Editor’s Note: The following essay was invited into a special issue of “Deleuze Studies Journal” and rejected by a peer panel. It is published here in full. Furthermore, in the Schirmacher Iero pegnini tradition, I am publishing the rejecting comments providing the phenomenology of “What is Wrong with the American Academy” or “Why no New Feminist idea can Come out of American Institutions.”
Tel Aviv Woman’s Demonstration 22 January 2017.I. INTRODUCTION
The global demonstration of feminine awakening during the 2017 Trump inauguration was a Badiousian Event. Multiple localities echoed a universal cry for gender equality in the face of a proliferating oligarchy. In determining that the Deleuzian-Guattari prediction of “decoding” under “accelerated capitalism” has taken place, the offspring of the French duo is instructive for moving from the banner slogan (fig. 1) to a viable structure for a new feminist theory reflecting, in and of itself, the “recoding” an authentic gender equality under egregious economic conditions.
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Intending to override psychoanalysis, the Deleuze/Guattari project re-introduced desire as “flow” into social investments subject to encoding and subsequent decoding:
For us, the essential thing is the relation of desiring-machines and social machines, their different regimes, and their immanence with respect to one another. In other words, how is unconscious desire invested in a social, economic and political field…we try to show how the flows invest different social fields, what they are flowing on, and by what means they are invested: encoding, over-coding, decoding. (Deleuze 2004:228-229)
Deleuze clearly associates “flow” with the feminine power (which he relates to the primitive) and its social orientation as an outward projection of internal desire: “What we’re trying to do is put libido in relation with an ‘outside.’ The flow of women among the primitives is in relation with flows of herd animals, flows of arrows.” (Deleuze 2004:229
In this paper, the movement into the right brain feminine thinking established the Deleuze Guattari coding now disclosed by a new continental philosophy: THE THIRD. Subsequently, it will be revealed by way of an established ontology, preciesely how this precipitous leap into a new paradigm by this French points the way to a new feminist movement.
II. Decoding the Language of Codes
The late Mark Fisher demonstrated how the Deleuze-Guatteri flow language was subject to its own codes. He appropriated Ellen Willis’ 1979 declaration for the title of his 2013 essay: “’A social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude’: Popular culture’s Interrupted Accelerationist Dreams”.
Along with paying homage to Willis in his assault on Neoliberalism, Fisher demonstrated that we can continue to look to the Deleuze-Guattari project for language that simultaneously constructs/deconstructs an evolutionary marriage of left/right brain hemispheres with its 360 perspective on the social binaries, whether it be right vs. left or capitalism vs socialism: “the social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other” (Deleuze-Guattari quoted in Fisher, 2013:6).
Fisher demonstrates his intrigue with this coded language of coding: “The passage is teasingly enigmatic — what do Deleuze and Guattari mean by associating ‘the movement of the market’ with ‘decoding a deterritorialization’? Unfortunately, they do not elaborate…”
Yet, Fisher’s process of entering the Uncertainty of the Deleuze-Guattari language of the in-between serves to reveal his own unconscious awareness of the dynamism of opposites, as he continues: “…which has made it is easy for orthodox Marxists to situate this passage as a classic example of how ‘68 led to neoliberal hegemony — one more left-wing capitulation to the logic of the new Right” (ibid).
A “decoding” of Fisher brings the feminine voice, via Willis, into his struggle for a binary interpretation (right vs. left/capitalist vs. socialist) of the Deleuze-Guattari Third argument of “accelerated flow reversing the coding”’ (ibid). Ultimately, he “reverses the code” by instigating a Willis intervention into a triumvirate of male voices — Michael Hardt, Marx and Foucault – to finish by inserting her phrase into his summation of Foucault’s elaboration on Marx phrase “man produces man”:
The program that Foucault outlines in his gloss on this phrase is one that culture must recover if there is to be any hope of achieving the ‘social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude’ which popular culture once dreamt of: ‘…we must produce something that doesn’t yet exist and about which we cannot know how and what it will be’. (Fisher 2013:8.
Paradoxically, the inclusion of the feminine voice with the (male) philosophical search for the New Man brings us to the declaration of Fourth Wave feminism.
