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French philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes writing about others as “a sort of buggery” or “immaculate conception” that is the result of “taking an author from behind and giving him a child”
he attends to a thinker’s “shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions” to give him “a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous”
Deleuze now has plenty of little monsters of his own—rootless rhi-zombies, dizzying metaphysicians, skittish geonaturalists, enchanted transcendentalists, passionate affectivists.
a “worthwhile book” performs at least three functions: polemics, recovery, and creativity.
argue against the “canon of joy” that celebrates Deleuze as a naively affirmative thinker of connectivity.
I rehabilitate the destructive
force of negativity by cultivating a “hatred ...
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I propose a conspiracy of contrary terms that diverge from the joy...
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The effect of the Joyous Deleuze’s image of thought is a sense of wonder, accompanied by the enjoyment of creating concepts that express how the world really exists.
revolutionary negativity in a world characterized by compulsory happiness, decentralized control, and overexposure.
Happiness is mandatory; happiness is slavery.
On the level of affect, it draws on Deleuze’s talk of indiscernibility, concealment, the shame of being human, and the monstrous power of the scream.
Pierre Klossowski,
secret society Acéphale,
Deleuze’s defenders are correct to dismiss such criticisms as either incomplete or outright spurious. Yet there is a kernel of truth that goes back to an old joke—a communist is someone who reads Das Kapital; a capitalist is someone who reads Das Kapital and understands it.
These everyday behaviors show that the seemingly modern world of commodities has not stolen our sense of wonder—we are as divinely moved by media as we once were by angels.
Deleuze and Guattari made a crucial declaration in 1991 as the Iron Curtain crumbled and the first commercial Internet service providers came online: “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. . . . We lack resistance to the present”
Dark Deleuze’s immediate target is connectivity, the name given to the growing integration of people and things through digital technology.
Popular media, the great screen of the collective unconscious, materialize fears about runaway technology. There is a whole string of Asian horror films that depict cursed media objects ruining our lives (Ringu, Pulse, Phone, One Missed Call, White: The Melody of the Curse). The usual cottage industry of romanticizing life without technology now suggests that “cell phones make us lazy,” while circulating ideas on how to “get on a social media diet.” Some philosophers, such as Bernard Stiegler, even say that technology is stealing our precious insides.
Alternatively, technology has not exceeded humanity’s capacity to manage it—if anything, Foucault’s insights (the analytic of finitude, biopower) suggest that humanity influences its own future more than ever before (DI, 90–93). The problem is, they know perfectly well what they are doing, but they continue doing it anyway!
Yet connectivity today is determined far more by people like Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, who demonstrates the significance of Deleuze’s argument that “technology is social before it is technical”
In a geopolitical manifesto cowritten with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt, The New Digital Age, Cohen reveals Google’s deep aspiration to extend U.S. government interests at home and abroad. Their central tool? Connectivity.
As perverse as it sounds, many Deleuzians still promote concepts that equally motivate these slogans: transversal lines, rhizomatic connections, compositionist networks, complex assemblages, affective experiences, and enchanted objects.
Deleuze has been derided as the lava lamp saint of “California Buddhism”—so
Put more modestly, the first step is to acknowledge that the unbridled optimism for connection has failed. Temporary autonomous zones have become special economic zones. The material consequences of connectivism are clear: the terror of exposure, the diffusion of power, and the oversaturation of information.
Deleuze forgets to pose the problem with the ambivalence found in all his other accounts of power—how affects are ruled by tyrants, molecular
revolutions made fascist, and nomad war machines enrolled to fight for the state. Without it, he becomes Nietzsche’s braying ass, which says yes only because it is incapable of saying no (NP, 178–86).
Deleuze refutes the image of Nietzsche as a dour pessimist. Flipping that image on its head, Deleuze argues that Nietzsche is an unparalleled thinker of affirmation.
Now that advertisers claim to be the most creative of all creatures on earth, it is time to replace creativity as the central mechanism of liberation.
Concepts are not discovered but the result of a catastrophe, Deleuze and Guattari say, from turning away, tiredness, distress, and distrust (6–7). True thought is rare, painful, and usually forced on us by the brutality of an event so terrible that it cannot be resolved without the difficulty of thought. As such, we must quit treating concepts as some “wonderful dowry from some wonderland” to understand the hard, rigorous work that goes into their creation
The implication is that critique is not effective in its own right, no matter how loudly it proclaims its truth. The only adequate knowledge is activity.
For Foucault, the reversibility of power is illustrated in homosexuality, which is first created as a medical category of sexual perversion but grows into a whole way of life that “spoke on its own behalf.”
Appeals to the frailty of life only obscure the issue even more. To say something rather controversial, though well established by ecologists decades ago: life will survive us. All human concern for the world is ultimately selfish anthropocentrism, for it was never life that was at risk (“the combined detonation of all the world’s nuclear weapons would be like a warm summer breeze to Gaia,” I once heard), just the world’s capacity to sustain humans (Luke, Ecocritique; Stengers, In Catastrophic Times).
Deleuze was too often overtaken by a naive affirmation of joy, and as such, he was unable to give hatred its necessary form.
(A Season in Hell).
Early basilicas contain crypts as a “second church” under their choirs, featuring a vaulted ceiling, many columns, several aisles, and an altar
From the crypt, Dark Deleuze launches a conspiracy. It is fueled by negativity, but not one of antimonies. Following Freud, negation is not a necessary by-product of consciousness. The lesson to be drawn from him is that negation is finding a way to say “no” to those who tell us to take the world as it is.
A number of commentators have tried to rehabilitate the conspiracy on the basis of an esoteric/exoteric distinction, whereby exoteric discourses are the mere public face to a deeper paranoia whose desire is concealed in an esoteric code.
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Klossowski warns
