008: 7). Deleuze’s theories of the expressiveness and refrain of territories are part of his project of dismantling notions of subject–object divisions, relations and continuity both through philosophical concepts and through the affectivity of art. Reading pleasure and the orgasm, not along the routes of psychoanalysis and subjectivity, but along the lines of territory and art claims such intensities as events that exceed subjective experiences. Like art, the intensities of sexual pleasure harbour the capacity to frame physical experience through the temporary qualities that emerge through shifting sensations. Rather than tying the individual to the organism, the orgasm may equally be seen to create an affective milieu by claiming a segment of the chaos of physical, sensory, auditory and mental sensations and images of sexuality through the event. As the different chapters of this book show, such affective milieus can be located and expanded through concepts such as becoming-woman, becoming-animal and becoming-disabled.

10 Introduction: The Body without Orgasm

Through such concepts we can better understand how orgasms claim the body as part of a territory, as an infolding of multiple intensities. This event is temporary and excessive: it is the becoming-expressive of the body in its wider sense. Like the walls that, Grosz explains, separate inside and outside and thereby create new connections and relations (Grosz 2008: 14), the orgasm excludes parts of the body and the world as it temporarily frames a set of expressive intensities. As this introductory chapter has begun to outline, it seems worth- while to try out the idea that the distinction between sexuality and desire and between the orgasm and the plateau deserves further attention. Rather than ‘untying pleasure from desire’ in order to make desire a more productive force, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 173), a shift in focus allows us to reclaim sexual pleasure, too, as an expressive and creative force. This is not untying but rather retying, or maybe re-coupling by means of a disjunctive synthesis. Looking forward, then, we will ask what political power a Deleuze-influenced understanding of sexual pleasure holds, and if it may be possible to effect its political potential by adding to it the new perspectives that recent decades of research and development have offered. Between the conceptual and the cultural appear, in the present moment, a number of perspectives that demand that we revisit the role, importance and potential of the relation between the plateau and the orgasm and between more abstract desire and physical sexual pleasure. The understanding and location of plateaus of contemporaneity makes it possible to argue that one of the reasons why the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari has become increasingly employed in critical and cultural research is because they offer concepts that correspond to, rather than counteract, many cultural phenomena of today. Numerous studies exploring contemporary culture in terms of rhizomatic structures, lines of flight, difference and desire suggest that Deleuze and Guattari’s work provides powerful tools to talk about culture and capitalism as they shape contemporary life. At the same time, this seeming applicability needs to be problematised, not only because the correspondence may not be as clear-cut as it sometimes seems, but also because in order to reserve some of the original political power of resistance we may need to read Deleuze against himself. As Eleanor Kaufman notes, Deleuze studies need less fidelity in order to be truly Deleuzian (Kaufman 2004: 651). In the present book, the need to ‘betray’ Deleuze, as Kaufman puts it, is based exactly on this uncomfortable correspondence between Deleuzian

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concepts and contemporary culture. The creative power of Deleuze’s writing is undermined by straightforward fidelity and the readiness to ‘champion radical flux and pure positive libido’, as Kaufman puts it (Kaufman 2004: 651). In the light of Kaufman’s proposal, I would suggest that in order to make Deleuze’s philosophy productive to an investigation of sexuality today, we will have to read Deleuze less as a good model for theorising capitalism and rhizomatic desire and more as a means of raising our awareness of what sexual pleasure can do to deterritorialise such powers. Seeds of this are already present in Deleuze’s work, not least in the under-theorised influence of Wilhelm Reich on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus project. I will approach Deleuze, not from behind, as his famous expression goes, but up front. The idea is not to make bastard children (sexuality is not just about reproduction, remember?), but to tease out some productive pleasure and open up orgasmic possibilities all over. The purpose is not to counteract his philosophy of desire, but to make use of its inherent generative difference by making it express itself in new ways, in conjunction with, rather than in opposition to, sexuality and orgasm. Like Lauren Berlant, who looks into the way in which sex seems to have arrived at an impasse, or a ‘beyonding’ in Anglo- American discourse, where interlocutors are looking for ‘ways out’, I am ‘still looking for “ways in” ’ (Berlant 2007: 435). The aim here is to activate a Deleuzian theory of sexual pleasure by putting sex back into desire and the orgasm into the plateau. To locate the creative force of sexual pleasure through Deleuze, his differentiation between desire and pleasure needs to be re-evaluated in the light of a number of factors. In Chapter 1, Deleuze’s separation of desire and pleasure is tested against Foucault’s division of the two concepts, a separation that takes his theories of sexuality in quite a different direction than Deleuze. Foucault’s History of Sexuality also elucidates the historical and cultural specificity of Deleuze’s understanding of pleasure and the chapter serves to underline the importance of taking Deleuze beyond his own delimited historical context. The second chapter outlines the specificity of the theoretical context in which Deleuze’s understanding of desire and pleasure emerges. Focusing on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein and Wilhelm Reich, the chapter looks for explanations for his dismissal of the potential of pleasure, as well as missed opportunities for developing a creative notion of pleasure in the psychoanalytic field from which both Deleuze and Guattari draw inspiration. Chapter 3 explores the possibility of building a Deleuzian notion of a pleasurable body.

12 Introduction: The Body without Orgasm

With the help of contemporary thinkers of sexual bodies such as Grosz, Luciana Parisi, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Deleuze’s conception of pleasure is explored against the many things that sexual bodies can be and do. In the face of his creative conceptualisation of bodies, this chapter suggests, his evaluation of pleasure is stuck within a realm of presuppositions which he has otherwise done away with. Here, his negative consideration of the orgasm is placed in conjunction with his more positive reconceptualisation of the body through philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Gilbert Simondon. By linking contemporary theories of sex to notions such as the fold and transduction, the chapter picks up on the opportunity of thinking the pleasurable body. Chapter 4 discusses the gendered history of the orgasm and how descriptions, representations and theories of the female orgasm underline some political problems with Deleuze’s implicitly male model of the orgasm. Some of his male ‘models’ are also explored as the chapter finds some clues as to why Deleuze would find sexual pleasure ‘deplorable’ in favoured literary writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. Looking at an alternative set of textual descriptions of orgasm, it is suggested that the orgasm harbours the potential to expand rather than delimit what bodies and sexes and pleasure can do. Continuing to expand on the explorations of what bodies and sexes and pleasure can do, Chapter 5 investigates how discourses on disability may assist the reconsideration of Deleuze’s understanding of sexual pleasure. Deleuze critiques the hierarchal organisation of bodies and their facialisation through social, political and gendered functions, and yet, a closer look at the rerouting of sexual pleasures of anomalous bodies suggests that his rejection of the orgasm rests also on ableist assumptions about how bodies work. Employing Deleuzian concepts such as becoming and faciality, this chapter analyses the ‘disabling’ of sexuality, that is, the way that sexual pleasure is hijacked by cultural, political, commercial and medical discourses. At the same time, reading Deleuze through discourses on disability makes it possible to ask if bodies that, in different ways, fail to function according to predetermined standards can express more productive relations between the orgasm and the body than the one Deleuze envisions. If previous chapters have begun to problematise the notion of a human sexuality, Chapter 6 notes more specifically how both the concept of sexuality and the concept of the animal have been employed to construct distinctly human subjectivities. This

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constitutes one reason why Deleuze rejects these notions in favour of desire and becoming-animal. While this book explores the possibilities Deleuze misses out on when he dismisses the productivity of sexual pleasure more generally, this chapter looks specifically at how his and Guattari’s notion of becoming-animal may help develop an understanding of a nonhuman orgasm. The possibilities, as well as the problems, of combining discussions of sexuality with ‘real’ animals is compared to ways in which becoming-animal of sexuality can break up Deleuze’s own deadlock positioning of the orgasm as speaking to an economy of lack. The chapter shows that while the economy of sexual pleasure that he rejects can be compared to the economy of domesticated animals, there is also the possibility of another, demonic pleasure and orgasm which corresponds rather to his and Guattari’s understanding of packs, rhythms and territoriality. As in the other chapters, Deleuze provides the tools needed to expand on the possibilities he never pursues himself. The last chapter proper picks up on the issues of temporality and psychoanalysis as recurring problematics in previous chapters to explore the implications of Deleuze’s rejection of the productivity of the orgasm and sexual pleasure in relation to his and Guattari’s Marx-inspired conception of capitalism. The capitalist movements of de- and recoding that liberate flows, only to reclaim and employ them in the service of capital, are used to analyse the ways in which sexual pleasure and the orgasm are put in the service of capital production. This ‘capture’ of sexuality, which Deleuze and Guattari analyse in Anti-Oedipus, is one of the reasons why it is left behind in their development of a more creative conceptualisation of impersonal desire. The chapter shows how the ‘money shot’ in pornographic film is emblematic of the way in which sexuality is captured by capitalist flows and agrees with Deleuze that facialised forms of sexual pleasure offer little in terms of creativity. However, this chapter argues, by lingering with this paranoiac movement of capture, Deleuze remains blind to the revolutionary potential of sexual pleasure. Rather despite themselves, Deleuze and Guattari’s project of creating schizzo-flows which unsettle capitalist and Oedipal economies can be employed to develop a more productive understanding of the orgasm. By rethinking temporal and representational structures of the orgasm as it is inscribed in contemporary culture, the chapter proposes a becoming-woman of orgasm as a break with, rather than a confirmation of, economies of capitalism, representation, subjectivity and psychoanalysis.

14 Introduction: The Body without Orgasm

The epilogue of the book outlines a more personal reflection on the relation between the project of writing the book and the notion of ‘Swedish sin’. By briefly mapping the historical development of my home country, Sweden, as a country identified with liberated sexual practices while returning to some of the central arguments made throughout the book, I discuss ways in which sexuality is entangled with politics, economy and cultural traditions. At the same time, I suggest that the endless curiosity that propels Lena Nyman to explore sexual pleasures as well as world economies in Vilgot Sjöman’s famous film I am Curious (Yellow) in the 1960s needs to be maintained. Like Deleuze’s desire, sexual pleasure does not stop – it continues to produce assemblages and reconfigure bodies. It is only if we stop being curious that meaning stagnates. Lena, who passed away in 2011, may have stopped being curious. But as this book shows, I, and many others with me, have not.

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1 A Nonlinear History of Sexuality: Deleuze with Foucault

We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality. (Foucault 1990a: 5)

Introduction Deleuze’s understanding of pleasure as a mode of capture and his claiming of desire as a mode of production build on a rather disparate tradition of theories of sexuality. Therefore, it is necessary to approach his oeuvre with an eye to his ideas about pleasure and desire by identifying key moments of influence. Our point of arrival is an explication of how the relationship between desire and pleasure in Deleuze is illuminated, enhanced or problematised by the rich tradition of writing on which it is built. Deleuze’s philosophy of desire in general demands attention to how both cultural artefacts and philosophical theories produce problematic relations between desire and pleasure. His two most central interlocutors are Foucault and psychoanalysis. These two are central enough, not just to Deleuze’s philosophy but to conceptions of sexuality more generally, to warrant some space of their own at the beginning of this study, and while this chapter will be devoted to the study of the former, the latter will be analysed in the following chapter. Because of Foucault’s position as a historian of sexuality, the relationship between Deleuze’s and Foucault’s philosophies, and indeed parts of their private interrelations, has to be interrogated closely. It would seem that between them, Foucault and Deleuze have the potential to theorise, critique and creatively rethink notions of sexuality. Foucault’s extensive investigation of the deployment of sexuality, the construction of sex, and the politico-historical powers

16 A Nonlinear History of Sexuality: Deleuze with Foucault on which they are based in combination with Deleuze’s expansive theorisation of what bodies are and what they can do should enable a reconsideration of sex and sexuality that is politically explosive as well as socially creative. They both question the claim of psychoanalysis on sexual bodies, and they both work to expand on how the idea of the political and social seizure of bodies and desires closes down the possibilities of what bodies and desires are capable of. Together, their theories of sexuality and desire have the potential to identify, dismantle and revolutionise ideas of sexuality, historically, politically and socially. At least initially, therefore, it seems surprising that neither Foucault nor Deleuze seems to have been particularly interested in such an operation, or rather co-operation. Admittedly, there are some important points of contact between the two philosophers when it comes to the topic of sexuality. Foucault writes the preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus in 1972 and recognises this volume as an invigorating critique of Freud as well as an antidote to ‘all forms of fascism’ (Foucault 1983: xiii). In 1977, Deleuze writes a letter to Foucault (later published as ‘Desire and Pleasure’) after the publication of the first volume of his History of Sexuality. Almost a decade later, Deleuze writes his book Foucault and sees a Foucault who struggles to escape the impasses of power that he has been so successful in identifying. Yet, these partial overlaps in their sympathies and interests do not bring the two philosophers closer. On the contrary, the matter of sexuality and desire, it seems, marked the beginning of a rift between them. Already, in the 1977 letter to Foucault, Deleuze writes that from this point ‘I no longer know how to situate myself in terms of Michel’s present research’ (Deleuze 2007a: 133). Similarities, points of overlap and connectivities between Deleuze’s and Foucault’s work are frequently pointed out and employed. As Wendy Grace notes, interpretations of Foucault frequently emphasise the commonality between the two writers (Grace 2009: 52). One similarity, as I point out in Chapter 4, is that neither of them manages to fully take into account the history of female sexuality. Recently, however, work has been done exploring, rather, the differences between them and, in particular, the differences relating to the topic of sexuality. In ‘The Passion and the Pleasure: Foucault’s Art of Not Being Oneself’ (2003), Keith Robinson discusses how Foucault sees in pleasure and passion the potential of not being oneself, and, in ‘ “The End of the Monarchy of Sex”: Sexuality and Contemporary Nihilism’, Noys argues that Foucault’s second book on the history

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of sexuality marked a ‘definitive break’ with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire (Noys 2008: 108). Grace’s ‘Faux Amis: Foucault and Deleuze on Sexuality and Desire’ (2009), as the title suggests, argues that Foucault and Deleuze are incompatible in terms of their respective theorisation of sexuality and desire (Grace 2009: 53). What one can do, of course, once such important differences have been analysed, is to abandon these particular tensions and work, instead, to find other ways in which the combination of Deleuzian and Foucauldian theories can help in reconceptualising sexuality. This is Mary Beth Mader’s strategy in Sleights of Reason (2011), where she uses Foucault’s theorisation of context-specific deploy- ments of sex as the grounds from which she can employ Deleuze’s ‘conceptual constructivism’ to interrogate a number of ‘sleights’ in their role as central components in the ‘concept of sex’ (Mader 2011: 4). Mader largely leaves behind notions of desire and pleasure and shows, instead, how concepts of ‘norm’, ‘bisexuality’ and ‘development’ can be seen to function as ruses that help maintain sex as a social category (Mader 2011: 3). The purpose of the present chapter, however, is not primarily to locate what both Robinson and Grace convincingly argue are important differences between Deleuze and Foucault on the topic of sexuality, nor to settle for a productive combination of Deleuze and Foucault on sex. The aim is neither an attempt to create a nonexisting cohesion nor to continue stress- ing their conceptual separation, but to work through Deleuze and Foucault on pleasure, sexuality and desire in order to see what kind of energy is produced if we bring together these tensions.

Denouncing Psychoanalysis It may be obvious, but it is still worth paying attention to the fact that Foucault writes the preface to Anti-Oedipus in 1972, that is, several years before he writes his three-volume work on sexuality. When he identifies Deleuze and Guattari’s book as an ‘ars erotica, ars theo- retica, ars politica’ (Foucault 1983: xii), he has not yet systematised, as he does in The Will to Knowledge, the crucial difference between ars erotica and scientia sexualis as the two main historical procedures for establishing the truth of sex. The former, found largely in non- Western and non-contemporary countries and periods, draws truth from pleasure. Through its intensity, quality, duration, and physical and spiritual reverberations, pleasure is defined in and of itself rather than according to external standards of law or utility. The latter,

18 A Nonlinear History of Sexuality: Deleuze with Foucault identified by Foucault as unique to ‘our’ civilisation, defines the truth of sexuality by means of knowledge production; the conditions of sexuality are defined and determined by a scientific discourse which determines its moral, legal and societal limits (Foucault 1990a: 58). So what does Foucault mean when he immediately identifies Anti- Oedipus as an ars erotica? We should, Foucault writes in his brief preface, read Anti-Oedipus not as philosophy but as art. Because of Deleuze and Guattari’s characteristic production of a wealth of new notions and concepts, their book does not so much answer the question ‘why’ as ‘how’ – what it offers is not a method of science but a mode of production (Foucault 1983: xii). The book, Foucault argues, combats the ‘sad militants’ aiming to preserve the order of political discourse and protect the Truth, the ‘poor technicians of desire’ who reduce desire to lack, and the historical as well as the fascism within us, and thereby abandons issues of morality in favour of a de-centralising, proliferating desire that cannot be captured either by unitary discourses or by fascist power hunger. Mutual grounds are established, then, through the denunciation of psychoanalysis and fascist appropriations of desire. By the time Foucault embarks on his own project on sexuality, however, it becomes clear that while they both reject psychoanalysis as a means to understand sexuality and desire, Deleuze and Guattari end up with wildly different alternatives to the Freudian model. While Foucault ends up writing a history of sexuality, Deleuze and Guattari remould earlier conceptualisations of desire. And we can be more specific than that: if Deleuze vehemently rejects the notion of pleasure, as we noted in the introduction, Foucault feels an equally strong aversion to the notion of desire. Foucault, Deleuze recounts in ‘Desire and Pleasure’, cannot stand the word ‘desire’. Even a different use of the term evokes lack to the point where Foucault feels the need for a different word. ‘So what I call “pleasure” is maybe what you call “desire” ’ (Foucault, quoted in Deleuze 2007a: 130). In some sense, Foucault might have a point, since his use of ‘pleasure’ and Deleuze’s use of ‘desire’ suggest some conceptual overlap. Robinson notes that while pleasure is about stratification and organisation and about negating desire for Deleuze, Foucault sees pleasure as unknown and pure in the sense that it is undamaged by medical and naturalistic discourses, and because it is ‘neither ascribed or ascribable’ (Foucault, in Robinson 2003: 125). Turn the terms around and we can see how the notion of pleasure is hopelessly inscribed by economies of lack for Deleuze, just as Foucault sees the concept of desire as irrevocably

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damaged by the different previous discourses that have claimed it. At the same time, however, and despite the fact that both concepts are created as part of a search for a vocabulary capable of articulating the forces that resist ‘the lures of identity’, as Tim Dean puts it (Dean 2012: 486), it is a surprisingly idle comment that Foucault allows himself to make, since neither he nor Deleuze took the idea of concepts lightly and they both took the notions of desire and pleasure most seriously. As Deleuze notes, their differences are not simply a matter of vocabulary (Deleuze 2007a: 130). Deleuze begins ‘Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire- Pleasure-Jouissance)’ by quoting Foucault. He refers to Archaeology of Knowledge and his point is about the emergence of a new type of statements (énoncés) in the Greek city. This is the beginning of a discussion of the dangers of the idea of individual statements that have coloured Western thought. Not only does the idea of individual statements determine and fix the relation between subject and statement, this idea also gives birth, through Lacan, to the idea of the split in the subject that the statement produces (Deleuze 2001: 92). Along with dualism and psychoanalysis, this idea establishes an inherent lack in the subject and in desire, and it is this idea that calls Deleuze to conclude that the relation between desire and pleasure in Western thought is ‘completely rotten’ (Deleuze 2001: 95). This type of engagement with Foucault’s ideas is characteristic of Deleuze at large. He picks up important cues from Foucault’s work mainly in order to support his critique of desire-pleasure. Throughout Foucault, Deleuze refers mainly to The Will to Knowledge and the discursive claiming of sexuality as truth and law – The History of Sexuality will ‘show how we can believe in a sexual repression operating within language’ (Deleuze 2006a: 25); Foucault shows how words and phrases of the Victorian age function to determine sexuality’s ‘conditions, systems, places, occasions, and interlocutors’ (Deleuze 2006a: 46), and how sexuality becomes ‘hystericized’ (Deleuze 2006a: 64). In the last chapter of Foucault, Deleuze picks up on the negative power of Foucault’s first book on sexuality. He suggests that Foucault had ‘trapped himself within the concept of power relations’ and that he had neglected the points of resistance. The book, Deleuze notes, ‘closes on a doubt’ about the possibility of escaping power (Deleuze 2006a: 79). Here it seems, and has been argued before, that Foucault, in lacking an extended notion of desire, is unable to present the body as anything other than a passive receptor of reactive forces (Blaikie 2003: 91). At the same time, it has also been suggested that

20 A Nonlinear History of Sexuality: Deleuze with Foucault it is nonetheless possible to ‘draw out the possibilities of refusal and reformulation (and revolt)’ in Foucault’s work (Noys 2008: 119). Noys suggests that Foucault provides a largely unacknowledged possibility of contesting the rule of sex through a politics of refusal, an ‘anti-sex’ position that refuses to traverse the terrains of sex as power and truth (Noys 2008: 105, 108). Noys’s proposal, which, as I noted in the introductory chapter, employs not only Foucault but also Badiou to articulate a politics of asceticism that can resist the nihilism of enjoyment that colours contemporary capitalism, is of new types of enjoyment and attachments. But when Deleuze makes local dips into Foucault’s comprehensive project he selects from Foucault the theorisation of sexuality in relation to language and law that he needs in order to be able to reject the potential power of sexuality. From this perspective, one might argue that Deleuze is not in opposition to Foucault’s take on sexuality so much as he is picking up on what Noys calls the ‘second gesture of disengagement from sexuality’ (Noys 2008: 108) and incorporating it into his development of impersonal desire. Indeed, as it appears here, the inextricability of sexuality and pleasure with power may be seen to support rather than negate Deleuze’s own project of building up a productive conceptualisation of impersonal desire beyond the use of pleasure.

Impasses of Desire and Pleasure At the same time, and as becomes obvious in ‘Desire and Pleasure’, Deleuze and Foucault are, in fact, miles apart in terms of their conceptualisation of desire, pleasure and sexuality. In this text – origi- nally, as we have noted, a letter to Foucault after the publication of the first volume of History of Sexuality in 1976 and later published in Magazine littéraire in 1994 – Deleuze is strikingly critical towards Foucault. He repeatedly, and more or less explicitly, suggests that the latter’s conceptualisations are immature and that their use-value remains to be determined. For example, he suggests that Foucault does not provide enough explanation for what Deleuze sees as a return to what amounts to a constituting subject (Deleuze 2007a: 123). Foucault, Deleuze argues, introduces the possibility of using the notions of power relationships, truths and pleasures in new ways but he fails to develop them fully (Deleuze 2007a: 129). For example, he is not convinced that micro arrangements can be described in terms of power (Deleuze 2007a: 124). In the face of the primacy Foucault gives to power/knowledge relationships, Deleuze presses

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the importance of desire here because to him desire always comes first. Power is an affectation of desire rather than resulting from it, and this Deleuze perceives to be a difference between him and Foucault (Deleuze 2007a: 125). He suggests that Foucault’s work lacks the equivalent of, and presumably therefore also the capacity for, deterritorialisations and lines of flight connected to historical determinations (Deleuze 2007a: 129). For Deleuze, this failure to locate more productive uses of sexuality can be directly related to Foucault’s use of pleasure. If desire constitutes the social in itself, then pleasure attains the status of blockage. Pleasure, Deleuze writes, lacks positive value because it ‘is on the side of strata and organization’ where desires are ‘regulated by pleasures’ (Deleuze 2007a: 131). In other words, desire precedes power but can be blocked and regulated by pleasure. If pleasure can block desire and desire precedes power, the logical conclusion would be that pleasure can regulate power. In this case, pleasure is not only ‘rotten’ or ‘deplorable’, as he argues, but absolutely central to an analysis of power. This, indeed, seems to be what Foucault realises and also why, perhaps, he is so reluctant to give up the discourse of pleasure in favour of reclaiming desire as a new concept. For if both Deleuze and Foucault reject the notion of desire as it has been constructed by psychoanalysis, and this is the reason why the latter decides to abandon it while the former is determined to reclaim it, this may tell us something about the willingness or unwillingness to create concepts. Deleuze does not give up desire but works to replace the psychoanalytic tradition with another one that makes it possible to claim the term as creative and productive. At the same time, one might argue that Deleuze abandons pleasure for the same reason. A similar but opposite strategy to their respective employment of pleasure and desire may be found in the different ways in which Deleuze and Foucault deal with the notion of the subject. While Foucault continues to discuss the subject, not least in his tracing of the ‘desiring subject’, Deleuze largely tries to abandon the notion in favour of more creative ideas of folding and becoming. If it is indeed a reference to Deleuze and Guattari, as Noys argues, Foucault would say that this attempted abandonment of the subject fails. He maintains, in his introduction to The Use of Pleasure, that the notion of a desiring subject lingers also in conceptions of desire ‘that sought to detach itself from it’ (Noys 2008: 108; Foucault 1992: 5). Successful or not, Deleuze suggests that one should work to find new functions and new fields in place of superfluous concepts. As he writes in Jean-

22 A Nonlinear History of Sexuality: Deleuze with Foucault

Luc Nancy’s collected volume Who Comes After the Subject? (1991), ‘[A] concept does not die simply when one wants it to’, therefore it is not very meaningful to criticise it (Deleuze 1991a: 94). The fact that his contribution to the book stretches to only barely one and a half pages in itself places emphasis on his lack of interest in what Nancy calls ‘one of the great motifs of contemporary philosophical work’ (Nancy 1991: 4). Yet, when it comes to desire, it is Deleuze who sticks with old terms and Foucault who abandons them. Indeed, Foucault seems to have a similar approach to the notion of desire as Deleuze does to the subject. The point of change in terms of concepts has a particular relevance also to the notion of sexuality itself. As Foucault notes at the beginning of The Use of Pleasure, the term ‘sexuality’ did not emerge until the early nineteenth century. While this clearly does not mark the emergence of sexual behaviour, it does, Foucault argues, link sexual experience to the development of fields of knowledge as well as religious, judicial, pedagogical and medical rules and norms. Already in The Archaeology of Knowledge, first published in 1969, Foucault calls out for a theory of sexuality that would reveal how the prohibitions and exclusions, the freedoms and the transgressions of sexuality are all linked to particular discursive practices (Foucault 2002: 213). When Foucault writes the history of sexuality, he does so with the ambition to locate its modes of construction beyond the juridical power of the law but within the biopolitical organisation of bodies. He works with a concrete historical material of articulation that reveals sexuality as a period-specific construction and how this construction became part of power/knowledge systems. He notes that the establishment of the term ‘sexuality’ itself is linked to the point where what had been one of life’s experiences turned into a central component of one’s subject position (Foucault 1992: 4–5). In the first of the three History of Sexuality books, Foucault shows how desire has been very firmly situated in relation to power. In fact, it is this link between desire and power that controls sexuality and restricts pleasure. A psychoanalytic tradition that sees desire as inevitably bound up with law, he points out, would judge it vanity to search for a desire that would be beyond power. His own ambition is nonetheless to achieve this, as he states that the analysis of power and sexuality which he works to develop builds exactly on the possibility of escaping what he calls the juridico-discursive representation of power which claims desire as its own (Foucault 1990a: 82). Such a representation of power governs sexuality in terms of negativity,

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prohibition and law. It can only function to exclude, block, disallow and separate sexuality into binary systems of the licit and the illicit (Foucault 1990a: 83–4). The conception of desire as conceived in relation to juridical and discursive power and the law, Foucault suggests, reaches back to ‘the theoreticians of right and the monarchic institution’ and crucially, it must be escaped if we are to be able to analyse the operation of power in a historical framework. We must, he argues, ‘construct an analysis of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code’ (Foucault 1990a: 90). What Foucault suggests here is that conceptions of desire have had a direct link with the power of the law, and since this is a law whose influence on sexuality we need to escape if we are to find a more rewarding way of analysing the history of sexuality, the expected conclusion would be that what is needed is an alternative conception of desire. Still, he immediately drops the concept of desire in this discussion as his focus remains with the problem of law. While his aim is to enable a mode of historical analysis that begins from a different theory of power, and thus, implicitly, a different theory of desire, his pursuit is formulated in terms of a conception of ‘sex without the law and power without the king’ (Foucault 1990a: 90–1). By the time Foucault writes his second book on The History of Sexuality he finds it impossible to uphold his original project of writing the history of the experience of sexuality. A theoretical shift has brought the notion of desire into the light in a way that makes it clear to him that sexuality is inextricably linked to the practices of the identification of the human subject as a subject of desire. On the one hand, the appearance of the notion of ‘sexuality’ in the early nineteenth century marks how sexual practices and pleasures become constituted as a definable and (ideally) controllable ‘experience’ in modern Western societies (Foucault 1992: 4). On the other hand, Foucault positions this experience as ‘dominated by the principle of “desiring man” ’ (Foucault 1992: 5). It is essential, Foucault suggests, that we understand the history of the desiring subject, which reaches across centuries, in order to comprehend how the history of sexuality came to be governed by a set of practices ‘by which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves, to decipher, recognise, and acknowledge themselves as subjects of desire’ (Foucault 1992: 5). Appearing as a classic biopolitical device, sexuality is, on the one hand, a way of securing the means to govern the behaviour of the subjects of society and on the other, encouraged as an individual practice by which subjects are encouraged to interpret desire as part

24 A Nonlinear History of Sexuality: Deleuze with Foucault of the nature of their very being. Such an understanding of desire posits it, at least seemingly, as akin to the way Deleuze and Guattari see pleasure, that is, as ‘an affection of a person or a subject’ and as ‘the only way for persons to “find themselves” in the process of desire that exceeds them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 173). At this point, it becomes clearer than ever that the uses of the concepts of desire and pleasure in Foucault and Deleuze, respectively, build on different social, historical and political premises. What Deleuze does not acknowledge is that Foucault’s solution to what he feels is the contaminated notion of desire is to reclaim the notion of pleasure from its pre-Oedipal history. The stubbornness with which Deleuze maintains his rejection of pleasure suggests two things about Deleuze’s writing on sexuality, one of which is distinctly Deleuzian and one of which is not. To begin with, the frames within which Deleuze exercises his philosophy rely on a specific set of Western, contemporary and largely male thinkers and writers. This is nothing new and, in terms of Anti-Oedipus as a book, it may to some extent be explained because it, unlike the following Capitalism and Schizophrenia volume, finds a very specific target in Freud. In his other work, however, and especially when he writes about sexuality, the exclusion of types of experience that exceed the fixed context of cultural references seems more delimiting. If a limited (if extensive within those limitations) context of reference is typical of Deleuze, what is less typical is the polemics with which he separates desire and pleasure. Assuming that the psychoanalytic context shapes Deleuze’s approach to pleasure, Foucault is, in fact, of great use as we can trace pre-Oedipal historical relations between desire and pleasure and test Deleuze’s approach against them.

Pre-Oedipal Desire and Pleasure For example, testing Deleuze’s rather sharp contrast between pleasure and desire against what Foucault describes as the more circular dynamics of the Greeks’ conception of sexuality opens up these concepts to the force of difference. To the Greeks, one of the essential characteristics of aphrodisia (best, if rather clumsily, translated as ‘sexuality’) is the close linkage between its three components: the sexual act, pleasure and desire. A ‘solid unity’ joins these three that continually feed into each other in a circular movement – ‘the desire that leads to the act, the act that is linked to pleasure, and the pleasure that occasions desire’. Importantly, the ontology of this circular

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unity is not one of deficiency but one of force. That force links the acts, pleasures and desires together is also reflected in the nature of the ethical question regarding aphrodisia which is not interested in identifying what desires or acts or pleasures are at stake so much as in determining the strength of the force of the pleasure and desires (Foucault 1992: 42–3). Foucault explains how this conception of sexuality brings with it questions more related to ethics than to morals. The recognition of the potential force and intensity of aphrodisia makes moderation of central concern. For Aristotle, as Foucault explains, desires are natural and common to everyone and the only offence possible pertains to ‘the more’, that is, to excessive quantity (Foucault 1992: 45). It is also in relation to moderation that the relation between desire and pleasure is determined for the Greeks. While pleasure is seen as a force strong enough to need to be kept in control, the objective is not, Foucault notes, to ‘reduce pleasure to nothing’ (Foucault 1992: 55). On the contrary, the Greeks wanted to maintain as much pleasure as possible, and to do so it was important to tie pleasure to the desire for it. Desire itself is placed as the cause of pleasure, which must be sustained by the deliberation of desire. The equilibrium of pleasure and desire is to be found by postponing sexual pleasure until one craves it (Foucault 1992: 56). Quite the reverse of Deleuze’s exhortation that the ‘Christian curse’ that places desire as based on lack goes back to the Greeks (Deleuze 2001: 95), the Greeks, as Foucault delineates their practices, find that desire is in a mutually dependent relationship with pleasure. Faced with this Greek conception of the composition and internal relations of sexuality, Deleuze’s rejection of pleasure appears as an unnecessary delimitation of sexuality. To begin with, the circular movement of aphrodisia clearly contradicts Deleuze’s surprisingly polarised distinction between pleasure and desire. Instead of positing pleasure as a ‘deplorable fact’ that puts an end to desire, the notion of each of the three components of sexuality feeding into each other creates a sense of continuous production. Such continuous production is more in line with Deleuze’s conception of desire than his considerations of pleasure and sexual activity, and even adds to it a more Deleuzian dimension than what Deleuze himself manages to summon. This brings us to the second reason why Deleuze’s demotion of pleasure in sexuality emerges as weak. The Greek model not only refrains from excluding, or at least devaluating, elements of sexuality, it also brings out a connectivity between them that is fully in line with the productivity of forces that Deleuze usually bespeaks. It

26 A Nonlinear History of Sexuality: Deleuze with Foucault recognises the superabundant force of sexuality, and by acknowledging the force of both pleasures and desires and sexual acts precludes the negativity that Deleuze ascribes to pleasure. In correspondence with the ideas of the care of the self, which, Foucault notes in his third book on sexuality, may be said to peak under the first two centuries of the Roman imperial period (Foucault 1990b: 45), Seneca theorises the pleasure in oneself that arises from successful access to, and balance within, one’s self. This kind of pleasure is completely self-sufficient, since it emerges from within the self and, once achieved, this ‘woven fabric’ of pleasure cannot be disturbed by external influence (Foucault 1990b: 66). In contrast to this Stoic pleasure, Seneca placed voluptas, that is, the pleasure that is dependent on external and thereby more volatile means. This is a precarious kind of pleasure, since it is based on objects whose presence we cannot rely on, and thereby on a desire that may, or may not, find satisfaction (Foucault 1990b: 66). While voluptas is violent, uncertain, conditional and intimately connected with desire, the former, self-sufficient pleasure (which Seneca called gaudium or laetitia) was ‘an enjoyment without desire and without disturbance’ (Foucault 1990b: 68). What is interesting from a Deleuzian as well as a general contemporary philosophical perspective is that, while these two different forms or pleasure are of wildly different nature, neither is associated with any kind of inherent lack in the subject. Especially in the last two of Foucault’s three volumes on sexuality, Deleuze does seem to recognise a potential opening in Foucault. A central question that he sees arising from the latter parts of the project pertains to how a modern subjectivity may reject a desire that has become dominated by Law and rediscover ‘the body and its pleasures’ (Deleuze 2006a: 87). The date is crucial here – the work on Foucault was published in 1986, that is, after the two Capitalism and Schizophrenia books that Deleuze wrote with Guattari. Deleuze suggests that Foucault provides at least the basis for an answer to the question of how we would name ‘this new dimension, this relation to oneself that is neither knowledge nor power’ (Deleuze 2006a: 87). However, this answer seems also to present more questions for Deleuze: ‘Is the affect of self by self pleasure, or desire? Or do we call it “individual conduct”, the conduct of pleasure or desire?’ (Deleuze 2006a: 87). Deleuze indicates that the answer to these questions shifts over time. Since all ages carry their own problems and potentials, the only way to establish the right term, Deleuze argues, is to identify the limitation of the dimension of the self’s relation to the self over time.

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There is a danger in the continued use of outdated modes of being in the production of ourselves as subjects (Deleuze 2006a: 88). Deleuze uses Foucault against himself, not only by the way he criticises the lack of correspondence between the long period covered in The Use of Pleasure and Foucault’s own beliefs in the temporal specificity of power/knowledge relations (Deleuze 2006a: 88), but also by suggesting that this recognition of the importance of temporal specificity undermines Foucault’s own theorisation of pleasure. What he seems to suggest is that even if Foucault may have been right about the Greeks, and even about the Victorians, a long time has passed since their problems could serve as a basis for the relation of the self to the self in terms of pleasure. ‘Perhaps’, he writes, ‘there still is a Greek somewhere in Foucault, revealed by a certain faith which he places in a “problematization” of pleasures’ (Deleuze 2006a: 94). Thereby, Deleuze has covered his own basis at the same time as he has made his standpoint quite clear. Even if Foucault was right about the use of pleasures, his understanding is based on historical and no longer active components of subjectivation. However, Deleuze acknowledges, even if solutions cannot be transposed between different ages, old problems are reactivated as ‘givens’ in new ones (Deleuze 2006a: 94). In later interviews, he concedes, Foucault does extend his historical findings to present day problems of sexuality (Deleuze 2006a: 94). In the rest of this chapter in Foucault, Deleuze abandons terms such as pleasure and desire. And so, we are back to what I described above as Deleuze’s characteristic deployment of Foucault, and indeed, of the history of philosophy and literature at large: picking up what he needs to develop his own philosophical concepts while leaving the rest behind.

Conclusion Apart from suggesting a number of particularly Deleuzian strategies in his claim on desire and rejection of pleasure, this brief outline of differences between Deleuze’s and Foucault’s understandings of sexuality and the historical context of their respective disjunctive desire-pleasure divide underlines how period-specific Deleuze’s rejection of pleasure is. His reaction against the territorialising function of pleasure is tied specifically to a modern context and, even more specifically, to a Western context characterised by the influence of psychoanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari’s project is, of course, largely ‘anti-Oedipal’ in its nature and as such it is necessarily inflected by

28 A Nonlinear History of Sexuality: Deleuze with Foucault the psychoanalytic theories that inscribe desire as lack. Thereby, their work also constitutes an important influence on contemporary philosophers of desire such as Jean-François Lyotard, who try to productively reconfigure libidinal economies in terms of the political rather than the familial. Deleuze and Guattari’s project is mainly to reclaim the positivity of desire from its psychoanalytic interpretations and this specific focus of this project may explain the lack of interest in pleasure. As we will discuss in the next section, it seems as though Deleuze is much more indebted to Lacan than he acknowledges; that his point of view remains within the context which he is explicitly working to resist.

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2 Psychoanalysis Unhinged: Deleuze with Lacan, Klein and Reich

But how very strange this domain seems, simply because of its multiplicity – a multiplicity so complex that we can scarcely speak of one chain or even of one code of desire. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 38)

Introduction That Deleuze and Guattari disapprove of Freud’s conception of desire has been well noted. Their vehement rejection of the regulation of desire through Oedipal structures and the triangle of daddy-mummy- me in many ways serves as the very starting point of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. On the topic of the orgasm, Freud’s theories, which we will have occasion to return to repeatedly through this book, not least in Chapter 3, are largely preoccupied with keeping sexual pleasure under control and within the limits of ‘normal’ sexual exchange. Thus, for example, he argues that once girls hit puberty, clitoral orgasm should be discouraged in favour of the vaginal alternative since the recurrence of the former could result in frigidity. Since Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of Freudian theories are so unequivocal, and because so many studies have further clarified this relation, the present chapter will focus on the psychoanalytic theories that remain an important influence on Deleuze. In a note for the Italian edition of The Logic of Sense, Deleuze writes that what happened to him since he wrote this book is that he met Guattari. Deleuze ascribes to his own writing in The Logic of Sense a ‘naïve and guilty sense of satisfaction with respect to psychoanalysis’ (Deleuze 2007b: 65). He was, he writes, trying to render psychoanalysis inoffensive. But when he met Guattari and began to seek out new methods and directions, something happened. Deleuze and Guattari ‘refuse to play “take it or leave it” ’ with psychoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 117). It is crucial, therefore, that a further delineation of the influences on Deleuze’s conception of desire and pleasure takes into account the writings

30 Psychoanalysis Unhinged: Deleuze with Lacan, Klein and Reich of the most central figures in terms of influence: Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein and Wilhelm Reich. As Néstor Braunstein notes, psychoanalysis, with the exception of Reich, has never been particularly keen on the idea of the orgasm (Braunstein 2003: 107). But since Deleuze and Guattari’s work is largely a severe, if creative, criticism of psychoanalysis, and since what they are perhaps most known for is their bold reconceptualisation of what was previously primarily a psychoanalytic discourse of desire, there may be reason to look in their writing on psychoanalytic theorists for ways in which the orgasm, too, could be claimed from its deplorable connections with lack and the cogito. While Deleuze and Guattari’s first Capitalism and Schizophrenia book is an obvious attack on psychoanalysis and what they call the analytic imperialism of Oedipus, it is also an attempt to salvage the aspects of Lacan, Klein and Reich that are of use to them. Lacan especially, they maintain, needs rescuing from those mistaken disciples who insist on re-Oedipalising his theories and ‘tighten the nuts and bolts where Lacan had just loosened them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 83). This chapter inquires further into these recovered relations in order to find clues as well as aid in the project of, in turn, recovering a Deleuzian understanding of sexual pleasure.

Lacan, Pleasure, Lack Deleuze and Guattari’s overwhelming critique of the way in which the idea of the Oedipus complex structures and closes down desire is also a recognition of how Lacan had begun to subvert the field of psychoanalysis, especially in relation to Oedipus and the instincts. Lacan, they point out, is not interested in the Oedipus complex (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 53), and he appears as an ally in the insertion of the real machinic and desiring production into what, for Freud, was only the relation between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. Lacan ‘saves’ psychoanalysis from Oedipus, albeit at the cost of regression and the despotic apparatus of the Law and the Signifier (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 217). In Anti-Oedipus, Lacan is even positioned as the first schizoanalyst: the ‘first to schizo- phrenize the analytic field’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 363). By lifting desire from Oedipal structures, Deleuze and Guattari see how Lacan opens for a productive reorganisation of desire. But despite the fact that they find in Lacan an ‘admirable theory of desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 27), Deleuze, in an interview only a year after the

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original publication of Anti-Oedipus, seems to have little patience with Lacan on the topic of desire and sexuality. If Deleuze proposes that ‘there still is a Greek’ in Foucault, he suggests that Lacan is ‘the last Cartesian’. Because he refers all statements back to the subject and its splitting as its cause, Lacan, Deleuze argues, offers no way out of the discourse of the cogito (Deleuze 2001: 93). Lacan thereby contributes to perpetuating ‘one of the multiple traps of psychoanalysis’, and indeed Western thought at large, which links the production of statements to the individual subject and fixes the cogito. Lacan’s theory, even in its conviction of the inevitable splitting, cutting and separating of the subject through statements, remains within the process of the cogito and the ‘metaphysics of the subject’ (Deleuze 2001: 93–4). If this 1973 interview thus appears to contradict, or at least make more complex, what in Anti-Oedipus appears to be praise of Lacan, it also expresses some fascinating tensions in the conceptual relationship that Deleuze had to Lacan. Let us first state some similarities across Deleuze’s and Lacan’s work on sexuality and desire. Deleuzian desire and Lacanian jouissance are both seen to exceed rather than end with pleasure. Neither of them can thereby be seen as an end-point. Lacan, Braunstein suggests, dismisses the idea that the drive would aim to reach a goal where it would be satisfied. Unlike Freudian desire, jouissance is beyond the pleasure principle and, as such, it is without purpose or goal (Braunstein 2003: 106–7). As with Deleuzian desire, then, jouissance lacks a single direction. Both Deleuze and Lacan also give up the dirty, messy sexuality of genital bodies. Satisfaction and orgasm interrupt both Lacan’s jouissance and Deleuze’s desire into what Braunstein describes as ‘the baseness of natural law’ (Braunstein 2003: 107). If Deleuze discards conceptions of desire that see it as ‘a dirty little thing that wakes us up, and that wakes us up in the most disagreeable manner’ (Deleuze 2001: 96), Lacan makes sure to emphasise that jouissance, associated with the mystical, sublime and transcendental, is separated from ‘questions of fucking’ (Lacan 1985: 147). For both Lacan and Deleuze, in other words, physical pleasure stands in the way of jouissance and desire, respectively. For Lacan, jouissance cannot be conflated with orgasm, and for Deleuze, the orgasm is linked to the deplorable interruption of desire. For both of them, conceptions of pleasure and orgasm are positioned as dirty little things that somehow must be fitted into their otherwise machinic or transcendent ambitions. Here they both react against Freud.

