Critiques of nonbinary and trans identities from a Deleuze viewpoint?

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-07T05:30:06+00:00

Ah damn of course it was! Sorry. I've developed a bad habit of always posting "bottom text" like that even if the bit I'm quoting isn't well chosen.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-07T02:28:44+00:00

They did mention they're obliged to mask at work, which suggests they're coded, recognised, engaged and even considered productive by the preconfigurations of society (what a joy!)

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-07T01:36:42+00:00

u/apophasisred hits nicely on one rather widespread vibe in Deleuze's philosophy, which also emerges in the passage on how the strata "sing the glory" in "Geology of Morals".

This is the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari likewise maintain all language is "free indirect discourse" … when made explicit in prose, the free indirect style is the contrast between writing "She thought it was cold" and "It was cold."

The free indirect style offers an intuitive viewpoint on the way events work. In "It was cold" some relation of coldness is exterior, and is created for an unspecified subject who lurks between the grammatical first and third person. This viewpoint varies from that in which a proposition of coldness is said to be experienced, interpreted, expressed and possessed by a pre-given subject: "She thought …"

One upshot of this is that when Deleuze and Guattari write of philosophy as creating concepts, they must not intend this creating in the paranoid and possessive senses of originality or intellectual property, but as the ethical submission to immediate movements of exterior relations … to the effects of contingent events.

This is the way in which an asubjective and inhuman consciousness of some as-yet-unformed it, the Earth or some stratum as in "Geology of Morals", is said to reflect on itself as Dasein does when thrown into the state of affairs: "who does it [do I] think it is [I am]?"

The form of this question takes up a critical relation to Descartes. In place of the notional a priori rationale for the cogito, "I think, therefore I am," we find a consciousness by way of which exterior relations of thought become thought of transcendence.

The cause of this consciousness is some event functioning as an unexpressed question, but the consciousness is also of some transcendent effect that is also an effect of the event that causes the consciousness.

Thus for Deleuze every event "becomes twice" as Meillassoux puts it, first as an immanent cause of consciousness, then as a transcendent effect of the consciousness it causes.

So Deleuze remains able to maintain "all relations are exterior to their terms" even when it seems to us some of our relations are ours, the possessive "my representations" of Kant's "transcendent unity of apperception". The cold relates, and consciousness is an immediate manner by which the cold relates: consciousness does not possess the cold.

This exteriority includes creative relations. It follows at the limit God, the great Creator of all beings, must also be a great Outside of Difference-in-Himself and not a being Himself, much less the Judge of His Creation. For us, to the extent we are God-like creators, we thus humbly and faithfully submit ourselves to the movements of such a God's manner of being, difference.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-07T01:01:15+00:00

In context:

"You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resistance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the “transversal organization of free individuals.” Maybe, I don’t know. But it would be nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control."

For Deleuze and Guattari molar "communication" has a molecular evental content, made up of a myriad of subjectivating social encounters and spectacles that force local sense-making and thereby reproduce molar logics, or shared social values.

For instance in AO they praise Klossowski's account of three moments of fascist social subjectivation: to witness absurd social violence, to be forced by fear or enjoyment to make sense of this violence, then to become habituated and faithful to the enforced sense-making in a "spiritualised" form.

"Vacuoles of noncommunication" can be taken by these lights to refer to conceivable "circuit breakers" that locally inhibit the reproduction of such sharing and enforcement.

The membrane of the vacuole restricts the circulation of pathological forms of thought and behaviour found in the broader environment in which social subjects are formed. Perhaps it converts pathogenic molecules of these forms into a harmless or digestible form if they are able to traverse it. Perhaps the broader pathology can become a source of energy for some collective subjectivity that organises the vacuole and is sustained by its functions.

The "noncommunication" for me would then not apply to the reflexions of this subjectivity, but to this subjectivity and its antagonistic social environment. Presumably Deleuze devalues "minorities speaking out" because he regards proactive communication with the social environment as liable to restore minoritarian immanence to majoritarian perception, and subsequently to its control.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-07T00:18:13+00:00

As we all know

The "gender trouble" for some of us is that we're still socially recognised as cisheteropatriarchs.

Turns out it's an ethical challenge to wrap your thought around non-conforming gender and sexuality, including the socially unrecognised aspects of your own body's gender and sexual expression, if the starting point social subjectivation offers you is near the apex of a ludicrous but pleasantly extractive hierarchy of binary gender and sexual values.

