The science of events: Deleuze and psychoanalysis

THE SCIENCE OF EVENTS: DELEUZE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of The Department of Philosophy Villanova University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in

Philosophy

by Edward P. Kazarian May, 2009

Under the Direction of John Carvalho

UMI Number: 3352425 Copyright 2009 by Kazarian, Edward P. All rights reserved

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To my parents, Mr. Edward V. Kazarian and Dr. Ann H. Kazarian, MD, from whom I have always received affirmation, support, and love without reserve.

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Acknowledgements My most profound thanks to my graduate advisor and the chair of my dissertation committee, John Carvalho, without whose teaching, encouragement, guidance and wisdom, this project, and my work as a whole, would not be what it is. Likewise, the other members of the committee, Thomas Busch and Walter Brogan, have been great teachers, supporters and interlocutors over the years that have led to this work, and I have been enriched in too many ways to count by my relationships with both of them. Further, my interest in Deleuze and in psychoanalysis generally, and my work on this project in particular, have received support from a great many people over the years that it has taken to reach this point in its development. Joshua Delpech-Ramey read at least parts of all the drafts of the present work and provided an invaluable sounding board throughout the labors of its composition.

Without his encouragement, his enthusiasm, and his timely,

thoughtful responses, it may well never have been completed. Chauncey Colwell and Nathan Widder have been friends since I began my graduate studies, and my thinking about Deleuze owes immeasurable debts to both of them. David J. Kim has been my longest standing interlocutor. The fascinating and free ranging conversations he and I have had since we were undergraduates have enabled me to think through more crucial issues deeply, with care and rigor, than I could possibly recall or list. I owe to him the suggestion to look at McLeanʼs and Maliʼs pieces, and more generally of the connection between Bachofen and Benjamin

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that I reference in Chapter 3. And finally, everyone involved The Philadelphia Lacan Study Group, especially Patricia Gherovici, Anneleen Masschelein, and Jean-Michel Rabaté, have contributed greatly to my understanding of French psychoanalysis and Deleuzeʼs relationship to it. Beyond them, I must thank everyone who has supported me, helped me, and offered their friendship and companionship over the years. You are too numerous to list, but invaluable all the same.

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Table of Contents ABBREVIATIONS

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ABSTRACT

1

INTRODUCTION

3

CHAPTER 1 I. II. III.

19 21 34 49

CHAPTER 2 I. II. III.

58 58 70 91

CHAPTER 3 I. II. III.

102 104 111 135

CHAPTER 4 I. II. III. IV. Postscript.

149 153 167 187 207 216

CHAPTER 5 I. II. III. IV.

220 220 237 257 288

BIBLIOGRAPHY

293

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Abbreviations Works by Gilles Deleuze SMM NPh PS CCR MD DR LS N

“From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” Nietzsche and Philosophy Proust and Signs “Coldness and Cruelty” “The Method of Dramatization” Difference and Repetition The Logic of Sense Negotiations

Works by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari AO ATP

Anti-Oedipus A Thousand Plateaus

Works by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet D

Dialogues

Works by Jacques Lacan E S

Écrits The Seminar of Jacques Lacan / Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan

Works by Sigmund Freud SE

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud

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Abstract This project began with my suspicions that there were serious problems with the conventional view of Deleuzeʼs relationship to psychoanalysis, at least among his English speaking readers. I argue that while it is reasonable to view Deleuze as a consistent critic of psychoanalysis, the nature of that critical position was, at least until the middle of the 1970s, essentially analogous to his similarly critical position towards philosophy. Deleuzeʼs affirmation of philosophy was always directed towards a “philosophy of the future,” which would have completed the critical task of “overturning Platonism” and dispensed with the “image of thought” that has governed the major line of the Western philosophical tradition since Plato, tying it to a series of figures of the Same.

Accordingly, while he always affirmed

philosophy, Deleuzeʼs affirmation only came on the condition that it should prove to be a mode of thought capable of affirming difference as such. I contend that a careful reading of Deleuzeʼs approach to psychoanalysis in the period between the beginning of the 1960s and the middle of the 1970s will reveal a similarly conditional affirmation, and on very similar grounds. In order to demonstrate the viability of such a reading, the dissertation traces the following path. First, it shows that the conventional view is based more on a refusal to read the relationship between Deleuze and psychoanalysis in any depth. Second, it attempts to develop a systematic overview of the critical position Deleuze and his collaborators came to in the 1970s. Thirdly, it shows

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that many of the same criticisms can be found in works dating back to the very early 1960s, except that they are there accompanied by a vision of a reformed psychoanalysis that would have both therapeutic and revolutionary value. Finally, the significance of this difference to Deleuzeʼs philosophy as a whole is explored in a consideration of the place of psychoanalysis in Deleuzeʼs major works of the late 1960s, in the course of an explanation of the value of the conditions he attaches to his claim, in The Logic of Sense, that psychoanalysis could be “the science of events.”

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Introduction

This project began with my suspicions that there were serious problems with the conventional view of Deleuzeʼs relationship to psychoanalysis, at least among his English speaking readers. Having published a paper concerned with Deleuzeʼs 1967 essay “Michel Tournier and the World Without Others” as well as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, in which I argued that the notion of “perversion” Deleuze developed in those texts was an extension of Freudʼs rather than a rejection of it, I became considerably more aware of the ways in which Deleuzeʼs work is linked to or in dialogue with psychoanalysis at a great many points.1 Or perhaps it is better to say that I was led to pay closer attention to this linkage, and to recognize that, far from what the literature (and even more the informal attitude that had pervaded Deleuze studies in all of my experience of them) had led me to expect, there was very little in Deleuzeʼs discussions of Freud and the various psychoanalysts that came after him which could reasonably be taken, by a reader familiar with the psychoanalytic texts and doctrines he was discussing, for a simple and uncomplicated rejection. Quite the contrary; it seemed that for a considerable time, and with increasing depth and seriousness, some of Deleuzeʼs crucial concepts were either developed—or, at very least, given a development—in relation to a theory of the unconscious which preserved in some form the vast majority of the Freudian conceptual scheme.

1

See Kazarian “Deleuze, Perversion, and Politics.”

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This entire movement was by no means uncritical. Indeed, in its earliest beginnings, Freud, in particular, was subjected to some fairly scathing critiques by Deleuze. And in many important respects, these critiques would anticipate key elements of the terms in which he and his collaborators would later come to pronounce a wholly negative judgment against psychoanalysis in all its forms, though this judgment would not become final until the late 1970s. For instance, Deleuze was already, in a 1961 article entitled “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,” strongly attacking the Freudian conception of masochism more than half a decade before the appearance, in “Coldness and Cruelty,” of his systematic demolition of the psychoanalytic conception of ʻsadomasochismʼ as a symmetrical, and so reversible, relationship governed by investments of destructive energy directed either toward the ego itself or toward the outside. In the earlier article, Deleuze complains that more or less every psychoanalytic conception of masochism, from Freudʼs to those of Theodor Reik and Sacha Nacht, was dependent on an illegitimate use of the image of the Father, and he goes on to explicitly denounce the “astonishing gymnastics” (SMM 128) that psychoanalysis performs in order to sustain an interpretation of the female figures that dominate masochistic fantasies as no more than guises of the Father. But Deleuze goes even farther than articulating this apparent precursor of his and Félix Guattariʼs assault on the notion of the Oedipus complex. He also accuses Freud, more generally, of failing to grasp anything beyond “the most superficial and most individualized levels of the unconscious” (SMM 128)—a

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criticism that will, in many ways, have far more important implications for the rest of the decade than the one above. In “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,” Deleuze largely appeals to Jung in order to justify these criticisms, arguing that the feminine images that are invested by the masochistic fantasy belong to a presubjective, pre-individual unconscious and that the fantasy itself amounts to the investment of an image of the Devouring Mother that belongs to an immemorial past. In other words, the fantasy circulates around an image that corresponds neither to a repressed nor to a phylogenetically determined investment, an image that has no possible value in relation to a referentially localizable origin. More profoundly, Deleuze argues that the point of this investment—which he acknowledges to be incestuous, but in a manner wholly distinct from the individuated dynamic of the Oedipal ʻfamily romanceʼ—is to make it possible for the masochist to undergo a rebirth that would completely disengage him from the patriarchal law to which he has been previously subject.

