JONES
formulates and projects upon an other, by way of a medium
of sensuality, a coding that unites the body-parts in a relationship governed by what appears to be, in the end, something
very close to a (Foucauldian) inscription of Care.
A. Lingis. Segmented organisms page 16.
J-F. Lyotard. The Inhuman Polity Press. Cambridge. 1991.
A. Lingis. The Society of Dismembered Body Parts page 7.
A. Lingis. The Society of Dismembered Body Parts page 7.
J. Derrida Of Grammatobgy Trans GC SpivakJohn
Hopkins University USA page 139
d'Io
J. Derrida. ibid page 140.
ditto
ditto
A. Lingis. The Society of Dismembered Body Parts
pee 20
M. Foucault. Discipline and Punish Trans A Sheridan.
Penguin Books. London. 1977.
A. Lingis. The Society of Dismembered Body Parts page
17
NOTES
1
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
24
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
Energumen Critique
I would like to begin with an anti-oedipal intervertion of Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason: "Our age is, in especial degree, the
age of universal schizophrenia, to which everything must submit". 0 Copernican Revolution! 0 critical sobriety! 0 submission and humiliation! A despot is being beaten. The great
geopolitical sweep through nomadic, anarchistic and despotic regimes that heralds the call-to-arms of critical philosophy is not so much of historical as it is of geographical and
strategic import: critical philosophy must secure the battlefield, the Kampfplatz of metaphysics; the latter's successive
governments are of only incidental importance, since above
all what impels the establishment of the Tribunal, "none other
than the critique of pure reason" (CPR Axil): is the completely
anarchic space these "endless controversies" have left behind; a flat and featureless extension over which to draw its
boundaries, erect its fences and maintain its "perpetually
armed state". Critique invests defensive stations at the extreme borders of this space, as well as at each of its internal
limits: not only, that is, on the other side of the "continuous
coastline of experience itself - a coast we cannot leave
without venturing upon a shoreless ocean" (CPR A 395), but
also on this side, as the lines dissociating the courtroom from
the battlefield - "the realm of this critique extends to all the
claims that these powers make, in order to place them within
the boundaries of their rightful use" (CPJ Ak.176). Communicating spontaneously with each line of the defensive positions
it occupies, critique has flattened out and striated the battlefield, which remains marked by the deep scars of its military
ascendancy, continuously remarking the ground plan or
architectonic of pure reason.
The critical revolution also spills over into other spaces. Notably the theatre. The theatre is above all an apparatus of
energetic capture, a means of retaining the ennervation of
the spectacle of "intestine wars" that racked the earth in its
25
GRANT
Hobbesian "natural state", so as to continue to draw on its
production of an indifferent earth on which Critique might
build its enlightened edifice. Thus, encasted in the courtroom,
observed from "the safe seat of the critic, these conflicts, now
bloodless, continue:
Instead... of rushing into the fight, sword in hand, we should
rather play the part of the peaceable onlooker, from The safe
seat of the critic. The struggle is indeed toilsome to the combatants, but for us can be quite entertaining; and its outcome,
certain to be quite bloodless, must be of advantage as contributing to our theoretical insight. Besides, (the conflict of
dogmatic and sceptical) reason is already of itself so confined
and held within limits by reason, that we have no need to call
out the guard. "(CPR A747/8775)
Towards the outer reaches of the critical plains, the same thing
is repeated as Kant looks onto the "scene, over a hundred
miles removed", of the French Revolution, which
finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in
the game Themselves) a wishful participation that borders
closely on enthusiasm ('An Old Question...', KH p.144)
Kant takes such enthusiasm to be an index of humanity's
progress. In the Critique of the Power of Judgement, however,
it is an affect bordering not only on participation, but on
Wahnsinn, delirium, wherein the "unbridled imagination" is
given free rein (CPJ Ak.275). These assaults on the distinguishability of border states (which Deleuze and Guattari, in Mille
Plateaux, call "zones of indiscernability") reach fever pitch
with the case of the sublime. In consequence enthusiasm
strikes us not so much as an index of humanity's progress, as it
does an index of deterritorialisation. This is why, following The
Anti-Oedipus, 2 critique must be regarded as a machinic assemblage of desire, such as function in "dreams, delirium,
and phantasma" (p.316), whose strata and substrata, these
extensive spaces, revolve around the intensive space of the
Body without Organs. We will return to intensive space later.
