Nick Land
Making it with Death
If Deleuze is to be salvaged from the inane liberal neo-Kantianism
that counts as Philosophy in France today it is necessary to reassemble and deepen his genealogy. The PseudoNietzscheanism of the late 1960's reaction against Hegel is
scarcely a context commensurate with a thinker of major
importance. and the same could be said of his jousting with
structuralized psychoanalysis. Deleuze's power stems from the
fact that he succeeds in detaching himself from Parisian
temporality much more successfully than most of his
contemporaries. including even Guattari. The time of Deleuze’s
text is a colder. more reptilian. more German time. or at least. a
time of the anti-German Germans of Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche in particular, for whom millennia were to be scanned
with scorn. Most of all it is a Lucretian or Spinozist time, a time of
indifferent nature; engineering bizarre couplings across the
centuries.
I
Modernity is ''essentially'' reeonstructive. a characteristic captured
both in the merely abstract continuity of its productive
organization – capital is always neo-capital – and in the
transcendental dynamic of its predominant (Kantian) philosophical
mode. Critique belongs to capital because it is the first inherently
progressive theoretical procedure to emerge upon the earth;
avoiding both the formal conservatism of inductive natural science
and the material conservatism of dogmatic metaphysics. In the
case both of the mode of production and the mode of reason what
is evident is a self-perpetuating movement of deregulation, whose
tendency is towards an increasingly radical prioritization of the
interrogative impulse. Of course. as Deleuze and Guattari
themselves indicate so graphically in their work, this process of
immanent liberation is constrained by active reconstitution of
archaic control mechanisms; faiths. state machinery, parochial
affinities, neo-tribalisms, an increasing ludicrous farce of authority,
morals, marriages, and mortgages.
The trajectories of modern philosophy map themselves out in
response to this social and theoretical predicament. One stream
of thinking, flowing through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche into the
repressed strata of Freud's psychoanalysis and metapsychology,
traces out the recurrence of the base formative impetus throttled
by Occidental theo-politics. Another stream, associated primarily
with Hegel, is guided by the implicit ideal of a speculative
reconstruction of the political in the wake of Capital. Both of these
tendencies point in the direction of a post-transcendendtal
thinking; in the former case dissolving the polarized differences
between the empirical and its conditions into an open hierarchy of
intensive strata, in the second collapsing the abstract composition
of this polarity into the infinite self-legislation of the concrete
concept. A third current, perhaps the most topographically
intricate of the three, is characterized above al1 by Schelling, and
is driven by the dynamic of critique towards a completion of the
transcendental programme: substituting the immanent continuity
of Spinoza's cosmology for the uninterrogated piety of logical
identity inherited from Kant.
Deleuze is the most powerful exemplar of this transcendental
Spinozism
amongst
contemporary
thinkers.
Derrida's
deconstruction, whilst in the end programmatically similar to a
schizo-analysis or genealogical critique of a Deleuzean kind, is
massively weakened by an influx of neo-humanist themes,
passing through Heidegger from Kierkegaard and Husserl. which
exacerbate the quasi-theological compromise from which
Schelling himself was very far from exempt. Heidegger. whilst
subsidizing the more sordidly regionalistic and idealist elements of
this inheritance, vigorously continues with the erasure of
Spinoza's influence. academicizing and de-naturalising the
thought of impersonal ground or Indifferenz. Whilst both Deleuze
and Derrida critique illegitimate articulation, the former tends to a
consummate materialism, in which intensive substance is
transcendentally released from its paralyzation in extension,
whilst the latter prosecutes a Judaic meditation, marked-out in
theo-graphisms, indefinitely radicalizing an anti-iconic relation to
the absolute. Deus sive natura is not an identity but an inclusive
disjunction; Spinoza the disappearing Jew or Spinoza the
explosive psychotic, deconstruction or schizoanalysis.