III. Reversing the Flow to the Equality of the Fourth Wave
We can achieve an authentic gender equality by reversing the flow from the culminating Event of Saturday, 21 January 2017 – to Mark Fisher’s 2013 Willis intervention capturing and captured (subject/object) by the enigma of the Deleuze-Guattari prescient Third view: capitalist acceleration recoding its destruction by way of women arising en mass against the oligarchic last stand of the patriarchy. This brings us to French duo’s theory/practice of externalizing libido in a choice social function: their writing collaboration. Deleuze addressed his process with Guattari as entering the “flow” beyond “traditional duality”:
As for the technical side of writing the book, the two of us working together was not a problem, but it did serve a precise function, as we came to realize. One thing is rather shocking about books of psychiatry or even psychoanalysis, and that is the pervasive duality between what an alleged mental patient says and what the doctor reports—between the “case” and the commentary on the case, the analysis of the case. It’s logos against pathos….This is precisely why we used so many writers and poets: you would have to be really clever to decide whether they speak as mental patients or doctors—mental patients and doctors of civilization. Strangely enough, if we tried to get beyond this traditional duality, it’s because there were two of us writing. Neither of us was the madman, and neither the doctor: there had to be two of us if we were to uncover a process that would not be reducible to the psychiatrist and his mental patient, or to the mental patient and his psychiatrist. This process is what we call a flow. But, again, flow is an everyday, unqualified notion that we needed….We imagined this book as a flow-book. (Deleuze 2004:218).
The terms “feminizing” and “schizoanalysis” emerged out of the “flow-book” that inspired this feminist self-critique. Anti-Oedipus interpreted psychosis within a threefold relation:
The relationships of neurosis, psychosis, and also perversion depend on the situation of each one with regard to the process, and on the manner in which each one represents a mode of interruption of the process, a residual bit of ground to which one still clings so as not to be carried off by the deterritorialized flows of desire. Neurotic territoriality of Oedipus, perverse territorialities of the artifice, psychotic territoriality of the body without organs: sometimes the process is caught in the trap and made to turn about within the triangle, sometimes it takes itself as an end-in-itself, other times it continues on in the void and substitutes a horrible exasperation for its fulfillment. Each of these forms has schizophrenia as a foundation; schizophrenia as a process is the only universal. Schizophrenia is aonce the wall, the breaking through this wall, and the failures of this breakthrough: “How does one get through this wall, for it is useless to hit it hard, it has to be undermined and penetrated with a file, slowly and with patience, as I see “it”. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983:136)
IV. The Liberation is in the Structure
It is crucial to examine the language structure here of this Third voice beyond doctor/patient as evoking and reflecting a proposition of three imbalanced states of being (neurosis, psychosis and perversion). Not only is the sentence composed of three phrases, but there is deconstruction within the constructed three parts, though we don’t realize this at first because the positive/negative process is happening simultaneously.
Deconstructed as literal phrases, the three reflect “a mode of interruption of the process”. The first phase, of the relationship between the 3, is marked here as positive (+); however, the process switches to negative (−) as the three interact with one another. The Third phase, or outcome, is where the opposites combine (+ −) in order to stabilize (“a residual bit of ground to which one still clings…”):
- +The relationships of neurosis, psychosis, and also perversion depend on the situation of each one with regard to the process
- − and on the manner in which each one represents a mode of interruption of the process
- + − a residual bit of ground to which one still clings so as not to be carried off by the deterritorialized flows of desire.
The text then interprets schizophrenia through language expressing the Third (breakthrough) via three subsequent phrases marked here with their quality of gender (the + −)
- +Schizophrenia is at once the wall,
- − the breaking through this wall,
- + − and the failures of this breakthrough
These two deconstructed sentences mirror one another. To understand the positive as the masculine energy and the negative as the feminine energy, we have a compositional diagram for the dynamism of gender opposites.
The key question is how to bring this erotic dynamism into a place of stabilization and balance required for authentic gender equality. The answer is in the very mode of the transition, keeping in mind that the word for transgender in French is “transgenre”. Trans means moving through, passing from one place or phase to another; the French literary term applied to gender means a moving through genre = moving through gender as genre. Therefore, the very ground of multiplicity proclaimed by the singular Deleuzo-Guattarian Third claims all genres, as well as genders, meaning the masculine, the feminine and the transgender/transgenre as the dynamic passage between the opposites.