32 Psychoanalysis Unhinged: Deleuze with Lacan, Klein and Reich

Lacan argues that when Freud ‘elevated sexual satisfaction to such an exemplary position, he was simultaneously underlining its limits and impasses’. He then quotes Freud’s statement that ‘ “we must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction” ’ (quoted in Lacan 1985: 112–13). What Freud seems to suggest here is that sexual pleasure is pathetically inadequate when it comes to satisfying desire. We will never be done with desire and can, as Deleuze rebukes, at best hope for temporary discharges of pleasure (Deleuze 2001: 96). This ‘rotten’ idea of pleasure that Deleuze ascribes not only to Freud but to Western thinking at large is what makes Deleuze reject pleasure as a useful philosophical category. In this respect, he takes on board Freud’s conception of pleasure since he rejects pleasure on these same grounds. Freud, however, does not give up the category of pleasure. On the contrary, the function and order of sexual pleasure and the libido constitute a central aspect of his work. Even if he downplays sexual pleasure as ‘nothing but the pleasure of an organ that depends on the activity of the genitals’ (quoted in Braunstein 2003: 107), he still, Lacan reproaches, is preoccupied with questions such as ‘Petty considerations about clitoral orgasm’ (Lacan 1985: 145). A major difference between Deleuze and Lacan when it comes to desiring economies is that while the former draws a line between desire and pleasure, these concepts both end up on the same side for Lacan. Where Deleuze sees pleasure as an obstacle for desire, Lacan, as Braunstein notes, places desire as well as pleasure (as well as phan- tasy) as barriers that regulate, and thereby stand in the way of, the transcendence of jouissance. Jouissance must in no way be confused with orgasm, since orgasm, as Tim Dean puts it, ‘confers a pleasure and a limit that helps regulate jouissance’ (Dean 2003: 249). Lacan, then, offers a rather different configuration of the terms pleasure, desire and orgasm than Deleuze since this is a configuration partly based on the presence of the notion of jouissance. The presence of this term also makes it difficult to make direct comparisons between Deleuze’s and Lacan’s understandings of desire while failing to take into account the notion of jouissance. If we want to understand something about economies of lack and economies of production we must take into account the differentiality inherent not only in the term desire, but also in pleasure. And if we are to discuss the differences between Deleuze and Lacan, we cannot do so without also comparing desire and jouissance.

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The difference in conceptual appropriation that, as we saw in the previous chapter, causes Foucault to abandon desire in favour of redrawing discussions of pleasure and Deleuze to perform the opposite operation, becomes more complex when we come to Lacan. Both Freud and Lacan, Braunstein points out, see a driving factor in the inevitable discrepancy between the satisfaction and pleasure attained and that strived for. This way, Braunstein notes, quoting Lacan, the driving factor ‘ “will permit of no halting at any position attained” ’ (Braunstein 2003: 106). This gap that opens up between pleasure strived for and pleasure attained could seem to point towards the lack that both Freud and Lacan ascribe to desire. And, of course, there is nothing controversial in suggesting that desire pertains to lack for Lacan. Central, however, is the fact that while Lacan, like Deleuze and Foucault, frequently includes the terms desire and pleasure in his discourse, he also, and unlike them, incorporates the notion of jouissance. This concept, sometimes put to use to mean anything from happiness to orgasm to petite mort, to ecstasy – and Deleuze, too, occasionally slips in his rigor when it comes to defining it – is decidedly, and importantly, different from both pleasure and desire. We could argue that it is incorrect of Deleuze to place jouissance in a ‘trinity’ with pleasure and orgasm, as he does in the 1973 interview (Deleuze 2001: 100). For Lacan, this trinity would rather include pleasure, orgasm and desire, all of which are impediments on the road to jouissance. To some extent, then, Lacan on desire is a false enemy for Deleuze. This is confirmed also looking back at Deleuze and Guattari’s more positive reaction to Lacan’s conception of desire in their Anti-Oedipus. What is at stake, however, and what explains Deleuze’s rejection of Lacan’s sexual economy, is the transcendence that Lacan ascribes jouissance. Presuming some correspondence between Deleuze’s and Lacan’s conceptualisations of desire, the radical difference emerges with Lacan’s understanding of jouissance as a rejection of pleasure, not so much because it prevents desire, but because it is subjective and physical, and thereby in the way of the sublimity of the transcendental. As Braunstein notes, this is a Hegelian move in that the experience of pleasure must be transcended for the subject to reach beyond himself and towards das Ding, or the Thing, as Lacan calls it (Braunstein 2003: 107). Needless to say, such Hegelian ambitions and their transcendent aspirations oppose Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence at its core. If, for Deleuze, the will to position desire outside an individual economy of pleasure means seeing it as part of

34 Psychoanalysis Unhinged: Deleuze with Lacan, Klein and Reich an immanent process of connectivity between bodies, Lacan’s jouissance rather moves in the realm beyond the subjective conscious. One may see the first as a movement sideways and the second as a movement upwards. Only then, in such a transcendent moment, does Lacan see jouissance as something equivalent to orgasm. There is no doubt, he writes, that Bernini’s famous statue of Saint Theresa in Rome portrays her as coming (Lacan 1985: 147). But this is a mystic coming, where the question of exactly what her jouissance is and where it is coming from remains unanswered. Accordingly, this is totally different from the ‘petty clitoral orgasms’ that Freud concerns himself with, not to mention the phallic jouissance which, ‘suf- ficiently stressed by the importance of masturbation in our practice’, Lacan describes as ‘the jouissance of the idiot’ (Lacan 1985: 152). Neither of these latter types of coming qualifies for Lacan essentially because, unlike the ecstatic pleasure of Saint Theresa, they are too knowable. For Lacan, and through issues of transcendence and the Real, the questions of pleasure and the orgasm are largely questions of language. For Deleuze, a major problem with Lacan is the way the hierarchal organisation of signification posits a split subject without access to the real. Jouissance plays a crucial role here since its very point is that it cannot be known. It is tied neither to signifier nor to signified, and thereby it cannot be placed in the divide in which meaning continually falters through the movement of signifiance. Caught between the false consistency of language constructed by the phallic and the Other which stands against the knowing that the subject lays claim to, Jacqueline Rose explains, the subject remains in the movement of signifiance (Rose 1985: 51). Because the phallic seeks authority from the Other but is refused, and because woman is positioned elsewhere to the phallic (Rose 1985: 51), Lacan privileges the feminine. There is, he famously writes, ‘a jouissance proper to her, this “her” which does not exist and which signifies nothing’ (Lacan 1985: 145). Woman, in other words, is closer to the not-knowing of jouissance. This not-knowing of woman’s jouissance can be related back to the sense of baseness Lacan (and Deleuze) ascribes physical pleasures. While the jouissance of woman, in its Otherness, cannot be known, man, in his jouissance, ends up supporting the signifier and thus unable to transcend signifiance (Lacan 1985: 152). If we recall Lacan’s rebuff of Freud’s ‘petty considerations with clitoral orgasm’, it becomes clear, however, that the reasons for this privileging of the feminine are not associated with the female body as much as they

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are related to the construction of sexuality through language. The positioning of woman and feminine jouissance has been the topic of much important attention, both from Lacan himself and from many post-Lacanian feminists, and will not, therefore, be developed further here. What it is important to note, though, is primarily two things. To begin with, jouissance represents the only opportunity for the subject to transcend its own impossibility; jouissance is the experience of absorption into absolute Other and the momentary escape of the subject from signifiance. Secondly, the manner in which Lacan privileges the feminine suggests that what interests him in sexuality is language rather than messy physicality of bodies; the function of jouissance is intrinsically tied to the structure of signifying chains. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze places sexuality on the one hand, and initially, as a prefiguration of the organisation of language and on the other, and subsequently, as a neutralisation of this prelinguistic state by its desexualisation through language. So sexuality comes to ‘inspire the first words made up of phonemes, morphemes, and semantemes’, but only at the point at which they are not yet in a relation with states of affairs. Once these linguistic elements arrive at this plane, they lose their initial sexual reverberation. Caught up in a language system, sexuality begins to mimic the organisation of sense and nonsense. Everything that will be said and all its meanings will be shadowed by sexual history that in itself will not be manifest but that will point to the initial sexual ‘appurtenance’ (Deleuze 2004a: 281). This way, sexuality exists only ‘as a vapor or dust, showing a path along which language has passed’ (Deleuze 2004a: 280). Sexuality is a surface that may be said to envelop or double around linguistic units – on the one side is prelinguistic sexuality and on the other, the organisation of sexuality through language. Importantly, these different series are neither about consciousness nor about the subject. Sexuality, rather, is a surface reverberating from the pressure of the different series. Two crucial differences between Lacan’s and Deleuze’s understandings of the relation between language and sexuality emerge here. To begin with, Lacan does not recognise any such thing as prelinguistic sexuality whereas, for Deleuze, sexuality has a prelinguistic series. This means that the signifying chains that tie and split the subject for Lacan (and for which jouissance is the only escape) are replaced in Deleuze by a play of sense and nonsense which keeps sexuality open. Deleuze recognises three series of sexuality: the erogenous connective synthesis, the phallic coordination of zones and the transformation of the phallic line into castration,

36 Psychoanalysis Unhinged: Deleuze with Lacan, Klein and Reich all of which are prelinguistic (Deleuze 2004a: 265). Even though sexuality is to some extent desexualised through language, these series of prelinguistic sexuality also produce a language that is sexual rather than a sexuality that is formed through language. This, and as Deleuze’s reference to the play of sense and nonsense suggests, opens sexuality to configurations rather than determinations through language. Secondly, Lacan sees sexuality as bound to the subject in that they both emerge from the split caused by language. Lacan’s account of sexuality, as Rose notes, is ‘solely in terms of its divisions – the divisions of the subject, division between subjects’ (Rose 1985: 47). For Deleuze, however, and as we have seen, sexuality is pre- individual. There is, writes Deleuze, a ‘play of surfaces in which only an a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual field is deployed’ and through which a nonsense and sense precede the ‘elaborate products of the static genesis’ (Deleuze 2004a: 283). If we add to Deleuze’s theory of prelinguistic series of sexuality in The Logic of Sense the way in which Deleuze and Guattari understand signs in Anti-Oedipus, we can also follow through the differences between Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari in terms of signification. ‘A rhizome instead of a series, says Guattari’ (Deleuze 2007b: 66). The signifying chains which, for Lacan, inevitably place the Real at one remove are replaced in Deleuze and Guattari by multiplicitous and heterogeneous relations between signs. They trace ‘indifferent signs’ which ‘follow no plan, [. . .] function at all levels and enter into any and every sort of connection’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 38). Deleuze and Guattari give credit to Lacan for discovering and incorporating the signifying chains into the unconscious. They deny, however, that these chains entail any exclusion. Exclusions, they argue, ‘can arise only as a function of inhibiter and repressers that eventually determine the support and firmly define a specific, personal subject’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 38–9). Because they see chains as heterogeneous and as capturing fragments from each other, they continually become through detachments, or ‘schizzes’. This is writing ‘on the very surface of the Real’, a polyvocal, transcursive inorganisation which disables the very idea of a search for something labelled ‘the Signifier’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 39). With all the outlined differences between Lacan and Deleuze in mind, it is easier to understand the former’s rejection of the orgasm than the latter’s, since Lacan sees it as maintaining the subject within natural law and thus preventing it from transcendence. The orgasm lacks productive power when it remains caught in a chain of meaning

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that for Lacan becomes but the unfruitful confirmation of the intrinsic relation between subject, signification and sexuality. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, whose chains have ‘nothing that impels them to become signifying’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 39), it is less clear why the orgasm cannot be seen to function as a part of the heterogeneous relation. Through this comparison with Lacanian language and sexual structures it becomes less comprehensible still why one should not be able to grasp pleasure and orgasm as polyvocal signs, and thereby as possibilities within the immanent process of desire. If the sign produces desire, as it would through Deleuze and Guattari’s Hjelmslevian reciprocal presupposition of signs and schizoid signifying chains, then rejecting orgasm as a deplorable affect of the subject reveals an unaccounted for dependence, firstly, on a Freudian conception of the inevitable impossibility of satisfaction and thereby an insufficiency of pleasure and secondly, on what Deleuze rejects as Lacanian Cartesianism. Only a (rather unlikely) porn star would say ‘I come, therefore I am.’

Klein, Orgasm, Objets Partiels As in their ambivalent relationship to Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari offer contradictory responses to Klein, who is sometimes described as being ‘perhaps worse than Freud’ (Deleuze 2007c: 84) and as writing a book that is ‘the shame of psychoanalysis’ (Deleuze et al. 2007: 101), and sometimes celebrated for rethinking the role of castration and for ‘the marvellous discovery of partial objects’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 44). Klein, Deleuze and Guattari note, works to locate some positive characteristics of the female sex by downplay- ing the role of castration and lack in favour of partial objects and flows (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 60). This way, a certain amount of phallocentricity can be avoided (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 295). At the same time, however, and as they note elsewhere, she restores ‘a specific vaginocentric feminine sexuality’ (Deleuze et al. 2007: 92) that is genital as well as determinate. Here, Klein comes to stand as their case in point against the organisation of the sexual body in general and genital sexuality in particular; even if we lighten the load of the phallus, we still end up with a reduction of sexuality to the difference between two sexes. Sexuality, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is completely misunderstood this way (Deleuze et al. 2007: 93). While what they take issue with here is Klein’s take on the development of the sexes in children, this focus on the two sexes may also be seen as a

38 Psychoanalysis Unhinged: Deleuze with Lacan, Klein and Reich reason why the idea of orgasm becomes so infected. Especially in the light of the differentiation between feminine and male pleasure, not least in Lacan but also among feminist writers, the orgasm remains within the discourse of the anthropomorphic distinction between two sexes. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s use of Klein also brings out ways in which psychoanalysis, at least as subverted by them, can provide some solutions. Klein, in fact, could provide ways of reconfiguring the idea of the deplorable orgasm through psychoanalysis itself. If Deleuze and Guattari would be at all interested in reclaiming the orgasm also in relation their own, more dynamic conception of the body and its sexualities, they might recognise that they themselves provide a way out of this deadlock. While Deleuze outlines some of Klein’s work on partial objects in The Logic of Sense, Anti- Oedipus adopts Klein’s idea of partial objects and puts it to work against some of the strands of psychoanalysis itself. Klein’s problem, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is that she fails to recognise the productive potential of the discovery of partial objects, that is, this ‘world of explosions, rotations, vibrations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 44). In Klein’s theory, they argue, these objects are caught up in causal, goal-oriented mechanisms of expression which make the partial object into an idealist entity rather than a means of genuine production. Partial objects could have the power to ‘shatter the iron collar of Oedipus’, but instead, Klein employs them only to confirm the familial structure of desire (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 45). However, and despite the rather harsh words uttered elsewhere, they seem to see Klein as a potential ally. Deleuze and Guattari claim partial objects as part of desiring- machines rather than parental images (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 46). This way, partial objects do not represent anything but rather serve as cogs in desiring-machines. They exchange the idea of ‘partial’ as in the Kleinian partiels, that is, an extensive part of what would otherwise be a complete unity, to partial as in partiaux, that is, intensities and positive multiplicities with transverse and polyvocal connections (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 309). This way, the body without organs ‘receives no specificity from any structural or personal unity’ but fills the space ‘each time an intensity fills it; signs of desire that compose a signifying chain but that are not themselves signifying’. So why would the orgasm have to signify? Transforming the theory of partial objects (partiels) as signifying determinate and lacking body fragments into a theory of partial objects (partiaux)

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which locates all desire in a continual network of intensities, Deleuze and Guattari themselves employ Klein in a way that could transform the idea of an orgasm as necessarily a part of the determinate organism and that opens for orgasm as a traversal of the body without organs. This would tie in also with Deleuze’s reinvestment of difference as an element of pleasure in Difference and Repetition. In the face of Freud’s systematically organised pleasure principle, Deleuze opens for pleasure that exists beyond ‘the value of being a principle of satisfaction’ and the confirmation of the continuity of past and present (Deleuze 2004b: 121). This pleasure is linked to virtual objects that do not correspond to already determined partial objects but to various parts of various human and nonhuman bodies (Deleuze 2004b: 125). Such virtual objects, or partiaux, do not function by means of identification. They both exceed the subject and resist any temporally continuous structure. Accordingly, such pleasure would not tie body to subject but would, rather, open the body to an atemporal becoming-pleasure as a becoming with.

Reich, Orgasm, Intensity If the orgasm is of little interest to Lacan, as we have seen, it is all the more interesting to Wilhelm Reich. Known for texts such as The Function of the Orgasm and the invention of the ‘orgone box’ – a device intended to increase orgasmic intensity, Reich would laugh in the face of Deleuze’s idea of the orgasm as the dead end of pleasure. Reich, as Deleuze notes, thinks desire with pleasure and also thinks pleasure along the ‘stronger and more violent word’ of orgasm (Deleuze 2001: 96). Reich reappears through the writings of Deleuze and Guattari as someone whose essential points become extremely useful but who himself largely fails to pursue them. His most quoted influence on Deleuze and Guattari, perhaps, is his reformulation of Spinoza’s question about why the masses come to desire their own oppression. If this quote is primarily related to desire, Deleuze and Guattari also praise Reich’s writing on sexuality in so far as he is going against Freud in terms of the familial primacy of sexuality, as well as in terms of the sexual function generally. Reich, they explain, places the cycle of sexuality – based on mechanical tension and electrical charge – before reproduction. This means not only that the familial is downplayed, but also that Reich expands the spatiality of sexuality. Sexuality, he states, is not limited to the procreative genitals but exists in the entire body (Reich 1973: 31). He also overturns

40 Psychoanalysis Unhinged: Deleuze with Lacan, Klein and Reich

Freud’s understanding of anxiety as the cause for sexual repression as he argues that anxiety is rather a result of it (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 291–2). The way in which Reich positions sexuality as primary to anxiety means that he resists Freud’s understanding of the death instinct, which, in turn, Deleuze and Guattari point out, frees up sexuality to a generative role (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 332). Nick Totton describes how orgasm comes to take the place of the death drive in Reich. Instead of the death drive, Reich sees the fear of the dissolution of the self through full orgasm (Totton 2006: 140). And even if Deleuze and Guattari are sceptical about sexuality as cosmic energy, they still, unsurprisingly, prefer this cosmic distribution of sexuality to the Freudian reduction of sexuality to the petty familial (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 292). But while Reich’s ideas about social desire and the politicisation of psychoanalysis are crucial to Deleuze and Guattari, they repeatedly see how Reich gets caught up in the Oedipal and the individual in a way that prevents these ideas from becoming truly radical. Most centrally, Deleuze and Guattari argue that Reich is the first to address the relationship between desire and the social field (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 118) but that he fails to locate the link between the two. What he would have needed, they suggest, is an idea of desiring production that links them together (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 30). Instead, he remains caught up in his own paranoiac and miracu- lous desiring-machines (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 119). Instead of following up on the crucial link between desire and the social field that he discovered, which would enable him to truly ‘make the analytic machine and the revolutionary machine function together’, his investigation of orgone energy becomes a deep dive into the mysteries of the function of individual potency and excitation. This, Deleuze and Guattari lament, keeps him in the realm of ‘a kind of diffuse Oedipalism’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 127). Accordingly, there are two problems with Reich, both of which are related to orgasm and to the relation between pleasure and desire. In fact, there is a sense in which Reich may serve as an example of the dangers Deleuze sees in focusing on the orgasm. To begin with, Reich’s focus on the orgasm is seen to keep sexuality in a dualism between political and libidinal economies. His focus on the relation between psychic health and sexual excitation cannot escape the economy of individualism and Oedipalism. Such an understanding of individual sexuality explains how Deleuze and Guattari end up considering the orgasm as standing in the

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way of establishing the coextension of desire and the social field. Furthermore, Deleuze and Guattari write, it is difficult ‘to present sexual energy as directly cosmic and intra-atomic, and at the same time as directly sociohistorical’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 291). Secondly, and despite the fact that Deleuze and Guattari recognise Reich’s freeing up of sexuality from the death instinct, Deleuze still finds that Reich’s orgasmic theories link desire to lack. Reich’s theory of the orgasm, he argues, pushes desire to the limit ‘in so far as it is linked to lack’ (Deleuze 2001: 96). If desire is not relieved by orgasm, for Reich, it produces ‘stasis’. Deleuze continues to conclude that as long as desire is related to pleasure or orgasm, it must be related to lack. At this point, however, Deleuze’s repeated exhortations of this kind come across more as a statement than as a grounded argument, as it is not quite clear how he is able to draw this conclusion. From a Reichian perspective, we may imagine an energy that needs to flow continually and that, when it is prevented from doing so, clogs up a healthy psyche. ‘Psychic health’, writes Reich, ‘depends upon orgiastic potency, i.e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act’ (Reich 1973: 6). In other words, the climax of excitation is a way of keeping the energy flowing rather than trying to fill an inevitable lack – it is not about incompleteness as much as it is about ‘pleasurable expansion’ (Reich 1973: 9). If Reich’s understanding of the orgasm confirms, to some extent, Deleuze’s rejection of the orgasm, there is also a sense, then, in which he could have used Reich to reformulate a constructive theory of sexual pleasure. As Reich’s quote shows, the orgasm, for him, should be discussed as a question of degree rather than in terms of a dualism of lack or production. A full orgasm is, in fact, a rather rare occur- rence for Reich, as Totton explains, because all kinds of neurosis construct blockages against complete surrender and thereby also maintain themselves as a frustration in/of the body (Totton 2006: 137). Depending on the amount and degree of the neurosis (as well as the status of feelings of love), the orgasm attains a different function and differing degrees of liberatory effect. Even if the energy of potency may thus be bottled up and create problems, sexuality and orgasm are parts of what Reich describes as ‘the expansive process of biological pleasure’ which is, in fact, ‘the productive life process per se’ (Reich 1973: 9). What Reich is describing is, in fact, the process by which sexual desire become converted to fascism and unhealth (why do the masses desire their own subordination . . .). This in turn

42 Psychoanalysis Unhinged: Deleuze with Lacan, Klein and Reich suggests that orgasm and sexuality, for Reich, are less about lack and more about the transformation of desire. Sexuality, Totton explains, works in a ‘functional antithesis’ with anxiety for Reich, as a ‘single bodily energy that turns from one to the other depending on the degree of tension present’ (Totton 2006: 140). Understood as a single energy which is circulated to a higher or lower extent depending on the blockages of the body and psyche, there is no reason why it has to be rejected along with the other psychoanalytical comprehen- sions of desire and orgasm as transcendent. Reich’s single energy evokes rather Spinozan ideas of univocity: a cosmic energy travelling through bodies through ‘pleasurable expansion’. Why did Deleuze not attempt to pick up on this possibility which would recognise orgasm and pleasure with an immanent flow?

Conclusion Deleuze and Guattari’s long-standing critique of psychoanalysis is, as we noted at the beginning of this chapter, primarily a critique of Freud. Despite their many quarrels with Lacan, Klein and Reich, they all in different ways also provide useful material in Deleuze and Guattari’s remoulding of desire. While their conceptions of desire and pleasure differ, they recognise an ally in Lacan in the opening up of desire beyond Oedipus and towards the machinic. Lacan’s jouissance aims towards transcendence and, as such, it is, from a Deleuzian perspective, guilty both of an ontological mistake and of a Cartesian presupposition. At the same time, and as I noted earlier, this also makes it easier to understand why Lacan finds the orgasm insufficient. One might say that Deleuze and Lacan both reject the orgasm because it remains within the realm of the subject while the alternatives they strive for are oppositional. If Lacan rejects the orgasm because it fails to transcend the relation between subject and signification, Deleuze does so because it fails to free desire from subject–object distinctions. The comparison with Lacan, and especially his linguistic theories, brings out the tension in Deleuze’s rejection of pleasure. For Lacan, signification keeps the subject caught up in chains of meaning, but for Deleuze and Guattari, schizoid signifying chains harbour the capacity to multiply meaning. If polyvocality is already part of signification and signification is about reciprocal presupposition, then the aim should be to recuperate all that has been caught up and imprisoned in stratified cultural, social and political structures, including the orgasm, and claim it

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as part of the flows of desiring-machines. Deleuze and Guattari are already halfway there in their claiming and repurposing of Klein’s partial objects. By adopting the idea of these objects while exchanging the parental images for which they were intended for the positive multiplicities that traverse the body without organs, Deleuze and Guattari enable a view of intensities as fragmented in the most positive sense of the word. In this sense, the Kleinian influence on Deleuze could, but does not, enable a view of the orgasmic as functioning also beyond structural and personal unities. As Anna Powell has shown, for example, it is quite possible to employ Deleuze and Guattari’s Klein to theorise, not only desire, but also sexual pleasure (Powell 2011). If we stay Deleuzian and claim the productive parts from these different theorists, we could add to this post-psychoanalytical reclaiming of the orgasm the single flow of energy that, for Reich, demands that we continually release sexual tension and achieve full orgasm. From a Reichian perspective, the orgasm cannot be seen as an end-point but is rather an opening up of the flows of the body as well as the universe. Whether it feels justified to combine the perspectives of Lacan, Klein and Reich or not, we can return now, as we did at the end of the previous chapter, to the question of how Deleuze’s understanding of sexuality is delimited by period- as well as theory- specific adversaries. Unlike his and Guattari’s conceptualisation of desire, which vehemently rejects or excitedly recovers parts of other philosophies in order to assemble this concept, comparing their understanding of desire and its Others with psychoanalytical theory, as this chapter has done, suggests that his philosophy is suffering from a lack of interest, and thereby a lack of creative input, when it comes to theorising sexual pleasure and orgasm.

44 3 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body

Rhythms, regularized patterns of vibration or resonance, are what move from the refrain to the body. What else is both labile enough and appeal- ing enough to slip from its material to its most immaterial effects, from the energy of the universe to the muscular oscillations that constitute pleasure and pain in living things? (Grosz 2008: 55)

Introduction After outlining some of the central theoretical explanations and impasses that have shaped Deleuze’s understanding of desire, pleasure and the orgasm, and before moving on to how specific pleasurable configurations of bodies in literature and culture challenge this understanding, this chapter offers a preliminary exploration of what a Deleuzian theory of the body and pleasure might look like. It also tests such a theory against contemporary conceptualisations of pleasurable bodies more generally. The body as other, as that which bleeds, and leaks, and comes back to haunt us in its glorious but fallible construction, has been of interest to theoretical discourse and cultural expression for centuries. If Descartes broke from earlier Greek philosophies in which the body was not conceived as separate from the mind, Descartes’s own mind–body dualism has, in turn, been shattered by modern theories of embodiment. Contemporary research, both in fields such as technology and medicine and in philosophy and culture, increasingly renders any conception of the body as a permanent and separate entity impossible to uphold. Deleuze’s philosophy has the potential to theorise the flux of these ever-evolving bodies. His and Guattari’s writings on the body not only open for, but insist on, delineating ways in which our understanding of its components, functions and affects can be expanded. As many have noted, however, it is not easy, or indeed possible, to identify the place of the body in Deleuze’s philosophy. Like Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and many of the other central philosophers of continental modernity, Deleuze and Guattari, as Grosz notes, offer

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no explicit ‘theory of the body’ (Grosz 1994: ix). Nonetheless, Grosz argues, all these philosophers do provide important theories for the analysis of sexuality. This is a curious and seemingly contradictory feature, and one that Grosz and other post-Deleuzian theorists, such as Rosi Braidotti and Moira Gatens, have worked to assemble into powerful and more coherent theories of sexuality and the body. If the body is everywhere and nowhere in Deleuze’s philosophy, as Joe Hughes suggests, in that it is repeatedly mentioned at the same time as it is displaced by a focus on affect, force and reason (Hughes 2011: 1–2), how, if at all, is it possible to create a theory of physical pleasure with this philosophy as a starting point? That affect and force work well in Deleuze and Guattari’s construction of desire and the bodies it produces has already been established by numerous readers and readings of their philosophy, but physical pleasure, in its more concrete form as well as more direct expression through orgasm, is harder to capture in the continuous production of volatile bodies. As the first part of this chapter shows, Deleuze can, and has been, used to theorise contemporary configurations of the body in relation to collectivity, communication, reproduction and biotechnology, to mention a few of the topical fields in which the body and our understanding of it are currently expanded. Yet, as the second part of this chapter will argue, Deleuze’s rejection of the creative potential of the orgasm relies on presuppositions about the body and its relation to a subject that go against the very grain of Deleuze’s own understanding of bodies and desires. These presuppositions need to be disentangled and dismantled if we are to use his philosophy to create a more constructive theory of pleasure. Looking specifically at two of Deleuze’s own favoured philosophers, the aim of the chapter is to try to build such a theory of the relation between bodies and pleasures in Deleuze. By placing ideas of sexual pleasure and orgasm, which, for Deleuze, remain inflected by notions of linearity and individuality, in relation to Leibniz’s concept of the fold and to Gilbert Simondon’s understanding of individuation, the aim is to circumvent Deleuze’s insistence on a relation between the subject and pleasure and discover the pleasurable contractions and dilations of the body in its ever-changeable form.

The Contemporary Body In some respects, there is a parallelism between Deleuze and Guattari’s mutable understanding of the mutability of bodies and

46 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body the way in which communication networks, medical and biological discoveries, inventions and interventions continually reconstitute the body in postmodern Western society. For Deleuze, technology shapes life, not in an essential sense, but rather in terms of the assemblages that make up the body. The extension of life through the maxi- misation of certain aspects, as well as the loss of others, as Claire Colebrook notes, indicates that life is shaped by ‘a potential for expressions, productions and movements’ that is contingent on the particular actualisations effected by technology (Colebrook 2006: 11). As Colebrook emphasises, this is an understanding of technology in a wider sense that includes all the practices that improve the efficiency of life from the eye to the cinema. Technology is thus not necessarily about high-tech machinery in modern society. However, the technological advances that continue to be made in contemporary society may be said to underline the way in which the contours and the components of the body are characterised by impermanence and volatility. In this sense, modern technology has caught up with the cultural and conceptual interrogations reaching back, not only to Deleuze and Guattari and their contemporaries, but also further back to thinkers such as Spinoza. Exploring what constitutes a body at any particular time, and what this body is capable of, is more interesting than trying to ascertain its relation to a central mind or the permanence of its identity. Recently, that dominant strand of the Western intellectual tradition which has tended to conceptualise the body in its relation to the mind has been further challenged by the notion of the body as thing, as a sentient opacity, as Mario Perniola would have it, the feelings of which are not filtered through the mind. Both culturally and conceptually, then, the contours as well as the components of the body and its place are growing less and less obvious. While there is a sense in which Deleuze’s theories speak to contemporary structurations of bodies and sociability, it is also correct that the past decades of cultural and conceptual transformations of bodies, and how we understand and experience them, make it necessary to revisit Deleuze’s philosophy of the body. Deleuze’s work is useful to theorise contemporary bodies but it is also, as we will see, limited to certain presumptions about the relation between desire and pleasure. To maintain, or even enlarge, the radical potential recognised in Deleuze’s work we need to do more than simply employ what seem to be eminently suitable concepts in this contemporary breaking down of old and more traditional ideas of bodies and their interrelations. From the final decades of the twentieth century and

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onwards, research into biological, medical, social and cultural conceptions of the body as well as of gender, and sexuality, are gradually wearing down distinctions that might not have been that clear to begin with. As Luciana Parisi notes in Abstract Sex (2004), for example, the ten years prior to her book, in particular, saw debates about how the meeting of biology and technology problematises the difference between natural and artificial (Parisi 2004: 8). On the one hand, cultural and technological developments forge new ways of transmitting sexuality, such as, for example, through electronic social networks. On the other hand, research carried out in fields such as medicine, biology and bacteriology forces us, or maybe enables us, to break up prevalent notions of bodily existence and interactions. Parisi notes that to the medical developments that affect our perceptions of what the body is and how we construct ideas of sexuality must be added the way electronic and cybernetic systems function to reconfigure human development and interaction. Parisi takes it so far as to call the development of these trends ‘the disappearance of natural sex’ (Parisi 2004: 2). The effect of information technologies on sexuality, Parisi suggests, tends to bring critics to the impasse between biological essentialism and discursive constructivism (Parisi 2004: 8). The materiality of the body is contrasted with a cybersexual world in which gender is not necessarily linked to anatomy. This binary construction of the biological and the cultural, she notes, reaches back to the very foundations of Western thinking (Parisi 2004: 9). In opposition to such tired binarisms, Parisi argues that the prosthetic extension of sexuality through cyberspace, the separation of the mind from the burden of flesh, and the potential redundancy of sexual reproduction in the face of cloning make it necessary to explore the conditions and possibilities of abstract sexuality (Parisi 2004: 1–3). In her analysis and response to a millennial state of modernity, she finds Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy useful for unlocking some of the philosophical and cultural presuppositions that haunt our expectations and discourses on sexuality. Primarily, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of immanence opens up ways for Parisi to theorise the body as freed from binary conceptualisations as either technological or biological, as well as stratifications of molecular dynamics such as, for example, the engendering of cells and the coding of matter into signs. ‘If orgasm is the experience of a wave of pleasure through the individual body, related through reproduction to gradient reduction’, as Margulis and Sagan propose, ‘so the pleasure of electronically linking to distant

48 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body others expands the gradient-reducing and reproductive activities of collective bodies’ (Margulis and Sagan 1997: 222). What this suggests is that we, at the very least, are now, in quite pragmatic and physical senses, uprooting the links both between reproduction and the individual body and between the individual body and pleasure. The question is whether this leaves us with a Deleuze proven right in terms of pleasure, desire and reproduction or a Deleuze that needs revision. On an immediate level, many current cultural, technological and medical developments seem to confirm face-value correlations between a Deleuzian understanding of bodies and desires and contemporary modes of being. But as terms such as rhizome and desire are readily applied to the collectives and connective links online, it becomes even more important that the implications of such particular configurations of sexuality are brought back to his philosophy. Even as the configurations of bodies and sexuality through the cyberworld can be usefully read and theorised through Deleuzian philosophy and what is seen as the rhizomatic structures of interlinking desires and abstract plateaus, the development of cybernetic interaction also opens up questions of the political role of the orgasm. While typically excluding the utopian confidence in the World Wide Web that coloured early writings on the political and social empowerment of digitised networks, contemporary artists and writers nonetheless recognise, in this type of collectivity, new configurations of sexual desire as well as pleasure. Porn surfing, for example, has been described in ways that resemble a Deleuzian deferral of desire. As full frame images crowd pornographic sites and pornographic sites crowd the internet, and thereby prolong the search for individual satisfaction, Zabet Patterson notes, surfing itself becomes part of the pleasure. The deferral itself, Patterson argues, becomes satisfactory – the goal, she suggests, ‘exists in part to allow the subject, or a portion of the subject, to rationalise the pleasure of surfing’ (Patterson 2004: 109). In other words, the goal is deferred in favour of desire itself. ‘The user constantly shifts on to new images – and in this process, new delays – in an endless slippage of desire in which part of the pleasure derives from habitual repetition and habitual deferral’ (Patterson 2004: 109). At first glance, a weakness in this description from a Deleuzian point of view would be the partial focus on the subject. For Deleuze and Guattari, as we have noted, the move away from pleasure in favour of desire is largely a move away from a desiring subject, or

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rather, from the ‘bad’ desire that fixes the subject in a state of lack. To have a subject ‘rationalizing’ its own pleasure by postponing it, as Patterson puts it, may seem too Cartesian in its methodical self-surveillance. However, Deleuze, at least in his early work on masochism, expresses a similar construction of desire in the maso- chistic subject’s own rationalisation of his own waiting. There is a distinct tension between the idea of masochist desire in ‘Coldness and Cruelty’ and the expression of the same in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, as I have argued elsewhere. The open-ended but temporally linear trajectory of masochist desire in the former stands in some contradiction to the multidirectionality of masochist desire as discussed in the latter (Beckman 2010: 98). The temporal form of masochism that Deleuze extracts from the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch relies strongly not only on a disturbingly linear temporality, but also on a type of narrative structure that, in fact, keeps desire in a very fixed teleology. This idea, suggestive as it is of a rather well-centred subject position, does not, of course, make the porn surfing example any more exemplary of the kind of desire that Deleuze and Guattari celebrate as a deterritorialisation of subjectivity. Nonetheless, the example of porn surfing provides a new means to discuss the tension between linear and multidirectional desire because, if the self-awareness of the surfing subject to some extent stands in the way of a desire that exceeds individual pleasure, there is also a sense in which this example, thanks to its World Wide Web setting, augments this tension in Deleuzian desire. Unlike the restricting linear form of desire found in Deleuze’s reading of Sacher- Masoch, the spatialisation and multiplication of possible pleasures through the Web keep the act of deferral more truly multidirectional and open-ended. Thereby, Deleuze’s notion of pleasure as a mode of negotiation of desire and the orgasm as a way for the subject to find itself becomes difficult to uphold. The pleasure, and the potential orgasm, are inextricable from a context that continues to exceed the limits of the subject at the same time as it makes pleasure available in all directions and along all routes. Deferral, in other words, no longer means the same thing. It is not a deferral of one thing – pleasure, an orgasm – it is the deferral of a hundred thousand things in the face of which a single orgasm is far from the end-point and pleasure has very little to do with the individual subject and the organism called its body. Deleuze has little patience with notions of individual subjectivity and of bodies as separate organisms. Importantly, and in the face of

50 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body his rejection of pleasure elsewhere, he does develop, in Difference and Repetition, a theory of pleasure that corresponds to his understanding of time and selfhood. More specifically, he works to establish an alternative mode of connectivity between the self, the body and pleasure through the stitching together of the passive and the active synthesis. The passive synthesis of time helps in constituting the organism through contractions, retentions and expectations. This synthesis enables the habit that we call the self by constructing time as a repetition of instants that link the past and the future according to succession. The subject is constituted through this temporal structure, but passively so since the synthesis occurs in the contemplative mind rather than by it (Deleuze 2004b: 91). These contractions construct the organisms by intertwining all the little selves – the ‘thousands of habits of which we are composed’ (Deleuze 2004b: 100). These larval selves, which thus occur through the organism in its entirety, enable the activity of the active subject – ‘the emergence’, as James Williams puts it, ‘of novel singularities against a background of multiple passive syntheses and series’ (Williams 2011: 50). The active synthesis constructs time according to the active process of the past as representation and the future as prediction. Rather than the spontaneous imagination of the passive synthesis, the active synthesis passes on to the ‘active faculties of reflective representation, memory and intelligence’ (Deleuze 2004b: 99). The two syntheses work together as the active work of the subject is based on the interpretation of the signs constructed by its passive contractions. The subject is thus not positioned as a separate and independent mind but rather as indistinguishable from the contractions that continually constitute and reconstitute the organism through passive synthesis. The subject’s capacity to experience affections, sensations and impressions relies on this possibility of stitching together passive receptivity and contraction with active synthesis. For Deleuze, this is why the cogito of Descartes, dependent as it is on the expulsion of time, is wrong, and why Kant, even as he includes time in his understanding of the subject, misses the mark: in different ways they both fail to recognise the role of the passive synthesis in the formation of sensation. In both cases the self is, as it were, too passive, as it is not given a role other than as the object of the subject’s constitutive reflection. This failure can also be related, in a third instance, to Freud’s understanding of pleasure. Freud understands pleasure not in terms of local process, but in terms of an empirical principle. By positioning pleasure as a principle, Freudian pleasure ‘exceeds

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its own instantaneity in order to assume the allure of satisfaction in general’ (Deleuze 2004b: 121). As a ‘systematic value’, pleasure is positioned as an idea, and, as such, it is tied to the temporal structure of past and present in the constitution of the subject. In other words, Freud’s pleasure precedes the subject and becomes the binding principle of its constitution. From a Deleuzian perspective, however, such an account of pleasure fails to take into account the passive synthesis that precedes and enables the pleasure principle. The binding of the passive synthesis is not about intentionality and mastery of excitation and pleasure, he argues, but rather, excitation and pleasure are integral to the binding itself. Pleasure thus becomes an effect of the process of individuation rather than the empirical principle of the constitution of the subject. Where the first synthesis is about habit and the second about memory, the third synthesis is about time out of joint. In this synthesis, the stitching of the first two, which enables a production of the self in relation to past and present (without, for that matter, situating it in temporal causality), is opened up towards the pure past as well as to the unpredictability of the future. The past is pure and the future empty because they are not carrying the load of habit, memory or prediction. This synthesis bears the potential of the new, as it is an event that is not bound by pre-existing measurements and coordinates. Without links to habit or memory, what the third synthesis binds is not passive receptivity and active contraction, but rather the virtual objects that mark the past without content and the future without prediction. Such an event bears no relation to the temporality of the self, but returns to it and destroys it, ‘as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth’ (Deleuze 2004b: 112). Unlike the first two syntheses, which carry intimate relations with sexuality and pleasure, this third synthesis, Deleuze argues, is desexualised. The excitation and pleasure of the folding and stitching of the first two syntheses is exchanged for the ‘mercilessness’ of linear time (Deleuze 2004b: 139). As the circular shape of time that enables the stitching of the self is straightened out, the libido turns into the death instinct. Unlike Freud, then, Deleuze does not discover a death instinct that is distinguishable from Eros, but rather one that comple- ments it through the de-sexualisation that follows on a different temporality. By positioning the first two syntheses as sexualised and the third as de-sexualised, Deleuze suggests that sexuality is intrinsically dependent on the circularity of the return. When the third synthesis

52 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body straightens out time, the self is unstitched and the pleasure caused by the effect of binding is undone. Since this is Deleuze, however, the straight line never remains so but sooner or later finds a way of returning. The straight line of the third synthesis ultimately forms a circle again through the eternal return, the return, not of what has gone before, but of a decentred world that has done away with the conditions that made the self (Deleuze 2004b: 141). Death is the unstitching of the first two syntheses; the falling apart of the self. For Deleuze, then, pleasure is not dependent on a transcendent principle but is intrinsic to the binding and unbinding of time. As pleasure is freed from the temporality of past and present of the pleasure principle, its role in relation to the self becomes more mutable. The relationship between the subject and pleasure in Freud is exchanged for an expanded notion of pleasure that emerges from the thousands of larval subjects that occupy and constitute the self. In this process, pleasure is no longer a transcendent principle for the subject to pursue, but rather turns into immanent and multidirectional desire. Deleuze’s rejection of pleasure and the orgasm is, as we have seen, based on the way in which they are seen to block the more productive mechanisms of such desire. As is becoming clear, however, this rejection is based on Freud’s, rather than Deleuze’s own understanding of pleasure. It might be possible to discover a more productive route if we, rather than pursuing Deleuze’s rejection of Freudian pleasure, take to its logical conclusion his own conceptualisation of pleasure through the passive and active synthesis. Indeed, Annie Potts argues, it is possible to envisage an ‘embryonic idea’ of sex that is not invested by what is often perceived as a mutually exclusive and even binary difference between orgasm and desire. Proposing sex as ‘interplay’, she suggests, would mean celebrating ‘the unfixedness of both intensification and diminution of pleasure’ (Potts 2000: 70). Two openings emerge with Potts’s suggestion, both of which are addressed in contemporary research. Firstly, the idea of a humanist subject capable of finding itself through a return to the same is questioned, not only in studies influenced by Deleuze, but in numerous analyses and discourses on postmodern cultures. Without a coherent subject, why would the orgasm be a deplorable affectation of it? In this sense, Deleuze’s reaction against the subjective experience of pleasure comes across as somewhat surprising, considering his own role in the analytic work to replace old conceptions of the subject. Secondly, the idea of an ‘unfixedness’ and undulating force

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of pleasure is encouraged by both cultural and conceptual modes of interconnectedness and plurality. Parisi, for example, searches for ways in which our conceptualisation of the body, as well as of sex, as inevitably caught up in the impasse between the biological and the cultural are challenged by ‘the unpredictable potential of transformation of matter’ (Parisi 2004: 10). At a point in time when communication, as well as reproduction of information, affects and restructures the body on all its levels of organisation, sex expands the things that a body is as connectivity inclusive of variable forms, functions and substances (Parisi 2004: 11). Parisi thus provides a way in which sex can be seen as a mode of connectivity and energy. Parisi, however, discusses the connectivity of abstract sex mainly in terms of reproduction. By interrogating biotechnical, bacterial, parthenogenic (genital-less), biodigital and machinic sex, she is able to articulate a theory of abstract sex as that which is (re)productive without being genital. Such sex escapes the Cartesian mind–body dualism, the Oedipal economy of desire and pleasure, as well as the division in cyberculture between essentialist nature and constructivist culture. The benefit of such an approach, apart from correspond- ing more closely to biophysical, biocultural and biodigital reality, is that it recognises the body as a mutating force and emphasises its ‘thousand modes of sex and reproduction’ (Parisi 2004: 197). Parisi’s project, heavily influenced by Spinoza as well as by Deleuze and Guattari, thus opens for ways of rethinking what bodies are and what they can do, and indeed, she argues herself, for acknowledging ‘new cultures and new species’ and ‘the proliferation of a new nature that encompasses all scales of matter’ (Parisi 2004: 201). Her focus on reproduction is crucial since reproduction has always constituted a central aspect of how sexuality, bodies and gender have been understood. Remaining in the realm of reproduction, however, the effects of these new natures of sexual pleasure are discussed exclusively in terms of the necessary negation of a humanism and Oedipal economy. While issues of reproduction are likely always to remain entangled with issues of sexuality to some extent, this relation has been increasingly suspended, not only by earlier sexual revolutions that brought with them the development, as well as the increasingly affirmative approach regarding contraception, but also by contemporary developments in medicine and technology, as well as the demographic regulation of the contemporary Western world. As population size ‘plateaus’, Margulis and Sagan note, sexual pleasure is increasingly

54 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body released from the reproductive function. The experimentation of sexuality that this severance enables opens up towards new and unexpected possibilities for the body. The proliferation of experimentation with sexual pleasures, they argue, leads to ‘unpredictable excesses on which evolution can potentially act’ (Margulis and Sagan 1997: 216–17). In this sense, we do not know the limits of what sex can and will be able to do. When humans have tended to tie sex to reproduction historically, it has taken on the function of preserving and reproducing identity. However, sex that is considered apart from reproduction needs to be recognised as ‘a natural tendency to mix things up, to randomise, to lose discreet identity due to the tendency of material systems to reach more probable states’ (Margulis and Sagan 1997: 19). In this light, the role of the orgasm as the pleasure that ‘promises performance of the actions that lead to reproduction’, as they put it, needs to be problematised (Margulis and Sagan 1997: 216). Ultimately, and fundamentally, Margulis and Sagan’s larger point implies that it is incorrect to continue building on discourses on sex that assume that sex is necessarily about copulation, genitality and reproduction (Margulis and Sagan 1997: 17). This argument, simple as it is in one sense, exposes the narrow view on pleasure that lies behind Deleuze’s understanding of the orgasm. Positioned only at the end of a goal-oriented, male-inflected sexual exercise, the orgasm comes to determine pleasure as part of its unidirectional trajectory. The possibility of opening up pleasure and orgasm beyond this course remains unexplored. That this understanding of the orgasm as the end-point haunts Deleuze as well as post-Deleuzians becomes particularly clear if we note how Parisi’s study, in itself a contribution to the expansion on how we understand sex by rethinking historically conventional understandings of reproductive sex, does not budge from the Deleuzian rejection of pleasure. On the one hand, her study does explore the space of ‘unpredictable excesses’ pointed to by Margulis and Sagan as she works to position reproduction as ‘the hypernatural capacities of a body to become’ (Parisi 2004: 196). It theorises ‘unpredictable mutations’ of desiring bodies ‘from the micro (bacterial sex, hypersex, meiotic sex) to the macro (hominid sex, disciplinary sex, parthenogenic sex) to the micro again (biodigital sex, cloning, transgenic sex)’ (Parisi 2004: 196). On the other hand, and even if Parisi clearly expands previous conceptions of the body and opens up for sex in terms of a multidirectional potential to become in the process, she still finds it necessary, like Deleuze, to reject the orgasm.

