Last meeting we discussed desire from two distinct but quite broad perspectives:

From Deleuze and Guattari, we saw desire as part of a machine that includes but subsumes the individual and their ego, and makes of subject and object a co-determining relationship rather than a hierarchical structure;

In Bataille, we saw a dangerous desire that threatens to dissolve the subject and the object into one another, and if pursued to its ecstatic ends, approaches death;

Keeping in mind why we arrived at desire in the first place, we wondered what these perspectives could do to help our dilemma of abstraction and speed;

In the former, where in the machine does intention fit? Where do we locate the means to make a distinction between desire and abstraction such as that made in Bifo’s article?

In the latter does the subject and object divide that the subject must overcome presuppose its inability to make the connection between them? In other words at the extremity of becoming an object (to the point of suicide) do we gain the capacity to “reactivate our ability to connect language and desire”(Bifo), or do we simply assume they can ultimately never be resolved? (Bataille seems to offer a partial answer to this: literature as the substitution of death and sacrifice.)

The next reading proposed is “Bodies That Matter” by Judith Butler (1993) to approach desire through a more focused lens on the construction of sexuality.
The meeting will be held Sunday the 8th of January at 5pm.

Hope you can join in one more repudiation of the solar hegemony before our flight from the terror of the lunar!

The next meeting of Happy Friends Reading Club will take place at HomeShop on Sunday, the 18th of December, 2011 at 5pm. Below are the readings, please make a request if you wish to receive them:

• “Desire Horrified at Losing and at Losing Oneself” and “Object of Desire and the Totality of the Real” (Chapters 3 & 4 of Part 4, vol. 2) of The Accursed Share, by Georges Bataille, written between 1946 and 1949 (translated and published in English in 1991).
  And the counterpoint to this text is:

• Desiring-Production” (Part 1, Chapter 1) from Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1972).

This combination was selected with the enigmatic finale to Bifo’s article from last meeting in mind:

This generation, which experiences a problematic relationship between language and the body, between words and affection, separates language from the body of the mother, and from the body in general—for language in human history has always been connected to a fear of trusting the body. In this situation, we need to reactivate our ability to connect language and desire, or the situation will become extremely bad. If the relationship between the signifier and the signified can no longer be guaranteed by the presence of the body, we lose our relationship to the world. 

We located one of the problems being the definition of desire, its relation to language, its helping to provide the grounds for a connection to “the world.” To be continued…