And so, this early

analysis of masochism tends to show that even the most strictly erotic or libidinous aspects of the masochistic apparatus are immediately revolutionary. Furthermore, this analysis really does seem, once again, to be anticipating key points that Deleuze and Guattari would emphasize in the 1970s. These erotic currents are said to be revolutionary not just insofar as they parallel the sociohistorical dimensions of the fantasy, drawing off a degree of satisfaction or enjoyment from dynamics that are themselves social rather than personal. Indeed, Deleuze claims that the ʻsocialʼ order is directly invested as such by the

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masochist in a revolutionary manner, this investment and the transformative suffering to which it gives rise functioning as a condition for the heroʼs own libidinal discharge. A year later, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze would use Freudʼs first topographic schema in his exposition of Nietzscheʼs analysis, in On the Genealogy of Morals, of the becoming-reactive of forces and the corresponding development of “bad conscience” as a result of the triumph of reactive forces. However, Deleuze balances this use of Freudʼs schema with a critique of the manner in which Freud himself seems to fall victim, more often than not, to precisely the forms of conventional morality that Nietzsche sought to overcome by means of the Genealogy. This time, it was not Jung but Otto Rank to whom Deleuze turned in order to find psychoanalytic support for his own critical judgment. The criticisms in this case are somewhat less developed, but the points against Freud that Deleuze cites from Rank are striking, to say the least: Freudʼs concept of sublimation is “flat and dull” and he was unable to “free the will from bad conscience or guilt” (NPh 211-212n5). Once again, we find what appear to be anticipations of what Deleuze and Guattari would say against Freud.

In particular, we find apparent precursors of Deleuze and Guattariʼs

notion that the official practice of psychoanalysis was closely bound up with a disciplinary regime that made it the continuation and extension of the project of nineteenth-century psychiatry, and of their disgust with what they took to be the refusal of psychoanalysis to recognize the integrity of the products of desire as

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such. Psychoanalysis viewed these products instead as symptomatic of various pre-ordained ʻcomplexesʼ corresponding to specific points of fixation on a strictly individuated developmental teleology, and it viewed the non-sexual investments to which desire occasionally gives rise not as genuine modes of action on the part of the unconscious, but rather as mere diversions, mere expressions the ʻtruthʼ of which lies elsewhere. Should not these texts be taken as evidence that the view holding that Deleuzeʼs basic instinct with regard to psychoanalysis was to stand in opposition to it is largely correct? In fact, such a view is far too simple. It makes it virtually impossible to satisfactorily explain Deleuzeʼs constructive and largely affirmative engagement with a broad range of psychoanalytic concepts and authors in the last years of the 1960s—even more so because at no point during the course of that engagement does he repudiate, implicitly or explicitly, the major points of criticism suggested above. Indeed, one gets considerably further by supposing that the point of Deleuzeʼs criticisms is not to justify a partial or a total rejection of psychoanalysis, but instead to specify the limitations of the elaboration that, so far, has been given to Freudʼs discovery—a discovery which Deleuze nevertheless considers to be essential. Considered in this light, one can see that Deleuzeʼs appeal, in the early 1960s, to the extensions of analytic theory proposed by Jung and Rank was not only a precursor to some of his and Guattariʼs criticisms of psychoanalysis in the 1970s, but also that, before serving that function, it laid the groundwork for his

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use of psychoanalytic theory in a very different capacity. Specifically, it is very possible to read Deleuzeʼs discussions of psychoanalysis in Difference and Repetition and see large portions of Freudʼs conceptual scheme being used to account for the manner in which the three ʻ passive syntheses of timeʼ that Deleuze identifies there—and which are the basic structuring elements of the ʻimpersonal transcendental fieldʼ that forms his replacement for the subjective philosophy of ʻrepresentationʼ—are, in fact, lived. In both “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” and Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze distinguishes between those elements of the psyche that fit—or can be made to fit—within the representational schema of subjective life and those elements which cannot, thereby failing the test of what Deleuze, already in Nietzsche and Philosophy, had begun to call the “image of thought.” It should not be controversial to say that the philosophical issues at stake in his critique of the image of thought are decisive for Deleuzeʼs philosophy as a whole, and for his relationship to other philosophers, even those he very much admires. Leibniz and Kant are perhaps the two most important examples of thinkers with whom Deleuzeʼs relationship is complicated by the fact that their work remains on the wrong side of this critique on a number of occasions. Generally, the basic contention of this critique is that there are several ʻsubjective presuppositionsʼ underlying the bulk of the Western philosophical tradition, all of which devolve, broadly, from a moral imperative that demands the privileging of the Same over difference.

Perhaps the clearest

exposition of this imperative comes when Deleuze connects it to the Platonic

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method of division, pointing out that the purpose of many of Platoʼs analyses was to establish a process by which it would become possible to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate ʻ pretendersʼ to any given ʻ titleʼ—the point being to ensure that what qualifies as an ʻ instanceʼ of something bears an internal resemblance to its Ideal case, rather than simply passing for something without substantially participating in what it is.2 This rule of identity is also, on Deleuzeʼs view, at the core of the ʻ will to truthʼ that was among the principle targets of Nietzscheʼs Genealogy. And indeed, this genealogical interrogation of the will to truth and the critique of the philosophical image of thought are deeply linked in Deleuzeʼs thought after Nietzsche and Philosophy, the latter being, if anything, a more specific example of the former, and both tending to emphasize creative and self-transformative activity, a will to difference, as an alterative to the strictures of the will to truth. Indeed, if the image of thought is in fact grounded, albeit surreptitiously, on a moral imperative to distinguish copies from simulacra, Deleuze makes no secret that his alternative amounts to the philosophical expression of an entirely different, and contrary, ethic. Furthermore, naming it as a “will to difference” should also make clear why, beyond being creative, such an ethical imperative must become revolutionary insofar as it is opposed to a ʻ will to truthʼ that has, through its linkage with the image of thought, given rise to what amounts to the

2

Despite her well known opposition to Deleuze, there would seem to be a remarkable resonance between Deleuzeʼs desire, during the 1960s to philosophically rehabilitate ʻsimulacra,ʼ in the sense of what simply passes in this way, and some of Judith Butlerʼs analyses of sex and gender as essentially performative.

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structural matrix within which the various power-knowledge regimes to be found in the Western arts and sciences of ʻ governingʼ have developed. Like SacherMasoch, Nietzscheʼs goal was the production of a genuinely “sovereign individual” (Nietzsche Genealogy II, 2); and Deleuze, on a number of occasions, explicitly places himself at the end of a philosophical tradition that includes Nietzsche. Indeed, the fact that he often presents this tradition as a ʻ countertraditionʼ in relation to the dominant or major lines of the history of philosophy3 makes clear the degree to which Deleuze has taken up the critical work of philosophy as he understands Nietzsche to have conceived of it. In this critical sense, the task of philosophy is to make possible a genuine becomingautonomous by detaching life from the various forms of ʻequivalenceʼ mandated by the image of thought, especially in its modern, scientific variations (NPh 45). Critical philosophy, as genealogy, thus stands opposed to and seeks to overturn or overcome the becoming “calculable, regular, necessary” (Nietzsche Genealogy II, 1) of human being. No one could deny that the pursuit of this project, both in its Nietzschean and its Deleuzian versions, has entailed a critique of previous philosophies, especially insofar as they had more or less maintained the priestly ʻ maskʼ that philosophy had to wear in order to survive its infancy.4 But it should also be noted that it has further entailed the use of philosophy in a

3

An excellent example of this can be found in the first chapter of Dialogues. Though in both cases, the critique is much more often a critique in principle, a critique of the effects of the mask per se, than it is directed against specific thinkers. The matters of principle are always the point, and the lack of anything even suggesting personal antipathy is a remarkably consistent feature of both philosophies. 4

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therapeutic manner, in pursuit of a ʻ great healthʼ to which Deleuze makes frequent reference.

