On Love & Libido

Engaging with Michael Downs' Fifth Seminar

This piece is an early attempt to engage with Michael Downs’ discussion of the role libido plays in the work of Deleuze & Guattari (D&G). He discussed D&G in the fifth entry in his seminar series, which is available to Theory Underground subscribers. In this piece, I’ll be taking Mikey’s interpretations of D&G for granted. I won’t challenge his reading.¹

Instead, my goal will be to complement what Mikey is doing by Platonizing his discussion. I think you’ll find that when we Platonize the libido discussion, it becomes much clearer precisely what’s inadequate about Deleuze & Guattari. D&G have an ontology that is politically stultifying - it does not permit us to identify or to make sense of a lot of major problems we have.

I’ll start by clarifying what I got from listening to Mikey. I’m sure there’s more going on in Mikey’s talk than what I got from it - this section will necessarily be slanted in various ways by my own preoccupations. Then I’ll bring in some Greek concepts. Finally, I’ll say something about death drive.

Mikey’s Account of Deleuze & Guattari

As I understand Mikey, D&G understand libido in terms of interfacing bodies. Libidinal desire is the desire to connect with other bodies in various ways. This can mean e.g., having sex with a person, eating something, saying something, striking something, or using a tool. It seems clear to me that libido is connected not merely to sex or consumption, but also with violence - inserting a spear into the abdomen of the other would clearly be a kind of interfacing that would have this character.

For D&G, as we engage in bodily interfacing, we discover that there are new ways we can interface, that previous ways of interfacing can be combined. But we are prevented from engaging in all the forms of interfacing that are possible by a society and by a politics that imposes prohibition. Instead of engaging in libidinal experimentation, we are made to take up habits. These habits grant us some opportunities to interface, but these opportunities are limited and repetitive. Since for D&G, our libidinal desire is constitutive of what we are, this prohibition is an attack by society or by the polity on our individuality. The way to overcome this is to deterritorialize, to destroy the mechanisms that prevent us from experimenting, that lock down libido and domesticate it. As we deterritorialize, we allow libido to flow and for new forms of interfacing to arise. The emphasis, then, is on natality - on the generation of new possibilities.

In the fifth seminar, David McKerracher asks Mikey a question about energy.² For Dave and Mikey, there are clearly many distinct types of energy. Sometimes you have the energy to go for a walk, but you lack the energy to read Plato. Dave and Mikey clearly want an account that can make sense of multiple types of energy. If there are a plurality of energies and we understand how these energies are generated, this would help us make decisions. If we want to have more of a particular kind of energy so that we can undertake a specific project that requires that energy, we need to know where that energy comes from. We need to organize our lives in such a way that we have regular access to the conditions that facilitate that energy.

But D&G don’t tend to think in terms of a plurality of energies. Instead, they place a heavy emphasis on libido, on bodily interfacing. This is one kind of energy that can motivate us to do many different things. Sometimes you desire to have sex, or to eat, or to scream at someone, or to stab someone multiple times. For D&G, the cool thing about libido is the vast array of possibilities arising from a single kind of energy. Their theory is, of course, completely amoral - but for them to judge is to territorialize, and to territorialize is to repress.

Since they are loath to engage in judgement, they are also unwilling to incorporate death drive into their theory. To say what it would mean to destroy your life would seem, in some way, to judge your activity. Once you begin deciding what it means for the other to destroy itself, you have begun to lock down the content of the other, to determine what it is for, to ascribe a telos to it, to territorialize it. For D&G, your life cannot be limited in these ways. You always have the possibility of further interfacing, and so your life is always in an open-ended process of libidinal becoming. The only thing you can do that would destroy this is to territorialize. Of course, we do territorialize on their account - we territorialize all the time. Why then, do we frustrate our own process of becoming?

We might come to desire our own repression, but through eros rather than through thanatos (i.e., death drive). The experience of being repressed could be yet another form of interfacing, albeit one that excludes other forms. The problem with repression would not be that it is a departure from libido, but that it is an expression of libido which circumscribes further expressions. It would then be the erotic turned against itself.

