Introduction: Deleuze and the Social: Is there a D-function?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
In the midst of the delirium of Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari calmly inform us that we ‘always make love with worlds’ (1984: 294). This marks their final transgression of the repressive segmentation of contemporary critique: the segmentation of the libidinal economy and the political economy, desire production and social production, Freud and Marx. In the Oedipal triangle and its double bind, desire was forever betrayed and political critique was forever kept from connecting with the real processes of production. This impasse is still with us: contemporary sociology makes love with no worlds we are aware of; social and economic analysis in general is paralysed before the problem of liberating desire, criticising its capture and expressing its abundance.
But is it feasible to put together a book that makes love with worlds? It will, in any case, put us in the volatile position of the alcoholic engaged in the experiment of drinking, always searching for the penultimate rather than the ultimate drink. The penultimate drink is a limit of relative deterritorialisation (you change, but you don't leave), whereas the threshold is the ultimate drink that will make the alcoholic change assemblage altogether, progressing into a hospital assemblage or a suicide assemblage. The penultimate drink will enable him to keep on drinking, living, moving, loving, while the ultimate drink is the end (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 438).
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- Deleuze and the Social , pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006