1AC BETRAYAL
[T]he only criterion of an act is its elegance. I am not contradicting myself in
asserting my choice of betrayal. Betrayal may be a handsome and elegant
gesture composed of nervous force and grace. I definitely reject the idea of a
nobility which, in favor of a harmonious form, ignores a more hidden,
almost invisible beauty which would have to be revealed elsewhere than in
objectionable acts and things.
No one will misconstrue me if I write: “Betrayal is beautiful,” or will be so
cowardly as to think—to pretend to think—that I am talking about cases in
which it is necessary and noble, when it makes for the realization of Good. I
was talking of low betrayal. The kind that cannot be justified by any heroic
excuse ... It is enough that the betrayer be aware of his betrayal, that he will
it, that he be able to break the bonds of love uniting him with mankind.
Indispensable for achieving beauty: love. And cruelty shattering it. If he has
courage—please understand—the guilty man decides to be what crime has
made him. Finding a justification is easy; otherwise, how would he live? …
Within his shame, in his own spittle, he envelops himself; he spins a silk
which is his pride. This is not a natural garment. The guilty man has woven
it to protect himself, woven it purple to embellish himself.
No pride without guilt. If pride is the boldest freedom—Lucifer crossing
swords with God—if pride is the wondrous cloak wherein my guilt, of which
it is woven, stands erect, I want to be guilty. Guilt makes for singularity
(destroys confusion), and if the culprit has a hard heart (for it is not enough
to have committed a crime; one must deserve it and deserve having
committed it), he raises it upon a pedestal of solitude. Solitude is not given
to me; I earn it. I am led to it by a concern for beauty. I want to define myself
in it, delimit my contours, emerge from confusion, set myself in order.1
Jean Genet, a deviant French writer and activist explains, in this bizarre,
drug-addled language, a relationship to betrayal and criminality: a
triumphant betrayal, a betrayal of betrayal, a betrayal of the possibility of
representation as such. The representation of the criminal is pushed and
twisted in this writing to betrayal the image. Our argument is that betrayal
of writing in writing is an ethical necessity, exploding the script of
criminality, opening up the possibility of becoming-otherwise and glimpsing
a singularity.
Haver 04. William Haver, professor of comparative literature at Binghampton University, “The
Ontological Priority of Violence: On Several Really Smart Things About Violence in Jean Genet’s
Work,” polylog: Forum for Intercultural Philosophy 5 (2004), http://them.polylog.org/5/fhwen.htm
The second really smart thing Jean Genet said regarding the ontological priority of violence
1
Thief’s Journal, 113-4
consists of a constant meditation , traversing all his work, on the solitude of things . Of the
hundreds of possible citations, let me select, to begin, just this, from The Thief's Journal:
[T]he mere appearance of things must have caused me that anxiety which at first was born
of fear . Then the anxiety disappeared. I felt I was perceiving things with blinding lucidity . Even
the most trivial of them had lost their usual meaning , and I reached the point of wondering
whether it was true that one drank from a glass or put on a shoe. As I discovered the
particular meaning of each thing, the idea of number deserted me. […]
I think I remember having the revelation of an absolute perception as I considered, in the state
of luxurious detachment of which I have been speaking, a clothespin left behind on a line .
The elegance and oddness of this familiar little object appeared before me without astonishing
me. I perceived events themselves in their autonomy . The reader can imagine how
dangerous such an attitude must have been in the life I was leading [as a thief], when I had to
be wide-awake every minute and ran the risk of being caught if I lost sight of the usual meaning
of objects. (Genet 1964, 129-130)
Commentary on this and nearly identical passages in Genet could go on forever; I will limit
myself to four observations. First, that in the blinding lucidity of this seeing , things exceed
their instrumentality , and to the extent that they do so, they lose their meaning (signification)
as well as – but it is the same thing – their relation to other things ; in this » absolute
perception « (connaisance absolue, rather than any savoir), in this revelation, the disposition of
things is entropic, coming to rest in the solitude of an absolute luminescence. In their
singularity , things cannot be subsumed within any generality or universality ; they therefore
cannot be counted , and thus render the very idea of number incomprehensible (for, with
Borges, Nancy, Deleuze and Guattari, and quite a number of others, we could only »count«
singularities as »1, 1, 1, 1…« but then »one« could no longer be a number [for what is one
without 2, 3, 4?] ).
