Gilles Deleuze - Dualism, Monism And Multiplicities.pdf - Deleuze - MKTK

Dualism, Monism and Multiplicities (Desire-Pleasure- Jouissance )

Gilles Deleuze

Seminar of 26 March, 1973

In the Archaeology of Knowledge , Foucault said some profound things about

statements ( énoncés ) that concern several domains at once, even if not at the same time.

I take two very vague examples. There is a moment in the Greek city when statements

of a new type emerge, and these statements of a new type emerge within assignable

temporal arrangements, in several domains. They can be statements concerning

love, concerning marriage, concerning war, yet we feel that there is a kind of kinship

or community among these statements. We have seen certain thinkers try to give

explanations of how statements emerge in diverse domains that have this kind of

kinship. In Greece, for example, during the “hoplite” reform, new types of statements

concerning war and strategy emerge, but also new statements concerning marriage

and politics. All this, it has been said, cannot be unrelated. There are some people

who immediately say, for example, that there is a system of analogies or a system of

homologies, and that perhaps all these statements refer to a common structure. They

are called ‘structuralists’. Others will say that these productions of statements depend

on a certain domain which is determinative in relation to the others. Such people, for

example, we will call ‘Marxists’.

Perhaps it would be better to look for something else.

There’s a book from which one can learn many things, entitled Sexual Life in Ancient

China. 1 This book shows clearly that manuals of love and manuals of military strategy

are indiscernible, and that new strategic and military statements are produced at the same

time as new amorous statements. That’s curious. I ask myself: OK, how can we extract

ourselves, at the same time, from a structuralist vision that seeks correspondences,

analogies, and homologies, and from a Marxist vision that seeks determinants. I indeed

see one possible hypothesis, but it’s so confused…It’s perfect—it would consist in

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saying: at a given moment, for reasons that, of course, must still be determined, it is as

if a social space were covered by what we would have to call an abstract machine. We

would have to give a name to this non-qualified abstract machine, a name that would

mark its absence of qualification, so that everything will be clear. We could call it—at

the same time, this abstract machine, at a given moment, will break with the abstract

machine of the preceding epochs—in other words, it will always be at the cutting edge

( à la pointe ), thus it would receive the name ‘machinic point’ ( pointe machinique ). It

would be the machinic point of a group or a given collectivity; it would indicate, within

a group, and at a given moment, the maximum of deterritorialization as well as, and

at the same time, its power of innovation. This is somewhat abstract at the moment,

it’s like algebra. It’s this abstract machine which, in conditions that will have to be

determined...it’s this machinic point of deterritorialization that is reterritorialized in this

or that machine, or in this or that military machine, amorous machine, productive of

new statements. This is a possible hypothesis.

I have the impression that there are things in Leroi-Gourhan we could use here, we

would have to see how that works. This machinic point would indicate a kind of speed of

deterritorialization. There are systems of indices under which reterritorializations are made

in qualified machines, war machines, machines of love, machines of marriage.

Kyril Rejik: This is your “series” ( enfilades ) which are taken up again in networks?

Gilles Deleuze: Ah, no, that’s something else. As you sense, at bottom this is not our

hypothesis. That’s because in this problem of where statements come from, what their

production is related to, the sub-jacent response will consist in answering: there are no

individual statements, and this is one of the multiple traps of psychoanalysis, which

is the inheritor of a type of thinking which we could call ‘Western thought’, and

which says that there are individual statements. And finally, the form or logic of

individual statements has been fixed by the cogito . It has been fixed by the cogito which

comprehends the production of statements from the subject, from a subject. Cogito :

this means that every statement is the production of a subject. It means that firstly; and

secondly, it means that every statement splits the subject that produces it. Lacan is the

last Cartesian. Then every statement refers to a subject, and every statement splits, cuts,

separates the subject that produces it. It is propositions that are linked up naturally,

because if it is true that a statement is produced by a subject, then for that very reason this

subject will be divided into the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement.

This is what the literal process ( démarche ) of the cogito consists of.

