What is Deleuze?

[josef k.]

What are you going to do once we're emancipated, Josef?

I would immediately be executed.

 

[poetix]

I'm going to leave nomad to go numpty-numpty-numpty, and Daniel to poke around blindly probing for something that will upset me, by or between themselves from this point onwards. If I deprive them of stimulus, it's possible that they'll eventually turn on each other.

I have a couple more things to say, though, about Badiou and Deleuze and stuff, and it looks like a few other people do as well. If anyone fancies trying to carry on the conversation, here seems as good a place as any.

 

[four_five_one]

I dunno, you think of one. I regard the Stonewall riots as an initiatory moment in a genuine and continuing emancipatory political sequence. On the other hand, I regard most soi-disant queer politics nowadays as the occultation of that sequence through reactionary conformity dressed up as taboo-busting transgressiveness. Fings ain't wot they used to be.

Repressive desublimation? And the desire for marriage & adoption is just an effect of heteronormativity and the ideology of 'reproductive futurity'...? This might be why queer politics is no longer radical - except in Iran, for instance.

 

[josef k.]

I'm going to leave nomad to go numpty-numpty-numpty, and Daniel to poke around blindly probing for something that will upset me, by or between themselves from this point onwards. If I deprive them of stimulus, it's possible that they'll eventually turn on each other.

I have a couple more things to say, though, about Badiou and Deleuze and stuff, and it looks like a few other people do as well. If anyone fancies trying to carry on the conversation, here seems as good a place as any.

Exit, pursued by a bear.

 

[nomadthethird]

Repressive desublimation? And the desire for marriage & adoption is just an effect of heteronormativity and the ideology of 'reproductive futurity'...? This might be why queer politics is no longer radical - except in Iran, for instance.

What is "repressive desublimation"?

The desire for the rights that everyone else has is what drove the civil rights activists to fight against segregation.

As far as queer radicalism is concerned, it is actually quite a big deal to demand the same rights to marriage and family that heterosexual have always enjoyed--maybe it's not "radical", but I don't think everything needs to be "radical"-- since gays have only become "accepted" in the media and on the public stage as tokens of bohemianism and art-faggyness and in their roles as super fun hairdresses who take you shopping!

The point of the fight for the right to marriage has to do with civic issues like: as a lifetime partner of X, I should be able to visit him/her in the hospital if s/he's sick, or inherit the house we lived in together, or to co-own a house, or to get the marriage tax breaks, to be able to draw on the partner's health insurance, to act as one legal entity in business deals or other matters, etc.

Are you seriously trying to say that gay people shouldn't be able to adopt kids because that would be "heteronormative"? Or to enjoy the benefits of marriage because straights already do?

To me that seems like the equivalent of saying women shouldn't have fought for the right to work outside of the home, because their oppressors did that.

 

[nomadthethird]

Maybe that should be a new thread...

 

[poetix]

Repressive desublimation? And the desire for marriage & adoption is just an effect of heteronormativity and the ideology of 'reproductive futurity'...? This might be why queer politics is no longer radical - except in Iran, for instance.

Repressive desublimation, yes...

I mean, I don't see why non-hetero households shouldn't civil-partner or adopt, but I do wonder slightly at the reproduction of straight norms in "same-sex couples". In terms of basic equality, obviously if the benefits (such as they are) of monogamous coupledom and nuclear-family-life are accessible to straight people they should be accessible to everyone else as well. But what we seem to be moving towards is a fairly straight split between "irresponsible" hedonism where you don't give a fuck about anyone else, and "responsible" co-domestication where you only give a fuck about one other person (and less and less about even them) - which has been the standard hetero model for years. The kind of collective sexpol that emerged around Stonewall, and later in response to the HIV crisis, gets completely buried: it's all about meee, meee, meee and my precious orgasms, and then meee, meee, meee and my Significant Other.

 

[nomadthethird]

Exit, pursued by a bear.

Can't wait for the sage to speak again. If you leave you'll miss out!

 

[nomadthethird]

Repressive desublimation, yes...

I mean, I don't see why non-hetero households shouldn't civil-partner or adopt, but I do wonder slightly at the reproduction of straight norms in "same-sex couples". In terms of basic equality, obviously if the benefits (such as they are) of monogamous coupledom and nuclear-family-life are accessible to straight people they should be accessible to everyone else as well. But what we seem to be moving towards is a fairly straight split between "irresponsible" hedonism where you don't give a fuck about anyone else, and "responsible" co-domestication where you only give a fuck about one other person (and less and less about even them) - which has been the standard hetero model for years. The kind of collective sexpol that emerged around Stonewall, and later in response to the HIV crisis, gets completely buried: it's all about meee, meee, meee and my precious orgasms, and then meee, meee, meee and my Significant Other.

Any proposed solutions to this terrible double-bind where people care about each other and sex, sometimes at once, sometimes not?