lf reconstruction is propelled by capital's ephemeralizing pieties,
schizoanalysis is driven by its magpie ruthlessness. Always
recode, the text of deconstruction tells us. but each time more
subtly. more elusively, developing a little further the law's
protracted parody of itself. Always decode, chatters
schizoanalysis; believe nothing. and extinguish all nostalgia for
belonging. Ask always where capital is most inhumane,
unsentimental, and out of control. Abandon all attachment to the
state. It is not Hegel's social managerialism that is most relevantly
contrasted with Deleuzean nomadism, Hegelianism was only ever
the black humour of modest history. It is rather the non-exclusive
polity of reconstruction or cruder nee-Kantian liberal theories, with
their abstractly re-composable humanities, which are the true
counterpole to Deleuze's anti-political economism. In contrast to
the obsessional neurosis of ethical thought. with its futile attempt
to consolidate a transcendent principle of justice out of that sad
puppet of contractual labour trading codes known as ''the agent'',
schizoanalysis shares in the delicious irresponsibility of everything
anarchic, inundating and harshly impersonal.
Capital cannot disown schizoanalysis without de-fanging itself.
The madness it would fend-off is the sole resource of its own
future; a fringe of de-socialized experimentation which corrodes
its essence and anticipatively mocks the entirety of the currently
existing modes of civility. The real energetic liberty which
annihilates the priest's cage of human freedom is refused at the
level of the political secondary-process during the precise period
in which the economic primary-process is slipping ever more
deeply into its embrace. The deep secret of capital-as-process is
its incommensurability with the preservation of bourgeois
civilization, which clings to it like a dwarf riding a dragon. As
capital ''evolves'' the increasingly absurd rationalization of
production-for-profit peels away like a cheap veneer from the
positive-feedback detonation of production-for-production.
If capital is a social suicide machine. it is because it is compelled
to advantage its assassins. Capital produces the first sociality in
which the pouvoir of dominance is perpetually submitted to the
hazard of experimental puissance. Only by an intensification of
neurotic attachments does it mask the eruption of madness in its
infrastructure, but with every passing year such attachments
become more desperate, cynical, fragile. All of which is to raise
the issue of the notorious ''death of capitalism'', which has been
predominantly treated as a matter of either dread or hope,
scepticism or belief. Capital, one is told, will either survive, or not.
Such projective eschatology completely misses the point, which is
that death is not an extrinsic possibility of capital, but an inherent
function. The death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine
part. The immanent voluptuousity of every unprecedented deal
takes off from the end of the bourgeoisie. Consider the finance
capital usage of cocaine: both a quantitative high traced out as a
deviation from zero and a sumptuary expenditure voiding the
historical sense of wealth. The coked-out futures dealer passing a
drunk on a Manhattan street translates the destiny of class
difference into an immanent intensity traced on a smooth surface
of social disappearance. The bum inhabits the social zero
preferred by capital as the vanishing point of pre-modern legality.
from which the coke rush is repulsed as an anonymous distance
from death. There is a becoming a rich bum, becoming a derelict
on coke. which is integral to the cynicism of frontier capital. This is
the advance modernity of Beckett, where high culture is
immanently differentiated from inarticulate. absolving itself from
ontological specifier. It is thus that there is a becoming-zombie of
the bum just as there is a becoming-wired of the real managers of
the social: the skagged-out housing estate as base line for the
effervescence of the stock market floor. It is quite inaccurate to
suggest that yuppie financiers are oblivious of deprivation, since
the limit oblivion of an absolute proletarianization is consumed
with each bubble of champagne.
There is a familiar humanist response to this becoming zombie at
the limit possibility of the modern worker, which is associated
above all with the word alienation. The processes of de-skilling, or
ever accelerated re-skilling, the substitution of craft by abstract
labour, and the increasing interexchangability of human activity
with technological processes, all accompanied by the dissolution
of identity, loss of attachment, and narcotization of affective life,
are condemned from the basis of a moral critique. A reawakening
of the political is envisaged, aimed at the restoration of a lost
human integrity. Modern existence is understood as profoundly
deadened by the real submission of humane values to an
impersonal productivity, which is itself comprehended as the
expression of dead or petrified labour exerting a vampiric power
over the living. The bloodless zombie proletarian is to be
resuscitated by the political therapist, ideologically cured of the
unholy love for the undead, and bonded to a new eternal life of
social reproduction. The death core of capital is thought as the
object of critique.