This would then give D&G an account of human life that is almost exclusively libidinal, in which nearly anything we do can be framed in terms of eros. The attempt to frame ourselves as motivated by something else - such as the good - would be an attempt to legitimate repression. If everything is erotic energy flows, then you can either be on the side of their acceleration or deceleration. You are left with no external standpoint from which to judge eros.

Plato to the Rescue

This kind of problem doesn’t come up in Platonism, because for Plato there are multiple distinct psychological drives. These drives are often discussed as “loves,” and at different points different numbers and kinds of them are posited. In the tripartite schema from the Republic or the Phaedrus, three key drives come up:

1. The love of wisdom or the good

2. The love of honor

3. The love of pleasure

The Greek language has different words for these things. I’m inclined to say that libido is concerned with bodily pleasure, with the what-it’s-likeness of various modes of interfacing. It’s to do with eros.

But beyond eros, there is also the love of honor, what the Greeks call “timē” (τῑμή). Honor is to do with recognition. A person who is moved by honor wants to be well thought of by other people. Dave often talks about this in terms of Bourdieu. Many people have, for instance, a desire be recognized as a legitimate practitioner of a craft - what the Greeks call “techne” (τέχνη). They want recognition within a field. There are other situations in which we want recognition, and in all of these cases timē is involved.

Eros and timē are both focused on the position of the body vis-a-vis other bodies. The person who is concerned with eros is concerned with the way their body interfaces with other bodies. The person who is concerned with timē is concerned with the way their body appears in the eye of the other - they are concerned with the judgement of others. In both cases, other bodies are valuable instrumentally, in terms of what they can do for you. They can be erotically interfaced with, or they can give recognition. So, when we are in eros or in timē, we are identifying with our bodies, treating ourselves as distinct from the totality.

The love of wisdom or the good overcomes this alienation by allowing us to identity with the one from which all bodies emanate, with the totality itself. From this point of view, we are able to ask ourselves if we are serving other bodies as ends in themselves. This requires us to think about the good of the other and to question whether our activity is aligned with it.

Because we are in separate bodies, it is difficult to know the condition of the other. We should not assume we know what is good for another body - we should exercise humility in judgement. That said, if we become intimidated by the epistemic difficulty of the task, this would be a form of cowardice. We need courage to act when we cannot be sure we are right as well as humility to prevent us from acting rashly.

This need for contradictory virtues that apply in different ways at different times requires us to exercise prudence. We need to be able to distinguish among cases, to apply the right virtues at the right points. All of this is very difficult. The more we succeed, the more prone we are to pride and hubris. The more we fail, the harder it is to generate courage. But if we can apply this love to all bodies, regardless of whether those bodies are conferring pleasure or recognition upon us, we move into the domain of “agápē” (ἀγάπη). The task of philosophy for Plato is not to deconstruct or deterritorialize, it is to make this move, from the preoccupation with eros and timē toward agápē. In this way, we “return to the one” from which we emanate. We come back to the totality, all of which is intrinsically meaningful at every point.

Now, sometimes this schema is further complicated. There are several other drives that get discussed by the ancients:

1. Pragma (πρᾶγμα), which is concerned with performing duties out of a sense of obligation. It is often invoked in commercial contexts, where it is tied to the necessary business of life and the day-to-day transactions that comprise it.

2. Ludus, a Latin term contributed later on by the Romans. Ludus is concerned with flirting and playfulness. You might be tempted to think of ludus as a kind of eros, but I’d frame it as the love we feel when we are in a liminal relationship with someone or something. In this situation, we can code or recode the love, experimenting not within eros but among the loves. Playing with people allows us to explore the possible kinds of love we might have with them. It also allows us to question habits and existing relationships, potentially reconfiguring them.

3. Philautia (φιλαυτία), which is concerned with the love we feel for ourselves. Agápē necessarily includes one’s own body, which is part of the totality. It is not possible to rule ourselves if we do not first love ourselves. Without this love, we experience self-government as repression. We rule ourselves too harshly, denying ourselves things we need, pushing too hard against eros and timē. This leads to a return of the repressed, as we rebel against ourselves. Repression, then, is not merely the regulating eros and timē, it is an excessive regulation of eros and timē that comes about as a result of insufficient philautia.

