One, Two, Many

Abstract

This introductory essay to the special issue “Sexual Difference between Psychoanalysis and Vitalism” provides a genealogy of the concepts of sexual difference in the Western tradition from Kant through Darwin, Freud, Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Irigaray, Foucault, Butler, and Deleuze and Guattari. The three main problems running through the essay are how these theorists think of the agency of the biophysical body in the process of sexual differentiation, whether sex is two or a multiplicity, and what the implications are for feminist politics. The essay does not summarize the contributions as they stand very much on their own.

Keywords:

• sexual difference
• psychoanalysis
• vitalism
• biology
• feminism

Notes

The origins of this special issue lie in the symposium “What is Sexual Difference Now? A Conversation with Joan Copjec and Elizabeth Grosz” held in Minneapolis on 13 November 2009, with the support of the University of Minnesota's Institute of Advanced Study and Departments of Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, English, and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies, as well as German and Russian Studies at Macalester College. Many thanks to the contributors, journal editors Gerard Greenaway and Charlie Blake, and co-editor Hoon Song, for believing in this project.

1. Manfred Kuehn, “Introduction” to Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006) xii.

2. Whether the first difference elided by formal universalism is sexual or economic-racial is a matter of dispute. The colonial, class, and epistemic violence which allowed humanism and the Enlightenment to flourish are well catalogued, as are Kant's own racist contributions to anthropology and geography. The latter cannot be understood separately from the prior definition of reason and morality as the business of European males, which Kant was uninterested in deviating from. On a feminist psychoanalytical interpretation the archaic frustrations of European patriarchy begot the Continent's frantic search for resources and satisfaction elsewhere; sexual difference logically precedes capitalism and racialization insofar as it engages the real, the fundamental prohibition of incest between man and his mother, whereas capital and race operate through networks of signs designed, in the final analysis, to forget prohibition was necessary at all. I tend to follow a Marxist view in which capital and race are themselves reals converging into sexuality.

3. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985) 205.

4. Ibid. 213.

5. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008). See my “Back to the Great Outdoors: Speculative Realism as Philosophy of Science,” Cosmos and History 5.2 (2009): 304–21.

6. Gilles Deleuze, Lecture on Kant at Vincennes University, 14 Mar. 1978, available <webdeleuze.com>. See also Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009).

7. See Doreen Massey, “Politics and Space/Time” in Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994) 248–72.

8. Elizabeth Grosz, “Space, Time, and Bodies” in Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995) 100.

9. Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006) 645–67. The consequences of this coupling are comprehensively elaborated by Alenka Zupančič in Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000), though sexuation is not her main focus.

10. Joan Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason” in Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002) 201–36; Immanuel Kant, “The Antinomy of Pure Reason” in Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and eds. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) 459–550.

11. Ibid. 518–19; bold type removed.

12. Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason” 220–21.

13. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993) 55.

14. Kant, “Resolution of the Cosmological Idea of the Totality of the Derivation of Occurrences in the World from their Causes” in Critique of Pure Reason 532–46.

15. See, for example, Monique David-Ménard, “Kant, the Law, and Desire,” trans. Leslie Lykes de Galbert, in Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, ed. Robert May Schott (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997) 341–54.

16. The recuperation in Zupančič's Ethics of the Real of an uncanny Kant for which freedom means coming to terms with the subject's internal split from itself, against the polite and wholesome Kant of liberals, is a feminist strategy in this sense. Deleuze similarly came to see in Rimbaud's formula “I is another” a summation of Kant's most difficult lesson: “our interiority constantly divides us from ourselves, splits us into two: a splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has no end.” Gilles Deleuze, Preface to Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984) ix.

17. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992) 149–51. See also Slavoj Žižek, “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing” in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994) 89–112.

18. Lacan himself does not argue that ethics is essentially feminine. One could point to his consistently old-fashioned statements on “man,” echoing Heidegger, throughout his seminars, giving rise to grammatical quasi-error:

Antigone appears as αυτθνθμθσ [autonomous], as a pure and simple relationship of the human being to that of which he miraculously happens to be the bearer, namely, the signifying cut that confers on him the indomitable power of being what he is in the face of everything that may oppose him. (Ethics of Psychoanalysis 282)

19. In contrast, when an act goes against every moral duty and even tries to reconceive what duty consists of, it derives from the innate propensity to misuse reason – what Kant calls radical evil. Zupančič, Ethics of the Real 82–96. Obviously men are far more prone to evil genius. See also Joan Copjec, ed., Radical Evil (London: Verso, 1996).

20. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis 244–48.

21. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2009) 162.

22. Idem, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005). Badiou tempers Lacan's overly enthusiastic adoption of mathematical logic and criticizes his disdain for philosophy. See Russell Grigg, “Lacan and Badiou: Logic of the pas-tout,” Filozoksji vestnik 26.2 (2005): 53–65.

23. Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2007) 7.

24. Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002) 45.

25. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004); idem, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005).

26. See, for example, Linda Mealy, Sex Differences: Developmental and Evolutionary Strategies (San Diego: Academic, 2000); David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, 4th ed. (New York: Basic, 2003).

27. The most consequential dichotomization ever of nature and history is found in Badiou's Being and Event.

28. John Dupré, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic, 2000). Controversies over sex directly lead to controversies over race. See Barbara A. Koening, Sarah S.-J. Lee, and Sarah S. Richardson, Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (Fredericksburg, PA: Rutgers UP, 2008); Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Refashioning Race: DNA and the Politics of Health Care,” Differences 15.3 (2004): 1–37.

29. Grosz, Nick of Time 64.

30. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981). An interesting detour into art history is found in George L. Hersey, The Evolution of Allure: Sexual Selection from the Medici Venus to the Incredible Hulk (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1996).

31. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986).

32. See Richard Dawkins, “Explosions and Spirals” in The Blind Watchmaker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) 195–222; and Matt Ridley's Dawkinsian The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (London: HarperPerennial, 2003).

33. Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991) 40ff.

34. It is here, incidentally, that Darwin was so misunderstood by Nietzsche, who had surmised from Haeckel that for biologists species take precedence over individuals.

35. See, for example, Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2006); F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003); Theunis Piersma and Jan A. van Gils, eds., The Flexible Phenotype: A Body-Centered Integration of Ecology, Physiology and Behaviour (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010).

36. Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, What is Sex? (New York: Simon, 1997) 5.

37. Margulis and Sagan, “A Universe in Heat: Sexual Energy” in What is Sex? 14–47.

Producing the order of living copies, by making self-similar living matter, sexual reproduction accelerates the production of disorder because the complex natural organization of a living being inevitably exports more disorder to pay for its organization […] Sex, embedded in animal reproduction, exemplifies the natural tendency for all copying processes to be imperfect. Therefore, sex both protects and disturbs the integrity of living matter, and yet does both in accord with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (Ibid. 35–36)

On this definition, sex is older than life (ibid. 70ff.).

38. Nick Lane, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005) 232–41.

39. Margulis and Sagan, What is Sex? 105–07.

40. Ibid. 236ff. and the chapter “Why there are Two Sexes” 258–65.

41. See Jared Diamond, Why is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Basic, 1997).

42. 

The human dilemma, then, is that a father and mother must work together for years to rear their helpless children, despite being frequently tempted by other fertile adults nearby. The specter of marital disruption by extramarital sex, with its potentially disastrous consequences for parental cooperation in child-rearing, is pervasive in human societies. Somehow, we evolved concealed ovulation and constant [female] receptivity to make possible our unique combination of marriage, coparenting, and adulterous temptation. (Diamond, Why is Sex Fun? 70)

For a critique of biologism from biology see Marlene Zuk, Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn about Sex from Animals (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002).

43. Alain Badiou, “Sex in Crisis” in The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity, 2007) 68.

44. On the relation between Freud and science see Jean Laplanche's New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) 17ff.

45. See Frank J. Sullaway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York: Basic, 1979), especially chapter 7; and more recently, Christian Kerslake and Ray Brassier, eds., Origins and Ends of the Mind: Philosophical Essays on Psychoanalysis (Leuven: Leuven UP, 2007).

46. The definitive critique of recapitulation, Stephen Jay Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1977), shows how Haeckel's biology colludes with vitalism and transcendentalism. Recapitulation had a “pervasive influence” in anthropology, criminology, and psychoanalysis (155–64). A more sympathetic sketch of Haeckelism is found in Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008).

47. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo [1913] in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIII, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–59) (henceforth SE). Darwin, drawing in his turn on ethnography, did not use the term “primitive horde.” What Freud noticed was rather Darwin's speculation that hominids already practiced a form of marriage because males were jealous of their wives and offspring; Descent of Man, Part II, chapter XX.

48. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1925) in SE XX: 126ff.

49. Idem, Moses and Monotheism [1923] in SE XXIII.

50. 

These long-familiar facts of [anatomical hermaphroditism] lead us to suppose that an originally bisexual physical condition has, in the course of evolution, become modified into a unisexual one, leaving behind only a few traces of the sex that has become atrophied. (Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [1905] in SE VII: 141)

51. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity” [1932] in SE XXII: 118.

52. Freud's “Female Sexuality” [1931] begins:

During the phase of the normal Oedipus complex we find the child tenderly attached to the parent of the opposite sex, while its relation to the parent of its own sex is predominantly hostile. In the case of a boy there is no difficulty in explaining this. (In SE XXI: 225)

53. Freud, “Femininity” 131; “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” in SE XIX: 252.

54. Later critics of Freud's insistence on penetration for orgasm overlook, however, that in 1905 he thinks “mature” pleasure requires a complex neuronal interaction for which he finds an enticing metaphor:

When at last the sexual act is permitted and the clitoris itself becomes excited, it still retains a function: the task, namely, of transmitting the excitations to the adjacent female sexual parts, just as – to use a simile – pine shavings can be kindled in order to set a log of harder wood on fire. (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 221)

55. Lacan, Écrits 463.

56. Amongst both humans and primates the rules around sex are sanctioned through violence. The difference that law makes in our species is not so much that it is learnt and spoken – animals have cultures they communicate – but that it has general instead of group applicability. Cf. Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes, 25th anniversary ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007).

57. Melanie Klein, The Psycho-analysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey, 3rd ed. (London: Hogarth, 1949) 270.

58. Ibid. 291.

59. Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman 115ff.

60. Ibid. 123.

61. Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade” in The Inner World and Joan Riviere: Collected Papers, 1920–1958, ed. Athol Hughes (London: Karnac, 1991) 94. The paper is about some intellectual women with lesbian tendencies, but readers have been able to generalize, especially in conjunction with the paper “Jealousy as a Mechanism of Defense,” ibid. 104–16.

62. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage, 2011) 55.

63. Ibid. 332. “Feminine arousal can reach an intensity unknown by man” (ibid. 411).

64. Ibid. 330.

65. In agitating patriarchy, hyperbole has its place. I would argue for the continuing relevance of Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, 20th anniversary ed. (New York: Basic, 2007).

66. Beauvoir, The Second Sex 35. This take on anatomy reverberates in Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and other Essays (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005).

67. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, rev. ed., ed. Rodney Needham, trans. James H. Bell and John R. von Sturmer (Boston: Beacon, 1969); Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Hall (London: Routledge, 2002).

68. Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship 148ff.

69. Ibid. 479.

70. Grosz, “The Evolution of Sex and Race” in The Nick of Time 64–92.

71. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss offers a critique of Freud's Haeckelism in the chapter “The Archaic Illusion” and a lucid denunciation of the assumption behind Totem and Taboo that small-scale societies represent an immature stage of development. In the name of universalist synchrony Lévi-Strauss was careful to avoid nineteenth-century evolutionism, effectively naming bourgeois sexuality a desperate exception instead of the presumed rule. Elementary Structures of Kinship 84–97, 490–92.

72. Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship 481.

73. Margaret Mead, Male and Female [1949] (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

74. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Psychoanalysis and Ethnology” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983) 166–83.

75. For examples of the deconstructionist feminist critique of nature/culture see Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York: Routledge, 1997); Elizabeth Wilson, Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition (New York: Routledge, 1998). For the Lacanian critique of deconstruction see Slavoj Žižek, “The Eclipse of Meaning: On Lacan and Deconstruction” in Interrogating the Real, eds. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005) 190–212.

76. In Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2000), especially the chapter “The Role of Gender and the Imperative of Sex,” Charles Shepherdson shows how psychoanalysis can stay clear of cultural relativism and its later avatar social constructionism.

77. Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982) 126.

78. Idem, Ethics of Psychoanalysis 308.

79. Idem, “The Signification of the Phallus” in Écrits 582.

80. Idem, Le Séminaire IV. La Relation d’objet, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1998) 153.

81. Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness 85. See also Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990) 122ff.

82. 