Deleuze is differentiated utterly from a socialist humanism of this
kind since in the schizoanalytic programme death is the
impersonal subject of critique, and not an accursed value in the
service of a condemnation. An intricate passage towards the end
of AntiOedipus runs:
The body without organs is the model of death. As the authors of
horror stories have understood so well. it is not death that serves
as the model for catatonia. it is catatonic schizophrenia that
gives its model to death, zero intensity. The death model
appears when the body without organs repels the organs and
lays them aside: no mouth, no tongue, no teeth – to the point of
self-mutilation. to the point of suicide. Yet there is no real
opposition between the body without organs and the organs as
partial objects: the only real opposition is to the molar organism
that is the common enemy. In the desiring-machine, one sees
the same catatonic inspired by the immobile motor that forces
him to put aside his organs, to different parts of the machine,
different and co-existing, different in their very coexistence.
Hence it is absurd to speak of a death desire that would
presumably be in qualitative opposition to the life desires. Death
is not desired, there is only death that desires, by virtue of the
body without organs or the immobile motor, and there is also life
that desires, by virtue of the working organs. [AOe 329]
It is not therefore that the worker is transformed by a process of
privation into a zombie. it is rather that primary production
migrates from personality towards zero, populating a desert at the
end of our world. It is important at this stage to note that Spinoza
changes the sense of desert religion, no longer a religion sprung
from the desert. it becomes a desert at the heart of religion.
Spinoza's substance is a desert God. God as impersonal zero, as
a death that remains the unconscious subject of production.
Within Spinozism God is dead, but only in the sense of a baseline
of zombie becomings, as that which Deleuze calls ''the plane of
consistency'', described in A Thousand Plateaus by the words
''fusionability as infinite zero'' (TP 158). One cannot differentiate
on the plane of consistency between bodies without organs and
the body without organs, between machines and the machine.
Between machines there is always a coupling that conditions their
real difference, and all couplings are immanent to a macromachine. The machines produce their totality alongside
themselves as the undifferentiated or communicated element, a
becoming a catatonic God, erupting like a tumour out of presubstantialized matter, by which nature spawns death adjacent to
itself.
Almost inevitably. when it is a matter of the body without organs it
is a matter of Spinoza. In AntiOedipus we are told that:
The body without organs is the matter that always fills space to
given degrees of intensity, and the partial objects are these
degrees, these intensive parts that produce the real in space
starting from matter as intensity = 0. The body without organs is
the immanent substance, in the most Spinozist sense of the
word; and the partial objects are like its ultimate attributes, which
belong to it precisely insofar as they ate really distinct and
cannot on this account exclude or oppose one another. (AOe
327)
And in A Thousand Plateaus:
After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO? The
attributes are types or genuses of BwO's, substance, powers,
zero intensities as matrices of production. The modes are
everything that comes to pass: waves and vibrations. migrations.
thresholds and gradients, intensities produced in a given type of
substance starting from a given matrix. [TP 153].
These remarks are obviously additional to others in the key
schizoanalytic texts, as well as to the extended discussions of
Spinoza in the two books Deleuze dedicates to his life and work,
and to innumerable comments scattered amongst other writings.
In Nietzsche and Philosophy, for instance, Deleuze isolates
Spinoza as Nietzsche's sole modern forebear, in a remark that is
as significant for understanding Deleuze's thinking as it is
unpersuasive in relation to Nietzsche’s.
The name ''body without organs'' is itself sufficient clue to what is
primarily at stake in the thought, that is to say; the reality of
abstraction. The body without organs is an abstraction without
being an achievement of reason. It is the transcendental desert of
primary production, or the reproduction of production as a
continuum of maximum indifference. It is described in Antioedipus
as ''the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the
unconsumable'' (AOe 8). After all, what could be burnt to injure
Spinoza's God or Nature? What could be created to exult it?
Nothing. Fertility and corrosion modulate substance without
impinging upon it, playing out its icy permutations without
preference. Whatever its empirical configuration there is always
production as such once again: the senseless luxuriance of the
impersonal.
Real abstraction is the transcendental conception of Spinozistic
substance. Already with the wave of Deleuzean texts of the late
1960's – and more particularly with the appearance of Difference
and Repetition – a consistent philosophical project is discernible,
most precisely described as transcendental Spinozism, or a
critique of identity. Parallel in a certain sense to Schelling, but
without any obvious direct influence, Deleuze is delighted by the
naturalistic basis of Spinoza's thinking, but understands it as
lacking an explicit transcendental comprehension of identity.
