What did Gilles Deleuze mean by “positive” desire?
Is anyone on this former a Deleuze fan? Sorry if this question sounds like I want you to do my homework, but this is something I’ve wanted to discuss/have explained since I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around it. I understand that in both Western and Eastern philosophy (and psychoanalysis) the concept of desire was mostly seen as a lack; IE a wanting or craving of what we do not possess. Deleuze on the other hand posits that desire is rather “productive” and has no lacking involved-it is instead an interplay between positive forces. How can this be?
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"Beneath the conscious investments of economic, political, religious, etc., formations, there are unconscious sexual investments, microinvestments that attest to the way in which desire is present in a social field, and joins this field to itself as the statistically determined domain that is bound to it." AO183
"It is doubtless true that interests predispose us to a given libidinal investment, but they are not identical with this investment. Moreover, the unconscious libidinal investment is what causes us to look for our interest in one place rather than another, to fix our aims on a given path, convinced that this is where our chances lie." AO345
If interest accounts for what one wants, desire accounts for the fact that one wants such and such in the first place. Check out Daniel Smith's Deleuze and the Question of Desire [PDF] for a fuller account of this.
Yes, I think this is a good way to put it!
Quoting Streetlight
I wonder if the distinction between desire and interest is comparable to that between the virtual and the actual , or perhaps between the intensive and the extensive.
Quoting Albero
I think there is a larger point to be made about the positivity of desire for Deleuze. This goes to the heart of his critique of concepts like opposition, contradiction and negation, which are central to Hegelian and Marxist dialectic. These forms or relation are attempts to cancel difference by equalizing it in the form of a dialectical reconciliation or synthesis. The equal and the unified are assumed to cancel the negativity of the lack. But for Deleuze difference , as the irreducible basis of reality, is not a problem to be solved, a lack to be compensated, but an endlessly repeated fecundity (productivity), an eternal recurrence of the same absolute difference.
And so the whole project of putting a positive spin on things. Deleuze difference ad nauseum the same as Whitehead's creativity ad nauseum?
Good question. I’m not familiar enough with Whitehead to answer that, but I don’t see how his theism, as unconventional as it is, is compatible with Deleuze’s immanentism.
[quote=Ethics IIIP6]... each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being[/quote]
that, like inertia or current, is harnessed – by modern technocapital(?) – in various productive modalities which, IIRC, D & G call "desiring-machines" ...
And eternal recurrence of the same.
I think Schop's inexorable, blind 'Will-to-survive-and-devour' instead.
Except that for Deleuze , there is no identity , no in-itself, no essence, even temporarily. Desiring -machines are self-differentiating.
No. It's where the emphasis is made: A wanting or a craving is a psychological need that one has no control over, like thirst. Deleuze, on the other hand, seems to have defined it as inspiration ("an inter play between positive forces). When one is inspired by a great writer, one desires to write a great book someday, like his idol.
Is this correct? Can cravings or needs not be engineered by socialization or marketing which generate needs where naturally, there might not be any, or only a bud of interest that never sprouts?
Are you talking about indoctrination? Like "subliminal message"? Then, no, I'm not talking about that, nor am I talking about brainwashing. And I think I misspoke when I said "psychological". Let me correct that -- I meant physiological need, like thirst.
There's that nice quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld - People would never fall in love if they hadn't heard love talked about.
What's positive desire?
Any and all forms of want that contributes to enlightenment, sensu lato.
This is good! But yes, there are outliers. I tend to be one. It's actually sort of empowering when you desire something that no one, or very few people would pay attention to. And don't get me started with attraction. I assure you that my taste is not your taste, or anyone here in the forum.
Yes, desire belongs to the order of the intensive: "We say that there is assemblage of desire each time that there are produced, in a field of immanence, or on a plane of consistence, continuums of intensities, combinations of fluxes, emissions of particles at variable speeds". (Dialogues). As it happens, in the works in which desire becomes a concern - from Anti-Oedipus onwards, basically - 'the virtual' more or less disappears as a category, and becomes more or less collapsed into the intensive.
For Deleuze and Guattari, there is not an I that produces but a process of production of which the I is a kind of product. Or, to put this in terms of Anti-Oedipus, there is no subject before the syntheses of the unconscious, there are no libidinal investments without desiring machines.
This perspective is from the ‘outside’ that comes before and indeed determines the subject of interests. The difficulty here is that we should access this outside through experimentation or just speculate about the productive unconscious process. For D & G, it is the crucial ethical point, the opportunity to find out "where our chances lie."
As an ethics , intensive difference is also irreducibly violent, the basis of blame.
Likely, what is implied here is the improper identification of drives and desire.
It does not matter whether drives are directly referred to as instincts or whether they are defined much more elaborate. “In any of these cases, we always return to the same idea: necessarily setting this raw world of desire against a universe of social order, a universe of reason, judgement, ego, and so on” (Guattari “Molecular revolution in Brazil”). Anti-Oedipus’s entire project was to overcome the negative connotations of the common notion of desire and to conceptualize it as not simply the expression of libido but primarily as a flow and one of the parts of social infrastructure. Therefore, for D & G the ethical task is to disclose and identify one’s desiring machines so that “we can fix our aims on a given path.”
Would you agree that a desiring machine , with its aim and path , is already internally differentiated, so that this flow is never a matter of the repetition of the identical aim and path?
Quoting Joshs
Let's go back to the original quote: "the unconscious libidinal investment is what causes us to look for our interest in one place rather than another, to fix our aims on a given path, convinced that this is where our chances lie." A desiring machine is described here as "the unconscious libidinal investment." And, in principle, it cannot have "an aim and path." A machine cannot have an origin, identity, telos, or a concrete path; it is in the process of continuous becoming other than itself. So, it is internally differentiated. Yet, in the quote,
D & G mean that we can have "an aim and path" in our conscious spiritual life to a certain extent. They imply a vague and complicated relationship between our desire, which is a part of the unconscious and blind social machine, and our conscious intentions and aims. D & G, together and separately, on numerous occasions, had endeavoured to clarify their concept of the machinic unconscious. I found that it is essential but very challenging. What about you? Would you agree to replace, for example, the notion of individual sexual drives with the concept of the impersonal collective machinic desire?
Only if it makes my orgies more enjoyable. Seriously though, I think D &G have done a brilliant job of integrating the conscious and the unconscious, the cognitive and the bodily-affective, and these with the social and the empirical-material, without giving preference to any particular of these domains. I do wonder, though if Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to time might not offer a more intimate understanding of the site of difference.