Deleuze and Feminist Theory Edinburgh University Press edited by IAN BUCHANAN and CLAIRE COLEBROOK Deleuze and Feminist Theory  This page intentionally left blank Deleuze and Feminist Theory  edited by IAN BUCHANAN and CLAIRE COLEBROOK EDINBURGH University Press © The Contributors, 2000 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in ITC–New Baskerville by Pioneer Associates, Perthshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1120 7 (paperback) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Disclaimer: Some images in the original version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Introduction 1 Claire Colebrook Chapter 1 Becoming-Woman Now Verena Andermatt Conley 18 Chapter 2 Becoming-Woman: Deleuze, Schreber and Molecular Identification Jerry Aline Flieger 38 Chapter 3 The Woman In Process: Deleuze, Kristeva and Feminism Catherine Driscoll 64 Chapter 4 Body, Knowledge and Becoming-Woman: Morpho-logic in Deleuze and Irigaray Dorothea Olkowski 86 Chapter 5 Is Sexual Difference a Problem? Claire Colebrook 110 Chapter 6 Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Mind Eleanor Kaufman 128 Chapter 7 Deleuze and Feminisms: Involuntary Regulators and Affective Inhibitors Nicole Shukin 144 Contents Chapter 8 Teratologies Rosi Braidotti 156 Chapter 9 Goodbye America (The Bride is Walking . . .) Camilla Benolirao Griggers 173 Chapter 10 Deleuze’s Bergson: Duration, the Virtual and a Politics of the Future Elizabeth Grosz 214 Notes on Contributors 235 Works Cited 237 Index 245 Contents vi I. INTRODUCTION Throughout A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari invoke Virginia Woolf’s style of writing as exemplary of a new mode of becoming. Woolf is enlisted to support one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most audacious and contentious claims regarding the notion of becoming and its relation to women. It may be tactical, they argue, for women to have a ‘molar politics’. And this molar politics would be concerned with a specifically female subjectivity. However, they go on to insist that this female subject ought not act as a ground or limit to the women’s movement. To embrace the female subject as a foundation or schema for action would lead to ressentiment: the slavish subordination of action to some high ideal (Deleuze 1983: 123). (If this were the case the women’s movement would cease to be a movement. It would have taken one of its effects – the female subject – and allowed that effect to function as a cause, a ground or a moral law.) This is where molecular politics comes in. In addition to the grounding ideas of movements there must also be the activation, question and confrontation of those tiny events that make such foundations possible. In this double politics of the molar and the molecular, Deleuze and Guattari produce two dynamic senses of movement: a political movement as the organisation of a ground, identity or subject; and a molecular movement as the mobile, active and ceaseless challenge of becoming. Any women’s subjectivity, they argue, must function, not as a ground, but as a ‘molar confrontation’ that is part of a ‘molecular women’s politics’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 276). Any assertion of woman as a subject must not double 1 Introduction CLAIRE COLEBROOK CLAIRE COLEBROOK or simply oppose man, but must affirm itself as an event in the process of becoming. This is why ‘all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman’ (277). Because man has been taken as the universal ground of reason and good thinking, becoming must begin with his opposite, ‘woman’. But this becoming must then go beyond binary opposition and pass through to other becomings, so that man and woman can be seen as events within a field of singularities, events, atoms and particles: The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo – that is what Virginia Woolf lived with all her energies, in all of her work, never ceasing to become. The girl is like the block of becoming that remains contemporaneous to each opposable term, man, woman, child, adult. It is not the girl who becomes a woman; it is becoming-woman that produces the universal girl. (277) Because the girl must become a woman, she is invoked as the becoming of becoming. Man is traditionally defined as being: as the self-evident ground of a politics of identity and recognition. Woman, as his other, offers the opening of becoming; and the girl thus functions as a way of thinking woman, not as a complementary being, but as the instability that surrounds any being. For a being – an entity, identity or subject – is always the effect of a universal becoming. What makes this becoming girl-like? Its radical relation to man: not as his other or opposite (woman) but as the very becoming of man’s other. And so when Deleuze and Guattari applaud the style of Woolf, they do so not because she is a woman writer but because she writes woman. Her writings neither express nor represent an already given female identity; rather, through Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique, identity is seen as the effect of a flow of speech. Isn’t there something scandalous about this invocation of Woolf and the girl for a general process of becoming? And should the women’s movement really be told that it must be ‘molar’ or con- cerned with identity only for a moment on the way to a ‘molecular’ becoming? On the one hand, we might regard Deleuze and Guattari’s elevation of becoming-woman as a final recognition of the function of feminism. Feminism has always been more than a quibble regarding this or that value or prejudice within an other- wise sound way of thinking. Feminism at its most vibrant has taken the form of a demand not just to redress wrongs within thought, but to think differently. This is why sexual difference may be the 2 question of our epoch – as the opening of a possibility for think- ing beyond subjectivity and identity. On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari’s invocation of Woolf and becoming-woman can also be read as a domestication and subordination. Is it really faithful to Woolf or the women’s movement to be defined as moments with- in a field of becoming? Just what are Deleuze and Guattari doing when they take Woolf and the women’s movement away from the concepts of identity, recognition, emancipation and the subject towards a new plane of becoming? II. THE POLITICS OF READING: INTERPRETATION AND INHABITATION This strategy of enlisting authors and styles of thought for specific purposes – and usually against the grain of conventional interpre- tation – is typical of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Deleuze’s relation to the history of writing has been one of a curious infidelity (Neil 1998). Texts are read in terms of how they work, rather than what they mean. Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Kafka, for example, describes a writer of passages, flight, spatial wandering and becoming-animal against the traditional understand- ing of Kafka as a poet of law and negativity (Deleuze and Guattari 1986). Deleuze’s book on Hume uses the Scottish Enlightenment thinker to describe a radical empiricism that exceeds the subject (Deleuze 1991a). Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche draws Nietzsche away from an all too human interpretation in terms of will and the overman and defines Nietzsche as the thinker of ‘a world of impersonal and pre-individual singularities’ (Deleuze 1990b: 107). In his book on Leibniz, Deleuze describes a writer concerned with a multiplicity of foldings (Deleuze 1993). This is directly opposed to the traditional readings of Leibniz as the philosopher responsible for a self-contained monad that acts as the ultimate ground of being. This is what makes Deleuze’s history of philosophy an inhabitation rather than an interpretation. Rather than seek the good sense of a work, a Deleuzean reading looks at what a philo- sophical text creates. To see a text in this way means abandoning the interpretive comportment, in which the meaning of a text would be disclosed. In contrast, one inhabits a text: set up shop, follow its movements, trace its steps and discover it as a field of singularities (effects that cannot be subordinated to some pre-given identity of meaning). Deleuze’s enlisted authors of singularity and becoming – including Spinoza, Leibniz and Bergson – perhaps present a more Introduction 3 [...]... But feminist questions have rarely taken this form On the contrary, feminist questions and concepts ask what a philosophy might do, how it might activate life and thought, and how certain problems create (rather than describe) effects What this suggests is that Deleuze s thought provides a way 7 CLAIRE COLEBROOK of understanding the peculiar modality of feminist questions and the active nature of feminist. .. that the essays in this volume encounter the work of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari As Verena Andermatt Conley’s location of Deleuze and Guattari’s work within its own post-1968 Parisian terrain makes clear, the link between woman and becoming formed part of a general movement The fact that there are resonances between the notions of becoming-woman and Hélène Cixous’s writing-woman is more than an interesting... thought and extraneous wanderings that are not at home in the philosophical terrain (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 41) What all this seems to suggest is that feminism finally finds itself when it becomes Deleuzean But this would be far from the case Indeed, it was precisely these notions of becoming, multiplicity and immanence that created the most anxiety when Deleuze s work was first encountered by feminists... do and effect Such a 8 Introduction philosophy is also therefore a radical or transcendental empiricism: it asserts that there is nothing beyond the given – no law or real that pre-exists and governs becoming To think philosophy and theory as affirmation, and to think philosophical questions in terms of the effects they create and the forces they enable provides a new way of understanding what feminist. .. the centrality and risk of becoming woman (as becoming imperceptible) in Deleuze and Guattari’s project Set against identity politics, subjectivism and essentialism, ‘becoming woman’ precedes all ‘molar’ identifications; in so doing becoming seems to have lost not only its feminist but also its political force But Flieger insists that we should not see feminist identity politics and Deleuzean becoming... flows and style For Driscoll, then, becoming is not the becoming of woman, but a becoming that exceeds the dual identities of man and woman, hence the significance of Woolf’s androgyny Dorothea Olkowski’s interrogation of Deleuze, woman and becoming also sets off from the feminist corpus This time the negotiation is through Luce Irigaray If Deleuze presents the horror of a loss of identity to the feminist. .. between non-identity and essence that Olkowski pulls apart, for both Deleuze and Irigaray attempt to think beyond these sorts of dualisms An encounter between the two might give feminist 14 Introduction thought a new way of proceeding, such that neither the subject nor becoming would govern a feminist programme Rather, Deleuze and Irigaray might be read in order to effect new ways of asking feminist questions:... splits between the raw and the cooked In this essay Shukin opens the 15 CLAIRE COLEBROOK possibility of doing Deleuzean things with Deleuze: what are the desires and figurations of this text, what positions does it carve out, and how is it placed in a broader field of desire? Deleuze, then, is more than the presentation of a theory His corpus is also a challenge to work, create and effect – rather than... (1993b) 17 1 Becoming-Woman Now VERENA ANDERMATT CONLEY Only recently and reluctantly have feminists taken a positive turn in the direction of Gilles Deleuze s philosophy Where the texts of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan have been a mainstay of feminist theories of subjectivity for several decades, welcoming receptions of Deleuze s philosophy have been few and far apart The reasons for this fact... the controversial expression ‘becoming-woman’, but rather than rehearsing the debates about its respective merit, I also wish to do minor violence to Deleuze s (and Guattari’s) text by reinserting it in the political, social and cultural context of its elaboration and by following its evolution both in the philosophers’ writings and in its formative milieu Even though Deleuze (and Guattari’s) philosophy . Deleuze and Feminist Theory Edinburgh University Press edited by IAN BUCHANAN and CLAIRE COLEBROOK Deleuze and Feminist Theory  This page intentionally left blank Deleuze and Feminist Theory  edited. and Feminist Theory  edited by IAN BUCHANAN and CLAIRE COLEBROOK EDINBURGH University Press © The Contributors, 2000 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in ITC–New Baskerville by. think- ing beyond subjectivity and identity. On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari’s invocation of Woolf and becoming-woman can also be read as a domestication and subordination. Is it really