V. Transgenre as a Movement into the Third
A new movement encompassing the Deleuzian view of feminism (which wasn’t conscious in his lifetime) provides the phenomenology through that craw stuck in the throat of feminism – language itself. In fact, a proactive movement of breakthrough via the dynamism of opposites (+ −) is interpreted purely by the text as the literal smashing through the schizophrenia wall in which various voices in a single system vie for dominance.
If the third phase of this construction is termed with the word failure, it is due to the inability of the collaborators to see the implications of their argument from a 360 perspective. Their creative use of the number 3 was to remain unconscious simply because it relates to the Third entity of their meeting of the minds. Extending this meaning of the Third to the 21st century icon that Jung termed as the Self and Wolfgang Pauli interpreted as the hieros gamos (Streitfeld, 2014), Edinger summed up the supremacy of this newly emerging archetype: “Since the Self is the central archetype, it subordinates all other archetypal dominants. It surrounds and contains them.” (Edinger 1972:38) This understanding was expressed by Michael Hardt, who declared his writing collaboration with Antonio Negri as guided by a Third entity (Streitfeld, 2014).
The process of getting to the Third requires the embodiment of this Deleuzian mirror we find in his second stage of the threefold process:
(2) − and on the manner in which each one
(2) − the breaking through the wall represents a mode of interruption of the process
Keeping in mind that the negative polarity, along with odd numbers, is troublesome and therefore associated with the feminine, the key to arriving at the state of gender balance is the acceptance of this second stage: interruption, chaos, and eventual breakthrough. Paradoxically, the invention is sourced in the collapsing opposites, requiring surrender into the chaotic stage. This is the natural outcome of the collapse of binary thinking, like trying to walk on solid ground during an earthquake the consensus reality is shattered.
With the reality TV showman Trump elected as POTUS, we see this process of breakdown on a public and national scale. Yet, from the 360 perspective, a complete collapse of logic is essential so that the intuitive (feminine) may come into balance with the rational (masculine). This dynamic of opposites coming into tension as a crucial stage of seeking a true (unconscious) equilibrium is what Deleuze and Guattari had the insight to foresee a priori of the American feminist misappropriation of French deconstructionist thinking. Schizoanalysis refers to the multiple voices vying for authority within a system in which a dictator (the female animus) appropriates the male logic for economic and political purposes, thereby undermining the deductive process of logic contained within the very structure of language.
In this paper, the 360 perspective of the in-between realm of the Third is labeled “beyond schizoanalysis”. Applying the term “beyond” to this universal state of equilibrium recalls Nietzsche’s term “beyond good and evil”, inspired by his fleeting intellectual partnership with Lou Salomé. Continental scholars are now viewing this kinship as the ever-present icon of the hieros gamos (sacred marriage).1
VI, The Erotic Consciousness of Nietzsche/Salomé
The merging of right and left hemispheres of the brain is an evolutionary process. We can trace this process through the German terminology of Selbstvergessenheit (self-forgetting) and Selbstsucht (self-knowledge) utilized by Salomé in her writing on eros (Hermsen, 2017:6).
The erotic consciousness shared by Salomé and Nietsche established a phenomenological model for the revival of the ancient Sumerian mythos of the dying and resurrected god/goddess (Streitfeld 2014:103-114). The lovers’ coded passage reflected the seasonal cycle from their initial spring encounter in Christendom (St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Rome) into their own coding of the “eternal recurrence” in a May Day creation of the Dreieinigkeit (Fig. 2) to the Sacred Marriage Rites of Sumer in their peak encounter on Monte Sacro (Sacred Mount) in Orta. Along the way, Nietzsche summoned the genus loci of place (Orta meaning middle, or medium) and characterized Beloved via the astrological symbols of the Lion (Leo) and Eagle (Scorpio) – an occult coding2 that would be later be utilized as literary metaphor in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
The “sacred marriage” of the Nietzsche/Salomé mind produced a wunderkind offspring: Übermensch and the Eternal Return. Nietzsche, intent on creating a new literary language, likened his Zarathustra to dance in his letters (Nietzsche’s
Letter to Erwin Rohde (Feb. 22,1884) cited in Nietzsche’s Library, 66 in Streitfeld 2016:175, 183) and his character spun full circle to embrace the Shadow, embodying the 360 perspective. This is the “sacred marriage” icon of the Übermensch absorbing the Shadow of unity, i.e. the bifurcation of the mind, as the natural outcome of Nietzsche’s subconscious resolving the tension of opposites.
The bilateral thinking of either/or bouncing from one opposite to the other is the condition that Deleuzo-Guattarian offspring termed “schizoanalysis”. While they failed to identify the sacred marriage icon in their language, they created a rich literature from the 360 perspective of having achieved it. This “holy wedding”, also known the “philosopher’s stone”, is personified by ancient alchemists as Sophia, the Greek goddess of wisdom who embraces the opposites of the Third space between the eyebrows, known as the Third Eye,
VII. Desire and the Feminine
While Sophia exists beyond desire, the denial of passion is simply repression, closing off the “flow” leading to enlightenment in the Third Eye, according to Hindu philosophy. Deleuze’s injection of desire into continental philosophy is explicitly directed at la féminin. His earliest writing addresses woman as indefinable Other:
Woman does not yet have a philosophical status. This is an urgent problem. The philosophies of the Other (Autrui) are strange to us, we are ill at ease with them, and for a simple reason: the world proposed to us by the Other is an asexual world (Deleuze, 2002:17).
Moreover, Deleuze doesn’t permit woman a place in the opposites of object/subject. She is therefore, transiting between both as the yet undefined Third:
Woman is neither object nor subject; she is no longer simply that which one has, but she is not yet that which is; she is the élan of the object towardssubjectivity. Neither an object in the world nor the subject of a possible world. (Ibid, p. 23).
Whatever the lack that Deleuze viewed in the women of his time, the Deleuzo-Guattarian phenomenology reveres the feminine by means of an unconscious emphasis on the quality, the feminine characteristic of number, to present their holistic argument:
The three errors concerning desire are called lack, law, and signifier. It is one and the same error, an idealism that forms a pious conception of the unconscious. And it is futile to interpret these notions in terms of a combinative apparatus (line combinatoire) that makes oflack an empty position and no longer a deprivation, that turns the law into a rule of the game and no longer a commandment, and the signify into a distributor and no longer a meaning, for these notions cannot be prevented from dragging their theological cortege behind—insufficiency of being, guilt, signification. Structural interpretation challenges allbeliefs, rises above all images, and from the realm of the mother and the father retains only functions, defines the prohibition and the transgression as structural operations. But what water will cleanse these conceptsof their background, their previous existences—religiosity? Scientific knowledge as nonbelief is truly the last refuge of belief, and as Nietzsche put it, there never was but one psychology, that of the priest (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983:134).
Deleuze and Guattari are freeing women to utilize their position in the transition between subject and object to adopt a trifold framework (via the three above topics: lack, law and signifier) for constructing a new vision of desire, a view that “makes of lack an empty position but not deprivation”. The term “emptiness” speaks again to the + − in that what is filled is positive, while the empty is negative. Getting rid of the negative connotations in which “empty is not deprivation” means seeking a balance between empty/fullness. This makes an erotic game of the efforts to destabilize the binary enforced as a patriarchal coding that is both derivative and hierarchical in its aim to continue repressing the authentic feminine power, the same dark energy Deleuze is intent on liberating in the body through “flow”.
The Third entity that is the collaborative voice uses the language of positive and negative on either side of “and” within the sentence construction. Thus, the Deleuze-Guattari text moves the reader into the realm of the opposites via a declaration in which “structural interpretation challenges all beliefs, rises above all images”. How much truth is there in this statement! The Third Entity “flow-book” organically creates an unconscious equilibrium within the dynamics of the Third. With the unexpected bon mot (“scientific knowledge as nonbelief is truly the last most tasty morsel refuge of belief”), the widespread problem of the binary is summed up without explicitly mentioning the cause: a universal acceptance of scientific reductionism making religion out of the secular.
VIII. Challenge to the Feminists
The Deleuzo-Guattarian marriage challenged feminists to follow their collaborative model of entering the “flow-text” of the Third as a tactic for undermining the unquestioned authority of binary reductionist language overtaking the academy. Yet, Deleuze’s earlier writing established a crucial provision for the game: players must free themselves from the “law” by reducing its blanket authority to a simple a rule in the binary game open to new interpretation and subsequently overturned by way of an evolved consciousness:
The modern world is one of simulacra. Man did not survive God, nor did the identity of the subject survive that of substance. All identities are only simulated, produced as an ‘optical effect’ by the more profound game of difference and repetition. We propose to think difference in itself independently of the forms of repetition which reduce it to the Same, and the relation of different to different independently of those forms which make them pass through the negative (Deleuze, 1994:15).