If the bad conscience that follows from the triumph of

reactive forces in the psyche is the ʻsicknessʼ that corresponds to the ʻimage of thought,ʼ5 then surely the cure must take the form of thinking in a different mode, the philosophy of the future, of the untimely, of difference or the eternal recurrence—a mode of thought that enables or facilitates self-overcoming, which completes the critique the image of thought by forcing the supersession of the subject for whom its presuppositions are what ʻeverybody knows...ʼ (DR 129). This is why Deleuzeʼs relationship to philosophy remains ambiguous, since philosophy can only be an object of affirmation insofar as it proves to be a mode of thought capable of affirming difference as such. And if philosophy is only to be affirmed conditionally, is there any reason why psychoanalysis should be subject to a different standard? Obviously, there is not, and recognizing this creates the space from which it becomes possible to read the history of Deleuzeʼs engagement with psychoanalysis in a different way. As long as he believes that a version of psychoanalysis can be constructed which does not violate the standard of what counts as the genuine affirmation of difference, and therefore the promotion of the dominance of active forces within the psyche, Deleuze will be glad to endorse that version of psychoanalysis—even while criticizing those aspects or those iterations of the same science that fail according to this same standard. And once we have recognized that Deleuzeʼs

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The sickness of which the conventional moralities that psychoanalysis too often serves are an expression.

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evaluation of psychoanalysis largely follows the thread of his evaluation of philosophy, according to the standards of the critique of the image of thought that he will eventually systematize in Difference and Repetition, it becomes possible to account for the transformations in his attitude toward psychoanalysis in a way that neither dismisses his criticisms nor minimizes or elides his attempts to delineate at least the outlines of an affirmative psychoanalytic theory—a theory that, if the terms involved are given their proper sense, might be said to fulfill the desire, which Deleuze attributes to Rank, “to rely on the active forces of the unconscious of Freudianism and to replace sublimation by a creative and artistic will” (NPh 211-212n5). In what follows, I have sought to demonstrate the viability of this reading, and to begin the exploration of its consequences, in the following manner. First, I have attempted to establish the existence of a tendency within Deleuze scholarship to minimize the entire question of psychoanalysis, or at very least to avoid rendering it in its full complexity. It is neither practical nor desirable to attempt to engage in a polemical discussion with every author who has in one way or another considered the question of psychoanalysis and Deleuzeʼs relationship to it—both because there have been a fairly wide variety of sentiments expressed about the precise tenor of that relationship and, more importantly, because very few of them are developed in any particularly extensive or careful way.6

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There is, in fact, less a ʻ prevailing viewʼ concerning this

Consider the following two texts concerning Deleuze and Guattariʼs relationship to Lacan in Anti-

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relationship than there is a strange absence of any developed view, the question being largely minimized or sidestepped even when the texts where Deleuze discusses psychoanalysis extensively, or relies upon it to a considerable extent, are under consideration. The argument in Chapter I attempts to account for this in several ways. First, it does so by considering the influence of the academic construction of “French Theory” on Deleuzeʼs initial reception in the Englishspeaking academy. To the extent that French Theory was, as Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen have argued, defined in opposition to “French Freud”—or,

Oedipus as examples of the sorts of material a more ʻcomprehensiveʼ survey would quickly be reduced to discussing. First, Stéphane Nadaud, in his introduction to Guattariʼs notes from the period when he and Deleuze were working on Anti-Oedipus, recently issued as The Anti-Oedipus Papers, declares that: “Something should be said about the case of Lacan in Anti-Oedipus, which gives the French psychoanalyst a very surprising place. Although Deleuze and Guattari rarely minced their words, and were usually scathing in their criticism, Lacan came out remarkably unharmed. And yet we would have to be blind not to detect the deeply rooted criticism directed at some of the essential principles of his theory” (Nadaud “Introduction” 18). It is remarkable indeed, given the pattern of brutal frankness that Nadaud cites, that he is so unwilling to imagine that while Deleuze and Guattari are critical of parts of the Lacanian conceptual apparatus, they might nevertheless remain willing to give Lacan himself the benefit of the doubt. And he goes on to explain away the apparent contradiction by suggesting that the supposed reluctance in this case can only be because either they have been unable to fully free themselves from Lacanʼs despotic shadow or because Guattari remained reluctant to “break-up” with Lacan on a personal or institutional level. This might be somewhat true in Guattariʼs case, but it is rather more difficult to imagine it being so in Deleuzeʼs. Another case would be the following comments by Dominique Lecourt in The Mediocracy, as he tries to use the ʻobviousʼ antipathy between Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan as evidence of the absurdity of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaultʼs ʻconstructionʼ of a unitary “pensee ʼ68”: “[This] construction makes light of the obvious differences between the authors whose works are subsumed under the category of la pensee ʼ68. For example, it is ridiculous implicitly to introduce Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as sons of Lacan, when the old master represents their main target. Yet in [Ferry and Renaultʼs] text, Anti-Oedipe features, by the same token as the Écrits, as a monument of la pensee ʼ68, on the grounds that in it one finds ʻthe figure of a pulverized or disintegrated Ego that appeared on the horizon of the rise of individualismʼ!” (Lecourt Mediocracy 26). As a critique of Ferry and Renault, this is undoubtedly quite apt. But it goes too far in the opposite direction insofar as it participates in the same tendency we have already observed in Nadaud, to act as if there is no ʻrealʼ ambiguity at all in Anti-Oedipus where Lacan and (at least) his version of psychoanalysis is concerned. Even among French commentators, who, presumably, should have a clearer view of the complexities of the intellectual history informing Deleuzeʼs and Lacanʼs relationship, let alone that of either man to ʻpsychoanalysisʼ as a whole, the presumption is the same as the one described in Chapter 1: that we already know what is really going on here and so there is literally no point in discussing it.

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failing that, Deleuzeʼs relevance within the ʻtheoreticalʼ domain into which he was first received was defined in terms of such an opposition—it becomes fairly easy to see how the question of a more subtle and nuanced relationship between Deleuzeʼs thought and psychoanalysis would have become the object of a certain degree of repression or resistance.

An exemplary instance of precisely this

tendency can be found in Ronald Bogueʼs otherwise excellent monograph on Deleuze and Guattari, which, despite a careful, systematic and above all sober and measured presentation of the development of Deleuzeʼs thought prior to his collaboration with Guattari, repeatedly brushes aside the question of the relationship between the Deleuze of the latter parts of the 1960s and psychoanalysis, and even tends to suggest that the real ʻpointʼ of Anti-Oedipus is not its critique of psychoanalysis, but rather the positive view of the unconscious that is developed therein, and the various consequences that follow from that— as if this ʻmachinicʼ unconscious can be so neatly separated from the Freudian version as this would make it appear.7 Conversely, those who would defend Freud, Lacan and company against Deleuzeʼs (and Guattariʼs) criticisms often seem all too willing to accept a rather simplistic version of the relationship. Even critics, such as Jerry Aline Flieger, who temper their suggestions that Deleuze and Guattari perhaps should give psychoanalysis a bit more credit with the insistence that there ought to be considerable common ground between Deleuzo-

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One can find other examples of a similar elision—not the least being Constantine Boundasʼ generally admirable article “Foreclosure of the Other,” which discusses The Logic of Sense and Deleuzeʼs essay on Michel Tourinerʼs Friday, but never even mentions the Lacanian discussions of Freudʼs “foreclosure,” to which Deleuze explicitly refers in the former.

