I often think about who I am. What I mean is that the I remains still impenetrable & ungraspable to that which would comprehend something, including very much that which it itself is. What is this I? Or rather: who is it who speaks I?
To find something localizable within or around an ego, an identity, must, I think be nice. Pleasurable, even. So many people seem to enjoy such pleasures.
My I, on the other hand, has always been messy. My identity as a child, due to poverty, rural isolation, homophobia, bullying & abuse, and the accompanying emotional & psychological dissociations, seemed always under question. Effaced. Marked only by an absence.
What relief, I sighed, when at 16 I found yoga & meditation in a thick paperback book on what was called Indian philosophy picked up at a five-and-dime. To relieve myself of self, of these problematic personalities by focusing on the breath, that which passes through, and on the body, that which remains, was something I had only ever previously experienced by taking butes.1
I’m revisiting the past I that haunts my memories primarily because I’ve been reading so much Gilles Deleuze over the past few years. I didn’t really pick him up until after completing a PhD in a program where he just wasn’t taught. I mean, it was difficult enough to find a course willing to cover anything by Jacques Derrida, toward whom most of my professors were openly hostile. So after submitting & defending a dissertation substantially on Derrida & other French bugbears, I treated myself to a copy of Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life.
What instantly resonated with me was Deleuze’s radical conception of a singular yet impersonal subjectivity. I hadn’t found something so personally & intellectually reassuring since my study of the no-self (anātman, 無我 [muga]) of Buddhism. And how unshackling after years of teaching myself the phenomenological methodology in which that which appears always & already does so to a consciousness, to a subjective pole of perception.
It was as if phenomenology’s middle-voiced event at last unraveled into the truth I always suspected it would. Beyond the active (I eat a sandwich) & the passive (a sandwich is eaten by me). Even beyond that pesky, ambiguous third option (there is eating going on between me & a sandwich), we could finally touch new ground, and one that had no ground already beneath it: fire, domestication of cereal grains, …, a sandwich, a scent of mustard, a mouth, saliva, some teeth, a digestive tract, enzymatic processes—that is to say, eating.
Imagine my great pleasure then as I’m guiltily, ashamedly watching my favorite garbage Spanish teen drama Netflix series—the one set in an elite high school for the insanely wealthy—and one of the characters delivers a full-on Deleuzian concept.2 Lavishly upmarket power couple Guillermina & Pier are trying to induce/pay formerly unhoused, current waitstaff Joel to participate in their weird power/sex dynamic.
To seal the deal, Pier removes his shirt and, to counter Joel’s initial hesitation (porque soy muy gay), soberly declares, “El placer solo entiende de cuerpos.” Pleasure only understands bodies. No active (Guillermina & Pier pay/command Joel to have sex) or passive (Joel is paid/commanded to have sex by/with Guillermina & Pier), just pure Deleuzian rhizomatic desubjectification: sexual dimorphism in mammals, …, some cash thrown on a mattress, a shirt removed, a weird power dynamic, some weird super-horniness, three bodies (without organs)—that is to say, fuck yeah.