Desiring-Machines, Community Politics and the Threat of Revolutionary Desire in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

In their work Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer an analysis on the formation of political and economic structures in capitalist societies based on the interpellation of subjects via a system of controlling physical and psychological desires. Their analysis showcases how desire control produces effective labor in a capitalist system, creates psychological massification and achieves political hegemony in a community of interpellated subjects. For the machine of society to function properly, desire needs to be filtered and commodified, otherwise it threatens the system with revolutionary ruptures. In Toni Morrison’s Paradise, the concept of community relates Ruby (a small all-black town cut off from the rest of the world) and the sign of its ontological other, the Convent (a house for wayward women), with the history of racial conflict and the politics of gender. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of how desire politics affect community politics, I attempt to examine how both the interpellating and revolutionary functions of their respective “desiring-machines” lead the communities in Paradise either to decay or evolution. I propose a parallelism between the signs of Ruby and the Convent with the sign of the despotic body (as explained by Deleuze and Guattari) in an attempt to represent the distorting and unifying processes that transform the experiences of both communities. By exploring the restoring flow of desire represented in the dance of the Convent women, I draw attention to the revolutionary changes desire causes in both the physical bodies of the character subjects and the organless bodies of the two communities. As a final point, by applying Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the body without organs to the symbolic spaces of the Oven and the Convent’s cellar, I highlight the linearity of the process of social-production via desire-production.