A chairde!
This is our twelfth discussion (out of fifteen) on the essay collection Transgender Marxism, the PDF for which can be found here - https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0b3d5edcb7_jules-joanne-gleeson-transgender-marxism-1.pdf
The intro discussion, with links to all previous essay discussions, can be found here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
Feel free to ask questions, I’ll answer them to the best of my abilities. I hope that you’ll read along, and we can all learn something new together, and maybe spark a discussion.
This essay is A Dialogue on Deleuze and Gender Difference by The Conspiratorial Association for the Advancement of Cultural Degeneracy.
CAACD is a collective name for dialogue encouraging lines of flight, and shaking of the habitual.
Edit: the discussion for the next essay, by Nathaniel Dickson, can be found here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/508468
“philosophy is not mere passive reflection. At the root of thought that has started to really think underlies a kind of violence.”
“my argument would be along these lines – that becoming-woman in trans always has this potential to render all these previously invisible forces visible”
“In the sense that this becoming is not only at the level of cognition but also viscerally felt. It affects the entire body.”
“So there’s a possible ‘line of flight’, a chance for deterritorialisation”
Alright, so “lines of flight” are a concept put forth by Deleuze in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. So a line of flight is an assemblage by which multiplicities can be deterritorialised, where the nature of a concept can be reshaped into new understandings. In a trans perspective, the line of flight would be a reshaping or recreating of the understanding of gender itself, crafting new social, psychological and political boundaries (or eliminating previous boundaries) in order to create a new plane of gender conceptions.
“What liberal identitarian rhetoric does is to reterritorialise this line of flight.”
Reterritorialising in this way is saying that liberal identity narratives are a way to reframe trans genders within the previously understood conceptions of gender. That is to say, it takes the line of flight that transness offers in reconceptualising gender, and attempts to reconcile it with the dominant capitalist framework of gender and thus subsume trans identity as a part of the current hegemonic concepts, robbing it of its potential to reshape gender concepts into something new.
“There’s this moment when all of what we’ve been taught, the way we viewed things changes. But like there’s obviously these very visceral moments that come with the realisation, right? Like the need to cry? Or even the euphoria we feel?”
"And it’s within those moments that the grip of the present slips on us. And that’s where I’m trying to locate the line of flight.
Outside the grip of the present? - [second person]
Yes, by the present I’m referring to our social reality. Since the way Empire functions is by maintaining an environment that’s like a perpetual present"
If you remember phenomenological philosophy from the previous essay, humanity exists on an axis between pain (the sensuous) and the imaginary (ideas of a future that could address the needs of the sensuous). Through work, humans transverse this axis, taking their ideas (imagination) and realizing them, thus creating of them the sensuous present.
A perpetual-present is an Imperial drive to create a permanent state of never-realized, where the imagined can never be attained, where work is suborned by capital and thus never able to create a new present by realizing the imaginary (potential for the future) and crafting of it the sensuous. In this way, the Empire traps us in pain that cannot be addressed.
This is, as the author says, an unchanging social reality, which serves to keep us from forming a new, more just social reality, as our current social reality serves capital.
“In my opinion this scream is also built into how we experience dysphoria.”
Yeah, this makes sense. A deep-seated, existential need that demands the creation of new concept to satisfy and understand.
“Or how suddenly the world feels intolerable”
“There is a very literal alienation between the self and the skin.”
"Deleuze sees Spinoza’s ‘we do not even know what a body is capable of’ to be a war cry, but to me, it seems like a very queer war cry."
“In that most screams that occur through how trans women experience the world, the violence enacted upon us, the way love for us is treated, the way our self-hate is trained in, they all become important to the scream”
“There is a horror in the sudden realisation that a fundamental unboundedness of the ‘body’, as you put it here, has been broken and bound.”
“Affirmation preceded by destruction”
“True. Also sexuation itself. Dysphoria is not just individual – it’s experienced at an individual level, sure. But dysphoria is produced socially and politically by massacring the body as soon as it’s born. And of course, as we know, this massacre is vital for the production of a productive labour force or the productive body. Vital for capitalism.”
“By placing the body under discursive constraints that we then go on to reproduce. Those constraints are like tenets of a reasoning. The entire reasoning I feel is geared towards arriving at determinism.”
“Dysphoria is this radical break – a sad affect, sure. But an important one that leads to an un-becoming and simultaneously a becoming”