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Innocent Guilt Dionysus versus Oedipus Dionysus, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and the Hasid invite us to dance. Oedipus is lame and does not. What about Levinas, who is not a Hasid? Would Deleuze and Guattari lump Levinas with the thinkers in whose works they find too much repression and gloom? Did we begin to learn that laughter and joy are not absent from his pages when it was noted in the last chapter that creativity is no less vital a component of his teaching than it is of what is affirmed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia? We may not have begun to learn this if, as was also noted in the last chapter, the creativity emphasized by Levinas is not the creativity affirmed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Schizophrenic creativity is the light creativity of Nietzsche’s song and dance. Schizo-analysis is that book’s updating of Nietzsche’s Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (“la gaya scienza”), which will be referred to here sometimes as The Gay Science and sometimes as The Joyful Science. Capitalism and Schizophrenia cites from The Joyful Science the following sentences, noting their similarity to what can be found in the works of Engels and Marx: “We burst out laughing as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of ‘man and world,’ separated by the sublime presumption of the little word ‘and.’”1 Imagine how much louder the laughter would be when Engels and Marx encounter the juxtaposition “man and world and God” or, NINE 152 | MARGINS OF RELIGION come to that, its phantom “man and world and father.” “The question of the father,” we are told in Anti-Oedipus, “is like that of God: born of abstraction, it supposes that the connection between man and nature or man and world is broken, so that man has to be produced as man by something exterior to nature and man.”2 Such a conception of production or creation fails to recognize that the only “effective” production or creation is that of what Guattari and Deleuze call desire and what Nietzsche calls will. What Nietzsche means, as do Guattari and Deleuze after him, is that the news Zarathustra brings down from the mountain is not simply that God or the father is dead, but that this news is of no consequence, for he never existed, or the God we have killed was already long ago dead. “The announcement of the death of the father embodies one final belief, namely ‘belief in the virtue of unbelief,’ of which Nietzsche says: ‘This violence still manifests the need for belief, for a support, for a structure,’” that is to say, Guattari and Deleuze add, the Oedipal structure.3 This is the structure that supports guilt, guilt over the infringement of law, in particular the law prohibiting incest, but also more generally the ten laws that Moses brought down from his mountain and the six hundred and thirteen listed in Leviticus and elsewhere. If Levinas defined responsibility and culpability simply in terms of such laws, what chance would remain of finding in his teachings room for such joy as is radiated by the writings of Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Guattari? On the other hand, if Emmanuel Levinas would then appear to be so enthused by the God of Sinai and Leviticus that joy would be suffocated under an incubus of melancholia , Deleuze and Guattari would appear to be so enthused by Dionysus, so swept away by the gales of Nietzschean laughter, so full of joy (Freude) and so afraid (afreudened?) of the fear they see dramatized in the Oedipal, Christian, and Hegelian triangulations, that they are ashamed to shed a compassionate tear over the injustices done to the millions who are not obsessed by those triangulations, to ordinary people, neither masters nor slaves, for whom the ethical is not, as it is for Deleuze and Guattari and Spinoza, a taking of power to the extreme where sadness (tristitia) is swallowed up in a bliss (laetitia) that is forgetful of others, and where agapē is crowded out by erotic love or erotic hate. Anti-Oedipus is a repetition of Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ. Yet the authors of the former book are reluctant to make anything of the admiration the author of the latter book, laughing till he cries, expresses in it for a certain unresentful Jesus who, as distinguished from the crucified Christ, is not antithetically opposed to twice-born and now maybe thrice-born Dionysus. Of this Dionysus Nietzsche goes as far as to say that after...

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