Another cliché, following up on this post.
UPDATE: It occurs to me that I should say something more about the book Male Fantasies, which gives this series its title. It's pretty amazing, a sort of Deleuzeoguattarian "schizoanalysis" of Weimar Republic proto-fascist anxiety about women, flows, softness, all those things that need to be contained by the "hard body" hyper-masculine shell of muscles / armor. It, or at least its "hard body" idea, was used a lot by film studies people looking at the Robocop, Terminator, Rocky ... movies, as well as by cultural studies people looking at the explosion of body building out of specialized gyms and into mainstream culture. "Whip your body into shape," or "pain is weakness leaving the body" are the sorts of micro-fascist lines in our culture that reading Male Fantasies will alert you to.
Being on the look-out for such micro-fascims led me, in response to a recent post of Eric's, to say that Foucault's naming of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus as a book of ethics should be taken seriously. Here's what Foucault said in his Preface to the English translation:
I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular "readership": being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living). How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body.
Paying a modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.
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