This key passage of Difference and Repetition stresses the authority of the binary to be undermined by the game the French author is literally playing with language. For example, the doubling in “different to different” in the final clause is an intentional Signifier of “repetition and difference”. Or is it “repetition of the Same”? Tricking the reader’s mind has an alchemical effect. Mercurial leaps separate the notion of different (associated with the feminine viva la difference) from the negative connotation in binary thought, and override the “lack” that has sufficed to dismiss the feminine from western philosophy.
Did the feminist thinkers take up the challenge to follow this marriage into new acts of language creation? What happened was the opposite: the feminists in the academy became the law intent on killing any and every form of erotic game.
IX. Lilith as the Third Wave Icon
The Third Wave of Feminists was termed “feminisms” (Strauss 2000). This covered up the lack of an overriding idea regarding feminist development at the close of the millennium. Yet, from the perspective of Deleuze, the inclusive term fits “schizoanalysis” as multiple voices reflecting the lack of center in postmodernism.
I would like to suggest a re-visioning of the Third Wave of Feminism as the resurrection of Lilith, the she-demon of Judiasm known as the first feminist. Lilith appears in the Sumerian myths as the shadow of Inanna, whose proactive journey to and from the Underworld prompts her self-declaration as “Queen of Heaven and Earth”. A clear signal a Lilith resurrection was the Woman’s Spirituality Movement of the eighties and entering pop culture in the nineties via the Lilith Fair.3
The intention to revision the Third Wave as the resurrection of Lilith is crucial from the perspective of a holistic Fourth Wave in which an authentic internal/external unity recreates the Übermensch in its gender free origin, Die Übermensch in accordance with Nietzsche’s muse Lou Salomé, a human vessel of the pre-patriarchal Sumerian Queen of Heaven & Earth (Streitfeld 2016:198-223).
Logically, the authentic face of the feminine must be fully emerged in order to declare an authentic balance of gender polarity within the individual, as well as externally in the culture. If we can take the Venus glamour of Sex and the City as Lucifer, the Morning Star rushing a new identification of feminist as brilliant and beautiful through excess, then we have the Evening Star polarity with Girls dark plunge into the Shadow of the New York art world of their parents.
X. A Thousand Plateaus
“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together….We are no longer ourselves. Each shall know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:3). This is how Deleuze and Guattari introduce the second phase of their experiment. A Thousand Plateaus solidifies the breakthrough of first title — which overcame duality by embracing the Tausk theory of the schizophrenic machine even as it rejected the outcome: the Oedipus theory of the rejecting Freud father.4 It achieves this with a language for the corpus straddling the opposites of biology and technology: “assemblage”, a “body without organs” and “a book itself is a little machine…” (Ibid 3-4)
The numerology in the new title is significant.5 One indicates a new beginning and zero indicates the zero point of absolute creation. Three zeros is creative beginnings. As noted, the Third entity of this collaboration balances the Cartesian right brain with the right brain intuition regarding the quality of number. As quality is a characteristic of the feminine, this unconscious method overturned the “negative” association of the feminine proclaimed by the binary. Therefore, the leap into the 21st century icon of the hieros gamos has overcome the sameness of repetition to arrive at “difference”. By this erotic dynamism of opposites, the game of chance proposed in Difference and Repetition is enacted from the 360 space.
Enlightenment has been made possible by the freeing of the universal archetype, Lilith. to express her abuse and exile through the subjectivity of Feminisms. The schizoanalysis label was therefore inevitable due to the schism of the Cartesian adaptation of the Second Wave to external challenges to equality imbedded political and economic conditions that required women to sacrifice their feminity (the interior journey) in order to compete with men in society. How could such a surface attempt to achieve a new objectivity through the subjective multitudes not result in a schizoanalysis?
XI. Beyond Schizoanalysis
This brings us to a new task in 2017, a year defined by something new: a U.S. presidential inauguration catalyzing a global Woman’s demonstration. This outpouring revealed the paradox at work: the “boots to the pavement” approach to equality is directly opposed to the real work of withdrawing one’s projections for the purpose of internal integration. Could the outpouring signify that the prototypes for balance within have been completed? It will take the liberated female brain to come up with balanced approaches that empower, rather than repress, the authentic face of the feminine newly emerging in the 21st century.