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In Abstract Sex, Parisi largely reiterates Deleuze’s convictions about the destructiveness of the economy of pleasure which she sees as repressing desire, imposing binary sexes on the body and subsuming desire ‘to the imperative of possessing and lacking the phallus’ (Parisi 2004: 199). Pleasure, according to this logic, keeps desire caught up in a closed cycle centred around the climactic moment, and thus around individual identity and self-satisfaction. She also develops this critique to include the reproductive economy more directly, as pleasure places nature ‘as a battlefield of individual competition and survival of the fittest ensured by the successful insemination of the semen’ (Parisi 2004: 198). While I would argue that Parisi remains, with Deleuze, inside the binary understanding of pleasure as the opposite to the flux of desire, her model works better than Deleuze’s in that her focus on reproduction better justifies her emphasis on orgasm as discharge. Parisi notes, at the very opening of her study, how artificial sex epitomises a male understanding of sex, ‘defined by the drive towards discharge, the channelling of all flows towards a final climax, the pleasure of self- satisfaction’ (Parisi 2004: 1). As long as orgasm is about male genitality and ejaculation, it clearly does remain within the rather delimiting linear and predetermined agenda of pleasure and discharge that both Parisi and Deleuze, as well as a great many feminist scholars, are eager to dispel. Parisi’s study proves that even reproductive sex does not have to be determined by such agenda. Since Parisi’s study, unlike Deleuze’s work, focuses on reproduction quite specifically, her rejection of climactic sex in favour of a ‘non-discharging distribution of energy’ also makes more sense (Parisi 2004: 12). In a way, then, we might say that Parisi’s study shows the usefulness of Deleuze’s rejection of the orgasm. To get away from the historically predominant understanding of sex as the reproduction of identity and structure through the ejaculation of semen, a focus on ‘non-discharging’ energy constitutes an important step. At the same time, however, Parisi’s endorsement of a Spinozan hypernature, that is, an immanent plane of nature that ‘envelops and is enveloped by all bodies of communication and reproduction’ (Parisi 2004: 36), favours the latter for the former and therefore does not, in fact, envelop all forms of communication. The ‘unpredictable potential of transformation of matter’ that her Spinoza-influenced conception of sex wishes to stress does expand on what the body can do in a true Spinozan fashion. The nonlinear reproduction of matter that she points towards usefully dismounts the distinction between body

56 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body and mind, as well as essentialism and embodiment on the one hand and constructivism and disembodiment on the other. However, the incorporation of the various biotechnological, biocultural and biodigital components into the realm of sexual reproduction also entails a decision to claim these forms of communication primarily for an understanding of reproduction. As a way of rethinking sexual bodies in the era of cybernetics and biodigitality, her strategy is crucial. As we have seen, this strategy also to some extent justifies the rejection of orgasmic pleasure. We could equally, however, decide to emphasise the former aspect of hypernature, that is, the bodies of communication that fold and are folded into the immanent plane. Unlike reproduction, whether genital or abstract, the idea of communication does not demand of us either a confirmation or rejection of pleasure. The way in which Parisi tends to couple the two without differentiation suggests that she reads them as part of the same. However, and quite against Parisi’s, as well as Deleuze’s, own agenda, we could salvage the notion of pleasure and even orgasm with the help of the model of immanent communication and its Deleuzian underpinnings that she offers. The concept of hypernature, intended to emphasise the always-already-constructed-ness of nature and position it as an immanent field of connectivity and recombination, erases transcendence while it celebrates the ‘intensive relations between the most disparate modes of communication and reproduction’ (Parisi 2004: 37). With the help of Spinoza, Parisi sees how collective bodies that are continually born and reborn through such communication and reproduction harbour differing potential to become, through the differing degrees of forces and intensities that enable them to connect. The desire that fuels such machinic connectivity is, as in Deleuze, different from ‘individual pleasure and climactic purposes’ (Parisi 2004: 38). But in rejecting orgasm in order to protect such desire from subjectivisation, Parisi, like Deleuze, assumes that the orgasm is necessarily linked to the subject. This presumption, which in itself goes against both Parisi’s and Deleuze’s projects, still haunts them both. As we will see, however, they both also offer ways out of this deadlock.

The Idiocy of the Orgasm In order to find a way of building around the impasse that Deleuze creates around pleasure and the orgasm, we need to understand the

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reason why he, who is otherwise so keen on developing alternative temporalities and theories of bodies, leaves pleasure behind. In his reading of the passive and active synthesis in Difference and Repetition he opens for a productive and distinctly un-Freudian conception of pleasure. Later, he continues to build on this understanding of time and, through him, theories of philosophers such as Spinoza, Leibniz and Simondon become available as a singular theory of immanence and desire. Despite the inconsistencies in temporality and directionality in Deleuze’s philosophy of desire noted above, both he and his readers do develop and theorise the aspect of desire in his philosophy, both in terms of temporality and in terms of its implications on how we understand what bodies are. In stark contrast, we find that the implications of his early understanding of pleasure, as well as his rejection of pleasure and the individual, both of which are equally steeped in issues of temporality and bodies, tend to be ignored by himself as well as by his readers. It is a curious thing that Deleuze, whose work is deeply invested in reconceptualising what the body is through Spinoza, and on rethinking linear time through Leibniz, and on breaking down the role of the individual through Simondon, does not pick up on the possibilities that he himself has set up. This disregard, which in effect entails that his rejection of pleasure rests on assumptions that he has otherwise already rejected, becomes particularly apparent if we contrast Deleuze’s understanding of pleasure with his rejection of Cartesian modes of thinking and conceiving of subjectivity. If Deleuze rejects the orgasm because it returns to confirm the subject rather than expands the connectivity of desire, this understanding of the source and trajectory of pleasure can be read alongside the Cartesian idea of thinking as that which returns to confirm the subject. As Potts notes, it is in humanist terms that the orgasm comes to simultaneously symbolise a peak of sexual pleasure and self- transcendence (Potts 2000: 57). If sex is part of our self in the Foucauldian sense, she suggests, then the orgasm is positioned as a meeting with oneself, a celebration of selfhood (Potts 2000: 59). This confirmation of the self through orgasm is distinctly similar to how Deleuze understands the subjective economy of the orgasm and sexual pleasure. It is exactly because it is invested with humanist ideas about self-identity that the idea of the orgasm needs to be discarded in favour of impersonal desire in his philosophy. However, it is only if we believe in the possibility of a unitary selfhood which the orgasm can transcend, only to return to and confirm, that the

58 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body orgasm becomes a problem. Such unitary selfhood, as we have seen, has already been shattered by Deleuze’s understanding of larval subjects. In this sense, Potts’s deconstructive analysis underlines the way in which Deleuze’s rejection of orgasm, at least in so far as it is based on a supposed salvation of desire, relies on humanist assumptions, rather than on his own conception of thousands of little selves and the pleasure emanating from their contractions. In other words, Deleuze’s assumptions about the orgasm as that which returns to confirm the subject are not unlike the Cartesian assumptions about thinking that he rejects. A comparison between Deleuze’s assumptions about the orgasm and the Cartesian assumptions about thinking is implicitly invited by Deleuze when he position desire and thinking as the same thing, although for him, of course, this association is a way of freeing the engines of becoming from ideas of individual subjectivity and Cartesian presumptions about thinking. One of the maledictions of the psychoanalytic link between desire and lack, he argues, is that it conceals the fact that thinking is desire and vice versa (Deleuze 2001: 95). This curse is replicated through the history of thinking through the continual reinforcement of lack, through, for example, the Other, or dualism, which thereby comes to block thought. Lack, in turn, is intimately related to pleasure as that which satisfies desire. Thereby, Deleuze argues, the ‘so-called Western thought is constructed from the relation between desire and pleasure, a completely rotten (pourrie) conception’ (Deleuze 2001: 95). It is from this idea of pleasure that Deleuze’s rejection of the orgasm originates. The intentionality and directionality of a discharge that supposedly assuages desire also links it to the lack in which it (vainly) attempts to flee through the same move. Through this important linking between desire and thinking we can compare Deleuze’s recovery of desire-without- lack with his recovery of thought-without- image. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze addresses a presumption about the nature of thought that underlies philosophy. Descartes, he argues, bases his notion of subjectivity on the capacity to think without interrogating the nature of thinking itself. This Image of thought haunts philosophy and makes idiots out of philosophers who fail to question thinking itself as a naturalised category. As long as thinking itself remains unquestioned, we are not yet thinking. For real thinking to occur, the Image of thought must be resisted (Deleuze 2004b: 167). If the presumptions underlying this pre-philosophical Image of thought rely on an idea of common sense, Deleuze and Guattari show

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in What is Philosophy? that no common sense of the kind is possible. They thereby propose a new Image of thought and a new conception of idiocy. In the place of the philosopher-as- idiot whose philosophy is based on uninvestigated presumptions, the new idiot – what they call the Russian idiot – is he who rejects the self-evidence of thought. As Deleuze puts it already in Difference and Repetition, the Russian idiot ‘lacks the compass with which to make a circle’ (Deleuze 2004b: 166). Deleuze and Guattari’s repurposing of the figure of the idiot does not contain any promise of escaping the Image of thought, as I have noted elsewhere, but serves rather to provide the means of negotiating this Image. Where Deleuze calls for a radical and rigorous critique in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze and Guattari focus rather on reconceptualisation (Beckman 2009: 57). One could argue that when Deleuze rejects the orgasm as a yoke that prevents desire from escaping the subject and lack, his refutation is in fact based on Cartesian presumptions of subjectivity. In this sense, Deleuze’s understanding of the orgasm is an idiocy of the orgasm (not to be confused with Lacan’s ‘jouissance of the idiot’ mentioned in Chapter 2). This argument could be supported in three main ways. Firstly, Deleuze fails to interrogate the presumptions about orgasm that underlie philosophical and psychoanalytical (male) claims about it. Why, when he overturns so many conceptions of the body and desire, would not this idea, like desire and idiocy, deserve reconceptualisation? Considering the different ways in which this conception of the orgasm is questioned from bodies different from that of the healthy Western male, as the rest of the present book will show, the presumptions about the orgasm as a model are shattered. Secondly, when desire becomes thinking at the expense of pleasure, it also becomes such at the expense of the body. The relation between thought and the contractions and dilations of organs and bodies is automatically rejected as a prison for thought, as if thought in this nexus were necessarily regulated by a delimiting subject position. This would not have to be the case, however, as we have already seen above in the discussion of larval subjects and as will be further developed below. The third reason why Deleuze’s rejection of the orgasm can be compared to pre-philosophical idiocy is that he, like Descartes, keeps the compass that enables him to make a circle. There are, in fact, two such circles in this case. To begin with, it is his insistence on the link between pleasure and lack that forces him to reject the orgasm. This link keeps orgasm caught up in an unproductive loop which, by virtue of its circular logic, pre-empts

60 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body the lines of flight that could produce bodies rather than fix them. Secondly, and in a more Cartesian vein, the idea of the orgasm as that which returns to confirm the subject, as we saw at the beginning of this section, not only presumes a subject to return to, but also the precision of the return itself. The compass must be an efficient one, indeed, if sexual pleasure always finds its way back to the lacking subject from which it supposedly emerges. The comparison between an idiocy of thought and the idiocy of the orgasm may be seen as precarious in the sense that whereas Deleuze associates thinking and desire, thinking and feeling are not typically seen as the same thing. Physical pleasure tends to be associated with feeling rather than with desire, but does that necessarily mean that it must be associated with the subject? As Perniola puts it, a ‘thing that feels seems somewhat different from a thing that thinks and moves’ (Perniola 2004: 7). Where thinking is associated with the mind and movement with the machine, Perniola argues that feeling, while not separable from thinking for Descartes, must be considered in itself, and thus apart from the thinking subject (Perniola 2004: 7–8). Perniola’s study of things and things that feel opens up ways of thinking about feeling and sexuality outside the economy of subjectivity. His study, which explores the cornerstones of ‘the encounter between philosophy and sexuality’ (Perniola 2004: 1), shows how thinking about thing-hood enables us to analyse the sentience and the sexuality that have typically been associated with the human subject. Perniola’s freeing of feeling from the subject gives sexuality a dimension beyond the subject, and should thus release the notion of pleasure from this economy. However, Perniola too, like Deleuze and Parisi, insists on the rejection of the orgasm. The feeling of a thing, he argues, is freed from ‘an instrumental conception of sexual excitement that naturally considers it directed toward the attainment of orgasm’ (Perniola 2004: 2–3). Perniola’s formulation elucidates that it is orgasm as a governing rule rather than the orgasm in itself that needs to be rejected. The common way of representing sexual activity by means of diagramming excitement prevents us from grasping the being of a thing and keeps us in the forced ‘orgasmomania’ that has negatively affected generations (Perniola 2004: 2–3). Despite his rejection of the orgasm, Perniola points to two important and interrelated things: firstly, sexuality and feeling are not necessarily linked to the subject, and secondly, we must differentiate between instrumental conception of sexual pleasure and the sexual sentience of modes of being that lie beyond it.

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If Deleuze and Guattari work to establish thinking beyond the Cartesian subject, and Perniola helps us establish the possibility of feeling and sentience beyond the subject, we should be able to read the pleasurable body beyond Descartes as systematically as Deleuze does when it comes to thought. Three distinctly Deleuzian ways of unlocking the presumptions about the orgasm and subject emerge. If Deleuze’s rejection of the orgasm is based on the idiocy of presumptions, then we might begin with asking if his and Guattari’s conception of the Russian idiot might be useful in proposing a more productive idiocy of the orgasm. Compared to its Cartesian forerun- ner, the thinking of the Russian idiot that Deleuze and Guattari offer is more productive because it includes the messiness and absurdity of situatedness and physicality, and thereby disrupts generalised presumptions. Just as Artaud’s mumbles and cries and rhythms destroy language and rationality and open up for new forms of thinking in a Deleuzian reading, one would imagine that the grunts and fluids and convulsions of physical expressions of pleasure could multiply the connectivity of desire and invest any general assumptions with difference. Pursuing such an analogy, a productive idiocy of the orgasm would need to be non-transcendent, creative and unpredictable. Such an orgasm would not respect the limits of what the body can know or feel. Such an orgasm, like Artaud’s thinking, would be haunted by the incapacity to return, to predict and to fully comprehend itself. Such an orgasm would be schizophrenic in that it falls outside categories and fails to find a correspondence between sensation and external models. Instead of identifying with the organisation of the body called the organism, or with a subject position externalised through identification, the pleasures of larval selves multiply as the body from which the orgasm emanates breaks down. Just as thought that does not recognise itself in the Image produces a productive destruction of this Image by the leap which truly constitutes thinking, the orgasm has the potential to open for a pleasurable space where the body and subject are no longer organised according to transcendent principles. A second way to begin to theorise a more productive understanding of the orgasm, outside the idiocy of presumptions, would be to exchange the principles of common sense for the concept of the fold. The concept of the fold, Gregg Lambert points out, is constructed in Deleuze’s philosophy as a figure of the disorientation caused by the lack of the higher principles of common sense. Leibniz, he notes, describes this as a dizziness or ‘swooning’ of the soul, unable to situate itself in relation both to perception and exteriority and to

62 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body psychological representation and interiority (Lambert 2002: 22). The Baroque, Lambert argues, is important, because it offers a new image of thought ‘that corresponds to how the mind is folded with the body (or le corps), that is, of an absolute “inside,” which is deeper than any interiority, which is co-implicated with a pure “outside,” which is further away than any external object of perception’ (Lambert 2002: 22). If the disorientation of the Baroque thus replaces the image of thought as a figure for thinking, equally, the ‘idiotic’ presumptions underlying Deleuze’s rejection of the orgasm could be replaced with the disorienting swoon of the orgasm as the body’s folding and unfolding makes indistinguishable the exteriority of perception and the interiority of psychological representation. The disorientation of the fold is also inevitably a temporal one. Instead of a linear logic, there is a dizzying turning and returning. ‘The problem’, as Deleuze writes, ‘is not how to finish a fold, but how to continue it, to have it go through the ceiling, how to bring it to infinity’ (Deleuze 1993: 34). This striving for continuation and infinity in Deleuze’s understanding of the fold also makes it possible to revise the linear thinking hidden behind his rejection of the orgasm. As he states at the beginning of his study of Leibniz, it is the idea of a continuous linearity that leads the Cartesian project down the wrong track. Descartes’s mistake, he argues, is that he searches for the continuity of the labyrinth through ‘rectilinear tracks’ (Deleuze 1993: 3). Similarly, as we have seen, Freud’s understanding of the pleasure principle is rejected on the ground of the systematic value of pleasure, which ties it to the temporal structure of past and present. To understand the labyrinth, Deleuze suggests, one must rather understand continuity in terms of the curvilinear movement of folding. The nature of matter, of the body as well as of the soul, is cavernous, which means that our search must not be for separate units and linear developments, but for the pleats through which worlds exist within worlds infinitely. Through the Leibnizian fold, Deleuze suggests that the organism, in itself a set of foldings, can fold, that is, reduce and withdraw into a world, or ‘unfold’, that is, increase and grow (Deleuze 1993: 8–9). This continuous movement is on the one hand part of individuation through the creation of monads, and on the other, the opening up of the organism ‘onto an entire theater in which it perceives or feels according to its unity, independently of its organism, yet, inseparable from it’ (Deleuze 1993: 11). New foldings follow upon each other as the subject becomes a site from which variation is apprehended (Deleuze 1993: 20). The ‘theater of matter’

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from which such subject (or ‘superject’) cannot be separated becomes part of this folding and unfolding. According to this perception of the structure of matter, both the body and the soul are constructed in terms of infinite folding. The Leibnizian body is characterised by the constant flux of parts. If we build a theory of pleasure on an understanding of the body, as well as the soul, as foldings, rather than on the linearity and self-reflexivity of Cartesian subjectivity, or on Freudian principles of transcendence, it becomes possible to free the orgasm from its deplorable economy of lack. The orgasm becomes an event that folds into the body at the same time as it folds out. Instead of returning to confirm the subject, the orgasm marks the folding through which the monad simultaneously withdraws into the contractions of muscle and mind in an intense moment of individuation and grows and opens towards the variations of matter. Rather than a concrete division of body and world, and subject and body, the orgasm creates a moment of cohesion which in itself is a folding:

Everything is folded in its own manner, cord and rod, but also colors dis- tributed according to the concavity and convexity of the luminous rays, sounds, all the more strident where ‘the trembling parts are shorter and more taut.’ Hence texture does not depend on the parts themselves, but on strata that determine its ‘cohesion.’ (Deleuze 1993: 37) Like the rays of light and sound, the trembling of muscles travels through the concavity and convexity of the foldings of the body, reconfiguring the cohesion of its elements through the stiffening of parts. Like the other physical mechanisms Deleuze describes, the orgasm is part of a mutual folding where ‘infinitely tiny fluvia that form displacements, crisscrossings, and accumulations of waves’ come together and apart, a bit like the ripples created by a stone thrown into water (Deleuze 1993: 97). Deleuze describes this movement of folding and unfolding in terms of ‘tension-release, contraction- dilation’ and also ‘enveloping-developing, involution-evolution’ (Deleuze 1993: 8). Such pairs of terms, which bear clear associations to sexual movement, seem easier for Deleuze to use when unthreat- ened by the economies of pleasure of the Oedipal subject. Yet, there is a way in which they could be used not only to describe infinite folding generally, but the flow of sexual pleasure specifically. Such a Deleuzian-Leibnizian understanding of sexuality would open for a constructive understanding of sexual pleasure beyond Oedipus,

64 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body beyond the deplorable subject, and beyond lack. Instead of bodies separated by differentials, it opens for bodies of communication and movement in which vibrations in ‘a receptive organ’ are understood, not in terms of a body in which a subject is caught, but as the ‘throbs of flesh’ itself, as the trembling of folding (Deleuze 1993: 95). If thinking about the orgasm in terms of the Russian idiot begins to free the orgasm from the idiocy of presumptions, and the fold helps constructing an immanent understanding of the orgasm through Deleuze’s own Leibnizian influenced philosophy, a third way of freeing the orgasm, and which links this process back to the individuation discussed earlier, comes with Simondon. Parisi argues that the communication between matter on the plane of immanence means that sex is ‘transductive: it webs bodies of all sorts’ (Parisi 2004: 3). Through the concept of transduction, Simondon comes to play a role in her understanding of hypernature as an immanent plane of nature enveloping and being enveloped by all forms of bodies. Simondon’s concept of transduction also occurs with some frequency through Deleuze’s writing, and is suggestive of an emergence of relations that is dependent on the assemblage of force at any one time. The concept points to the always-already- collective nature of bodies and sensation. But while transduction is suggestive of inherent potential and becoming, it is also a temporal construct. As Massumi puts it, a ‘transductive process crosses intervals of dephasing where it is repo- tentialized for a next emergence’ (Massumi 2002a: xxxvii). Rather than established structures of the body and its organs, Massumi explains, Simondon’s understanding of dephasing builds on the idea of relays establishing temporary continuities between phases, objects and organs and thereby transforming the body (Massumi 2002b: 120). With the concept of transduction comes the possibility of thinking the transformative body as well as of escaping what increasingly appears to be a rather linear understanding of sexual pleasure in Deleuze. Rather than the deplorable linearity of tension and release, transductive pleasure harbours the potentiality to weave and become, to dephase and emerge, to dephase and re-emerge. Simondon understands individuation as something that precedes the individual in human form. ‘Anything that contributes to establishing relations already belongs to the same mode of existence as the individual, whether it be an atom, which is an indivisible and eternal particle, or prime matter, or a form’ (Simondon 1992: 298). He suggests that if we only recognised the other things produced in the process of individuation besides the individual itself, then we would

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be more interested in the process and less interested in the outcome. His point is that we need ‘to understand the individual from the perspective of the process of individuation rather than the process of individuation by means of the individual’ (Simondon 1992: 300). Following Simondon’s emphasis on process and individuation rather than on product and the individual enables yet another way for us to claim pleasure and the orgasm as matters of weaving and individuation rather than of linearity and individuality. Becoming, according to Simondon, is set in motion because of a dephasing. Because being falls ‘out of phase with itself’, it dephases itself through individuation. Unlike unity and identity, which apply only to a single phase of being, individuation is the process that continually follows phasing and dephasing (Simondon 2009: 6). It is quite possible to see how Deleuze affirms this movement when he builds his understanding of becoming and desire, but there is also a way in which this conception of individuation as a response to being ‘falling out of phase’ with itself can be used to theorise a temporality of sexual pleasure. If becoming is caused by the disjunctive and productive movement of individuation, then the orgasm too could be seen as a moment, not of the subject ‘finding himself’, as Deleuze argues, but of moments, and movements, of contraction and dilation. As such, the orgasm comes to mark contractions in a continuous and undulating process of individuation. Rather than marking the site of subjectivation, it can be webbed through the emergence and re-emergence of pleasure. A useful understanding of sexual pleasure would be one that undoes Deleuze’s own idiocy by combining, on the one hand, his understandings of Leibniz’s fold and Simondon’s transduction and individuation and, on the other, the forces of his and Guattari’s conceptualisation of desire. Through such weaving, individual human feelings are no longer on a different ontological plane than the forces of desire organising life, but rather, become part of an immanent flow of forces through which bodies expand and contract. Returning to Deleuze’s understanding of pleasure as integral to the binding of the passive and active synthesis in Difference and Repetition, we can begin to see how even the pleasures of the orgasm can be incorporated into a philosophy of immanence and desire. Once we have passed the threshold of the individual, which in Deleuze’s understanding of the orgasm remains a stumbling block, we can begin to map the pleasurable connections of physical vibrations. More willing than Parisi and many other post-Deleuzian scholars to affirm the creative role of pleasure, Grosz does make use of Deleuze’s philosophy to theorise

66 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body such vibrations. Perhaps, she suggests, sexuality should not be understood so much in terms of its ends or goals, but rather in terms of its forces and pleasures. Such forces are about ‘bodily intensification’ (Grosz 2008: 33). Recognising living beings as ‘vibratory beings’, she suggests that vibration is about differentiation and the enjoyment of forces: ‘Vibrations, waves, oscillations, resonances affect living bodies, not for any higher purpose but for pleasure alone’ (Grosz 2008: 33). Such pleasure is no longer about deplorable discharge but about vibrating intensities that, rather than returning to confirm the subject, create affective assemblages. Apart from exchanging the link between pleasure and the subject for a connectivity of vibration and assemblages, it is also important to note, as I do in the introductory chapter, how the pleasure Grosz outlines stands outside an economy of capitalisation. Such pleasure is about excess and, as such, it is not linked to the efficiency of reproduction, but rather to a sense of ‘uselessness’. Positioning pleasure as useless implies, firstly, that there is no gain outside pleasure itself. Grosz looks into birdsong and music as examples of that which yields pleasurable sound that is superfluous to the mating process, or, in other words, a mode of vibration that exceeds the bare neces- sities of survival (Grosz 2008: 54). Here, the female orgasm, which will be discussed further in the next chapter, may be of particular interest, since, despite numerous efforts, it has been impossible, as Elisabeth A. Lloyd notes, to adequately demonstrate its function either for fertility or for reproductive success (Lloyd 2005: 222). Secondly, the uselessness of pleasure can be related to temporality. Because such pleasure exceeds the basic striving for survival, it also exceeds a temporal directionality which ties pleasure to a specific goal. Instead, this pleasure is identified as part of a rhythm and a refrain. Earlier in this chapter I discuss the way in which Margulis and Sagan consider sex apart from reproduction as an undoing of fixed identities and a randomisation that leaves space for new states of things. In such randomisation, pleasure does not have a fixed teleology, but rather produces, as well as is produced by, unpredictable excess. Through Grosz’s more Deleuzian terms, we may understand this as the vibrations that resound through earth to create rhythms of bodies from the chaos of interminability to the determination of specific bodies (Grosz 2008: 54). These ‘rhythms of seduction, copulation, birth, death – coupled with those of the earth – seasons, tides, temperatures – are the conditions of the refrain, which encapsulates and abstracts these rhythmic or vibratory forces into a sonorous

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emblem, a composed rhythm’ (Grosz 2008: 55). What Grosz shows, then, via Deleuze but also through a development of how we may understand pleasure, is how pleasure can be linked to a temporality of rhythm rather than to directionality and causality. The body is seen as capable of moving between material to immaterial effects, ‘from the energy of the universe to the muscular oscillations that constitute pleasure and pain in living things’ (Grosz 2008: 55). Through such rhythms and contractions, pleasure becomes part of a refrain, a refrain that is played by, as well as plays, the body. The body con- tracts and dilates with the universe. The vibrations are not imposing a temporal directionality but rather constitute ‘a becoming-temporal of spatial movements and spatial processes, the promise of a future modeled in some ways on the rhythm and regularity of the present’ (Grosz 2008: 55).

Conclusion The present chapter attempts to locate a productive understanding of the body that accommodates the flux of desire at the same time as it embraces the idea of the orgasm. Having discussed the possibilities that Deleuzian readings have in theorising the complexities of present day bodies, it has also become clear that contemporary constructions of pleasurable bodies through various modes of communication and reproduction take place through types of collective, cybernetic and biotechnical networks that Deleuze’s philosophy only partly anticipates. Parisi’s study of abstract sex shows most clearly how Deleuze’s philosophy can be used to analyse such contemporary bodies and their sexual relations. At the same time, her study, as well as Perniola’s, suggests that Deleuze’s legacy in terms of the rejection of pleasure is hard to escape. Pleasure and the orgasm stay firmly on the side of the subject and a male rectilinear economy of ejaculation, and as long as this is the case, it does indeed need to be rejected if new bodies and desires are to be recognised. As we have seen, however, it is possible to engage Leibniz, Simondon and Grosz, as well as Deleuze’s own early work, to locate a theory of pleasure that is related to sexuality as well as bodies without, for that matter, being caught up in mechanisms of individual subjectivity. Rather than the idea of pleasure as that which puts an end to a more productive and connective desire, pleasure emerges as a principle holding things together – a stitching of the passive and active syntheses of individuation. This way, we get a pleasurable universe in a constant state of

68 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body immanent vibration. In such a universe, the orgasm is but an intensification, a phasing and dephasing, a coming and going of affect and differentiation. However, the understanding of the body and the way our understanding of its pleasures may be expanded have so far remained rather generalised. In the following chapters, more specific components of bodies are theorised in order to expand the way in which we may use Deleuze to analyse the pleasurable body also in terms of its historical, medical, social and political constructions.

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4 Orgasmic Feminism

Our person is a covered entrance to infinity Choked with the tatters of tradition. (‘O Hell’, Loy 1996: 71)

Introduction Positioned as secondary to male ejaculation, discouraged if clitoral, and seen as ‘signifying nothing’, the female orgasm has had a very different status in history than its male counterpart. On the one hand, a deeper understanding of the female orgasm has been overshadowed by its being subsumed as a subcategory of male sexuality, and on the other, the differences between how male and female sexual pleasure have been perceived and theorised are enormous. In both cases, it seems indefensible to disregard the deeply gendered politics of the orgasm, whether your aim is to defend its philosophical and political potential or reject it. Yet, neither Foucault nor Deleuze seem to take these differences seriously enough. Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Lesley Dean-Jones argues, is a history of male sexuality (Dean-Jones 1992: 77). Not least in the way in which he understands the historical use of pleasure and the orgasm as defined through a model of the ‘viral “ejaculatory schema” ’ and the female act as a duplicate to this schema, Foucault fails to recognise the different politics as well as expressions of orgasm and ejaculation (Dean-Jones 1992: 54). At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari’s demotion of pleasure and genitality, while intended to expand sexuality beyond the two sexes, makes them blind to the fact that their understanding of desire and sexuality fails to take into account the actual politics of sexual difference. Their liberation of sexuality from genitality and their rejection of the orgasm in favour of desire are rejections primarily based on the structural power of male anatomy and experience. The female orgasm is missing. If the history of sexuality is male, or even, as Catharine MacKinnon maintains, ‘an orgasmic, ejaculating history of getting

70 Orgasmic Feminism some’ (MacKinnon 1992: 117), and the female orgasm, to the extent to which it is represented, is typically described as a job accomplished by the male, as Jean Duncombe and Dennis Marsden note (Duncombe and Marsden 2002: 328), then the orgasm clearly does not carry much creative force. In this respect, Deleuze does the right thing in rejecting the orgasm and pleasure, both because he recognises the ‘deplorability’ of such an orgasmic history and because he opens up the possibility of an understanding of desire beyond the male and the female. For Deleuze and Guattari, genitality is a bad word connected with the stratified body – it is a construction that not only links sexuality with reproduction but also carries the responsi- bility of the illusion of the body (and its sexualities) as delimited to the organism and two sexes (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 20). The body is stolen by a dominant history that forces it to conform to the construction of two opposable organisms (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 305). As Deleuze and Guattari’s work shows, however, gendered sexuality can be creatively reconsidered by reconfigurations that are not limited by binaries or ejaculations. While this move away from the structural delimitation of the sexes, as well as their sexuality, is a highly meaningful strategy that opens bodies to becomings beyond their territorialised functions, Deleuze and Guattari are too hasty, or perhaps too uninterested, to explore the orgasm itself as a potential generator of becoming. If MacKinnon’s solution is to produce ‘an insubordinate history’ of ‘who uses who for pleasure and how they get away with it’ (MacKinnon 1992: 126), and Deleuze and Guattari’s is to build a completely different economy of desire that escapes molar entities, my strategy here is neither to trace a history of passive receivers of dominant pleasures nor to reject the discourse of sexual pleasure altogether, but rather to map an alternative history of pleasure and the orgasm. Even if we want to move beyond the teleological directionality of sex, we cannot simply drop notions of pleasure and orgasm regardless of how implicated they are in such understandings of sexuality. As Lloyd shows, the assumptions underpinning the understanding of the female orgasm in most major studies of sexuality are based on male sexuality, including ideas of its relation to reproduction, intercourse and temporality (Lloyd 2005). This latter point is especially important in the present context since it underlines how Deleuze’s idea of the orgasm as an end point is based exactly on such gendered assumptions. As Lloyd shows, the idea of orgasm as a culmination of pleasure followed by a period of sleep or tiredness is

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based on studies of male sexuality. The female orgasm, on the other hand, is often followed by ‘tendencies to wakefulness and continued states of arousal’ (Lloyd 2005: 226). Had Deleuze taken into account how orgasm may generate a perpetuation of energy, rather than relying exclusively on the idea of the orgasm as marking the end, his positioning of it in opposition to the plateau would have been more difficult to uphold. As a model for the continuation of pleasure and desire, the orgasm could have become an ally, rather than an adversary to the movement of becoming. A closer look at a history of understanding female sexuality, as well as at feminist political history, makes it possible to redress Deleuze’s disregard for the orgasm. This closer look, which includes historical, sociological and literary understandings of the female orgasm, should be seen not so much as a critique as an opening up of Deleuze’s philosophical writing beyond the delimitations he to some extent sets himself. As the first part of this chapter shows, these limitations are related to an implicit reliance on male understandings of the orgasm. As the second part of the chapter suggests, these limitations are also shaped by the literary writers that he and Guattari employ as champions of desire. Reading D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller for the sex, I argue, to some extent explains Deleuze’s rejection of its creative potential. Looking at other textual models, however, such as the poetry of Mina Loy or the writing of Anaïs Nin, it is possible to assemble a more radical and productive understanding of the orgasm. At the same time, it is important to note that the limitations that Deleuze’s philosophy may suffer from are, at least in terms of the recognition of female sexuality and orgasm, hardly limited to Deleuze’s work. While human female sexual behaviour and orgasm have been described in the sociological studies and reports published by Kinsey et al. and Masters and Johnson in the 1950s and 1960s, not to mention Shere Hite’s more expressed feminist angle in The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality in the 1970s, female pleasure has had little grounding in philosophical language (Hite 1976). As Grosz notes as she gives up the project of writing about female orgasm, the labour of evoking the ‘languid pleasures and intense particularities’ of female orgasm is ‘hardly a project for which the disciplines of philosophy, or, for that matter, psychoanalysis, could provide adequate theoretical training’ (Grosz 1995a: 279). Similarly, Mary D. Pellauer notes that research into the female orgasm has been ‘systematically overlooked and distorted in the previous centuries of sexual ethics’ (Pellauer 1993: 162). Nonetheless,

72 Orgasmic Feminism or rather therefore, this chapter shows how the politics of the female orgasm has the power to close down the sexual body, but also how the multiplicity of its expressions open it up towards productive encounters.

Orgasm, History, Politics The very existence of female sexuality as other than simply an accommodation of male sexual drives has been debated through history. The idea of female sexual pleasure, in particular, has been a contentious issue. Attitudes towards female sexual pleasure and the orgasm reveal a lot about cultural and political ideas of the body, of gender and of reproduction. From being seen as compulsory for conception to more modern ideas of the female orgasm as that which ‘signifies nothing’, as Lacan would have it, the orgasm has, in the past century, come to constitute an important part of sexual liberation in general, and women’s liberation in particular. A brief history of the orgasm may take a starting point in ideas that female orgasm was as necessary as male ejaculation in securing conception. Such ideas, Thomas Laqueur notes, were commonplace long before they were formulated by ancient doctrines such as those of Galen, Soranus and the Hippocratic school (Laqueur 1986: 4). Even if little was thought about female sexuality generally, Dean-Jones describes how this belief, at least potentially, placed women in a position where they could demand sexual satisfaction (Dean-Jones 1992: 68). Notable here is the importance assigned to the orgasm, not only for successful conception, but also for the definition and position of female versus male. According to Galen, Laqueur notes, the distinction between men and women, who were otherwise seen as the same in kind (the woman being a man turned inside out), was that females were cooler than males in order to be able to keep the genital and procreational organs safe inside the body (Laqueur 1986: 4). Interestingly, then, heat itself can be seen as a factor for whether the organs are situated outside the body (male) or inside (female). This distinction becomes important when weighed against the fact that sexual pleasure and orgasm were seen as instruments to make the body hot enough for the seeds to ‘comingle’ and create a new life. In this sense, Laqueur notes, sexual pleasure was not delimited to genital pleasure and orgasm; as long as the body reached the right temperature, the source for warmth could just as well be food, wine or imagination (Laqueur 1986: 7).

