#guattari

But anyway, there's no more point complaining in advance about misinterpretations, since you can't predict them, than fighting against them once they're made. It's better to get on with something else, to work with people going in the same direction. As for being responsible or irresponsible, we don't recognize those notions, they're for policemen and courtroom psychiatrists.

It would be absurd to go to war against power in general. On the contrary, certain types of politics of power, certain types of arrangements of power, certain uses of language, notably national languages, are normalized in the context of an historical situation, which implies the seizure of power by a certain linguistic caste, the destruction of dialects, the rejection of special languages of all kinds -- professional as well as infantile or feminine--I think that is what happens. It would be absurd to oppose desire and power. Desire is power; power is desire. What is at issue is what type of politics is pursued with regard to different linguistic arrangements that exist. Because -- and this seems essential to me -- capitalist and bureaucratic socialist power infiltrate and intervene in all modes of individual semiotization; today, it proceeds more through semiotic subjugation than through direct subjugation by the police, or by explicit use of physical pressure. Capitalist power injects a microfascism into all the attitudes of the individuals, into their relation to perception, to the body, to children, to sexual partners, etc. If a struggle can be led against the capitalist system, it can only be done, in my opinion, by combining a struggle -- with visible, external objects -- against the power of the bourgeoisie, against its institutions and systems of exploitation, with a thorough understanding of all the semiotic infiltrations on which capital is based. Consequently, each time one detects an area of struggle against bureaucracy in the organizations, against reformist politics, etc., one must also see just how much we ourselves are contaminated by, are carriers of, this microfascism.

Actually, to assert–as I do–that the lived-world of schizophrenic delusion is characterized by what might be called subjectivization may at first sound fairly consistent with these classic images.

"That is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: "More taxes! Less bread!"? As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for."

do you like Guattari?

One of the less noted debts of Deleuze and Guattari's work is the inspiration they take from Franz Fanon and an accompanying antioedipal sense that the human is but one way in which one might think of existence and one that ought to be placed within a history of colonization and racialization. The subject for whom the world is a structure of sense beyond which lies the dark night of chaos is the outcome of a history in which complex social machines are contracted until we arrive at the private individual whose desires have been rendered personal and familial. If we are the effect of a history of evolving perceptions that can be mapped in relation to technologies, it would be both possible and desirable to think of potentialities beyond the human, because desire itself transcends and precedes the human. What makes Fanon's work so important today becomes evident when reading Deleuze and Guattari's debt to Fanon.