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SO YOU LOVE ME
ABSTRACT. This essay uses the work of Gilles Deleuze, in some detail, to argue for a new
practice of criticism. Not in order to purify, refine, or generally redeem anything, but rather
to encourage a focusing upon the production of fields of experience as an ethical event.
As such, the piece re-problematizes what it means to raise questions, and demonstrates the
underlying responsibility of doing so.
KEY WORDS: Carroll, contract, criticism, despot, Masoch, Sade, sense
I NTRODUCTION
It is not the law that binds you but the other of law.
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sophically this is not important. Not because of any divide between the
banal and the philosophical. That kind of distinction is itself an enemy
of this paper. It is not important because destroying an enemy means
destroying the desire of that enemy.1 To kill an opponent will not change
the world. It is not criticism. But to destroy your opponents desire will
change the world, and is then a critical operation.
So far, I have talked of destroying enemies as if this were a war story or
a spy thriller. There are parallels. However, it must be noted that destroy
is used here in a specific way. It means to have done with something.2 This
is the precise difference between a military act and the action of criticism.
The military cannot have done with its enemies never was this clearer
than during the Cold War.3 The military, the state, murderers are all motivated by specific networks of desire, whereby they perpetuate themselves
through a relationship to an other. They never take action, but can only act
out their phantasies through war and imagination. By reproducing themselves, they avoid all critical actions they never create anything.4 Rather,
they act as lightning conductors for specific symbolic delusions. Phantasy
would then be the limitlessness of signification. Becauase it can always
mean something else, desire can be actualised in the most extraordinary
neuroses. There is always an other.5 Particular others congeal around the
desires of a particular body. Each acts as an ideal for the other: the interplay
of signifier and signified. The body of the murderer is like the face of the
1 In many ways this is the most surprising and yet obvious assertion. Perhaps I should
have called this paper The Art of Love or alternatively The Art of Murder. See for
instance P. Virillo, Moving Girl, in F. Peraldi, ed., Semiotext(e) #10 Polysexuality (New
York: Semiotext(e), 1995); or J.-F. Lyotard, The Assassination of Experience by Painting
Monory, in S. Wilson, ed., Revisions ( London: Black Dog Publishing, 1998). At any
length, while the current paper is permeated by this issue of what it may mean to kill
anothers desire, it is not something that is addressed here explicitly. Rather I must leave
this issue for another day.
2 Cf. G. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (London: Verso, 1998). See in particular
To Have Done with Judgement.
3 Or the current adventures in the east.
4 The reproduction of the self . . . this is really the central issue, the manner in which so
many critics encounter the world with the sole aim of perpetuating their current state. The
precise phantasy here is narcissism; moulding the world in your own image.
5 One area of difference between Deleuze and Guattari from Jacques Lacan, is the
manner in which they tie together what is incommensurable (the subject and its unconscious). The signifier need not always unify its field of operations. Rather, desire is split
in a manner which can only ramify the plentiude of creation, rather than expose its lack
or absence. Contrast Psychoanalysis and Familialism: The Holy Family, in Deleuze
and Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone, 1984) with
The Unconscious and Repetition, in J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-analysis (London: Vintage, 1998).
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their own desire for the aura of the scapegoat. I am with this against you.
Freud has been used to condemn us to such perpetual adolescence: The
unconscious is to blame. We cannot be responsible. Yet somehow we are
always to blame.
G OATS WILL F LY
We are in the habit of wanting to understand things in a complete manner.
Not only is this an impossible (and therefore essential task), it is potentially
dangerous because it can have the effect of discouraging us from action.
Just look at the work of Baudrillard! Notice how he cannot stop spewing
it out.10 Complete knowledge necessarily cancels itself out. In this sense,
life is fuelled by ignorance. The danger here is in thinking in terms of great
explorers there is actually nothing to discover. You only ever discover
what you expect to discover consider the flag they took to the moon!