 

[josef k.]

The sage has stuck his fingers in his ear. No further critical comments will be welcomed. The truth is apparently pretty fragile. Like egos.

 

[nomadthethird]

the sage has stuck his fingers in his ear. No further critical comments will be welcomed. The truth is apparently pretty fragile.

lol

Anything that isn't couple-dom is now "irresponsible hedonism", I like it.

 

[josef k.]

 

[nomadthethird]

Edit: I got this by typing "superman is a dick" into google image search. I shit you not.

 

[josef k.]

Interesting as well that the weighty conceptual resources of the philosophy of emancipation are apparently only able to identify exhausted sequences of political truths... things aren't what they used to be... No positive vision seems possible, and what political sequences do exist in the present are to be condemned from Northampton for their reactionary conformity.

 

[nomadthethird]

Interesting as well that the weighty conceptual resources of the philosophy of emancipation are apparently only able to identify exhausted sequences of political truths... things aren't what they used to be... No positive vision seems possible, and what political sequences do exist in the present are to be condemned from Northampton for their reactionary conformity.

Oh please, anyone who knows any gay people or is one knows exactly what gay people are still up against.

Saying they're "repressive desublimating" or whatever nonsense term you're trying unsuccessfully to borrow from psychoanalysis to downplay the struggle gays have made to be recognized legally as citizens is a few steps away from saying that black people should never have tried to be recognized as citizens because that's too much like becoming Whitey.

It sounds like the sort of thing Bill O'Reilly would say as an attempt to out-fox (no pun intended) liberals at their own game of identity thumping.

 

[nomadthethird]

I suppose that the work of blacks toward equality is also so over, now that they are nominally recognized as "human" by the law, even if institutionalized racism is still a large and intractable problem (social and economic).

 

[nomadthethird]

Sorry, that's borrowed from Marcuse.

But according to his definition, the civil rights movement was just another selfish bargaining chip for a pandering minority.

 

[josef k.]

What seems clear to me is that - no matter how strenuously the sage attempts to deny it - the militant of Badiou's philosophy enjoys an eagle-eyed view on the world, a superior vantage point, from which they are able to judge the political sequences at work in the world, and separate sequences of reactionary conformity from the various sequences of militant authenticity held to have taken place in the past. The fact that authenticity seems to belong entirely to the past is significant and symptomatic. Things aren't what they were, and this is bad. Judging by the example which the Parson presents, the real effect of the philosophy is itself highly reactionary; it encourages people to proclaim their opinions from the comfort of their own homes on all kinds of processes which they really know nothing about, and have no real interest in, besides for their interest in condemning it, in the name of truth and their own beautiful souls. Those unwilling to join them in this, or critical towards this posture, will be seen as hysterical, malicious, unworthy of their engagement. The wages of a fallen world. There may be other problems associated with Deleuze (and Guattari), but they don't really encourage the same attitude.

 

[nomadthethird]

The Stonewall Inn, located at 51 and 53 Christopher Street, along with several other establishments in the city, was owned by the Genovese family.[3] In 1966, three members of the Mafia invested $3,500 to turn the Stonewall Inn into a gay bar, after it had been a restaurant and a nightclub for heterosexuals. Once a week a police officer would collect envelopes of cash as a payoff; the Stonewall Inn had no liquor license.[34][35] It had no running water behind the bar—used glasses were run through tubs of water and immediately reused.[33] There were no fire exits, and the toilets overran consistently.[36] Though the bar was not used for prostitution, drug sales and other "cash transactions" took place. It was the only bar for gay men in New York City where dancing was allowed;[37] dancing was its main draw since its re-opening as a gay club.[38]

Sounds like my kind of scene.

 

[nomadthethird]

What seems clear to me is that - no matter how strenuously the sage attempts to deny it - the militant of Badiou's philosophy enjoys an eagle-eyed view on the world, a superior vantage point, from which they are able to judge the political sequences at work in the world, and separate sequences of reactionary conformity from the various sequences of militant authenticity held to have taken place in the past. The fact that authenticity seems to belong entirely to the past is significant and symptomatic. Things aren't what they were, and this is bad. Judging by the example which the Parson presents, the real effect of the philosophy is itself highly reactionary; it encourages people to proclaim their opinions from the comfort of their own homes on all kinds of processes which they really know nothing about, and have no real interest in, besides for their interest in condemning it, in the name of truth and their own beautiful souls. Those unwilling to join them in this, or critical towards this posture, will be seen as hysterical, malicious, unworthy of their engagement. The wages of a fallen world. There may be other problems associated with Deleuze (and Guttari), but they don't really encourage the same attitude.

And isn't this strenously held belief in lapsed authenticity exactly the same sort of thing they believe to be holding the world back and stalling political progress? But they persist in it. They can't get out of it. They're stuck in their own purgatory of lust for an era of bygone absolutism.