You're joking, but Deleuze wasn't:
I cannot give any positive value to pleasure, because pleasure seems to me to interrupt the immanent process of desire; pleasure seems to me to be on the side of strata and organisation; and it is in the same movement that desire is presented as internally submitted to law and externally interrupted by pleasures; in the two cases, there is negation of a field of immanence proper to desire. I tell myself that it is no accident if Michel [Foucault] attaches a certain importance to Sade, and myself on the contrary to Masoch. It's not enough to say that I am masochistic, and Michel sadistic. That would be good, but it's not true. What interests me in Masoch is not the pain, but the idea that pleasure comes to interrupt the positivity of desire and the constitution of its field of immanence (as also, or rather in another way, in courtly love - constitution of a field of immanence or of a body without organs where desire lacks nothing, and guards itself as much as possible from the pleasures which would come and interrupt its process). Pleasure seems to me to be the only means for a person or a subject to "find themselves again" in a process which overwhelms them. It is a re-territorialisation.
What zero pussy DO does to a mf, huh
They start talking about potatoes and shit
for those interested, this comes from "Désir et plaisir, lettre de Deleuze à Michel Foucault en 1977" (letters from Deleuze to Foucault).
Thank you comrade, it's exactly the text I need right now.
I think it is: "courtly love" is the love that's forever unconsummated...
It's not my cup of tea either. Maybe study Wilhelm Reich? He thought orgasms were necessary in the fight against fascism, which was based on sexual repression.
I'm not saying you should pick your authors based on the conclusions you prefer, just pointing out that there are other views on the relation between sexuality and politics.
Desire in Deleuze's work is a machine that continually produces fantasies, experimentation, "lines of flight", that challenges everything that gets in its way, so it does have revolutionary potential. Pleasure stops the machine. Eternal self-repression isn't the answer though, because desire is supposed to be productive.
He isn't really advocating anything. He didn't write self-help books; he'd rather make things more complicated than give answers... But it's clear he's on the side of experimentation, but not necessarily of pleasure - one possibility offered in the quote above is masochism, also not everybody's thing of course.
he's asking you to forever experiment new forms of desire, of arrangements, without ever being firmly organized, beware of the ones with power that organize your desires to an inert and hierarchical form, explore without ever indulging too long in the pleasure of an instant, always follow that everchanging line to the horizon.
Pleasure is useful, sometimes, to organize yourself a little bit to help you get out of the situation that is too big for you, too complicated for you, on the search for new arrangements and desires. But beware of getting stuck in pleasure, it can kill the desire forever.
There is never an organization, an arrangement, an environment eternally adapted, each one of us must decide to bind or unbind, to build, deconstruct, rebuild, on the open path.
Pleasure interrupts pain for a moment, desire interrupts pain fully, because finally, it creates totally, a new arrangement, a new environment, step by step, eternally advancing.
No. No no no no no. I need you all to stand around me with guns and protect my orgasms!
