All entries for Thursday 02 February 2006

Autopoiesis, stasis and the praxis of the eternal return

This is a really interesting contribution Farshad. My comment is only indirectly relevant. Maybe you can provide a helping hand. In any account of the socius as an abstract machine don't we also need to be able to provide an explanation – maybe this isn't the best word – of how this machine promotes stasis, uniformity, rigidity, segmentarity, molar lines etc… as part of its very auto-poietic activity? And for all the talk of concomitant deterritorializations how are we to account for what Deleuze himself acknowledges as the move from disciplinarian societies to societies of control? Despite new possibilities for a becoming-molecular the patent asymmetry within the geopolitical arena vis-à-vis the State apparatus (writ large) leads ultimately to the elision of any form of substantive resistance. Maybe I'm being fatalist. I pledge ignorance for the moment but I'm sure that someone can provide a helpful suggestion somewhere. But isn't this the ultimate consequence of Deleuze and Guattari's Spinozistic analysis of capitalism? By contrast, Nietzsche's emphasis upon incorporation throughout his oeuvre suggests our fateful (amor fati?) entanglement with reactive forces not their circumvention via selection for the production of difference. So even if he does argue for the insipidity of Christ he nevertheless must affirm him. This is stated more or less unequivocally in 'The Anti-Christ'. The eternal return for Nietzsche isn't as it is for Deleuze a centrifugal existential precept, expelling all reactivity in its wake – it doesn’t finally emerge as comical. The tragic dimension of Nietzsche's thought is never lost despite the generation of an affirmative praxis. Deleuze's conception of the eternal return becomes superfluous for the wrong reasons – it undermines itself – for Nietzsche it becomes superfluous because it's incorporated – it becomes second nature to the over-man.

: 02 Feb 2006 00:32 |  Tags: Autopoiesis Eternal Return Praxis |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem