War Machines and Love Machines... A Foucault/Deleuze Synthesis

[sodapopinski51]

The World is a War Machine. But it is also a Loving Machine. These two impulses drive the entire world. The insatiable desire for acceptance, love, affection, approval, and nurturing actually leads to the wanton abuses of power, war, destruction, and so forth

Comments

[seasontoseason]

well, first of all, pederasty and homosexuality are abnormal. that is a fact, since "abnormal" merely means "not normal", i.e., not statistically normal. of course people assign moral force to such things, but in a strict sense they are statistically less common, not the "arithmetic mean."
But I see your point that normalizing sexual discourse regulates us. Only ... why use pederasty as the example? i think it's problematic to use "pederasty" as your term for sex between a man and a boy, since it suggests that "pederasty" now, in , say, america in 2009 and pederasty in ancient greece or rome are the same-- simply sex between a man and a boy. (I also think it's sort of curious that you describe sex between young boys and men in Rome as your example of pederasty rather than ancient Greek pederasty, which probably would have served you better. But that's a sidenote) My issue is that pederasty in one culture is different than pederasty in another. On the surface, this is also your point.
But you actually want to elide the two pederasties (to say, hey, pederasty now isn't so bad, it was completely fine in the ancient world) rather than emphasize their differences. My thought is that your suggestion that the two pederasties are the same, or that the "ok-ness" of pederasty in the ancient world demonstrates that there is nothing necessarily wrong with pederasty now is fundamentally mistaken. Sex between adults and children now is wrong, and is sexual abuse, precisely because of the power relations between adults and children in our culture. Surely there were "ageist" ideas and social structures in ancient Rome, but they were different and without going in deeply to analyze them I can't say exactly how they functioned in relation to pederasty as a social institution then. But I can say that in our culture the way that power is assigned, granted and withheld due to age makes pederasty abuse.

I also know that in ancient Rome, for example, there was no such thing as homosexuality. So to even begin to speak of homosexuality or pederasty in these two cultures, we have to realize that we are not able to simply apply terms across both. Homosexuality didn't exist because sex or sexuality was not defined by the gender of the participants. that is how it is in our culture, and how we arrive at "gay", "straight", and "bisexual"-- but not then. Instead, sex was defined by the roles of the participants, either active or passive, and the activeness or passivity of the various roles was very defined (but isn't always intuitive to a modern person).

I'm not sure, I'm realizing, in the end what you are exactly trying to say.... I don't think any of us will disagree that pathologies-- as named, discreet entities-- are essentially invented by medical discourses. But that doesn't mean that everything goes, nothing can be judged or determined. Not sure if you ever meant to say that, but it seemed implied. i think one interesting thing is to wonder what we would be without regulation. could we be at all?

[sodapopinski51]

Yes. I am saying, "anything goes."