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Another example of how the orgasm has been an important political tool, and also of how philosophers such as Foucault have failed to recognised this, can be found in Dean-Jones’s analysis of Foucault as a historian of male sexuality. She argues that had Foucault given enough attention to the ways in which the Hippocratic Corpus described female sexual experience, he would not have been able to assimilate ‘the medical conception of a woman’s relationship with herself in sexual matters to the viral model so easily’ (Dean-Jones 1992: 48). The differences that Dean-Jones uncovers are interesting in two ways. To begin with, she notes that the Greeks understood male pleasure as object-directed. Male sexuality responded to multiple objects-choices inside and outside the home and inside and outside the female sex, and therefore it was in need of regulation. Female sexuality, on the other hand, was seen as passive and latent. It was not awakened by particular objects of desire (as was its male counterpart), but was activated by the insertion of the, or rather a, penis. Pleasure and orgasm were possible for women, but only as a passive response and side-effect of the primary function of sexuality for the female, which was to make sure that the womb did not dry up or close over. The belief was that the female body, primarily defined as a function of the reproductive system, needed regular penetrations. Secondly, and what is much more interesting, is that while such politics of pleasure is described in the medical and philosophical works of the time, the contemporary literature, Dean-Jones observes, conveys a very different message. Helen wants Paris and Paris only, and Medea’s passion for Jason is anything but passive (Dean-Jones 1992: 67). Rather than the passive receivers of sexuality described in the medical books, the literature of the time portrayed strong women with very special wishes regarding their object of desire and very particular needs to be fulfilled. This contrast between the clinical and the critical stands as an example of a contradiction, but also of how little was recorded in the medical literature of women’s potential, and hopefully also occasionally actual, sexual pleasures. As expected, there is little mention of how Greek women perceived the politics of their sexuality (Dean- Jones 1992: 65) and whether they felt more akin to the medical or the mythical definitions, if either. But as this early example shows, it is clear that the politics of pleasure are distinctly gendered and that the female orgasm, like so many other female expressions, has been placed in a passive position for political reasons. Even if these theories are not very Deleuzian in their focus on reproduction, and even though they are certainly not very modern

74 Orgasmic Feminism in their conception of the anatomy of the human body, it is still possible to learn something by linking these ancient claims to Deleuze’s philosophy. The desiring model that Deleuze and Guattari propose is so strongly a reaction against Oedipalised structures of sexuality that a U-turn around Freud yields a completely different set of insights. While their anti-Oedipal insights are crucial, the habitual connection of discussions of desire with the anti-Oedipal context restricts our awareness of the possibilities of sexuality and what it can do. Shifting the perspective slightly by connecting Deleuze and Guattari’s work on desire and the orgasm with a different sexual history and politics enables an expanded understanding of the role of the orgasm and sexuality. We need to take into account what the body can do beyond what will appear to be a delimited understanding also in an anti-Oedipal tradition. If obviously outdated ancient theories of the sexual body feel unsatisfactory as a model for a rethinking of the relation between sexual pleasure and desire, we can go to more recent descriptions of the female orgasm. In The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Lloyd shows how the conception of female pleasure has been shaped, not only by Greek ideas about anatomy or Freudian theories of repression, but also by a number of other scientific misconceptions about how female orgasm is linked to evolution (Lloyd 2005). In The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800–1975, Hera Cook traces the modern history of female orgasms. Here is located a trajectory of how female pleasure has been theorised and how the idea of a woman wanting, needing or even demanding an orgasm goes from being unknown, to interesting, to burdensome, to a symbol of feminist ambition and equality. Cook’s reading recounts the sexual politics and fear that have shaped understandings of female sexuality, as well as the ways in which these understandings have shaped women’s experience of their own sexual pleasure. Broadly, if earlier understandings of the female orgasm were based on inadequate knowledge of anatomy and reproductive biology, twentieth-century conceptions of the orgasm are shaped by a fear of lost masculinity and uncontrollable female sexuality. A crucial aspect of female pleasure and the theories that have shaped it is found in the focus on the orgasm. Seen as necessary for conception in earlier days, Victorian values, Robert Muchembled notes, suggested that only prostitutes desire orgasm (Muchembled 2008: 214). Later still, the idea that women can experience different kinds of orgasm, both clitoral and vaginal, is of great importance, mainly in the sense that the clitoral

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orgasm is purely pleasurable and also not necessarily dependent on male activity. When Freud suggests that the function of the clitoris is only to transfer excitement to the vagina he is also suggesting that clitoral orgasm is a threat to normal sexuality, as continued clitoral pleasure would prevent vaginal sexual sensation and could result in frigidity (Cook 2004: 215). In effect, this means a prohibition against masturbation as well as a restriction of women’s pleasure in what, in Deleuzian terms, amounts to a territorialisation of sexuality by dividing it up into good and bad sensations and behaviours, and thereby dividing also the body into good and bad sexual zones. At the same time that Deleuze and Guattari are writing their most influential book on sexuality and desire, Anti-Oedipus, in the early 1970s, women have begun the immense work of claiming sexual pleasure, in Europe as well as in America. Groups such as the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) and the National Organization for Women (NOW) are beginning to untangle female sexuality from patriarchal structures and drawing attention to the politics of pleasure and the orgasm. For women, sexual pleasure generally, and the orgasm in particular, come to constitute an important symbolic as well as actual aspect of liberation and equality. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, which outlines connections between how women have been ‘castrated’ politically as well as sexually, was first published in 1971 and soon acquired international bestseller status. Considerably less radical from a feminist perspective, but quite popularly influential, Cosmopolitan magazine, under the editorial eye of Helen Gurley Brown, started to publish regularly on topics of women’s sexuality and female orgasm. Between 1968 and the mid-1970s, Jane Gerhard points out, sexual pleasure and the orgasm came to play a crucial role in the discussions that would lay parts of the foundations for modern feminism in America and elsewhere (Gerhard 2002: 450). As Muchembled puts it, the female orgasm erupted into the public and the private in an unprecedented way, and with incalculable effects (Muchembled 2008: 5). For second wave feminists, active at approximately the same time as Deleuze and Guattari are writing Anti-Oedipus, the female orgasm, as Gerhard notes, becomes a symbol of the political power of women’s sexuality and self-determination (Gerhard 2002: 450). The very idea of sexual pleasure for women comes into focus and gradually, ‘the knowledge that sex could and should be pleasurable for women’, as Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott put it, hits mainstream culture (Jackson and Scott 1996: 12). This new focus on women’s pleasure called

76 Orgasmic Feminism for a reconfiguration of sexual practices to accommodate for sexual exchange that extended beyond male pleasure and orgasm (Jackson and Scott 1996: 12). As Cook shows, the idea of female sexual pleasure as independent of penetration that the clitoral orgasm comes to symbolise also comes to constitute a threat to normative values as well as to the previously imposed dominance of male sexuality (Cook 2004: 218). In a prime example of the biopolitics of sexuality, the orgasm is important because it reveals so clearly how women’s sexual pleasure has been written into the social contract. As Cook notes, sex manuals of the 1940s and 1950s, informed as they are by Freud’s warning against clitoral orgasm, describe how women who ‘preferred to be stimulated externally’ can undertake practice in terms of thought control as well as vaginal exercises. Women, one of these manual reads, ‘must force themselves to believe that stimulation inside the vagina is preferable to around the outer lips’ (in Cook 2004: 231). At the same time, Cook shows how women in the 1960s adopt the clitoral orgasm as a ‘weapon’ to claim sexual freedom by rejecting vaginal pleasure as passive and as maintaining the heterosexual institution (Cook 2004: 257). In the 1970s, the vaginal orgasm was positioned firmly in the debate about gender and pleasure. In 1972, Anne Koedt publishes the influential article ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’, in which she insists that the vaginal orgasm exists only as a construct to ensure male pleasure. In opposition to Freud’s argument that an adult female sexuality needs to transfer sexual pleasure from the clitoris to the vagina, she argued that women cannot achieve orgasm at all through vaginal intercourse only. Since men do, however, and because they can achieve both orgasm and confirmation of their masculinity and power through penetration, vaginal orgasm has been positioned as normal and standard (Koedt 1996: 112). Koedt maintains that the fact that women have orgasms only through stimulation of the clitoris has been of no interest to a patriarchal society other than as a threat to existing power structures (Koedt 1996: 116). Accordingly, women’s pleasure has been delimited by men and by ‘an orgasm that in fact does not exist’ (Koedt 1996: 112). Even if Koedt has been proven at least partially wrong by contemporary research into the clitoris, in the sense that it has discovered the extensiveness of its internal anatomy and thereby undermined the distinction between vaginal and clitoral stimulation, her point about the gendered politics of sexual pleasure remains valid in so far

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as that male pleasure has been positioned as primary, and the female as less important, or even nonexistent. Indeed, the fact that it would take until the beginning of the millennium until enough research had been done on clitoral anatomy to ascertain its structure is telling in itself. Even more revealing is the fact that considerable knowledge about the anatomy of the clitoris has been available since the early nineteenth century, but this knowledge has been, and continues to be, missing from both medical and textbook literature. As Helen E. O’Connell, Kalavampara V. Sanjeevan and John M. Hutson show in the report published by the American Urological Association’s journal in 2005, classic texts such as Gray’s Anatomy and Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response, as well as contemporary anatomy textbooks, continue to devote space to the anatomy of the penis while omitting information about the clitoris. In some instances, information about female genital structure existed earlier, only to be omitted in later texts (O’Connell et al. 2005: 1189). This means that, even if technological advances such as magnetic resonance imaging have enabled recent research to discover additional details about the multiplanar structure of the clitoris, considerable knowledge about it has existed for centuries, but has been ignored. ‘The tale of the clitoris’, as O’Connell and colleagues note, ‘is a parable of culture, of how the body is forged into a shape valuable to civilization despite and not because of itself’ (O’Connell et al. 2005: 1194). In a sense, then, it is possible to argue that the orgasm that does not exist still haunts the discourse of female pleasure. Positioned as secondary to ‘ejaculatory schemas’, and constructed to confirm gender hierarchies, the female orgasm has also been seen as a proof of women’s citationality. Derrida, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes, picks up on Nietzsche’s argument that women ‘ “give themselves”, even when they give themselves’ (Spivak 1984: 22). This con- currence of self-presence and self-citation is located in the possibility for women to fake orgasm. In their capacity of ‘acting out’ orgasmic pleasure, women also have the capacity to undermine their own knowability, and thereby men’s mastery of their pleasure (Spivak 1984: 22). Although, and as Spivak recognises, Derrida’s argument is based on a problematic view that places men’s pleasure as the signified and leaves women’s pleasure in a curious hiatus, the point is that the faked orgasm, as an orgasm that does not exist, makes woman ‘the mark of the critique proper’ (Spivak 1984: 22). While Spivak proceeds with an examination of Derrida’s positioning of woman in relation to his project of tracing différance, what is of interest here is

78 Orgasmic Feminism how woman’s orgasm has become both nothing and so many things at once. Like the myth of the hymen, which has shaped and still very much shapes sexual politics without even existing as such, the female orgasm carries layers of social and political meaning, even before any pleasure has taken place. It seems that, when writing Anti-Oedipus and their later books, Deleuze and Guattari are oblivious of, or simply uninterested in, the fact that intense public debates are going on about the sexual pleasure of women. That these debates never make it to the anti-Oedipal project could partly be explained by the fact that Anti-Oedipus was published in 1972, and thus appeared at the very same time as these movements and thoughts were gathering momentum. However, since neither their joint work nor Deleuze’s later writing is more open to this explosive reconfiguration of sexuality, this emerges rather as a lack of interest in the potential of feminist sexual politics to contribute to their project. As the contemporary feminist debates move from the earlier focus on genitality and reproduction to questions of the politicisation of pleasure and the rethinking of its expressions and possibilities, Deleuze and Guattari seem already to have decided to forfeit pleasure and orgasm. The way in which Deleuze’s rejection of the notion of sexual pleasure as a politically meaningful category coincides with the historical period in which women begin to claim it as part of their political agenda seems to mirror, to some extent, what some have argued to be an unfortunate coincidence of the ‘fragmentation’ or ‘death’ of the subject position at a time when women were finally in a position to claim it. Even if the idea of orgasm and sexual pleasure as a locus of self-determination might be evidence of a molar rather than a molecular politics, and an instrument of identity rather than becoming, the location of sexual pleasure as a means of negotiating stratified conceptions and systems of the body is nonetheless crucial to the idea of connective desire. Sexuality, as Deleuze shows in The Logic of Sense, has three moments which can be identified in terms of the connective, the conjunctive and the disjunctive syntheses. The first creates the erogenous zones of a single series, the second introduces the phallic coordination of these zones and the third opens the sexual up towards a ‘result which never ends’ (Deleuze 2004a: 265–6). If connective synthesis is based on the creation of continuity, and the conjunctive introduces the phallic, the disjunctive synthesis creates pure affirmation which, rather than excluding predicates to retain the identity of a thing, opens the thing towards ‘the infinity of

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predicates through which it passes’ (Deleuze 2004a: 199). Exclusion and identity are replaced by the communication of events. This makes it problematic to exclude the orgasm from the idea of sexuality as productivity. In a sense, one may argue that Deleuze retains sexual pleasure within the continuous and the phallic, and that he thereby excludes it from the event. In a sense, pleasure thus retains the ‘systematic value’ which, as I argued in Chapter 3, Deleuze is otherwise so eager to escape. This also makes it possible to address the fact that his description of the orgasm, as much of his other writing, is informed by an implied male, and arguably molar, model. Unlike Irigaray, who, as Grosz points out, positions female sexuality as ‘irreducible to a single organ, a single sexual zone, or a single orgasm’ (Grosz 1994: 219), Deleuze seems hesitant to situate his conception of the orgasm in a context wider than the dominant one. Later, when he writes with Guattari, Deleuze seems oblivious of the fact that their differentiation of orgasm and plateau rests on a set of assumptions that are both individual and gendered. Apart from the lost opportunities of rerouting sexual pleasure through the female body suggested by Irigaray, Deleuze and Guattari also miss the way in which female orgasmic pleasure opens up for sexuality beyond reproduction. The two most powerful biases that have shaped explanations of female orgasm, Lloyd shows, are that it has a reproductive and thereby an evolutionary function, and that an analysis of female sexuality can take off from the same starting points as an analysis of male sexuality (Lloyd 2005: 1–2). As Spivak points out, whereas the male orgasm ‘ “normally” entails the male reproductive act – semination’, female orgasm does not. The orgasmic pleasure of the female body ‘does not entail any one component of the heterogeneous female reproductive scenario: ovulation, fertilization, conception, gestation, birthing. The clitoris escapes reproductive framing’ (Spivak 1981: 180–1). Spivak argues for the importance of freeing female sexuality from its association with reproduction, and she also points to the immense political importance of such a move. A differentiation between what she calls the ‘uterine social organization’, which is related to reproduction, and ‘clitoral social organization’ would have to take into account ‘the varieties of the effacement of the clitoris’ (Spivak 1981: 181) and thereby enable a recognition and investigation of the political investment in sexual pleasure in itself. Such an investigation, which would address both Sudanese victims of clitoridectomy and Western women struggling to find a place for orgasm, would constitute a step towards undoing the

80 Orgasmic Feminism ideological–material opposition which has tended to keep feminism in the hold either of separation or of colonialisation (Spivak 1981: 184). Spivak’s argument makes it clear that throwing the pleasure out with the reproductive bathwater is a mistake if you want to truly politicise sexuality beyond Western preoccupations with Oedipus. In the light of being caught up in social and political meanings, the female orgasm can indeed be seen as a central part of the human sexuality that Deleuze and Guattari resist; the facialisation that overcodes the body with a signifying system that makes it into a social system (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 189, 201). As Leonore Tiefer shows, for example, the female orgasm continues to be co-opted, both by medical definitions, such as the problematic definitions of sexual dysfunctions in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and by the pharmaceutical industry’s eagerness to develop a wide definition of female sexual disorders for their ‘female Viagra’ (Tiefer 2002: 2). The definition of ‘normal’ female pleasure, Tiefer shows, is coded in accordance with male ideas of how desire and pleasure work, as well as through a commercialised eagerness to define problems that can be cured by pills. The understanding of the complexity of the body and its interrelations is narrowed down to a neatly defined disorder and a potentially staggering commercial success of a little pink pill. The body is separated from what it can do, and forcefully inscribed in social, political, and economical patterns that co-opt desire and claim it for specific purposes. Indeed, as in the two examples of Koedt’s myth of vaginal orgasm and Derrida’s faked orgasm, desire is not about sexual pleasure at all but about politics. But even if Deleuze and Guattari provide fruitful ways of theorising the stratification of desire and sexuality, they to some extent remain blind to the way this stratification of the body and its pleasures plays out in their own philosophy. Let us look, for example, at the some of the writing that Deleuze and Guattari favour as offering un-Oedipal modes of sexuality.

Lawrence, Miller, Literature and the Proliferation of Orgasmic Pleasure Along with other male authors such as Thomas Hardy and Allen Ginsberg, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller are praised by Deleuze and Guattari for their portrayals of sexuality and desire. These writers are seen to ‘scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse

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the desert of the body without organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 132–3). Enjoying such privileged positions in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of desire, their role demands further attention. If their work helps us see the circulation of desire, is it possible through them also to find an explanation as to why this desire is so insistently posited as in contradiction with sexual pleasure? Lawrence recurs with some frequency in Anti-Oedipus and elsewhere as a model for non-Freudian modes of desire. Like the other writers that Deleuze and Guattari list, he is praised for creating a fluid and ‘viscous’ libido and a polyvocality that resists Oedipalisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 133). Lawrence critiques psychoanalysis and rejects it as a fad – ‘Father complex, mother complex, incest dreams: pah, when we’ve had the little excitement out of them we shall forget them as we have forgotten so many other catch-words’ (Lawrence 2007: 94). In this respect, he is clearly useful to Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal project. An expanded reading of Lawrence, however, provides a more complex and more problematic view of his take on sexuality. His theoretical work Fantasia of the Unconscious, for example, is suggestive of an approach to sexuality revolving around ideas of absolute division between male and female –‘The talk about a third sex, or about the indeterminate sex, is just to pervert the issue’ (Lawrence 2007: 69) – and about appropriate sexual behaviours. Once woman ‘reaches the point of fulfilment, she should not break off to ask for more excitements’ (Lawrence 2007: 90). Lawrence has received acute critique from feminist quarters on his male-centred depictions of sexuality. As Carol Siegel shows, he has even become a kind of token adversary for many feminist critics (Siegel 1991: 5). Most famously, perhaps, he is critiqued by Kate Millet, who argues that his writing appears as an enforcement of male sexual power. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Millet suggests, the words ‘sexual’ and ‘phallic’ are used interchangeably, and this, she argues, is suggestive of the sexual and very Freudian politics of the novel where the penis is repeatedly discussed and praised while the female genitals are kept in the dark and in passive acquiescence (Millet 2000: 238–40). How the flows can circulate when they cannot even get past the phallus is obviously an important question to take back to Deleuze and Guattari, as is the question of how such a repeated focus on the penis relates to their rejection of genitality, but here, and in the light of the present focus on the orgasm, we will highlight one passage in Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover that Millet misses in her account of female sexual passivity in the book.

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Even if Lawrence’s protagonist, Connie, might have to get her orgasm when she can, as Millet puts it (Millet 2000: 240), the novel does not completely disparage the importance of her orgasm. In the novel, as Cook notes, great importance is given to the difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasm, and the former is depicted as decidedly negative (Cook 2004: 216–17). As Lady Chatterley is described as working to ‘bring herself off’ by moving and rubbing herself against Mellors – ‘She’d try to lie still and let me work the business. She’d try. But it was no good. She got no feeling off it, from my working. She had to work the thing herself, grind her own coffee’ – she is seen as violent and selfish, and as a whore (Lawrence 1942: 254–5). It is not so much her faithlessness to her husband that is morally rejected but her insistence on self-generated pleasure through clitoral orgasm. Furthermore, as Cook suggests, this approach to female orgasm reflects contemporary perceptions of the ‘demand’ for clitoral orgasm as a burden to the man, an obligation that prevents him from enjoying his pleasure and postcoital relaxa- tion (Cook 2004: 235). In portraying the clitoral orgasm as a selfish and immoral act, Lawrence appears to confirm rather than escape Freudian models of sexuality. Lawrence, Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes, eagerly describes orgasm in his work. The build-ups and climaxes that shape the book position the various descriptions of orgasm as steps along the road of differentiating and devaluating between different kinds of female orgasm (DuPlessis 2001: 77). This recognition of, and fascination with, female orgasms was both radical and a sign of the times. DuPlessis notes how the early twentieth century featured, on the one hand, social purity reformers who analysed sexuality in terms of its dangers and victimisation of women, and on the other, a set of ‘sex- radicals’ who explored the specificity of female anatomy and pleasure (DuPlessis 2001: 57). In this sense, Lawrence’s interest in the female orgasm may be seen as ‘radical’. Yet, Duplessis notes, women in Lawrence are will-less, while male potency is enthusiastically celebrated (DuPlessis 2001: 78). Female orgasms are positioned as forces to be regulated. Clitoral and active pleasure, in particular, needs to be controlled, as such pleasure constitutes a sign of depraved women, probably ‘Lesbian’, who are obsessed with their own sensation. In the end, DuPlessis argues, ‘Lawrence’s curiosity and tolerance extend only to varieties of phallic sexuality’ (DuPlessis 2001: 78). If we can establish that Lawrence is problematic as a Deleuzian champion in his moral and, dare we say, Freudian portrayals of

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female sexuality, his work is also at odds with Deleuze’s work structurally. Lawrence’s literary strategy in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DuPlessis suggests, is to create formal links between narrative and sexual climax. The end points of these build-ups are affirmations of heterosexuality and the organisation of pleasure (DuPlessis 2001: 77). The creation of parallel and continuous structures in which both narrative development and sexuality are kept in line seems to have little in common with Deleuze’s belief in the need to deterritorialise explanatory narratives of continuity. In providing what DuPlessis describes as a Bildung for women, Lawrence’s stand on sexuality is prescriptive and educational. Understood as conveying prescriptive messages by means of linear and teleological narratives, Lawrence’s work appears far from the schizophrenia that Deleuze and Guattari ascribe it. This can be related to a third point at which Lawrence’s work seems at odds with Deleuze’s. The sharp distinction between male and female in Lawrence’s work is hard to fit into a theory of immanent desire, as is his understanding of the individual. ‘Sex’, Lawrence writes in Fantasia of the Unconscious, ‘is always individual. A man has his own sex: nobody else’s. And sexually he goes as a single individual; he can mingle only singly’ (Lawrence 2007: 79–80). In his poem ‘Manifesto’, DuPlessis argues, we can see how he positions woman and man as absolutely irreconcilable. Even Siegel, who works to show the usefulness of Lawrence to a feminist project and how he highly values female sexual fulfilment, agrees that he insists on an ‘irreducible gender difference’ (Siegel 1991: 15, 3). Even if he celebrates sexuality, DuPlessis argues, and even if he ‘feels that intercourse is the path’, Lawrence portrays the merging of man and woman as ‘a tax on the solemnity of male isolation and quest’ (DuPlessis 2001: 80). ‘She has not realised yet, that fearful thing, that I am the other,/ she thinks we are all of one piece./ It is painfully untrue’ (cited in Duplessis 2001: 79–80). Lawrence bursts not only the erotic dream of complete unity, but also the possibility of all bodies as ‘all of one piece’, that is, Deleuze’s firm belief in the univocity of desire. If Deleuze’s reading of Lawrence increasingly emerges as partial, that is, as locating fragments of usefulness in the face of problematic perspectives on gender, narrative and ontology, it is also clear that he is not interested in how Lawrence understands orgasm theoretically. Here, Lawrence could have been more useful. Lawrence warns against sex as an end-point in itself (Lawrence 2007: 138), but the orgasm in itself is not an end-point as it is for Deleuze. In his Fantasia

84 Orgasmic Feminism of the Unconscious, after describing a rather binary understanding of sexual intercourse as a meeting of ‘the polarized magnetic attraction’ between man and woman, Lawrence explains orgasm as a ‘crash into oneness’. The powerful magnetism of the blood makes man and woman surge towards, and merge with, each other in orgasm. After the orgasm, however, the two individuals are again separate. But something also changes through orgasm which positions it, not as an end-point, but as a generative spark. ‘But are they as they were before? Is the air the same after a thunder-storm as before? No. The air is as it were new, fresh, tingling with newness’ (Lawrence 2007: 77–8). The orgasm is an infusion of energy, a recharging of bodies. ‘From these centers rise new impulses, new being, rising like Aphrodite from the foam of the new tide of blood’ (Lawrence 2007: 78). In the face of gendered individualism, then, Lawrence’s idea of the orgasm in itself is one of re-generation of energy and transformation of being. Sandra L. Gilbert writes, in the introduction to Hélène Cixous’s The Newly Born Woman, that Connie’s orgasmic pleasure can be described in terms of a cosmic pleasure that releases her from ‘the historically hegemonic Western “nerve-brain” consciousness that would subordinate body to mind, blood to brain, passion to reason’ (Gilbert 1996: xvii). From this perspective, Lawrence expresses a liberating and diffusive orgasm that, in Gilbert’s view, reflects something of the explosive orgasmic power that Cixous writes about in her work (Gilbert 1996: xvii). Somewhat contradictorily, then, the orgasm is seen as a morally offensive and threatening act on behalf of the male protagonist at the same time as it is portrayed as a force capable of rewriting the body, in terms of both its cultural heritage and its physical stratifications. In one sense, the representation of orgasm in Lawrence, in itself at one point the cause of societal cen- sorship, actually opens up sexuality and bodies to new connections beyond culturally dominant ways of determining the organism. On the one hand, then, Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments that Lawrence liberates desire and flows will have to be discussed in relation to the way in which sexuality retains a phallic focus in the novel as well as to the delimitation of a woman’s pleasure to fit into a tradition of male control over desire, sexual activity and sexual release. On the other hand, Deleuze’s rejection of the orgasm has to be weighed against the fact that even one of his most favoured authors depicts it as a possibility of exploding the stratified body. DuPlessis contrasts Lawrence with the modernist poet Mina Loy. Lawrence’s contemporary and, like him, a cause of outrage because

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of the sexual explicitness of her work, Loy portrays a very different orgasmic universe. Loy’s work is not phallic, not goal-oriented and not climactic. Rather, she depicts sexuality along the lines of ‘a loosely structured poetic plot of connection, loss, and analytic reprise’ (DuPlessis 2001: 79). In her work, narrative climaxes are scarce and are not lined up with the sexual climax (DuPlessis 2001: 79). Sexuality is not positioned as a separate force. For Loy, DuPlessis suggests, the orgasm deactivates gender binaries as suspicion is exchanged for ‘grasping flesh’ (DuPlessis 2001: 80). Loy’s poetry offers a sexualised and mechanised universe where ‘human cylinders’ revolve in what arguably corresponds much better to Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines than do Lawrence’s binary and moralis- ing sexual subjectivities. It offers ‘The human cylinders/ Revolving in the enervating dusk/ That wraps each closer in the mystery/ Of singularity’. In her poem, the kernel of the lover is indistinctness as their lovemaking ‘extrudes beyond the tangible’, a connectivity of ‘elastic tentacles of intuition/ To quiver among the stars’ (‘Human Cylinders’, Loy 1996). Even if Loy’s political view on gender posits the sexes as separate, as her brief ‘Feminist Manifesto’ suggests, her belief in the sexual embrace as ‘the only point at which the interests of the sexes merge’ shapes her poetic expression and yields powerful representations of sexuality as central but also as fuelled by irresolu- tion (‘Feminist Manifesto’, Loy 1996). As the final lines of ‘Human Cylinders’ warns us to ‘Destroy the Universe/ With a solution’, we note that the sexual merges the sexes at the same time as it stimulates the tensions that keep desire flowing. Only touching on Loy here serves to underline how Deleuze and Guattari’s choice of Lawrence weakens the argument they have and prevents them from developing a fully productive theory of sexuality. The unfortunate nature of their choice in this respect becomes even more obvious when we consider their praise of Henry Miller. If they read Lawrence’s expressions of desire and sexuality in a partial way that ignores both some of their problems and some of their possibilities, their praise of Miller as a searcher for ‘nonhuman sex’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 315) makes one wonder if they followed Mary Graham Lund’s example and spent an afternoon tearing out the ‘dirty’ pages of Miller, ‘not because they shocked or nauseated me, but they were in my way’ (Graham Lund 1967: 18). There may be parts of Miller’s writing that confirm their claim that Miller, like Lawrence, expresses desire-as- flux (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 5) and represents ‘vibrations, flows, schizzes rather than clearly defined

86 Orgasmic Feminism personalities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 362), but these are certainly not the passages describing sexual encounters. Whether Miller provides an insidious ‘compendium of American sexual neurosis’, as Millet puts it (Millet 2000: 295), or puts up a productive fight ‘against America’s sexual schizophrenia’, as Erica Jong suggests (Jong 1994: 4), his renowned sexual explicitness should be hard to ignore. Let us take a look at some examples. Miller’s novel Sexus (1949) includes a number of descriptions of orgasm, all of which are preoccupied with the penis and male accom- plishment. Miller plays a central part in the efforts of his generation to push for sexual expression in literature. His novels certainly abound in descriptions of sex, and it is also true that he describes women having orgasms, which, like Lawrence, made him radical at the time. But what is radical is the appearance rather than the nature of these orgasms. The women in Miller inevitably orgasm thanks to the male protagonist’s skilful use of his penis. They yearn for his penis, reaching for it ‘greedily’ (Miller 1987: 227), ‘gobbling’ it ‘like a hungry buzzard’ (Miller 1987: 182), and as she comes,

I was in such a cold-blooded state of control that as she went through her spasms I poked it around inside her like a demon, up, sideways, down, in, out again, plunging, rearing, jabbing, snorting, and absolutely certain that I wouldn’t come until I was damned good and ready. (Miller 1987: 227) He pushes her to distraction, making her beg for more, and he gives her more until she is so exhausted that she lies there

like a sack of oats, panting, sweating, utterly helpless, utterly played out, that she was, I slowly and deliberately rammed my cock back and forth, and when I had enjoyed the chopped sirloin, the mashed potatoes, the gravy and all the spices, I shot a wad into the mouth of her womb that jolted her like an electric charge. (Miller 1987: 227) As these passages suggest, Miller’s representations of sex are not only coloured by male power and performance, they are also characterised by a male subject in ‘full control’ of sexual pleasure. He is very much a subject – a male subject – who cold-bloodedly works the woman while she has surrendered. She is very much a body – a female body – passive, receptive and prone to abandon. The sex is a celebration of genitality, penetration and the organisation of the organism in terms of the two sexes – his penis, her womb – all of which Deleuze and Guattari expressedly reject. Deleuze and Guattari do admit that even their favoured writers have to pursue their search

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for nonhuman sex by ‘borrowing from territorial circuits’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 315). However, the circuits that Miller delineates in his writing on the orgasm seem to foreclose deterritorialisation altogether. It seems highly problematic that Deleuze and Guattari clearly do not read Miller for the sex at the same time as he is repeatedly used as a model for the schizoanalysis of sex. They pick out passages from Miller that enable them to present his writing in terms of a break-up of personalities. A passage from his Hamlet (1939), for example, suggests a ‘scouring of the unconscious’, a ‘schizophrenic process of deterritorialization’, and ‘the functioning of desiring-machines’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 299). But when claiming that Miller, along with Lawrence, has ‘a more accurate understanding of sexuality than Freud’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 292), it makes little sense to ignore his representations of sex. The only explanation as to why Deleuze and Guattari can insist that Miller belongs to a set of writers of schizoanalysis who would ‘tirelessly take apart egos and their presuppositions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 362), in the face of his writing on pleasure and the orgasm, is that sexuality is seen as irrelevant to such a project. And indeed, if Deleuze formed his perception of the orgasm through reading Miller, his rejection of pleasure and the orgasm becomes more comprehensible. Orgasms in Miller tie sexuality to sexed bodies, celebrate the male subject (and ego), and consume its energies, leaving the woman exhausted like a ‘sack of oats’ that can be rejuvenated only through the sperm which he shoots into her spent body. In other words, the economy of the orgasm in Miller is certainly deplorable. As long as writers like Lawrence and Miller are the cornerstones of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of desire, we remain within what truly does appear as deplorable economies of pleasure and orgasm. An obvious comparison to Miller, for temporal, cultural and personal reasons, is the writings of Anaïs Nin. The famous combination of an intense love affair, a blend of admiration and disgust, and two mutually inspired and yet markedly different authorships gives us, in Miller and Nin, an important contrastive material in terms of sexual pleasure. We may add to this the fact that while Lawrence and Miller were invited into Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage of writers of desire, Nin was largely ignored. Yet, Anna Powell argues, Nin anticipates the multiplicity of the erotic that Deleuze and Guattari theorise via the conjunctive synthesis. Although retaining some patriarchal as well as Freudian and Jungian influences on her

88 Orgasmic Feminism writing, Nin expresses ‘the particular erotic vitality of part-objects that exceed individual lovers in congress’ (Powell 2011: 51). Powell’s analysis of Nin is important to the present project in its ambition to extend Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of sexuality beyond their own objects of analysis, as well as beyond their own conceptualisations. It is important also in that it highlights Nin’s ambivalent reading of Miller’s work as, on the one hand, inspiring and electrifying in its violent, virile destructiveness, and on the other, as vulgar and flat. She positions her own ‘slipperiness’ of mind against his ‘relentless dissection’ (Powell 2011: 62–3). The most potent of their differences is highlighted when Powell contrasts Nin’s description of her relationship with Miller as orgasmic – ‘like living every moment in orgasm, with only pauses between plunges’ – to Miller’s account of the same as ‘one literary fuck fest’ (Powell 2011: 63). While both focus on the sexual, Nin’s depictions of a continuous flux of orgasm and plunges is suggestive of a desire that is at once more erotic, more ethical and more open to the multiplicities of sexuality than Miller’s, who, no matter how conscientiously obscene, fails to express or recognise the reverberations of erotic multiplicities.

Becoming-Orgasmic If Powell’s project is to recover Nin specifically, the aim here is not to incorporate any particular authorship to the Deleuzian project. Rather, the intention is simply to provide a few, and enough, examples to enable a recovery of the orgasm as a potential part of, rather than as a stumbling block towards, becoming-woman. Considering the importance of the concept of becoming-woman in Deleuze’s philosophy, it is odd that he does not take up the problem, or potential, of pleasures that escape societal determinations. Becoming-woman, which is not necessarily related to the molar entities known as women but rather with locating routes of escape from predetermined subject positions and relations, is about exploding molar entities of both man and woman as defined by form, organism and subject positions. These routes, which are discovered by picking up on the movements and rests that exist outside the body as organism are defined as becoming-woman because ‘woman’ is not tied up with molar organisations of the body and subject in the way ‘man’ is (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 304). By the same token, one might argue that women’s pleasure – which would again not necessarily be linked to the molar entity of woman – should harbour potential

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to escape molar understandings of pleasure and orgasm. Irigaray notes that there is no law or discourse for women’s pleasure (Irigaray 1985: 95). Positioned outside the law for Lacan, and outside the molar for Deleuze, woman is expected, Irigaray suggests, to ‘enjoy without law’, which she takes to mean, in psychoanalysis, without desire (Irigaray 1985: 96). Because it cannot be ordered through law or discourse or psychoanalytic desire, women’s pleasure is an-archic and a-teleological. Since the desire that women’s pleasure does not have, according to this argument, is of the psychoanalytical kind, and, as such, invested with lack, the notion of pleasure without such desire, that is, a becoming-woman of pleasure, opens up to a different possibility. Even if not fully compatible with Deleuze’s theories of desire, as we shall soon see, Irigaray’s understanding of the temporality of man’s and woman’s sexuality can assist in recuperating the radical potential of sexual pleasure and orgasm. As Tamsin E. Lorraine notes, Deleuze and Irigaray have a number of convictions in common, not least the belief in how we can break free from delimiting forms of life not only conceptually, but also in terms of our corporeal morphology (Lorraine 1999: 15). But Irigaray, unlike Deleuze, embarks on what Lorraine notes is a detailed critique of Freud’s invariably masculine paradigm for sexual pleasure (Lorraine 1999: 25). Through Irigaray, it becomes clearer than ever how distinctly male Deleuze’s concern that the orgasm will constitute an end-point of desire is. Irigaray suggests that because man is cut off in space (from the mother), and because the sexual act for him is dependent on the exposure of both the erection and its detumescence (which is compensated for by the production of a child), his sexuality is bound up with a kind of temporal repetition – a futile attempt to recuperate his exile by ‘parceling out’ his desire (Irigaray 1993: 63–4). Woman, on the other hand, is cut off from time – her body, which is marked by the interior and the maternal body, follows cycles of rebirth. Thereby, she also retains the access to the spatial. Helped by her relation to the cyclical and maternal, as well as by the interiority of her organs, her sexual economy is not based on lack. While man searches for infinity beyond himself, woman finds it in the expanse of the present. Without the end-point that man constantly bumps into and that marks his exile, woman can love indefinitely. Her sexuality is not regulated by ‘the imperatives and risks or erection and detumescence’, and is therefore not limited by ‘thresholds’ that ‘mark a limit, the end of an act’ (Irigaray 1993: 64). It expands, rather, in a constant touching – a ‘sentence without a

90 Orgasmic Feminism period’, an endless musical phrase, an everlasting expanse, an always more, or encore (Irigaray 1993: 64–5). On the one hand, it is clear that Irigaray’s insistence on the organisation of sexuality through the organs and essential differences between men and women stands in sharp contrast to Deleuze’s ambition of thinking the body without organs. This contrast also explains her critique towards this notion as well as the concept of becoming- woman. Dorothea Olkowski notes how Irigaray, while not averse to the concept of multiplicity, sees the body without organs as an historical condition for women. This, in her eyes, makes Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-woman but yet another appropriation of the female body by the male (Olkowski 2000: 103). On the other hand, Irigaray is helpful to a Deleuzian project, not only because she exposes the male suppositions that mark Deleuze’s rejection of the orgasm, but also because she provides the means of developing Deleuze’s limited conception of the orgasm as end-point. If we theorise her two different temporalities of sexuality, not in terms of a binary sexual anatomy but in terms of what Deleuze understands as the dominant time of causality versus duration and the virtual, it becomes possible to discuss the orgasm beyond the end-point without resorting to essentialism. After all, developing a conception of time that extends beyond the actual and causal without, for that matter, implying a transcendent eternity constitutes a central aspect of Deleuze’s project. By complementing the temporality of actual bodies with a layer of virtual time – ‘an entity infinitely divisible into past and future, and into the incorporeal effects which result from bodies, their actions and their passion’ – Deleuze proposes a Bergsonian concentration of the present in which past and future are gathered (Deleuze 2004a: 8). These two temporalities are complementary but mutually exclusive. Distinguishing between states of affairs (being green, being small) and incorporeal events (to green, to grow) is a way of understanding the movement of time, not as a causal relation that impacts on an already existing state of affairs, but as emerging from the becoming of the event itself (Deleuze 2004a: 8). Even in its actuality, the present itself is always already full of the virtual. This is why Deleuze is so fond of Lewis Carroll’s Alice – the dissolution of causality and logic in Wonderland lays bare the ‘paradox of infinite identity’ – of the present extending in both directions at once – of growing smaller and bigger at the same time (Deleuze 2004a: 4). However, when Deleuze rejects the orgasm as belonging to a temporality of ‘pleasure-discharge’ (Deleuze 2001: 101), he positions the

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orgasm exclusively in the realm of the actual. Coming, rather than being seen as a process of becoming, is caught up in the hopeless repetition of calming desire but momentarily before it becomes necessary ‘to call it up again’ (Deleuze 2001: 101). It is, in other words, positioned in an economy of being – a state of affairs that need to be confirmed or, as Irigaray would put it, in a male economy of futile striving for completion – the deflation of the penis as a failure that will need to be compensated by a child, another sexual encounter, or other phallic substitutes (Irigaray 1993: 63). But why, when all other processes of the body are opened to becoming, does Deleuze position the orgasm so determinedly in such a linear temporality? Why, when he does such a good job stealing concepts of identity and subjectivity from Hegelian and Freudian frameworks, and transforming them into creative conceptions of individuation and desire, is the orgasm left to wither among the debris of Freudian lack? These questions are particularly confounding if we consider how well his descriptions of becoming could work to describe the orgasm in its expansive capacity. The multiplicities of the orgasm, as some of the examples below will show, also need to be recognised exactly as harbouring ‘the infinite identity of both directions or senses at the same time – of future and past, of the day before and the day after, of more and less, of two [sic] much and not enough, of active and passive, and of cause and effect’ (Deleuze 2004a: 4). Like Irigaray’s feminine pleasure, an orgasm understood through such temporality would be without thresholds, without limits or end-points and, in Deleuzian terms, a becoming smaller and bigger at the same time (Deleuze 2004a: 8). When Irigaray argues that female sexual pleasure is not ‘orgiastic in the limited sense of the word’ (Irigaray 1993: 64), she implicitly opens for an expansion of this term. Her way of doing this would not be through Deleuze and becoming-woman, since this concept is not sympathetic to the sexed specificities of male and female bodies that are so important to her. By the same token, Deleuze would not be content with Irigaray’s overtly genital understanding of sexuality. However, if we combine Irigaray’s insistence on sexual pleasure without end with Deleuze and Guattari’s expanded conception of the body beyond the ‘great dualism machines’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 305) we can begin to theorise an orgasm that reverberates through the body in the widest sense. Such an orgasm could in itself be instrumental to the process of becoming-other, becoming- woman, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible. As Alphonso Lingis writes:

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Is not orgasm, instead, the passage into the uncontainment and unrest of liquidity and vapour-pleasure in exudations, secretions, exhalations? Orgasm is the dissolute ecstasy by which the body’s ligneous, ferric, coral state casts itself into a gelatinous, curdling, dissolving, liquefying, vapor- izing, radioactive, solar, and nocturnal state. In the transubstantiations in the carnal substance, movements that do not terminate in quiescence or nirvana, a voluptuous pleasure hardens, solidifies, surges, rushes, vapor- izes, and vanishes without leaving contentment or satisfaction. (Lingis 1994: 32) Lingis’s description positions the orgasm as a melting and melding of the body in a wider sense. Internal sedimentations – the ligneous, the ferric, the coral – become fluid at the same time as pleasure ‘hardens’. As pleasure solidifies, the body escapes its solidity. This is an event that does not leave the body satisfied but rather passes through it like a wave, a transubstantiation that reminds us of the liquidity of both pleasure and the body itself. The idea of orgasm as a constant return that is part of the body is expressed slightly differently in Mary Fellon’s fictional text Hot Works: and then there were all those bubbles bursting last night all those dehy- drated desires packed in every cell our fingers and tongues reconstituted with light and moisture all those scraggy little cells sitting up and opening their mouths again and then lying on their backs to have their tummies tickled and then is this called frustration because the lid was not put back on the bottle the orgasm was not had – an orgasm shouldn’t be had like a woman it should be and is as coming and going as ever present as – let me think – waves yes or tides – it can be orchestrated as a filmed tenth-take it can be like being hit by a car but it is what makes us the same as water or trees it is some energy which relates us to life. (Fallon 1995: 48) Represented like this, orgasm appears as a convulsive possibility. Both the body, packed to the fingertips with desires and with cells that roll over with pleasure, and the way it connects with the world through waves that link it with life itself point to sexual pleasure as an expression of immanence, a burst of energy that turns the body into water, trees, waves of life. Such an orgasm, as Fallon’s text indicates, is not ‘had like a woman’. It is, rather, an ever-present coming and going. This way of understanding and experiencing orgasm depicts it as full of possibilities for escape as well as support for a body expressed as life itself, as energy pumping through matter. Note also how both these descriptions of orgasm lack any reference to the genital. The body is fingers, and tongues and cells, and it

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expresses itself in exudations and secretions as it is becoming waves and energy, gelatinous, radioactive and interstellar. The experience of orgasm is certainly not a ‘deplorable release’. Another orgasm may already be beckoning, and a heightened, rather than a diminished sense of excitation and desire inject the body with tingling energy. An orgasm is not an end-point so much as it is a reminder and boost of connective energy. An orgasm is not so much about the subject as it is about the universe, about the sentence without a period. Paying attention to both theoretical and literary descriptions of orgasm provides us with a very different understanding of the orgasm than the one Deleuze identifies. We can expand on these fields of investigation further by looking into the field of sociology. Pellauer notes that while ‘sexuality is always already interpreted’ (Pellauer 1993: 166), orgasm is a phenomenon that is very hard to describe. Orgasms are fleeting and escape memory, they are diverse in a manner that escapes the control of the subject, very difficult to convey to others, and very difficult to compare (Pellauer 1993: 167–8). Fleeting and eluding subjective memory, such orgasms exceed habit and temporal continuity. Diverse and unpredictable, they are invested with difference and are indescribable; they elude the descrip- tive and prescriptive. At the same time, however, this elusiveness also makes them susceptible to generalisations. Pellauer, convinced that the diversity of sexual sensations in women and the lack of descriptions thereof demand more writing on female sexuality, focuses on putting into words her own experience of orgasm. Because she believes that ‘Ecstasy spills over onto the world outside the bed, not accidentally but intrinsically’ (Pellauer 1993: 181), these descriptions are part of a political strategy of opening up female sexuality beyond its always already made interpretations. The project of telling the female orgasm is also a way of exploding predetermined structures of sexuality – a becoming-woman of orgasm. In Pellauer’s words, the sexual pleasure is an opening beyond the differentiation between you and me. In the midst of what seems like a rather non-radical relationship and sexuality – she describes herself as heterosexual, white, well-educated and in a long and stable marriage – pleasure opens a space of connectivity and a nonhuman sexuality:

My partner’s skin is an icon of the universe. I am enraptured, captivated, mesmerized, by the planes of this back, arms, navel plain, thighs, the globes of this rear end blending gracious curves into thighs and back, and by my own as well. I fall/ slide into them, and they turn into the universe.

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When I am in this state, reverently and greedily cherishing these gracious plains of flesh, whole self-as- caress, I want to cherish every plane in the world with this same tenderness – the wood of the bedside table, the walls of the room, the grass of the yard outside, the iron bars of the back fence, the gnarled bark of trees, all call out to me to caress them in this same tender mood, not to intrude upon them my sexuality, but to cherish them as I cherish our skin-self. (Pellauer 1993: 171–2) As Pellauer feels her body stretching out to touch and be touched by walls, bars and bark, this sexual experience is suggestive of an expansion of the organism through pleasure. Rather than the committal to subject and organism that Deleuze finds in pleasure, Pellaurer’s pleasure creates a connectivity that embraces a variety of objects. Her body expands to incorporate and vibrate with all these surfaces as they become part of her sexual skin. There is no mention of genitality at all. On the contrary, it is the curves and planes of the body that are cherished. The homophonic connection between ‘plains of flesh’ and planes in the world makes the body become surface and, as such, expandable beyond the individual and sexed. As Pellauer’s sexual pleasure expands beyond the couple and the genital, her description of orgasm becomes a further expansion:

I am most fully embodied in this explosion of nerves and also broken open into the cosmos. I am rent open; I am cleaved/ joined not only to my partner, but to everything, everything-as- my-beloved (or vice versa), who has also become me. The puny walls of my tiny separate personhood either drop so that I-you- he-she- we-they-it are one or they build up so thoroughly that all/ me is one. (Pellauer 1993: 171–2) Fully embodied and fully open at the same time, this orgasmic pleasure is an explosion, but also an extension of the stimulation of the nerves beyond the walls of the organism. The cosmos becomes part of sexual pleasure. The orgasm does not mark the transcendence of the self or the body but rather a mutual folding, an opening of the body and ‘everything’ at the same time. Both the I and the partner are rent open at the same time as my beloved becomes everything that ‘has also become me’. In Pellauer’s description, the orgasm is like Alice losing her proper name, a cherished idea of Deleuze’s. Not being sure whether the ‘puny walls’ of her person disappear or come to incorporate everything, the orgasm not only blurs the borders of subject and organism but also positions this blurring as an event that could be described as a moving and pulling ‘in both directions at once’ (Deleuze 2004a:

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3). Like Alice’s growing bigger and smaller at the same time, the orgasm is a paradox that affirms both senses and directions. Like Alice’s ‘infinite identity’ that encompasses future and past, more and less, and too much and not enough, the orgasm becomes an expression of a pleasurable loss of self-identity. The flesh of the body becomes part of the universe rather than a limitation of the subject and organism. ‘My very flesh’, writes Pellauer, ‘has this capacity to burst me open to existence, to melt me down into a state in which my connections to the rest of the universe are not only felt, but felt as extremely pleasurable, as joyous’ (Pellauer 1993: 178). This orgasm is an event where the subject is ‘swept away by the verbs’ that the body expresses. These verbs are not the language of ‘substantives and adjectives’ but the movement and sensation of connective flesh; they mean only what and when they are expressed. The body thus becomes a mode of expression, not in the biopolitical sense, but in the sense of a becoming, an affirmative expression of the existence and connectivity of the world as body.