The crucial ignorance of critical action (i.e. limited thought) is experimentation. Ignorance problematises a field of knowledge, and motivates
the latters transformation through creativity. Adding new things. It does
not involve trying to achieve a particular end precisely because we are too
ignorant to have one. Therefore, there is no causal distance between an
action and its consequence. They are one and the same thing a constant
surprise. The survival of any specific system is dependent upon avoiding
too big a surprise. This is the constant worry of the monarch, the military
and murderers: the traitor, the ambush, the arrest. The point of this is that
the despot can never know the total effect of selecting signifieds from the
stream of signifiers. So it is not really a question of trying to know what the
despot or monarch is doing. Interpretation is always already a game, which
has to be played on the despots terms. As a result, we can never know the
monarchs others, even if it is us. Rather, we can turn the game against him
we can exaggerate otherness so long as we do the same for despotism
simultaneously. Critical action is the movement from knowing your enemy
to forgetting your enemy. Deleuze and Guattari, working from Foucault,
show how the scapegoat serves an important function in maintaining the
despot: the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the
system of signs: it is charged with everything that was bad in a given
period . . .11 It is precisely any distortion in the interplay of signifier and
10 Actually this is just an element, or style, in Baudrillards output, and is clearly bent
back on itself in order to produce a new tone of thought. See for example Baudrillard,
Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987).
11 Supra n. 6 at 116.
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an other? The need is for something that leaps right out of the whole
system . . . something that is totally alien, but somehow unfolding from
within. Criticism is not just something that the despot does not know it
is something that he knows that he does not know. Those that leap achieve
this by the affirmation of their affirmation. It is not enough to say, I am
other, as if this would concern the despot. It must be taken to the next
level; the state that Nietzsche implies when man finally hears the news of
Gods passing. The shock for the monarch, confronted with an experience
outside of his thought, literally not knowing what it is. Suddenly they are
there. But who is there? What is there?
Do not mistake what you are about to read. The one who leaps is the
goat. But have we not just seen how the goat must be discounted as the
mere other of the despot? The difference is that the tethered scapegoat
must transform itself into a merrily prancing kid. Only then will it leap.
The kid knows nothing of self-pity. It does not cry out or ask why me?
Rather, it says, let it come down. It has no concept of murder or military
operations: The will to power certainly appears in an infinitely more exact
manner in a baby than in a man of war.14 Leaping out, the goat turns
itself into an authoritarian, according to Deleuze and Guattari.15 Not rule,
and not all knowing. Rather, a particular expertise within a given field of
operations. An authority in the sense of know how. The monarch knew
what he was doing when he drew out a line of flight. The goat has no idea
what he or she (or they the name of the goat is legion) is doing by fleeing
down it.
. . . a sign or packet of signs detaches itself from the irradiating circular network and sets
to work on its own account, starts running a straight line, as though swept into a narrow,
open passage. Already the signifying system drew a line of flight . . . but the system gave
that line a negative value and sent the scapegoat fleeing down it. Here, it seems that the line
receives a positive sign, as though it were effectively occupied and followed by a people
who find in it their reason for being or destiny.16
Psychoanalysis is never critical for this reason it interprets, and this puts
it on the side of the despot. Together they say, know thyself. The kid
does not know itself and does not interpret anything. It is in a world of the
obvious, made up entirely of surfaces, of tactile images.17 It is affected.
Deleuze and Guattari juxtapose the priest with the prophet:
the prophet interpets nothing: his delusion is active rather than ideational or imaginative,
his relation to God is passional and authoritative rather than despotic and signifying; he
14 Supra n. 2 at 133.
15 Supra n. 6 at 121.
16 Ibid. (Authors emphasis).
17 See G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image (London: Athlone, 1997).
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anticipates and detects the powers of the future rather than applying past and present
powers.18
S HARKS OR S NARKS
When the time comes you must be capable of forgetting everything that
you know, in order to put it into practice: that is affirmation. In The Logic
of Sense19 Deleuze revels in an almost pseudo-philosophical20 account of
how propositions come to denote, manifest and signify. The trick with this
book is to remember its central factor: Lewis Carroll. It should be read
humorously, with the same sly jokes, as we would expect from Duchamp
or Roussel. Deleuzes book is highly complex and self-referential, so it
is impossible to give any definitive account of it. Perhaps this is part of
Deleuzes strategy to produce a book that can only be used rather than
finally interpreted. So we know where we are:
. . . denotation . . . is the relation of the proposition to an external state of affairs . . .