The process of the cogito , you recall, is: I can say “I think, therefore I am,” but I can’t

say “I walk, therefore I am.” Descartes explains this in his Responses to Objections ,

in Descartes’s rare comic pages. Someone has objected, “Why don’t you say ‘I walk’

like ‘I am’?” and he says, “I can’t.” That amounts to saying that “I walk” is a subject

of the statement, whereas “I think” is the subject of enunciation. Then, perhaps I’m

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not walking, but there’s one thing I’m sure of, and that is that I’m thinking of walking.

In other words, the subject cannot produce a statement without being thereby split

( scindé ) by the statement into a subject of enunciation and a subject of the statement.

This introduces the entire metaphysics of the subject into psychoanalysis. If we

look closely at the cogito …

Question: But there is no alterity in Descartes.

Gilles Deleuze: What are you looking for? And dualism! There is a dualism at the level

of thought and the object thought. There is a dualism at the level of soul and body, there

are as many dualisms as you like. And if we ask: What is the source of all the Cartesian

dualisms?—it lies in this scission internal to the subject, between the subjects of

the statement, which allow no conclusion, and a subject of enunciation, which is

subtracted from doubt: “I think.”

In the entire series of Cartesian dualisms (soul-body, thought-extension, statement-

enunciation), the only remark and the only question is that this isn’t the final aspect.

The duality of subjects of the statement and subjects of enunciation—once again, the

subjects of statements of the type “I am walking,” “I am breathing,” “I imagine,” and the

subjects of enunciation “I think”—is it not this duality that will inhabit all the dualisms

of reflection and all the other dualisms of substances, bodies, etc?

I take up again, I’m thinking of the text where Descartes says, it may be—I see a

unicorn, or I imagine a unicorn—it may indeed be that the unicorn does not exist, it may

very well be that the proposition, that the statement “I see a unicorn” is false. But in

return, it’s true that I think I am seeing a unicorn. At this level, a kind of disengagement

of a subject of enunciation occurs, and thereby all the subjects of possible statements.

Whence he will say to you: I cannot say “I walk, therefore I am,” for from a subject

of the statement I cannot conclude a being of enunciation, or the being of a subject

of enunciation; but I can say “I think, therefore I am,” because from a subject of

enunciation I can conclude the being of this subject.

Now all the dualisms of Descartes, even passion and action, depend strictly on this

operation of the cogito , which consists of relating statements to a subject of enunciation,

which will consequently split the subject in two: the subject of the statement, and the subject

of enunciation. This will be found, for example, at the Cartesian level, in the subject of the

statement, which in the end refers to the union of the soul with the body, and the subject

of enunciation, which refers to the thinking subject. When I say that, in a certain manner,

psychoanalysis is the final inheritor of Cartesianism, it is because, even looking at the cogito ,

it is very curious at what point it is an Oedipal apparatus, a sublimated Oedipal apparatus.

It could very well be that I myself, as a living being, have been made by my father and

my mother. But the fact that I think, that isn’t explained by my father and mother, that’s

explained by what? If we consider the cogito as a machine, we can see three great moments

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in it: doubt—which is typically a type of paranoiac machine; the non-deceiving God is a

miraculating (trans: reading “ miraculante ” for “ déraillante ”) machine, and the “I think” is a

celibate machine. That is the Oedipal space of pure thought. There are Oedipuses everywhere;

there are not only familial Oedipuses, there are also scientific Oedipuses; and the philosophical

Oedipus is the cogito , it is the Oedipal machine at the level of thought. This is what one calls

dualism. Dualism is what prevents thought. Dualism always wants to deny the essence of

thought, namely, that thought is a process. And the source of dualism, it seems to me, is this

type of reduction, this flattening of all statements of thought, precisely, by this speculative,

Oedipal apparatus in which the statement, on the one hand, is related to the subject, to a subject,

and on the other hand, and simultaneously, the subject is split into a subject of the statement and

the subject of enunciation. In this perspective, the subject is rethought.