In their singularity , things are neither individual nor particular ; they are incommensurable in
their entropic solitude , and thus never coalesce into what might be called a »world.« Which
threatens , in an essential way, the comportments , practices , and gestures that constitute
the thief's subjectivity ; this seeing is not the faculty of a subject. As Genet was to tell Hubert
Fichte years later à propos works of art, »I more and more lose the feeling of being ›me‹
[moi], the feeling of ›I‹ [je] as anything other than the perception of a work of art.« (Genet
1991a, 146) Finally, the solitude of things is neither a matter of astonishment nor of
enchantment ; this is neither enlightenment nor magical realism. And if this constitutes a
fetishism , it is quite contradictorily a disenchanted fetishism (sometimes called materialism ,
of course).
The luminescent entropy of the solitude of things , the disenchanted fetishism of this
materiality – in short, this singularity – is at once always already accomplished at the same
time that it is always yet to come , and yet neither precedes nor survives its articulation. It is
always a process of disenchantment , of an approach to absolute solitude , of a tendency
toward entropy , a process (which perhaps amounts to a practice) of becoming-singular ,
becoming-nothing-but-thing , of becoming-nontranscendent . It is a kind of k_nosis (a kind of
becoming-stupid , as Ronell has recently reminded us; Ronell 2002, 178-185) in a certain
abjectification , a becoming-destitute or desperate , constant themes of Genet's writing.
Indeed, the quotation with which I began is preceded by a passage that is not merely existential
psychology:
In short, the greater my guilt in your eyes , the more whole , the more totally assumed , the
greater will be my freedom . The more perfect my solitude and uniqueness . By my guilt I
further gained the right to intelligence . Too many people think, I said to myself, who don't
have the right to . They have not paid for it by the kind of undertaking which makes thinking
indispensable to your salvation . (Genet 1964, 84)
Here, guilt is the figure of that non-transcendence , non-neutrality , which alone vouchsafes
the right to think . Evil , betrayal , crime , treason , the themes of more than the novels and
plays, are all becomings , all trajectories of separation , passages of dissociation , flights from
relationality , acts of more than metaphysical violence . All of these negations of relation ,
these non-relations , these anti-relations , are themselves relations . The constitutive –
creative – relation in Genet is the violence of separation . At Mettray, the reformatory where
Genet spent much of his adolescence and which preoccupies him throughout Miracle of the
Rose, the only relation among the inmates are violent, erotic, and therefore social relations. And
in his last, avowedly post-literary work, Prisoner of Love, he recalls attending mass at the abbey
of Monserrat:
Then came the famous kiss of peace: after the elevation the Abbot kissed each of the acolytes
on both cheeks, and they conveyed the salutation to each of the monks sitting in the choir. Then
two choristers opened the screen doors and his reverence came down among the congregation,
kissing some of us. I was one of those who received a kiss, but I broke the chain of fraternity by
not passing it on. (Genet 1992, 33)
This thought of violent separation in betrayal , treason , crime , k_nosis , abjection , guilt ,
evil , desperation , and disenchanted fetishism is a thought of becoming-thing , of entropy :
in short, at once an empiricism and a materialism . And let me repeat that this violent
becoming is neither the realization of a possibility (because it is always already realized ),
nor is it ever accomplished in any teleology ; it is a becoming with neither ground nor telos ,
which nevertheless happens . If this thought of singularity is important for Genet , it is
because it bears with it , equiprimordially as it were, a thought of multiplicity , a thought of
sociality as the infinite proliferation of differences . But I have oversimplified; things are
essentially more complicated than that.