Sophia is an apt icon for a new era ” beyond schizoanalysis” to achieve a new objectivity universally applied to all women – regardless of economic status, race, religion or culture. The essence of the pre-patriarchal Venus her bi-polar journey to and from the underworld establishing the duality of Venus as the Morning Star (Vesper) and Evening Star (Hesperus). The worship of a holistic philosophy of the feminine embedded in these cosmic cycles circles back to the ancient source of the hieros gamos achieved by flow between the male and female deities. 6 Clearly the Deluezo-Guatteri marriage couldn’t view from an outside perspective the Third Mind in which they were immersed as collaborators.
Can we now surmise that Deleuze’s notion of the Eternal Return was tied into his hope for an emergence of difference in the authentic face of the feminine repressed by the patriarchy? This approach was a direct contrast to the American feminists fighting to reduce the gender differences between male and female in their quest for political and economic equality. Therefore, it had to be coded.
Here is an obvious code that reveals the passage forward: equality has quality written into it. This suggests that a state of gender equality means introducing quality into the notion of gender balance. For example, to analyze the feminist waves through the quality of number, a Fourth Wave returns us to the One, the holy marriage of unity. In this manner, the feminist passage from the beginning of the 20th century can be viewed as an alchemical transformation in which women became their gender opposite (Second Wave) in order to undergo schizophrenic breakdown (Third Wave) and resurrect (Fourth Wave) as a unity of masculine and feminine in reflection of both the holism of Sophia and containment of the erotic dynamism of the bipolar Love Goddess. In order for this alchemical equation7 to be complete, we have the images and slogans of woman’s march on Washington, displaying the full range of emotions –- from rage to joy — that women in society have been denied under the patriarchy.
The task now for women is to consciously embody this pair of icons: Sophia penetrating a wisdom beyond the opposites, and Inanna, whose erotic dynamism between opposites has been anticipated in pop culture through the slick Sex and the City and its antidote, Girls.
What this leap into the Third requires honoring the alchemical stages of the inner marriage mirroring the zigzag evolution of feminism itself. While this is a condition extremely hard to achieve in the gadget love of the 24/7 technological society, the rewards are too great to deny the attempt. Out of the belly of an applied “eros consciousness” comes the birth of Das Übermensch as the 21st century woman guided by her holistic brain.
Can we really continue to interpret Marx’s New Man apart from the feminine? The Dutch author Joke J. Hermen created a Kairos moment when she placed aside her written paper at the 2017 Lou Andres Salomé Colloque International and announced that she discovered Salomé through her professor, Gilles Deleuze, who told his students of her writing on Nietzsche. Hermen became the human fusion of opposites when she seized upon chronological time to embody in free form Lou’s Kairos pursuit of the Self:
For her artists are best able to articulate this exploration of the inner self which transcends individual identities. In her works on art, the writer defines a unique space devoted to the exploration of the innermost recesses of the psyche: it becomes the mirror that enables us to search for and scan the contours of a Self with unparalleled loving care and attention. (Hermen, 2016),
Salomé’s l.anguage of the in-between encapsulates the Deleuzian concepts of Eternal Return with Difference in that the embrace of Uncertainty is key to real change. This brings us full circle back to the philosophical term of Übermensch as the Aquarian archetype of the sacred marriage and Lou Salomé as the human embodiment.
XII. Conclusion
The Deleuzo-Guattarian marriage foresaw the individual internal struggle between opposites manifested in language as the necessary prerequisite to solving the global problem. This was put into practice at a time they could not express their views of feminism for fear of being attacked by means of their own terminology: schizoanalysis. Instead, they put their vision into practice, surrendering their individual ego as a model for the reconstructed feminine.
The Fourth Wave of feminism honors the unified brain and puts it to work to resolve social problems in a manner that is both holistic and sustainable. Lou ’s personal example of living a life dedicated to psychic integration provides a trangender/transgenre model for a new feminist movement. This universal effort annihilates the binary reductionist coding of the military industrial complex. The painful reality is that this either/or mentality resulted in the disastrous 2016 US election. The dueling male and female golems (Fig. 4) arising from the binary patriarchal division legitimized the schizoanalysis language born out of the flow. Is it now wonder that what came to pass as a vote of “the lesser of two evils” removed the affirmation of individual choice?