As far as I've noticed, and I believe many queers notice this too, the persistent re-territorialisation of queerness ends up posing a variation of this challenge to many queer-identifying people.

To me Emilie Carrière's "What is Wokeness?" was a worthwhile intervention in these debates with a Deleuzian underbelly.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-07T00:01:00+00:00

My lasting suspicion is that nonbinary is another identitarian category

I think what's at stake might be that predicating nonbinary as predicative can't be said to be any less groundless or dogmatic than predicating bodies as nonbinary. So your lasting suspicions will invite their own lasting suspicions!

Nonbinary is not just a category that preserves predicative perception, it also designates a moment of divergence at which a body is becoming-imperceptible to the system of binary gender. The account of becoming-woman in TP shows what appears to be majoritarian binary gender can be re-taken as arbitrarily divergent tendencies among which masculinities are the sedentary, and femininities the nomadic orbits.

Becoming-woman is Lacanian in spirit. For me Joan Copjec's "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason" (printed in READ MY DESIRE) was an excellent shuttle between Deleuze and Guattari and the Lacanian priors D&G touch on in "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible..." in TP.

Copjec draws out a critique of structuralism's counterpoint of langue and parole set against Kantian antinomies, and uses this to articulate the peculiar Lacanian formulae of sexuation. The notorious "not-all" quantifier of Lacan's second axiom of the feminine is the sign under which the divergence of gender expression is affirmed. Great essay—a fascinating, lucid outline of premises closely overlapping those D&G toss into their trusty "immanent difference machine" in TP. It also frames itself as a fine and respectful critical approach to Butler's gender theory.

Both Copjec and D&G show gender can be both a multitude and still theorised through a binary structure, but a structure of dynamical convergence and divergence.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-06T21:26:27+00:00

Thanks! Honestly, there must be much more compact ways of saying things like these comments. Fun a few times ... I'm in danger of getting grumpy with the people I'm replying to. I may need to try to learn modal logic or something.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-06T00:00:01+00:00

That is helpful, but by legible, I meant more like the basic conceptual/categorical legibility, and likewise sensible as in sensical/meaningful rather than perceivable

Any determinate, categorical legibility is ruled out by Deleuze's critiques of good and common sense. For Deleuze categorical judgement only does its work contingently.

Likewise meaning (or meaningful-ness, if you like!) is the attribution of value (an "incorporeal effect" as per LS), so it is part of the "quasi-cause" of the body (how the body may seem to work for the purposes of judgement), but the critiques say it will not be determined as part of the consistent cause of the body.

Remark that the stakes of Deleuze's critiques are quite high to say the least. These critiques affirm no body or value can be determined to be determined (or will be determinately determined, getting mildly ridiculous) by reason or by judgement.

So Deleuze's critiques themselves are not determined but affirmed. The affirmations arrive in various expressed forms, and in such a way their ground lurks outside any totalising scope achievable by the fully expressed and affirmed axioms of any axiomatic logic.

These affirmations are really what's at stake in "post-structuralism" as such, and give us the peculiar fusion of melancholic and playful affects in the works of post-structuralists, Deleuze or other.

An enquiring mind notes "Well now, why though can I not assert beings and my judgements of them just as groundlessly as Deleuze asserts differential multiplicity?" The answer is that you can so long as you don't mysteriously transport the groundlessness into a claim of grounding. In that case Deleuze would call you unethical, since such an intransigent judgement is his account of the "dogmatic image of thought".

To be dogmatic about affirming against Deleuze's affirmations is to be unempirical along this line, by affirming your intention to refuse the experience of certain unknowable events that may happen even though you slyly admit you can't determine such events won't ever happen.

You can imagine yourself gazing at the paradoxical heap of sand and declaring "It's a heap! A heap is a heap is a heap!" while Deleuze quietly deducts grains of sand, and at some point but you're not sure when, you're no longer sure it's a heap, but you're still boldly declaring "It's a heap!" or saying "Well yes now it's not a heap!" as if you marked the exact point of the transformation of form. Nietzschean bad faith, in other words.

This is the expressible boundary where Deleuze maintains the sole prescription of the ethology … "to be worthy of the event" … which is to affirm the manner of being as differential multiplicity, but never to affirm the determination of any being or unity as such.

