The previous post relatively focused on reterritorializating functions of the line-of-escape (the vertical levitator) which Deleuze-Guattarian sorcerers usually work with, its mechanisms and certain dangers. This part traces the cutting edge of deterritorialization that is also included in the line-of-escape, and the dangers that it may bring for escapist sorcerers.
As in the case of the cutting edge of deterritorialization (D) that the vertical (levitator) line-of-flight holds, sorcerers are always under the danger of drawing a sudden and too rapid (in the sequence from its initiation to its operating -- cutting -- status) line of D, a premature D which exhausts the putative integrity of the ground, and pushes it to an abrupt and total disintegration happening on a local level. Deleuze and Guattari’s reprimand of such a D: there is always the danger of suicide. Everywhere philosophy finds a virulent process; it relates the consequent danger to suicide, because philosophy can only perceive danger as something opposed to survival (it has presupposed the equation of survival with life itself) and hinting at suicide as the ultimate danger is always a ready scapegoat, it never fails to work as an intelligent and effective deterrent, a modus. Definitely, the urge to suicide may rush in when a premature line of D is engineered, but it should not be considered as a danger; the definite danger is that the disintegration triggered by the premature D installs a purgatory (exterminating) machinery on the ground and territories / states grounded on it, a destructive / purgatory process that functions on a local level; it engineers a raum and niche or an empty space (as a capacity proper for dwelling) which can be easily (i.e. minimum resistance, with no risk of contamination, overlapping or infective communication) occupied and inhabited by other regimes which from now on are immunologically resistant to that particular line of deterritorialization and are able to be fundamentally rooted in that region for, once again, there is virtually no significant remaining of the previous assemblage which prevents (via participation and transplantation: contaminating the new agency) the new regime to be deeply planted and developing its own purificatory processes which know nothing but themselves. This is not exactly the process of negative D wielding the opportunity or to be exact the power of a “lost territory” (Deleuze and Guattari) appropriate for reterritorialization -- playing as a remorseless mercenary in a coup d’état -- but a purgatory process which does not only seize the empty raum of the lost territory but also vaccinates the new territory, making it immune to similar lines of D which emerge on that region, and at the same time, it exterminates all effective phylumic traits of the last ‘kingdom’, allowing the new territory to take roots deeply and populate according to highly purified(ing) eugenic programs.
Posted by hyperstition at November 5, 2004 03:40 AMThe too-rapid decompression of the sign results in a condition of the bends, the proliferation of nitrogen in the blood arriving in the figure of the blue man. A depressing mark of the grave inscription run amock: the epitaph invokes bodies into its hole. Extended and naturalized within life, the blue men become a "life that is not life" (Empedocles), the half-life and half-light of the strivers, ushering in a kind of twilight of the soul which sparkles darkly ("Every man and every woman is a star"), radically individualized and radically conformist simultaneously, the spirit of recalcitrance.
Extermination always contains within it a husk of suicide, since what the regime is attempting to eradicate are those traits in the regime represented by the subjects of extermination. "In murder the actor often tries to kill a part of himself that he hates *without* killing himself." (O'Keefe, Stolen Lightning, 308) Murder offloads the psychic pain of suicidalism onto other bodies. In extreme cases, cases of genocide, the omnipresence of murder and death, while providing a "valve" by which psychic pain is relieved, invokes more death; it becomes the imago upon which genocidal actors model themselves. Death erects and army of the dead in life and sustains the process by (actively) surrounding it with death.
Posted by: thistle at November 8, 2004 04:27 AM