The Anti-Oedipus makes no secret of its critical affiliations:
In what he termed the critical revolution, Kant intended to
26
ENERGUMEN CRITIQUE
discover criteria immanent to the understanding so as to
distinguish the legitimate and the illegitimate uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of transcendental philosophy..., he therefore denounced the transcendent use
of syntheses such as appeared in metaphysics. In like fashion
we are compelled to say that psychoanalysis has its metaphysics - its name is Oedipus. And that a revolution - this time
materialist - can proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of the
unconscious as found in Oedipal psychoanalysis, so as to
rediscover a transcendental unconscious defined by the immanence of its criteria, and a corresponding practise that we
shall call schizoanalysis. (A-Oe p.75)
A desirerevolution with which Deleuze and Guattari quite
rightly credit Kant (A-Oe p.25). Schizoanalysis in turn flattens
the institutional, bureaucratic overcoded spaces of the Critical Tribunal, but follows Kant in deterritorialising the despots'
territory, rendering it artificial, "more perverse". They, however, do not theatricise the bloodless conflicts in the core of
the courtroom, they take despots as agents of de- and
reterritorialisation, deterritorialising the "primitive territorial
machine" and reterritorialising it as "the despotic machine".
"Leave the tedious lingring method", bellows Hume, interrupting his schizo-stroll or getting up from the dinner table to
hurl Molotovs into the citadel of human reason: "one can
never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialisation" (AOe p.321). It is in this direction that we will now briefly turn.
Deterritorialisation and Geology
Deleuze and Guattari are careful to insist that deterritorialisation
and reterritorialisation form a circuit of intensities that circulate
over the Body without Organs, "the ultimate residuum of a
deterritorialised socius" (A-Oe p.33).
Whether physical, psychological or social, D is relative insofar
as it concerns the historical relations of the earth with the
territories sketched on it or effaced from it, its geological
relation with eras and catastrophes, its astronomical relation
with the cosmos and the solar system of which it is a part. But
27
GRANT
deterritorialisation is absolutewhen the earth passes into the pure
plane of immanence of a thought-Being, a Thought-Nature, towards
infinite diagrammatical movements. (...) The deterritorialisation of
such a plane does not rule out its retenitorblisation, but sets it up as
the ccrningcreafion ofanewearTh. Further, absokrle detenibfiaii;afion
can onlybe thought according to certain relations lobe determined
with relative reterritorialisations, not only cosmic, but geographical,
historical and psychosocial. There is always a sense in which absolute detenitorialisation on the plane ofimmanence conies on from a
relative detenitorialisation in a given field.(QP p.85)
The geological motif in this passage retains a geo-historical trajectory, based on eras, catastrophes and the new earth; Arnaud Villanni
finds the "precise geographical sense of the plateau" in linear
transformations of the erosion-sedimentation type, 3 but both remain
within a very narrow band of the intensities that remain on the full
body of the earth, constituting "relative deterritorialisations". It is in
this sense that Kant's deterritorialisations must be understood. The
sequence barbarian-despot-nomad-judge, i.e.,the critical revolution,
demonstrates relative deterritorialisations that are immediately followed by judicial "perversions" (detournements) or retenitorialisations.
So it is with most revolutions, whether fascist, bourgeois or revolutionary: it makes little difference to the libidinal investments (A-Oep.
364). As Deleuze and Gucrttari putt concerning the discovery of the
unconscious and its ensuing recoding on the analyst's couch and
the machinery of neurosis, "psychoanalysis is like the Russian
revolution: we don't know when tstarted going bad" (A-Oep.55). But
critique has many unexpbited intensive thresholds that are not at all
stable. For example, the enthusiasm Kant finds in "the hearts of the
disinterested spectators" of the French revolution is simultaneously
an index of the progress of humanity and encroaching delirium. We
must accordingyfollow Dominique Nog uez on the matter of revolutions when she insists that the Russian revolution constitutes a vast
"dadaist prank on history".
The Anti-Oedipus proposes an intensive geology, an absolute
deterritorialisation wherein the earth is stripped of the layers or
"planes of resistance" thcrtenvelopthe BwO, proceeding "with great
patience, great care, by successively undoing the representative
terrttorialties and reterritorialisations" (A-Oe p.318).