Dominance and criminal deviance are situated in a violent dialectic, one
that imposes identity onto the deviant, enclosing the body within a grid of
intelligibility. We follow Genet, a betrayal of ourselves as writers and
speakers, we betraying our “true selves” contrary to the effervescent norm –
we are a perverse, parodic form – we are the inversion of the dialectic, a
cultural tactic of forcing the forefronting of the void as we affirm the
perverse inauthenticity of identity as such
Dollimore 86. Jonathan Dollimore, professor of English at the University of York, “The Dominant
and the Deviant: A Violent Dialectic,” Volume 28, Issues 1-2, pg. 189
As a style, and even more as a politics, inversion has proved controversial , especially when
grounded in the celebration of a perverse inauthenticity and the subversion of its opposite,
authentic subjectivity. Take the case of Genet . Kate Millett” finds that his deviants reproduce
in inverted form the structures of dominant heterosexuality , especially its masculine
component . Thus inverted, these structures are shorn of their ideological legitimation; in effect
the world of normality beyond which Genet lives in exile is ridiculed and contradicted in the very
process of being imitated. Genet’s femininity for instance ’is, as Sartre phrases it, a ’hostile
eroticism’, delighted to ridicule and betray the very myth of virility it pretends to serve’ (pp. 18,
349). Genet appears for Millet ’the only living male writer of first class literary gifts to have
transcended the sexual myths of our era’ (p. 22). Conversely, for Hans Mayer’” Genet‘s
commitment to inversion makes him deeply conservative: ’Genet’s books are the exact opposite
of a literature of indignation and rebellion. The author has no intention of making accusations or
unmasking society. He is a true believer in the bourgeois order, not a critic.’ More hostile still are
those like Walter Heist who conclude that Genet is pervaded with fascism (cited by Mayer, p.
225, who dissents from the view). The disagreement is both political and aesthetic , these
things being indissociable , and it returns us to Hassan’s fierce dialectic between margins and
centre , and certain pressing questions : who wins : what changes ?
There’s currently-a theoretical version of Mayer‘s critique of Genet which questions whether
resistance from the margins is ever successful , and whether it isn’t ever doomed to
replicate the strategies, structures and even the values of the dominant. The argument comes
in several forms. First there’s the anthropological version which sees transgressive practices
like carnival as not at all subversive of dominant values but rather their guarantor - a licensed
release of social tension, a kind of safety valve effect . Then there‘s the theoretically sceptical
point that simply to invert a binary opposition (e.g. masculine/feminine ) is to remain
within rather than overthrow its oppressive structure . Third there’s the psychological
version , to the effect that true faith paradoxically lives in honest doubt , that it's the
sacrilegious who most know the true value of the sacred, who are most beholden unto it, even
as they seek to destroy it. All three versions of the argument could be applied to Genet , but
especially the second and third. 'I am steeped in an idea of property while I loot property . I
recreate the absent proprietor ', he says in The Thief's Journal (p. 129), and in a 1975
interview: 'I would like the world not to change so that I can be against the world .
Nevertheless- and perhaps it's only my too brief summary of what are in fact sophisticated
positions which suggests this - I wonder if all the versions of this argument don't assume
impossibly authentic and essentialist criteria of transgression and resistance , precisely of
the kind which Genet and Foucault reject?
Consider, for example, Richard Sennett's very interesting theory of 'disobedient dependence ',
the argument in its psychological version. 'Transgression', says Sennett, 'is perhaps the most
forceful element in disobedient dependence', which involves a defiance based on dependence, a
rebellion not against authority but within it: 'the transgressor disobeys but authority regulates
the terms'. As such this rebellion 'has very little to do with genuine independence or autonomy',
moreover: 'the world into which a person has entered through the desire to transgress is seldom
. . .a real world of its own, a true alternative which blots out the past'. 22 But what could this
genuine independence and autonomy , this true alternative , this real world of its own ,
actually be in political practice , remembering that the transgressor typically emerges from a
position of marginality , subordination and repression ? What for example could it have been
for Hall and other lesbians in 1928?
Jacques Derrida reminds us that binary oppositions are 'a violent hierarchy' where one of the
two terms forcefully governs the other. A crucial stage in their deconstruction involves an
overturning , an inversion 'which brings low what was high' . The political effect of
ignoring this stage , of trying to jump beyond the hierarchy into a world quite free of it, is
simply to leave it intact in the only world we have . 23 Both the reversal of the
authentic/inauthentic opposition in Rubyfruit and the subversion of authenticity itself in
Wilde, Genet and Orton, are different aspects of overturning in Derrida's sense . Moreover
they are stages in a process of resistance , one whose effects can never be guaranteed and
hardly even predicted . Marginal inversion , if at all successful, provokes reaction . The result
is a cultural struggle between unevenly matched contenders , a struggle in which the
dominant powers , which transgressive inversion fiercely disturbs , now react equally fiercely
against it . 24
“It was the surface which concerned us, and we learned its contours as we
moved over them.”2 We gesture towards another form of movement, a
betrayal of all recognizable modes of movement, an art of disappearance.