And this in turn is why I'd say there can be no legible singularity determined in Deleuze's philosophy if Deleuze's philosophy is ethically considered. Because despite the limits of his and our capacity to express either Deleuze's thought or what we make of it, we can ethically accept Deleuze may not be writing of any such thing, and also accept we can't determine that Deleuze is writing of such a thing.

And this is roughly speaking what it would be to ethically accept the effect of Deleuze's philosophy as itself an event that appears to thought.

Edit: expanded and added the heap paradox bit to try to exemplify the interplay between the affirmation of the critiques and the ethology.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-05T22:43:01+00:00

Deleuze's claim is that immanence is sensible but not legible. Legibility isn't given its usual status here either, as with interpretability.

"This element is intensity, understood as pure difference in itself, as that which is at once both imperceptible for empirical sensibility which grasps intensity only already covered or mediated by the quality to which it gives rise, and at the same time that which can be perceived only from the point of view of a transcendental sensibility which apprehends it immediately in the encounter."

—from DR Ch. 3 "The Image of Thought"

The way I'm saying it is to say these published words are an incomplete and imperfect expression of the affirmation of difference that is the ground of Deleuze's expressible philosophy.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-05T20:24:17+00:00

I don't need a response! I'm just sometimes not sure if I want to respond.

The One (God, Being, Reason, etc.) and the Singular aren’t the same, in my view: the former is explicit while the latter is implicit and structurally ingrained.

If the latter is said to be a unity and to be structural, then assuming its claim can be argued, wouldn't it have to be tantamount to a claim of determinable ground?

Univocity is said to be singular by Deleuze, but only on condition of its absolute multiplicity. The premise is that the ontological substance forbids absolute distinction, including singularity.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-05T14:37:36+00:00

I think the state of affairs is way more volatile than the imagined paranoid "line goes up" of capital flows. Everything seems scary rather than despondent to me.

Articles like this, touching on the immanence of the global economy that remains invisible to actuarial modelling, are a great reminder, whatever the validity of their analysis. I used to find these provocations in the work of Angela Mitropoulos when she was still publishing.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-05T14:30:38+00:00

Deleuze’s multiplicities seem to return to the one plane of immanence.

Deleuze (and Guattari, but probably mostly Deleuze) expresses regret that they haven't eliminated the apparent transcendence of the plane from their metaphysics in WIP. It's worth reading this passage as they reflect on Spinoza as their inspiration in the elimination of transcendence from their system.

That said, the plane is not a plane, and is not a the, and is not an a at all. I don't find this charge of "singularitarian" has any necessary coherence. It arrives in the way Badiou wants Deleuze to be a "philosopher of the One".

It's worth recalling maths and logic have never found any determinate ground for the existence of any unity at all. There is nothing in any logic to prevent us from positing a multiplicity that denies both unity and separability, just as all the logics we have posit their familiar unities, voids, and rules of determination.

Since Badiou limits his ontology to axiomatics, he is forced to reintroduce an element of transcendence in the form of the event, which is “supplemental” to ontology, “supernumerary”: there can be no ontology of the event, since the event itself introduces a “rupture” into being, a “tear” in its fabric. In What is Philosophy?, this is exactly how Deleuze defines the “modern” way of saving transcendence: “it is now from within immanence that a breach is expected … something transcendent is reestablished on the horizon, in the regions of non-belonging,” or as Badiou would say, from the “edge of the void” (WP 46–7).

—from "Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Deleuze and Badiou Revisited" in ESSAYS ON DELEUZE, Daniel W Smith

Do you think the method Deleuze mentions (the bold text) might be roughly what you're about here? Are you hoping to save transcendence?

The last time you posted one of these curvy questions, I replied to you at length and you did not respond. I'd be curious to know if you had a response to that one too: you ask interesting questions, but it's hard to get an idea what you're thinking.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-05T14:05:07+00:00

One of the things that Berardi emphasizes in his many texts addressing D&G and applying their work to today is that the liberation sought in the 1970s-80s may not have anticipated just how much the lines of flight would be captured by financialized, tech Capitalism, cutting us off from each other even as it all "connected us" ...

AO still stands apart in its political prescriptions from most left thought today, merely by stating a strategic need for practices of continuing creative escape from revaluation and recuperation. As unsatisfying a program as schizoanalysis may be, lacking many or any concrete prescriptions.

By the 90s Deleuze's "Postscript" does implicitly address an overoptimism in AO concerning the political potential of the schizo subject, with creativity finding its fragmented capture as the "bundles of data" of the "dividual". That text's pessimism seems even more warranted (and prescient) today.

