nick-land-making-it-with-death-remarks-on-thanatos-and-desiringproduction

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 24 N°. I, January 1993 MAKING I T WI TH DEATH: REMARKS ON THANATOS AND DESIRING-PRODUCTION NICK LAND If Deleuze is to be salvaged from the inane liberal neo-Kantianism that counts as Philosophy in France today it is necessary to re-assemble and deepen his genealogy. The Pseudo-Nietzscheanism 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" recontructive, a characteristic captured both in the merely abstract continuity of its productive organisation - 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 conservativism 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 de-regulation, 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 modem philosophy map themselves out in response to this social anq theoretical predicament. One stream of thinking, flowing through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche into the repressed strata of Freud's psychoanalysis and metapsychology, trace 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-transcendendatal thinking; in the former case dissolving the polarised differences between the empirical and its conditions into an open hierarchy of intensive strata, in the second 66

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 characterised above all 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 examplar of this transcendental Spinozism amongst contemporary thinkers. Derrida's deconstruction, whilst in the end progr ammatically 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 subtilizing the more sordidly personalistic 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 inc.lusive disjunction; Spinoza the disappearing Jew or Spinoza the explosive psychotic, deconstruction or schizoanalysis. If deconstruction is propelled by capital's ephemeralizing pieties, schizoanalysis is driven by its magmic 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 inhuman, 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 modem history. It is rather the non-exclusive polity of deconstruction or cruder neo-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 67

period in which the economic primary-process is slipping ever more deeply i n t o i t s 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 t h e issue o f the notorious " death o f capita lism", w h i c h h a s 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 proferred by capital as the vanishing point of pre-modem 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 inarticulacy, absolving itself from ontological specifity. 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 modem 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 a b s t ract labour, a n d the in creasing i nter­ exchangability of h u man a ctivity with technological process es,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. Modem existance is understood as profoundly 68

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 pol itical 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 moJar 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 frim 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 1 5 8]. 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 macro-machine. The machines produce their totality alongside themselves as the undifferentiated or communicated element, a becoming a catatonic God, erupting like a tumour out of pre­ substantialized 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 are really distinct and cannot on this account exciude or oppose one another. [AOe 327]. 69

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, substances, 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 modem 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 l 960's - and more particularly with the appearance of Difference and Repetition - a consistent philosophical project is d i s c ernible, most p r e c i s e l y 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 comprehesion 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 r e mains unaddressed: how is it possible for something to be the object of a judgement 70

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 deterritorialized 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 71

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 death-carrying 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 identity 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 revolutiona ry/fascist disjunction is used to discriminate between the broad tendencies of deterritorialization and reterritiorialization; 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 unpick 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 72

that would otherwise fall subject to fascist persecution. Schizo-politics is the coercion of capital into immanent coexistence with its undoing. This 1972 position becomes fundamentally problematized 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 destratification, 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 all schizoanalytic impetus, and reverted to the sad interest-group based reformism which characterizes the loyal opposition to capital throughout its history. Its deterritorialization 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 preconsciqus 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 s u g g e s t that t h e 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 73

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 thr 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 all developed capitalist militarism has in a certain sense exceeded fascism. Perhaps, then, the desire of the Nazis goes beyound 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 rediculous 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 trans formed the jungle wilderness at the heart of psychoanalysis into a structuralist parking-lot, before proceeding to analyse Guattari for seven years, who programmes the supposed anti-Freudianism 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 all 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 conformist 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 L a c a n as a s c hizophrenizing ten d e n c y 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 74

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 all 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 self-preservation, power, and prestige diminishes greatly. They are component drives whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own 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 obstacle. 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 can simultaneously envy and condemn them. Proliferate new subjectivities; racial subjects, national subjects, elites, secret societies, destinies. 2) Bum 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 ofearth 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 disasterous than the launching of a moral case against Nazism: Nazism is morality itself; heir to Europe's respectable history; that of witch­ burnings, 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 75

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 Gotterdammerung that would inscribe them in the history books, but these things never stretch to dissolution-desire. Afrer 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 tum 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 c o mplicit 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 idealism - 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. University of Warwick References AOe: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane, London 1984 (Paris 1972) OM Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology, The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth 1984 TP Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, translated by Brian Massumi, London 1987 (Paris 1980) 76