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Guattarian and psychoanalytic thought, seem to have accepted before they begin making their argument that there is a monolithic and more or less total and inflexible Deleuzian critique of psychoanalysis—one which is, in their view, misguided and overly simplistic. Accordingly, before considering the earlier texts where Deleuzeʼs view appears to be manifestly more complex and less strictly opposed to analysis, it is worth considering whether and to what extent his and Guattariʼs (and Parnetʼs) later criticisms amount to a bald rejection of psychoanalysis, and the basis for that rejection. Chapter 2 attempts to do just this: consider this issue in sufficient depth to establish that the significance of those criticisms is undoubtedly that, by the late 1970s, psychoanalysis has definitively failed to convince Deleuze that it can avoid becoming an instrument of repression. It begins, however, by noting that even the various collaborative texts that Deleuze produced during the 1970s, Anti-Oedipus, Dialogues and A Thousand Plateaus, are not entirely consistent with one another, there being considerable development in their collective views during the course of the decade. Having thereby established the limits of any attempt to elaborate a generic ʻDeleuzo-Guattarianʼ view, the chapter goes on to explore the relationship between two basic critical moves that Deleuze and his collaborators make against psychoanalysis during this period: a philosophical interrogation of the psychoanalytic view of the unconscious and an ethical or political questioning of the effects of psychoanalysis on individual and social life. The ʻphilosophicalʼ line of inquiry is developed, first, by considering Deleuze and

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Parnetʼs claim in Dialogues that: “Weʼve only said two things against psychoanalysis: that it breaks up all the productions of desire and crushes all the formations of utterances” (D 77). The first section discusses the sense of these two criticisms in general terms.

The first amounts to the claim that

psychoanalysis has generally misunderstood the ʻ productive unconscious,ʼ operating in terms of a set of intensive relationships that are, as such, differential, multiple and above all positive, but which psychoanalysis tends to view though an interpretive lens that privileges ʻ extensiveʼ categories more suitable to consciousness than to a genuinely adequate view of the unconscious as such. The second, in turn, amounts to the claim that, despite being the ʻ talking cure,ʼ the overall effect of psychoanalytic practice is to restrict speech insofar as it tends to cut patients off from the machinic assemblages that actually produce the statements which may flow from the unconscious but which also always include ʻsocialʼ elements that are excluded from the psychoanalytic clinic.

Having

established these points, the second section considers in detail the account of the productive unconscious (or desiring-production) that Deleuze and Guattari elaborate in the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus.

In so doing, it pays special

attention to the manner in which that initial elaboration takes place by way of a re-reading of Freudʼs analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber in “Psychoanalytical Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia.” It closes with an account of the manner in which the theoretical concerns developed earlier are doubled by a set of practical considerations, showing how these may, in fact, be

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the much more serious problems and the ones that are leading towards the decisive rejection of analysis that would be found in the latter parts of the decade. Chapter 3 presents a detailed development of the points we have already discussed concerning “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” and Nietzsche and Philosophy, considering both the texture of Deleuzeʼs critical remarks about psychoanalysis in those texts and also the manner in which those criticisms anticipate and form the basis for a conception of psychoanalysis and an approach to the unconscious that would be in accordance with the ʻrevolutionaryʼ and ʻ creativeʼ aspects of Deleuzeʼs philosophy in both texts.

Following this,

Chapter 4 begins to take up and analyze the development that this basic approach received in the last years of the 1960s, especially in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition. It is structured around showing the three passive temporal syntheses which form the core of Deleuzeʼs account of a transcendental unconscious—and which also anticipate a similar set of formations that would be used by Deleuze and Guattari to structure their reading of the evolution of Schreberʼs delirium.

Unlike the latter case however, in

Difference and Repetition, Deleuze goes to considerable lengths to connect his philosophical account of these passive syntheses of habit, memory, and eternal recurrence to an explicitly psychoanalytic account of the formation and structure of the psyche (or what Deleuze calls “biopsychical life”). Indeed, it proves to be possible to account for nearly all the major elements and developmental phases of the Freudian psyche in this way. What also emerges in the course of this

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analysis is the persistence of a critical perspective in Deleuzeʼs appropriation of psychoanalysis that can be linked to his philosophical critique of the image of thought. Chapter 5 begins by surveying the results of the previous consideration, drawing together as many of the various threads linking Deleuzeʼs reading of psychoanalysis and philosophy as is practical before developing an account of the final sections of The Logic of Sense which proposes an answer to the basic problem of the sense in which Deleuze is willing to affirm psychoanalysis as a “science of events”—and posing, finally, a series of questions that would be involved in determining the value of that affirmation given his later repudiation of psychoanalysis.

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Chapter 1

Until very recently, the most common view of Deleuzeʼs relationship to psychoanalysis has made him out to be an opponent of it, a deeply hostile one. It is certainly possible to find a number of explicit statements of this view. They appear in the specialist literature on Deleuze, and also in broader discussions of the intellectual milieu to which he belonged or of the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis in France.1

These explicit statements are

relatively rare, however. If the view in question is more or less ubiquitous, it is not because it is often repeated or because it is the view that is consistently articulated whenever the matter is discussed. Rather, it persists, more or less independently of discussion, as a background assumption that informs much of what does get said and written about Deleuze, whether or not that writing concerns psychoanalysis in any particularly direct or significant way. Indeed, this presumption that Deleuze is purely and simply critical of psychoanalysis has been so intense and basic that it has persisted in the face of and despite the fact that we can, should, and often have known better. It has thus come to function as one of those truths that “everybody knows,” despite the fact that no one can say exactly how they know it.

In other words, this view has taken on the

character of a sort of ʻ knowledgeʼ that, in psychoanalytic terms, must surely be

1

Excellent examples of the latter can be found at various points in Elisabeth Roudinescoʼs Jacques Lacan & Co. (see especially 494-98), and in the Sherry Turkleʼs Psychoanalytic Politics, especially chapter 6. Turkleʼs view is more nuanced than most, being quite clear about the fact that Anti-Oedipus, at least, belongs to a “psychoanalytically inspired antipsychiatry” (163).

19

said to be symptomatic, having, precisely insofar as it may turn out to be a mirage, much more to say about the subject who knows it than about the thing that is supposedly known. Before we begin to consider the merits of this view, it will therefore be necessary to account for the fact that it is widely held at all. Despite everything, it is not immediately obvious that an anti-psychoanalytic stance is either central to or even a consistent feature of Deleuzeʼs philosophy. Without doubt, presenting him as an anti-psychoanalytic thinker does not reflect a consensus among the first readings of his work in France—nor even among the first readings of his and Guattariʼs work. This is nicely exemplified by Rene Girardʼs long review of AntiOedipus, originally published in 1972, wherein he claims that any pretense Deleuze and Guattari make of having expelled Freud from the schizoanalytic system does not really amount to much. Freud is everywhere in a legitimate and official capacity in those aspects of his work that are explicitly called upon because they can be used against the Oedipus complex or have been judged at least detachable from it. Deleuze and Guattari summon a good Freud, who in their eyes is better than the evil Freud of the Oedipus complex. They want to divide the great man against himself. But the expulsion of Freud by Freud never takes place. The work remains impregnated with Freud, especially where he is violently repudiated. The Freud chased out the front door slips in the window, so much so that at the end of this Freudian psychomachy he is entirely or almost entirely reinstated, a Freud in particles, perhaps even molecular, a Freud that is mixed and emulsified, but nonetheless Freud (Girard 97). Despite its availability in translation since 1978, Girardʼs review is remarkably absent from most discussions of Anti-Oedipus or Deleuze and Guattariʼs work more generally.