28
ENERGUMEN CRITIQUE
One never deterritorialises alone; there are always at least two
terms..., and each of these two terms reterritorialises on the other.
reterritorialisation must not be confused with a return to a primitive or
older territoriality; it necessarily implies a set of artifices by which
one element, itself deterritorialised, serves as a new territory for the
other, which has lost its own territoriality as well. (MP p.174)
Thus the cycles of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, endlessly revolving at different speeds and intensities, overlapping,
feedbacking and breaking into multiplicities of other cycles, "there is
no such thing as relatively independent circuits" (A-Oep.4). Asking
Kant, with Deleuze and Guattari, "what drives your own desiringmachines?" (A-Oep. 290), we impatiently await the opportunity to
seize onthe delirium which heraldsthe breakdown andtotal collapse
of the critical machinery, as itsimutaneously approaches its highest
and lowest intensities.
Incipient Delirium
We have seen that deterritorialisation movesfrom geologyto cycles
and circuits, from maps to diagrams and intensity. Critique, by the
same token, moves from history to geography to geology to intensity. It is this "last" passage (geology - intensity) that we will
examine here. Sch (:)analysis replaces the maps of the old earth
with circuit-diagrams of the new.
"There are no statues in the unconscious" (A-Oep.338). 4 Whatthen
of Kant's battlefields, courts, theatres and architectonics? They are
filled up with desiring-machines, "indices of deterritorialisation" (AOe p.316) which testify to immense perverse reterritorialisations: the
Kant assemblage, as we shall see, constitutes a particular deleuzoguattarianmegamachinethatopercrtes prodigious deterrttorialisations
and reterritorialisations. The scorched earth leff by Hume's imperialist expedient ("Here then is the only expedient, from which we can
hope for success in our philosophical researches, to leave the
tedious lingring method, which we have hitherto followed, and instead
of taking now and then a castle or village on the frontier, to march up
directlyto the capital or center of these sciences, to human nature
itself (...). From this station we may extend our conquests over all
those sciences... 5), is a vector of deterritorialisation on which critique
29
GRANT
seizes and reterritorialises, only to be caught up in a more intense
deterritorialisation that digs up the subsoil of critical space. The
Critique of the Power of Judgement institutes a "critique of the
judging subject" (CPJ Introduction VIII, Ak.194)in order to explore
"the terrain supporting this edifice to the depth at which lies the first
foundation of our power of principles... so that no part of the edifice
may give way, which would inevitably result in the collapse of the
whole" (CPJ Preface Ak.169). Here, the linear order of temporal
succession is displaced: the First Critique provides the new earth
and marks it with the boundaries and borderlines of the architectonic;
the Third undertakes to dig up the foundationsfor a "last" look, a final
test.
With this "last" test, we might ask, with Deleuze and Guattari,
"what does an alcoholic call the last glass?" (MP 438) The
"last" forms a limit, a break in a series and the incipience of a
threshold, which, in the case of the alcoholic, is marked by the
continuation of the series following the limit, the last glass, and
the "'I'm going to stop', the theme of the last glass" (Ibid). In
like fashion, critique never stops: just as, in Lyotard's Libidinal
Economy, Little Girl Marx reproaches Old Bearded Prosecutor
Marx for never quite completing the case against capital, 6 so
the delirial Jacobin-Revolutionary Kant and the strict, sober
and just Prussian-Reformist Kant are caught in the critical
machinations of endless cycles of de- and re- territorialisation,
of increasing intensity.
From the case of enthusiasm, we proceed to that of the
Sublime, or the threshold of critique's becoming-delirial that
sets all its borders and careful deliniations oscillating wildly. As
we said, the excavators of the Third Critique set to work on the
liminal coded space of the tribunal. What the First Critique did
to history, the third does to space. Nothing illustrates quite so
clearly these indissociable circuits of de- and re-territorialisation as does the Sublime, the aesthetic judgement of which,
Kant writes, "contributes nothing to the cognition of objects;
hence it belongs only to the critique that is the propadeutic to
all philosophy - viz., the critique of the judging subject" (CPJ
Ak.194).