This elides the possibility of a guerilla historicism, one that violently throws
thought against thought, flounting the beauty of betrayal.
Haver 04. William Haver, professor of comparative literature at Binghampton University, “The
Ontological Priority of Violence: On Several Really Smart Things About Violence in Jean Genet’s
Work,” polylog: Forum for Intercultural Philosophy 5 (2004), http://them.polylog.org/5/fhwen.htm
2
Genet, 105
What you see is what you see. I would like to emphasize two aspects of this sensuous
empiricism. The first aspect is embedded in this fourth really smart thing Jean Genet said
regarding the ontological priority of violence:
Every fedayee felt free ranging over this area [the Ajloun hills] on foot or by car, never letting go
of the surface. It was the surface that concerned us, and we learned its contours as we moved
over them. Each fedayee's horizon was taught him by his eyes and feet. He had only to look in
front of him to see where he was going, and behind him to see where he'd come from. (Genet
1992, 105)
This first seeing , this nearly empirical seeing , is first of all a practical and interested intuition
of what is given; given not a priori or as essential possibility , but given in and as its utter
contingency . What is seen in practical or interested intuition is not a landscape , but hiding
places , escape routes , obstacles and possibilities . It is not simply that seeing all of this is
contingent , but that seeing itself belongs to contingency itself , seeing is of contingency; this
is the seeing of the glimpse rather than the gaze , illumination as fulguration rather than
enlightenment . Calculation there is, but it is paradoxically an instantaneous calculation , or
what is too easily termed »instinctive« calculation , a canine or feline calculation . Seeing
here is not the path to transcendence; on the contrary, it is a kind of haptic seeing , where
seeing becomes touch . This haptic seeing is first of all, as Genet says, a matter of surfaces –
and nothing but surfaces , surfaces that are not shells that surround and protect any
substantiality , but surfaces that constitute what Deleuze and Guattari called »smooth
space,« a space that is not the emptiness of a plane , field , or volume , but the infinite
empirical congestion of contingent being (Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 474-500; see also Ricco
2002). This is the seeing required by guerrilla warfare , as Genet says, of » that ›little war‹ in
which you had to find allies in fog , damp and the height of rivers , in the rainy season, the
long grass, the owl's cry, and the phases of the sun and moon « (Genet 1992, 108).
Thus, this guerrilla seeing belongs to the situation or opportunity ; it is essentially and
thoroughly opportunistic , as Massimo De Carolis has said (1996, 37-51); that is, what is seen
determines the fact of seeing; haptic seeing , guerrilla seeing , is neither an instinct nor a
faculty , but an accident , an opportunity . It is, as it were, a phenomenology without the
essential reflection that makes phenomenology what it presumptively is. That is, it is a
situating of oneself without a cartographic or perspectival reflection , because haptic ,
guerrilla seeing exceeds , essentially and at every point , every possible cartography or
perspectivism . And therefore is something other , something more , than the reflective
subjectivity of every transcendental cartography . Haptic, guerrilla seeing never puts things
in perspective . It is the very experience of non-transcendence , of non-neutrality.
What you see is what you see. The second, and I think consequent, aspect of this immanent
seeing is a question of witnessing. Here, then, is the fifth really smart thing Jean Genet said
regarding the ontological priority of violence: »When so many things are there to be seen , just
seen, there are no words to describe them .« (Genet 1992, 55) » Just seen «: Genet insisted
over and again – in the first pages of Prisoner of Love, in his commentary on a Paris exhibition of
photos of the Palestinians, in his essay on the massacre at Chatila, for example – on the
heteronymy of seeing and understanding , on the fact that seeing does more than download
a world for interpretation's hard drive ; he insists on the essential stupidity of the senses
(and this is also the case, by the way, when what is seen is words). And yet this just seeing, this
radical empiricism, does not go unremarked; indeed, the fact that it marks the limit of the
possibility of description does not thereby augur the end of description or of representation
altogether . What is at stake , I want to suggest, is a certain becoming : becoming nontranscendent , becoming non-neutral in a haptic witnessing , a guerrilla historicism . This is
a going-under , what Genet calls a drowning , an art of disappearance with neither
preservation nor conservation .
