Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T07:00:14.738Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - The Age of Cynicism: Deleuze and Guattari on the Production of Subjectivity in Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Jason Read
Affiliation:
University of Southern Maine
Ian Buchanan
Affiliation:
University of Wollongong
Nicholas Thoburn
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Get access

Summary

Gilles Deleuze argues that Spinoza's assertion ‘we do not know what a body can do’ functions as a ‘war cry’ cutting through the conceptual divisions of soul, mind and consciousness, defining a new concept of power, philosophy and subjectivity (Deleuze 1990: 255). Deleuze's assertion suggests, albeit obliquely, that works of philosophy can be interpreted through not just their central insight or main points, but their ‘war cry’, the formulation that expresses the battle they wage against other philosophies and conceptions of the world. The ‘war cry’ or slogan (as in mot d'ordre) that could be used to sum up Deleuze and Guattari's two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is ‘desire belongs to the infrastructure’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 348/416). With this phrase Deleuze and Guattari reject any dualisms or hierarchies, between the mental and the material, subjective and objective or social and libidinal, that would make either the subjective an effect of the material (as in most Marxisms) or the social an effect of the libidinal (as in psychoanalysis). In the first volume, Anti-Oedipus, this assertion is the basis of the polemics against psychoanalysis: for psychoanalysis desire and its anxieties are necessarily mediated through the family, which provides both their cause and condition of intelligibility. This assertion of the immanence of desiring production to social production, or, in the terms of A Thousand Plateaus, machinic assemblages of bodies to collective assemblages of enunciation, persists throughout the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, becoming a central philosophical assertion as many of the polemics against psychoanalysis of the first volume are left by the wayside (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 89/113).

Type
Chapter
Information
Deleuze and Politics , pp. 139 - 159
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×