Thirty-six Thousand Forms of Love

The Queering of Deleuze and Guattari

Bibliographic Data

ID23201611
AuthorsVerena Andermatt Conley (corresponding author)
Year2009
Pages24-36
Publication date2009-01-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueDeleuze and queer theory (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherEdinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1515/9780748634064-003
OpenAlexW2476307119
ISBN9780748634064
LanguageEN
Citations received5

TO QUEER : to deviate from expecting norm, to make strange. Example of bad word that has been turned around. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/queering American critics often credit themselves for having invented queer theory. It can be argued, however, that French theorists' rethinking of official philosophy and psychoanalysis after 1968 dealt extensively not only with feminisms but with homosexualities. Much of Michel Foucault's work, but also Helene Cixous's notions of bisexuality and of homo sexuality (Cixous 1975), or Jacques Derrida's various staging of male couples – Derrida-Genet or Socrates-Plato (Derrida 1974 and 1980) – explored the destabilisation of a self and of what today are called ‘nonnormative sexualities’. It is, however, especially in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that the question of homosexuality as queering, that is, as becoming and as an ongoing differing of difference, is raised. From Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1977 and 1987), queering is discussed and performed in the context of the philosophers' attack on ‘normality’ and enforced behaviour in a capitalist, institutionally bourgeois disciplinary society. Deleuze discusses it openly when he writes about his desire to impregnate state philosophers by way of anal penetration. In his translator's preface, Brian Massumi quotes the couple: ‘I imagined myself approaching a [philosopher] from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 276). For his part, Guattari discusses homosexuals engaged in non-genealogical, ‘monstrous’ becomings.

Aesthetics · Art · Deleuze and Guattari · Psychoanalysis · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Philosophy · Psychology