4. Philia (φιλία), which is concerned with the love we feel for a friend or a brother, someone we consider equal to ourselves. The true friend loves the friend for their own sake. But this is much less universal than agápē, because it extends only to those we have come to know. Philia can regress into eros if we pursue friendship only with those who interface with us in ways we like.

5. Storge (στοργή), which is concerned with the love we feel for our parents or children or for our community - for the polity or for social organizations. This love is highly instructive for agápē because it often requires us to love people who do things we do not like. But it still operates at too near a level of proximity - it does not easily extend beyond the bounds of the household or the city. And storge can regress into timē if we become overly focused on where we stand in the eyes of family and community members.

Now, I think that in capitalism, the tendency is for pragma to serve as the brake on eros and timē. So, instead of returning to the one, we are reminded to get serious and find a way to produce the necessaries of life. When our schema is reduced to eros, timē, and pragma, the purpose of pragma seems to be to facilitate a return to eros and timē. This way of thinking is communicated effectively in the film Scarface, where it is put this way:

First you get the money, then you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the women.

Here pragma is instrumental. It generates recognition - the power in the community - and that recognition then makes it much easier to move in eros.

When we instead think in terms of agápē, it becomes clear that eros and timē need to be disciplined so that we can use our scarce time to pursue the good of others. Once our project is agapesized, we no longer want to spend the bulk of our timenergy on eros and timē. That doesn’t mean we can negate these things completely - if we ignore eros and timē outright, we fail to show philautia, and the body rebels against our repressive rule. Agápē allows us to rule by enabling us to judge in terms of the good. It does not simply cause us to negate or repress parts of ourselves.

It’s for this reason that Plato argues in the Philebus that reason is concerned with “deciding upon the limit,” that in the Republic he emphasizes so heavily the need to distinguish between the “necessary” and “unnecessary” desires.³ We need to know how far eros and timē must be satisfied so that we can move in agápē as much as possible. Otherwise, we will constantly botch the mixture of energies. We need philautia so that the necessary concessions can be made to eros, timē, and - especially under capitalism - pragma. But we also need to be able to reason about these things, because if we can’t reason about them then we can’t sort how to decide upon limits. So, agápē requires both philautia and philosophy - it requires an ability to do philosophy with loving compassion for one’s own body.

When we politicize this, we see that to run the polity, it is necessary to regulate eros, timē, and pragma, but not in a way that represses these things. To truly show storge for the community, it is necessary to show loving compassion for the community members as bodies with many distinct kinds of necessary desires. And, when we broaden that out so as to encompass the totality - when we move toward agápē - we have to be prepared to show this compassion to an even greater plurality of bodies who have configured the loves in extraordinarily diverse ways.

Capitalism doesn’t invite us to do this kind of politics. Instead, capitalism universalizes pragma, promising to unshackle eros and timē. Instead of universalizing access to agápē, it obscures the possibility of agápē, storge, and philia, treating all other-regarding behavior as the performance of pragmatic duty, as always already instrumental in character.

It is in this sense that D&G are consummately capitalist. Now, many are inclined to respond to them by trying to RETVRN to a pre-capitalist configuration where agápē is accessible to a narrow elite. But I do think it’s possible - and often necessary - to become alienated from good things so as to reobtain them in a fuller and more complete form at a later stage. And this is why my position is not simply anti-capitalist. This alienation from agápē is necessary, not because agápē is bad, but because we can only universalize access to agápē by going through a prolonged period in which most people struggle to get beyond pragma. Capitalism develops abundance by using eros and timē to motivate us to do things that are bad for us but potentially good for our descendants. It is a kind of pact with the future, in which we mutilate ourselves for the benefit of future generations, who are meant to get something that will retroactively redeem our sacrifice.