This newfound inner/outer position is being termed by continental philosophers as diverse as Slavoj Zizek and Bracha Ettinger as the Mobius strip (Streitfeld 2014:148). In this figure, the inner and outer are so intertwined that neither can be distinguished from the other. Integration automatically resolves the problem of the objective vs, subjective in which Lacan dismissed the feminine as “excess”. In the present state of chaos, these opposites can be overcome simply through conscious recognition of the dynamic tension linking them in the body and without. The oligarchic society of the late stages of capitalism is where Lilith fully awakens in the culture to vocalize the deplorable state of inequality existing far beyond the loins.
Clearly, the time is NOW for a twenty-first century philosophy of feminism. In 2017, we see a new positive global society arising out of a holistic movement in the arts and philosophy which resolves the problem of gender balance by returning humanity to its origins — the hieros gamos.8 The feminist that has traveled through the subsequent stages of growth to embody this icon is the proactive mover of a new age of gender equality. In this sense, the contemporary feminist has become the Deleuzo-Guattarian offspring in that she has also birthed the New Man and New Woman in herself: the hieros gamos.
Deleuze/Guattari demonstrated how this can be achieved – the coding of capital acceleration recoding female desire as a mass social movement seeking genuine gender equality. The partners anticipated the collapse of the quantum wave and were setting up the rules of the erotic game in which the constellating icon of the hieros gamos guiding their hand would free the daughters from assaults on both sides of the gender divide: the patriarchal authority intent on keeping women from expressing their authentic power through capital flows and the feminist authority intent on repressing eros that forbids access altogether. In this sense, the Third realm occupied by Deleuze and Guattari fulfilled the Foucault prescription of “man produces man” – (“we must produce something that doesn’t yet exist and about which we cannot know how and what it will be”) by giving permission to women to play the game of love as a unifying force of the opposites. Sometimes it is necessary for the father to unmake the sins of the mother.
Notes:
- Amirpasha Tavakkoli’s “Nietzsche lu por Lou Andreas- Salomé” stressed the feminine balance that Salomé brought to Nietzsche’s philosophy. The paper was delivered in “Lou Andreas- Salomé Colloque International” in Strasbourg 9-11 February, 2017.
- Nietzsche’s coding for the sacred marriage between himself and Salomé was uncovered through occult methods such as astrology and numerology in my 2016 dissertation for European Graduate School, “ÜBERMENSCH: Nietzsche, Salomé & the Age of Aquarius”. See 2.2.4.1. Nietzsche’s Dream, pp. 103-113.
- At this time, I was in discussion with Lily Rivlin to update her classic 1972 essay “Lilith” republished in a 1984 anthology: Which Lilith: Feminist Writers Recreate the First Feminist”.
- 5. See section 3.3.2. Dreieinigkeit 1912: Salomé, Freud and Tausk (pp. 279 – 321) in “ÜBERMENSCH: Nietzsche, Salomé & the Age of Aquarius” for an analysis of the Dreieinigkeit between Lou Salomé, Victor Tausk and Sigmund Freud and its influence on Freud’s theory of Oedipus. It would seem that Tausk’s influential text, on relating the schizophrenic influencing machine to libido influenced the Deleuze Guattari language and Tausk’s role in the development of Freud’s Oedipal theory, along with Salomé, ties their experiment with the hieros gamos to that of Deleuze Guattari. See also: Tausk, Victor, Sexuality, War and Schizophrenia: Collected Psychoanalytic Papers. Introduction and edited by Paul Roazen. Translated by Eric Mosbacher. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991.
- See “The Event” (pp. 162-167) in Lisa Paul Streitfeld’s Hermeneutics of New Modernism (2014) for deconstructive method of number as quality.
- New scholarship during the writing of this paper has determined the Greek enosis Aphrodite Cover-Up repressing the ancient bisexual fertility goddess in Cyprus and knowledge of the dual face of the Venus orbit as Morning and Evening Star.
- The Axiom of Maria Prophetissa applies here, particularly if the Third Wave can be seen as the daughters of the Third Wave creatively birthing something entirely new that will resolve the problem of gender via integration (Trangender): “Out of the One comes Two; out of Two comes Three; and from the Third, comes the One as the Fourth. In this way the Two become One.” See Streitfeld 2016:16.
- See Remo Roth’s Return of the World Soul (2012) for his translation and interpretation of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung’ s 30-year correspondence in which they come to an agreement on the hieros gamos as the 21st century icon.
References
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HERMENEUTICS OF NEW MODERNISM 