Benedictus de Spinoza bene dictus de Anarchia: desire, sexuality and pleasure in Spinoza cum Deleuze

Abstract

Ethics becomes psycho-sexual-politics when it turns into the art of mutually learning how to compose new relations of potency (between our collective potencies of thinking and acting) that enable us to create for ourselves both a new liberatory society without servitude (in which it is worth living and working together with others), and a new liberatory subjectivation without psycho-sexual domination (in which it is worth affecting and being affected by others). The present article addresses the following problems: Does Spinoza merely repeat what all modern philosophers (Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, Burke, Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer) have repeated—namely, that desire (cupiditas) and conatus are defined by their negativity, lack, privation, longing for pleasure and jouissance, and by their welding to the Law?? What conception does Spinoza have of sexuality as it pertains to our already-statized subjectivations? How does he characterize sexual desire (coeundi cupiditas), sexual arousal (coeundi libido), pleasure (titillatio), and satisfaction? How can we characterize in a divergent (acratic) way male psyco-sexual violence (e.g., prostitution)? How can we surpass—following the Spinozist line of flight—the the dominant phallic-pimp State sexuality toward a sexuality of univocity or of the non-human sex (a question for a new sexual ethics)?