Over and again in his texts on the Palestinians and the Black Panthers , Genet insisted upon
the uncommunicable distance between the transcendence of geopolitical perspective , the
neutrality of what he called Europe on the one hand , and the haptic existence of Black and
Palestinian guerrillas on the other. These texts bear witness to that existence and that
distance . They do not translate that existence which Genet shared for a time; rather, in
saying what he has seen – dead bodies in their empirical singularity and multiplicity, just for
example – he bears witness to the fact of just seeing , to the stupidity of the senses in their
heterogeneity (what Lyotard, à propos the sublime, called a »negative presentation« ), but as
»negative presentation« is specifically historicist ; or rather, belongs to what Foucault called
»political historicism ,« a guerrilla historicism , the work of becoming non-transcendent , nonneutral. Genet's writing is not witness to the feeling of the post-Burkean, post-Kantian sublime,
but testimony to the failure of the sublime to sustain subjectivity.
In all of Genet's political texts on the Black Panthers , the RAF , and on the Palestinians , he
will offer a historical narrative , to suggest how it is things came to be the way they are. Yet
these stories are in every case interrupted and fragmented by descriptive episodes ,
testimony to guerrilla phenomenology , testimony to catastrophe , negative presentations of
what remains unrepresentable , everything that cannot be overcome and preserved in any
story. These interruptions , »political historicism« on Foucault's account, constitute a work of
dis-integration , dis-appearance , an affirmation , precisely, of non-transcendence , nonneutrality .
But let us not be lulled into historiographical slumber here. The work of dis-integration or
dis-appearance , the affirmation of finitude and non-neutrality , are never peaceable
processes or procedures ; they are violent , the very fact of a violence that is never
metaphorical . Nevertheless, they are not negative .
“We need to mistrust our enthusiasm for noble causes: it quickly becomes
an attitude of ethical self-satisfaction […] I am not saying that we should
systematically refuse to support the oppressed, but that it would be useless
if, at the same time, we did not betray the dominant society which we are a
part of: We have to betray ourselves.”3
Global politics is characterized by the positioning of identity onto the body
this is the evicersation of singularity and movement
Haver 04. William Haver, professor of comparative literature at Binghampton University,
“The Ontological Priority of Violence: On Several Really Smart Things About Violence in Jean
Genet’s Work,” polylog: Forum for Intercultural Philosophy 5 (2004),
http://them.polylog.org/5/fhw-en.htm
Clearly, violence is positive for Genet only insofar as it is non-instrumental or
para-instrumental . Revolt is not revolution . Violence is positive only insofar
as ends and means are identical in existence . For Genet, the Panthers and
the Palestinians have no possibility for existence outside of their violence ; they
cannot »choose« whatever might count as non-violence , because their very
existence in the world is violence . Concomitantly, the violence of existence in
its positivity is never to be conflated with institutionalized brutality : should
the Palestinians or the Panthers ever have a territory or state, Genet will no longer
be there . In a short essay that first appeared in Le Monde in 1977, and which occasioned a
major furor in the press, Genet supported the actions of the RAF precisely as a creative
violence that sought the destruction of state brutality (Genet 1991e, 199-206). Not unlike
Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and others before him, Genet saw the positivity of
violence to belong to the practical constitution of being , in the affirmation
that is potentia rather than the affirmation of potestas ; that is, in existence as the
actualization of a possibility that did not exist before its actualization , and
which does not survive the happening of that actualization , rather than in the
brutality of institutionalized power . For Genet, the affirmation of violence as
the actualized potential of existence depends not only upon its non- or parainstrumentality , but upon what one might call its »immediate finitude,« that fact
that survival , continuity , institution , conservation , preservation , and
salvation are quite beside the point . Genet wrote:
You have to understand that the people you call terrorists know without needing to be
told that they , their persons and their ideas , will only be brief flashes against a
world wrapped up in its own smartness . Saint-Just was dazzling , and knew his
own brightness. The Black Panthers knew their own brilliance , and that they
would disappear . Baader and his friends heralded the death of the Shah of
Iran . And the fedayeen, too, are tracer bullets , knowing their traces vanish in
3
Genet, 838
the twinkling of an eye .
