BEYOND THE TRANSCENDENTAL

Now that Deleuze's philosophy has gained a certain hegemony, it is possible to see its limit.  Maybe the best way to put it is like this:  either Deleuze's ethics features a secret, unspoken eschatological horizon (which is the thesis of Joshua Ramey's book The Hermetic Deleuze) or else his ethics has transformed into the very engine of cyber-capitalist nihilism: create, produce, consume, yield novelty, take risks, be different, refuse to conform.   The conceptual opposition between subjected group (under the yoke of Oedipus) and subject group (the emerging identity) presented towards the end of Anti-Oedipus seems too facile in 2016.   Instagram celebrity, silicon valley startups and artisinal exposed brick shops in Williamsburg seem to fit the description of the latter more or less, and, though it isn't obvious that these three things are downright bad, their value is at the very least questionable.   It is worth noting that the now-dominant mental health tools, cognitive behavioral therapy and psychopharmacology, are just as anti-Oedipus as Anti-Oedipus.  But it is obvious that these things do not lead to any kind of liberating gnosis.  Pills and cognitive therapies as a rule bring people only to the point at which they are able to bear the stress of working in the current labor market.

In contrast to this (the, you might say, anti-Oedipal transcendental), we have to propose something higher.  The OLOLONIC then is a "religious" horizon for the transcendental.  

Without the payoff of either a transformative event or a gradual spiritualization, the creative novelty becomes simply more and more stressful and inane - just try to take seriously Nick Land's vision, and you can see what I mean.  We end up with a Nietzschean "last man" in the place we least expected to find him... having chosen the path of liberation of desire, we end up with a sort of catatonic clicking that is very much the last man's inane "blink".