Indeed, it has been all but forgotten along with the more 20

nuanced view that one can find reflected even in Deleuzeʼs and Guattariʼs own interviews from around the time Anti-Oedipus first appeared.2 In its place one finds the view that Deleuze is and always was a critic of psychoanalysis, and that if the criticisms were at times nuanced and moderated by endorsements of the fundamental importance of Freudʼs discoveries, what was important was that they were the criticisms; everything is reduced to the fact of opposition, and little else.

I. To a very considerable extent, this view seems to have its origins in the way Deleuze was first presented in the English-speaking world, and especially in America. Recently, the patterns involved in this presentation, and the rhetorical strategies they reflected, have become the subject of considerable comment,

2

The most notable example of such a nuanced account of what was at stake in the writing of Anti-Oedipus vis a vis both Deleuzeʼs and Guattariʼs relationship to psychoanalysis comes in the following passage from an interview that they gave to Catherine Clément that was published in the same in the same issue of LʼArc as Deleuzeʼs ʻconversationʼ with Foucault, ʻIntellectuals and Powerʼ: “Félix had talked to me about what he was already calling “desiring machines”...So I myself thought heʼd gone further than I had. But for all his unconscious machinery, he was still talking in terms of structures, signifiers, the phallus, and so on. That was hardly surprising, since he owed so much to Lacan (just as I did). But I felt it would all work even better if one found the right concepts, instead of using notions that didnʼt even come from Lacanʼs creative side but from an orthodoxy built up around him. Lacan himself says “Iʼm not getting much help.” We thought weʼd give him some schizophrenic help. And thereʼs no question that weʼre all the more indebted to Lacan, once weʼve dropped notions like structure, the symbolic, or the signifier, which are thoroughly misguided and which Lacan himself has always managed to turn on their head to bring out their limitations” (N 13-14). As we will see, Deleuze later complicates this story considerably in a 1988 interview, claiming that: “Oddly enough, it wasnʼt me who rescued Félix from psychoanalysis; he rescued me. In my study on Masoch, and then in The Logic of Sense, Iʼd thought Iʼd discovered things about the specious unity of sadism and masochism, or about events, that contradicted psychoanalysis but could be reconciled with it. Félix, on the other hand, had been and still was a psychoanalyst, a student of Lacanʼs but like a ʻsonʼ who already knew that reconciliation was impossible” (N 144).

21

notably by Elie During and Sylvère Lotringer.3

Both agree that it is virtually

impossible to understand Deleuzeʼs reception without taking account of ʻ French Theoryʼ as a specifically American invention.

But, as During points out,

presenting Deleuze as a ʻtheoristʼ constitutes an image of him that is substantially at variance with the one that has been dominant in France. “In France, he has been recognized as one of the chief thinkers of his generation, and his philosophical reputation is certainly still more important there than that of many of his ʻ postmodernʼ peers.

Quite consistently he was explicitly cautious not to

present himself as a provider of “theory”—he was too much of an empiricist (or a philosopher)” (During 165).

In America, by contrast, it has been difficult to

disconnect Deleuze from this ʻtheoreticalʼ apparatus because his reception here has been intimately tied to it. The truth is that the reception of Deleuze in America was prepared, and to a certain extent “arranged” (as in “arranged marriage”), by a very simple, yet very efficient machine. Its function is to sort out the available sources in order to produce the Deleuze that America is willing to use, a figure that is both user-friendly and sophisticated enough to retain its appeal (During 167-168). She goes on to emphasize “the importance of the very label ʻFrench theoryʼ in the production of some of [the] most basic effects [of the black box ʻ Deleuze in Americaʼ] engineered by this sorting mechanism” (During 168).

During has

borrowed this notion of ʻblack boxingʼ from Bruno Latour, who uses it to describe a system of settled operations (machines) that allows and encourages us to

3

Lotringer, of course, played an important role in the first large wave of translation and distribution of Deleuze and Guattariʼs work through his journal Semiotext(e).

22

“focus only on the inputs and the outputs and not on its internal complexity” (Latour, in During 163).

She uses the notion to argue that the selection of

Deleuzeʼs texts that America received was determined by a set of practical imperatives that were not only foreign to his work, but were foreign to the specifically French aspects of the intellectual context in which that work was produced. In this regard, During is able to show with remarkable clarity how many of the ʻ critical strategiesʼ to which Deleuzeʼs thought has often been reduced are themselves the key products of this black boxing operation—and this remains true even when they are applied to Deleuzeʼs own writings in order to justify that reduction. That such an operation, whose smooth functioning depends on the disappearance of its mechanism, might be resistant to critical interrogation is considerably in line with the observation we have already made that the hostility of Deleuzeʼs work to psychoanalysis is, more often than not, presumed to be too obvious to even merit substantial discussion. But before we make a wholesale commitment to Duringʼs thesis that Deleuze in America is to a considerable extent a series or set of these functional mechanisms, it is worth reviewing the series of intellectual stages on which his work made its appearance in English, since the correlation between those stages and the interpretations we are interested in is rather striking. The Anglophone community received its first large-scale exposure to Deleuze in the form of the Viking/Penguin edition of Anti-Oedipus in 1977. Prior

23

to this, there had been only two other publications:

the translation of

Présentation de Sacher-Masoch—as During notes, “under the sexier title Masochism” (During 185)—and a translation of the first edition of Proust et les Signes in 1972, which went out of print quickly and remained very difficult to obtain for years. According to During, all of this was “fairly symptomatic of the editorial and intellectual context that surrounded the penetration of French theory in the early seventies. As the author of Proust, Deleuze was tolerated in some departments of literature, but it took another fifteen years before he came to be accepted as a major academic reference” (During 185). Fifteen years, that is, between these publications and the appearance in English of A Thousand Plateaus and Dialogues, with its virulently anti-psychoanalytic third chapter. Aside from Anti-Oedipus, the only major text of Deleuzeʼs to appear in English during this interval was Nietzsche and Philosophy, published in 1983. Indeed, it was not until The Logic of Sense appeared in 1990 that English-speaking readers had access to a text in which Deleuze offers a substantially positive reading of psychoanalysis; and it was not until 1994, just a year before his death, that his major philosophical work, Difference and Repetition became available, more than a quarter century after its original publication in France. This makes the situation even worse than During suggests, because without Difference and Repetition,4 a serious philosophical assessment of Deleuzeʼs work is virtually

4

Given the considerable limitation in the number of scholars who would be willing to tackle a very difficult text in the original language written by an author who is largely unknown, let alone one by an author with a somewhat ambiguous reputation, it is not too much to say that the text was

24

impossible—and in any event did not take place, apart from the work of a few dedicated and isolated scholars, until the second half of the 1990s.5 And given these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the initial Anglophone assessment of Deleuzeʼs basic character as a philosopher included the view, already very much certified by the ʻ theoreticalʼ reading, that he was ʻanti psychoanalytic.ʼ And so, for all intents and purposes, it will remain possible to say that the ʻtheoreticalʼ reading has remained importantly determinative of our understanding of Deleuzeʼs position, even after the concerns of the theory movement have largely ceased to be the principle determining forces driving the publication and dissemination of Deleuzeʼs work in English. Accordingly, “French Theory” as a phenomenon needs to be considered more carefully, especially with regard to its effects prior to the development of large-scale philosophical interest in Deleuzeʼs work.

