Gym Life
Everytime I throw up, I think of Julia Kristeva. (This sentence is not, luckily, reversible.) All down to an encounter with her description of the abject at an impressionable age. By way of comparison, in five months of going to the gym, I feel like I’ve been getting more intimate with Deleuze. Firstly, based on my distant memories of his book on Masochism, I have to say that I’ve never been as masochistic a relationship as I am with my instructor. The basis of masochism for Deleuze is not abjection, or humiliation, nor even bondage, submission or pain, but the contract. This is formal, but internalised. So when I force myself to do something I really don’t feel like doing, out of a sense of obligation to an instructor I have only met twice, but with whom I now have an agreement, filed on a bit of paper in a drawer at the back of the room, I feel like I know what masochism is. Of course, I’ve probably mangled the concepts horribly. Apologies to k-punk and his chums. Secondly, I think I have found a way to understand Deleuze and Guattari’s machines and assemblages stuff. It’s not so much that I go into the gym and use the rowing machine which sits there. It’s more that the rowing machine isn’t a rowing machine until it’s completed by being combined with my, equally incomplete, body machine. Together we are one sort of machine, apart other sorts of machines. I like this one better, but again, I’m happy to admit this is based on passing acquaintance with Thousand Plateaux and I’m sure our learned friends will put me right if I’m wrong.