Jouissance, the experience of the body, is produced in a purely contingent manner; it simply happens to the subject. Moreover, if jouissance functions as support of the subject, it is in a way quite different from the being of the philosophers. Jouissance is an unsupportable support, unbearable to the subject who defends against it through the production of a fundamental fantasy. (Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman 7)

On desubstantialization see Adrian Johnston, Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2008).

83. See Ellen Ragland, The Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lacan (Albany: State U of New York P, 2004), especially chapter 4.

84. Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment 51.

85. Idem, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2008) 121ff.

86. Lacan, Feminine Sexuality 144.

87. See Suzanne Barnard, “Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other Jouissance” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan's Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, eds. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (Albany: State U of New York P, 2002) 171–86.

88. Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment 143.

89. Idem, “Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father, or How Not to Misread Lacan's Formulas of Sexuation,” Lacanian Ink 10 (1995), available <http://www.lacan.com/zizwoman.htm>.

90. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXII: RSI, unpublished seminar, 1974–75. A translation of the key lecture of 21 January 1975 is found in Feminine Sexuality 164–71.

91. See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, “The Real of Sexual Difference” in Reading Seminar XX, eds. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink 57–76; “Deleuze and the Lacanian Real,” available <http://www.lacan.com/zizrealac.htm>. A. Kiarina Kordela couples sexuation with Marx in $urplus: Spinoza, Kant (Albany: State U of New York P, 2007) 99ff. Levi R. Bryant couples sexuation with ontology in The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities, 2011) 245ff.

92. Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which is Not One” in This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985) 23–33.

93. Rosi Braidotti, “Sexual Difference Theory” in A Companion to Feminist Philosophy, eds. Alison M. Jagger and Iris Marion Young (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 298–306.

94. See, for example, Maria C. Cimitile and Elaine P. Miller, eds., Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of Unity (Albany: State U of New York P, 2007).

95. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); idem, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

96. Butler later came to an understanding closer to Braidotti's: “sexual difference is the site where a question concerning the relation of the biological and the cultural is posed and reposed, where it must and can be posed, but where it cannot, strictly speaking, be answered,” but she remains suspicious of the implied anatomical dichotomy in the term. “The End of Sexual Difference?” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004) 186. More on this crucial debate in Rosi Braidotti with Judith Butler, “Feminism by Another Name,” Differences 6.2/3 (1994): 27–61; Pheng Cheah and Elizabeth Grosz, “The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell,” Diacritics 28.1 (1998): 19–42.

97. Butler, Bodies that Matter 29.

98. Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” Research in Phenomenology 13.1 (1983) 74.

99. Foucault traces modern sexual biopower to earlier Judeo-Christian and ancient forms in History of Sexuality Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. R. Hurley (London: Penguin, 1978); idem, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France (1973–1974), trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).

100. Howard Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916) 47–48.

101. Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (London: Picador, 2003) 243.

102. Idem, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1985); idem, The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France (1983–1984), trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011).

103. Copjec, “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason” 206.

104. Shepherdson, Vital Signs 91.

105. Lacanians argue from the clinical perspective that the phallus cannot be dodged consciously as (some) lesbians try to do, but only indirectly after acknowledging its structuring of all sexuality including their own.

Female homosexuality fails the not-all through its attempt to eliminate the phallic signifier. [S]he will not have access to feminine jouissance [genuinely separate from the phallic function] unless she accepts the “weakness” of being not-all for a man, who can only desire a woman as a partial being, or objet a. (Geneviève Morel, “Psychoanalytical Anatomy” in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000) 37)

Butler conceives of a deliberately contradictory “lesbian phallus” (Bodies that Matter 57–92) but forgets that the essential phallic function is to bifurcate two sexes heterosexually. More consistent is then to displace the psychoanalytical edifice entirely; see Grosz, “Reconfiguring Lesbian Desire” in Space, Time, and Perversion 173–86.

106. Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994) 12–13.

107. “[I]t is not only that Power itself generates the excess of resistance which it can no longer dominate; it is also not only that – in the case of sexuality – the disciplinary ‘repression’ of a libidinal investment eroticizes this gesture of repression itself. [Hence] the power edifice itself is split from within: in order to reproduce itself and contain its Other, it has to rely on an inherent excess which grounds it,” which Foucault declines to theorize. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997) 26–27.