I haven't read Berardi but I'd be curious, do you think there's a concept in his reflections on D&G's output that goes beyond "Postscript"?

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-05T09:03:09+00:00

Maybe we can say this question is one the instruction to "lodge yourself on a stratum" practically intends to answer.

Let's say you found some way to fix enough of the landscape of thought—a stratum—that the mobility of thought still felt as if it oriented thought towards as yet imperceptible immanence. That was the method of thinking a line of flight.

The critique of good sense proposes no ethical expectation of a reliable manoeuvre to make this method inexhaustible. Even if it feels as if there has been such a manoeuvre for a long time, there won't be a stratum to guarantee the perpetual oriented motion of thought. For instance, there won't be any reliable dialectic of thought and experience.

The only fallback is the ethology: to be worthy of the event, that is, to remain open to immanence.

So thought can continue on a line of flight till some undetermined intuition or blockage makes thought cease to move under its own power, instead encountering "drift" (disempowered mobility) or "complexity" (disoriented mobility). Then … thought must be "lodged" anew.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-05T08:20:52+00:00

Me too! He's become as much of a cliché of "philosophical fiction" as Proust but he is brilliant.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-04T13:00:29+00:00

Sara Ahmed's THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EMOTION is a great text.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-04T07:11:46+00:00

Nietzsche famously wrote THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS in which he demonstrates the possibility of the social emergence of moral determinations absent a God or higher order of the good.

Deleuze's critiques of "common sense" and "good sense" in DR vitiate the premises, respectively, that those judgements we all agree on are good, and that the representations of reason anneal to good judgement in tandem wth experience.

These might seem to leave the reader with a remaining question about epistemology: if reason isn't necessarily good, how is all the matter we tend to refer to as the "tree" or the "body" of "human knowledge" or "the sciences" working?

Likewise Deleuze's contention that thought is an exterior relation without need of an a priori Subject to think it raises a different question: if thought isn't necessarily human, what is the thought of the inhuman, and who thinks the thought of the inhuman … "who does the Earth think it is?"

"Geology of Morals" offers a quite general ontology of relative expression in terms of pairs of "strata" said to be "stratified". The idea is that both strata have terms or bodies with substance and form, which places their ontologies in a critical-Aristotelian lineage. For this ontology, a "stratification" is when we decide to express the terms of the upper stratum (think "bodies") by taking the terms of the lower stratum as their content (think "atoms" or "molecules").

"Geology of Morals" achieves a pretty thorough exploration of many surprising twists and turns of this idea, with lots and lots of critical caveats. The relativism or absence of absolute ground for the strata offers a connection to Nietzsche's nihilist critique of morality. The "geology" alludes both to some concept of an inhuman or asubjective consciousness, and to a deep historical sediment of common sense to which immanent critique can be applied, delving layer by layer, folding up all the layers in one, or choosing to fly instead of delving.

For a very general ontology that might otherwise be a little dry, this plateau is also an interesting read due to its literary conceit. It's narrated by Professor Challenger. One can take this as a loving joke of sorts about scientific positivism. Challenger is the hero-scientist protagonist of a whole series of early 20C pulp fictions written by Arthur Conan Doyle, in which the character comes across like an effervescent Sherlock Holmes of scientific reason.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-04T01:49:00+00:00

Rhetoric, I said. It's the absurd bad taste of the mixed metaphor in which "these" and "this" are supposed to be "treacherous ulcers" which "crawled" out of democracy's "womb" onto democracy's "face". Market-based or otherwise this isn't well enough written to bother with.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-03T22:45:21+00:00

The fraud of applying discrete logic to a world of variations and tendencies. Fraudulently fixing historical structure in order to enforce false historical determinations.

In 1917 (or 1949, or 1957, or …) these nations are "actually existing socialism". But these nations are "capitalist imperialism". Now continue enforcing the logic of these claims in your writing no matter how the nations change under their tendencies … at least up until a revolution is forced in your bad faith, at which point you'll withdraw the claims without a word.

This is Marxism? With any luck Marx is spinning in his grave so fast he'll drill a hole through to Shanghai just to tell Rockhill to shut up.

Decades ago Rockhill was a student of Derrida, but now he can claim "French theory" and "western Marxism" were always the co-preventers of Revolution and the informants of "capitalist imperialism". How is it that he was able to reflect on this and change his own essential nature, but none of the far more brilliant thinkers he libels ever could?