30
Judgement Deranged
ENERGUMEN CRITIQUE
Just as Kantian theatrics delimits the specular space of
derealised conflicts, the topological series which figures in
both the first and second introductions to the Third Critique,
delimits the field of the concept, bounded by the inaccessible
field of the supersensible, and subdivides the former field into
territory, domain and residence. The purpose of this conceptual geography is both to reassert the critical conquest of
speculation, or the prohibition of undertaking perilous voyages on the unbounded ocean, "native home of illusions", in
thecretica I reason, and to (provide the incentive to " occupy(beseten)
(the supersensible) with Ideas", to invest in this unbounded field with
neither territory, domain nor residence (CPJ Intro.11, Ak.174-5). As
Kant says, the critique of the power of judgement bears precisely on
placing the claims made bythe various powers orfaculties "within
the boundaries of their rightful (use)" (Ak.176). Judgement, meanwhile, has itself no domain nor field, its task being "to have already
explored" the terrain "supporting the edifice" of metaphysics, to
establish and secure "the firstfoundation of our power of principles
independent of experience" (Ak.168). Judgement, both primary and
parasitic, territorialising and deterritorialising, a supplementary power
par excellence, "maybe annexed to (theoretical or practical reason)
as needed" (Ak.168).
Having no proper field, then judgement remains the war-machine' of
critical philosophy: the Tribunal's "judicial sentence" not only "strikes
at the very root of conflicts" and thus "secures an eternal peace", as
in the First Critique (A752/8780), it revivifies these conflicts as
spectacle, and consumes them in a state which "borders on
enthusiasam"(KHp.144). Judgement can find no residence in the
liminal fields of critique, and its mercenary annexation to one or the
other of the realms of reason, theoretical or practical, far from
establishing and securing the terrain upon which the edifice of
metaphysics is to be constructed, intensifies their disjunct spontaneity, mobiles and agitates the "permanently armed state" occupied by critique.
Judgement remains nomadic, both critical and sceptical: it circulates
both inside the pre-critical spaces deranged or perverted by
31
GRANT
desire, or, as the Anthropology has it, fragmented by the
"intrusion of a disturbed power of judgement (gestorte
Urteilskraft: APV s52, Ak.215); and outside, "uninvolved", looking peacefully on from the "safe seat of the critic" (CPR
A747/8775), Similarly, it is in the "state of nature", a "state of
violence and injustice", in the "absence of critique", that
war as opposed to the lawsuit provides the only only means to
"establish and secure" the claims of reason (CPR A751-2/
B779-80).
It is particularly striking that what was the "boundless ocean" and
the "native home of all illusion in the First Critique (A235-6/8295),
has become, in the conceptual geographyof the an unhabitable
realm, but a field nonetheless. There is a geological acceleration of
the becoming-land of the ocean, at the sometime as there takes
place in the Judgement of the Sublime, a becoming liquid of the
affect, as theAnthropology puts it. The one deterrttorialisesthe other,
but neither can reterrtorialise on the other. Deleuze and Guattari are
only partially correct then when they write that with the Copernican
Revolution, Kant establishes a "direct relation between thought and
the earth" (QP p.82). All this changes with the Third Critique. The
earth prepared for the Tribunal and its liminal spaces enters, with the
nomad power of judgement seizing onthe affect of the Sublime. As
affect, it "works like water that breaks though a dam" (APV s74,
Ak.252). Here, in the Sublime and in enthusiasm, we catch a
glimpse of the delirium that drives critical philosophy, an obsessional
relation to the becoming liquid of the earth, or as The Anti-Oedipus
puts it, "the greatest danger would be yet another dispersion, a
scission such that all the possibilities of coding would be suppressed: decoded flows, flowing on a blind, mute deterritorialised
socius - such is the nightmare" that critical philosophy, as opposed
to the "primitive social machine", cannot exorcise." (A-Oep.153)
There is also an intensive relation; the circuits of the affect increase
in intensity with the Sublime, since the latter is "a pleasure that
arises only indirectly: it is produced by the feeling of a momentary
inhibition (Hemmung: the text has Freud's word) of the vital forces
followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger"
(CPJ s23 Ak.245). This is indeed the desirerevolution that Deleuze
and Guattari ascribe to Kant;8 the sublime effects an absolute
32
ENERGUMEN CRITIQUE
deterritorialisation that brings the critical cycles of
deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation to its peak of intensity
all the way to a draining that brings it to its base =0, or the
critical Body without Organs.
