Get Over Yourself! Critique and Desubjectivation

Abstract

In The Three Ecologies, Guattari points out that any potential ecological ‘revolution’ must take into account ‘molecular domains of sensibility, intelligence and desire’. Meanwhile, Foucault follows Nietzsche in holding that ‘every sentiment, particularly the noblest and most disinterested, has a history’. O’Leary’s talk will approach the question of these changing sentiments and domains of sensibility by sketching a Foucauldian model for understanding the historical transformation of experience. On that basis, it will present an account of critique in which critique is seen as the potentially transformational, experiential practice of engaging with the contemporary apparatuses of experience, or what T.S. Eliot calls the ‘mechanism of sensibility’. Critique, therefore, demands the folding back of experience onto itself. Understood in this way, critique can be seen as a desubjectivizing practice that both requires and allows us to get over ourselves. And it is this getting over ourselves that can, perhaps, lead to the kind of shift in the ‘molecular domains of sensibility’ that is called for by Guattari.