Deleuze and Holiday Part 2

(this essay begins here: https://4kdirector.blogspot.com/2018/12/good-and-evil-on-holiday-introduction.html )

Act Three: Will to power versus Will to dominate

The will to power as a force, is expressed through Anne in this act as she moves from forced intoxication into the reality of Graham’s dream of judgment.  What that looks like is Anne takes on new affects influenced by Graham, such as strategizing, pretending, attacking, forces she would not have allied herself with in the past.  This allows her to escape.  She is then able to run, hide, and evade Graham.  This is what a Nietzschean will to power looks like in its most healthy sense.

Graham expresses the madness of judgment, a drive to control, and an extreme will to dominate.    Graham trudges his way across the countryside as his imaginary vision of Death closes in, the epitome of a will to dominate becoming a will to nothingness.  After being let down by his Mexican helper, Rosa, he is forced to buy a junk car in town, returns to find Anne gone and chases her down with fury, his power and authority being called into question.  

By the end of act three, Anne endangers herself by still believing in the safety of Divine intervention, finding temporary reprieve in a hermit’s cave.  She feels she has defeated Graham.  Unfortunately, such a feeling of domination over Graham drains Anne of her power and she once again becomes vulnerable.

Act Four: Combat versus War

For Deleuze, resistance to judgment means perpetual combat: “Combat is not a judgment . . . but a way to have done with . . . judgment”.⁶  One who is in action, in combat, creates who one is in the world, a creative becoming as a force against judgment.  Deleuze distinguishes combat further into combats-against and combats-between.  Again, these are not good or evil forces of combat:

Combats-against tries to destroy or repel a force . . . but the combats-between, by contrast, tries to take hold of a force in order to make it one’s own.  The combats-between is the process through which a force enriches itself by seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble: a becoming.⁷

These “becomings” for Deleuze are the affect of forces in an alliance that generates combats-against that push against judgment in favor of justice.  The law is not eternal, but finite and malleable.  And what is important is not the combat against authorities, so much as the combat going on within the individual:

Combat appears as combat against judgment, against its authorities and its personae.  But more profoundly, it is the combatant himself who is the combat: the combat is between his own parts, between the forces that either subjugate or are subjugated, and between the powers that express these relations of force.⁸

It is the combats-between that we negotiate each day that ultimately determine the nature of the combats-against in pursuit of justice.

Early in act four, Graham locates Anne and carries her away.  From Graham’s point of view the war is over and he has won.  For Anne, there is only combat, a continual becoming.  Deleuze makes a distinction between combat and war:

Combat is not war.  War is only a combat-against, a will to destruction, a judgment of God that turns destruction into something “just” . . . judgment is on the side of war, and not combat . . . war is the lowest degree of the will to power, its sickness . . . Combat, by contrast, is a powerful, nonorganic vitality that supplements force with force, and enriches whatever it takes hold of.⁹

Graham’s judgment of himself leads to a demand for domination.  Emboldened by his recapture of Anne and the power he alone has over her, Graham becomes the extreme of War, soldiering forward, eventually disguising himself as the opposite of a warrior: a middle-aged salesman.  His closure on himself and self-loathing costs him the deal for the girl and almost costs him his life.  Death, the god of Judgment, sits in his black limo pursuing him, all powerful yet never able to leave the darkness, alone and separate from the world, beyond appeal.  Anne, on the other hand, aligning herself with combat, first sat waiting for opportunity, then willing to inflict harm escapes, and finally runs to safety.  Anne is the will to power as becoming, via combat.