In the introduction to the volume in which Duringʼs essay appears,

Lotringer and Sande Cohen cite two beginnings of French Theory in America:

effectively ʻabsentʼ from the English-language sense of Deleuze—or that its presence was always mediated by the concerns of those scholars who discussed it, like Ronald Bogue, whose work will be considered below. 5 In fact, prior to Deleuzeʼs death, the number of specialists in his work teaching in graduate level philosophy programs in the United States could have been counted on one hand. The situation in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom was somewhat better, but not enormously so. Indeed, it seems fairly clear that, contrary to what a cynic might believe, Deleuzeʼs death had less to do with the explosion of interest in his work in the Anglophone philosophical community that followed it than did the fact that it coincided almost exactly with the point at which all of his major texts were finally available in translation, thus making his philosophy ʻteachableʼ and available to a much broader discussion than it had been previously. Prior to that, the ʻtheoreticalʼ presentation of Deleuze—as distinct from a philosophical one—was essentially the only developed reading, and it set the agenda for criticism and scholarship largely unchallenged. And given that it was already comparatively well established, there is a real way in which the ʻtheoreticalʼ version still exerts a considerable influence over philosophical readings of Deleuze.

25

“the ʻSchizo-Culture Conferenceʼ organized by Semiotext(e) in 1975 at Columbia University, which included papers by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard” (Lotringer and Cohen 2); which was itself preceded by “the 1966 colloquium at Johns Hopkins University, often said to have been the real beginning of French Theory in America” (Lotringer and Cohen 3). The versions of ʻFrench Theoryʼ exemplified by these two conferences differ in important respects.

While the Schizo-Culture Conference was centered

around the stars of post-May ʼ 68 French Anti-Psychiatry (their philosophical significance being entirely secondary), the Johns Hopkins conference, “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” centered around Derrida, De Man, and Lacan, and so advanced a version of (post-)structuralism that gave a very important place to psychoanalysis. Furthermore, in 1972, the effect of the psychoanalytic orientation of the Johns Hopkins conference was reinforced (and confirmed) by the appearance of the famous “French Freud” issue of Yale French Studies,6 which was subtitled ʻStructural studies in Psychoanalysisʼ and included translations of Lacanʼs ʻ Seminar on the Purloined Letterʼ and significant essays by Laplanche, Leclaire, and Derrida.

The Schizo-Culture Conference thus

announced the emergence of a counter-tendency; its basic purpose was to support the constitution of an anti-psychoanalytic7 version of ʻ French Theoryʼ

6

ʻFrench Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis.ʼ Yale French Studies, 48, Fall 1972. It is important to note here that while, in France, as we have already seen Turkle pointing out, anti-psychiatry was by no means necessarily anti-psychoanalytic in its orientation and that many of its key figures were in fact, like Guattari, psychoanalysts, this point seems to have been considerably obscured in the American context especially. Psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and 7

26

around the language of Deleuzeʼs and Guattariʼs as yet untranslated text—visibly aligning them with Lyotard and Foucault against the trio of Derrida, De Man, and Lacan.

Of course, having already been established in the absence of a

translation of Anti-Oedipus and made to form the basis of an institutional alignment, the sense Deleuzeʼs hostility to psychoanalysis, and to Lacan in particular, became an expectation that readers would largely find confirmed in the English versions of Deleuze and Guattariʼs work that appeared in the next few years.8 And so, it became very easy for ʻinformedʼ readers of Anti-Oedipus, Dialogues, and A Thousand Plateaus to feel that they had encountered a style of “theory” quite opposed to the unrelenting psychoanalyzation that Lacanʼs work had provoked in parts of the Anglophone academy.9 These three works form the basis for the ʻ black boxʼ mechanism During calls “Deleuze in America,” as is evident when she reminds us that “Deleuze was in fact first admitted to the canon of French theory under the name “Deleuze-

clinical psychology alike were all caught up in a theoretical reaction to various regimes of normalization and mental hygiene in which they were all viewed as being profoundly complicit. 8 The power of this belief that Deleuze was above all anti-Lacanian is reflected in the sorts of (almost certainly apocryphal) rumors that were passed around graduate programs and conferences at least as late as the mid-1990s, chief among those that I heard being that ʻLacanʼs offices at Vincennesʼ (really the offices of the Departement de psychanalyse a Vincennes, which was a sub-unit of the philosophy department) ʻwere kept locked after the publication of AntiOedipus.ʼ The reason for this was given as being that Deleuze insisted on keeping a seminar room directly across from them, even though it was too small for the number of people he typically drew. Its amusement value aside, this was taken by many, including myself at the time, as a credible story, which indicates neatly just how little we understood of Lacanʼs situation, the situation at Vincennes, and the institutional situation of psychoanalysis both inside and outside the university. 9 Indeed, there can be little doubt that Lotringerʼs own work at Semiotext(e), which edited and issued early translations of parts of A Thousand Plateaus well before the full text was available, and did the same with Foucault, was in many ways responsible for the persistence and reach of this image of Deleuze and Guattari in the American academy. For Lotringerʼs own account of this, see his own text in the same volume (Lotringer 2001).

27

Guattari” (During 185). And it is not difficult to see how extensively the post-1975 version of French theory came to be bound up with the Deleuzo-Guattarian text. In their introduction, Lotringer and Cohen propose four ʻ thesesʼ by means of which they attempt to demarcate the field of ʻFrench Theory.ʼ

First, ʻFrench

Theoryʼ is said to have “the synthetic ʻpointʼ of [...] the permanent suspension of representation” (Lotringer and Cohen 4). This suspension entails rejecting the ʻcommunicativeʼ projects of recognition and reconciliation, the theory already having “subsumed concepts of communication in notions of signification and contestation” (Lotringer and Cohen 4).

Under the sign of practical critical

strategy, one thus concludes that all ʻ metanarrativesʼ should be treated as ideological, and that “meaning is probably a red herring, a repressive idea, as signification is local, partial, precise; neither language nor consciousness can be relied upon to achieve understanding of totalities that are themselves always partial and fragmented” (Lotringer and Cohen 5). One need only glance at a few randomly chosen articles on Deleuze to find many of these claims repeated more or less verbatim.

And the same convergence is reflected in Lotringer and

Cohenʼs second thesis, which has to do with the upshot of this rejection of representation at the level of the ʻsubject.ʼ Once more, what is at stake here is the rejection of a rehabilitative project, that of “refurbishing subjectivity from the rubble of Nazism and Fascism”—a rehabilitation the Frankfurt school sought to achieve by pursuing a “synthesis of Marx and Freud, [and an] emphasis upon political consciousness and the ego-in-resistance” (Lotringer and Cohen 6). By

28

contrast, the new style of ʻFrench Theoryʼ would not “try to salvage or rehabilitate the subject, especially the subjectʼs capacity for identification,” pursuing instead “the idea of moleculating agents who ʻ remain in disjunction,ʼ affirmatively” (Lotringer and Cohen 6). And of course, this move away from subjectivity comes with the coda that “recent French theory, Jacques Lacan excepted, turned away from all theories of lack (and law and signifier, as Anti-Oedipus stressed)” (Lotringer and Cohen 6)—and so we find Deleuze and Guattari explicitly placed at the heart of the general movement of French theory as an intellectual formation, while Lacan, by contrast, is allowed to persist chiefly in the mode of an exception.

