If an enantiomorph in crystallography / physical chemistry indicates a mirror image kind of symmetry between two crystals, then how do DG (via Canneti) recast enantiomorphosis as a death-dealing operation?
OK… so a crystal is formed in the image of another (only in reverse of the original). This formation somehow prohibits the matter of the formed crystal from becoming something else / taking a different form? Is that it?



By: nomadologist

One Response to “How does enantiomorphosis come to mean (via Canneti) prohibitions on becoming in Deleuze and Guattari?”

1. idratherbebarrelled on August 12th, 2009 8:18 pm

   …

   Now if we consider the first aspect of the order-word, in other words, death as the expressed of the statement, it clearly meets the preceding requirements: even though death essentially concerns bodies, is attributed to bodies, its immediacy, its instantaneousness, lends it the authentic character of an incorporeal transformation. What precedes and follows it be an extensive system of actions and passions, a slow labor of bodies; in itself, it is neither action nor passion, but a pure act, a pure transformation that enunciation fuses with the statement, the sentence. That man is dead . . . You are already dead when you receive the order-word . . . In effect, death is everywhere, as that ideal, uncrossable boundary separating bodies, their forms, and states, and as the condition, even initiatory, even symbolic, through which a subject must pass in order to change its form or state.

   This is the sense in which Canetti speaks of enantiomorphosis: a regime that involves a hieratic and immutable Master who at every moment legislates by constants, prohibiting or strictly limiting metamorphoses, giving figures clear and stable contours, setting forms in opposition two by two and requiring subjects to die in order to pass from one form to the other. It is always by means of something incorporeal that a body separates and distinguishes itself from another. The figure, insofar as it is the extremity of a body, is the noncorporeal attribute that limits and completes that body: death is the Figure. It is through death that a body reaches completion not only in time but in space, and it is through death that its lines form or outline a shape. There are dead spaces just as there are dead times. If [enantiomorphosis is] practiced often the whole world shrivels. . . . Social prohibitions against metamorphosis are perhaps the most important of all. . . . Death itself, the strictest of all boundaries, is what is interposed between classes. In a regime of this kind, any new body requires the erection of an opposable form, as well as the formation of distinct subjects; death is the general incorporeal transformation attributed to all bodies from the standpoint of their forms and substances (for example, the body of the Party cannot come into its own without an operation of enantiomorphosis, and without the formation of new activists, which assumes the elimination of the first generation).
   

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Email Address(required)

Website