I mention these truncated lives because I see in them a joy I think I also see in
the final rush of Nasser's funeral , in the ever more complicated and lively
transports of the hands that drummed on the coffins , in the almost joyful
passage in the ›Kyrie‹ of Mozart's Requiem . (Genet 1992, 179)
The only possibility for existence is, as Genet quoted an old Palestinian woman, »to
have been dangerous for a thousandth of a second .« (Genet 1992, 239)
One might argue, rather wearily perhaps, that all this is nothing more than a Romantic vitalism,
which may well be true. But I think it important to bear in mind, first, that Genet only ever
spoke of , and from , the place of those who have nothing left to lose , from
where one has no choice and is therefore, as Janis Joplin once told us, caught up in
an affirmation she called »freedom.« And, second, that this violence, in and as its
»immediate finitude,« is the very edge of becoming , of metamorphosis .
»If I take leave of this book, I take leave of what can be related. The rest is unsayable. I say no
more and walk barefoot.«
It is first of all a question of borders and frontiers , the lines that separate the
here from the there , the this from the that , but are themselves both the here and
the there, the this and the that, and yet are neither here nor there, this nor that. Were he
to have been born other than who he was, and had he a choice in the matter, Genet mused, he
would have been born in Alsace-Lorraine, because »[w]hatever they may say, anyone
approaching a frontier stops being a Jacobin and becomes a Machiavelli« (Genet 1992, 147);
one forsakes a war of position in favor of guerrilla phenomenology . But borders
and frontiers, geopolitical and metaphorical, are always the place of a decidedly nonmetaphorical violence.
Betrayal is ontological violence – thought in the form of guerilla
phenomenology becomes endless flight and fancy, betraying structures that
attempt to overdetermine the body in a state of structural gridlock through
the tyranny of representation. Betrayal is an insertion of movement, flux,
and flight.
---performance fails if it operates within grid of intelligible
---2NC gridlock DA – catching the body in a “structural freeze-frame”
---perm is multiplying a number by zero – if a number is our attempt at movement and zero
represents the lack of movement in their positional FW
Massumi 02. Brian Massumi, professor of communications at the University of Montreal,
Parables For the Virtual, pg. 2
"The Body." What is it to The Subject? Not the qualities of its moving experience. But, rather, in
keeping with the extrinsic approach, its positioning . Ideological accounts of subject formation
emphasize systemic structurings . The focus on the systemic had to be brought back down to
earth in order to be able to integrate into the account the local cultural differences and the
practices of resistance they may harbor. The concept of "positionality" was widely developed
for this purpose. Signifying subject formation according to the dominant structure was often
thought of in terms of "coding." Coding in turn came to be thought of in terms of positioning
on a grid. The grid was conceived as an oppositional framework of culturally constructed
significations : male versus female , black versus white , gay versus straight , and so on. A
body corresponded to a "site" on the grid defined by an overlapping of one term from each
pair. The body came to be defined by its pinning to the grid . Proponents of this model often
cited its ability to link body-sites into a "geography" or culture that tempered the universalizing
tendencies or ideology.
The sites, it is true, are multiple. But aren't they still combinatorial permutations on an
overarching definitional framework? Aren't the possibilities for the entire gamut of cultural
emplacements, including the "subversive" ones , precoded into the ideological master
structure ? Is the body as linked to a particular subject position anything more than a local
embodiment of ideology ? Where has the potential for change gone ? How does a body
perform its way out of a definitional framework that is not only responsible for its very
"construction," but seems to prescript every possible signifying and countersignifying move
as a selection from a repertoire or possible permutations on a limited set of predetermined
terms?
How can the grid itself change ? How can what the system has
pinpointedly determined flip over into a determining role capable of acting on the systemic
level? The aim of the positionality model was to open a window on local resistance in the name
of change. But the problem of change returned with a vengeance . Because every bodysubject was so determinately local , it was boxed into its site on the culture map.