manifestation . . . concerns the relation of the proposition to the person who speaks and
expresses himself . . . Signification is defined by (an) order of conceptual implication where
the proposition under consideration intervenes only as an element of a demonstration, in
the most general sense of the word, that is, either as premise or as conclusion.21
The question Deleuze asks is how is it that the proposition comes to have
sense? Certainly, it is not within the three relations of the proposition, as
each relation must presuppose the other two in order to function.22 Therefore, none can be the locus of sense as each of the three relations is, in
turn, primary.23 As is so often the case with Deleuze, one must begin at
the end and end at the beginning in order to upack these ideas.
18 Supra n. 6 at 124 (Authors emphasis).
19 G. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia, 1990).
20 This does not quite catch it: the book is rigorously philosophical, but it is precisely
the philosophy of bending philosophy back on itself; of finding the humour in it rather than
the irony.
21 Supra n. 19 at 1214.
22 Ibid. see 1213 generally.
23 Ibid. at 119.
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Again, think of how the shark is extended across the series of characters,
and thereby determines them as elements of its world (its destruction at
the hands of the chief being a divergence: another world), while simultaneously, the shark is merely a dream of the characters, their phantasy.
Deleuze goes on to explain, A world already envelops an infinite
system of singularities selected through convergence. Within this world,
however, individuals are constituted which select and envelop a finite
number of the singularities of the system.28 The point is that the world
only exists through the individuals who are its expression, who actualise a
variable quantity and quality of singularity. What must be borne in mind
is that the singularities are pre-individualistic: We see that the continuum
of singularities is entirely distinct from the individuals which envelop it in
variable and complementary degrees of clarity.29 In short, the singularities are only partially determined by their actualisation through worlds/
individuals. At this point, Deleuze is able to distinguish between two types
of event; that is the event of the singularity itself, and the event of the
24 Ibid. at 107.
25 Ibid.
26 See G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is Philosophy (London: Verso, 1994).
27 Supra n. 19 at 109.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid. at 111.
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analytic predicate of the subject,30 but that this latter event, despite its
involving the expression of the world through individuals, has neither
logical hierarchy nor the character of generality.31 This is why it is only
a partial determination. The proposition here is still undetermined, in as
much as its sense cannot be separated from it:
When a predicate is attributed to an individual subject, it does not enjoy any degree of
generality; having a colour is no more general than being green, being an animal is no
more general than being reasonable.32
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aleatory point that has constant properties, so that all worlds become its
variables. It is not something missing from the world, but is the great
contraction. It brings unity without idealism by adding the one to make
one. The paradox of the synthetic procedure is that the one is always in
addition, not subtraction. It is precisely this procedure that the musician
James Brown puts into effect, for example.35
The object = x is also the person, thereby completing the passive series
of world, individual and person. It must be remembered that this term
is used by Deleuze in a passive sense. Specifically, this person does not
belong to any race. Does not in fact belong at all. Deleuze writes: Each
person is the sole member of his or her class, a class which is, nevertheless, constituted by the worlds, possibilities, and individuals which pertain
to it.36 The person is always then in addition to the world/individual.