Conclusion In rejecting the orgasm so vehemently, Deleuze does himself a disfa- vour. Like a fragment judged at face value and abandoned without further inquiry, the orgasm is sucked up into the Oedipal, familial and stratified organisations of sexuality that he works to escape. Considering the writers he praises as part of this project, such as Lawrence and Miller, in some sense explains his dismissal of the radical potential of the orgasm. As it emerges from their texts, the orgasm is characterised by all the things he works to abandon, including genitality, stratification and exhaustion. It seems odd that writers who include such deplorable depictions of orgasms should be chosen as champions of sexuality. Even if other parts of their writing ‘scour the unconscious’ and create desiring-machines, the idea that these machines work either inclusive of, or in spite of, such perceptions of the orgasmic is equally unsettling. To merely write these accounts off as part of an inevitable ‘borrowing from territorial circuits’ is not good enough, as it downplays the importance of the politicisation of pleasure that both Deleuze and Guattari are so eager to remould. What is particularly surprising is that Deleuze fails to pick up the creative lines of flight that emerge if you read the orgasm as part of becoming-woman. To begin with, the female orgasm, as this chapter

96 Orgasmic Feminism has shown, points to a very different sexual history than that of the male. Both in its being and nonbeing, it has been deeply entrenched in the politics of pleasure. In this sense, it is important as a tool for uncovering the ways in which our bodies are stolen, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, in the fabrication of ‘opposable organisms’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 305). Secondly, the history of female orgasm also entails a completely different set of possibilities that can be employed in the project of escaping stratified determinations of the organism. As their own concept of becoming-woman shows, particles that are not already stratified create zones of proximity and spark becomings. In the face of the political use of the orgasm outlined in the first part of this chapter, looking at some alternative depictions of orgasm in the latter part suggests that expressions of orgasm are repeatedly positioned through a sense of constant return, a continuum of vibrations, as truly connective, and as escaping the determinations that would fix it. Instead of being deplorable end-points in patriarchal hierarchies of pleasure, such orgasms are capable of sexualising the entire world. As such, not only do they open for an expansion of pleasurable becomings – they also open sexuality towards an ethics that is interesting in all interrelation between bodies, no matter with or without (what) organs.

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5 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing

What health would be sufficient to liberate life wherever it is imprisoned by and within man, by and within organisms and genera? (Deleuze 1997: 3)

Introduction Deleuze’s philosophy is intently preoccupied with the production that emerges through the collapse of the traditionally functional. The straight routes of the sea merchant, the unified subject and the organisation of the body called the organism all, in different ways, symbolise the stratification of desire and thereby the delimitation of becoming. Deleuze regards functionality through the lens of the social and political theft of the force of the body – the enforced organisation of matter according to transcendent principles of utility. The striated, as he notes with Guattari, produces distinct order and form and thereby fixes the variable into points between which the trajectory is set. The smooth, on the other hand, is about a connective desire that couples forces and enables unnatural participations. Unlike the fixed organisation of the striated, the smooth is about the explosion and reinvention of forms by the force of becoming inherent in all matter. The smooth is ‘continuous variation, continuous development of form’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 528). Thus literature, for example, should not be about imposing a predetermined form on matter, but should move ‘in the direction of the ill-formed or the incomplete’ (Deleuze 1997: 1). Similarly, the body should not be about ‘the organization of the organs called the organism’, but should be dismantled, opened up to assemblages that move beyond the forms and functions of hierarchal stratification (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 175–6). True health, Deleuze argues, is being rid of the disease of dominant orders and functions, about evoking a ‘bastard race’ stirring beneath dominant orders, about ‘inventing a people who are missing’ (Deleuze 1997: 4). This chapter explores how discourses on anomalous bodies may help coupling Deleuze’s

98 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing rejection of the hierarchal organisation of the body according to principles of utility with a reconsideration of his rejection of the productivity of sexual pleasure. Can bodies that in different ways fail to function according to predetermined standards express a more productive relation between the orgasm and the body than the one Deleuze envisions? On the one hand, Deleuze can assist an analysis of how sexual pleasure is disabled by cultural, political and commercial striations and, on the other, as this chapter shows, a Deleuzian- inflected notion of becoming-disabled of sexuality can help us recognise the polyvocality of the sexual body and thus, in the face of such striations, invent a people who are missing.

Disability Studies and the Tyranny of the Normal The disability studies agenda falls into two categories that roughly correspond to the functional and the incomplete, respectively. Like the discourse on feminism discussed in the previous chapter, and that on animality, discussed in the next, disability studies is, on the one hand, preoccupied with the question of recognising and establishing equal rights and opportunities and, on the other, with critiquing the conceptions of the subject and the body that have underpinned humanist discourse. To begin with, then, the rights of disabled people to be recognised as sexual subjects generally, as well as their right to assistance also in their sexual needs, are widely debated. As James Overboe notes, much discourse on disability has focused on the validation of an understanding of identity that is based on the ‘humanistic register’ of the self-reflexive individual (Overboe 2009: 241). In this sense, this discourse is akin to those of other civil rights movements, such as feminism and queer politics, that have worked to validate a subject position for those unrecognised, ignored or excluded by society. In other words, this first category corresponds to the politics of more or less enabling and disabling striations. The politics of rights is crucial, and just as Deleuze and Guattari find it indispensable for women ‘to conduct a molar politics, with a view to winning back their own organism, their own history, their own subjectivity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 304), it is equally crucial to establish such rights for people with disability. At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari note how the possibility of conducting molar politics also brings with it the risk of being caught up in stratified forms of being. Through striations, they argue, the body is stolen from us in order to construct clearly recognisable and opposable

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organisms (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 305). Just as the body is divided up into two clearly distinct sexes, the identity associated with the disabled body risks becoming delimiting rather than enabling as a divergent set of traits tend to be contrasted with an image of normative functionality. In this sense, recognising a disabled identity is politically important at the same time as it risks imprisoning the forces of all bodies by perpetuating the borders that have defined categories of normality and disability. As Lennard J. Davis notes, just as the ‘normal’ body has to be assumed as a gestalt that hides fragmentation, the body that in any way physically deviates from this body also has to ‘put on, assume, the disabled body and identify with it’ (Davis 1995: 140). In line with this concern with the ‘tyranny’ of the normal and the molar, the second main focus of interest in disability studies is on the possibility of exceeding and breaking down traditionally functional entities such as the notion of a sexual subject and a coherent organism. Like the concept of ‘the animal’, which, as I show in the next chapter, has largely been used to delineate the borders of the human rather than the multiplicity of animality, the employment of the term ‘disability’ tends to say more about the ableist culture that has placed it as other than about the multiplicity that the category itself encloses. It is assumptions about normality, rather than knowledge about difference, that lie behind the notion of disability. The world, as many disability scholars have noted, is structured to accommodate ‘people who have no weaknesses’ (Wendell 1997: 260). Society is based on ableist culture that disregards, or fails to acknowledge, other types of bodies than those seen as normal. As Minae Inahara points out, for example, disability has a tradition of being conceptualised in relation to ‘able-bodied parameters’ (Inahara 2009: 48). Just as the term ‘animal’ has come to stand for all that which is not ‘human’, the term ‘disability’ has tended to define not only that which is not ‘normal’, but also what constitutes this normalcy in the first place. Even the term itself suggests a failure to ‘be able’ according to present standards. The term is not suggestive of a unique set of abilities, but is rather a definition determined by negativity: it is primarily determining a lack of particular and predetermined abilities. Thus, we have a list of disabilities that, in very different ways, indicate the failure to, for example, hear, see or move in the expected way. As many researchers in the field have pointed out, the notion of disability is fluid. Margrit Shildrick is reluctant to define a set of borders for ‘what must otherwise remain a shifting nexus of both physical and

100 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing mental states that resists full and final definition’ (Shildrick 2007a: 223). The borders, she notes, are heterogeneous and context-specific. Shildrick proposes the term ‘anomalous embodiment’ to account for a more far-ranging and flexible understanding of bodies more generally (Shildrick 2007a: 223). Apart from expanding the notion of disability to include a variety of more or less able bodies, the idea of anomalous embodiment opens for a more nuanced perspective on bodies at large. Such a broadening of perspective has a far-reaching effect if we agree with Susan Wendell that one effect of ableist culture is that all bodies, be they categorised as able or as disabled, are oppressed. The diversity of human bodies, including their shapes, functions and movements, is considerable and also in continuous flux. In addition to the various kinds of capacity of different bodies, ideals about physical appearance and bodily strength and control shift over time. Together, these factors suggest that the contours and functionality of the body are far from stable and universal. The idea of a stable body based on identity and continuity is a false one that not only robs those with a disability of their specificity but also robs ‘normal’ bodies of their difference (Wendell 1997: 267). This, Wendell argues, is also why we need a theory of disability that undoes its othering – to liberate all bodies from the societal and cultural oppression that determines them (Wendell 1997: 275). Overboe notes the possibilities that emerge if we affirm the body as a mode of expression, as a set of singularities that were never intended to conform to normality. Whereas humanist discourses are considered crucial in certain respects, such as the assertion of the protection of the sanctity of life, Overboe points to Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective as one that affirms, rather, the vitalism of impersonal life (Overboe 2009: 242). Instead of the ressentiment born from the pursuit of normality and unity, a Deleuzian perspective on disability opens for the amor fati of becomings, for the affirmation of the vitality of singularities (Overboe 2009: 246). Deleuze and Guattari illuminate how that which is already always outside the molar carries a potential in its indeterminacy. Just as becoming- woman is a sidestep that unlocks the territorialisations of the body, becoming-disabled would be a step towards disengaging the functional body from its puppet strings. As Davis notes, the definition of the normal body is largely dependent on the definition and repudiation of the disabled one. Especially in visual culture, disabled bodies are presented as grotesque, as an otherness that cleanses us from difference and centralises normalcy (Davis 1995: 150). Challenging

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the interdependent definitions and borders between normality and disability means recognising all bodies in their potential to mean differently. If a theory of disability can help free bodies from delimiting determinations, such a theory could also be brought to bear on sexuality. As Shildrick notes, recent research focusing on embodied selves that differ from the norm brings both a possibility to disclose the ruling force of the cultural imaginary in terms of bodies and sexualities, and the need to acknowledge forms of sexuality that exceed social, political, normative standards (Shildrick 2007b: 64). In the field of disability, Wilkerson points out, ‘Alternative possibilities for politics and pleasures are being imagined and enacted individually and collectively’, to the benefit not only of those who have needed to reconfigure their sexuality after an injury, but also those interested in the ‘extensive possibilities of human sexualities that depart from the heterocentric and phallocentric norm’ (Wilkerson 2002: 51). Sexuality has indeed become a growing concern within disability studies itself. While pointing to the virtually nonexistent theorisation of the intersection between sexuality and disability in an article from 2004 (Shildrick 2004: n.p.), Shildrick notes, in an article published three years later, that research on this interrelation is ‘gathering strength’ (Shildrick 2007b: 64). At the same time, she points out, the conjunction of sexuality and disability is a concern, not just for scholars and activists in this particular field, but also for any project that aims to ‘queer’ sexual politics (Shildrick 2007b: 64). Bodies that fail to conform to standards of functionality and normality can, on the one hand, be cut off from the joys and pleasures that some physical connectivities would yield, but on the other, accommodate affects and connections that an able body caught up in the expectations and shapings of such bodies may not have discovered. Disabled women, for example, and as Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine note, are less likely to fulfil traditional sexual roles, which may make them more oppressed but also potentially freer to be different (Asch and Fine 1997: 241). In a different vein, fictional explorations of the erotics of the disabled body, such as, for example, that in J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash (1973), suggest that a disabled body does not have to mean a mourning of lost sexual engagement, but rather that new configurations of the body open for new configurations of sexuality. Deleuze’s philosophy has come to play an important role in this field, as it is increasingly recognised as a way of rereading disability in terms of production and positivity, rather than fragmentation and

102 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing lack. Shildrick, Overboe and many others have shown how Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of central issues such as desire and bodies are of immense use in the project of reconceptualising disability. Since a main aim is to problematise the role of a cultural imaginary that restricts both the expression and understanding of disability, as well as sexuality, and since a psychoanalytic paradigm seems incapable of unsettling such an imaginary, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy becomes an invaluable source for rethinking disabled bodies (Shildrick 2004: n.p.). But if Deleuze provides new dimensions to the field of disability studies, disability studies also brings out new dimensions in Deleuze. A slight shift in perspective with a focus on the implications of these new uses of Deleuze to his own philosophy with a particular focus on sexuality brings back new questions to Deleuze on the topic of sexual pleasure and orgasm. With the idea of anomalous bodies, the idea of pleasure as a blockage of becoming can be exchanged for the possibility of thinking about pleasure in terms of a ‘becoming-disabled’. As is the case with the critique of the concept of becoming-woman, there is the risk that a notion of becoming-disabled may be seen as idealising or romanticising the disabled body. Idealising the disabled body would not only be prejudiced and presumptuous, it would also create the risk of closing down what is inevitably a multitude of bodily differences. We are not interested, of course, in delimiting the disabled body according to the same mechanisms that shut down the difference in all bodies. To be truly revolutionary, bodies must be discussed not in their difference from a norm, but rather through difference in itself. What we are interested in is a radical politics of disability which, as Shildrick and Janet Price note, has the possibility to reveal as insufficient the norms of the universal body, and, at the same time, bring to the surface the shifting and plural conditions of bodies generally (Shildrick and Price 1996: 105). A becoming- disabled of sexuality would work to open up all bodies to assemblages that exceed stratified and unified conceptions. Becoming, as Deleuze and Guattari stress, is not about imitation, identification or classification (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 263), and equally, a becoming-disabled of sexuality is not about making use of bodies classified as disabled in order to produce some kind of liberated ‘normal’ sexuality. Rather, and just as becoming takes place ‘beneath assignable relations’ for Deleuze and Guattari, a becoming-disabled of sexuality takes place beyond identifiable categories. On the one hand, and as Shildrick suggests, an acknowledgement rather than

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repression of the ‘plasticity of sexuality’ would enable a multitude of expression also from those whose physical constitution precludes them from normative sexual practices – ‘whose bodily difference may quite literally preclude them to a greater or lesser extent from normative forms of sexual practice’ (Shildrick 2007a: 241). On the other hand, such an acknowledgment of the multitude of bodily differences would force us to problematise ‘the conventional parameters of sexuality’ and ‘explore non-normative constructions of sexual identities, pleasures, and agency’ (Shildrick 2007a: 227). As such, Shildrick notes, ‘The potential implications for a more positive model of sexuality specifically with regard to disability are considerable’ (Shildrick 2007a: 241). So, how do we retrieve the plasticity of sexuality through Deleuze’s philosophy? For Deleuze, inventing a people who are missing is about finding or evoking life that is not captured and con- tained in perceivable and delimited identities and bodies. His belief in the power of the ill-formed is reflected in the figures that inhabit his philosophy. Literary figures such as Herman Melville’s Bartleby and Carroll’s Alice, writers such as Franz Kafka, Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett, and personae such as the masochist and the anorexic all, in different ways, ‘fail’ to function in accordance with the forms and shapes that their societies have prepared for them. In this sense, they may all be seen as disabled. In the eyes of Deleuze, however, theirs are not disabilities, but rather a set of various abilities, or at least potential abilities, to escape from stratified forms of being. Bartleby and the others help us think through presuppositions of the nature of the will, temporality, the body, and thinking itself. If Bartleby’s preference ‘not to’, Alice’s ableist assumptions of the world, Kafka’s metamorphosis, Artaud’s self-proclaimed incapacity to think, the masochist’s disavowal of pleasure, and the anorexic’s opting out inform Deleuze’s understanding of the immanence of desire and the materialist becoming of the body without organs, can disabled perspectives also tell us something about the presuppositions of sexual pleasure and what happens if we are incapable of fulfilling the expectations of ‘normal’ sexuality, or if we simply prefer not to? Deleuze never wrote on disability explicitly. However, if disability perspectives uncover the great variety of cultural norms that determine our ideals of the perfect body, as Wilkerson suggests (Wilkerson 2002: 36), and if such perspectives simultaneously reveal the norms and politics that establish sexual pleasure along fixed lines of desire, then a discussion of disability and sexuality may broaden

104 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing also a Deleuzian perspective on what bodies are and what they can do. Deleuze’s philosophy brings an alternative perspective on what constitutes ableist culture and what a becoming-disabled could achieve. Discussing mechanisms of determination and liberation through Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of faciality illuminates these mechanisms at the same time as it reveals the revolutionary aspects of sexual pleasure. Developing such a discussion by reading sexuality through Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of a minor literature enables us to further discuss ideas of how a disabled sexuality sets free the productive forces of the body. At the same time, we can yet again show how Deleuze’s rejection of the orgasm and sexual pleasure is premature. Through the perspective of disability, we can see how sexual pleasure can also be about the deterritorialisation of the fixtures of the body in its Oedipal and socially stratified functionality. Anomalous embodiment also means anomalous sexualities: an invention of a sexuality that is missing and of a people to come.

Pleasure and the Force of Faciality As Deleuze’s writing on sexuality shows, and as his understanding of the orgasm suggests, he would consider sexual pleasure as a stratum of facialisation. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality functions to describe the way in which polyvocal bodies are inscribed into a dominant reality. The body is facialised by being made into a map that can be recognised and decoded. By connecting the body to striations of signifiance and subjectification, the body is deterritorialised from the stratum of the organism to that of subjectification (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 191). The overcoding of the body touches all its parts, all of which also remain fully sexual. All body parts – ‘Hand, breast, stomach, penis, vagina, thigh, leg and foot’ – are facialised as they are pulled into coordinates of meaning and force the body to ‘slide into’ a face (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 189, 196). There is no sublimation, but rather a production relating to a set of coordinates (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 189). The body is claimed in a production of meaning that is legible and attuned to the systems of signifiance. Along the same lines, the orgasm and other sexual pleasures are inscribed in systems of meaning which curtail the polyvocality of the body. Individual pleasure, and the way in which we construct our bodies and desires in identification with such pleasure, reveals how we are inscribed in politics of the subject, the organism and Oedipalisation. Sexual pleasure is seen to correspond to the social

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field that delimits desiring machines to the determinate production of specific social and political patterns (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 29). The social and political patterns that Deleuze and Guattari critique are primarily invested in psychoanalytical models of desire that insist on interpreting sexuality in terms of the individual and the familial. Pleasure as inscribed into the familial and the genital is ‘closed up’ in an Oedipal triangulation that excludes desire as a wider mode of production (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 47). Rather than the direct investment of desire into social relations, the sexual body is facialised by being given a determinate function in the Oedipal drama. Desire as lack organises wants and needs, and, thereby, the nature as well as the direction of pleasure (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 28). Instead of participating in ‘the fantastic factory of Nature and Production’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 49), the multidimensional corporeal codes of the body are reduced to a map of predetermined meaning for others to read (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 188). Pleasure as facialisation, then, is about the delimitation of connective desire through its determination along genital and specifically phallic channels. As the different chapters of this book show, the orgasmic body has been inscribed in societal and political patterns in different ways at different points in time. The ways in which these inscriptions have worked to establish a connection between sexual pleasure and dominant values and behaviours are indicative of the orgasm as a facialisation of the body. Especially important in the present chapter are the ways in which the orgasm has come to be associated with prescriptive social, cultural, medical and commercial codes. As the orgasm has acquired the role of a command, bodies are under more pressure than ever to be able to perform. Disability studies scholars provide important perspectives on how the sexual body is facialised more generally by the social and political systematisation that determines its rules of attraction. The way it looks and moves, the objects or bodies it is attached to, and its function as a commercial object code the sexual body into a functional and socially and economically useful organism. Sexuality is determined in terms of bodily organisation as well as physical health. In terms of the orgasm, cultural, commercial and medical forces play a particularly central role in the construction of the ‘normal’. One example of how sexuality is facialised through cultural representation may be seen in the popular television series Sex and the City. The series in general pays much attention to female sexual pleasure and has been seen as groundbreaking for its representations

106 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing of women as sexual agents. Of course, it has also been submitted to many analyses of contemporary society and sexuality. It has even been argued that the series provides ‘a forum about women’s sexuality as it has been shaped by the feminist movement of the last 30 years’ (Henry 2004: 66). The centrality of female sexual pleasure generally, and the female orgasm in particular, is indicated by its prompt introduction in the very first episode (‘Sex and the City’ 1:1) of this ninety-four episode show. One of the protagonists, Carrie, ups and leaves her lover after achieving orgasm, feeling ‘powerful, potent, and incredibly alive’ as a result. While this display of nonchalance is important in the sense that it serves as a response to, and critique of, the way in which the male orgasm has counted as the fulfilment of sexual intercourse, it is also a reactive response that, in its very imitation, remains within the realms of social sexual economy. Imitating a sexual economy by ‘having sex like a man’, that is, by being ‘an active agent in the pursuit of pleasure’, Carrie, as Astrid Henry puts it, elevates the clitoris to a symbol of female potency (Henry 2004: 77). While such a shift may open for a level of self-confidence and power for women, it does not free sexuality from its facialisation. Carrie’s orgasm and her disregard for her lover’s pleasure indicate that even if feminist movements have achieved some development in terms of women’s right to sexual pleasure, little has happened that would truly revolutionise what sexuality is about. The codes of the body are reconfigured only in so far as the clitoris gains a status similar to that of the penis. At the same time, the male characters, like many female characters through the history of representation, become little more than a set of sexualised attributes. For both female and male characters, then, the body remains a map inscribed by genital coding and patterns of power. Another example of how sexual pleasure is inscribed into cultural and commercial codes can be found in the plethora of self-help books. Titles such as Five Minutes to Orgasm Every Time You Make Love: Female Orgasm Made Simple (2010), Orgasms and How to Have Them: A Guide for Women (2007) and Orgasm: How to Get the Ultimate Satisfaction (2007) abound, and point not only to the contemporary preoccupation with the orgasm but also to what is clearly inscribed as a need for such advice. Such books may be enormously helpful to some, but the fact that people feel the need to be told how to do it, or how to do it right, is suggestive of the way in which sexuality, like the body itself, is seen as a cultural performance to practice until perfection. The message that the prevalence

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of these instructive books reproduce is that you need orgasms and you need to have sex the way we tell you to in order to make it happen. A ‘normal’ sexual body and a ‘normal’ sexual pleasure needs to be constructed through manuals. Although to a different purpose and in a different context, Deleuze suggests a link between military and sexual strategies through manuals: ‘manuals of love and manuals of military strategy’, he suggests, ‘are indiscernible’ as ‘new strategic statements are produced at the same time as new amorous statements’ (Deleuze 2001: 922). This is the abstract machine that produces new statements by incorporating the war machine as well as the amorous machine (Deleuze 2001: 93). While Deleuze refers to a Chinese text on martial arts, his reading can be carried over to the modern, Western context. In the sense of manuals of orgasm, and as we will see more in Chapter 7, it is clear how the sexual imperative is caught up in the capitalist machine of production. If sexual pleasure and orgasm are part of the facialisation of bodies through their inscriptions as cultural, gendered and commercial codes in contemporary Western society, they are also facialised by medical discourses. What is understood as ‘normal sexuality’ has become dependent on the orgasm, to the point that the lack of it deserves an entry in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). A separate entry is given to ‘orgasmic disorder’, which for females is characterised by absence of, or diminished pleasure in, orgasm and for males by the delay, infrequency or absence of ejaculation. Considering the influence of the DSM as a tool for diagnosing mental disorders, the inclusion of these entries clearly signals the parameters of ‘normal’ sexuality and classes inability to fulfil the criteria as a disorder. Normative sexuality, then, is necessarily inclusive of orgasmic pleasure. At the same time as normal sexuality is supposedly dependent on the orgasm, sexual pleasure itself is seen as exclusive to normal bodies. As numerous critics have shown, and as cultural representation shows by not showing, sexual desire and pleasure are largely ascribed to able-bodied individuals. As Shildrick points out, for example, the sexuality of non-normative bodies creates fear, denial or fetishism in a society that is anxious to protect the clear limits of the body (Shildrick 2007b: 53–4). Along with children and the elderly, disabled people are typically considered asexual, and any expression to the contrary as abject or perverse. Sexual pleasure, Mitchell S. Tepper points out, has largely been written out of the disability studies agenda – it is ‘a missing discourse’ (Tepper 2000: 283).

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The disabled body, Tepper notes, is exempted from the requirements of sexual pleasure (Tepper 2000: 287). According to the same DSM that prescribes the orgasm as a part of normal sexuality, orgasmic failure is not a disorder if it can be ascribed to a ‘Sexual Dysfunction Due to a General Medical Condition’. This attitude, Tepper argues, perpetuates the idea that disabled bodies lack sexual desire and are incapable of accommodating orgasm (Tepper 2000: 287). While failure to achieve orgasm is seen as a disorder, the lack of sexual pleasure in people with disability is virtually expected. Instead of the ‘orgasm imperative’ of contemporary culture which haunts those positioned within ‘normality’, the disabled are considered as inevitably marked by ‘orgasmic disorder’ (Tepper 2000: 287). In other words, disabled bodies are facialised as nonorgasmic. The general inscription of the ‘normal’ body as an endlessly per- fectible medium of pleasure also makes it an endless resource for economic exploitation. The inscription of the orgasmic body as a standard can be seen through the medical and commercial interests in the orgasm. As Wilkerson notes, medical discourse has a great and socially accepted power over how sexuality is shaped and perceived, and since it is linked to social production, it is a powerful tool for ‘diagnosing and managing the bodily chaos indicative of social disorder’ (Wilkerson 2002: 33–4). If the chaotic bodies that Wilkerson points to can be related to the anomalies that Shildrick notes and the polyvocalities that Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge, it is quite clear that the systems of commercialisation and medicalisation work to facialise this chaos and transform it into socially decodable and commercially useful units. As Muchembled notes, ‘Sexologists, psy- chologists, laboratories manufacturing Viagra, firms specializing in making aging penises perform and a host of others’ all rush to help at a high price, one of which is the suggestion that happiness depends on you keeping it up, ‘without flagging’ (Muchembled 2008: 250). Similarly, and as we saw in Chapter 4, the pharmaceutical industry’s hunt for the ‘female Viagra’ puts pressure on defining sexual differences and problems in terms of medical female sexual dysfunctions. As Tiefer shows in her work, sexuality generally is medicalised today to the point where sexual practices and identities are defined, and delimited, by commercial interests. Tiefer identifies two main reasons why sexuality is so susceptible to co-option by such ‘disease mongering’. Firstly, the social and political regulation of sexuality has separated people from sexuality in the sense that they have become unable to assess and understand it. Secondly, popular culture

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has created images of what sexual pleasure should be like, thereby affecting expectations of how sexuality should work (Tiefer 2006: 436). In this process, socially constructed anxieties are converted into ‘medical diagnoses suitable for pharmacological treatment’ (Tiefer 2006: 436). On the one hand then, and as we have seen in this passage, the facialisation of sexual pleasure points to the production of a disabled sexuality in the sense of a separation of bodies from what they can do. Tiefer’s point about the way in which the medicalisation of sexuality incapacitates human bodies is a case in point. Importantly, such disabling is not just about blocking the power of sexual bodies to mean differently, but also about the way in which the medicalisation of bodies undermines ideas that sexual pleasure may also be dependent on a host of other factors such as desire, equality, and social and political structures. On the other hand, and as we will see in the next passage, a becoming-disabled of sexuality in a Deleuzian sense is exactly a way of refusing discourses on normalisation. In opposition to the disabling of sexual agency, a becoming-disabled is about affirming pleasure outside cultural, social, gendered, commercialised and medicalised conceptions about what bodies are, and what they should do.

Sexual Pleasure as a Politics of the Face Connecting the facialisation of the body and sexuality with an ableist culture, we have seen how the sexual pleasures of those deemed disabled are judged according to the goal- oriented genital sexuality ascribed to those considered more able bodied. Just as the notion of disability is an indication of ableist assumptions of normality, the idea of sexual pleasure is invested in social, political and medical assumptions and expectations concerning the function and execution of sexuality. Ideas about sexual pleasure, whether deemed impossible or abject, constitute ways of enabling certain modes of sexual interaction while disabling those that fall outside the realms of utility and recognition. Perceptions about sexual pleasure, then, depend not only on the normalisation of the body and its pleasures, but also on its efficacy and utility. Deleuze would argue that the sexuality enabled by capitalist and post-Freudian society steals the polyvocal body and imposes upon it fixed order and forms. His strategy, in so far as we can locate a strategy of sexuality in his work, would be a disabling of these forms of sexual pleasure and the utility of sexuality

110 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing at large. Dominant orders need to be dismantled to give way to the people who stand outside them, that is, the ‘people who are missing’. Apart from the general rejection of orgasm and sexual pleasure in favour of desire, Deleuze’s work may be seen to offer three strategies that can help towards a becoming-disabled of sexuality and create space for new forms of sexual pleasure. The first one would be through an opting out of the structures of utility altogether. Such a strategy can be located, for example, through his writing on Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, Deleuze celebrates, rather than mourns, the breakdown of functionality as an opening towards the smooth spaces of becoming. Bartleby is seen as a doctor, rather than a patient of a sick society. In his catatonic and anorexic state, he creates a space for a people to come: a ‘schizophrenic vocation’ (Deleuze 1997: 90). Focusing on Bartleby’s well-known phrase ‘I would prefer not to’, Deleuze spends some time on the oddity of this grammatically correct phrase. The phrase, he suggests, displays a ‘strange formula’. The strangeness of this formula he relates to its abrupt ending. Bartleby prefers not to, but the nature of what he rejects remains undetermined (Deleuze 1997: 68). The insistence and repetition of the phrase throughout Melville’s short story further underline its unusual character (Deleuze 1997: 68). The ‘formula is ravaging, devastating, and leaves nothing standing in its wake’ because ‘The effect of the formula-block is not only to impugn what Bartleby prefers not to do, but also to render what he was doing impossible’ (Deleuze 1997: 70). The preferable and the nonpreferable become indistinct, as a zone of indiscernibility or indetermination is created. ‘Not a will to nothingness, but the growth of a nothingness of the will’ (Deleuze 1997: 71). Melville’s text is part of what Deleuze and Parnet see as a powerful mode of deterrritorialisation found in Anglo-American literature. In Melville, but also in texts by writers such as Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Jack Kerouac, to mention a few, ‘everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap daemon, relationship with the outside’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 36). If one can only discover life through ruptures of continuity, such authors display exactly the broken flights that enable new worlds. In terms of sexuality, Aislinn O’Donnell points particularly to the usefulness of Melville’s figures Bartleby and Billy Budd. Like automatons, not preferring anything to any other, such figures introduce a repetition that intensifies being (O’Donnell 2011: 230). Disintegrating rationality by eliminating preference, they free desire from the sensory-motor schema and expose the force of

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power that they resist (O’Donnell 2011: 230–1). By refusing to take on an expected identity, sexuality becomes a less personal and a more partial experience that creates assemblages of desire (O’Donnell 2011: 231). Deleuze connects this to the inhuman, the creation of ‘the new man or a man without particularities’, a refusal of will or identity, a decomposition of the paternal function (Deleuze 1997: 84). In this light, Oedipal sexuality is disabled by a discontinuity that undoes the directionality of desire. In disabling directionality, Bartleby’s function is similar to how the figure of the masochist functions in Deleuze’s philosophy. If Bartleby is a doctor of humanity, both the Marquis de Sade and Sacher- Masoch are seen as symptomatologists; they take on conceptions of man and culture and discover new forms of expression, feeling and thinking by linking language directly to the senses (Deleuze 1991b: 16–17). In different ways, both these writers challenge the limits of language and the sexuality that it is supposed to express. Sacher- Masoch’s symptomatology is of particular interest to Deleuze and it provides the second strategy of a becoming-disabled of sexuality. Exchanging pleasure for pain and gratification for the act of waiting, the masochist that Deleuze delineates in ‘Coldness and Cruelty’ opts out of the temporal form that places satisfaction as a telos of sexuality. This way, Deleuze argues, Sacher-Masoch ‘has a particular way of “desexualizing” love and at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity’ (Deleuze 1991b: 12). In this sense, the masochist is like a conceptual persona of desire. The masochist body disables the role of sexual pleasure in its conventional sense; the suffering of the masochist is the untying of ‘the pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an intrinsic measure’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 171). On the one hand, this disabling could be understood in a very physical sense: the masochist tied up, being forced to wait, and being in pain is physically prevented from enacting what might be perceived as ‘normal’ sexual interaction. On the other hand, this disabling is created primarily through language. He is, as Deleuze notes, ultimately ‘bound by his word alone’ (Deleuze 1991b: 75). The rather strong subject position that emerges from the figure of the masochist as the one whose desire determines the interaction, as well as the action of the supposedly dominant woman is, as I have argued earlier, problematic from the point of view of impersonal desire. Where the masochist that emerges from A Thousand Plateaus functions to create a body without organs, and thus a desire that is not dependent on subjective pleasure, the disabling of pleasure of

112 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing the masochist that Deleuze discovers through Sacher-Masoch more directly demands a subject position that can stage the disabling of the sexual body. The point in the present context is how the masochist, like Bartleby, provides ways of opting out of Oedipal structures and of creating a more impersonal desire. However, such disabling of conventional parameters of sexuality still retains a bond between sexuality and subjectivity that is neither severed nor productively reconfigured beyond teleology and unidirectional desire. Both Bartleby’s way of discontinuing an Oedipal sexuality and the masochist’s way of reconfiguring the relation between desire and pleasure correspond rather nicely to Deleuze’s preference ‘not to’ include orgasm in his theory of desire. There is a third way, however, in which we can employ Deleuze’s philosophy to expand sexual pleasure by disabling its dominant stratifications, that is inclusive of the orgasm. With the help of a radical politics of disability we can develop sexuality to include what Deleuze would describe as a trembling or stuttering, a discontinuation of the false unity and continuity of bodies. Combining a theory of disability with what Deleuze and Guattari theorise as a minor literature we can construct a fruitful way of disabling sexuality as a major concept. A minor literature affects language ‘with a high coefficient of deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 16). This is a writing that does not have to emerge from a minor language, but it does appropriate a major language and puts it to use through deterritorialisations. As Réda Bensmaïa puts it in his foreword to Deleuze and Guattari’s book on Kafka, this is not about ‘trafficking’, it is not about mishandling language, but about ‘essentially proposing a new way of using it’ (Bensmaïa: 1986: xvi). Like the minor literature that Deleuze and Guattari find through Kafka and which explodes dominant languages from within and makes it express communities to come, a minor sexuality would be one that defamiliarises dominant ways of employing sexuality and opens for alternative sensibilities. Because the sexualities of those deemed disabled is ‘a missing discourse’, as Tepper suggests, the sexual expression and experience of anomalous bodies must be coloured by a sense of being a stranger within your own sexuality (c.f. ‘To be a sort of stranger within his own language’, Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 26). Like all sexualities, the sexuality of anomalous bodies too must be caught up in major structures of sexuality, mainly, as we have seen, by means of its negation, but from within these structures, sexualities emerge that explode the limitations of the ‘normal’ and the functional. Various

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anomalies of body and mind enable new ways of using sexuality that are inscribed neither in the cultural imaginary, nor in the genital, reproductive and Oedipalised striations of a major sexuality. By virtue of being, to some extent, excluded from social and gendered expectations, disabled bodies also have the possibility of escaping them (Asch and Fine 1997: 254). This is related not only to gender roles and sexed positions, but also directly to sexual pleasure. For example, Wendell observes how one man’s loss of feeling in his genitals resulted in a much greater enjoyment of sex than before (Wendell 1997: 274). As Wendell puts it, paraplegics and quadriplegics have ‘revolutionary things to teach about the possibility of sexuality which contradict patriarchal culture’s obsession with the genitals’ (Wendell 1997: 274). Tobin Siebers quotes various experiences of how sexual experience and the sexual body have ‘slowed down’ and expanded with a disability. Through various reconfigurations of physical interaction, sex expands to include new spatial and temporal coordinates. Disabled sexuality, he notes, transforms both the erotics of the body and the temporality of sex. Whereas normative sexuality tends to be understood in terms of a beginning, a middle and an end, disabled sex ebbs and flows and is informed by a physiognomy that ‘does not necessarily mimic conventional responses of arousal, penetration, or orgasm’ (Siebers 2012: 48–9). If facialisation affects all body parts and pulls them into coordinates of meaning as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, how is this production effected if body parts do not correspond to the expected coordinates? As we saw earlier, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the facialisation of all body parts – ‘Hand, breast, stomach, penis, vagina, thigh, leg and foot’. But what if the hand is deformed, the breast is missing, and the ‘stomach, penis, vagina, thigh, leg and foot’ are paralyzed? Any deviation from normative sexual practices reveals the framing of sexuality that keeps it enclosed in a territory determined by culture and politics. As Grosz notes, there is ‘no one architecture, no single enframement, no universal technique of territorialisation: each form of life, and each cultural form, undertakes its own modes of organisation, its own connection of body and earth’ (Grosz 2008: 16). In terms of sexuality as with everything else, the territorialisations vary over cultural and temporal coordinates. As we have seen, Deleuze’s rejection of sexual pleasure as a transcendent mode of capture that keeps the subject and organism tied together in a deplorable economy of genitality and temporary release is clearly a reaction against a particular form of territorialisation central to a

114 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing post-Freudian Western world. The understanding of sexuality that he rejects is framed largely by an Oedipal organisation, in itself a form of disability in two different ways. To begin with, the blindness and castration associated with Oedipus are arguably disabilities – disabilities that, through Oedipus, come to be placed at the centre of the familial sexual economy. Secondly, the appropriation of desire that Freud stages through Oedipus can be seen as a disabling of sexuality in that it radically delimits what sexual bodies are, and what they are capable of. The deterritorialisations that Deleuze’s new conceptualisation of desire enables are based on a new architecture of sexual territories that expands the field of sexuality. This strategy proves how the framing of chaos that makes territory is a flexible event that is capable of including qualities that transform bodies and sexualities. If sexual pleasure is art because it frames a set of sensory intensities, as I argued in the introductory chapter, then any sexual pleasure that exceeds the territorialisation of the ‘normal’ body is a deterritorialisation. Just as painting or music transforms the body through affect, a sexuality liberated from the predetermined and the habitual has the capacity to produce sensation that produces a becoming. As Grosz puts it:

If painting aims to make every organ function as an eye, if it aims to make the very entrails see, and if music makes every organ and pore of the body function as an ear attuned to rhythm and melody, if, as Deleuze suggests, painting ever more deeply materializes the body while music spiritualizes it, this is because, through the various arts, the body is, for a moment at least, directly touched by the forces of chaos from which it carefully shields itself in habit, cliché, and doxa, those movements of containment that render only predictable and preproduced sensations, not sensations that announce the future. (Grosz 2008: 21)

Just like painting and music, sexuality can produce habit and cliché, but, like them, sexuality is also open for the chaos beyond the containment of habit: sexual pleasure is capable of making every part of the body a sexual organ. It has been noted, for example, how both men and women with spinal cord injury, and so with a limited or nonexistent sensitivity in the genital regions of the body, have been able to experience ‘psychological orgasm’ which has been described as a warm and satisfying release of tension (Brockway 1994: 110). Similarly, there are reports of ‘mental orgasms’ (Siebers 2012: 49). Researchers, Margulis and Sagan note, have found ‘new pathways for orgasm’ by discovering that the vagus nerve, which links the brain

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with functions of the body such as breathing and swallowing but not with the spinal cord, can also be the source of sexual excitation and even orgasm. Through the vagus nerve, women with damaged spinal cords may experience orgasmic pleasure on other parts of the body such as the shoulder, the chest, or the chin (DeKoker 1996: 32). Such a rerouting of pleasure challenges our perceptions of what the body is and what it can do. It also challenges the link between sexuality and visual pleasure. ‘The sexiest part of the body’, Brenda DeKoker writes, ‘may never be ogled on the pages of Playboy’ (DeKoker 1996: 30). A becoming-disabled of sexuality elucidates the act of the framing of the chaos of physical and mental sensation and images at the same time as it reveals the plasticity of the frames and thereby sensation and sexuality at large. In the face of stratified forms of being, Deleuze and Guattari’s car- tography offers a way of thinking about how a body is constructed by the intensities that occupy it at any given time. Rather than being defined through its forms and organs, the body should be seen as a variable set of affects and movements (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 287). From this perspective, it matters little what hands, or feet, or breasts are included in the form of the body; what matters is allowing body parts to become with others, ‘to place elements or materials in a relation that uproots the organ from its specificity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 285). This would be ‘a becoming-intense, becoming- animal, becoming-imperceptible . . .’, as one of the plateaus in A Thousand Plateaus is called, and as I am suggesting here ‘. . . a becoming-disabled’. The example of the vagus nerve shows how the orgasm may help us rethink rather than territorialise how we perceive the organisation of the organism. As Wendell notes, little effort has been made to explore the implications of the potential expansion of sexuality and the sexual body that the disabled body could entail for the able-bodied (Wendell 1997: 274). A minor sexuality undoes the facialisation both of the disabled body as asexual and of the normal body as necessarily constructed according to preordained genital zones. To borrow and repurpose some of Bensmaïa’s words describing a minor literature, a minor sexuality would be a ‘short-circuiting’ of sexuality’s [language’s] appeal to dominant reality, a deterritorialization of the cogito. The principle strata ‘the organism, meaningful- ness, interpretation, subjectivization, and subjection’ are destratified through minor sexuality [language] (Bensmaïa 1986: xvi). If the first characteristic of a minor literature is a deterritorialisation of language, the second characteristic that Deleuze and Guattari

116 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing outline is that such literature is political. Unlike a major literature that is concerned primarily with the individual, the familial, the marital, the ‘Oedipal intrigues’, a minor literature makes each individual concern vibrate with the commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical coordinates that ‘determine its values’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 17). These conflicts, which all take place ‘down below’ in major literature, are in minor literature enacted ‘in the full light of day’. Of course, sexuality at large, as both Foucault and Deleuze have shown, is related to societal values of economy and law. But whereas a major sexuality can continue to represent these values, a minor sexuality brings out into the open the ‘cellar of the structure’ that upholds and constructs conceptions of sexual pleasure (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 17). This, as we have seen, can take place through the way in which various forms of disability challenge the physical conditions of the body and its sexual possibilities. Like a minor literature which, as Bensmaïa puts it, exposes major literature to ‘a series of displacements’, a minor sexuality dislocates major structurations of sexuality. It makes sexuality ‘slow down to a crawl’, and sends it ‘into a panic’ as it unfolds ‘at a vertiginous pace’ (Bensmaïa 1986: xvi). The third characteristic of a minor literature is the expression of collective value. Enunciation is not individuated but necessarily takes place as part of a collective statement (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 17). This means, not that each enunciation by a person identified as disabled is collective, but rather that sexual expression becomes part of creating an alternative space or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘another possibly community’ to come (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 17). Deleuze and Guattari express this in terms of a collective enunciation, a machinic assemblage. In terms of various body parts and various bodies capable of various kinds of expression, the collective value would be understood in terms of the differences inscribed in or on the body. The differences within and between anomalous bodies reveal what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘polylingualism’ but not of language as they propose, but of sexuality. An intensive use of body parts expands how and what the body is able to express. Deleuze and Guattari argue that Kafka reveals desire as a process rather than a form (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 8). The multiple and changeable forms of the anomalous body suggest that the formalisation of the body is flexible and mobile also in terms of expression and sexual pleasure. Reading sexuality and disability in terms of a minor sexuality shows that recovering a sexuality of smooth, rather than striated,

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spaces affirms a strangeness that a major sexuality works to ignore. Becoming a stranger in your own sexuality is about leaving behind the functional structures ascribed to the body and sexuality. Becoming-disabled is about showing how the pleasure of anomalous bodies is a politics of dismantling the face. Just as faciality is a politics of signifiance and subjectification, Deleuze and Guattari argue, dismantling the face, too, is a politics, a ‘breaking through the wall of the signifier and getting out of the black hole of subjectivity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 208). In this instance, such a politics of the face works to effect a subversion of the power of inscription and interpretation that has facialised and thereby determined the nature of disabled as well as able-bodied sexuality. From this perspective, sexual pleasure, and the orgasm in particular, brings with it a possibility of breaking the wall of the signifier of the disabled as well as the notion of sexual pleasure itself as a mode of facialisation more generally. Thereby, all bodies also emerge as invested with difference, as more or less anomalous, and all the more powerful and pleasurable for it. This is also the goal of current activism on the part of a group of feminist academics, activists and clinicians who work to counteract the tendency of medical and commercial discourses of determining what constitutes a healthy sexuality. This group, Tiefer shows, has produced a ‘New View Manifesto’ which essentially strives towards the abandonment of any such thing as a ‘normal’ sexual function (Tiefer 2006: 439). Apart from providing a number of disabled practices as examples of the plasticity of sexual desire and pleasure, the minor sexuality that we can discuss through disability makes it clear how urgently we need to ask the question ‘How many people today live in a sexuality [language] that is not their own?’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 19).

