Gilles Deleuze: Becoming Alcoholic, Becoming Addict, Becoming Imperceptible

Abstract

In the article an attempt is made to reconstruct alcoholic and drug abdiction lines of flight relying on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s reflections and some Lithuanian writers’ insights by asking the question what are the peculiarities of this line looking from the perspective of everyday economy. The author notices that Deleuze connects the everyday regime of an alcoholic style of life with the concepts of limit and threshold, the paradigm of disenchántedness and becoming imperceptible. On the other side, he discerns alcoholism as a social style of life preferred by creative personalities, relying on the mode of life examples of some American creators, John Ford (1894–1973), Jack London (1876–1916), and Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940). Thirdly, the author in this article notices that by connecting the drug users line of flight with the molecular becoming and taking the examples of Henri Michaux (1899–1984) and Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) experiences Deleuze and Guattari discover the paradoxical sticking of this line of flight to the spiral moving not upwards but downwards. In the article the rhetorical question is asked: is it possible that Deleuze and Guattari wax lyrical these destructive modes of life as creative lines of flight? Nevertheless, the final conclusion is that after making the attempt to discover the inner framework of such possible styles of life, Deleuze and Guattari come to the conclusion that the best intoxication is abstinence, and the topmost level of intoxication is reached by pure water.