Gridlock .
The idea of positionality begins by subtracting movement from the picture . This catches the
body in cultural freeze-frame . The point or explanatory departure is a pinpointing , a zeropoint of stasis. When positioning of any kind comes a determining first, movement comes a
problematic second. After all is signified and sited , there is the nagging problem of how to
add movement back into the picture. But adding movement to stasis is about as easy as
multiplying a number by zero and getting a positive product. Of course, a body occupying one
position on the grid might succeed in making a move to occupy another position. In fact, certain
normative progressions, such as that from child to adult, are coded in. But this doesn't change
the fact that what defines the body is not the movement itself, only its beginning and
endpoints . Movement is entirely subordinated to the positions it connects . These are
predefined. Adding movement like this adds nothing at all. You just get two successive states:
multiples of zero.
The very notion of movement as qualitative transformation is lacking. There is
"displacement," but no transformation ; it is as if the body simply leaps from one definition to
the next. Since the positional model's definitional framework is punctual , it simply can't
attribute a reality to the interval , whose crossing is a continuity (or nothing). The space of
the crossing, the gaps between positions on the grid, falls into a theoretical no-body's land .
Also lacking is the notion that if there is qualitative movement of the body, it as directly
concerns sensings as significations . Add to this the fact that matter , bodily or otherwise,
never figures into the account as such. Even though many of the approaches in question
characterize themselves as materialisms, matter can only enter in indirectly: as mediated.
Matter, movement, body, sensation. Multiple mediated miss .
We are a minor literature about the topic. In, but not of it. Existing in its
cracks: an idea made possible by its very language, that in turns twists and
pulls on the grammar and syntax of legalization. We are “genuine
traitors…traitors for the love of it.”4 We contextual this move towards
escape through the diasporic relationship between Genet and George
Jackson, a solidarity, a questioning of terms, a move outside normality that
is UNIQUE to the AFF. “Betrayal, theft and homosexuality are the basic
subjects of this book…”5 Betrayal is an ontological violence, a line of flight, a
momentary schism after which everything is the same, but different.
Koerner 11. Michelle Koerner, professor of women’s studies at Duke, “Lines of Escape: Gilles
Deleuze’s Encounter with George Jackson,” Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2 Summer 2011 pg. 164
Writing
On the first page of the provocatively titled essay “On the Superiority of Anglo- American
Literature,” Jackson’s line is once again deployed, but here it is in reference to the idea that the
“ highest aim of literature ” is to escape (Deleuze and Parnet [1977] 2006: 26). An interesting
convergence occurs here between political and aesthetic practices , suggesting an
indiscernibility between the two insofar as both effectuate becomings. Genet had already made
a similar point in describing Soledad Brother as a “poem of love and combat,” but deploying
Jackson with respect to the question of literature as such, this essay invites us to rethink a more
profound relation between blackness and writing.
At some distance from traditional Marxist theory, Deleuze and Parnet insist we reject any
account of literature as an “imaginary representation” of real conditions (literature as
ideology) in order to consider writing as a production at the level of real conditions.10 Writing,
which is to say the unleashing of the creative force of becoming in language (a line of flight), is
not finally reducible to already existing historical conditions , because such an act involves
the production of new conditions . Literature, as they underscore, is driven by a desire to
liberate what existing conditions seek to govern, block, capture; as such, it asserts a force in the
world that existing conditions would otherwise reduce to nonexistence.
Such formulations enable a radical assertion: Soledad Brother, insofar as Jackson’s letters defy
4
5
Genet, 151
Genet, 171
the prison system and the arrangement of a social order defined by the criminalization and
capture of blackness, escapes what would otherwise be thought of as the historical
conditions of its production . Jackson’s writing gains its real force by a total refusal to adjust to
existing conditions of capture, enslavement, and incarceration. And it does so concretely by
rejecting the subjectivity produced by the structures of what Genet, in his introduction to the
letters, called the “enemy’s language” (Jackson [1970] 1994: 336). Jackson (ibid.: 190, 305)
himself underscores this dimension of the letters several times, remarking, “I work on words,”
and more precisely describing an operation by which the intensities of black resistance come
to be expressed in writing: “We can connect the two, feeling and writing, just drop the syntax”
(ibid.: 331). The specific feeling invoked here is linked first to Jackson’s total rejection of the
terms of captive society—“the feeling of capture . . . this slave can never adjust to it” (ibid.: 40)
— but it further affirms a connection to the “uncounted generations” of enslaved black labor: “I
feel all they ever felt, but double” (ibid.: 233). In dropping the syntax, Jackson describes a
method for rearticulating the relationship between the historical experience of capture (and
the multiplicity of feeling carried across the passage) and the feeling of that experience.