Conclusion Put simply, Deleuze consistently resists any organisation of life that cuts the body off from what it is capable of. This is the ethology that Deleuze and Guattari inherit from Spinoza – it is the affects the body is capable of that should determine it, not its organisation of organs. ‘We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 284). From this perspective, the organisation of the body in terms of its forms and organs is a stratifi-

118 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing cation of the forces that it could otherwise express. The facialisation of the body is a making-functional according to social, political and commercial demands. Sexuality constitutes an important element in such demands, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear in Anti-Oedipus. The theorisation of desire that they begin to develop in this book is part of their larger project of breaking with the stratifications of the body that a Freudian understanding of sexuality engenders. One could argue that what Deleuze and Guattari do in this book is to reveal Oedipal sexuality as a normalisation of sexuality that also, by the same means by which it ascribes it into fixed patterns of lack and familial structures, disables sexuality. Just as those with anomalous bodies have to ‘put on’ and assume the disabled body, as Davis put it, ‘normal’ bodies are produced by putting on the Oedipal body. And just as the ‘analytic imperialism’ of psychoanalysis hears what it has already decided to hear (‘the wolf is the father, as we all knew from the start’, Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 32), sexuality is stratified along predetermined routes of desire and the body. If Deleuze and Guattari’s strategy is to focus on desire, discourses of disability make it possible to retrieve sexual experience and pleasure itself as part of the schizoanalytic project. Sexual pleasure and ‘normal’ bodies are indeed subject to functional organisation, but the anomalous body offers new challenges to such facialisations of sexuality. As Deleuze shows through figures such as Bartleby and writers such as Artaud, bodies and minds that fail to correspond to the subject position and its physical embodiment open for becomings that escape the striated constructions of selfhood. In this chapter, I have tried to claim this approach to make up for what Deleuze neglected in his writing on the orgasm, that is, how anomalous bodies also open up for a different kind of sexual mapping. This mapping would be less about interpretation and desire based on an inevitable lack in the subject and more about an acute attunement to body parts and connectivities that lie outside genital and Oedipal construction of sexuality. Becoming-disabled is about coupling sexual pleasure with anomalous bodies. Such a becoming opens the body to sexualities beyond the genital and the Oedipal. The people who are missing are not people with disability as such, even if we have seen how disabled bodies are excluded from discourses of sexuality. Rather, the people who are missing are the people we invent by resisting the normalisation, culturalisation and medicalisation of sexuality, and by inviting Deleuze’s ‘true health’ beyond dominant functions and interpretations.

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6 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm

there is a circulation of impersonal affect, an alternate current that disrupts signifying projects as well as subjective feelings, and constitutes a nonhuman sexuality. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 257)

Introduction As we have seen in previous chapters, part of Deleuze’s quarrel with sexual pleasure and the orgasm is the way in which he perceives them to tie subject and organism into one constitutive entity. Pleasure and orgasm are linked to a sexuality associated with stratified systems of interpretation and organisation, such as psychoanalysis and State power, that in different ways delimit and determine the boundaries of the body and what it can do. In this way, pleasure and the orgasm also come to stand in the way of desire as a force of connectivity and creation. As such, sexuality understood in relation to psychoanalysis and State power remains but a human construct caught up in negativity. Desire, contrastively, opens towards the imperceptible, the machinic and the nonhuman. This chapter understands the animal in part as the threshold between sexuality and desire, between the human and the nonhuman. If sexuality is rejected because its actualisations seem intrinsically bound up with humanist discourse, then equally, at least in some respects, the animal can be seen as being employed in the service of familial and State politics. Where concrete sexuality tends to be replaced by abstract desire in Deleuze’s philosophy, actual animals are replaced by becoming-animal. While Deleuze’s understanding of sexuality is under scrutiny in the present volume, his understanding of animals has also received recent attention. On the one hand, the concept of becoming-animal has been cast as holding a special place in posthumanist discourse by tying the reimagining of the human and the animal closely together, and for ‘chartering the possibilities’ of lost identities of any kind (Baker 2002: 68). On the other hand, the same concept has been seen

120 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm as Deleuze and Guattari’s failure to recognise and take into account the concrete reality of real animals (Haraway 2007). To some extent, and as we will see in this chapter, the concept of becoming-animal is now under question in the same way as the concept of becoming- woman was in the early days of feminist responses to Deleuze. Any perspective that expresses an ostensible lack of concern for the situ- ation of real women and real animals certainly deserves attention, but as feminist scholars have shown, and as an increasing number of scholars working in animality studies indicate, it is also important to recognise that both of these allegedly problematic concepts possess revolutionary and transformative potential. Engaging with both the debates about the posthuman informed by Deleuze’s work and the recent critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-animal, this chapter attempts to locate the productive force of sexuality through animality. What, as Steve Baker asks, ‘does becoming- animal look like?’ And more importantly, ‘does it amount to something that might be acted on: a practice, in other words, rather than a mere rhetoric’ (Baker 2002: 68). As well as references to popular culture and pornographic films, the chapter also reads two Canadian novels from the 1970s, both of which include interspecies sexuality. By analysing expressions of sexuality and the orgasm through the relation between animal and becoming-animal, it becomes possible to ask whether the distinctions Deleuze makes between pleasure and desire are indeed unavoidable to a posthuman philosophy, or whether we can instead find ways of salvaging the orgasm through the philosophy of becoming-animal.

Human Concepts As concepts, both ‘sexuality’ and ‘the animal’ emerge as responses to developments in humanist discourse. ‘Sexuality’, Foucault notes, is not established as a term until the early nineteenth century. The emergence of the term, which obviously has no correlation with the emergence of the phenomenon of sexual practice, is related to the simultaneous development of various fields of knowledge, including biological perspectives of reproduction and social sciences of behaviour, as well as religious, judicial, pedagogical and medical rules and norms (Foucault 1992: 3). In other words, a wide range of already existing expressions and practices comes to be formalised in the shape of recognisable behaviours and practices. At the same time, these practices create ‘subjects of a “sexuality” ’, that is, social

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subjects whose sexuality is weighed against these increasingly nor- malising fields of knowledge in order to create an identity (Foucault 1992: 3). In a sense, then, the appearance of the concept of ‘sexuality’ is not a response to the possible worlds of sexual experience and pleasure, but rather to a type of society which has an increasing need to control and determine the nature of these worlds. Even if sexuality is certainly regulated according to social norms before the early nineteenth century, the possibility of referring to sexuality as a singular and historically consistent experience demanded, Foucault notes, the presence of three ‘tools’ that could analyse this experience: sciences of knowledge, powers of regulation and the construction of subjects (Foucault 1992: 4). Knowledge, power and subjectification are all biopolitical tools, ‘tools’ of the Aristotelian polis and thereby tools that transform zoe into bios. The notions of zoe, or bare life, versus the bios of political life point to the historical development of the concept of life. The Greeks, Giorgio Agamben notes, have no single term for ‘life’. Instead they have two terms, one of which signifies ‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings’– zoe – and one which points to ‘the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’ – bios (Agamben 1998: 1). Importantly, this means that there is no distinction between animal and human as such, but rather a distinction between levels of existence, some of which are not accessible to all forms of life. For Aristotle, via Foucault, it is the capacity of political existence that separates humans from animals, a political existence at least partly enabled by language, which is thought to be a skill unique to humans. As Braidotti shows, via Deleuze and Guattari, the post- structuralist critique of the humanistic subject forces us to challenge the anthropocentrism built into conceptions of the human subject. This anthropocentrism, she notes, ‘prevents us from relinquishing the categorical divide between bios and zoe’ (Braidotti 2006: 40). Braidotti’s understanding of posthumanism is built on the possibility of affirming the vitalist power of zoe and provides a way of transpos- ing modes of sexualisation and naturalisation into productive force (Braidotti 2006: 42). However, and to return to the emergence of ‘sexuality’ as a concept in the early nineteenth century, this concept does not affirm vitalism but presents, rather, a distinctly human sexuality determined through language and a political existence shaped by the conditions of the polis. Just as the emergence of ‘sexuality’ is shown to be related to the emergence of a particular kind of modern biopolitics, the concept

122 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm of ‘the animal’ can be figured in relation to the co-emergence of a particular kind of modern, humanist subjectivity. As ‘one of the principal architects of humanism’, as Neil Badmington puts it, Descartes makes an ‘absolute difference’ between the rational human mind and the machinic nature of all bodies, be they human or animal (Badmington 2000: 3–4). When Descartes develops the notion of the human subject, ‘the animal’ concurrently comes to present that which is other than the subject. Laurie Shannon points out how the word ‘animal’ itself gains strength in combination with Cartesian dualism: ‘To put it in the broadest terms: before the cogito, there was no such thing as “the animal” ’ (Shannon 2009: 474). The idea of categorising the human on the one hand and clumping together all other living creatures on the other, and making a sharp as well as a hierarchal distinction between them, makes a lot of sense from a Cartesian perspective aiming to establish the exceptionalism of the human subject. Thus, at a time when Cartesian subjectivity is under construction, the notion of ‘the animal’ is created in response to the need for a concept that conveniently separates the human subject from all other living creatures, regardless of the infinite range of differences between them. It would be wrong, therefore, to assume that the codification of ‘the animal’ legitimately refers to the world of animal. In fact, the Cartesian concept of ‘the animal’ bears very little relation to actual animals. As Derrida suggests, it is even unacceptable that we claim the right to employ the definite article – ‘the’ Animal – ‘in spite of the infinite space that separates the lizard from the dog, the protozoon from the dolphin, the shark from the lamb’ (Derrida 2002: 402). ‘The animal’ is thus not truly a concept of the animal because its primary function is not to denote a full conceptualisation of living creatures other than humans, but rather to delimit a specific conceptualisation of the human. Just as the concept of sexuality is engaged as a mode of biopolitical restraint, the concept of ‘the animal’ is employed in the service of the human rather than the animal. The contours of ‘the animal’ remain excruciatingly vague whereas the particular conceptualisation of the ‘human’ becomes very clear. Thus far, we may note that the birth of the concepts of ‘the animal’ and ‘sexuality’ in themselves, as well as what has, to a large extent, been the perpetuation of these concepts in Western culture, has less to do with actual animals and actual sex than with the philosophical and political conceptualisation of the human. With such a profound impact on what we take to be our selves and our reality, the

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emergence of the terms ‘sexuality’ and ‘the animal’ are suggestive of more than the development of a convenient terminology. Rather, the installation of the notions of ‘the animal’ and ‘sexuality’ may be seen as performatives – as calling into being the phenomena to which they refer. Sexuality as we know it is largely shaped by the forced unity of the concept. This forced, and false, unity affects the way we perceive both ourselves and others. Equally, the concept of ‘the animal’ has, at least until recently, shaped ideas of animals as somehow related to each other, and as somehow conceptually unrelated to humans. This has, in turn, greatly affected the way animals are perceived and treated. However, concepts, or rather the concept of the concept, can also be understood differently. As I noted in Chapter 1, Deleuze does not take the concept of the concept lightly. For Deleuze and Guattari, all concepts ‘are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 16). Created in response to problems that are poorly understood, a concept responds to a possible world by cutting out new contours and by reactivating this recutting (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 18). Concepts, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, inevitably exist in proximity with other concepts in relation to which their contours are coordinated. Concepts are essentially incorporeal and do not point to the essence of what they bespeak, but rather to the event (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 21). The event marks the internal difference inherent in all things through the shifting between actual and virtual. The fact that concepts are events also means that becomings occur between concepts on the same plane (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 18). Various components of proximate concepts can link up and support each other. Considering how sexuality and ‘the animal’ have constructed and shaped experiences of human as well as nonhuman animals, they can be seen as concepts in the Deleuze and Guattarian sense. As we will see, Deleuze and Guattari enable us to open up the complexities of the concepts of ‘the animal’ as well as sexuality, complexities that have been largely glossed over in humanist discourse. In order to do this, we need to escape or, alternatively, reconceptualise what we talk about when we talk about animals and what we talk about when we talk about sex. ‘It is almost impossible’, Cary Wolfe points out, ‘to think about what the animal means to us in the modern and postmodern period without working through Freud’s theories of drive and desire and the anthropological work on sacrifice and sexuality’ (Wolfe 2003: xiv). While it is true that Freud’s understanding of sexuality does continue

124 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm to play an important role in discussions of animality, Deleuze and Guattari offer us an ‘anti-Oedipal’ theory that undoes this Freudian impasse. The plateau ‘1914: One or Several Wolves’ in A Thousand Plateaus provides a clear explanation of how sexuality and animality are linked to their rejection of Freud, and to their understanding of multiplicity and desire. It all comes down to the One or the many, the subject or the pack, the unity or the multiplicity. As such, it speaks to a fundamental aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of univocity which rejects hierarchal and dual organisations of being in favour of a conviction of the inherent pluralism of being itself. There is only one type of being and we cannot extract a transcendent unity from it. For example, analysing the subject in terms of a unity contrasted with what is outside it imposes an order on the multiplicity of ‘packs’ that traverse us. This pluralist understanding of being is contrasted with Freud’s analysis of the Wolf man. Freud, they argue, has already decided that ‘animals could serve only to represent coitus between parents, or, conversely, be represented by coitus between parents’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 32). This kind of analysis always brings the same results: restoring identity and unity (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 31). Thus, the Wolf man’s dream of wolves is quickly reduced to symbolise an accidental glimpse of his parents’ lovemaking and the many wolves are reduced to the one wolf – the father. Freud’s enforced reduction of many wolves to the one representing the father is taken as emblematic of his reduction of desire to the male and the familial. ‘Who is Freud trying to fool?’ The wolves, never allowed to express their multiplicity since they were already destined to mean only one thing, ‘never had a chance to get away and save their pack’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 32). But the wolves, Deleuze and Guattari insist, are a multiplicity. They live in packs and as such their existence is only partly individual. A pack of forever variable intensities, wolves express the way bodies are continually composed and recomposed through desire. They are linked together as a multiplicity in which ‘each element ceaselessly varies and alters its distance in relation to the others’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 34). To become-wolf is to surrender the unity of the supreme self to the multiplicities that make the subject but one intensity in a larger pack. Held together and fuelled by desire, such packs are fluent and irreducible to the One. This is also how we must understand making love. To love somebody is ‘to find that person’s own packs’. These packs are the multiplicities enclosed within that person. Love is joining these multiplicities together, ‘to make them

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penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person’s’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 39). Such ‘heavenly nuptials’, created by moving through so many bodies in each other, is making love through a body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 40). When Freud reduces the dream of the Wolf man to a representation of the father, he not only robs him of the impersonal desire that invests him and re-inscribes him into a familial economy of lack and castration, he also robs sexuality of its multiplicities and leaves it in the poverty of the one, the Oedipal, and the familial. Pursuing Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of desire and animality in relation to the kind of sexuality they only briefly point to here will further facilitate a critical development of the relation between pleasure and desire in Deleuze’s philosophy. The project of employing Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of becoming-animal to steal the concepts of ‘the animal’ and ‘sexuality’ from their essentially human discourses is informed by crucial contemporary debates about human–animal relations. According to Wolfe, two main factors make the study of this relation available in our immediate contemporaneity. Interestingly, both these factors bear a relation to sexuality. To begin with, he suggests, three decades of structuralism and poststructuralism, and the related crisis of humanism, have unsettled the notion of the human as a constitutive entity. As Wolfe notes, the pre-discursive and pre-technological human has been severely questioned through the exposure of ‘the human’s own impossibility’, which has entailed a move towards a posthumanist approach that does not see the human as a given entity. This must be brought to bear on sexuality in a number of ways, the most central here being the ways in which anthropocentric expectations and traditions have functioned to delineate and delimit what sexuality is and what it is for. The second explanation Wolfe gives for the intense development of human–animal studies today is that the research, both within and outside the humanities, in fields such as cognitive ethology and field ecology, has begun to question what has previously been seen as the constitutive differences between the human and the animal such as language, the use of tools and inher- ited social behaviours. This has meant that the divisions between animal and human have increasingly begun to erode (Wolfe 2003: xi–xii). How the crisis of humanism and the developments in human- animal studies affect our understanding of sexuality specifically is already under intense investigation. New approaches to issues of sexuality and gender explore and explode preconceptions and socio-

126 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm cultural myths about the nature of, as well as the relation between, human and nonhuman animals. Nonhuman animals, as Hird notes, have been charged with the immense burden of providing examples for, and evidence of, ‘natural’ human sexual relations (Hird 2008: 227). By the same token, animal sexuality increasingly emerges as a projection of human perceptions of ‘natural’ behaviour. Here, at the intersection of the crisis of humanism and the emergence of a number of critical reconceptualisations of animals, Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-animal appears as a powerful tool in a wider project of rescuing sexuality from its anchoring in humanist discourse.

Companion Species-Companion Orgasm-Companion Pleasure In developing their understanding of desire, Deleuze and Guattari allow both sexuality and the animal to become-other beyond psychoanalytic and humanist interpretations. While recognising the creative potential of this move, the ambition of the present book is also to try to recuperate some of the elements of sexuality lost in this process. When it comes to the animal, many have celebrated the productive effects of Deleuze and Guattari’s take, while some have interpreted it as highly problematic. Donna Haraway, for example, rejects Deleuze and Guattari’s take on animals quite vehemently. Haraway’s repudiation of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on becoming-animal bears similarities with Jardine’s early response to their concept of becoming-woman. Just as Jardine critiqued what seemed to be a circumvention of real women with this concept, Haraway repudiates what she perceives to be a disregard, and even contempt, for real animals. Here, she positions herself on the side of animal studies, which, according to Michael Lundblad, typically explores the physical interaction with animals, in comparison with animality studies, which tends to deal with the discursive construction of animality. As Lundblad and Marianne DeKoven note, however, the distinction between animal and animality studies is not as diametrical as some might believe. The concerns are not unlike the tensions between, for example, those who work explicitly with questions of equality and advocacy for women and those who work to problematise constructions of gender (DeKoven and Lundblad 2011: 3). If animality studies is less concerned with direct questions of advocacy, for example, it tackles questions of this kind in a different manner, focusing, instead, on problematising and historicising

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the human/animal binary (DeKoven and Lundblad 2011: 3). Where Haraway deals largely with animal studies, Deleuze and Guattari’s work is arguably more thoroughly anchored in animality studies. But if the difference between animal and animality studies is that of a tension rather than of opposed concerns, the tensions that emerge between Haraway’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s work depend on a rather forceful and evaluative distinction between their projects. Just as feminists have shown the relevance of problematising notions of gender and sex without giving up on the importance of ‘real’ women (even if this notion in itself becomes increasingly problematic, as does, as we shall see, the notion of the real animal), a lack of writing on ‘real’ animals need not in any way be apolitical or irrelevant to discourses on the animal. Contrary to Jardine, many feminists have shown that the notion of becoming-woman can indeed be very helpful in the political struggle to create spaces where it becomes possible to escape and remould binary and delimiting subject positions, what, for instance, Braidotti calls nomadic subjectivity. In Chapter 4, I employ the concept to unlock Deleuze’s gendered conceptions of the orgasm and in Chapter 7 I use it to try to free the orgasm from some of its representational and capitalist structures. But just as becoming-woman only becomes comprehensible if you take into account Deleuze and Guattari’s project of revealing molar and molecular politics, as well as the lines of flight through which stratified concepts may be allowed to become, understanding the radical potential of becoming-animal, too, demands that you recognise this attempt to theorise both the delimiting and the potential components of all concepts. Haraway does not recognise any potential in Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the animal. As Charles Stivale notes, she is highly selective when it comes to Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, as she focuses exclusively on a few selected quotations from A Thousand Plateaus and ignores all of their other writing, together and apart. This, Stivale points out, only allows a caricature of Deleuze and Guattari, who come to serve merely as straw men and ‘convenient rhetorical targets’ (Stivale 2011). Aiming to prove Deleuze and Guattari’s lack of interest in real animals, she quotes them saying ‘Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool’ (Haraway 2007: 29; Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 265). Had she looked beyond the one text she quotes, Stivale notes, she would have discovered how Deleuze explains the statement about disliking animals by saying that what he cannot stand is not animals per se but rather the human

128 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm relationship with the animal (Stivale 2011). This would also have enabled her to see how this foolishness of liking cats and dogs is not really a statement about animals at all, but about humans. While she is right in saying that Deleuze and Guattari seem to scorn the ordi- nary and the mundane (Haraway 2007: 27), she also disregards the point about the politics that Deleuze and Guattari work to develop. The animal, and even one and the same animal, Deleuze and Guattari argue, can have both re- and deterritorialising functions (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 258). Some animals, and in particular individuated ones, have little possibility of escaping the familial and political structures that have been determined for them. It is not the animal in itself, as Deleuze explains in L’Abécedaire, but the human relationship to the animal that needs to be rejected. Had Haraway taken on board Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of the molar and the molecular she might have seen that their problem with individuated animals is not qualitatively different from the problem they have with constructions such as the subject or the human: such constructions are caught up in macrostructures, and provide limited possibilities of escaping them. Therefore, the kinds of animals with which you ‘play family’ or Oedipus do little more than confirm existing familial structures and psychoanalytical projections (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 257). Haraway’s project is qualitatively different from Deleuze and Guattari’s, and her take on animals would likely be particularly unsettling from their perspective. To begin with, and as Lynn Turner notes, Haraway is ‘at pains to extend “companion species” beyond the “companion animals” that we think we know under the name of “pets” ’ (Turner 2010: 73). Already here, in the realm of human–animal companionship, her work is at odds with Deleuze and Guattari’s. Secondly, she remains, albeit somewhat playfully, or ironically, Turner suggests (Turner 2010: 72), within a profoundly human discourse. Her dog is specified and determined according to human standards in a number of ways: she is canid, she is a Red Merle Australian Shepherd, her name is Ms Cayenne Pepper and, as this last point shows, she even has a human and gender specific title (Ms). Haraway describes how Ms Cayenne Pepper’s ‘darter-tongue kisses have been irresistible’ and how her ‘red-merle Australian shepherd’s quick and lithe tongue has swabbed the tissues of [her] tonsils’ (Haraway 2007: 15–16). On the macro level, Turner suggests, Haraway finds herself ‘in the thick of what might be popularly construed as fascism’ – gene politics, maintaining pure breeds, and aestheticising a type (Turner 2010: 719). At

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the same time, Haraway combines playing sports with her Australian Shepherd with a sensual relationship, with kissing and exchanging bacteria. She compares these exchanges with the bacterial sex discussed by Margulis and Sagan – ‘Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cells’ (Haraway 2007: 15). On this micro level, Turner suggests, Haraway succeeds in generating ‘the interspecies kiss’ – a co-constitution and reproduction that exceeds species and de-humanises life (Turner 2010: 71). Even if she may be seen to have in common with Deleuze and Guattari this rethinking of the notion of the human, her play with the determination of animals through species and titles points to the profoundly different strategies, as well as aims, of their projects. A crucial question that emerges from Haraway’s argument, however, and one which is central also to how we may continue to use Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on animality in productive ways, is how exactly one does write about ‘real’ animals. The question has been approached in many different disciplines and with many different answers. In performance art, as Carolee Schneemann has shown, physical interaction with animals – cats, snakes, fish – open and ‘refract’ our view on issues of interspecies interaction and human sexuality (Schneemann 2003: 264). In philosophical writing, Derrida insists quite vehemently that his cat is not a figure, an allegory or a mythical cat, but a real cat (Derrida 2002: 374). Furthermore, he contends that it is not ‘a cat’ in the sense that it responds as a species or genus, but the very specific creature that gazes at him in his nakedness and forces him to respond. It is exactly the reality of the cat as an absolute – as opposed to the cat as an allegory or cats as a determined species – that makes it is impossible to capture ‘its unsub- stitutable singularity’ (Derrida 2002: 378). Still, Haraway argues, in a critique similar to, if more generous than the one she bestows on Deleuze and Guattari, that Derrida fails to consider the possibility of alternative modes of engagement with the cat, engagements that might have opened up a communication beyond the kind he himself acknowledges as insufficient (Haraway 2007: 20). In fiction, Marian Engel’s novel Bear (1976) portrays quite powerfully the way in which animals, even when marking something radically different, tend to be incorporated into human relationships. It also portrays the tensions between a human knowing about animals and a posthuman becoming-animal. In Engel’s novel, Lou, a lonely anthropologist, receives a commis- sion to catalogue the library of an old family estate on a secluded

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Canadian island. It has been the tradition of the family to keep a bear and on the island remains the last of these pet bears. Her cataloguing is frequently interrupted by the discovery of notes about bears that keep falling out of various books. These notes, combining mythical history and biological classification of bears, constitute an obvious attempt to determine the nature of the bear both biologically and conceptually and thus to find for it a place in human culture. As such, these notes emphasise quite strongly the human-animal hierarchy of attribution and colonisation. But part of Lou’s work is also to look after the actual bear that is chained up in one of the outhouses. This, it would seem, is an opportunity to encounter the reality of the animal itself – its affects and expressions rather than its classifications. And despite the fact that Lou does not like animals, she soon develops a relationship with the bear. This relationship becomes increasingly intimate. The bear starts coming into the house and Lou buries her hands and rubs her feet in his deep pelt. Soon, the bear starts licking her, his fat and ridged tongue rasping against her body and probing ‘all her secret places’ (Engel 1976: 93). The bear is gentle and patient with her. Unlike her lonely human relations, where the only exchange was when her boss ‘fucked her weekly on her desk’ (Engel 1976: 92), the bear ‘perseveres in her pleasure’ and licks away her tears as she comes. He is content just to lick her and she comes to love him intensely. Both Bear and the bear, it is worth noticing, fulfil a function that is inscribed into a specific embodied moment in time. Written in the 1970, Engel’s novel is quite clearly part of a feminist claiming of female sexuality outside the confines of traditional heterosexual and patriarchal family structures. As I expanded on in Chapter 4, this is a vibrant period for the feminist political struggle for the right to one’s own sexuality, and the period between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s in particular is seen as a time when discussions of women’s sexual pleasure play a central role in the development of modern feminism in America. In the novel, Lou’s relationships with men are described as brief and selfish. While they fill some sort of emptiness for her, they are invariably described in words of poverty and loneliness. Along with her boss ‘fucking her on her desk’, an encounter with a man in the nearest town confirms human-to-human sexuality as impoverished and unequal. ‘When he was finished he said thank you. Then they dressed’ (Engel 1976: 126). Because it is overtly contrasted to the insufficiency of such human relations, the patient licking of the bear is positioned less as an expression of an alternative

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sexual orientation and more as filling the empty space left by these self-centred men – the bear as the ideal man or as an alternative to patriarchal modes of sexuality. But while their interspecies relationship is intensely sexual for her, and although the bear is described as patient and generous in licking her, there is nothing to indicate that this is a sexual experience for him. As in Haraway’s critique of Derrida, Lou fails to be curious about what her companion may be feeling or thinking (Haraway 2007: 20). The bear is not a bear so much as it is a supplement to a world of human sexual economy. As such, it is a cipher rather than a specific animal. Tom Tyler notes that philosophy, and I would like to add literature here, has a strong tradition of using nonhuman animals as ciphers (Tyler 2008: 10). As ciphers, animals are but ‘place fillers’, and, as such, they are of no importance in themselves; they are ‘nonentities’ that fill a function in the text and which reveal ‘the casual anthropocentrism that pervades the discipline’ (Tyler 2008: 15). Through the bear, Lou, who has previously been the passive receiver of human male ‘fucking’, has found orgasmic companionship. As we will see, however, her sex with a bear is not positioned as a development of her already active and perhaps alternative sexual orientation as much as it is presented as the means through which she can rediscover her essentially human and heterosexual self. The human–animal sexuality portrayed in Engel’s novel provides a schoolbook example of Freudian sexuality. It portrays what Braidotti, in a different context, describes as the ‘long march through the Freudian phases, anal, oral, genital’ (Braidotti 2002: 141). In first getting to know the bear, Lou is advised by the old woman who has previously taken care of it to ‘shit with the bear’ (Engel 1976: 49). The bear, she is told, will like her then. She follows the advice, and this event marks the beginning of their intimacy. After the shitting comes the persistent licking. The genital, however, marks the limit of Lou’s sexual interaction with the bear, and also ultimately marks the necessity of returning to the world of human, heterosexual relations. The bear does not try to have intercourse with her, and even as she tries to excite him, he will not rise to the occasion. She becomes increasingly interested in this type of penetrative intercourse but after trying to straddle him, she feels intensely guilty. She feels she has gone too far and that she stinks of bestiality. The next day, she goes into town and has sex with a man whom she has previously rejected. As Braidotti notes, Freud, in his frequent use of animals – horses, wolves – humanises rather than recognises desires that would other-

132 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm wise have had the potential to blur the boundaries between human and animal (Braidotti 2002: 140). Freud, Tyler argues, also exposes his lack of recognition of nonhuman animals. Apart from the animal as cipher, philosophy also uses animals as what Tyler calls indices. Instead of playing the role of place filler, an index is when a specific animal is used for its particular qualities. While still employed in a representational function, the specificities of indices are important to the philosophical argument in which they appear. Thereby, they also escape the all-encompassing function of ‘the animal’ (Tyler 2008: 27). In his famous writing on the wolf, Tyler notes, Freud shifts from wolves to dogs to wolves and thus blurs the roles of wolves as indices, that is, the importance of wolves as wolves and the wolf that could just as well be a dog, that is, the wolf as a cipher. This, Tyler argues, reveals more about Freud’s inattentiveness to animals than about the animals themselves (Tyler 2008: 26). The point here is that the distinction between animals is less important than the separation between animal and human. For Freud, as Braidotti notes, a clear separation needs to be made between the ‘animal part’ and the human subject that one, by virtue of leaving the animal behind, thereby becomes (Braidotti 2002: 140). Through such demarcation, it becomes possible for Freud to organise the organism and its sexuality in accordance with familial and socially recognisable structures. In Bear, the presence of the bear stands for an otherness that ultimately only confirms the borders of the human. The novel presents Lou’s increasing preoccupation with the possibility of having penetrative sex with the bear as marking the limit of the human–animal sexual relation. When the bear eventually does rise to Lou, as her stay on the island draws to an end and she declares that their relationship is over, she eagerly prepares to receive him by getting down on all fours ‘in the animal posture’. But instead of inserting his erect penis into her vagina in accordance with her expectations, he reaches out one of his great paws and rips the skin on her back. Bleeding intensely, she throws him out of the house, worried that the smell of blood may tempt his animal instincts (Engel 1976: 131-2). This penetration of sorts finally frees the bear from the macrostructures of human sexuality. The wound on Lou’s back, while opening her body, simultaneously marks the boundary between them. The bear is becoming-animal and in the process, Lou becomes all the more human. Having been described as a lonely mole blinking at daylight at the beginning of the novel, the end finds her knowing, through her very pores, ‘what the world was for’ (Engel 1976: 137). She will keep

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the scars after the bear’s claws, she thinks, as if they remind her of her orgasmic summer at the same time as they mark her as essentially human. As the bear is shipped off to his previous carer, Lou goes back to the city. The otherness of the bear frees her, not by welcom- ing her into the nonhuman but, quite the contrary, by enabling her human sexuality. In a sense, the domestication of the bear can be read as a premoni- tion of the domestication of Lou’s sexuality. This is not the reworked understanding of domestication that Haraway presents and which sees it as a mutual event, or as a dance of heterogeneous agencies (Haraway 2003: 28). On the contrary, the domestication of the bear, and of Lou, is presented rather as a more traditional and hierarchal domestication of animal by man. Not only is the bear kept, and fed, and taken out like a companion to its carer, it is also the subject of the aforementioned notes of classification that the owner of the estate left around. These notes, which include information about the biological constitution of bears, the physical description of their genitalia, and several references to different cultural and mythological conceptions of bears, appear as an ideological net cast over the bear to seize its power and incorporate it into human knowledge and definitions. Indeed, it is quite curious as well as ironic that Lou’s job, itself a labour of ordering and classification, is interrupted by these notes of classification of what has become the object of her erotic desire. Apart from reminding her about the hierarchal relation between human and animal, the notes may also be seen as reminders of the discursive appropriation of animality as well as sexuality. The imperialism that, as Foucault would have it, transforms all sexuality into ‘a perpetual discourse’ and institutionalised organisation (Foucault 1990a: 33) becomes evident through the way in which these notes focus on physical determination and mythologisation. Even if Lou’s relation to the bear is quite physical, the notes assist in retaining her perception of her animal lover within the realms of human knowledge. In a kind of literal instantiation of Foucault’s delineation of the biopolitical determination and classification of sexuality discussed in Chapter 1, Lou’s knowledge is not only a parallel line to the physical interaction, but the sex itself is physically associated with these notes. This becomes quite clear in a description of one of their many sexual encounters: ‘His tongue bent vertically and he put it up her cunt. A note fell out of the book: The offspring of a woman and a bear is a hero, with the strength of a bear and the cleverness of a man. – Old Finnish legend. She cried with joy’ (Engel 1976: 99). Not only does

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Engel’s novel juxtapose descriptions of a sexual and a discursive nature, it also suggests that Lou is actually reading this note while the bear is between her legs. As if to mirror the way in which human sexuality is delimited by discourses and determinations of sexuality, ultimately, Lou’s encounter with a bear, regardless of its physicality, is not so much an encounter with a bear as it is an encounter with the knowledge and myths of bears. Thereby, she is also prevented from becoming anything other than human. They are both caught up in a language of mastery rather than a poetics of becoming. As long as the bear is the bear of human classification and myth, Lou, too, remains domesticated. Playing families with animals, as Deleuze and Guattari might say, necessarily robs the animal of its world at the same time as it robs the human animal of the becomings that could expand its world. As long as it remains so essentially human, Lou’s sexuality is caged, or locked up, as Braidotti might call it, in as ‘a sort of Fort Knox of the Libido’ (Braidotti 2002: 140).

(Be)coming-animal The blocking of becoming that we have just seen in Bear illustrates quite neatly the problem Deleuze and Guattari have with domesticated animals. Any animal, they point out, can be part of a pack (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 266), although some have a less obvious degree of multiplicity. Equally, any animal can be caught up in human structures (although we must allow for different degrees of adaptability here too). Domesticated animals and their companions are prevented from becoming-animal as long as their worlds are delimited by individualisation and familial structures. Accordingly, it is not the cats and dogs themselves that are the problem but the structures that delimit their worlds. In sharp contrast to Martin Heidegger, Deleuze explains in L’Abécédaire that ‘every animal has a world’, and that not all people do. An animal world is particular to each animal and consists of the intensities extracted from its environment. The quantity of intensities varies enormously, and consequently, so do the different worlds. Using Jakob von Uexküll’s understanding of the tick as an example, he notes that in the face of a swarming world, the tick reacts to only three stimuli: the light which brings it to the tip of the grass, the smell of the animal body towards which it aims and the tactile stimulus that will help it choose a good area of skin to sink into. ‘This’, he explains, ‘is what makes a world’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: n.p.).

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The tick, of course, offers a rather extreme example in its very limited world, but the point is that instead of the distinction between the worldlessness of stones, animals as poor in the world, and the world-forming of human beings that Heidegger posits (Heidegger 1995: 177), Deleuze poses an infinite range of worlds which link together rhizomatically. Not only do different animals have different worlds, they also, to varying degrees, have the capacity to deterritorialise from these worlds by being taken up in becomings that momentarily create a block of different durations. If animals ‘have worlds’, so do human animals, but not by definition. People, Deleuze argues, may ‘live the life of everyone’s life’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: n.p.). This is what Braidotti describes as Deleuze’s anti-metaphysics, a reaction against the notion that man’s ek-sistence enables him to transcend himself and Being (Braidotti 2002: 121). For Deleuze, of course, no such transcendence is possible – the nomadic subject is immanent to its ‘habitat/ environment/ territory’ and can therefore not be positioned as separate from animality (Braidotti 2002: 123). Becoming-animal is therefore inevitable, the question instead becomes about allowing the human out of the cage of anthropocentric interpretations. In L’Abécédaire, Deleuze describes his abhorrence of cats rubbing against his legs. This, it seems, is similar to his abhorrence of pleasure; it marks, for him, the dead end of desire, and thereby the dead end of becoming. As the cats that he cannot seem to escape, even in his own home, rub against his legs, they are so territorialised, not by their own instinct but by human relations, that they are robbed of their potential becoming. Again, it is the human relationship to, and the over-determination of, the animal that Deleuze detests – the robbing of worlds. Equally, one could argue that most human sexuality, perceived as genitals rubbing against genitals on MTV or in porn films, too, is robbed of its potential worlds. Like the domesticated animal, sexuality is caught up in familial and all-too-human structures. In fact, it is quite possible, and quite fruitful, to read the delimitation of sexuality alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the delimitation of animals. Deleuze and Guattari figure domesticated animals as individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history, ‘my’ cat, ‘my’ dog. There animals invite us to regress, draw us into a narcissistic contemplation, and they are the only kind of animal psychoanalysis understands, the better to discover a daddy, a mommy, a little brother behind them. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 265)

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Stealing and modifying this passage from A Thousand Plateaus by exchanging the references to animals to ones about sexuality brings out this similarity:

individuated sexuality, family sexuality, sentimental, Oedipal sexuality each with its own petty history, ‘my’ self, ‘my’ sex. These sexualities invite us to regress, draw us into a narcissistic contemplation, and they are the only kind of sexuality psychoanalysis understands, the better to discover a daddy, a mommy, a little brother behind them. This passage, describing in the original the first and most domesticated of three kinds of animals, is followed by two other kinds: state animals and demonic packs. The comparison with sexuality continues to hold as we note that while state sexuality would be about ‘sexualities as they are treated in the great divine myths, in such a way as to extract from them series or structures’, demonic sexuality would be about ‘pack or affect sexualities that form a multiplicity, a becoming, a population, a tale’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 265). If Deleuze has neglected discussions of ‘real’ animals and ‘real’ sexuality in favour of abstract becoming and desire, as I suggest at the beginning of this chapter, the merging of these discourses, or the becoming of concepts, as I also indicated then, would welcome rather than reject sexual pleasure and orgasm through the becoming-animal of sexuality. A becoming-animal of sexuality does not, of course, have anything to do with worn comparisons between carnal lust and the animal side of human beings. This would immediately rob both human and nonhuman animals of all animal-becomings through its anthropocentric interpretations of animal behaviour. A simple example of such links between sex and animal behaviour can be found in the Bloodhound Gang song about having sex ‘doggy-style’. Doing it ‘like they do it on Discovery channel’ might cause you to come ‘quicker than FedEx’, if you are that way inclined, but while this recognises the mammal in humans, it has nothing to do with becoming-animal. Becoming, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, is not about resemblance, imitation or identification (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 262). While the version of animality that the Bloodhound Gang represents here has nothing to do with becoming-animal, it might have something to do with the kind of orgasm that Deleuze finds deplorable. In fact, the Bloodhound Gang’s ‘coming like FedEx’ elegantly captures the web of sexual, economic and cultural structures with which sexuality and the orgasm are made molar. Supposedly fast, dependable and

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world-reaching, some of FedEx’s slogans through the years make perfect sense in this respect – ‘When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight’, ‘Absolutely, Positively, Anytime’, ‘The Way the World Works’, ‘We Live to Deliver’. Yes, Bloodhound Gang, your FedEx simile captures the molar politics of the orgasm perfectly and yes, Deleuze, if this is all we make of the orgasm then you are right in rejecting its political and philosophical potential. Domesticated and tamed, such types of orgasm are not unlike the domesticated animals that you reject. They are captured by discourse, by familial politics, and by cultural and economic expectations to the point where a temporary relief may indeed be all you can ask for (Deleuze 2001: 96). In other words, we may want such orgasms, just as we may want such cats and such dogs. We may also want to be rubbed in a number of ways and feel comforted by the reassurance of proximity to other human or nonhuman animals, even in the midst of the politics that we cannot seem to escape. If Deleuze and Guattari provide a thorough analysis of both familial and Oedipal appropriations of both animals and sexuality in Anti-Oedipus, they describe in A Thousand Plateaus how States appropriate the desire that builds it by breaking and reducing becoming-animal to relations of ‘totemic or symbolic correspondence’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 273). To illustrate their unwillingness to stick with the attributes, genus and classification of animals, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the difference between a racehorse and a work horse is greater than the difference between a work horse and an ox (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 283). Referring to von Uexküll, they describe how animals have passive and active affects which are activated differently, depending on the current individuated assemblage. A State animal, or state sexuality, would be one whose affects are steered towards a functional assemblage that corresponds to the models of the State. This is how some animals come to be little more than tools to order societies (a direct example would be the insistent reading of animal behaviour to ‘prove’ the natural- ness of certain, primarily violent, patriarchal and sexual behaviours in humans), just as sexuality tends to become little more than a set of sexological, psychiatric or cultural classifications through which the behaviour of citizens can be evaluated, as discussed in Chapter 5. Foucault’s History of Sexuality study offers the most detailed account of State sexuality. In main focus when Deleuze and Guattari reject the psychoanalytic conception of desire is the Oedipal structures which have kept it imprisoned and which they supplant with

138 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm the becoming-animal of desire – desire as pack, desire as blocks of becoming, the demonic desire that escapes such structures. In order to escape the psychoanalytic, familial delimitation of desire, Deleuze and Guattari also theorise a different conceptualisation of bodies that rests less on organisation by species or genus and more on the connection of affects – the plugging together of desiring machines. While there is a direct link between social production and sexuality, the very point of rethinking what desire and bodies can do is to reroute desire away from the reproduction of sexuality in its existing familial structures towards its more positive connections. Foucault, on the other hand, is more patient with the notions of bodies and pleasures. As we saw in Chapter 1, he rejects the concept of desire altogether and focuses, instead, on the concept of pleasure. This enables him to draw the contours of the history of sexuality, and us to discuss the functions of state animals and, by extension, State sexuality. This may have resulted in Foucault getting caught up ‘within the concept of power relations’, as Deleuze suggests (Deleuze 2006a: 79), but it also enables him to provide a detailed analysis of the history of the entanglement of sexuality in State functions – in Foucauldian terms: the deployment of sexuality. Where Deleuze and Guattari provide a thorough analysis of familial restrictions of desire and animals and also, to some extent, discuss State appropriations of the same, they offer, in the chapter on becoming in A Thousand Plateaus, a brief sketch of sexuality in relation to becoming-animal. This corresponds to the category of the becoming-demonic. A becoming-demonic of sexuality resists the binary organisation of sexes, initiates conjugated becomings and invites a proximity or indiscernibility with elements from the animal. Sexuality produces a thousand sexes and as many uncontrollable becomings (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 307). Here, it becomes clear that the kind of sexuality that Deleuze commonly rejects, the deplorable orgasm and pleasure, is such only in so far as it is domesticated. Like the cats and dogs that he personally has problems handling and like the state animals that he and Guattari reject in A Thousand Plateaus, these orgasms keep sexuality and desire leashed within familial structures and social conventions. And of course he is right: as long as it is the question of the deployment of pleasure as outlined by Foucault, or the orgasm as inscribed into the history of sexual politics (and which is important to discuss for that very reason, which I do in Chapter 4), Deleuze’s rejection is understandable. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s opening up of sexuality as a possibility here

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is not followed up by any concrete examples of what such a sexuality might look like. Most of us have been shown what a human orgasm looks like. At least a male human orgasm. The most clear-cut, if somewhat extreme example is the cum-shot in mainstream porn films. Typically, the girl kneels in front of the man and submissively looks up at him as his cum sprays in her face and mouth. End of scene. Unless, of course, there are a few more men there who wish to cum on her face before the scene ends. Also known as the ‘money shot’, this kind of orgasm is what Linda Williams describes as ‘the obsessive attempt of a phallic visual economy to represent and “fix” the exact moment of the sexual act’s involuntary convulsion of pleasure’ (Williams 1999: 113). Such an orgasm, as I discuss in more detail in Chapter 7, is inscribed in a whole set of human economies, including gender, power and capitalism – it is ‘an ideal instance of commodity fetishism’ (Williams 1999: 95). There is certainly no becoming-animal involved here, regardless of how many ‘animal’ postures might have preceded it. No matter how inhumane the porn industry and its products are, and no matter how such products may be said to speak to our ‘animal instincts’, they are profoundly human. The postures of the bodies, the arrangement of fields of vision and the representation of sexes all signify molar structures of human consciousness, closure and the indexing of body parts – nothing is left to the imagination, no holes are left through which deterritorialisations of these molar systems could take place. So what would a becoming-animal of the orgasm look like? Quite unlike Deleuze’s rejection of the orgasm as a deplorable mechanism of the subject, and quite unlike the Bloodhound Gang’s ‘coming like FedEx’, Lingis suggests that the orgasmic body decom- poses ‘the competent body’, the body that has been diagrammed and contracted for practical use and capitalist tasks (Lingis 1998: 62). Our bodies, he argues, are typically ‘yoked to some conscious goal or purpose that is or can be justified in some capitalist program for economic growth or some transcendental or theological fantasy’ (Lingis 1998: 59). The orgasm has the power to undo the body as ‘the posture, held oriented for tasks’. Its diagrams dissolve as body parts are ‘dismembered’ by the touch and movement of another (Lingis 1998: 63). As the social and machinic functions of our bodies fall away, our sense of ourselves, as well as our ego’s capacity to evaluate, demand and take initiative are replaced by an ‘animal irresponsibility’. ‘Our muscular and vertebrate bodies transubstan-

140 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm tiate into ooze, slime, mammalian sweat, and reptilian secretions, into minute tadpoles and releases of hot moist breath nourishing the floating microorganisms of the night air’ (Lingis 1998: 64–5). The inhuman intensities that swarm through Lingis’s poetic mélange of different philosophical texts are clearly influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, from whom he adopts several points about seasons, rhizomes and wolves. But unlike them, he produces a portrayal of orgasm that is fully in line with, rather than in opposition to, their becoming-animal. In L’Abécédaire, Deleuze says that an animal is ‘a being on the lookout’ (être aux aguets). Whatever it does, it is always alert to the unexpected. The forces that occupy its plane of immanence are constantly on the move. A nonhuman orgasm would be on the lookout: instead of centring its attention to genitality and the consciousness of sexed economy, it is invested by nonclassified forces of body parts (and here, ‘body’ is meant in its widest sense), by the tactility of impressions, and the acuteness of sensations that undo the codes that inscribe the body with identity and the human consciousness that orders it. This way, a nonhuman orgasm overrides the kind of pleasure that, as Braidotti puts it, ‘acts as the psychic “glue” that fixes sensations on to organs and maps them out psychically’ and as ‘an invisible ink that writes out the chain of signifiers onto the sensible matter of the flesh’ (Braidotti 2002: 123). Here, we can return to Klein, who, as I demonstrated in Chapter 2, is reproached by Deleuze and Guattari for perpetuating a genital, and especially a ‘vaginocentric’, organisation of the sexual body. However, they do appropriate her work on partial objects with the aim of releasing these objects from being the idealist entities that Klein outlines, employing them, instead, to elucidate the body without organs. As I began to suggest in that chapter, the way in which Deleuze and Guattari allow partial objects to fill up the intensity of space without signifying should open for orgasm beyond lack. A nonhuman orgasm is the activation of the positive multiplicities of partial objects – a becoming-animal through ‘being on the lookout’. Where the concept of the animal is intimately tied up with the notion of the human, becoming-animal is as much about the transformation of the animal as a transformation of the human. As in Deleuze’s famous example of the wasp and the orchid, where the wasp and the orchid mutually become part of one another’s sexual apparatus, becomings are always mutual. In the novel What the Crow Said (1978), Robert Kroetsch describes a similar becoming, but one that, significantly, includes the orgasm.

