Accessible

Resistance is accessible through black fugitivity

Koerner 12 /Michelle, Professor of Comparative Literature @ UC-Berkeley, Line
of Escape: Gilles Deleuzes Encounter with George Jackson Genre, Vol. 44, No. 2
Summer 2011 DOI 10.1215/00166928-1260183/

Jacksons name always accompanied by the refrain I may run, but all the while that I am,
Ill be looking for a stick appears in both volumes of Deleuzes Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1985, [1980] 1987), written with Guattari, and in a short text written in
1977 with Parnet, On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature (Deleuze and Parnet [1977]
2006).5 In each instance, Jacksons line announces the idea that escape is revolutionary:
Good people say that we must not flee, that to escape is not good, that it isnt effective, and that one

What matters
is to break through the wall, even if one has to become-black like John Brown. George
must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that escape is revolutionary. . . .

Jackson. I may take flight, but all the while I am fleeing, I will be looking for a weapon. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1985 [1972]: 185, 277; my emphasis)6 Affirming the force of fugitivity to break
through the wall (a wall that throughout the book is defined as the limits of capital), this passage
maps two important connections. First, invoking the nineteenth-century American abolitionist John

aligns antiracist militancy with becoming black , a notion that, along

with becoming woman, becoming animal, and becoming imperceptible , emerges in A
Brown, the text

Thousand Plateaus as a universal figure of minoritarian consciousness (Deleuze and Guattari [1980]
1987: 106). In connecting a political concept of escape with a white abolitionist becoming
black,Deleuze and Guattari imply a thinking of blackness that resonates with
what FredMoten (2008a: 1745) has called blacknesss distinction from a specific set of things called
black. Browns absolute commitment to end slavery in the raid at Harpers Ferry emerges as an event
that affirms, to quote Moten (ibid.: 1746) again, that everyone whom blackness claims, which is to
say everyone, can claim blackness. A second connection directly quotes Soledad Brother and
introduces a crucial element into thinking of escape as a revolutionary idea. Jacksons line I may run .
. . announces that fugitivity, rather than simply being a renunciation of action, already carries with it
an active construction: a line of flight composes itself as a search for a weapon .7
Disrupting the opposition of flight or fight that has often troubled the political understanding of
fugitivity, Jacksons line affirms a politics where escape is always already a
counterattack. What we encounter here, quite rare in the work of a European philosopher, is a
political concept produced in connection with both nineteenth-centuryabolitionism and
the resistance to what Jackson termed the neo-slavery of theAmerican prison
system a concept of resistance that affirms a force of becoming black or, more
precisely, a blackness of becoming

White civil society has already told you what blackness is; only
you can decide whether or not you will accept those codes or
exist otherwise. That flips try or die.

Ehlers
Even if subjects are formed in power, they are not determined
by power. -Ehlers Evidence.

Fischer
Social death theory is historically inaccurate, and falls prey to
colonial redaction. Slavery continues to explain the plight of
blackness as catastrophe, but remains curiously inanimate.
Hegemonic structures silence the events at the core of the
black Atlantic this is slavery as communal, queerness on the
middle passage as a unique narrative of self-love, the stories,
instances of massive uprising, cultural fraternities such as the
Cuban Cabildos, etc. all prove that resistance Fischer

Hudson
Social death is not engraved in ontological stone. Black and
white are sustained in contingently performed signification
which the aff disrupts Hudson.

2AC Social death Libidinal Economy

The aff solves desire is conjugated by subject building we
liberate and interrogate.
Psychoanalysis cant be scaled up to explain society or politics
their theory is not falsifiable.
Sharpe 10 [Matthew, lecturer, philosophy and psychoanalytic studies, and Geoff
Goucher, senior lecturer, literary and psychoanalytic studies, Deakin University
Matthew and Geoff, iek and Politics: An Introduction, p. 182-185]

Can we bring some order to this host of criticisms? It is remarkable that, for all the criticisms of ieks political

ieks political position might reflect

his untenable attempt to shape his model for political action on the curative final
moment in clinical psychoanalysis. The differences between these two realms, listed in
Figure 5.1, are nearly too many and too great to restate which has perhaps caused the
theoretical oversight. The key thing is this. Lacans notion of traversing the fantasy
involves the radical transformation of peoples subjective structure: a refounding of
their most elementary beliefs about themselves, the world, and sexual difference. This is undertaken in
the security of the clinic, on the basis of the analysands voluntary desire to overcome their inhibitions,
Romanticism, no one has argued that the ultra- extremism of

symptoms and anxieties. As a clinical and existential process, it has its own independent importance and

The analysands, in transforming their subjective world, change the way they regard
the objective, shared social reality outside the clinic. But they do not transform the world.
The political relevance of the clinic can only be (a) as a supporting moment in ideology critique or (b)
authenticity.

as a fully- fl edged model of politics, provided that the political subject and its social object are ultimately identical.

rests on the idea, not only of a subject who becomes who he is only through
whose traversal of the fantasy is
immediately identical with his transformation of the socio- political system or Other.
Option (b), ieks option,

his (mis) recognition of the objective sociopolitical order, but

Hence, according to iek, we can analyse the institutional embodiments of this Other using psychoanalytic
categories. In Chapter 4, we saw ieks resulting elision of the distinction between the (subjective) Ego Ideal and
the (objective) Symbolic Order.

This leads him to analyse our entire culture as a single

subjectobject, whose perverse (or perhaps even psychotic) structure is expressed in every manifestation of
contemporary life. ieks decisive political- theoretic errors, one substantive and the other methodological, are
different (see Figure 5.1)

The substantive problem is to equate any political change worth the

name with the total change of the subjectobject that is, today, global capitalism. This is a type of
change that can only mean equating politics with violent regime change, and ultimately embracing dictatorial
government, as iek now frankly avows (IDLC 41219). We have seen that the ultra- political form of ieks

the theoretical Left and the wider politics, is that no one is

sufficiently radical for him even, we will discover, Chairman Mao. We now see that this is because
ieks model of politics proper is modelled on a pre- critical analogy with the total
transformation of a subjects entire subjective structure, at the end of the talking cure. For
what could the concrete consequences of this governing analogy be? We have seen that iek equates the
individual fantasy with the collective identity of an entire people. The social fantasy, he says,
criticism of everyone else,

structures the regimes inherent transgressions: at once subjects habitual ways of living the letter of the law, and

If political action is modelled on the Lacanian cure,

it must involve the complete traversal in Hegels terms, the abstract versus the determinate
negation of all these lived myths, practices and habits. Politics must involve the periodic founding of entire
the regimes myths of origin and of identity.

new subjectobjects. Providing the model for this set of ideas, the fi rst iekian political subject was Schellings

divided God, who gave birth to the entire Symbolic Order before the beginning of time (IDLC 153; OB 1448). But

can the political theorist reasonably hope or expect that subjects will simply give up on
all their inherited ways, myths and beliefs, all in one world- creating moment? And can they be
legitimately asked or expected to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy they will only retrospectively see,

if they do not for iek laments that today subjects

are politically disengaged in unprecedented ways what means can the theorist and his allies use
to move them to do so?
after they have acceded to the Great Leap Forward? And