Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: The Body without Orgasm
- 1 A Nonlinear History of Sexuality: Deleuze with Foucault
- 2 Psychoanalysis Unhinged: Deleuze with Lacan, Klein and Reich
- 3 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body
- 4 Orgasmic Feminism
- 5 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing
- 6 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm
- 7 Capitalism and Sexuality
- Epilogue: Swedish Sin, or the Importance of Remaining Curious
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: The Body without Orgasm
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: The Body without Orgasm
- 1 A Nonlinear History of Sexuality: Deleuze with Foucault
- 2 Psychoanalysis Unhinged: Deleuze with Lacan, Klein and Reich
- 3 Folding, Individuation and the Pleasurable Body
- 4 Orgasmic Feminism
- 5 Disabling Sex: Inventing a People who are Missing
- 6 Becoming-Animal and the Posthuman Orgasm
- 7 Capitalism and Sexuality
- Epilogue: Swedish Sin, or the Importance of Remaining Curious
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If the sexual body is indeed historical – if there is, in short, no orgasm without ideology – perhaps ongoing inquiry into the politics of pleasure will serve to deepen the pleasures, as well as to widen the possibilities, of politics.
(Halperin 1992: 261)The notion of a plateau, or plateaus, is a suggestive one that stirs the imagination, or may even be felt in the body. The idea of a peak, or a number of peaks, around which intensities are built makes it almost too easy to allow oneself to make associations with some kind of graph of sexual excitation. Yet, the notion of a ‘plateau’, as Brian Massumi notes in his introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, must not be confused with direct sexual pleasure and release. Gregory Bateson's détournement of the word, in a study on Balinese culture, is based exactly on the fact that he finds, in this culture, a libidinal economy that is decidedly different from ‘the West's orgasmic orientation’ (Massumi 2004: xiv). The very point about a plateau, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use Bateson's term, is that it maintains a quivering pitch of intensity that is not automatically finalised through a climax. A central characteristic of the plateau is that it does not release tension so much as it carries it forward. Rather than an orgasmic release, there is a perpetuation of energy through a ‘fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting troutes could exist’ (Massumi 2004: xiv).
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- Information
- Between Desire and PleasureA Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality, pp. 1 - 15Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013