Feminism and Deleuze

Molar/Molecular politics
• molar = mass
• Molecular = small components
• However, they go on to insist that this female
subject ought not act as a ground or limit to the
women’s movement. To embrace the female
subject as a foundation or schema for action
would lead to ressentiment: the slavish
subordination of action to some high ideal
(Deleuze 1983: 123). (If this were the case the
women’s movement would cease to be a
movement. It would have taken one of its effect
to function as a cause, a ground or a moral law.)
• Deleuze and Guattari produce two dynamic
senses of movement: a political movement as the
organization of a ground, identity or subject; an a
molecular movement as the mobile, active and
ceaseless challenge of becoming. Any women’s
subjectivity, they argue, must function , not as a
ground, but as a “molar confrontation” that is
part of a “molecular women’s politics”. (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1987, p.276)Any assertion of
woman as a subject must not double or simply
oppose man,but must affirm itself as the event in
the process of becoming
• This is why “all becomings begin with an pass
through becoming-woman” (277). Because
man has been taken as the universal ground of
reason and good thinking, becoming must
begin with his opposite, “woman”. But this
becoming must then go beyond binary
opposition and pass through to other
becomings, so that man and woman can be
seen as events within a field of singularities,
evets, atoms and particles:
• The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass
between, the internezzo- that is what Virginia Woolf lived with all
her energies, in all of her work, never ceasing to become. The girl is
like the block of becoming that remains contemporaneous to each
opposable term, man, woman, child,c adult. It is not the girl who
becomes a woman; it is becoming woman that produces the
universal girl (277)
• Because the girl must become a woman, she is involved as the
becoming of becoming. Man is is tradditionally defined as being, as
the self-evident ground of a politics of identity and recognition.
Woman, as his other, offers the opening of becoming; and the girl
thus functions as a way of think woman, not as a complementary
being, but as the instability that surrounds any being.
• Feminism has never been the pure and
innocent other of a guilty and evil patriarchy.
It has always been obliged to use the master’s
tool to destroy his house,and has done so in
the full knowledge that this complicity, with its
corruption and contamination, is itself an
action against a metaphysics that would
present itself as pure, self－ fathered and fully
autonomous. (p.4)
• Thus feminism has always been marked by an odd relation to its
other. And so when Deleuze and Guattari address demiism, as the
possiblity for a new form of address or relation, they are at once
drawn into the difficult relation between the becoming of feminism
and the identity of the tradition…. Woolf’s writing is not “struggling
to find some new and pure idetity beyond the being of traditional
thought, and the women’s movement is no longer seen as a ritical
point outside the tradition.”

The contamination of tradition ists nonidetity and infidelity to itself, is

affirmed when writers are read in terms of what they do, and not in
terms of some pre-given model of reason or authorial intention. It is
this strategy- of locating oneself within a body of thought In order to
dis- organise that body- that typifies not only Deleuze and Deleuze and
Guattari’s work but, also, the curious place of women’s writing.
• Shelly’s text, on the other hand, is becoming itself,
not the becoming of some being or grounding
intent but the presentationof becoming itself, a
becoming that then effects ceertain modes of
being. Writing Frankenstein, with all its
quotations, allusins, framed stories and multiple
narrators, frees becoming from being. There is
the becoming of literature- such that the
monster’s learns what it is to be human by
overhearing a narration of Paradise Lost. The
monster’s humanity or being Is he effect of a way
of speaking and writing.
• “all speaking I s a ‘collective assemblage’: ‘ Before the interiority of
a subject, or the inner space of consciousness and the unconscious
there is an utterance which creates an assemblage, an act of
bcoming, an unconscious and collective production’ (1987, p.38). A
way of speaking or thinking does not belong to a subject who is the
ground of thought. Rather, subjects or chacters are effects of
speaking styles.
• Confronted with a body of thought with a language that comes
from elsewhere, feminism has had to pose the question of how it
might think and speak otherwise.
• “Inhabitation”: one inhabits a text; set up shop, follow its
movements, trace its steps and discovr it as a field of singularities
(effects that cannot be subordinated to some pre-given identity of
meaning. (p.3)
A thought is reactive, however, if it pretnds to be the mere adherence, representation,
replication or faithful copy of some prior truth or meaning. An active philosophy or
theory asserts itself as force, as what it is capable of doing and willing, and is
affirmative of the events it effects. A reactive theory, on the other hand, subordinates
itself to some unquestioned good “image of thought” (Deleuze, 1994a, p.118)/ In so
doing, reactive philosophy mistakes the cause- effect relation. In the beginning
thought confronts chaos (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 208). Thought is a hetero-
genesis or becoming. In its confrontation with chaos thought creates concepts- so that
concepts are the effect of active thought, and not laws by which thought ought to
proceed. A reactive philosophy misrecogises this relationship. It sees effects-
concepts- as the ground s or cause of thought. Thus reactive philosophy takes certain
concepts- such as the subject, man, the human, being, reason- and subordinates
thought to such concepts.
On the contrary, thought must reactivate its concepts: see concepts in terms of effects.
One can’t simply identify or find active philosophy, becoming active must be a
continual challenge. (Thus when feminism takes hold of the arsenal of philosophical
concepts it can’t be a question of how correct or faithful a certain concept is, rather,
one might ask how a concept might be made to work.)
• If we were to understand philosophy as the faiful commitment to
truth and good reason, then feminism’s could only be a deployment
of a general philosophic ideal. Or, if we were to understand
philosophy as nothing more than the expression of male reason,
then feminism would be a deployment of a general philosophic
ideal. Or if we were to understand philosophy as nothing more than
the expression of male reason, then feminism wold be placed
outside the possibility of philosophy.
• Deleuze- “Who Speaks?”
• All thinking and speaking are trans-individual possibilities of
becoming. All speaking is already a collective utterance and all
thinking is an assemblage.
• Feminism is ‘to assess the force of concept” and to “create new
concepts” (p.9)
Thus feminism might not be seen as an accomplishment
to the transition from liberalism through Marxism to
postmodernity, but more as an ongoing and active
suggestion that thought might be more than a genealogy.
Rather,than understanding itself as the unfolding or
progression of reason, feminist questions have more
often not been directed to interventions, encounters,
formations of identity and productive becomings. To use
Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, we might supplant
the notion of genealogy with geology: the creation of
new terrain, different lines of thought and extraneous
wanderings that are not at home in the philosophical
terrain (Deleuze and Guattari, 1997, p.41)
• If feminism has no subject, then for whom does it
speak, and what is it hoping to achieve? If
feminism is neither the expression nor the
formation of a subject, what is it?

• Can feminism be a subject or identity when these

concepts have for so long acted to ground or
subordinate thought? Perhaps, then, feminism is
a becoming, and much of its history suggests that
it is.
• The problem with the human is not that it is
one concept among others, but that it
presents itself as the origin of all concepts, as
the presence from which all concepts arise or
become. A becoming that is not subjected to
being, or a creative concept of becoming
would need to direct itself against man. One
strategy of becoming would be to think
woman. For it is woman that blocks or jams
the conceptual machinery that grounds man.
• If man understands himself not as the effect
of a coc