THE FABRIC OF THE WORLD: deleuze on fetishism and generative time images

Abstract

Deleuze's attitude towards fetishistic desire reveals important ethical commitments found throughout his philosophical corpus, bridging the gap between works written alone and those co-written with Félix Guattari. This essay traces the function of the “scene” in Deleuze's writings from Coldness and Cruelty through Thousand Plateaus to Cinema 2, showing its kinship with the concepts of “flesh” and “montage” in Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, and bringing Deleuze into dialogue with feminist and queer accounts of fetishistic sexuality.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• cinema
• sexuality
• fetishism
• queer studies
• masochism

Notes

Thanks to Brent Adkins, T. Kenny Fountain, and the anonymous reviewers of Angelaki for helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay.

The following abbreviations have been employed: AO: Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus; TP: Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus; CC: Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty; C2: Deleuze, Cinema 2; WP: Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?; FFC: Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts.

See also Gamman and Makinen 72–74, 80; Steele; Trebay; and Weiss. A brief historical overview of the ways in which fetishistic themes were incorporated in filmed pornography over the course of the twentieth century can be found in Williams 196–97.

Hetero or homosexual preferences enter into my understanding of fetishism only insofar as most people, whether or not they are explicitly fetishist, give special importance to the sexually distinct anatomy of their prospective partners, which would otherwise simply be one of many vulnerable and pleasurable body parts.

As Alison Moore has noted, Deleuze's analysis of Sade and Masoch, major European authors of past centuries, shows us how to detect, not to define the actual differences between overlapping epistemological, political, and sexual “desiring-machines” in the historical practices of queer communities.

Alfred Binet's classic essay “Fetishism in Love” appeared in 1887. Freud first discussed the phenomenon in the 1905 “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” where it simply consists in replacing “the normal sexual object” with “another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim” (153). For Freud's account of fetishism in terms of “disavowing” recognition of sexual difference, see “Fetishism” (from 1907). Freud tends to distinguish fetishism, hetero or homosexual preference, and sadism or masochism as separate phenomena, and to consider the function or development of these phenomena differently depending on whether they occur in the lives of men or women. For these distinctions, see also “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” and “Female Sexuality.”An influential psychoanalytic study of fetishism and other minority sexual practices, in which transvestitism and aggressivity play a major role, is Stoller's Perversion; similar ideas are found in Roudinesco. However, Stoller changed his mind about the inevitability of these motivations with the publication of Pain and Passion. American feminists have criticized the simplistic understanding of sexual “difference” at work in these theories; see Butler and McCallum. French analysts who share their conviction that differences are multiple and ambiguous include Nahon and Prokhoris. For an example of the neurological understanding of fetishistic sexual preference, see Doidge 93–131.

Following Freud (“Three Essays” 135–36; “Instincts” 122), Lacan defines drive by its object, by its aim, and by its goal – the material for one's project, the way one goes about that project, and what one hopes to accomplish by doing so (FFC 178–79). Aim and goal are both possible translations of the French but and the German Ziel; Lacan clarifies that sometimes, especially in the case of part drives, these phenomena must be distinguished.

The pack is the primary unit, and “wolf,” horse, girl, boy refer to many subject positions and object positions within a single scene (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 274–77). Their combination can also be figured as a combination and selection of affects: inhibition, aggression, playfulness, permission, compulsion, tenderness, persistence, surprise. One never, according to Deleuze and Guattari, completely becomes a wolf any more than one imitates a wolf; one adopts discrete attitudes that are components of a wolf-multiplicity. The same holds for Schreber or any transsexual whose montage can best be described as “becoming-woman” – although every becoming-woman is singular, this singularity is a flock of women as it would be in a three-way dressing-room mirror.

Note that in Coldness and Cruelty Deleuze refers to this as resexualization by Thanatos rather than Eros (120). This Freudian name for the drive, which associates repetition with the destruction of existing boundaries, organisms, and relationships (i.e., the death drive), is less important in Thousand Plateaus. In the latter, however, Deleuze and Guattari do express concern about the possibility of getting stuck in a destructive version of deterritorialization (TP 150–51).

This may be true at the level of childhood associations between “maleness” and exploration or excitement and “femaleness” with soothing, as in the work of Jessica Benjamin, or the ways in which class, race, and religiously inflected roles and images of the two genders influence the self-understanding and self-explanation of adult actors, such as those in care professions and political office.

However, there is nothing more mechanical or clichéd about the sensation of being whipped than the sensation of being penetrated (or hugged, or caressing silk), and the body parts involved are equally celebrated in their own genres of erotica, although they obviously present the subject with different challenges to his or her self-respect.

This is the basis for Carter's account of Sade as an unerring critic of male domination in “straight” society and MacKinnon's radical feminist critique of heterosexuality as indiscernible from sadism in a sexist culture. One might also argue that shame and confusion about (unwelcome) demands of heterosexuality encourage aggression, which many producers of pornography are only too willing to exploit for economic gain.