Death Drive as Rebellion Against Pragma

When we become stuck in pragma, with only eros and timē as consolation, we find that this makes us very unhappy. To be truly happy, people need to serve something larger than themselves - they need, at minimum, philia and storge. To get philia and storge, it’s necessary to first achieve some level of philautia. Without philautia, we struggle to be good friends or to function well within family and community settings. We constantly make these spaces about ourselves, and this turns our interactions with our “friends” and “family” into transactions. Our friends and family may tolerate this, either because we nonetheless fulfill our pragmatic obligations or because these other people have found a way to love us for our own sakes in spite of our failures. But often, without philautia, we will struggle even to accept the love that is offered to us, because we won’t think we deserve it.

A person in this situation - without philautia, and trapped in pragmatic obligations - does not value those pragmatic obligations for their own sake. This means that if this person has friends or family members, those friends and family members are experienced not as people to love, but as sources of duty. We know, on some level, that pragma is insufficient. So, our duties are not self-legitimating. We need a reason to perform them. The capitalist reasons - further access to eros and timē - are ultimately inadequate. They aren’t enough to make us happy. But if we are cut off from the higher reasons, we will eventually find ourselves wanting to be freed from the schema in which we are bound.

Yet we remain bound in that schema. So, our attempts to free ourselves simultaneously appear as attempts to destroy ourselves. Caught at the level of pragma, we can only escape pragma by escaping the level at which we are caught. Since we cannot go up, we must go down. We neglect our pragmatic duties and sink into an abyss of eros and timē. Our freedom therefore consists in our destruction.

This can be overcome - if we are able to achieve philautia and move into philia, storge, and agápē, we will see that it is not necessary to destroy ourselves to diminish the amount of energy we give to pragma. Rather, we can tap into these higher energies and use these to generate a genuine, real commitment to those we serve.

But in capitalism, this overcoming is rare and arduous. It is also continuously sold to people as a consumable product, as an experience for the body, or as a lifehack, as a way of more efficiently engaging in pragma. In this way, enlightenment is eroticized and pragmatized. The alleged escape from the body is nothing more than a retreat into it. Attempts to get out are diverted, and those who try hardest to escape are often in this way driven into the darkest despair. For without philautia, we lack the psychological resources to engage in the positive despair, the despair that enables us to reason anew about our situation. We instead turn this despair inward, against ourselves, where it manifests as thanatos.

This is not to say that death drive only manifests in capitalism. In other periods in history, the set of people who had the timenergy necessary to ascend was heavily restricted. Many people were, therefore, also caught in pragma. In societies with less commerce, with more interstate competition for land, you had to worry about getting caught in militaristic honor games, in entire social and political systems based around timē. These “timocracies” would also produce death drive, as honor-bound warriors wished to access philia and storge but found themselves unable to love themselves enough to love others well.

If capitalism is overcome and these energies are unlocked, we will unleash far more human possibility than D&G can imagine. They’re restricted to the possibilities that stem from eros. Theirs is a false abundance. It functions as a cage, keeping us locked in pragma. This is functional, if you think that capitalism has not yet finished its work. If more capitalism is necessary before it can be overcome, then it is necessary to find ways to stultify the development of people at all levels of society - including would-be theorists - so that no premature attempts are made.

But what if it takes capitalism a very long time to finish its work? In such a situation, could the memory of agápē be lost? Could the set of people able to move in philautia, philia, and storge become too limited? At minimum, someone has to do the work of preserving these modes of consciousness so that they are available in the future. If this is not a job for theorists, who is it a job for? And if capitalism has pragmatized the academy, how are theorists meant to do this work? As I see it, Theory Underground is a response to all of this. We are trying to keep these energies alive so that, as capitalism and the modern state develop and new political and social possibilities are generated, these modes of consciousness are available to be taken up and realized at scale.

1. There is an episode of Political Theory 101 in which D&G are discussed. That episode is based on my own engagement with their work.

2. And if this piece is any good, you have to thank Dave for pushing me to write it in preparation for the Epic Marathon Stream at Theory Underground (EMSTU) currently scheduled for 29 December.

3. For Plato, I read the translations available in the Hackett complete works. That’s the Grube & Reeve translation of the Republic, the Nehemas & Woodruff of the Phaedrus, and the Frede for the Philebus. For Aristotle, I read the Reeve for the Politics and the Crisp for the Nicomachean Ethics.