Production – Intimacy
”Desire is not satisfied; it’s expelled” (Robert Glück, Jack the Modernist, 57). With these words Glück crystallises the creativity Nietzsche accorded his gift-giving virtue and, in turn, Deleuze and Guattari their anti-oedipal and productive desiring machines. In making us laugh at Werther’s consumptive sorrows, Goethe seems to have endorsed a similar principle. At times, Freud too thought the aim of desire in terms of tension and its release instead of the control or absorption of an external object or of the other’s desire.
If desire is production and release then its frustration, assuming one can still use the term at all, is likely to produce a poisoning of the body, or of the self, by that which it has produced but cannot or will not expel. With every opening and with every expulsion, a resistance may be witnessed. Desire is then at odds with a tendency to gather and keep whole, a tendency that is potentially deadly in its magnitude and impact. In this context, one can be one’s best and most efficient enemy.
Bob, the principal character in Glück’s text, is confronted with a seemingly irreconcilable tension, the one he must endure as a result of this thought for he will go on to ask “If I am so dispersed, what happens to the possibility of intimacy for me?” (59). In one respect at least, the question has already been addressed, and by none other than Glück himself, for it is precisely in the expulsion that intimacy is made possible, in the production that we call desire that generates the objects, grounds, and possibilities for potentially intimate connections and relays between self and other. A word, a note, and a stroke of paint are amongst the most familiar of these objects and/or grounds.
It might be worth noting here that the intimacy pertains not only to the other but also to those parts of one’s body, or of one’s self, that have been desirously made other.
In posing the question of intimacy, one is also posing the question of integrity since that which has been expelled is hardly ever waste or unwanted excess; it is rather a crucial part of the self that has made it what it is and what it can become. Bob’s tensions will hence remain irreconcilable for as long as he thinks identity in terms of integration and fidelity in terms of the possessive and exacting allegiance that cannot allow dispersal, in terms of the singular qua synthesis.
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Glück, Robert. Jack the Modernist. New York and London: High Risk Books, 1995.
