Becoming Woman and Gender Typologies 197
Government betrayed our country”.1 The old man continues with a historic
lesson: “With you, personal honour is everything: you will never, any one of
you, lie or cheat. But your national honour is not: you may say one day one
thing, and the contrary on the morrow”.2 This anecdote, we might posit, not
only represents in micro-form the essence of Anglo-oriental relations in the
last few centuries it also illustrates desire and interest as defined by Deleuze
and Guattari. Desire for Deleuze and Guattari, is always produced in relation
to an outside in an impersonal process as distinct from interests. While desire
is molecular, unconscious and positive, interests are molar, negative, conscious
or preconscious. Desire stands for itself alone. It is prior and indifferent to all
kinds of interests, such as class, nation, self and capital. This indifference makes
desire open to, and an easy target for all kinds of exploitations of power. Hence
desire, which is revolutionary in nature, turns into a reactionary, destructive
and anti-revolutionary retreat. When desire and interests are combined in a
single person, no matter what nation, race or gender he or she belongs to, in-
terests have a manipulative power over desires: and that is human nature, and
the nature of desire itself.
Deleuze and Guattari warn us about the negative turns of desire as “desir-
ing one’s own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate”, and they list a
number of its reactive forms such as money, state, army, police and fascism. 3
And Deleuze argues elsewhere that desire might turn “against one’s own inter-
ests: capitalism profits from this, but so does socialism, the party, and the party
leadership”.4 When desire does away with the ego, and attains a positive and
productive direction in connection with an outside, it is called “becoming”:
one becomes impersonal, something other than himself or herself. The aim
is to free life where it becomes trapped, to free thought from its constraints.
Through becoming, one finds new possibilities for living and thinking. Becom-
ing is always becoming-minoritarian and becoming-molecular. This is the only
creative and active direction for the movement of desire. There is no becoming
majoritarian or becoming molar which are always reactive and nihilistic, and
they lack creativity. Majoritarianism is a static being as a dead end.
1 Marmaduke Pickthall, Oriental Encounters: Palestine and Syria (1894-5-6) (London: Collins,
1918), 72.
2 Anne Fremantle, Loyal Enemy (London: Hutchinson, 1938), 49.
3 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.,
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 168.
4 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, edited by David Lapoujade, trans-
lated by Michael Taormina (Los Angeles, ca: Semiotext(e), 2004), 257.