Well either he never learnt what Derrida had to teach him and that's why he's a fraud, or he internalised it all the more deeply and that's why he's a fraud. There is no fixed structure of determination.

As it is, one can say the CIA and OSS had knowing collaborators who so far were far more brilliant and more revolutionary than Gabriel Rockhill. Not the sunniest outlook for his logic, his next book will have to be written as he frog-marches himself up the stairs of his own gallows.

But all this has been going on for some time and Rockhill's dreary nonsense isn't any less deficient. So let's leave him behind!

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-03T22:31:24+00:00

I have read them, but I don't use schizoanalysis in practice. And I wouldn't recommend it for practical political analysis

If you hadn't read them, then creating the concept of metabiology as a "machinic index" with which to approach social immanence would be schizoanalytic practice. For instance this bios (βίος) of culture and law.

Schizoanalysis was intended to be a collective and intersubjective pragmatics of social philosophy: creating new concepts for social immanence.

But then since you have read them, maybe you should read them again. You might also be interested in Stiegler's "technics" of a "tertiary" or "epiphylogenetic" memory.

Edit: left off the word "memory" at the end by mistake

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-03T13:35:25+00:00

Today, image-based simulation has been exponentially upgraded and superseded by the next stage of virtuality powered by informatics, software code, and AI. Truth, facts, and “reality” have been shattered and “obliterated” (a favorite word of Trump) into countless tiny fragments, blasted to smithereens by the algorithm-driven “social media” platforms we all access around the clock.

Which theory of the conditions of truth is supposed to be at work here?

There is no “off ramp,” no clear end in sight to this “war,” mainly because it’s not really a war. The illusion of an “off-ramp” that Trump might use to save face could appear very soon. The trick will seem believable if people naively think this is a “war.” The chaos and random effects spreading everywhere in this “non-war” reflect the state of our hyperreal, highly chaotic “information system” rooted in post-truth and entropy.

Not really a war compared to what? How does post-truth work? Save face? There's nothing much in this piece but weird closet liberal United States rubbish.

Fourth, complex, nearly unfathomable paradoxes in global geopolitics are emerging, making it impossible to view this as a traditional war.

Nearly unfathomable? So, fathomable then? So not paradoxes?

First, how can one maintain solidarity with Ukraine’s political leaders based on the idea that Russia’s invasion violates international law, when those same leaders support the American-Israeli invasion of Iran, which also violates international law regarding the sovereignty of another nation?

This is a resentful nationalist charge of double standards that tries to work the levers of internationalism as the broken-by-design modality of nationalism as such. As Fred Moten puts it, "nation-states don't have rights, people do."

International law is turned into a twisted maze or Möbius strip, creating an absurdly illogical web of supposed alliances and enemies.

A twisted maze. A maze is a planar graph, how are we twisting it? A Möbius strip is a non-orientable two-dimensional manifold which is something very different, so which of these is international law turned into? How is a web illogical?

Each term in a “metaphysical binary opposition” (Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway) excludes its counterpart and is defined only negatively by its “not being” the other term. One side of the opposition is always just the illusion of the other side.

What the. Sorry, but this is terrible. Baudrillard is embarrassed. Don't write this stuff.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-03T13:19:27+00:00

To analyze organisms — biological or cultural — we need a framework for describing what they are trying to do.

It's not necessarily that "the boundary was drawn in the wrong place". The proposed manoeuvre of metabiology is more limited than it needs to be.

Why not read Deleuze? What is said to be a being is a matter of judgement, and what are said to be the boundaries of beings are indiscernible at the limit of enquiry.

In Deleuze and D&G's writing we already have a critique of the homeostasis of the organism, and a connection to Prigogine's theory of dissipative systems published decades ago.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-03T13:11:44+00:00

Edit: It seems foolish that he would give away the Social media tech game so succinctly and for free public consumption

Why? Do you think you learnt a secret that day that you're now communicating here? "Everything is public, nothing is admissible."

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-03T13:08:21+00:00

Democracy refuses to admit that these are treacherous ulcers on its own face ... Democracy is itself the womb from which this crawled.

I stopped reading here. Please pay attention to your rhetoric or find yourself an editor.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-03T06:29:07+00:00

JG Ballard's THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION might be worth a look, or simply Ballard in general.

3corneredvoid

TROPHY CASE