24 October 2006
affection
'Rationalist optimism is at the same time an infinite cruelty' - Deleuze, lecture on Leibniz, 22/04/80.
Meanwhile, Daniel feels that something is lacking somewhere. I would suggest that it's neither love, nor sex, but affection. I believe affection to be a genuinely revolutionary sentiment, as it depends not on the one who loves/fucks the other who, in turn, loves/fucks the other whilst all the time each is (really) thinking of themselves, but on a pure kind of ecstatic, expansive selflessness. It may well be a form of post-religious spiritual abasement that gauchely assumes it can fur up the circuits with a useless kind of joy, but it touches upon nothing of telos, marital or otherwise, and those ciphers of kapital from Sex in the City would never understand it. For what reason, other than affection, did Schreber offer up his adorned, unmanned body to the Godhead in a bid (the only one possible) to save humanity? His ribbons cost but a few pence, but his sacrifice was infinite.
It is the bourgeoisie, of course, those purveyors of pvc, alcoholic drinks and sex toys, who have 'drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation' (Communist Manifesto).
Long live chivalrous enthusiasm in the name of revolutionary affection! Death to egotistical calculation! Long live philistine sentimentalism! Let a thousand Schrebers bloom!