Deleuze identifies two processes at work here, as the instigators of the
world/individual and persons: sense and nonsense respectively. This may
seem strange at first because we think we know what sense is. However
(and this is why Lewis Carroll is so appropriate for Deleuze here) by
thinking of what we know, we are merely displacing our understanding
to an equally non-determined position. Sense would then actually be not
that which we think we know, or even think of, but merely that which we
think: passive thought itself. Deleuze shows the logic of this in the hilarious
and beautiful Fifth Series of Sense section of his book, in the form of four
paradoxes. The paradox of regress arises due to the impossibility of the
proposition of containing its own sense. Rather, the sense of a proposition
can only be stated in a second proposition, and the sense of the second
proposition can only be stated in a third, and so on. The paradox of sterile
division relates to the failure of sense to ever be productive it can never go
beyond the proposition that expresses it. Deleuze describes it as both extra
being and non being relative to the proposition, and the specific paradox
is that sense is dependent upon the proposition, while simultaneously
engendering the proposition. The paradox of neutrality is the result of the
indifference of sense to affirmative and negative. All propositions, regardless of whether or not they are contradictory, have sense (thus, dialectics
does not make sense). Sense defeats good sense by going in all directions at
once, as Deleuze shows very well when he writes, It is neither at the same
35 Hear for example Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine, Mother Popcorn, Licking
Stick, Super Bad, Soul Power, etc. For Brown, The One is the first beat of a bar, or
measure, in 4/4 time. However, while the overall pulse remains constant, the displacement
of time, during the bar itself, means that while you can always be sure when the one will
come, you can never be sure where it is. Needless to say, in this context, the one is in a
relationship of reciprocal determination with the rest of the bar in its entirety.
36 Supra n. 19 at 115.
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time, nor in relation to the same thing, that I am younger and older, but it is
at the same time and by the same relation that I become so.37 That is, by
becoming older than I am at the same moment that I become younger than
I will be! The paradox of the absurd relates to single propositions, which
are in themselves contradictory while still having sense (e.g. a square
circle). Together, these four paradoxes demonstrate how sense is always
both very close and further away (leaping). Again, we find a psychoanalytic and decontructionist echo, but consistency must be insisted upon: the
proposition is not motivated by lack. Propositions are distributed along the
series, and we find more in common with Foucault than Lacan: propositions say everything that is capable of being said in a world. How it can
be said depends upon the individuals; what will be said depends upon the
persons. More formally, the deconstructionist approach ultimately makes
the proposition mean either too much (psychoanalysis) or nothing at all
(Baudrillard). This does not make sense.
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SO YOU LOVE ME
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T WO F IELDS OF D ESIRE
Why criticise? To increase potentials, becomings, to realise what we can
be (Know thyself understood in the Nietzschean sense of Become what
you are); in short to live. Criticism is the giver of life and is the opposite
of murder (of course, much criticism actually falls on the side of death).
The action of self determination. As if Nietzsche had not said it loudly
enough in his quiet writing, this passive embodiment is a question of joy
and humour, and this element of criticism is traced in an explicit way in
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 To refer back to the beginning, you have destroyed an others desire when s/he asks
What can I do? You have made love to them, but simultaneously (in a manner I now
hope is clear), they have also caused you to ask the same question of yourself.
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law operates through these others. Rather, the ungrounding of law needs
an alternative process from its own outside. Deleuze does not attempt to
address what the process may substantially be as we have seen from the
above discussion of The Logic of Sense, this is not possible unless we are
grounded in specifics. Rather, Deleuze looks to a more formal analysis, in
the work of Kant. Here he finds a new understanding of law; that is law
for the sake of law, not the sake of the Good. This is the beginning of
the modern experience of law that has now become THE LAW,58 without
reference to any Good at a higher level. Additionally, Deleuze explains that
because THE LAW has no orientation, no object it strives to attain, as it
did when it strove to attain the Good, it follows that the application of the
law is divorced from what is best: Clearly THE LAW, as defined by its
pure form, without substance or object or any determination whatsoever, is
such that no one knows nor can know what it is. It operates without making
itself known.59 The series of the law is separated from the despot who had
overcoded it, who had extended himself across it, who had actualised in a
specific way the limits to its irony and humour. Instead, the new regime of
control seizes upon the ironic element and makes it the new principle of
the law in its entirety: all become guilty,60 while the humour of the law is
displaced to the moment of a punishment become discipline (and finally a
question of performance). The perspective of law has been reversed so that
what had been the other of law in fact becomes its new location.
