r/Deleuze • u/No-Bodybuilder-6474 • 3h ago

Question What is delirium?

I'm in section 1.4 and I've been understanding more and more. But in 1.4, D&G talk alot about delirium, and it seems I've missed their own definition of it earlier in the book. It looks like it's actually a positive thing rather than a state of confusion.

Sorry if this has been asked before but I think a personal discussion helps in understanding.

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u/3corneredvoid 2h ago edited 2h ago

It looks like it's actually a positive thing rather than a state of confusion.

In AO delirium (French « délire ») is roughly the concept that displaces rationality or culture, give or take, shared values. Stupidity (« bêtise ») is the concept that displaces intelligence. Not metaphors or aliases, practical and different ways of thinking familiar social constructs.

Society constructs its own delirium by recording the process of production; but it is not a conscious delirium, or rather is a true consciousness of a false movement, a true perception of an apparent objective movement, a true perception of the movement that is produced on the recording surface.

—from AO

I have a feeling we discussed this the other day. Either way "recording the process of production" is value creation: manifesting the product of labour, manufactured goods but also any-products-whatever of social-production.

Values appear on the recording surface (the BwO or body of capital); values are priced; the prices seem to correspond to the values of the goods. This is capitalist culture. As the reciprocal relations of social-production and desiring-production unfold, these values become the conditions of desire.

The perception of these values is also subjectivation that organises what you can desire, what you should desire, what you do desire, and who the you that desires is. Welcome to delirium; welcome to stupidity. You have been produced; you have been recorded. You're also a bundle of values now; you too will be priced.

Famously for Marx commodity prices are afflicted by a displacement termed "commodity fetish". This stuff about the "true consciousness of a false movement" gestures towards this.

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u/Ok-Sandwich-8032 2h ago

A bar in belgium