Deleuze's response is typically generous; smuggling in the
required machine-part and pretending it was already there.
Critique operates by marking the difference between objects and
their conditions, understanding metaphysics as the importation of
procedures which are adapted to objects into a discussion of their
constitutive principles. This means that critique is primarily a
philosophy of production, extracting the genetic or pre-objective
from the discourse; one concerned with constitutive relations, or
syntheses.
In the elementary identity statement A = A the question of
transcendental interpretation is left open. Does 'A' represent an
object of some kind, whether possible, ideal, formal. etc.? Or does
it designate identity as such, as a conditioning principle? In the
former case the relation of identity would be an extrinsic one, with
an ulterior ground, whilst in the latter its relation to a possible
object remains problematic. The critical question remains
unaddressed: how is it possible for something to be the object of
a judgement of identity? Or, how is the object produced in its
identity with itself?
Identity is traditionally conceived as absolutely abstract essence,
or, correlatively, the final principle of intelligibility. Both of these
formulations correspond to the pure logical subject in advance of
predication. Something is what it is. Essence is conceived, at
least implicitly, on the basis of Platonic Eidos; the timeless truth or
pure possibility of the thing, the unproduced, the sterile, the
unengendered. In this way the traditional conception of essence
runs together specificity and identity, and the syllogism operates
from its origin according to generic hierarchies of essence or type
which culminate in the logical theory of sets. From Aristotle to
Kant reason is thus adjusted to the thought of the ''same thing'',
unaware that a transcendental topic is thus conflated with an
empirical one. The body without organs is the real differentiation
between these topics: the same de-thinging itself.
An astonishing philosophical rigor begins to emerge from the
delireal words of Artaud cited early in AntiOedipus :
The body is the body '
it is all by itself
and has no need of organs
the body is never an organism
organisms are the enemies of the body (AOe 9)
Here we find a judgement of identity of a historically aberrant kind.
The body is the body, but only as a repulsion of the organs, or the
retraction of the same from any specific organization. The
compromise peace between the body and its organs that founds
Occidental ontology is threatened by a violent movement of
scission. and one that does not come from the subject, but from
the body. It is thus that Artaud anticipates difference in the
Deleuzean sense, which is to say; radically transcendental
identity.
The reality of identity is death, which is why the organism cannot
coexist with what it is. On the smooth surface of the body without
organs ''what'' and ''is'' recoil allergically from each other, opening
an inclusive disjunction at the heart of essence. This disjunction
separates the identity pole of the body without organs from the
unfettered difference of the detenitorialized organs, splitting apart
the objectivism which implants an empirical identity into rigidified
configurations of difference. Pre-critical objectivism thinks
syntheses on the basis of their consequences. which can be
described as their transcendent or illegitimate usage. Where Kant
writes of legitimacy and illegitimacy, the texts of schizoanalysis
write of the molecular and the molar. Thus the body without
organs is described as a ''giant molecule'' (AOe 327), whilst the
organism is always a molar construct: co-opting identity to
specificity.
Death too bifurcates along this fissure; on the one hand death as
the desert identity of difference, the catatonic cavity of absolute
critique at the end of capital, and on the other death as the molar
object of a negatively constituted desire, reinvesting the intensive
zero into the social order. In AntiOedipus the relative
molecularization of molar death is described in the following
terms:
Freud himself indeed spoke of the link between his ''discovery'' of
the death instinct and World War I, which remains the model of
capitalist war. More generally. the death instinct celebrates the
wedding of psychoanalysis and capitalism; their engagement had
been full of hesitation. What we have to tried to show apropos of
capitalism is how it inherited much from a transcendent deathcarrying agency, the despotic signifier, but also how it brought
about this agency's effusion in the full immanence of its own
system: the full body, having become that of capital-money,
suppresses
the
distinction
between
production
and
antiproduction: everywhere it mixes antiproduction with the
productive forces in the immanent reproduction of its own always
widened limits (the axiomatic) . The death enterprize is one of the
principal and specific forms of the absorption of surplus value in
capitalism. It is this itinerary that psychoanalysis rediscovers and
retraces with the death instinct . . . [AOe 335]
What separates the reinvested antiproduction of capitalist war
from the absolute repulsion of the body without organs is the final
liquidation of death into its function. This is still no more than the
issue of consummate critique, since capital is the historically
concrete illegitimate usage of the conjunctive synthesis. This
means that the production of equivalence is crushed under the
pre-critical or segregated identity of capital. It is thus by occupying
the space of a transcendent condition for production that capital
persists, perpetuating the molar order of social production. The
limit of capital is the point at which transcendent identity snaps,
where the same is nothing but the absolutely abstract
reproduction of difference, produced alongside difference, with
utter plasticity. It is not that difference, too, must have an identity,
but rather that density is the identity of difference. and nothing
besides. Difference does not have a transcendent essence, but
only an immanent plane of consistency without ulterior foundation.