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The novel opens with an event that transforms the world that the narrative is in the process of constructing. It is spring and Vera Lang, for reasons no one could explain, takes off her clothes and lies down on a bed of crocuses. Maybe it was the April wind, the breaking clouds and her simple desire to dream in the sun. She falls asleep and is woken up by swarming bees which, ‘Scouting for a nest, a new place to hive’, have been attracted to ‘the scent of her sun-warmed body’ (Kroetsch 1978: 8). The bees gather above ‘the suddenly naked branch’, humming and blooming in the air like a ‘great flower itself breathing, pulsing itself large, contracting, swelling again, as huge as a house that had bloomed into the air’ (Kroetsch 1978: 8). Vera closes her eyes to the whine and hum of ‘the bees’ coming’ (Kroetsch 1978: 9). They ascend her body and as Vera yields, lifting her body against the weight of the surging bees, she too begins to swarm. Like the bees, her nipples swell and throb as her belly tightens in response to the rubbing of ‘her myriad unthinking lovers’ (Kroetsch 1978: 10). With bees between her fingers and between her toes, and with eyes, mouth, ears and vagina filled up by bees, Vera comes at the point where she has ‘no mind left for thinking, no fear, no dream, no memory’ (Kroetsch 1978: 11). As the bees move into every crevice of her body, her body moves ‘with the surge of grass in the wind, a field of green oats, a flowering of clover’, Vera leaves her human consciousness behind. Becoming-branch, becoming-nest, becoming-animal, is what Vera Lang has become, a body without organs that is free from ‘the codes of phallogocentric functions of identity’, as Braidotti puts it (Braidotti 2002: 124). The bees, historically a symbol of productivity and society, pull Vera into their worldling. Becoming-animal, her body knows nothing of prescribed pleasures or acceptable behaviour. It knows nothing of the indexing of ‘certain organs on to specific functions, so as to produce operational sequences: eye/ vision/ sign/ reading/ scopic verification; ear/ voice/ acoustic signification; desire/ object/ appropriation/ pleasure’ (Braidotti 2002: 123). It creates molecular lines such as eye/ nest/ movement, humming/ skin/ surging, and forgetting/ coming/ swarming. It is a ‘being on the lookout’ and as such, it knows nothing about pleasure and orgasm as subjective or telos. As a metamorphosis of instinct and desire, of nesting and mating, of coming and coming again, this becoming-animal is also an opening for repetition. After coming a first time, Vera reaches out and pulls her own thighs wider apart. As the bees move, she begins to move again, ‘unable to stop and yet no longer urgent, the hiving

142 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm bees arriving home, the whole nectar of her world-old virgin body poured into their instinct to begin again’ (Kroetsch 1978: 12). This is a meeting of orgasm and desire, a coming without lack, a nonhuman orgasm, a becoming-animal of sexuality.

Conclusion – One or Many Orgasms Since Deleuze and Guattari aim to break with the reduction of sexual relations in terms of ‘the father, the penis, the vagina’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 30–1), it should also be logical to reconsider the orgasm. Why would the orgasm not harbour multiplicity – a thousand tiny orgasms, a pack multiplicity that howls and runs with the pack that is the body without organs? Why can we not have a nonhuman relation to the orgasm? Deleuze and Guattari allow for nonhuman desire, and even for nonhuman sex, but they do not allow for nonhuman pleasure or orgasm. On the contrary, what they, and Deleuze in particular, write about pleasure and orgasm is deeply entrenched in the discourse of humanism. It is because the orgasm suggests a lack in the subject that it is deplorable for Deleuze. In the face of becoming-animal it becomes more obvious than ever that lack in itself is an idea fundamentally inscribed in the discourses that he discards. Deleuze and Guattari reject as psychoanalytic understandings of human sexuality based on an economy of lack, and equally reject the phenomenological notion of the animal being poor in the world. Becoming-animal is, after all, about assemblage rather than lack. If we follow through with Deleuze and Guattari’s own argument, a nonhuman sexuality should be free, not only from the subject but also from the lack which inflects its pleasures as part of psychoanalytic economy. As Braidotti puts it, a nomadic subject is necessarily part of a pack. Becoming-animal is about the sharing of territorial space, the emergence of relations that are nonhuman because they do not privilege the human and endow it with a world separate from animals (Braidotti 2002: 123). In this sense, becoming-animal must also allow for pleasure and orgasm as a matter of pack-becomings. More than that, the orgasm may itself be seen as a becoming-animal – as an emergence of relations. We need to allow the many wolves to enter the sexual body. We need to allow for pack orgasms. One or many wolves? ask Deleuze and Guattari. Similarly I ask: One or many orgasms? Braidotti has already initiated this project by showing how animality, and especially wolves and hybrid relations, offer great possibilities of metamorphosis through sexuality. ‘This

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“explosion” of the civilized confines of one’s “self” re-assert some of the raw corporeality of the subject, which is often rendered in the mode of the orgasm, of the ecstatic erotic encounter with radical otherness’ (Braidotti 2002: 128). Deleuze and Guattari praise von Uexküll’s theory of transcodings through which he describes nature, including animals and vegeta- tion, in terms of melodies. Components of nature serve as motifs for each other. For example, it is suggested that the spider’s web implies that the spider’s code includes sequences of the fly’s code – a motif. This way, a rhythm is established, an expression of motifs in what becomes a nature ‘as music’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 346). Milieus of rhythm are established, and if they become expressive, through temporal consistency and spatial range, this rhythm becomes an act of territorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 347). From this perspective, sexuality without subjects may be seen as a rhythm without lack. Such sexuality may be territorialised, since bodies as well as behaviours establish some temporal and spatial continuity, but it may also be deterritorialised through new motifs and rhythms. The posthuman orgasm becomes part of such a rhythm. If the concepts of ‘the animal’ and ‘sexuality’ have been useful in tracing the contours of modern human subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of becoming-animal and desire are crucial to a posthuman ethics in that they spill over the edges of any such contours. The rhythm of animals and the connectivity of desire do not respect the boundaries chartered on humanist maps. At the same time, and like the concepts that for Deleuze and Guattari have the power to reconfigure the contours of what they define, the revolutionary force of rhythm can be employed to negotiate and expand the territories of human sexuality. Grosz, to whom we have often had reason to return in earlier chapters, has developed the ways in which rhythm and territories function to frame chaos and create intensive nonhuman states. The notion of becoming wolf, which in Deleuze and Guattari’s reading is a way of allowing for multiplicities rather than confining unities, can be engaged to expand the milieus of human and nonhuman territories. As the reading of Bear indicates, the human-animal relation, no matter how intimate, is impotent so long as it is remains within the structures of human, psychoanalytic structures. However, and as reading What the Crow Said suggests, the human–animal relation can also be established through a rhythm that undoes the very dichotomy that the dash between them signifies – .

144 7 Capitalism and Sexuality

This is why the forms of human sexuality are so much about plugging up every orifice, by giving every partial object (desiring-machine) something to do, by turning all the desiring-machines into an orchestra that constantly play nothing but the sad and mournful riff of Oedipal sexuality. (Lambert 2011: 143)

Introduction Where the previous chapters of this book have mapped the implications of Deleuze’s rejection of pleasure as a productive force, and the possibilities that emerge if we recuperate pleasure as part of his philosophy along a number of tracks, one central question remains. Throughout the present book I have worked through different ways in which traces of the Oedipal and distinctly male linger in Deleuze’s understanding of the orgasm and suggested ways in which a rethinking of sexual pleasure along more Deleuzian terms can assist in strength- ening a Deleuzian conception of bodies, desires and pleasure. But if the Oedipal thus remains as a problem in his understanding of pleasure and desire, then what are the implications and possibilities of this when it comes to his and Guattari’s understanding of capitalism? The link between capitalism and the Oedipal is at its most obvious, of course, in Anti-Oedipus , but the way in which Deleuze and Guattari let their understanding of desire take off and differentiate itself from a post-Freudian model continues to inform their philosophy at large. Identifying Deleuze’s understanding of pleasure as invested with an Oedipal trace that inhibits a fuller fruition of Deleuzian desire, this chapter considers the effects of this trace, its temporal implications, and its possible reconfiguration in and through Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of capitalism and schizophrenia. The connection between capitalism and schizophrenia that Deleuze and Guattari stress by the subtitle common to both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus is an historical one emerging from and within the structures of Western civilisation. When ‘the quantitative

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calculations of the market replace meaning and belief-systems as the foundation of society’, as Eugene W. Holland explains it, capitalist society comes to be driven by the ‘unlimited semiosis’ of the cash nexus (Holland 1999: 2). Thus, capitalism sets free flows that do not have a predetermined value or function. This lack of permanence is itself a schizophrenic trait of capitalism. However, capitalism also harbours another, paranoid, function. At the same time as it is built on the very possibility of freeing cash from meaning, it also relies on its capacity to recode its flows and qualify this process. In order to function, the capitalist machine must ensure that the flows it has decoded perform a useful role in the capitalist order. The flows are put in the service of social repression as their energy is caught up in ‘a bound state on the body of capital’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 246). Accordingly, there is a distinction between the break-flows of capitalism that are decoded and caught up in the system by means of an internal limit and those that break with it. In their two Capitalism and Schizophrenia books, Deleuze and Guattari introduce and develop their understanding of the way in which capitalism functions as a mode of capture. The claiming of flows that characterises the capitalist system is theorised by means of a Marx-inspired ‘three-headed apparatus of capture’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 490). Briefly, this apparatus captures and codes movement by turning territory into land, activity into work, and exchange into the accumulation of capital. The temporal series according to which primitive systems exploit territory and turn their activity into a more or less direct exchange-value is appropriated by the despotic apparatus of capture, and coded in terms of a spatial system where land becomes the vehicle for stock and whereby itinerant activity turns into organised work. Capitalism, in turn, decodes the distribution of space and meaning, making the system axiomatic. Through this shift, the State apparatus ensures the capitalist order by means of what Deleuze and Guattari, informed by Marx if radically different in their anti-dialectical ambition, see as a double movement of de- and recoding. Permanent values are erased at the same time as the movement and function of bodies are subordinated to the system by means of abstraction and commodification. With its dependence on production for production’s sake on the one hand, and its need to fix this production towards determinate ends on the other, capitalism needs to expand beyond its own limits at the same time as it needs to hurry to code the flows that it thereby includes (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 259).

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Deleuze and Guattari compare the possibilities and limitations that emerge with this de-and recoding of flows in capitalist society with Freud’s theory of desire and effect a typically Deleuze and Guattarian disjunctive synthesis. In this reading, Freud’s important configuration of desire as libido decodes previous conceptions of desire as related to objects or aims, and frees it up as an abstract force. At the same time, however, he recodes desire by delimiting it to the family, thereby obscuring ‘the wide open spaces glimpsed for a moment’ with the ‘dirty little secret’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 270). The reference to Freud is, in fact, more than just a comparison, as Deleuze and Guattari take Oedipus out of the family triangle to show how it functions as a means for capitalism to internalise the schizophrenic limit. ‘Oedipus’, they write, ‘is this displaced or internalized limit where desire lets itself be caught. The Oedipal triangle is the personal and private territoriality that corresponds to all of capitalism’s efforts at social reterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 266). In other words, the Oedipal formation of desire is a capitalist decoding as well as a recoding of desire that functions to control the break-flows that capitalism itself has let loose. Manageable subjects of desire are created within the familial and social structures that work to code desire to feed the flows of the capitalist machine. Where they identify desire as coded, recoded and decoded in the territorial, despotic and capitalist regimes respectively, they see Oedipus as a recapitulation of all these three states (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 267). But while the first two are included by means of an empty limit and the symboli- cally occupied limit, it is the capitalist machine that completes the imaginary Oedipus. Essentially, they find that Oedipal desire, while fully accomplished in the images of the capitalist machine, continues to be reconfigured in accordance with Oedipus as a despotic image – through it, the capitalist machine ‘makes the despot into one of its images’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 267). In building their ‘anti-Oedipal’ understanding of desire, Deleuze and Guattari work to rescue desire from this interlinked Oedipal and capitalist recoding, and thereby to obliterate the dirty little secret that blocks the traversal of wide open spaces. Their ambition is to pick up the break-flows enabled by, on the one hand, Freud’s decoding of desire and on the other, the decoding enabled by capitalism before they are recoded into social and economic systems. Such desiring-production is made possible by discovering the flows concealed beneath the simulacrum of the individual and its fantasies (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 271). Holland suggests that Deleuze and

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Guattari’s conceptualisation of desiring-machines amounts to what Freud would call a tendentious joke. By interlinking elements that are normally kept separate through repression, the tendentious joke creates pleasure from its unexpected juxtaposition (Holland 1999: 23). By introducing the notion of the desiring-machine, Deleuze and Guattari create what is, at the time, an unexpected link between libidinal and political economy, economies which are normally kept apart (Holland 1999: 24). This link is, of course, to be pursued with some care by Lyotard in Libidinal Economy just a couple of years later (where he also makes a direct comparison between the orgasm and commerce through the idea of coitus reservatus, that is, the post- ponement of orgasm for the purpose of increased pleasure (Lyotard 2004: 97)). But when Deleuze and Guattari publish Anti-Oedipus a few years earlier with the aim of showing how social production is desiring-production ‘under determinate conditions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 29), their project to some extent paves the way for the friction and ‘glee’ (Holland’s phrase) created by refusing, after Reich, to separate desire and politics. Where Freud codes sexuality in terms of his understanding of Oedipus and the family, capitalist society needs to code sexuality so that it can make use of the energy derived from its schizzes while also controlling it. Of course, desire too, and especially the mobile kind theorised in poststructural theories, runs the risk of reproducing the deregulation of capital flows, as Noys suggests (Noys 2008: 105). However, and as Foucault shows, the concept of sexuality is particularly susceptible to such co-option as it is indicative of a coding of pleasure through its identification and inscription in political and social structures through language. Just as the family goes from shaping the form of economic production to being subordinated to the form of economic production (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 263), sexual pleasure becomes a practice aimed to serve capitalism. If Deleuze and Guattari’s aim is to analyse the de- and recoding of desire, the aim of this chapter is to dig a little deeper into the mechanisms of de- and recoding of sexual pleasure specifically. The way in which capitalism exploits pleasure, Dean notes, has created considerable scepticism about the political status of pleasure within the Marxist tradition and a questioning, such as Frederic Jameson’s of how we can distinguish between ‘real pleasure’ and pleasure turned into commodity consumption (Dean 2012: 482). While Deleuze and Guattari are persistent in untangling desire from its Oedipal codings and capitalist paranoid recodings, pleasure is left to its fate as hope-

148 Capitalism and Sexuality lessly inscribed in Oedipal and capitalist production. But perhaps part of the productive friction is lost when Deleuze abandons pleasure as part of his tendentious ‘joke’. If desire is central to social production, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, then any revisiting of the role of desire in relation to pleasure also necessarily entails a reconsideration of the relation between pleasure and social production. There are political dimensions of sexual pleasure that Deleuze sacrifices by rejecting it so schematically. As I began to outline in Chapter 2, Deleuze’s rejection of pleasure, unlike his affirmation of desire, relies on its implicit formulation in accordance with Freudian principles and, as such, it does not take him anywhere. This chapter develops this claim and argues that while schizoanalysis provides the means of releasing desire from the codes and images of psychoanalytical/ capitalist configurations, pleasure, in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, remains a despotic image, a paranoid inscription of desire back onto the personal and territorial. From a Deleuzian perspective, it would seem that linking pleasure to a politics of deterritorialisation is the tendentious joke. This chapter explores what productive friction such a joke might yield. In order to test this hypothesis, this chapter will take a close look at the notion of the ‘money shot’ in pornography. The importance of mainstream pornography for the perpetuation of capitalist and patriarchal structures of sexuality is not to be underestimated. As Linda Williams noted in 2004, in America alone, the approximately 400 Hollywood films made per year can be compared to the 10,000– 11,000 made annually by the porn industry. About 700 million porn films are rented each year (Williams 2004: 1), and this purely American and somewhat aged figure obviously does not include pirate films and downloads. The impact of this abundant and highly commercial mode of representation on sexual practices, politics and identities can be compared with the way language captures sexuality and makes it into a practice, as Foucault has shown. Just as the words and phrases of Victorian England function to capture sexuality, images of sex, especially those of a pervasive and recurring kind, organise sexuality through representation, commodification and economic structures. The money shot may be a rather extreme visual representation of orgasm, but it is also an extremely common one. Pornography makes concrete and visualises ways in which bodies are coded into money-flows. It decodes pleasure in terms of its personalised structures at the same time as it recodes it through the representation of the expenditure of pleasure within its own internal

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limits. According to the double movement of capitalism outlined briefly above, the capitalist machine strives to free the flows of money at the same time as it continually recodes these flows in order to ensure that they perform their required role in the capitalist order. This way, the energy that is deterritorialised with the one hand is reterritorialised with the other (c.f. Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 257). Where money is thus caught up in ‘a bound state on the body of capital’, the money shot may be seen as a concretisation of this image. Where Foucault writes about ‘the nearly infinite task of telling’ that functioned to transform sex into discourse (Foucault 1990a: 20), pornography invokes the sense of an infinite task of showing. The orgasm in particular, has a special economy of visuality and may thus be seen to stand as the epitome of capitalist coding. Linguistically, figuratively and economically, the male orgasm that comes in the form of the ubiquitous ‘money shot’ can be seen, as Williams argues, as ‘the perfect embodiment of the illusory and insubstantial “one- dimensional” “society of the spectacle” of advanced capitalism – that is a society that consumes images even more avidly than it consumes objects’ (Williams 1999: 106). In Chapter 6, the notion of the money shot in terms of the wish to ‘fix’ pleasure along the lines of gender and power is contrasted, briefly, with the becoming-animal of the orgasm. The first part of the present chapter reads this same configuration of the orgasm as an ultimate example of the capitalist recoding of sexuality. The purpose of this section is to underline how Deleuze’s rejection of pleasure conforms to, rather than challenges, the paranoid tendencies of capitalism. Like the capitalism he and Guattari theorise, and that needs to control and resist ‘the revolutionary potential of decoded flows with new interior limits’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 246), the pleasure they theorise comes to constitute an interior limit, a ‘flattening axiomatic of connections that puts it in the service of the capitalist order’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 246). If the notion of becoming-animal provided a way out of the fixing of the orgasm in relation to the human and the nonhuman in Chapter 6, Deleuze does not offer a clear way out of the fixing of the orgasm in relation to the Oedipal and capitalism. In the second part of the chapter, I therefore embark on a Deleuze and Guattarian project of exploring the possibilities of locating a more productive and schizophrenic understanding of orgasmic pleasure. Releasing pleasure from what I argue is its paranoid determination in Deleuze, the chapter ultimately suggests that sexual pleasure, like desire, also has a wide expanse that

150 Capitalism and Sexuality we can traverse, and that doing this creates schizzo-flows that unsettle the economic and visual deployment of sexuality in contemporary capitalism.

The Money Shot as an Apparatus of Capture When Deleuze positions the orgasm as that which fixes the subject and delimits the flows of its desiring connectivity, he identifies sexual pleasure as a mode of recoding desire. The vast spaces of multidirectional and unbound desire are barred by the functions of the subject. Although it seems contradictory to talk about interrupting immanence, Deleuze insists that he ‘cannot give any positive value to pleasure because pleasure seems to interrupt the immanent process of desire’ (Deleuze 2007a: 130–1). Through the intermediary functions of the family and the Oedipal, pleasure keeps the body human and in the service of capital. Such coded pleasure does not have a positive value because it ‘is on the side of strata and organization’ (Deleuze 2007a: 131). The Oedipal apparatus constitutes a mode of capture that makes sexuality mean only one thing. Through the representation and repression of sex into an Oedipal economy, sexuality will always be coded into the genital, the reproductive and the familial. As the Oedipal ‘anthropomorphic machines’ claim sexuality, they simultaneously inscribe it in an economy of lack. This way, the apparatus of capture not only pins down the subject and body, but also sexuality itself as a practice. Pleasure is not creative but a mode of capitalisation through which behaviours and identities are established. Reading pleasure through what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a three-headed beast of capture, we can see how capitalism has inscribed creative sexual activity onto abstracted systems of money. For Deleuze and Guattari, the development from primitive assemblages to capitalist societies takes place by a three step reconfiguration of their temporal and spatial conditions. At a pre-capitalist stage, the itinerant exploitation of territory marks movement by means of seriality. The territory is explored to its limit, which means that it is traversed repeatedly by means of temporal succession; the primitive assemblage of hunter-gatherers, they explain, ‘perseveres only by switching territories at the conclusion of each operation period’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 486). When the apparatus of capture codes territory into land, on the other hand, it is spatialised. In this despotic regime, land becomes the repository for stock and is characterised by the overcoding of extended space rather than

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successive coding. Spatiality itself enables the switch from immediate exchange to an economy of capital through stock. As territory is overcoded and becomes land, exchange turns into an economy of debt. In this ‘first great deterritorialization of codes and meaning by abstract value’, Holland explains, money works by means of ‘tribute money’, that is, money which is not integrated into society economically as exchange-value, but which functions as a means of direct, hierarchal subordination (Holland 1999: 65). This has profound effects on the organisation of life, as those traversing the territory turn into workers tied to the land and to the despotic regime. In a third movement, capitalism integrates money into all levels of society at the same time as it abstracts it from earlier codings. Not land but labour itself becomes its main object. This axiomatic is distinguished from the codings and recodings of the despotic regime because its nature is not specified. The axiomatic of capitalism needs no specific values, codes, or individuals but is invested only in the functional– ‘naked labor, independent capital’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 500). When money becomes capital rather than exchange-value, Eric Alliez notes, quoting Aristotle, time becomes money and man becomes ‘time’s carcass’, that is, ‘labour time personified’ (Alliez 1996: xv). For Aristotle, Alliez notes, interest marks most clearly the way in which time departs from production as it ‘puts a price on time’ (Alliez 1996: xvi). By making time abstract, the ‘empty form’ of interest also introduces a separation between being and self. Marx follows up on this as he points to finance capital as empty of content and as ‘economic determination in its pure form’ (Alliez 1996: xvii). The money shot may be seen as such an empty form. In showing it all, Williams suggests, the money shot may be seen to stand for a ‘cinematic will-to-knowledge’ (Williams 1999: 100). The money shot constitutes an absolutely central aspect of pornography – ‘if you don’t have the come-shots’, as Stephen Ziplow suggests in a filmmaker’s guide, ‘you don’t have a porno picture’ (Ziplow, cited in Williams 1999: 93). Ziplow recommends including at least ten in any one production. Although the power of the money shot is on the wane, as Williams has noted, the money shot is also so called because of its intrinsic value to the film. As in film more generally, where the term ‘money shot’ signifies the most expensive shot in its production, the pornography industry ‘puts out’ as it were, for these repeated male ejaculations. There is, in other words, a direct link between the act of coming and the money it is deemed to be worth. The money shot, Nina Power suggests, is essentially about the man ‘completing’

152 Capitalism and Sexuality his product and producing what he gets paid for ‘in a base capitalist form’ (Power 2009: 54). The economic transaction of this type of orgasm, then, is one invested, not only in fetishism and gender structures, but also in commodification and capitalist paranoid recoding. ‘Perhaps’, Williams suggests, ‘in the money shot’s repeatedly inflated, “spending” penis we can see condensed all the principles of late capitalism’s pleasure-oriented consumer society: pleasure figured as an orgasm of spending; the fetish not simply as commodity but as the surplus value of orgasm’ (Williams 1999: 108). If we return, for a moment, to the three-headed beast of economic capture that Deleuze and Guattari outline, we can see how capitalist structures need to free sexuality both from its temporal territoriality and from spatial codings and recodings. Claiming sexual pleasure into capitalism demands an abstraction of values and bodies – sexual pleasure as an axiomatic relation. Like the flows of any exchange, the system needs to ensure that sexual pleasure works for, rather than against, its service. Instead of sexuality as part of the territorial colouring of milieus and rhythms, sexuality turns into labour and the physical labour of the worker becomes increasingly hard to differentiate from the labour of sexual practice. The body can no longer move by means of itinerancy and temporal succession, as ‘an act of rhythm that has become expressive, or of milieu components that have become qualitative’, as in a Deleuze and Guattarian territorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 348). Neither can the body be identified in a clear system of codes and values. Rather, the body is caught up in the axiomatic of capitalism, what Deleuze and Guattari call the reinvention of ‘an entire system of machinic enslave- ment’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 505). This is also what blocks the sexual body from its potential – the becoming-animal that pre-exists both despotic coding and capitalist paranoia. The money shot provides a clear-cut expression of the capitalist recoding of sexual pleasure. The central version of this display comes as an ejaculation on the woman’s face. This configuration of coming thus has nothing to do with reproduction and everything to do with an economy of a supposed male visual pleasure. Unlike the woman’s orgasm which, to the extent it is of interest in pornography, remains largely invisible, the ejaculation of semen is not only a celebration of the relation between power and money but also a visible representation of surplus value. Semen surplus. No babies are born from such ‘exchange’. Rather, what is produced is, on the one hand, of course, the load in itself as a token of surplus capital (or what Bataille would

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call waste) and by the same token, the sexual body as its abstracted space. This abstraction is visualised through the physical configuration of space in the money shot. As Williams notes, for the truth of the money shot, that is, ‘the very limit of the visual representation of sexual pleasure’ to be represented, the penis must be kept separate from any genitals or mouth that would hide it (Williams 1999: 101). If the male orgasm here comes to stand as the visible proof of impersonalised labour, the female body serves as a reconfigured receptacle – a recoding that turns all the invisible and evasive and traditionally dangerous holes and insides and unknown territories of her body into a clearly decipherable surface. Where part of the kick of pornography is the sense of real action, and which the money shot ‘proves’ by showing us the actual coming, as Power suggests, female pleasure and the orgasm in particular, is harder to measure (Power 2009: 54). Apart from the numerous other problematics related to the female orgasm that we noted in Chapter 4, it also emerges here as denying us the access to the real perceivable through male ejaculation. To be claimed into the visual economy, her pleasure must be made surface. This ‘frenzy of the visible’, to borrow Williams’s term, spatially reconfigures the classic positioning of female body as a passive receptacle – a modern day, capitalist version of Freud’s ‘anatomy is destiny’ – as the face rather than the ovum becomes the repository of sexual expenditure. With the focus on a particular sexual economy invested in capitalist, Oedipal and gendered flows, that is, on sexual pleasure as caught up ‘in a bound state on the body of capital’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 246), the money shot underlines Deleuze’s reasons for rejecting the orgasm as a creative and productive aspect of desire. Arguably, the facialisation of the penis in the money shot is indicative also of the figure of the penis as inscribed into what Deleuze and Guattari understand as the paranoia of capitalism in Anti-Oedipus. Paranoia, like schizophrenia, is a libidinal investment, but one that captures and determines capitalist flows. Positioned as the dark shadow that haunts the molecular possibilities of capitalism and schizophrenia, the paranoiac works by means of organisation and authority. He is ‘the artist of the large molar aggregates, the statistical formations or gregariousnesses, the phenomena of organized crowds’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 279). Paranoia, as Holland puts it, ‘would designate an absolute system or belief where all meaning was permanently fixed and exhaustively defined by a supreme authority, figure-head, or god’ (Holland 1999: 3). The ejaculating penis in the money

154 Capitalism and Sexuality shot becomes the figurehead of the molar aggregates of capitalism. Whether understood as part of the Oedipal or the political or both, sexuality is organised by means of this authority and in its visualised concreteness, the money shot is the violent manifestation of the capitalist production of paranoiac sexuality. That Deleuze would reject understandings of pleasure as configured through a capitalist visual representation such as the money shot is not a radical claim. Not only does he position the orgasm as the ultimate indication of the capture of desire more generally, but the visually represented orgasm in particular also speaks to Deleuze’s view of its ‘deplorability’ by confirming his understanding of representation as a primary mode of capture. For Deleuze, representation distorts desire and, as Holland notes, it constitutes a main way in which desire is betrayed and repressed (Holland 1999: 22). Indeed, the whole task of schizoanalysis is ‘to overturn the theater of representation into the order of desiring-production’ – to substitute, for the private subject, ‘collective agents of enunciation that for their part refer to machinic arrangements’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 271). But while they perform this schizoanalytic task in their development of an alternative understanding of desire, they continue to rely on a conception of pleasure that is uncomfortably similar to the paranoiac production of sexual pleasure in the money shot. While they recognise machinic arrangements of desire, they rely on a model of sex that leaves it caught up in the theater of representation. Because they rely on a masculinist model of sex, they impose a paranoid function on the release of pleasure. The line of paranoiac production, Deleuze and Guattari argue, ends at the body without organs where it either deterritorialises back into a schizophrenic flow or hits the wall and falls back into paranoiac organisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 283). If we can understand the money shot as a prime example of paranoiac production of sexuality, the wall may be seen as the face of the woman, receiving semen as ‘a gift from the gods’ (Williams 1999: 231). Hitting the surface into which the woman’s sexuality has been flattened, the semen stays within the economy of representation and lack, sexual pleasure arriving at what Williams describes as ‘a sense of an ending’ (Williams 1999: 93). The enforced visualisation of pleasure that works to underline its ‘reality’ within the frames of the film keeps the meaning of sexuality wedged between the walls of the two faces, and thus safely blocked from any lines of flight. This way, the sexualised body becomes the safeguard of abstraction, locking

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pleasure in a sense of the real characterised by representation, sexual difference and paranoiac capitalist production. When Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the arrival of paranoiac production at the body without organs opens towards the possibility of deterritorialisation into a schizophrenic flow, they open for the ever-productive potential of flows. This is also what enables them to provide a creative philosophy of lines of flight. However, their understanding of sexual pleasure seems blocked from such becoming. Instead, it repeatedly hits the wall and falls back into the paranoiac. By insisting that pleasure blocks desire they, like the capitalist machine they theorise, prevent it from its potential becomings. Instead, sexual pleasure remains as a paranoid recoding that arrests and qualifies the process of desire. As long as this delimitation of forces subsists, the energies of the schizophrenic flows are kept on that ‘bound state on the body of capital’; the deplorable orgasm, the money shot, ‘labour time personified’.

Becoming-Woman of Orgasm If the Oedipal machine is too familial, reading the money shot through the signifying machine illuminates how sexuality becomes part of the labour of capitalism. Instead of the exchange and activity taking place in a territorial economy, sexual pleasure turns into labour. But by positioning sexuality as a flow and by analysing capitalism by means of schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari also flag for the possibility of decoding. This should entail not only that desire can be decoded from its containment in Oedipal and capitalist-paranoiac structures, but that pleasure, too, harbours this possibility. ‘Give me the possible’, Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘or else I’ll suffocate’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2001: n.p.). Should not sexual pleasure have a possible that is not necessarily delimited by the way sexuality has been abstracted by Western capitalist structures historically? One could, like Noys, work to build up a politics of asceticism that refuses sexual pleasure as we have known it through ‘critical practices that detach us from ‘sexuality’, and open new collective modes of attachments’ (Noys 2008: 118). But, as I suggested in the introductory chapter, there is no need to discard Deleuze and Guattari to pursue such a project. It also seems more Deleuzian to transform and pervert than to discard concepts. But since Deleuze does seem to discard the creativity of sexual pleasure we have to ‘betray’ him – as discussed in the introduction – if we are to create a Deleuzian theory of sexual pleasure. If we take the schizophrenia that Deleuze and Guattari the-

156 Capitalism and Sexuality orise seriously, this should mean that neither sexuality, nor pleasure, nor orgasm have to hit the wall of faciality. The paranoid capture of pleasure can always be decoded and thereby turned into break-flows. True sexual becomings, as Massumi suggests, are antiphallocentric and put the fractal nature of the part-object into play (Massumi 1992: 127). In order to locate such sexual becomings, we need to pick up our understanding of the orgasm, not from the axiomatic configurations of capital, but on ‘the road to the asignifying and asubjective’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 190). The visual configuration of the orgasm in the money shot puts its finger on the theoretical transition between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus which, Holland suggests, moves from a focus on schizophrenia and paranoia in the former to theories of faciality in the latter (Holland 1991: 59). The main difference, Holland notes, is that the latter expands to include the postsignifying regime. In this regime, the capitalist decoding of flows theorised in Anti-Oedipus is exchanged for subjectification and subjection that comes with the politics of the face. Faciality works to describe the mechanism whereby the polyvocality of bodies is claimed and made legible by a dominant reality. The face, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, serves to overcode the polyvocal body and make it available and readable as part of the signifying machine. For example, and as we saw in Chapter 5, this is how anomalous bodies come to be inscribed either as ‘normal’, or as ‘disabled’. Faciality is not necessarily about actual faces, it is rather about the appropriation of expression by the signifying regime, the production of legible surfaces. The faciality of the money shot is only partly literal. Because while the face is central to the ‘privileged figure’ of male climaxing in the money shot (Williams 1999: 111) it is not just the face but the body as a whole/ hole that is captured by faciality. When the face overcodes the decoded parts of the body, everything remains sexual. There ‘is no sublimation’, Deleuze and Guattari argue, ‘but there are new coordinates’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 189). The money shot, then, shows with full force how the decoded flows of capitalism are not just abstracted, but also recoded in terms of a particular sexual economy. Importantly, the value of the money shot is not just about the domination of phallic libidinal economy, but also about the facialisation of the orgasm more generally. Its meanings are inscribed into both economic and gendered structures, and the sexuality of the man is just as facialised as the woman. What is central to the money shot, of course, is the close-up on the production of semen. To the extent that the male face

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is in the image at all, it is secondary to the importance of the penis and its performance. If the sexual body and sexual pleasure are overcoded by faciality, Deleuze and Guattari also provide the means to dismantle the face. The face, they suggest, ‘has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 190). For example, the favoured organ of the penis, with its immense theoretical baggage, is but a part-object for them. As discussed in previous chapters, Deleuze and Guattari pick up on what they see as the great but mis- recognised potential in Klein’s theory of partial objects. Where Klein understands the partial object as an idealised entity with a specific and goal-oriented causality (partiel), Deleuze and Guattari expand on the productive potential of such objects as positive multiplicities without unitary determinations (partiaux). Such objects harbour connective potential that exceeds Oedipal and, indeed, any specific signification. ‘You can make any list of part-objects you want’, write Deleuze and Guattari, ‘hand, breast, mouth, eyes . . . It’s still Frankenstein’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 190). In the money shot, the penis as partiel may be read as a determined part of the system of the strata. If we choose to read the penis as partiaux, on the other hand, we are still unable to extract it from its particular goal-oriented position, but we can better analyse it in terms of its inscription as a capital investment. In a film’s close-up, Deleuze and Guattari argue, what is central is not the individuality of the face, ‘but the efficacy of the ciphering it makes possible, and in what cases it makes it possible’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 194). In the case of the money shot, the penis picks up the speed of the capitalist strata, it is facialised in a visibility-machine, an abstraction of sexuality (compare, for example, with the territorial markings that some monkeys effect by exposing their penis – ‘a rhythmic and expressive color-carrier that marks the limits of the territory’; Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 347) in favour of the generation of money. In a post-signifying regime where faciality is no longer about a single despot but about the ‘delusion of individual subjectivity’, as Holland puts it, there are multiple directions in which desire can travel. It may be blocked – ‘bouncing off the blank wall back onto the desolate subject’, it may be surrendered ‘as in the Lacanian metonomy of desire for the lost object’, or, Holland reminds us, it may refuse either of these and resurface from the black hole and pierce the blank wall as it ‘forms a rhizome or collective enunciation, criss-crosses the deterritorialized earth on an endless voyage of

158 Capitalism and Sexuality exploration and discovery’ (Holland 1991: 61–2). Deleuze, as we have seen, maps desire as it dismantles the face and forms rhizomes, but he leaves the orgasm to its fate with the ‘desolate subject’ and the figure of lack. In this sense, his understanding of pleasure corresponds to the way in which the money shot keeps sexual pleasure caught in deplorable economies of the subject. Like the semen that hits the white wall of a kneeling woman, the orgasm bounces back and confirms the subject, and like the politics of the visible which demands that we see that the orgasm is ‘for real’, it reinforces the sense of lack. The semen is a tangible signifier of real sex at the same time as it keeps reality at one remove in the Lacanian sense. An orgasm that breaks the surface of such walls, however, engages in an immanent process of transformation whereby these holes turn into routes through which pleasure and desire can travel. Faciality, as we have noted, happens when the polyvocal codes of the body are overcoded so as to create a ‘condition of possibility’ for the subject and the signifier (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 199). Through the abstract machine of faciality, the body receives coordinates that correspond to the system in which it is read. The body without organs is assembled into a stratum and a form from which can be extracted ‘useful labour’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 176). In this sense, the black holes on the white wall, which, for Deleuze and Guattari, are about mapping signifying systems rather than actual facial traits can also serve as a quite literal reading of the holes of the sexual body as they are made to ‘conform in advance to a dominant reality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 186). The body, as well as its pleasures, is abstracted at the same time as it is configured so as to respond to larger systems of signification. The body is dragged, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, across the holey surface (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 189). Just as we have to ‘put on’ normal as well as disabled bodies in the reinforced identification with signification, as I noted through Davis in Chapter 5, the orgasmic body is ‘put on’ through the money shot as the signifying system of capitalist economies of pleasure constructs a holey body. Desire bounces off the wall and ultimately returns to the subject to confirm its lack. With the possibility of breaking through the wall, however, comes the possibility decoding this surface. Instead of a sexuality constructed to feed the paranoia of capitalism, the black holes of the body prolifer- ate and new routes of sexuality and pleasure are enabled - a creative involution of intensities, sex organs sprouting anywhere (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 170).