Furthermore, this parade of examples derived from Deleuze and

Guattari continues when Lotringer and Cohen develop their third thesis, claiming that second wave French Theory as a whole treats “negative schizophrenia as a general social condition” (Lotringer and Cohen 6). Once more, the language is substantially that of Anti-Oedipus, while the content of the claim—that, under capitalist social conditions, “negations of all kinds are interpreted into the System, all life capitalized” (Lotringer and Cohen 6)—is made to flow directly out of the considerations regarding language and subjectivity that we have seen above, and from the idea that representation and the subject are both constituted through and proceed by a sort of general obliteration of differences and an ideological (or heavily axiomatic) process of ʻovercodingʼ—a process that is, in its effect, “despotic” in Deleuze and Guattariʼs sense. And finally, Lotringer and Cohenʼs fourth thesis concerns a specifically French Nietzscheanismʼ that was

29

imported as a central part of all this ʻtheoryʼ and which provides a philosophical basis for opposing the ʻ despoticʼ operations described above. Here, Lotringer and Cohen refer to Nietzsche and Philosophy as a central text in this “reception of Nietzscheʼs texts in America, traveling on a French ticket” (Lotringer and Cohen 7), linking it to the Deleuzo-Guattarian points above: The French Nietzscheans...set aside the master/slave model with its mutually assured destruction in the form of a competition over recognition. They opted for an intellectual “emancipation from the law.” Nietzsche was invoked to contest the antiproduction of recording and reterritorialization, which today effectively means the universityʼs (museumʼs, etc.) affirmation of negation (what one lacks, what one needs, what one has to have, etc.). To the linearity of historicism, which turned existence as such into the evolution of survival and recognition, endowment and debt, Nietzscheʼs text came to America already quasi-antihistoricist (Lotringer and Cohen 78). The “French Nietzsche” thus becomes, very much a la Deleuze, the anti-Hegel; and this allows it to provide a philosophical foundation for the ʻtheoreticalʼ contestation of representation, subjectivity, and, in its rejection of the Hegelian notion of the teleological labor of the negative, for the sorts of ʻ historicistʼ interpretations of culture that reduce differences to mere moments in a linear evolution of a totalizing system of cultural production. Thus the genealogical project is made to coincide with the schizoanalytical one. And more generally, all of the theses that Lotringer and Cohen use to demarcate the field of “French Theory,” understood as an “American invention” (Lotringer and Cohen 1), are articulated to a considerable extent in terms of Deleuzeʼs and Guattariʼs work— so much so that one might well think that the loose definition of post-1975 ʻFrench theoryʼ that emerges from this amounts to little more than a selective 30

cribbing off key points in Deleuzeʼs oeuvre, with or without Guattari. However, it is at precisely this point that Duringʼs claim that the Deleuze of ʻFrench Theoryʼ involves a considerable amount of ʻ black boxingʼ becomes critically important. If the first major reception of Deleuze in English-speaking academic circles can be tied to the elaboration of the mechanics of a certain kind of critical approach in the terms of Deleuzeʼs later thought, so that it becomes possible to say that Deleuze is received at all to the precise extent that certain of his concepts and gestures turn out to be useful elements in a ʻ theoreticalʼ machine, it also remains the case that in the course of this Deleuzo-Guattarian elaboration, ʻ theoryʼ also undergoes and substantial revision and reorientation. Theory takes on Deleuze, but Deleuze also takes on theory. The operation being described here is not a deliberate and self-conscious ʻconstruction,ʼ any more than it is a massive case of collective critical bad faith. During rightly insists that “nobody can claim to have intentionally assembled the black box ʻ Deleuze in Americaʼ” (During 168), and reminds us that Deleuze himself supplies “refrains— theory is a toolbox, concepts are bricks”—that enable and encourage a “free treatment” of his own work (During 170).10 But ʻfree treatmentʼ is not really what is at issue when During insists that “it is not sufficient to say that the category French theory results from a process of appropriation or distortion whereby some French authors play a role within the American context” (During 168). The

10

These ʻrefrainsʼ may certainly be invoked in order to try to insulate the results of any given treatment of Deleuze from criticism by making it appear contrary the sprit of his thought. But Duringʼs point is not to discuss obviously disingenuous readings, which tend to show themselves to be inadequate without extensive critical intervention.

31

theoretical reworking amounts, not merely to an appropriation, but rather to an effective application of Deleuzeʼs thought in a new scene, an application which produces effects that must be acknowledged as importantly ʻDeleuzian.ʼ This is what is at stake when During cites Lotringerʼs assertion that, in light of “the political blockage that we inherited from the 60s, French theory [...] was a way of provoking a real debate about society” (Lotringer, in During 168) as evidence for her own claim that the “first aim, as a category” of French theory was “political” (During 168). As becomes clear, the point of reminding us of this political aim is to highlight the extent to which what is occurring here can reasonably be taken as a productive application of Deleuzeʼs philosophy. One must also acknowledge that “French theory” is directly instrumental in engineering these theoretical and political transformations. It is both the name and the cause. Thus Deleuze belongs to French theory and his presence in this category bestows some credibility to it because his philosophy has first been reframed in its own terms (During 168). This last point is crucial. The black boxing operation makes Deleuze effective, but it deploys nothing other than his own conceptual apparatus to do so. If this is correct, then we cannot simply dismiss the ʻtheoreticalʼ reception of Deleuze as a matter of anything as simple as a distortion of his thought by outside forces. Instead, we encounter something altogether more subtle:

“in an uncanny

reversal of the order of reception, it would seem that Deleuzism precedes Deleuze himself in the guise of a stylized, partly self-fashioned, more or less academic version of his own thought corresponding to the inherent expectations of French theoryʼs grand scheme” (During 169). The effects of this reversal have

32

persisted precisely insofar as it amounts to a stylization rather than a falsification. And there can be no doubt that this stylization prepared the way for the arrangement of a ʻ marriageʼ between Deleuzeʼs work and an intellectual and political context in which it finds real echoes and important points of application. And seen in this light, it is not difficult to understand how its terms have proven so resistant to shifting and revision, even as our philosophical understanding of Deleuzeʼs work has improved enormously—and even where those improvements should have led to some questioning of the stylized version. Among these terms are the key elements of the anti-psychoanalytic image of Deleuze, including: the emphasis on the ʻ schizoanalyticalʼ in opposition to the psychoanalytical; the insistence on a productive unconscious as opposed to a signifying and legalistic one that would remain trapped in a logic dominated by guilt and shame; and the opposition of a positive reading of difference as a productive ground to one based on negativity, exclusion, and above all the ʻlackʼ which is seen to be a central pillar in Lacanian theory.

Nothing in Duringʼs

account tends to challenge any of these elements. She is primarily concerned with the extent to which the persistence of the Deleuze-Guattari black box has become an impediment to understanding the deeper operations underlying their thought. As far as she is concerned, the problem with this lies in the degree to which the validity of the relationship between ʻinputʼ and ʻoutputʼ has become a matter of almost dogmatic faith, despite the often considerable obscurity of the internal processes in the Deleuze-Guattarian apparatus. Dogmatism of this sort

33

is deeply problematic in her view. But she seems to have no serious qualms, for all that, about the basic frame within which Deleuze has been positioned, going so far as to cite several of its main features as factors useful for explaining the delay of Deleuzeʼs reception in America: “Deleuze did not appeal to scholars involved in Marxists, psychoanalytic, or linguistic theorizing.

He was not

interested one bit in the ʻ signifierʼ (a ʻ drearyʼ word), and from the outset his relation to psychoanalysis has been conflictual to say the least” (During 165). At this point, it is unclear whether by ʻfrom the outsetʼ she means to refer to Deleuzeʼs presence in America11 or to the beginning of his career as a whole— and in the end it hardly matters. Far more important is the exemplary manner in which, even in a text devoted to a highly sophisticated interrogation of the mechanics according to which the ʻDeleuzistʼ apparatus has been assembled and made to function, his position with regard to psychoanalysis remains more or less outside the scope of the discussion.

