Postmodernism is a humanism: deleuze and equivocity

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Notes

‘[T]he paradox is that the Real as external, excluded from the Symbolic, is in fact a symbolic determination—what eludes symbolization is precisely the Real as the inherent point of failure of symbolization’ (Žižek 2000:121).

The relation of love, in Badiou's work, is only one way in which we might consider the event, which also manifests itself in the poem, the matheme and the revolutionary situation. I am here deliberately narrowing the terms of debate to the question of sexual difference and gender. The figures whom I am contrasting with Deleuze—Judith Butler, Joan Copjec, Slavoj Žižek, as well as Alain Badiou—do offer highly nuanced reflections on the problem of sexual difference. By drawing a stark contrast between their approaches and that of Deleuze—despite the fact that there are certain sympathies—I hope to focus on the ways in which the work of thinkers like Butler has (however unwittingly) led to an unthinking celebration of the performance, discourse and constitution of gender at the expense of the positivity of sexual difference.

Deleuze and Guattari historicize what Lacan takes to be a transcendental condition. We are, they concede, subjected to the signifier, regarding our desires as mediated through the law of the father; but this is the consequence of capitalism's shift of the law away from an external prohibition towards a general axiom. It is the act of speaking as such, existing in a world with others, that now imposes a command of prohibition. We are now tyrannized by a supposedly general human condition of lack.

If Luce Irigaray and Deleuze share the same project of sexual difference, albeit with different outcomes, this is because they both draw on Heidegger's recognition that western thought has been dominated by a Platonism that the works of Plato, if read carefully, would allow us to challenge. That which truly is, substance or hypokeimenon, cannot be identified with or exhausted by any of its expressions or representations. The thought of substance is just the opening of thought to that life or being that is beyond thought's own limited images; the thought of substance therefore allows for real difference. However, once substance is seen as numerically distinct from perception as other than or different from the represented world then we fall into equivocity: the perceived world on the one hand, and its different ground on the other. Man or the subject becomes that point in the world from which difference and representation are explained in advance.

Deleuze and Guattari therefore spend a great deal of time in A Thouand Plateaus describing regimes of signs and various strata. Strata refer to various ways in which the one expressive life produces distinct levels, such as the strata of language in the narrow sense that borders the life it signifies on one side, and the system of speaking subjects on the other. But there are other stratifications, such as the social arrangement of bodies that faces law on the one side, and the desires of bodies on the other. One side of a stratum faces towards territorialization or organization, while the other faces towards deterritorialization or the freer flow of singular, not yet connected, differences. This allows us to think of various regimes of signs, with formal language being one of many. A sign, for Deleuze and Guattari, is not other than life, not an order imposed on life, but a relation within, or of, life. Sexual difference can be considered as a sign, with one body's perception and desire of another body producing a relation that is both sexual—because it is desiring, connective and productive—and a sign, for life is just this relation of singular differences that must somehow read, code or perceive other differences both in terms of its own life and striving, while also being transformed through this perception. So all perception is (a) sexual or desiring, (b) a sign, because the difference encountered must be read, (c) anti-interpretive, because this reading or perceiving does not posit a meaning behind what it perceives but creates a body and relation, a territory of assemblage, and (d) expressive, because these signs, perceptions and strivings are not signs of a life that lies outside them, for life is just this striving, perceiving whole.