In his introduction to Soledad Brother, Genet focuses almost entirely on how Jackson’s use of
language could be understood as a “weapon” precisely because Jackson’s lines were shot
through with such violent hatred of the “words and syntax of his enemy” that he “has only
one recourse: to accept this language but to corrupt it so skillfully the whites will be caught
in his trap” (ibid.: 336).11 In corrupting the “words and syntax” of domination, one directly
attacks the “conditions that destroy life,” because language is here considered a mechanism
by which one’s thought, agency, relations, and subjectivity are “caught” by Power. As can be
seen, this idea is not one that Genet imports into Soledad Brother. Rather, these are ideas that
Jackson himself has already emphasized. Jackson’s “minor use” of a standard, major language
thus contributes to Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of literature. This is to say that, while
commonly associated with Franz Kafka, the very notion of “minor literature” is also linked to the
encounter between black radicalism and French philosophy in the early 1970s.
The connection forged between writing and feeling in Jackson’s letters sug- gests that the
production of resistant subjectivities always involves a dismantling of the dominant order of
language. To “drop the syntax” names a strategy for forcibly rearranging existing relations. But
such a strategy also implies that one releases something else, specifically the affective force of
what resists those relations. Writing here becomes the “active discharge of emotion , the
counterattack ” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987: 400). Or put differently, writing becomes
a weapon .12
When Deleuze (1997: 143) states that “in the act of writing there’s an attempt to make life
something more than personal, of freeing life wherever it’s imprisoned,” he seems to refer to
something exceedingly abstract, but Jackson’s letters concretely assert writing as a freeing of
life—of blackness—from the terms of racist imprisonment. As we will see, Jackson twists and
pulls on the joints of language itself , quite literally seizing on the standard syntax until it
breaks. In doing so, what Jackson describes as his “completely informal” style makes language
an open field shot-through with fugitive uses (Jackson [1970] 1994: 208). Writing becomes an
expression of thought on the run , a way of mapping escape routes and counterattacks that
cannot be adequately understood in terms of structure or an understanding of language as an
invariable system.
But escaping the existing dominant social order on “lines of flight” — given the volatile
intensities they assert in the world — carries a real danger . In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze
and Guattari ([1980] 1987: 229) note the risk of “the line of flight crossing the wall, getting out
of the black holes, but instead of connecting with other lines and each time augmenting its
valence, turns to destruction , abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition .” Here, a
restricted concept of abolition , understood simply as the destruction of the existing social
order , runs the risk of transforming the “line of flight” into a line of death . For this reason the
issue of escape must not stop at negation “pure and simple” but become one of construction
and the affirmation of life .
And it is for this reason that the effort to connect “lines of flight” and to compose consistencies
across these lines becomes a matter of politics: an affirmation of a politics of reconstruction as
the immanent condition of abolition. Jackson ([1970] 1994: 328) wrote from prison: “ Don’t
mistake this as a message from George to Fay. It’s a message
from the hunted running blacks to those people of this society
who profess to want to change the conditions that destroy life .”
A collective imperative determines the reading of these letters—namely, the necessity to put
them in connection with other lines. The circulation of these letters in France during the 1970s
offers a compelling example of how Jackson’s message insinuated itself into what would seem
an unlikely arrangement of French philosophy in the 1970s. Yet it is precisely in understanding
that moment in French thought as an effort to “change conditions that destroy life” that we
gain a sense of how Jackson’s book arrives at its expressly stated destination. In making the
connection between Jackson’s line and the lines of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and
his coauthors can be said to have gotten the message.