Gilles Deleuze

Mohammad Rananda Satria Falah

16/397382/FI/04247

Gilles Deleuze was one of few poststructuralist and posmodernist

philoshopers in France. He was born in 8 January 1925 from a conservative
family in Paris. He studied at Lycée Carnot, Paris and attended Sorbonne to study
philosophy in 1944. Deleuze was an atheist, like many of his contemporaries. At
the age of 70, Deleuze committed suicide, throwing himself from the window of
his apartment on 4 November 1995.

Deleuze was a nietzschean thinker who restored desire to discourse. He

collaborated with Felix Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Scizhoprenia that criticized rationalization in modern times.

Ratio enthroned as the master of human history and an access road to a

definite identity. At this point, ratio is the absolute holy faculty, while other
elements in man regarded as inferior faculty alone. The wildness of desire
predicted only produces fallacy in thinking that leads to distortion of
epistemological and heresy acts that leads to ethical distortion. Therefore, desire
was ignored in critical discussion of philosophical and crowned as the orphan
desire. In philosophy, the discussion of desire only complementary to the status
quo ration. The existence of desire, in other words, is not crucial for a shaft
referential and depend entirely on the existence of ratio. (Hartono, 2007: 17)

Deleuze said desire exist everywhere. Desire is never really conquered. The
presence of desire on social reality and the self cannot be repressed. Castration of
desire will only enrich the birth of desire in more amount. It is inseparable from
the essence of desire as the soul always move beyond the categories of space and
time. Desire is also defined as a productive machine that always produces streams
called schizophrenic desire.
 The characteristics of schizophrenic desire has consequences, namely:

1. On an individual level, schizophrenic desire dismantles all social

formations identity opaque inside and offers a new way of being, a
nomadic bodies. Nomadic bodies marked by relentless migration process
of human from one existence to another. In other words, bodies resides in
transitional positions and always proceeds.
2. At the macro level, schizophrenic desire contains the revolutionary
potential to overthrow the existing order. The destruction of the social
order is the way to liberate the movement of schizophrenic desire.
Schizophrenic desire always externalize themselves without any social
barrier criteria.

However, in the society, as much as possible, human desires are repressed,

suppressed, or eliminated. The elimination or suppression of human desire has
started since human birth. The theory of Oedipus complex, according to Deleuze-
Guattari, is the beginning of the domestication process or the taming of desire. In
the Oedipus complex, the child eager to mother, but was forced to submit and
succumb by the father's power. This desire castration process continues from
family, to society/state, and to capitalism.