II
The AntiOedipus interpretation of fascism is no doubt crude, but it
is also of enormous power. The revolutionary/fascist disjunction is
used to discriminate between the broad tendencies of
deterritorialization and deterritorialization; between the dissolution
and reinstitution of social order. Revolutionary desire allies itself
with the molecular death that repels the organism, facilitating
uninhibited productive flows, whilst fascist desire invests the
molar death that is distributed by the signifier; rigidly segmenting
the production process according to the borders of transcendent
identities. This is a priestless and guiltless politics emerging from
writers stretched between Spinoza and Reich, and further
developed by Klaus Theweleit, whose study of National Socialism
in his two volume Male Fantasies is – despite its theoretical
naivety – the fullest flowering of schizoanalytic anti-fascism.
The identity of revolutionary and anti-fascist politics lies in
resisting capital's molar projection of its death. All the supposedly
alien sources of disorder which capital represents as the
exteriority of its end, such as working class agitation, feminism,
drugs, racial migration, and the disintegration of the family, are as
essential to its own development as the attributes of a substance.
The revolutionary task is not to establish a bigger, more authentic,
more ascetic exteriority, but to unpack the neurotic refusal
mechanisms that separate capital from its own madness, luring it
into the liquidation of its own fall-back positions. and coaxing it
into investing at the deterritorialized fringe
that would otherwise fall subject to fascist persecution. Schizopolitics is the coercion of capital into immanent coexistence with
its undoing.
This 1972 position becomes fundamentally problematical by
1980, with the appearance of A Thousand Plateaus. Between
AntiOedipus and A Thousand Plateaus a massive shift takes
place in the diagnosis of National Socialism. which is dislodged
from the general category of fascism. And subjected to a more
specific analysis. This mutation is necessitated by an insight – in
part derived from Virilio – that whilst fascism is driven by an
imperative to social order under the molar dominion of the state,
National Socialism is essentially suicidal; employing the state as
the tool of an overwhelming death impulse. This is summarized in
a sentence from the end of ‘Micropolitics and Segmentarity’ –
scandalously mistranslated in the English – as a ‘war machine
that no longer had anything but war as an object and would rather
annihilate its own servants than stop the destruction’ [TP 231]
This is possible because:
The BwO is desire: it is that which one desires and by which one
desires. And not only because it is the plane of consistency or
the field of immanence of desire. Even when it falls into the void
of too-sudden disqualification, or into the proliferation of a
cancerous stratum, it is still desire. Desire stretches that far:
desiring one's own annihilation, or desiring the power to
annihilate. (165)
The politics of AntiOedipus. allied to the molecular dissolution
process flowing out of the impersonal energy-core of capital, are
threatened by a familiar neuroticization. In the end this is nothing
less than the contemporary citadel of Oedipus: if you don't obey
daddy you'll become a Nazi. Attach yourself to the molar
aggregates and you become like Mussolini. but attach yourself to
the untamed molecular flows and you become like Hitler. The
historical impact of this oedipal usage of the National Socialist
episode, and most particularly – of course – the holocaust, can
scarcely be overestimated. Morality has become the complacent
whisper of a triumphant priest: you better keep the lid pressed
down on desire, because what you really want is genocide. Once
this is accepted there is no limit to the resurrection of prescriptive
neoarchaisms that come creeping back as a bulwark against the
jack-booted unconscious; liberal-humanism, watered-down
paganism, and even the stinking relics of Judaeo-Christian
moralism. Anything is welcome, as long as it hates desire and
shores up the cop in everyone's head.