There is only one form of thought, it’s the same thing: one can only think in a

monistic or pluralistic manner. The only enemy is two. Monism and pluralism: it’s the

same thing, because, in a certain manner, it seems to me that every opposition, even

all possibilities of oppositions between the one and the multiple…This is because the

source of dualism is precisely the opposition between something that can be affirmed as

one, and something that can be affirmed as multiple, and more precisely, what signals

it as one is precisely the subject of enunciation, and what signals it as multiple is

always the subject of the statement…

We saw last time how to bring about the suppression of the opposition between

the one and the multiple. It happens the moment the one and the multiple cease to be

adjectives and give way to the substantive: there are only multiplicities. That is to say,

when the substantive “multiplicities” takes the place of the one, of the multiple and their

**** and at this moment, one and multiple lose absolutely all meaning, at the same time

as the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement. There are multiplicities,

which obviously implies a theory and practice of multiplicities. Wherever we leave

the domain of multiplicities, we once again fall into dualisms, ie., into the domain of

non-thought, we leave the domain of thought as process.

Now to show at what point things become botched, I always think of this history of

desire. What I have been saying since the beginning amounts to saying that thinking and

desiring are the same thing. The best way to avoid seeing or to refuse to see that desire

is thought, that the position of desire in thought is a veritable process, is obviously to

link desire to lack. Once desire is linked to lack, one is immediately in the domain,

one has already assumed the basis of dualism. But today I would like to say that there

are more underhanded ways of reintroducing lack into desire, either through the Other,

or through dualism. Here, so-called Western thought is constructed from the relation

between desire and pleasure, a completely rotten ( pourrie ) conception.

The first malediction of desire, the first malediction that weighs on desire like

a Christian curse, and goes back to the Greeks, is that desire is lack. The second

malediction is: desire will be satisfied by pleasure, or will be in an enunciable relation

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with jouissance . Of course, there will be those who will tell us that these are not the

same thing. Nonetheless, there is a peculiar circuit here: desire-pleasure- jouissance . And

all that, once again, is a way of cursing and liquidating desire.

The idea of pleasure is a completely rotten ( pourrie ) idea. One only has to look

at Freud’s texts, at the level of desire-pleasure, which amount to saying that desire is

above all a disagreeable tension. There are one or two texts where Freud says that, after

all, perhaps there are agreeable tensions, but again that doesn’t take us very far. Broadly

speaking, desire is lived as such a disagreeable tension that—a horrible, hideous word is

required here, that’s how bad this thing is—a discharge is necessary. And this discharge,

this is what pleasure is! People will have peace, and then, alas! desire is reborn, a new

discharge will be necessary. The types of conceptions that are called, in scholarly terms,

hedonistic, namely, the search for pleasure, and the types of mystical conceptions that

curse desire, by virtue of what is fundamental in lack—I would simply like you to sense

that, in any case, they both consider desire to be a dirty little thing that wakes us up, and

that wakes us up in the most disagreeable manner: either by putting us in relation with

a fundamental lack, which can then be assuaged by a kind of activity of discharge, and

then one will have peace, and then it will all begin over again…When one introduces

the notion of jouissance into all that—you can see I’m in the process of trying to make

a circle, very muddled, a pious circle, a religious circle of the theory of desire—we can

see at what point psychoanalysis is impregnated, and how great the psychoanalytic piety

is. This circle, one of its segments is desire-lack, another segment is pleasure-discharge,

and once again, they are completely linked.

And then I ask myself: What’s wrong with Reich? There are two great errors in

Reich: the first error is dualism, then he passes to the side: it’s the dualism between

two economies, between a political economy and a libidinal economy. If one speaks

of a duality between two economies, one will always be able to promise to make the

connection ( branchement ), but the connection will never be made. And this error of

dualism has a repercussion at another level: desire is still thought of as a lack, and thus

it is still thought with pleasure, as its unit of measure. And Reich has indeed given

the word pleasure a stronger and more violent word, he calls it orgasm. His entire

conception of the orgasm, which he will try to turn against Freud, consists in pushing

desire to the limit insofar as it is linked to lack. If it cannot manage to obtain

the discharge that assuages it, it will produce what Reich calls ‘stasis’. Desire is

fundamentally related to the orgasm, and in order to relate desire to pleasure or to the

orgasm, one must relate it to lack. It is exactly the same thing. The first proposition

is the inverse of the second.

If we add the third arc of the circle: desire-lack, all that always concerns desire

which is directed toward transcendence. In effect, if desire lacks something, it is like

intentionality aiming at what it lacks, it is defined as a function of transcendence,

in the same way that it is measured as a function of a unit that is not its own, which

will be pleasure or the orgasm, which assures its discharge. And, in order to close the

Contretemps 2, May 2001

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