DESIRING-MACHINES, COMMUNITY POLITICS AND THE THREAT OF REVOLUTIONARY DESIRE IN TONI MORRISON’S PARADISE
DESIRING-MACHINES, COMMUNITY POLITICS AND THE THREAT OF REVOLUTIONARY DESIRE IN TONI MORRISON’S PARADISE

Summary/Abstract: In their work Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, GillesDeleuze and Felix Guattari offer an analysis on the formation of politicaland economic structures in capitalist societies based on the interpellationof subjects via a system of controlling physical and psychological desires. Theiranalysis showcases how desire control produces effective labor in a capitalistsystem, creates psychological massification and achieves political hegemonyin a community of interpellated subjects. For the machine of society to functionproperly, desire needs to be filtered and commodified, otherwiseit threatens the system with revolutionary ruptures. In Toni Morrison’s Paradise,the concept of community relates Ruby (a small all-black town cut offfrom the rest of the world) and the sign of its ontological other, the Convent(a house for wayward women), with the history of racial conflict and the politicsof gender. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of how desire politicsaffect community politics, I attempt to examine how both the interpellatingand revolutionary functions of their respective “desiring-machines” leadthe communities in Paradise either to decay or evolution. I propose a parallelismbetween the signs of Ruby and the Convent with the sign of the despoticbody (as explained by Deleuze and Guattari) in an attempt to representthe distorting and unifying processes that transform the experiences of bothcommunities. By exploring the restoring flow of desire represented in the danceof the Convent women, I draw attention to the revolutionary changes desirecauses in both the physical bodies of the character subjects and the organlessbodies of the two communities. As a final point, by applying Deleuzeand Guattari’s theory of the body without organs to the symbolic spacesof the Oven and the Convent’s cellar, I highlight the linearity of the processof social-production via desire-production.

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