Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. As posted on Jodi Dean’s blog, July 17, 2006. http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/. 2. I remain convinced that the series of books that Arthur and Marilouise Kroker initiated through their own press efforts (New World Perspectives) during the 1990s, written in a delirious style that matched Deleuze and Guattari’s efforts in Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus, were a forewarning of what has come to pass—global capitalism in full bloom continues to decenter identity into various assemblages as a means to increase profit margins through the rhetoric of digitalized technology as freedom. Paul Virilio’s technology as pure speed, Jean Baudrillard’s technology as simulation, Roland Barthes technology as rhetoric, Jean François Lyotard’s technology of aesthetics, Foucault’s technologies of the self, and Deleuze and Guattari’s technology as a desiring machine present an idealized landscape of total mutability where an Enlightened subjectivity seems to be a quaint idea of the past. 3. This was the same criticism leveled at Judith Butler’s performativity thesis when it was first developed in the early 1990s, with its bold claims of resistance to patriarchy despite her attempt to ward off her detractors in Bodies that Matter. Her thesis still remains problematic, unsolved, and strongly critiqued (see Tim Dean (2000), although her work has become progressively more psychoanalytic as she continually changes her position (see Layton, 2004, 207–240 for an assessment). By 2004, Butler had already moved on through yet another self-critique in Undoing Gender. 4. Difficult in this context not to think of the 1988–90 television series Alien Nation, where the story line enabled the exploration of issues of racial difference. 5. The East/West globalized paranoia (Al-Qaeda/Bush) is what Michael Rogin 1987 would term political “demonology”: “The demonologist splits the world in two, attributing magical, pervasive power to a conspiratorial center of evil” (40). It doesn’t take much foresight to see how loudly this claim is ringing on both sides. 6. Todd McGowan (2003) has written an excellent exposé of authority’s loss, rehearsing ∨ Ziz∨ek’s general claim that superegoic “enjoyment” has emerged due to its decentering. Jon Lewis’s (1992) study of “teen anomie” in teen films and youth culture in the early 1990s had adumbrated this loss of authority as well. He expressed a rather pessimistic outlook, for although youth under capitalism are privileged beyond measure, the issue of the increase in teen suicide and depression does not go away. 7. For instance, the philosophical reflections of Giorgio Agamben (2004) and Eric Santner’s (2006) magnificent study of Rilke, Benjamin, and Sebald as to the “open” of our animal nature. 8. Here I am simply referring to the “spiritualization” of artificial intelligence as discussed by Ray Kurzweil (1999) for instance, and the writings of Marvin Minsky (1986), Daniel Dennett (1991), and Patricia Churchland (1989). 202 NOTES 9. I have Gayle Gorman to thank for getting me started watching this series about the posthuman future. 10. The same applies to the collapse of psychoanalysis with cognitive science and neuro- science. See Wilma Bucci (1997) for the former development and Mark Solms (2003) for the latter. 11. This insight concerning xenomoney comes from Brian Rotman (1987). When read carefully, Rotman does an excellent job of showing the genealogy of how the missing center of capitalism—its transcendental void that keeps it as a system open in the way profit is continually used to make more profit—develops from the notion of “zero” as it becomes adopted economically as part of the Western consciousness incorporated from its Arabic roots. As Lyotard (1993) put it, credit is “the advance of wealth which does not exist. Made in order that it comes to exist” (225). 12. This is rather well-known territory for feminists who support Irigaray’s own “hysteri- cal” writings in which she tries to establish a counternarrative to Lacan’s edifice. See Lacan’s (1998) “God and Woman’s Jouissance’” in S XX, Encore, and Irigaray’s (1985) reply in her essay, “Cosí Fan Tutti.” See also Tom Hayes (1999). 13. This topological distinction of the Real I have maintained throughout my work. Sight has been reserved for the Imaginary, while cite belongs to the Symbolic register. 