Since philsophy is a majoritarian, molar, institutional discourse
that still adheres to the "tedious lingring method" that Hume
was so bored by, opening a discourse on intensities is a tricky
business. Thus Lyotard in 'Notes on the Return and Kapital':
From the moment we begin to speak here we are in representation and theology. The walls of Cerisy-la-salle are the walls
of a museum, i.e. the setting aside of affects and the privilege
of exteriority accorded to concepts; intensitiesare placed in
reserve, made quiescent, and thus put on stage. (...) Weakening, the loss of intensity, old age and normalisation sustain
representation. Even if we suppress these castle walls, even if
we held this discourse in the subway, it would remain corrupt
as Nietzsche said. The condition of representation is internal to
philosophical discourse. 9
The deduction of volume, the theatrical dispositif: the institution puts intensities on stage. We find the same thing in Kant.
Faced with the ennervating spectacle of the French revolution, unfolding "on a stage more than a hundred miles away",
critique machines these errant intensities and regicidal desires
into signs, into an index of progress. We find the same thing in
Freud. Dreams, as the "royal road to the unconscious", 10 take
place on "another scene or stage (ein andere Schauplatz)" ;11
here too the displacing and condensing intensities of the
primary processes are molded into signs to be decoded,
indices of what Deleuze and Guattari call a relative
deterritorialisation, or a transcoding and reterritorialisation.
Thus the theatrical apparatus: the body at the centre of a
concentric organisation of spaces, the institution shares its
walls with the auditorium. Hence Freud's regal quest, and
hence Kant's regicidal enthusiasm: there was quite a different
scenario when Queen Metaphysics was gleefully deposed
and butchered by nomads, sceptics and anarchists, as Kant
relates in the preface to the First Critique:
Her (metaphysics') government, under the administration of
33
GRANT
the dogmatists, was at first despotic. But inasmuch as the
legislation still bore traces of the ancient barbarism, her empire gradually through intestine wars gave way to complete
anarchy: and the sceptics, a species of nomads, despising all
settled forms of life, broke up from time to time all civil society.
(...) And now... the prevailing mood is that of weariness and
complete indifferentism - the mother, in all sciences, of chaos
and night. (...Such indifference) is a call to reason to („.)
institute a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims,
and dismiss all groundless pretentions, not by despotic decrees, but in accordance with its own eternal and immutable
laws. This tribunal is no other than the critique of pure reason.
(CPR Aix-Audi)
Here regicide was a pretext for (and Kant is uncertain) either
"approaching reform and restoration" or "a single and sudden revolution"; if not to reassemble, revive and reinstate the
Queen, then to reterritorialise her in the new earth's bureaucracy, to frantically guzzle at her remains in order at least to
renew the savour of her "strict, just and sober" prohibitions, in
the face of the manifest indifference currently regining over
the battlefield of metaphysics. "We have hung the Queen, so
we must hang her portrait". The first Critique is resonant with
the building of a severe architecture, which has as its purpose
to prepare the ground for the assembly of a new organism.
There is a redrawing of borders, a redrafted statute of rights of
way, and, when all the limits have been established and are
adequately policed (as Kant has it, "to deny that the service
which the Critique renders is positive in character, would thus
be like saying that the police are of no positive benefit" (CPR
Bxxv), they produce a skeletal proto-interiority, a moquette of
pure reason. Deleuze and Guattari have provided a machinic
portrait of the Kantian Body without Organs, the exquisite
corpse of critique:
"We could imagine", write Deleuze and Guattari, "a
machinic portrait of Kant, illusions and all:
1.- the "I think", the sonorous cow's head which endlessly
repeats Ego = Ego. 2.- the categories as universal concepts (4
great headings): extending and retracting shafts that follow
the circular motion of 3.3.- the mobile wheel of the schemata.
