『아들과 연인』에 나타난 폴의 활력과 자본주의 비판

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss Paul’s vitality as living individual and its critique of capitalism in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Paul as a living individual feels as if his body were living empty. This being is univocal because through ‘combat-between’ he realizes his power in a life. It is this mode of individuation that overcomes the static identity and abolish work. Because univocal being must be conceived as difference that “constitutes being as a synthetic multiplicity.” This intensive life defeats the logic of identification in the modern civilization. In this novel, Paul is becoming through a dissolved self, which is no longer imprisoned within the fixed subjectivity and consists of events and singularities. As opposed to a subjectivity, Paul’s individuality is the force of non-organic life and an event, not a thing or a person. In this sense, Paul equilibrates himself with others, even nature. His creative journey can make things have fluid relationship with the circumambient universe. Deleuze says that this indefinite life attains a sort of beatitude. In this novel, Paul attains a life’s “very ecstasy of living, the highest point of bliss” in which a man reaches his fullest living and lives in immanent life. The psychoanalytic conception of desire is lack and the desire is repressed by the Oedipal law. But the Oedipus is the effect of social repression on desiring production. Desire is not a lack of something and doesn’t refer to any law which traditional psychoanalysis supports. In this regard, revolution consists of “the repetition of the future in its difference” just as positive desire functions heterogeneous in the field of immanence. For, Deleuze and Guattari, desire includes no lack: it is revolutionary because desire as productive process, desiring machine, prevents the body from being repressed by the Oedipal Law and being deprived of his labour power by capitalism. It is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari condemn the practice of psychoanalysis, through which desire is determined to desire its own repression as “a gigantic enterprise of absorption of surplus value.” In this result, this irreducible inequality forms the condition of the world. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Lawrence is a novelist who only affirms “pantheism of flows” in his characters so as to de-oedipalize the capitalism. As Lawrence considers capitalism as “ugly relationship” between labourer and capitalist, revolution is to live as univocal being, a life that is immanent, which means Paul’s passage of a life can break the alliance between oedipal law and capitalism.