108. Charles Shepherdson, “History and the Real: Foucault with Lacan” in Vital Signs 153–86; idem, “Derrida and Lacan: An Impossible Friendship?,” Differences 20.1 (2009): 40–86.

109. It is a huge pity that Deleuze did not read more Darwin.

110. Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”; Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, “It's a Powerful Life: A Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy,” Cultural Critique 57 (2004): 151–83; Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003); Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham UP, 2008); Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone, 1997).

111. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994).

112. Grosz, “The Nature of Culture” in Time Travels 42–53.

113. Exceptions include Christian Kerslake, who in Deleuze and the Unconscious (London: Continuum, 2007) and Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009) demonstrates an indebtedness to both Jung and German Idealism; Monique David-Ménard, who in Deleuze et la psychanalyse (Paris: PUF, 2005) understands Deleuze as strengthening the philosophical implications of Lacan's later abstraction; and Joe Hughes, who in Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (London: Continuum, 2008) discovers a Husserlian scheme underpinning Deleuze's entire project.

114. Gilles Deleuze, “Description of Woman: For a Philosophy of the Sexed Other,” trans. Keith W. Faulkner, Angelaki 7.3 (2002): 17–24. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Concrete Relations with Others” in Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Helen E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square, 1956) 471–556, on love, masochism, sadism, etc. For more background see Keith W. Faulkner, “Deleuze in Utero: Deleuze–Sartre and the Essence of Woman,” Angelaki 7.3 (2002): 25–43.

115. Deleuze, “Description of Woman” 18. On the Other-structure see idem, “Michel Tournier and the World without Others” in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia UP, 1990) 301–20.

116. Deleuze, “Description of Woman” 20, 21–22.

A pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus's voice, a horde of wolves in somebody's throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the anus, mouth, or eye one is intent upon. We each go through so many bodies in each other. (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) 35–36)

For Guattari on faciality and Proust see The Machinic Unconsciousness: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011) passim.

117. “In fact, it is the caress that denies all thickness; in tracing a delicate and subtle curve, the caress ceaselessly folds exteriority, draws it into itself, renders it internal to itself” (Deleuze, “Description of Woman” 23). I do not read Deleuze as presenting the caress as futile as Keith Faulkner does (“Deleuze in Utero” 34).

118. Gilles Deleuze, “Statements and Profiles,” trans. Keith W. Faulkner, Angelaki 8.3 (2003) 91.

119. Gilles Deleuze and Léopold Sacher-Masoch, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty and Venus in Furs, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone, 1989) 13.

120. Deleuze nonetheless insists on the phallus as the central problem disallowing any closure of sexual identity.

Birth and death, and the difference between the sexes, are the complex themes of problems before they are the simple terms of an opposition. (Before the opposition between the sexes, determined by the possession of lack of the penis, there is the “question” of the phallus which determines the differential position of sexed characters in each series.) It may be that there is necessarily something mad in every question and every problem, as there is in their transcendence in relation to answers, in their insistence through solutions and the manner in which they maintain their openness. (Difference and Repetition 107)

121. Deleuze, Logic of Sense 317.

122. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 294.

123. Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011) 132–36.

124. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 295–96.

125. Idem, A Thousand Plateaus 216.

126. See also what is likely to be one of the best statements on Deleuze's vitalism for a while: Claire Colebrook's Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (London: Continuum, 2010).

127. See the pairing of Deleuze–Guattari and Margulis in Luciana Parisi's Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology and the Mutations of Desire (London: Continuum, 2004).

128. Elizabeth Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics,” Topoi 12 (1993): 167–79.

129. 

When Virginia Woolf was questioned about a specifically women's writing, she was appalled at the idea of writing “as a woman.” Rather, writing should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming. Very soft particles – but also very hard and obstinate, irreducible, indomitable. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 276)

See also Rosi Braidotti, “Becoming Woman: Or Sexual Difference Revisited,” Theory, Culture, and Society 20.3 (2003): 43–64.

130. For all these questions see Rosi Braidotti's Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia UP, 2011).

131. Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000); Peter Hallward, Out of this World: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006).

132. Peter Hallward, “You Can’t Have it Both Ways: Deleuze or Lacan” in Deleuze and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Essays on Deleuze's Debate with Psychoanalysis, ed. Leen De Bolle (Leuven: Leuven UP, 2010) 33–50.

133. Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004) 20–21.