34
ENERGUMEN CRITIQUE
4.- Time, the shallow streaming gutter, as form of interiority into
which the schemata-wheel plunges and resurfaces. 5.- Space
as form of exteriority: shores and beds. 6.- the passive Ego on
the stream-bed as the juncture of the two forms. 7.- the principles of the synthetic judgements that sweep space-time. 8.- the
transcendental field of possible experience, immanent to the I
(plane of immanence). 9.- the three Ideas or illusions of transcendence (circles turning on the absolute
horizon: Soul, World and God)." (QP 57)
8
("Machinic Portrait of Kant" by Deleuze & Guattari)
What sort of space does crifique inhabit? Kant, of course, delineates
a series of sitesfor critique: the Kampfplatz, the "other scene" (the
French Revolution), the island-dominion of the pure understanding,
surrounded bythe "native home of illusion", the wide and stormy
ocean, and the "realm of the concept", subdivided into territory,
domain and residence. What is crucial in each space is its intensity:
the degree, according to what Deleuze and Guattari accurately
designate as Kant's " profoundly schizoid theory" (A-Oe 19)of space,
according to which "matter that has no empty spaces" is filled up
35
GRANT
with intensive qualities. Liminality, circumscription and border
definition are crucially important to the critical revolution, not
just because they define boundaries and prohibit transgressions, but because they annihilate interiority/exteriority in favour of intensity and extension. Critique, like the unconscious,
is constantly condensing and displacing. Although this is most
tangible in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, it flows
wildly through the First Critique. All critical space is "precipitous space", and as such, according to Sun-Tzu, 12 must be
avoided. These ancient Chinese military codes revolve around
the measured accumulation of "All-Under-Heaven" with minimal losses. Sun-Tzu advises that as much be left intact and
unchanged as is militarily practical. Critical combat, however,
while modelling its spectatorial core on the sceptical model of
"shadow warriors" and "mock conflicts", is engagaed in
what Lyotard has called "populocide": 13 propelling even the
remnants of an irrelevant humanity to the farthest reaches of
the earth, Dr. Kantenstein redistibutes its organs in a way that
neither Wolff nor Napoleon could hitherto manage.
This is no mere provisional occupation, schizoanalysis cannot
but invest in the critical Kampfplatz, albeit in the name of "a
race oppressed, bastard, inferior, anarchic, nomadic; irremediably minor" (QP 105), in the name of those pack animals
that consume the obsessional deliria collectively known as
Kantianism:"Schizoanalysis must devote itself with all its strength
to the necessary destructions. Destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes. And when engaged in this task, no
activity will be too malevolent." (A-0e, 314, emphasis added.)
Just as the theatricised spectacle of regicide on the French
scene made Kant feverish and delirious with enthusiasm, so we
greet the demise of representation with a sly grin as we pull the
trigger. And let's face it, after two centuries of Kantianism,
philosophers are well prepared for a bullet in the brain. In the
corridors of every institution, we can still here them chant:
"Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to
criticism everything must submit" (CPR Axiin). We can practically see them, head on the block, gazing into the basket,
wetting themselves with excitement over fulfiling the duty of
36
4
ENERGUMEN CRITIQUE
their excremental fatality as the chair starts to hum, as water
mixes with gas, as the blade falls,
"Critique", writes Marx in the 'Contribution to a Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right', 14 "is not a scalpel; it is a weapon":
even the butchered corpse of the socius lying on the operating table expends its last strength nodding in agreement. We
might have read this in Kant: critical philosophy is indeed
forever brandishing arms, arms which, as Lyotard claims, "reflection", in Kant's third Critique, "seems simply to dispose of
altogether", 15 We have our doubts: reflexion, as Derrida says,
is a "barricaded street" 16 not a rest home in the midst of the
battlefield. Unable to cope with the eerie silence reigning over
the battlefield, critique, desperate for renewed slaughter, baits
a trap to draw its enemies out of the shadowplays:
They wish to prove, very well then, let them prove, and the
critical philosophy will lay down its weapons before them
asvictors. Since they do not actually wish to prove, presumably because they cannot, we must again take up
theseweapons... (CPrR, Preface, 5)
In spite of the challenge and the intimation of conflict ("They
wish to prove"), they remain silent ("they do not actually wish
to prove"), but are cut down anyway; their silence even
impels ("we must again take up these weapons") critique to
war, to nature, to a renewed scepticism, anarchism, despotism and nomadism.
Notes
1.
References to Kant's texts areas follows:
CPR: Critique of Pure Reason, tr. N.K. Smith (London:
Mocmilan,1929)
CPrR: Critique Of Practical Reason, tr. L.W. Beck (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1956)
CPJ: Critique of the Power of Judgement, tr. W. Pfuhar
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). Although %hors translationis simply
entitled IheCritiqueofJudgement, this ignoresthe Kraft in the German title, Kritik der Urteilskraft; I
37
GRANT
have ammended This in accordance with Pluhar's own
practise in rendering Vernogen.
APV: Anthropology from a Pragamatic Point of View, tr. V.L.
Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1978)
KH: Kant on History, ed. & tr. L.W. Beck (New York:
Macmillan, 1963)
References to Deleuze and Guattari's texts are as follows:
2.