For Deleuze, the consequence of laws irony and humour is detailed
in the work of Sade and Masoch respectively. With Sade, Deleuze shows
how a fury is harnessed at the audacity of a law that presents itself as
total, and yet can only be secondary to a more fundamental principle (no
longer the Good with Sade, but rather sovereign nature): irony is Sades
method of demonstration. (Part of Sades genius was his ability to maintain
a permanent revolution of fury without descending into a murderous existential void. As such, the atrocities in his work have a very special quality,
which, it must be stressed, are primarily literary before being sexual. As
a sexual practice, sadism in fact comes under the sign of maschoism,
opposed to the pure, and always imaginary, sadism of would-be murderers
and rapists. Obviously, the distinction can be a fine one, and, as ever, calls
for a discerning eye.) Sade is then always concerned to prove something
about law and as such, never leaps outside of it.61 While Deleuze talks
of sadism as an attempt to transcend the law, we must note that it is not
so much a transcendence as it is a close look at just what the law is. On
58 Supra n. 9, at 83.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid. at 84.
61 Ibid. See 8687.
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the other hand, masochism is much more inclined to leap from the law in
the way in which we have been contemplating, through the humour of the
laws consequence. In this context, a fundamental problem of the law is
knowing what the sense of the law is, because very often a strict adherence
to the meaning of the law will be a departure from its sense altogether. This
situation is precisely the humorous one that Sacher-Masoch seizes upon:
A close examination of masochistic fantasies or rites reveals that while
they bring into play the very strictest application of the law, the result in
every case is the opposite of what might be expected.62
While pure sadism is ultimately a destructive force, masochism is very
much a functional one: it contracts a new field of potential by reversing
the possibilities of the law and its limit. By subjecting oneself to the
punishment, Deleuze argues that the masochist then has the right to the
transgression that the punishment was supposed to discourage. What must
be understood is that the transgression is not predetermined by its denial
by law because the modern experience of law is its unknowableness, it
follows that there can be no substantial transgression defined by the law.
There is merely that which the law knows it does not know, and this is
reached by the masochist exaggerating what the law does know: that we are
all guilty. Rather than the misery of a guilt within the system of law (and
distinct from the sadistic total destruction of that system), the masochist
uses his/her guilt to leap from the system. The masochist is not concerned
to destroy THE LAW, but instead to replace it with the system of his/her
own desire as law.
This is clear in an obvious way from the importance of the masochistic
contract that Deleuze highlights. The use of the contract to safeguard
particular rights has the immediate effect of displacing those rights. This
displacement is one in favour of the law instituted by the contract: if there
is no beyond of law (because the Good is now the result of the law), it
follows that rights are now dependent upon the form of the law, rather than
the substance of the contract (precisely because the contract can no longer
be the substance of the law its Good). Entering into a contract invalidates
that contract simultaneously. As Sade had already pointed out, law can
never restrain a despot. Instead, it guarantees his appearance (at the same
moment as his substantial disappearance). The masochistic strategy is to
exaggerate this function of the contact. Initially, the contractual arrangement in masochism appears as something the despot would approve of.
The exaggeration of the form is, however, achieved at the despots expense
because it involves a reversal of perspective that, in Sacher-Masochs work,
appears as the reversal of male-female relations. While contract generally
62 Ibid. at 88.
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longer the same desire as the contracting parties began with. As such, we have a perfect
example of what it is to criticise.
65 Supra n. 9, at 101.
66 Precisely a transformation of desiring practices, or regimes.
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S TILL TO C OME
Criticism is not something to be undertaken lightly, but it is something
to lightly undertake. Through both tears of laughter and tears of pain,
criticism gives life to new bodies by exaggeration of the law. The process
is a humorous and parodic one, rather than the deathly conclusion of
sadisms irony and satire. For this reason, there is a direct link to dada and
surrealism, which can now both be seen as attempts to laugh without law
(rather than as satire, which is always based upon deviation from the law).
The most necessary criticism of this paper is the development of a system
of female masochism. In other words, how sadism becomes humorous
through the mechanism of consent. We have already seen how consent
to a contract undermines that consent. Might the feminine line of flight be
the constant repetition of consent; that is, the undermining of formal law
by the return of substance?68
Kent Law School
University of Kent
Canterbury
Kent CT2 7NS
UK
67 Supra n. 9, at 100.
68 This involves the production of an ethic of law, which is then directly experienced as