The Apotheosis of Nullity: A Genealogy of Subjectivity in the Deleuzoguattarian Primitive and Despotic Regimes

After delineating the striking parallels which exist between the mode of autogenesis of God as subject in Schelling’s Weltalter and the mode of emergence of molar human subjectivity out of the cauldron of the Deleuzoguattarian unconscious, the thesis dwells upon the vicissitudes which beset human subjectivity in and between two of the authors’ politicoeconomico- semiotic regimes: the primitive and the despotic. The primitive regime encompasses pre-State and pre-historical societies in general. It employs a ritualized physical cruelty upon the body so as to train man to be a good debtor and thwart within him the onset of resentment. The erection of the despotic regime, broadly circumscribing all State societies, transpires through an initial external invasion upon the primitive regime which destroys its form of ethics. Suddenly failing to be able to act his reactions to external excitation and likewise coming to be defined by fear of death as the termination of his vital substance, formerly noble primitive man becomes the slave of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic and the Nietzchean man of ressentiment and bad conscience, as well as the bare unqualified life referred to by Giorgio Agamben as homo sacer cowering under the Damocles’ sword of the transcendent despotic Law. Exit strategies to this multiple predicament are sought in the Mosaic revolution of political liberation, St. Paul’s undeadening of the subject mortified by the Statist Law through the latter’s supersession by grace, and Kafka’s deconstruction of the despotic Law at the behest of the immanent peregrinations of molecular desire. Finally, through Kantorowicz’s reading of Shakespeare, it is demonstrated how the despot may, through a diametrical reversal, himself be reduced to precisely the naked unqualified life over which he had heretofore so sovereignly presided.