A-Oe: Anti-Oedipus, tr. H.R. Lane, R. Hurley and M. Seem
(London: Athlone, 1984)
MP: A Thousand Plateaus, tr. B. Massumi (London: Athlone,
1988)
QP: Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit 1991)
Arnaud Villani, 'La Geographie physique de Mille pla3.
teaux', Critique, 1985, p.333.
Jean Tinguely's Vittoria-machine (Piazza Duomo, Milan,
4.
28th November, 1970) shows The stages of increasing delirium
that disrupt the critical Tribunal. Tinguely reports that he was to
build "a large white machine that would turn itself intoa large
black machine and drive away" (Jean Tinguely andPontus
Hulten, A Magic Stronger Than Death (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), p.196): "A gigantic gold phallus, about ten metres
high (...). Smoke rose from the tip of the phallus. Some of the
explosions were extremely loud; a few of the rockets seemed
to reach around 250m. The testicles were adorned with gold
plastic bananas and grapes. The man (Kant?) who turned the
big wheel to set the huge internal machinery going wore a
shiny silver asbestos-lined suit. (...). It lasted about half an
hour." Tinguely has also engineered several other machines,
amongst which the 'Study for an End of the World' series (1: 'le
monstre- sculpture- autodestructive- dynamique and aggressif':
2:
'L'Opera- Burlesque- Dramatico- Big- Thing- Sculpto-Bourn)
highlight the Kampfplatz and the theatrical aspects of critical
terrain. Deleuze and Guattari discuss his 1989 retrospective
show at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in QP, pp.55-6.
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: OUP,
5.
1896), Introduction,
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Economie fibidinale (Paris: Minuit,
6.
1974), pp.117 ff.
In the Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine',
7.
38
ENERGUMEN CRITIQUE
Deleuze and Guattari indicate that although "the despot and
the legislator" (...u)ndoubtedly stand in opposition term by
term, (...t)he two together exhaust the field of the function.
They are the principle elements of a State apparatus that
proceedsby a One-Two, distributes binary distinctions and
forms a milieu of interiority. (.„) It will be noted that war is not
contained within the apparatus. Either the State has at its
disposal a violence that is not channeled through war - either
it uses police officers (cf. CPR Bxxv - IHG) and jailors in place of
warriors, has no arms or no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, "seizes" and "binds", preventing all
combat - or, the State acquires an army, but in a way that
presupposes a judicial integration of war and the organisation of a military function. (MP 352). The war machine remains
"irreducuble to the State apparatus (ibid),This model is also
employed in the kantian division and reterritorialisation of
theoretical and practical reason; these latter also exhaust the
field, leaving judgement, like the war machine, in the Third
Critique, with neither "territory'", "domain" nor "residence"'
within critical philosophy.
8.
Discussing the "traditional logic of desire", Deleuze
and Guattari draw attention to the fact that "Kant... must be
credited with effecting a critical revolution as regards the
theory of desire, by attributing to it "the faculty of being,
through its representations, the cause of the reality of these
representations (CPJ Introduction s3, Ak.177-8)" (A-Oe 25).
9.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionels (2nd Edition. Paris: Christain Bourgois, 1979) p. 291). See also 'Notes on
the Return and Kapital' tr. R. McKeon Semiotext(e) 3:1, 1978,
P.44,
10. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. and ed. J.
Strachey. Penguin Freud Library 4 (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1975), p.769.
11. Ibid., p. 684ff.
12. Sun-Tzu, in The Art of War, tr. S.B. Griffith (New York:
OUP, 1971), Ch.IX v.16, classifies five "precipitous torrents":
Heavenly Wells, Prisons, Nets, Traps and Cracks.H e writes:
"You must march speedily away from them. Do not approach them." (See also Ch.X v.1, 6).
13. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Le Postmoderne explique aux
39
GRANT
enfants (Paris: Galilee, 1986), p.40.
14.
Karl Marx, Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right', in Early Writings tr. R. Livingstone and G.
Benton (London: Penguin and New Left Review, 1975), p.246.
15. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lecons sur L'Analytique du Sublime (Paris: Galilee, 1991), p.47.
16. Jacques Derrida, La Dissemination, (Paris: Seuil, 1972),
p.299: ".../a marche barre d'une telle reflexion." B.
Johnson's English translation gives the impeded march of
any such reflection" (London: Athlone, 1981).
lain Hamilton Grant
May 1992
40