3 - ‘My whole structure of perception is in the process of exploding’ – Deleuze and Guattari and the Sublime

Summary

To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language? (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 241)

Philosophy, with all its method and its good will, is nothing compared with the secret pressures of the work of art. (Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. 163)

Deleuze's reading of the sublime reveals both his closeness and distance from his colleague Lyotard. Both thinkers ground their ontology of sensation on the difference between the faculties of the supersensible and the sensible found in the sublime, both seek to reverse the domination of cognitive thought over aesthetic experience in the name of a sublime ‘intellectual-feeling’, and both privilege modernist art as a mechanism by which we can experience this. Lyotard, however, as we have seen, increasingly saw the sublime in terms of the fundamental dualism irrevocably separating the supersensible from its sensible event, and its ‘negative presentation’ in aesthetic experience. While negative presentation also plays a part in Deleuze's account, this significantly differs from both Kant's and Lyotard's versions. In fact, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari criticise precisely this aspect of Lyotard's Discours, Figure, and subsequently this difference will only become stronger. After some very positive comments praising Lyotard and his concept of the ‘figural’,2 ‘which carries us to the gates of schizophrenia as a process’, Deleuze and Guattari drop a heavy ‘but’. But, they write, Lyotard too often returns this process ‘toward shores he has so recently left behind’, back to the discursive structures and spaces in relation to which these processes can now only be secondary ‘transgressions’, a problem arising, they continue, because ‘Lyotard reintroduces lack and absence into desire, maintains desire under the law of castration, at the risk of restoring the entire signifier along with the law’ (1983: 244).

For Deleuze and Guattari castration is an oppressive ‘universal belief’ that brings everyone together under ‘one and the same illusion of consciousness’, separating it from the ‘inhuman’ and unconscious ‘great Other’, as Lacan calls it.3 Beginning from castration as an a priori of human consciousness therefore condemns desire to being a signifier for what can never be named or appear, what Lyotard later calls ‘the Thing’.