Any politics that has to police itself has lost aIl schizoanalytic
impetus, and reverted to the sad interest-group based reforming
which characterizes the loyal opposition to capital throughout its
history. lts detenitorialization is to be treated as suspect, dissent
finds itself in the conservative role of regenerating a faculty of
moral censure, occupying a space of accusation. In this way the
tawdry pact between the preconscious and the superego that has
dominated socialism since its inception would be reinstated at the
heart of a – now wholly spurious – schizophrenic neonomadism. It
is no exaggeration to suggest that the theory of a ''black-hole
effect'' or ''too-sudden destratification'' (TP 503) threatens to
cripple and domesticate the entire massive achievement of
Deleuze and Guattari's joint work.
Throughout A Thousand Plateaus the warnings against
precipitate deterritorialization are incessant. On three successive
pages from the essay ‘How Do You Make Yourself A Body
Without Organs?’ one finds three typical examples:
You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency. by wildly
destratifying. [TP 160]
The worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into
demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on
us heavier than ever. [TP 161]
A body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns
immediately into a body of nothingness, pure self-destruction,
whose only outcome is death. [TP 162]
It is not obvious where this leaves Freud. Does the death drive
culminate in Nazism, which would mean that the libidinal
dynamics of the Second World War were commensurate with
those of the First? This seems improbable for a number of
reasons, not least because it would mean that a1l developed
capitalist militarism has in a certain sense exceeded fascism.
Perhaps, then, the desire of the Nazis goes beyond the
reinvestable thanatos that emerges in psychoanalysis' pact with
capital, to the point that it insidiously simulates the transcendental
recession of the body without organs? It is tempting to think that
the contortions such a thought demand expose an overhastiness
in the 1972 reading of thanatos, which even in 1980 is still being
dismissed as ''the ridiculous death instinct'' (TP 155). If by 1980
the option is between an adherence to paralyzing post-holocaust
neurosis – Hitler's last and most devastating secret weapon – or a
rethinking of Freudian thanatos, it is perhaps time to challenge
what might earlier have seemed a merely comically overblown
antipathy to Freud. It is worth asking firstly: is Freud ever really
engaged in AntiOedipus? Is it not rather Lacan, who had already
transformed the jungle wilderness at the heart of psychoanalysis
into a structureless parking-lot. before proceeding to analyse
Guattari for seven years, who programmes the supposed antiFreudianism of the book? Of course, Oedipus is peculiarly
nauseating Viennese nursery pap, but where is Oedipus in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle? A question which could be asked
of the majority of Freud's texts. It is Lacan who insists on
Oedipalizing the Fort-Da game, in the general process of
Oedipalizing desire to its foundations; ripping al1 the energy,
hydraulics, pathology, and shock out of Freud. and substituting
lack, the pathos of identity, and Heideggerian pomposity, whilst
deepening the role of the phallus, and trivializing desire into the
cringing aspiration to be loved. There is a neurotic and coformist
stratum in Freud of course, but it floats upon the impersonal flows
of desire that erupt out of traumatized nature. Where are the flows
in Lacan? Where would one be less likely to find anything that
flows than in the gnarled post-Saussurian fetish of the signifier
that dominates his texts? Deleuze and Guattari's estimation of
Lacan as a schizophrenizing tendency in psychoanalysis is the
most absurd contention of their work. By 1980 it has ceased to be
a joke.
The death drive is not a desire for death, but rather a hydraulic
tendency to the dissipation of intensities. In its primary dynamics it
is utterly alien to everything human, not least the three great
pettinesses of representation, egoism, and hatred. The death
drive is Freud's beautiful account of how creativity occurs without
the least effort, how life is propelled into its extravagances by the
blindest and simplest of tendencies, how desire is no more
problematic than a river's search for the sea.
The hypothesis of self-preservative drives, such as we attribute to
alI living beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that the
life of the drives as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in
this light, the theoretical importance of the drives for selfpreservation, power, and prestige diminishes greatly. They are
component drives whose function is to assure that the organism
shall follow its path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of
returning to inorganic existence other than those which are
immanent in the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with
the organism's puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any
context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obtacle.
What we are left with is the fact that the organism wants to die
only in its own way. Thus these guardians of life, too, were
originally the myrmidons of death. Hence arises the paradoxical
situation that the organism struggles most energetically against
events (dangers, in fact) which might help to attain its life's aim
rapidly – by a kind of short-circuit. Such behavior is, however,
precisely what characterizes purely drive-based as opposed to
intelligent efforts, [OM 312]
What if – instead of ‘How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without
Organs?’ – one were to ask: how do you make yourself a Nazi?
For this is far more strenuous than the 1980 diagnosis suggests.
1) Wherever there is impersonality and chance introduce
conspiracy, lucidity. and malice. Look for enemies everywhere,
ensuring that they are such that one than simultaneously envy
and condemn them. Proliferate new subjectivities; racia1 subjects,
national subjects, elites, secret societies, destinies.
2) Burn Freud, and take desire back to the Kantian conception of
will. Wherever there is impulse represent it as choice, decision,
the whole theatrical drama of volition. Introduce a gloomy
atmosphere of oppressive responsibility by couching all
discourses in the imperative form.
3) Revere the principle of the great individual. Personalize and
mythicize historical processes. Love obedience above all things.
and enthuse only for signs; the name of the leader, the symbol of
the movement, and the icons of molar identity.
4) Foster nostalgia for what is maximally bovine, inflexible, and
stagnant: a line of racially pure peasants digging the same patch
of earth for eternity.
5) Above all. resent everything impetuous and irresponsible, insist
upon unrelenting vigilance, crush sexuality under its reproductive
function, rigidly enforce the domestication of women, distrust art,
classicize cities to eliminate the disorder of uncontrolled flows,
and persecute all minorities exhibiting a nomadic tendency.
Trying not to be a Nazi approximates one to Nazism far more
radically than any irresponsible impatience in destratification.
Nazism might even be characterized as the pure politics of effort;
the absolute dominion of the collective super-ego in its
annihilating rigor. Nothing could be more politically disastrous
than the launching of a moral case against Nazism: Nazism is
morality itself; heir to Europe's respectable history; that of witchburnings, inquisitions, and pogroms. To want to be in the right is
the common substratum of morality and genocidal reaction; the
same desire for repression – organized in terms of the
disapproving gaze of the father – that AntiOedipus analyzes with
such power. Who could imagine Nazism without daddy? And who
could imagine daddy being pre-figured in the energetic
unconscious?
Death is too simple. too fluid. too disdainful of races and
fatherlands to have anything much to do with the Nazis.
Ressentiment was something they knew about. as was the
aspiration to a mythic sacrifice, a Götterdämmerung that would
inscribe them in the history books, but these things never stretch
to dissolution-desire. After all, lose control and you might end up
fucking with a Jew, becoming effeminate, or creating something
degenerate like a work of art. Does anyone really think that
Nazism is like letting go? Theweleit's studies of Nazi body posture
should be sufficient to disabuse one of such an absurdity. Nazism
can turn you into a stiff before the messy passage into death.
A consummate libidinal materialism is distinguished by its
complete indifference to the category of work. Wherever there is
labour or struggle there is a repression of the raw creativity which
is the atheological sense of matter and which – because of its
anegoic effortlessness – seems identical with dying. Work, on the
other hand. is an idealist principle used as a supplement or
compensation for what matter cannot do. One only ever works
against matter, which is why labour is able to replace violence in
the Hegelian struggle for recognition. Work is also complicit with
phenomenology, which grounds the experience of effort, rather
than treating this experience as one other thing that matter can
effortlessly do. Even in the deepest sickness of its illegitimacy
everything is effortless to the energetic unconscious, and the
whole of our history – which seems so strenuous from the
perspective of idealists – has pulsed with hydraulic irresponsibility
out of a spontaneous and unconscious productivity. There can be
no conception of work that does not project spirit into the origin,
morally valorizing exertion, such that Jahweh needed to rest on
the seventh day. In contrast matter – or Spinoza's God – expects
no gratitude, grounds no obligation, establishes no oppressive
precedent. Beyond the gesticulations of primordial spirit it is
positive death that is the model, and revolution is not a duty, but
surrender.