A Politics of Experience

Michael Foucault, at the end of the preface he wrote for Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, suggested that the art of living counter to all forms of fascism carries with it a certain number of essential principles, and I would like to list just a few of them here to make these forums into a manual or guide to everyday life:

1. Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.

2. Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.

3. Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.

4. Do not become enamored of power.

I would hope that the "traps" of this site will be those of humor: so many invitations to let oneself be put on, to take one's leave of this site and slam the door shut. May we lead each other to believe it is all fun and games, when something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.

I knew the rules, but the rules did not know me.

Extending thought to the point of madness and action to the point of revolution, ours is indeed a politics of experience. The experience is no longer that of man, but of what is nonhuman in man, his desires and his forces: a politics of desire directed against all that is egoic in man. We dig deep for insights concerning madness and dissension, politics and desire. We, along with Deleuze and Guattari, urge humankind to strip itself of all anthropomorphic and anthropological armoring, all myth and tragedy, and all existentialism, in order to perceive what is nonhuman in man, his will and his forces, his transformations and mutations.

Our current forms of knowledge seem to project an image of reality at the expense of reality itself. They blind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.

Depression does not just show up one day. Depression is an agency of the State before being delegated to the family, church, school, nation, or party. Neurosis is the result of power on individuals.

For anti-oedipalists, the ego is "part of those things we must dismantle through a united assault of analytical and political forces."

Oedipus is belief injected into the unconscious which gives us faith as it robs us of power. It is what teaches us desire for our own repression. Everyone has been oedipalized (neuroticized) at home, at school, at work, and, for the toughest nuts to crack, in jails and asylums. How might a living body ward off the deadly effects of power on Being?

We reverse the distinction between neurosis and psychosis that measures everything against so-called normal neurotics. Instead, we witness the upholder of the status quo deferring to the dominant society as neurotic - one on whom the Oedipal imprints take hold, rendering the individual more subdued; we witness the psychotic as the one incapable of being oedipalized, even and especially by psychoanalysis. Hence, having reversed the Freuduan distinctions between neurosis and psychosis, I suggest that the first task of the revolutionary is to learn from the psychotic (the modern day 'medicine-man' ?) how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power in order to create a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs.

Our goal is to break the holds of power. Once we forget about our egos, a non-neurotic form of politics becomes possible. Egoloss is the experience of all mankind, and an even further journey into the beings of animals, vegetables, and minerals.

Depressed populations are easily repressed, demeaned, and made docile. If desire is repressed, it is because every desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: Desire is explosive.

"There is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors."