/lit/ - Literature

>>12242219
(continued)

So basically the assemblages the anus is part of and the assemblages that wolves are part of (recognizing a wolf, running away from it, thinking it would make for a cute pet etc. everyone has their own assemblages, some weirder than others) interact without the need for an Oedipal mediator.

> For in the end the anus also expresses an intensity, in this case the approach to zero of a distance that cannot be decomposed without its elements changing in nature.

An intensity for D&G is something that has its own internal logic out of which extension is created. The approach to zero thing is a bit more difficult to explain because Deleuze liked the Leibnizian-Spinozist idea of actual infinities (turtles all the way down, but with emergent properties based on relations within multiplicities otherwise it would just be infinite regress with no becoming). Imagine that you have a bag that can only hold dicks. Even if it's empty it can still only hold dicks and any attempt to change it makes it not-a-dickbag, it loses its properties. It is what Bergson called "the indivisible": it can be divided, but it loses its properties in the process and there's no way around it.

So the anus is connected to this intensity of emptiness which is itself a thing and has "positive" consequences (nothing is a mode of Being for Deleuze).

I should mention that for Freud and the anthropologists of his day, the anus was also associated with verticality: humans, in their long evolutionary history, ended up seeing the sky as something superior and the ground as something dirty and this is mapped on their body as well (especially due to upright position becoming a thing) so that their anus and its functions becomes something to be avoided, which is very different from how animals use it.

D&G see a connection being formed within the logic of the larval subject that dreams when we're asleep between the emptiness associated with the anus and the child's other dream productions (his place in the "pack" and the fact that he is himself in his lonesome a pack in order to have properties of any kind, the difference between jaw and anus in their intensities and "vertical" opposition). The thing is that within dreams all the everyday territorializations that become consolidated through repetition and taken for granted in waking life get freed and start having strange interactions and even form new connections that have the potential for consolidation (Medieval philosophers often talked about dreams based on their effects on the dreamer and placed great value on the dreams that forever changed him).

>>12221725
Deleuze was against identity (and identifying) of any kind in favor of becoming.

From Letter to a Harsh Critic:

> The question's nothing to do with the character of this or that exclusive group, it's to do with the transversal relations that ensure that any effects produced in some particular way (through homosexuality, drugs, and so on) can always be produced by other means. We have to counter people who think "I'm this, I'm that," and who do so, moreover, in psychoanalytic terms (relating everything to their childhood or fate), by thinking in strange, fluid, unusual terms: I don't know what I am--I'd have to investigate and experiment with so many things in a non-narcissistic, non-oedipal way—no gay can ever definitively say "I'm gay." It's not a question of being this or that sort of human, but of becoming inhuman, of a universal animal becoming—not seeing yourself as some dumb animal, but unraveling your body's human organization, exploring this or that zone of bodily intensity, with everyone discovering their own particular zones, and the groups, populations, species that inhabit them.

Keep in mind that Deleuze was heavily influenced by Nietzsche and for Nietzsche there is no metaphysical "you", it's always a composite, a struggle and a becoming. Deleuze would say that it's a matter of connections being more than their terms: these are "your" desires, what "you" do with them is already something new and something changing "you" at each moment. Even to advocate for some fluidity like it's an imperative is a new connection and one which must be differentiated from other connections which are more complex (and more liberating as a result).