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As previous chapters have shown, reading the body in terms of the ‘holey’ surfaces of psychoanalysis or as a humanist separate entity is simply to confirm a set of humanist values that are no longer viable. We need, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, to find a way of disengaging ourselves ‘from the points of subjectification that secure us, nail us down to a dominant reality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 177). As the body is increasingly dismantled and deterritorialised through discourses of disability, bacteria and animality, its blank wall is pierced and gives ways to multidirectional and collective rhizomes, not just of desire, but also of pleasure. Increasingly, such bodies do not function to define and determine desire but rather to express its possibilities. Such decoded flows, as this book is working to show, also give way for an expanded understanding of pleasure and the orgasm. After all, and if Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is an ars erotica, as Foucault argues, their work should be about production rather than science. As I note in Chapter 1, Foucault understands ars erotica as a philosophical mode of expression that draws its truths from pleasure rather than utility. Unlike the delimiting scientific approaches of modern day scientia sexualis, ars erotica defines pleasure through its internal qualities: its intensities, reverberations and durations. Foucault implicitly gives us a key to a Deleuzian politics of pleasure. But for such a theory to be possible, it must be separated from the coded temporality in which Deleuze places it. That Deleuze’s understanding of desire relies on his rethinking of temporality is well established. As I note throughout the present study, his understanding of the politics of pleasure in general, and the orgasm in particular, too, rely on an understanding of temporality, albeit the linear kind that he is otherwise so determined to abandon. While he is keen to free desire from a linear and goal-oriented temporality, pleasure tends to be left to interpretations informed by psychoanalysis, representation and subjectivity. As such, and as we have seen, it remains subordinated to the apparatus of capture that claims and codes it. The psychoanalytical nexus, as a means to recode desire in capitalism, makes pleasure a mode of capture. Coded through such apparatus, the flows of pleasure are regulated by utility. Just as time is unhinged as capitalism makes it subordinated ‘to the regulated movements it was measuring’ (Alliez 1996: xvii–xviii), pleasure as an expression of unlimited desire is overturned and regulated by the movements of capital. And just as capitalism is not content to be the object of measure but rather subordinates time, sexual pleasure is incorporated into a temporality of interpretation

160 Capitalism and Sexuality and efficacy – the paranoid inscription of pleasure in capitalism. Creating subjects forever chasing that reality which they will never reach, the temporality of the money shot, and the orgasm in general the way Deleuze understands it, captures pleasure in an economy of lack. As long as sexuality is subordinated to the temporality of production man does indeed become ‘time’s carcass’. Sexual pleasure is ‘labour time personified’ and the orgasm a coded flow that keeps track of the subject and the trajectory of desire. Enabling an alternative and multidirectional temporality of pleasure hinges on finding a way of freeing pleasure from the paranoid inscriptions upon which Deleuze insists. To continue in the realm of the visible, the possibility of pierc- ing the blank wall and enabling rhizomatic pleasure is linked to the potential. Unlike the visual testimony of the orgasm in the money shot, which supposedly verifies reality at the same time as it subordinates pleasure to its impossibility, an orgasm that breaks through the wall must emerge from the black hole of potential and deterritorialise the earth. This black hole is the realm of the virtual, an expansion of time and space that gives birth to new symmetries. Holland notes how Freud’s ‘conservative’ view of pleasure as the repetition that binds the self to stasis and neurosis, and thereby to death, must be counteracted by the difference in repetition that frees pleasure from such mechanical and strictly linear repetitions and temporality (Holland 1999: 26). But to make this possible, pleasure requires ‘a complementary counter-force to the connective synthesis, which would otherwise lock the organism into instinctual and habitual patterns of connection’. Such counter-force would introduce variation into pleasure, a continuous breaking and remaking of organ-machine connections (Holland 1999: 26). In Deleuze and Guattarian terms, what is needed in the process of opening orgasm to variation is a becoming-woman. As I noted in Chapter 4, and like the concept of faciality, becoming-woman does not necessarily refer back to ‘real’ faces or ‘real’ women. Yet, there is a sense in which sexual activity and the orgasm enable also this more literal reading and as such, it underlines the importance of spatio- temporal symmetry. In Chapter 4, I engage with the concept to point to the way in which Deleuze’s understanding of sexual pleasure fails to escape a male temporal economy. Here, I would like to develop this theme and situate it in relation to the coding and recoding of flows that Deleuze and Guattari analyse. In the earlier chapter, I emphasise the importance of steering clear of idealised notions

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of female orgasm. In this project, we find assistance in Guattari. Through the present project, Deleuze’s rejection of orgasm has been in focus, but Guattari too is vehement in his denunciation of the orgasm. In ‘Becoming-Woman’, a text published in the Semiotext(e) collection Hatred of Capitalism, he writes:

Orgasm is another over-blown notion whose ravages are incalculable. Dominant sexual morality requires of the woman a quasi-hysterical identification of her orgasm with the man’s, an expression of symmetry, a submission to his phallic power. The woman owes her orgasm to the man. In “refusing” him, she assumes the guilt. So many stupid dramas are based on this theme. And the sententious attitude of psychoanalysis and sexologists on this point doesn’t really help. (Guattari 2001: n.p.)

The symmetry that Guattari points to here is crucial. Again, the image of the money shot can help illustrate this symmetry – the conjunction of phallic power and spatialised accumulation of capital. What Guattari shows is how this dominant sexual configuration is not just about the male orgasm, but also about the female orgasm. As long as woman’s sexual pleasure must be expressed in symmetry with man’s, all pleasure is equally bound up in the dominant sexual logic that utilises it as labour. To take an example from pornography, there is, Williams notes, an increasingly frequent image of masturbating women. While images of women masturbating have been around for a long time, Williams notes that the woman who uses electrical or mechanical tools in masturbating and who is in no urgent need for a man is relatively new in mainstream pornography. Such a woman, she points out, ‘is simultaneously insatiable and satisfied, capable both of continuing her pleasure indefinitely and of satisfying herself’ (Williams 1999: 109). Now, on the one hand, this may be seen as a development in pornography towards an increased recognition of women as more than passive receptors of male sexual activity. It may also point, to some extent, to the more complex temporality of female orgasms. On the other hand, however, its pornographic representation undermines the creative potential of the female orgasm as it ties it to the representational economy of male visual pleasure. It is still just labour. Such female orgasms clearly lack the force to break through the white wall. Regardless of whether the symmetry is an actual, physical one, as in the money shot, or a facialisation of sexual pleasure, as inscribed in an economy of gain more generally, sexual pleasure continues to ravage desire as long as it depends on this structural logic. Indeed, the ‘unlimited female orgasmic capacity’ and

162 Capitalism and Sexuality the pornographic image of the insatiable woman may even, as Steven Marcus suggests, ‘seem more apt than the money shot as an emblem of mass-produced sexual fantasies’ of ‘contemporary consumer society’ (Williams 1999: 108). Even if women might ‘achieve orgasm easily by masturbating or having sex with another woman’, as Guattari notes (Guattari 2001: n.p.), it is only if the spatio-temporal construction of power-relations indicated by Guattari’s symmetry are challenged that this pleasure becomes revolutionary. The theorisation of woman’s temporality that I discuss through Irigaray in Chapter 4 can be employed here to locate the productivity of the routes of desire and to analyse how sexual pleasure may escape the flows of capitalism. I suggest in that chapter that a combination of Irigaray’s understanding of female temporality as fluid and cyclical and Deleuze’s understanding of time in terms of duration and the virtual opens up the possibility of theorising the orgasm as invested by spatiality, repetition and becoming, rather than by causality and linearity. If the orgasm is not an end-point, it also resists the accumulative economy of capitalist production. Here, I would like to add Grosz’s Irigaray-inflected question of the countability of female sexual pleasure. Addressing Kinsey’s study of male and female sexual behaviour (see Chapter 4 for more on Kinsey’s study), Grosz questions the possibility of measuring female sexuality by means of numbers. The morphology and anatomy of female sexual pleasure, she argues, resist ‘precision, clarity, form, identity’ (Grosz 2005: 209–10). It is hard, she notes, to determine both the temporality and the spatiality of the female orgasm – orgasms merge, differ and move through the body in different ways (Grosz 2005: 211). While female sexual pleasure may be ‘submitted to the imperative of identification and neutralization that is inherent in numbers’, she writes, this is imposing upon it ‘an external grid or set of categories’ (Grosz 2005: 209–10). If we, instead, affirm the unknowable and paradoxical about female sexual pleasure, we arrive at ‘an object that isn’t one, an organ that isn’t one, an orgasm that isn’t one but that isn’t none either’. Just because it falls outside the numerical grid, it must not count as nonexistent, but must rather be considered as anticipating alternative representations (Grosz 2005: 210). Earlier in this chapter, I noted how the apparatus of capture transforms the itinerant and serial movement of territory, via the despotic spatialised accumulation of stock, to the axiomatics of capitalist flows. The facialisation of sexual bodies in a capitalist order, exemplified here in the extreme case of the money shot, employs sexual pleasure as a means of

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impersonalised labour. Sexuality is abstract, the money is concrete. By being essentially unknowable and unaccountable, however, the female orgasm resists the idea of use-value. If we explore the route of a deterritorialised notion of orgasm through the temporality of fluidity and cyclical movement that Irigaray proposes and the unaccountability that Grosz points to we not only avoid the deplorable end-point, but also an accumulation that can be accounted for. Like a tease, a circular temporality of orgasm veers away from ultimate arrival. This is a plateau if any. Importantly, and despite the rather concrete way in which I imagine the black holes through which desire remerges through the white wall as collective enunciation, this is neither about ‘the whole array of invisibility and specularity which feminists have been arguing against since the early days of Lacan’s work’, as Braidotti puts it (Braidotti 2002: 54), nor about abandoning the male orgasm as hopelessly caught up in structures of capitalist production and psychoanalytic lack. Rather, this is a way of breaking with the paranoiac symmetry that keeps pleasure bouncing off walls and confirming lack. A becoming-woman of sexual pleasure speaks to mutable and multiple orgasms emerging from multiple erogenous zones. Through the fluidity and productive discontinuity by which Braidotti finds an erotics of becoming-woman (Braidotti 2002: 60), Deleuze’s paranoiac positioning of pleasure can be dismantled through a politics of pleasure that cannot be fully captured by representation. If the money shot is the ultimate proof of the ‘reality’ of sex because we can see the reality of the orgasm, as discussed earlier, the female orgasm, which of course can be ejaculatory too, typically refuses this access to reality. Apart from the unaccountability Grosz refers to, the female orgasm also resists the truth. As Power notes, the porn star, like any woman, may be faking it (Power 2009: 54). Where male ejaculation comes to stand for the truth of sex, the female orgasm remains out of reach of the claws of this curious configuration of representation and reality. Such orgasms are about expression rather than representation and as such, they do not respond to questions of true and false. Like Deleuze’s powers of the false, the female orgasm is not about truth or identification, but about continuous modification and irreducible multiplicities (Deleuze 1989: 133). And like the cinema of false images which fails to confirm ‘legal connections in space and chronological relations in time’ (Deleuze 1989: 133), the female orgasm falsifies and thereby disrupts continuous narration. Thereby, it cannot be captured and organised. Of course, it can be organised

164 Capitalism and Sexuality in symmetry with male orgasm but this, as Guattari notes, is rarely about women’s actual pleasure. As the history of sexuality has shown, and not the least in the recurring theorisation of woman as lack, the secrecy of the female body has been both idealised and oppressed. Female bodies are also claimed into capitalist structures in a number of ways, the ‘goods’ they can deliver through reproduction and nurture, of course, being central. In contemporary Western society in which reproduction constitutes an increasingly marginal aspect of sexual pleasure, the productive ‘uselessness’ of women’s sexual pleasure is underlined. Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the boom in the commercial interest in female sexual pleasure witnessed, for example, in the pharmaceutical industry’s eagerness to develop the female Viagra discussed in Chapter 4, or in the enormous number of self-help books about orgasm pointed to in Chapter 5. As these industries show, it would be a considerable mistake to suggest that the pleasure of women escapes the logic of capitalism. Still, because the female orgasm will never be as countable or as photogenic as male ejaculation, there is a fundamental sense in which her pleasure remains in a state of capitalist unproductivity. The becoming-woman of orgasm, then, is about refusing countability and accountability, about resisting the symmetry of relations and the logic of representation. Like Andy Warhol’s experimental silent film Blow Job (1963), which shows the pleasure and orgasm of a man only by showing his face, both men and women need to pass through an ambiguous process of affirming embodiment while de- individualising pleasure. Warhol’s film portrays this ambiguity quite clearly. On the one hand, the exclusive focus on the face of the man coming may indicate subjectification – a person with ‘his’ orgasm. On the other hand, the fleeting pleasures expressed through the face are pleasures as such. A more contemporary example may be seen on the website ‘Beautiful Agony’, which collects homemade videos of faces during orgasm. Unlike Warhol’s film, these videos include sound and colour, but like his film, only the face and its expressions are onscreen. On the one hand, this site, which is ‘dedicated to the beauty of human orgasm’, emphasises sexual pleasure as such, without reason or rhyme. On the other hand, many of the videos are accompanied by ‘confessions’ in which the person in question speaks about their fantasies and experiences. Through these confessions, the orgasms re-enter the arena of identity, narration and representation. There are also, as Charlie Blake and Beth Johnson note, a number of

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other theoretical caveats around the site’s aspiration to reality and truth, not least of which is the directional control over the material which comes both in the shape of instructions and through editing (Blake and Johnson 2011: 208). Warhol’s Blow Job, however, continues to refuse the ‘legal connections in space’ which, even if it resisted the full visuality of the porn film, would have worked to form the orgasm into ‘truthful narration’ (Deleuze 1989: 133) through description or montage. The exclusion of the visual ‘truth’ of the orgasm through the representation of ejaculation thereby functions to dismantle the face by decoding the paranoid capture of pleasure. A representation of ‘what is actually happening’ would have given the orgasmic face relations outside itself. It would have made the face into a character. Instead, the close-up does its job, in a Deleuzian sense, by liberating the face from the spatio-temporal coordinates of representation and thereby deterritorialising desire. Other similar films by Warhol, such as Kiss (1963) and Eat (1963), show a similar de-individualisation, but the expressive relations between the couple kissing, or the man chewing, still endow them with a certain measure of characterisation. Both Blow Job and also Warhol’s filmSleep (1963) peel off narration even further. In all their physicality, the activities in question are more like the incorporeal events – ‘to sleep’, ‘to come’. At the same time, their bodies are de-individualised as they turn into the indefinite articles that Deleuze and Guattari identify as conductors of desire: ‘ “A” stomach, “an” eye, “a” mouth: the indefinite article does not lack anything; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 182). Through such impersonal regions we may locate the intensities and vibrations that Grosz recognises as the creative assemblages of forces discussed in Chapter 3. As I noted there, Grosz sees these forces as affecting bodies for pleasure without higher purpose. No aim, no goal, but the vibration of being itself. A becoming-woman of orgasm.

Conclusion Between them, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus establish ways of criticising and analysing capitalism in terms of its de- and recoding of flows and as an apparatus of capture. A temporally itinerant movement through territory in primitive societies is captured and binds worker to land in a despotic regime and then to

166 Capitalism and Sexuality labour in the capitalist order. But Deleuze and Guattari’s project is not only to critique and analyse but also to create – to tap into the schizophrenic flows that capitalism incessantly produces before they are equally incessantly re-coded in the paranoiac service of capital. Their anti-Oedipal theory of desire constitutes a central way in which they decode psychoanalytic desire to enable the deterritorialisation of flows and to escape the economy of lack and goal and surplus value. The orgasm, as this chapter has shown, constitutes a central example of this two-directional mechanism of capture and flight. While Deleuze tends to leave it on the side of negativity and capture, it also harbours the potential of flight. In its visual representations, the orgasm seems to confirm the way in which sexual pleasure is captured and turned into labour and capital. But if the money shot that has been discussed here can be seen ‘as that moment when the phallic male libidinal and material economy most falters, most reverts to an absolute and unitary standard of value’ (Williams 1999: 117), this absolute and unitary standard also constitutes its weakness. Values, as Deleuze and Guattari themselves show, are not permanent, but are constantly de- and recoded. Life, as Deleuze and Guattari write ‘reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 551). If Deleuze and Guattari see the connection between capitalism and schizophrenia as materialising along with the emergence of Western civilisation, their adoption of Bateson’s notion of the plateau appears in the context of the late 1970s. At this point, in the aftermath of 1968 and ideas of sexual liberation, the introduction of the plateau as more productive than the orgasm is a way for Deleuze and Guattari to reconfigure sexual energy into productive force – to pick up this flow before it is reclaimed by stratified politics. For Deleuze and Guattari, May 1968 ‘did not happen’, as the title of their famous article notes. Rather, May ’68 was an event and, as such, it was a crack in the causal chains of social determinism. The event opens up history to the possible, that is, history beyond the causal, and a new space in which to act. When an event truly happens, it creates a new existence and a new subjectivity – ‘new relations with the body, with time, sexuality, the immediate surroundings, with culture, work’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2001: n.p.). May ’68, Deleuze and Guattari argue, was of the order of the event. But the possible that it opened up was betrayed. As the French authorities insisted on waiting for this event to pass, rather than

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choosing to meet up and match the new subjectivities emerging in its wake, no new subjective redeployment arose to encompass and distribute the potential of the events as they occurred. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari argue, you can identify the children of May ’68 by the indifference they have developed, knowing ‘perfectly well that nothing today corresponds to their subjectivity, to their potential of energy’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2001: n.p.). One may say that sexuality was counted on to retake effect as a biopolitical device in the Foucauldian sense, as a means of governing subjective behaviour and at the same time encouraging citizens to interpret this behaviour as correlating to their own being. This ‘perverse dynamic’, Noys suggests through Lacan, entails that the regime reclaims deterritorialising forms of transgression by putting them on display – ‘Watch them fuck . . .’, as Lacan writes (Noys 2008: 106). As a controllable experience, sexuality is tied to the idea of the individual. Important as it had been in the political struggles of the time, Deleuze perceives sexuality primarily as a means of closing down the possibilities of bodies and desires to mean only certain things. When he and Guattari reject individual pleasure and replace it with a theory of impersonal desire, this is a way of politicising libidinal energy also on the level of social and economic production. The notion of desiring-machines that Deleuze and Guattari develop already in Anti-Oedipus largely function to replace ideas of subjectivity. As sexuality is replaced with desire, the subject is replaced by desiring-machines. Issues of sexuality and subjectivity are thus intimately intertwined, even as they are rejected as modes of capture that delimit the multiple and impersonal energy of desire. If their concept of desire was thus born in a post ’68 context of a sexual liberation followed by disillusion, the recoding of pleasure into capitalist structures today constitutes a blatant part of our everyday culture. The orgasm, and the female orgasm in particular, has grown into a major capital investment. Thousands of handbooks outline how we should achieve more, better and stronger peaks. The female characters in TV series such as Sex and the City have set the tone of open discussions about the right to sexual gratification. But at the same time, the idea of climaxing as an end-point is arguably resisted rather than promoted in a commercialised capitalist society whose very foundations rest on the fact that we must never be satisfied. If we were to find our televisions big and flat enough, our cell phones small and smart enough, our bodies thin and sexy enough, society would collapse. The faster money spins, the more it is built

168 Capitalism and Sexuality into our systems that we should start desiring something new even before we have finished enjoying what we have. In other words, no matter how mind-blowing the orgasm is, we are counted on to want another one not long after. In this sense, the image of the sexually insatiable woman in pornography may indeed be a more apt figure than the money shot as an emblem of contemporary mechanisms of consumption, as Marcus suggests. The question is if it is still fruitful to talk about the orgasm as a deplorable end-point in such a context? Or even the organism as an end-point? Just as what Deleuze calls the ‘deplorable’ release and supposed passivity of a post-orgasm state could in fact be seen a challenge to our contemporary capitalist tempo, the organism without technological (in the actual as well as Foucauldian sense) and medical enhancements, and without multiple connections to various networks, could very well be constituted as a break with capitalist production. However, to be able to recognise this potential, the orgasm must be released from the paranoiac understanding that Deleuze insists on in the face of his own schizoanalysis. As long as we continue to keep sexual pleasure bound to Oedipus and to the body of capital, we deprive ourselves of the political force of sexual pleasure. As I argue at the beginning of this chapter, we need to challenge rather than conform to the paranoid tendencies of capitalism and question the interior limits that regulate the flows. The orgasm, in its economic and visual deployment in contemporary capitalism, constitutes such a limit. I think Deleuze would agree that we do not want this ‘binding’ of schizophrenic charges, but want, rather, to map ways in which their revolutionary potential escapes the internal limits of the capitalist axiomatic (see Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 246). Like desire, this chapter has worked to show, the orgasm can create schizzo-flows that subvert the paranoiac recodings of capitalism. I hope this is betraying Deleuze in its most productive sense.

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Epilogue: Swedish Sin, or the Importance of Remaining Curious

When this book was still in its infancy, an American friend and Deleuze scholar insisted that being a Swedish woman writing about sex without addressing the associations between Swedish women and sex would simply be inappropriate. In the light of what this book has ended up as – a kind of defence of the cultural, conceptual and political importance of sexual pleasure – I find this comment rather intriguing. Just as I had no idea that the associations of Sweden with sex were so powerful until I started travelling beyond the Swedish borders, it had not crossed my mind that my interest in delving into the political, cultural and social implications of sexual pleasure might also emerge from a more specific national historical context than that of my own contemporary, academic framework. It seems apt, as an epilogue, to reflect on the book as a whole in relation to this particular context of its writing. I am not Monika or Lena, from Ingmar Bergman’s and Vilgot Sjöman’s famous films, and I am not really curious yellow or blue either, as Sjöman’s film titles go. But how can I tell if my interest in what sex is and what it can do – an interest that certainly is not that uncommon in itself – is somehow shaped by a Swedish historical configuration of sexuality as a relatively naturalised aspect of life? Is this why I find it hard to accept Deleuze’s rather cursory rejection of the political potential of sexual pleasure? Or, conversely, maybe my interest in the mechanisms of sex in relation to bodies, identities, roles and pleasures is more likely to have been influenced by the ‘unnaturalness’ of sex, that is, for instance, by the way I, like many other Swedish women, repeatedly encounter ourselves as sexual clichés in the eyes of others when we are abroad? If so, maybe this is why I find Deleuze’s philosophy so enabling in its understanding of the immanent creativity of images. Without being able to determine whether this is actually a shaping factor in my choice of research topic or not, it is safe to say that the Swedish context has underlined, on a personal level, my sense of sex as a force that can become fixed into formulas but that can also counteract established modes of thinking and being.

170 Epilogue: Swedish Sin, or the Importance of Remaining Curious

The sexual practices of the Swedish people, Frederick Hale notes, have been commented on ever since the eighteenth century. And as both his own 2003 article and some of the other studies cited below suggest (Kulick 2005; Humphrey 2007), Swedish sex continues to be of interest to international scholars today. Hale shows how the early interest in sex in Sweden gives way, during the first half of the twentieth century, to a predominant interest in the development of the welfare state –Sweden: The Middle Way, by Marquis Childs, marking its height – only to return in the 1950s through a series of films (Hale 2003: 352–3). Some early examples include Arne Mattsson’s Hon Dansade en Sommar (One Summer of Happiness, 1951) and Ingmar Bergman’s Sommaren med Monika (Monika, 1953) and Vilgot Sjöman’s considerably darker 491 (1964). Swedish filmmakers of this period insist on portraying nude swimmers, exposed breasts, (hints at) premarital sex, and women with an active and independent sexuality (in the case of the first two), and sex as a weapon in violent games of political power (in the case of the third), thereby pushing the limits of what could be represented. Also, and while Swedish cinema has been seen as ‘bold but essentially heterosexual’, Daniel Humphrey points to how lesser known films, such as Egil Holmsen’s Hästhandlarens Flickor (Time of Desire, 1954), placed the national imaginary of Sweden also in the minds of a queer American audience (Humphrey 2007: 34). These films, which are generally better known than the context of their making, must be seen also in connection with the broader politics of pleasure in the Sweden of the time which made sex part of the debates about the welfare state and equality. Its famous films, as Don Kulick notes, constitute but one of the two main phenomena that give Sweden an international reputa- tion as ‘a sexually liberated wonderland’, the other being its sexual politics (Kulick 2005: 210). The first country in the world to do so, Sweden made sex education in schools obligatory in 1955. This, as Lena Lennerhed shows, elicited a considerable reaction from abroad. Lennerhed has unearthed some of the rubrics in international journals of the 1950s: ‘Sex Revolution Staggers World’, ‘The Most Daring Experiment in the World’, ‘Sweden – Land of Sexual Liberty’ (Lennerhed 1994: 89). Of central concern in international debates of the time is a combination of a religious and moral anxiety in the face of a permitting attitude towards premarital sex on the one hand, and a political critique of what is perceived as a State regulation of private affairs on the other. The indignation towards what was seen as an emasculation of moral values thus came to be entwined with

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the socialism associated with the ‘Swedish model’ of the welfare state (Lennerhed 1994: 90). Swedish people, some argued, had turned into State-run machines, their individuality replaced by State-organised collectivity. Some, Lennerhed shows, even analysed Swedish permis- siveness as a compensation for the lack of freedom in other areas, like an opium for the people intended to keep citizens under control (Lennerhed 1994: 96). The American response to this project, in particular, points to how sex in Sweden was perceived through the nexus of the moral and the political. In the moral arena, the chiasm in moral values between Sweden and America of the 1950s may be seen in how Bergman’s more neutral film titleSommaren med Monika, the literal translation of which would be ‘The summer with Monika’, initially receive the morally unambiguous American title Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl. (In Belgium and France, to pursue this fascinating comparison just a little bit further, the title of the film is Monika et le désir – ‘Monika and desire’.) Politically, the American response also tends to put the development of sexual politics in Sweden in direct correlation with the socialist values seen as shaping the Swedish welfare system and their possible association with the more hard-core socialism of neighbouring Russia. Much of the blame was put on the way in which Swedish political structures included a close correlation between State and Church. The Church, it was argued, lacked the power to contend the new ‘socialist’ view on sex (Hale 2003: 366). From a Swedish perspective at the time, the period is rather seen as a time ‘in which the mist of sexual disenlightenment is beginning to clear’ (Linnér 1967: xv). This is also largely a women’s project working towards women’s right to their own bodies and towards equality in terms of work as well as sexual relations. The project, as Birgitta Linnér suggests in 1967, is about ‘finding a new place for sex in a democracy’ (Linnér 1967: xvii). Rather than the inter- nationally misinformed idea that Sweden is ‘a country of free erotic practices’ (Linnér 1967: xv), the Swedish attitude to sex is informed by a belief in information and education. With the idea of accepting sex as an inevitable and natural part of all human life, regardless of age, gender and marital status, it is seen as a better political move to acknowledge and regulate such activity through sex education, contraception, and, as a last resort, abortion. One of the most active radicals promoting the importance of sex education was Elise Ottesen-Jensen (1886–1973). One of the founders of an important institution for sexual health and education in Sweden today, RFSU

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(the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education), Ottesen-Jensen, or Ottar as she signed herself, was a radical socialist journalist who already in 1923 travelled and lectured in order to spread information about contraception and to fight against the laws that then existed prohibiting abortion. It was Ottesen-Jensen, of all people, that American journalist Joe David Brown met on the first night of his week-long sojourn in Sweden as part of his research into ‘Swedish sin’. It has been argued that his subsequent article in Time in 1955 – ‘Sin & Sweden’ – has had the most influential and long-lasting effect on the view of Sweden from abroad of all the events of the time (Hale 2003: 371). This article, which sparked extensive debates in the US, in Sweden and in other countries, was based, Hale shows, on Brown’s one evening with Ottesen-Jensen and her circle of politically active friends, followed by a few days with a number of religious leaders anxious about the degeneration of Swedish morals (Hale 2003). In the article, Brown accounts for his exchange with a scornful Ottesen-Jensen, a Lutheran bishop disappointed with the lack of response to the bishops ‘coming out against sin’, and a ‘sad’ Roman Catholic priest who tells him that Swedish people are ‘incapable of imagining a world where there are not unwed mothers, where abortions and birth control are not necessary’ (Brown 1955: 29). With his combination of a poorly researched paper, some plagiarism, a number of factual errors, and some clearly questionable journalist ethics, Brown presented to the Americans a horror tale of the deterioration of morals in Sweden. The ‘sexual moral standards in Sweden today are jolting to an outsider’, writes Brown. He is shocked at what he sees as parents and teachers in Sweden condoning promiscuity without even trying to inform their youngsters that it is wrong (Brown 1955: 29). With such allegations and conclusions, Brown’s article, as Hale notes, had considerable impact on the shaping of the international image of Sweden (Hale 2003: 371). Even if Brown presented a skewed view of Sweden, the arrival of Vilgot Sjöman’s two-part films Jag är Nyfiken – Gul (I am Curious (Yellow), 1967) and Jag är Nyfiken – Blå (I am Curious (Blue), 1968) and Torgny Wickman’s Ur Kärlekens Språk (The Language of Love, 1969, also translated in America into Swedish Marriage Manual), films which all, in different, earnest and for the period explicit ways, explore the political as well as anatomical workings of sexual relations, did not ‘help’. The educational film The Language of Love created havoc, resulting in legal proceedings in the US and a

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demonstration by 30,000 people in the UK. I am Curious (Yellow) was a great success in the US – partly, James Stuart Olson suggests, because of the considerable media coverage it received when the US Customs Service sought federal court opinion on the legality of its distribution (Olson 1999: 241). This curious metafilm – ‘the most explicit movie ever to be imported here’, according to an assistant US attorney (quoted in Humphrey 2007: 33) – shows how Lena Nyman, both actress and character in the film, explores sexuality at the same time as she develops a socialist awareness of world politics. Lena discusses class society, demonstrates against the Vietnam war and Franco, discusses communism with Soviets and ponders nonviolent resistance while trying masturbation and having sex in trees as well as outside the Royal Palace in Stockholm. She tries a number of men but finds the first nineteen boring because sex with them is all about ejaculation. The general message about sex and politics may best be summarised by Lena’s discovery of a rewrite of the Ten Commandments, the original version of which has been found irrelevant for the people of her time. According to this new version, the Seventh Commandment reads: ‘Many are better off than they deserve. If you are one of those, share. Otherwise, steal.’ The Sixth commandment reads: ‘You shall not spread venereal deceases, produce unwanted children or expose others to sexual violence. You should avoid producing too many children – there are far too many being born. Apart from that, you may engage freely in sexual intercourse, masturbation, pornography, and all other good things in this genre that your animal nature finds in its mercy to give you’ (I am Curious (Yellow) 1967, my translation). That these films, and their portrayals of Sweden as a country of relatively free and open sexual practices and Swedish women as sexually active and independent, made it into the cultural consciousness and have remained there can be seen, for example, when François Truffaut lets young boys steal a still picture of Monika from Sommaren med Monika in The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups, 1959), when Travis takes his date to the movies to see The Language of Love in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), and more recently, in The Simpsons episode 287 called ‘I am Furious Yellow’ (The Simpsons 2002). That a widespread conception of something known as Swedish sex played a role in the American 1950s and 1960s has also been underlined recently in the TV series Mad Men. Set in the American 1950s and 1960s, this series deals largely with the struggles to find new male and female identities in a shift between

174 Epilogue: Swedish Sin, or the Importance of Remaining Curious the housewives of the 1950s and the ‘liberated’ sex of the 1960s. Here, when a young male character tries to convince a woman to go to bed with him, he uses the ‘Swedish way’ as a mode of persua- sion. ‘In Sweden’, he maintains, ‘they make love the minute they feel attracted. And it’s healthier because you can find, you know, the perfect person. Because making love is a very important part of a life with someone. The most important. In Sweden anyway.’ If this is not already a telling misconception of how things are done in Sweden, the woman’s response is even more so. Despite being referred to ‘enlightened’ articles, she exclaims that he will never be able to per- suade her to do ‘anything Swedish people do’ (Mad Men 2010). But just as I am not Monika or Lena, I am not Ingmar Bergman or Vilgot Sjöman or Arne Mattson, nor Elise Ottesen-Jensen, and my millennial context is quite different from the 1950s and 1960s during which the notion of ‘Swedish sin’ emerged. Our roles and agendas and contexts are obviously different in a number of ways. The battles begun in the middle of the twentieth century in Sweden were in one sense about the political importance of naturalising sexual pleasure and sexual bodies. The films, as well as the debates that followed, were overtly interlinked with political issues of equality, of gender, class and other social issues. One may say that Swedish attitudes towards sex in the 1950s and 1960s emphasised the political importance of its naturalisation; hence, the nakedness, the frequently unglamorous bodies, and the candidness of its representations. If these bodies stress the ‘baseness of natural law’ that both Deleuze and Lacan see as problematic end-points to their more creative desire or jouissance, as noted in Chapter 2, they do not, for that matter, portray them as ‘dirty little things’ that put an end to desire. If they promote ‘questions of fucking’, as Lacan puts it so bluntly, we are closer to the truth if we see this sex as part of ‘the fantastic factory of Nature and Production’ than as the ‘dirty little family secret’ to follow Deleuze and Guattari’s take on D. H. Lawrence (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 49). The sexual pleasure sought in films such as I am Curious (Yellow) is not tied to sad family triangles but rather to wider, political and existential networks, the workings of which, as Lena maintains, have to be explored. ‘Watch them fuck’, Lacan says, sceptical of the political force of transgressive sexualities (Lacan 1990: 128), but I am not sure we should give up that easily. We watched Lena fuck, and although this certainly contributed to the subsequent political and commercial co-option of ‘Swedish sex’, there is also a sense in which this fucking demonstrated the relevance

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of a continual exploration of how sexuality functions in relation to bodies in the widest sense of the term. If the battle of the Swedish 1950s and 1960s was about the politicisation of sex through its naturalisation, the battle today is rather about politicisation through de-naturalisation. As sexual identities and practices are claimed and moulded in accordance with humanist assumptions, political ambitions and consumerist culture, what we need is not to mirror these bodies – we have seen enough nipples, surely – but to hold them up against the crystals through which their unities are scattered and their use-value interrupted. Rather than taking bodies and their representations at face value, there is much to gain from combining Deleuze’s rethinking of bodies with its implications for sexual pleasure, something that he himself, as I have argued throughout this book, does not do. In the face of what, for Deleuze and Guattari – as well as many other French theorists, as Peter Starr notes (1995) – constitutes a rather pessimistic view on the use of pleasure after ’68, I would argue that the politics of pleasure is more important than ever, albeit in a different way. At the same time as the nature of bodies and sexualities are interrogated theoretically, as Chapter 3 showed, the pervasiveness of commercialised sex demands an even further attention to a politics of pleasure, both because of the blatant economic and political exploitation of sex and because this inscription of sex and pleasure means that there is actually so very little of it. As I argue in Chapter 7, there is a sense in which pleasure as it is inscribed in economic and political structures does not qualify as pleasure at all in any meaningful way. Such pleasure, as we have seen both through Deleuze and Foucault, is caught up in political and economic structures and has thereby lost the kind of explosive potential it may have had in Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s, and in France in and around 1968. But why would we have to leave the explosive potential of pleasure to history and admit – too readily – to its subsequent failure? After all, does not a Deleuzian perspective on history allow us to pick up events and intensities exactly because they are not inescapably lost to a linearly ordered past? Letting go of pleasure because of the way in which it has been historically and psychoanalytically inscribed into orders of capitalism and lack seems to me to acknowledge conceptions, not only of pleasure, but also of history and politics that Deleuze himself normally works to rethink. When he questions the linearity of history he simultaneously opens potential gaps in what may otherwise be understood as a determinate past. Through these

176 Epilogue: Swedish Sin, or the Importance of Remaining Curious gaps emerges the possibility for change. History as repetition rather than linear narrativisation undermines the type of causal explanation that places the present as an inevitable outcome of the past, and the future as projected on the identifiable possibles of the present. This repetition, of course, is not the stagnant reiteration of past truths, but is, rather, inclusive of the virtual element that opens history, and thereby the future, to new potential directions. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari’s partial approval of Lacan is, as I noted in Chapter 2, based on his decoding of Oedipal desire. At the same time, however, Lacan is seen to recode desire through the apparatus of the Law and the Signifier and thereby to fix the cogito. This focus on the individual subject results in the kind of suturing of secondary narrativisation, a making sense of the past through the stitching of its gaps into one continuous and explanatory narrative. One may say, then, that the recoding of desire effected by Lacan is suggestive of a need for historical continuity, the illusion of which glosses over the lack from which we cannot escape. Deleuze and Guattari’s decoding of desire through the refusal to acknowledge this lack enables them to free us from the need to gloss over through narrativisation. It is this move that also opens up history to new directions. But despite this possibility of freeing up history for new conceptual openings, sexual pleasure is never fully decoded in Deleuze’s philosophy. Its codes remain those of psychoanalysis and capitalism. In this book, I have tried my hand at some decoding. As I note in the beginning, Deleuze’s rejection of pleasure and the orgasm is part of the very important project of expanding the politics of desire beyond the individual that political and economic forces have constructed. As caught in its psychoanalytical and capitalist web, the idea of the individual is seen mainly as an obstruction of the multivocal possibilities of desire. Individual pleasure and the orgasm thus come to stand as petty subjective alternatives to the real political potential of desiring-machines. The type of politics of pleasure that I have tried to identify throughout this book, however, refuses to separate the two so definitely. Through rethinking the constitu- ents, functions and coordinates of bodies through notions such as becoming-woman, becoming-animal and becoming-disabled, we can identify a kind of pleasure that expands rather than delimits what bodies are, what they can do, and what they can become. The brief outline of ideas of sex in Sweden in this epilogue is not provided in order to give an example of how easily sexual pleasure, even when given the space for naturalisation, is caught up in political

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struggles and commercial clichés, although it could certainly do that too. From being a cause of anxiety to politicians in the 1950s, worrying about how the stamp of immorality would affect attitudes towards Sweden, to the profitable porn export during the 1970s, the idea of Sweden as a haven of pretty and sexually liberated blondes has come to be used as a valuable marketing tool. Rather, the intention behind this example is to point to historical instances where ‘the use of pleasure’, to return to Foucault, is also intertwined with periods of intense political curiosity. Because of course, and regardless of the question that opens this epilogue, it matters little whether my Swedish nationality has influenced my choice of topic or not. But when Lena Nyman ‘suffers’ from relentless curiosity in Jag är Nyfiken – Gul and holds up the microphone to people on the street as well as to politicians, and when she has already undone her bras- siere when about to have sex with her new lover, she wants to find out ‘everything’ from whether Sweden has a class society to what sexual pleasure means when decoded from its historical, religious, patriarchal and political traditions and inscriptions. If the sexual revolution of the 1960s took help from the ways in which contraception, education, representation and changing moral norms reconfigured the possibility of sexual pleasure, a sexual revolution today could be assisted by the radically altered ways in which bodies are understood. Finding out about how sexual pleasure works, as I have tried to show, is finding out how bodies work, from the clitoris to bacteria to vagus nerves. Deleuze lays the ground for such important work with his reconceptualisation of what bodies are. Bodies, I am sure he would agree, hold a revolutionary potential, a potential that can be facialised and inscribed into apparatus of capture but that never cease to harbour the possibility for difference. It is this potential of bodies that I would like to pick up on. This potential may also counteract what Berlant sees as the tragic sacrifice of sex today, when what we really need is not to give up on sex but to recognise ‘a world of contact whose temporalities and forms of reciprocity desperately need reinvention’ (Berlant 2007: 440). I think the world continues to demand reinvention as well as inspire curiosity. Swedish or not – and maybe I am a little curious (yellow) and curious (blue) – let us not bury the potential for revolution in its past re-codings.

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188 Index

Ableism, 100–1, 104–5, 110 Faciality, 105–10, 114–19, 154, 157–9, Actual, 9, 91–2, 124 163–4 Affect, 9–10, 45–6, 115–16, 118, ‘Female Viagra’, 81, 109–10 138 Fold, 62–5 Alice in Wonderland, 91, 95–6, 104 Foucault, M., 12, 16–29, 70, 74, Animality, 120–44 121–2, 138–9 Anomalous bodies, 98–9, 101–3, 105, Freud, 40–1, 75–7, 147–9 113, 117–19 Animals, 124–6, 132–3 Anthropocentrism, 122, 126, 132, 136, Desire, 30, 32–4, 51–3 137 Oedipus, 3, 30, 161 Aphrodisia, 25–6 Art, 9–10, 115, 130 Gender, 6, 48, 70–1, 73–4, 77–8, 80, Artaud, A., 62, 104, 119 84, 86, 114, 128, 131 Asceticism, 8, 21 Greeks, the, 25–6, 28, 74–5, 122 Assemblage, 4, 15, 47, 65, 67, 98, 103, Grosz, E., 4, 9–11, 45–6, 66–8, 115, 112, 117, 138, 143, 151, 166 144, 163–4 Guattari, F., ‘Three Billion Perverts’, Bacterial sex, 54–5, 130 7–8 Bartleby, 104, 111–13, 119 Becoming-animal, 10, 14, 120–1, Haraway, D., 127–30, 134 127–8, 135–44 Heidegger, M., 135–6 Becoming-disabled, 10, 99, 101–5, Holland E., 147–8, 154, 155, 157, 110–19 158–9, 161 Becoming-woman, 10, 89–94, 96–7, Hypernature, 56–7, 65 127, 128, 161–6 Berlant, L., 12, 178 Idiocy, 59–62 Braidotti, R., 122, 132–3, 136, 142, Image of Thought, 59–61, 62–3 143–4, 164 Individuation, 52, 63–6, 68 Irigaray, L., 80, 90–2, 163–4 Capitalism, 6–7, 8, 11–12, 14, 21, 108, 110, 140, 145–69 Jouissance, 2–3, 32–6, 43 Carroll, L. see Alice in Wonderland Clitoris, 76–8, 80, 107 Kafka, F., 104, 113, 117 Klein, M., 38–40, 44, 141, 158 Derrida, J., 78, 123, 130 Koedt, A., 77, 81 Deterritorialisation, 88, 105, 113, 115–16, 136, 149, 160; see also Lacan, J., 31–8, 43, 168, 175, 177 territorialisation Lack, 38, 42–3

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Index

Lack (cont.) Schizoanalysis, 8, 31, 88, 119, 149, Desire, 2–3, 31, 33–4, 59, 106, 126, 155, 169 159, 176–7 Sex education, 171, 172–3, 178 Subject, 2–5, 19–20, 60, 64–5, 143, Sexual difference, 70–97 144, 161 Shildrick, M., 100–4, 108 Lawrence, D. H., 72, 81–6, 88, 96 Simondon, G., 58, 65–6 Leibniz, G. W., 62–5, 66, 68 Spinoza, 2, 9, 40, 43, 47, 54, 56–7, 58, Lingis, A., 92–3, 140–1 118 Loy, M., 85–6 Spivak, G. C., 78–81 Lyotard, J., 29, 148 Subject, 22–3, 58–69, 94–6, 99, 112–13, 121–3, 125, 158–61, 168 Margulis, L and D. Sagan, 13, 48–9, Lacan, 32, 34, 35–8, 43, 177 54–5, 67, 115, 130 Lack, 2–3, 4, 20, 143–4 Marx, 146, 152 Foucault, 24–5, 27–8 Masochism, 50, 104, 112–13 Temporality, 49–53 Melville, H. see Bartleby Synthesis Miller, H., 72, 81, 86–9, 96 Active/passive, 51–3, 58, 66, 68 Millet, K., 82–3 Conjunctive, 79, 88 Minor literature, 105, 113, 116–18 Connective, 36, 79, 161 Disjunctive, 11, 79–80, 147 Nin, A., 72, 88–9 Noys, B., 7, 8–9, 17–18, 21, 148, 156, Technology, 45, 47–9, 54, 78, 126, 168 169 Biotechnology, 46, 57 Oedipus, 30, 31, 41, 82, 105–6, Information technologies, 48, 49 113–15, 119, 145, 147–9, 151 Temporality, 4–5, 50–3, 58, 65–6, 67–8, 90–2, 114, 160–1, 163–4 Pack, 125, 135, 137, 139, 143 Territorialisation, 76, 114–15, 147, Parisi, L., 48, 54, 55–7, 65, 68 151–3, 166–7 Partial objects, 38–40, 44, 141, 158 Animals, 129, 136, 144, 158 Perniola, M., 47, 61–2, 68 Art, 9–11 Plateau, 1–2, 5, 6, 11–12, 72, 80, 164, Subjectivity, 9–11, 144 167 Territory see territorialisation Pornography, 49–50, 140, 149–50, Transduction, 65–6 152–4, 162–3 Virtual, 9, 40, 52, 91, 124, 161, 163 Reich, W., 30–1, 40–4 Voluptas, 27 Repetition, 49, 51, 90, 92, 111, 142, 161, 163, 177 Warhol, A., 165–6 Reproduction, 48–9, 54–7, 67, 68, 71, Williams, L., 140, 149–50, 152–4, 73–5, 80–1, 165 162–3

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