Introduction

As we have seen in previous chapters, part of Deleuze's quarrel with sexual pleasure and the orgasm is the way in which he perceives them to tie subject and organism into one constitutive entity. Pleasure and orgasm are linked to a sexuality associated with stratified systems of interpretation and organisation, such as psychoanalysis and State power, that in different ways delimit and determine the boundaries of the body and what it can do. In this way, pleasure and the orgasm also come to stand in the way of desire as a force of connectivity and creation. As such, sexuality understood in relation to psychoanalysis and State power remains but a human construct caught up in negativity. Desire, contrastively, opens towards the imperceptible, the machinic and the nonhuman. This chapter understands the animal in part as the threshold between sexuality and desire, between the human and the nonhuman. If sexuality is rejected because its actualisations seem intrinsically bound up with humanist discourse, then equally, at least in some respects, the animal can be seen as being employed in the service of familial and State politics. Where concrete sexuality tends to be replaced by abstract desire in Deleuze's philosophy, actual animals are replaced by becoming-animal.