14. Here the entire problematics between reason and madness emerge. Foucault’s (1965) historicizing of madness, as supported and praised by both Deleuze and Guattari, was severely critiqued by Jacques Derrida (1978) on the grounds that he had inadvertently set up a binary between madness and reason, which repeats the very “objective” dis- courses of psychiatry and the medical profession that frame madness in the first place. It seems that Descartes’ method of “doubt” has a paranoiac dimension to it in the form of the malin genie, which is precisely where madness that underlies reason hides for Derrida. Descartes imagines that there is an all-powerful malicious demon that is con- trolling his perceptions, making him hallucinate or dream that he is in the world. For Derrida, the dividing line between madness and reason disappears in this case in such a way that a particular philosophy may be a form of madness itself. Madness is never excluded—the restricted economy of reason functions only in the general economy of madness. Derrida maintains that by virtue of speech, madness is staved off. It always remains the “other” of speech, as silence, but not thought (Cogito). Madness inside of thought can only be evoked through fiction (Felman 1975, 219). Yet, both present the deadlock of the role of literature as a buffer zone between madness and thought. For Derrida the fiction of madness orientates philosophy as a form of protection from it; for Foucault, it undermines and disorientates thought. The malin genie and madness are opposed, introducing radical doubt in Foucault’s account. The binary is maintained. “The philosopher is also orientated, but in his [sic] own fiction so as to aban- don it, while the madman remains engulfed by it” (220–221). In this debate we are really no closer in making any easy distinctions between being mad (as thought) and being mad (as silence). As Lee (2004) put it, “madness is part of reason, and vice versa; what remains stupid is our inability to distinguish between the two” (63). Chapter 1 1. See Stevie Schmiedel (2004) for an important analysis of the differences between Deleuze and Lacan within the context of feminist theorizing of becoming-woman. 2. In none of the televised serials that are discussed can it be said that “the deficient pater- nal ego [given that it is under attack, missing, or simply weak in paranoiac plot lines] NOTES 203 makes the law ‘regress’ toward a ferocious maternal superego, affecting sexual enjoy- ∨ ment [as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or The Birds]” (Ziz∨ek 1991, 99; see Buchanan 2002). Not even in the most Oedipal-looking plot, Dawson’s Creek. When Dawson’s father dies in a car accident, his mother does not begin to interfere or dominate his love life. She almost disappears from the story line for the rest of the seasons. Dawson’s guilt is transferred over to Jen who is made to feel guilty for the cause of the accident. When ∨ it comes to Hitchcock films, the maternal superego is a Ziz∨ekian formulation, not a Lacanian one. However, this maternal superego becomes more and more prevalent as the Oedipal Father recedes. 3. This is where I part company with Buchanan’s (2002, 112) mistaken claim that somehow the Lacanian Real is categorically separated from reality, when Lacan’s claim is just the opposite: the Real is always present, but is revealed as nonsense, which “may” profoundly change one’s perspective if it is encountered. Buchanan maintains that for Deleuze and Guattari,“the [R]eal and reality are one and the same thing” (112). If this is the case, then Lacan would say this is psychosis—that “other” form of madness. Buchanan maintains that “schizoanalysis begins where psychoanalysis leaves off, namely, the point where reality collapses into the [R]eal—the crack” (ibid.), then schizoanalysis is simply another name for psychosis. To maintain, as Buchanan does, that schizoanalysis is the moment of the crack when “it becomes clear that even though nothing has actually happened, everything has changed” (ibid.) is either to be read humorously as a psychotic break- down that is permanent, or quite comfortably Lacanian as an encounter with the Real. Again, there seems to be no way to distinguish the mad from the truly mad in schizoanalysis. Both are cracked, yes—but when is a delusion so great that it engulfs the sub- ject totally in the Real, despite being a “pragmatic” way of dealing with the unbearable horror of the symbolic order? 4. In The Logic of Sense (1990, 224–33), Deleuze discusses Lacan’s phallic signifier of excess and lack and attempts to make the case that the heterogeneity of the pregenital and Oedipal series can be maintained through a disjunctive synthesis (229) rather than being ensured convergence and regulation by the phallus as object=x. 5. I make this case especially when it comes to “queering” the phallus (jagodzinski 2006a). Jan Campbell’s (2000) “Queering the Phallus” covers some of this ground, as does Bergoffen (1996). 6. Perversion and hysteria are explored in Youth Fantasies (2004, 92, 127) and developed in Music in Youth Culture. 7. For example, the string of American political scandals and corruptions such as the Bay of Pigs, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the Kent State shootings, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair, the FBI’s targeting of the Black Panthers, the Watergate affair, the Waco fiasco, the Oklahoma City bombing, the anthrax scares, the Columbine shootings, and of course 9/11.

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