Anthony Baker begins his mediation on the notion of “perfection,” Diagonal Advance: Perfection in Christian Theology , with the Romantic Prometheus and various responses to it. Deleuze and Guattari make an appearance, and one would think that they have put the Romantic well behind them. Not so, says Baker:
“in the summoning of an image of foundational schizophrenia, they appeal tacitly to a transcendent order of things in general and of the human thing in particular. Being itself, they say, is schizoid, and any move toward functional unities on the part of those agencies that emerge within it will always be secondary. I, and we, exist in a realm of actuality that can freeze within the endless chaos of virtual, but will always be ‘untrue’ to the formless being that issues it. Why and how is this simply the case? It could only be because virtuality itself, the depths of ontological schizophrenia, stands sovereign over us in the way God and the Id once did. The unmanaged array of desiring machines is a new ontological positivism, and insurrection against this order of things is futile. Just as Mercury tries to convince the chained Titan, the only possible existence under the aegis of this unassailable God comes through submission” (12).
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