II. The fact that it is often presumed does not mean that Deleuzeʼs opposition to ʻpsychoanalysisʼ has not also been the subject of a number of discussions in the specialist literature. Typical of these is Ronald Bogueʼs Deleuze and Guattari, which, even though it appeared in 1989, was the first book length study in

11

Which, after all, began with the publication of Masochism, a text which is undoubtedly stridently critical of a psychoanalytic theory, namely that masochism and sadism are ultimately reversible expressions of a single negative or destructive drive,

34

English of Deleuzeʼs work. Granting Duringʼs assertions that Deleuzism, and specifically the black box “Deleuze-Guattari,” largely preceded Deleuzeʼs reception into the American academy, it should hardly be surprising if we find a substantial resonance between it and Lotringerʼs and Cohenʼs four theses. Of particular importance is the way that Bogue presents Deleuze and Guattariʼs ʻNietzscheanismʼ in the role of an alternative to the Freudo-Marxism of earlier iterations of ʻtheory.ʼ Consider the beginning of his discussion of Anti-Oedipus: Anti-Oedipus is by far the best known work by Deleuze or Guattari. A succès de scandale in 1972, the book generated heated disputes and violent polemics in France that have since reverberated, with varying degrees of intensity, across Germany, Italy, England, Australia, and the United States. The modern counterpart of The Antichrist of Nietzsche, The Anti-Oedipus (a more literal translation of its title) is a frontal assault on the contemporary form of piety known as the Oedipus complex. Although directed specifically against psychoanalysis, a pervasive force in French social and intellectual life in the late 1960s and early 1970s, AntiOedipus ultimately challenges every psychological theory that elevates family relationships and the unified self to positions of pre-eminence. Deleuze and Guattari argue that all desire is social rather than familial, and that the best guide to social desire is the schizophrenic id rather than the neurotic ego. They propose to replace psychoanalysis with a ʻschizoanalysisʼ, which focuses on sub-individual body parts and their supraindividual, social interconnections, and which treats the Freudian and Marxist theoretical domains as a single realm of desiring production. No mere Marxo-Freudian synthesis, Anti-Oedipus subsumes Marx and Freud within a Nietzschean framework, which serves as the basis, not only for a critique of psychoanalysis and traditional Marxism, but also for the development of a history and a politics of social-libidinal activity (Bogue 83). The extent to which Bogueʼs account became a trope—or was replaying one—is witnessed by the way in which Paul Patton essentially repeats it more than a decade later at the beginning of the fourth chapter of Deleuze and the Political. Deleuze and Guattariʼs Anti-Oedipus launched a polemical assault on the 35

varieties of uncritical synthesis of Freudianism and Marxism which had become theoretical orthodoxy from much of the extra-parliamentary left in France after May 1968. Their criticism of the psychoanalytic concept of desire and sketch of an alternative schizoanalytic concept immediately became a succès de scandale. The notoriety achieved by their first collaborative work has meant that the names Deleuze and Guattari are firmly associated with a philosophy and politics of desire (Patton 68). Both authors implicitly discount the possibility of psychoanalysis being rehabilitated in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms.

And both seem aware that

psychoanalysis, narrowly construed, is not Deleuze and Guattariʼs only target: Marxism and ʻ Freudo-Marxismʼ featuring prominently among the full list of Deleuze and Guattariʼs critical objects, as well as “every psychological theory” that privileges “family relationships and the unified self,” which is to say the vast majority of them. And finally, both Bogue and Patton are aware that Deleuze and Guattariʼs concerns reach beyond the theoretical domain—a point which is very often expressed in the terms Patton adopts, that what is ultimately at stake is neither Freud nor Marx but ʻdesireʼ (or ʻsocial-libidinal activityʼ in Bogueʼs terms). This last point is of considerable importance insofar as this ʻpracticalʼ aim can easily be used as a referential trump card, in order to relativize the specific language in which any of Deleuzeʼs or Deleuzeʼs and Guattariʼs claims are expressed.

Doing this enables an assimilative reading that emphasizes the

common features or ʻtargetsʼ of Deleuzeʼs analyses, most commonly “difference” or “desire,” as in the following passage from Bogueʼs introduction. The anti-rational, post-structural orientation of Anti-Oedipus, then, although in tune with popular sentiments inspired by May 1968, had been evident in Deleuzeʼs work for some time. Anti-Oedipusʼs assault on the ʻtyranny of the signifierʼ simply intensified Deleuzeʼs attack on 36

structuralism. The workʼs characterization of desire and the unconscious merely extend the Nietzschean concept of ʻwill to powerʼ that Deleuze had outlined in Nietzsche and Philosophy. And its critique of Lacanʼs theory of desire was but a continuation of Deleuzeʼs long-standing opposition to post-war Hegelianism. (Lacan attended Kojèveʼs seminars in the 1930s, and the influence of Kojèveʼs Hegel may be discerned at several points in Lacanʼs work (Bogue 3-4).) There is, in fact, a great deal to recommend such a reading. Quite possibly following Bogue, many Deleuze scholars have sought to emphasize the coherence, and in some cases the systematicity, of Deleuzeʼs wide ranging oeuvre, and the results of that emphasis, where the overall project of understanding his philosophy is concerned, have more than justified it. Nevertheless, here we see the result of Bogueʼs determination to show the developmental coherence of Deleuzeʼs work from his early writings to well into the 1980s. Not only does he claim that there are substantial criticisms of Lacan in Anti-Oedipus, but indeed it becomes almost necessary that he pronounce it obvious that the text, on the whole, is anti-Lacanian. This is because, in Bogueʼs view, this ʻattackʼ is, if not quite an afterthought, then certainly a consequence of an earlier and more fundamental feature of Deleuzeʼs philosophy, his critique of Hegel, for whom Lacanian structuralism becomes essentially an avatar. Precisely because of its systematic character, Bogueʼs view is very plausible.

It has the advantage of presenting Deleuzeʼs thought as globally

coherent, showing him responding similarly to similar theoretical gestures, even if they appear in different authors and concern different subject-matters.

But

conversely, it also presents the Deleuzian theory as flexible enough to respond to

37

an intellectual movement outside the scope of philosophy proper while still using the tools for which he had long been constructing a philosophical groundwork. Indeed, it is not difficult to see on this basis why Bogueʼs text was so important to the Anglophone reception of Deleuze. The two features we have just identified fulfill two of the most important requirements that During sees informing the creation of the “Deleuze-Guattari” black box: that ʻDeleuze in Americaʼ should be an efficient, user-friendly machine; and that it demonstrate sufficient philosophical sophistication to lend intellectual credibility to the critical political enterprise into which it was being drawn (During 168). Furthermore, Bogueʼs conclusions seem to echo many of the key tenets of Lotringerʼs ʻFrench theoryʼ construction. And he seems to anticipate Lotringerʼs and Cohenʼs overall view in a particularly striking way when he writes, in his epilogue, that: Nietzsche and Philosophy and Anti-Oedipus especially stand as important turning-points in contemporary French thought, the one signaling the advent of the new French Nietzsche, the other the shift away from the sciences of the signifier, in both their structural and Lacanian guise, and towards the analytics of power, desire, and the body (Bogue 161-162). But just as we have already seen in Duringʼs analysis, here again we find that even though Bogueʼs reading is compatible with the ʻtheoreticalʼ view of Deleuze, that hardly makes it a bad reading of Deleuze. Indeed, there are good reasons for making both claims in the passage above that have nothing to do with the exigencies of the theory-market. And Bogue also avoids committing many of what During sees as the characteristic sins of the ʻ black boxingʼ readings. In particular, he does not fall into any of the ʻmannerismsʼ that may masquerade as

38

stylizations—“whether one drifts along with Deleuze or sets out to ʻ mapʼ the tracings of his thought”—but which usually amount to no more than “a mere representation or staging of concepts that wraps itself in pragmatic clothes” (During 172). If, nevertheless, he is guilty of a bit of academicization—though surely not yet, in 1989, canonization—he is still careful enough to adopt what may well be the most effective strategy for dealing with this particular danger in reading Deleuze: explicitly reminding his readers not to “presume the existence of such a thing as an unchanging, autonomous ʻDeleuzeʼ” (Bogue 9) and trusting in their ability and inclination to take the warning seriously. So it is that, due to its precedence and the concise, direct, and unmannered way in which it sets out the terms of Deleuzeʼs philosophy and situates it in relation to its influences and its critical targets, Bogueʼs text must be seen as an important nodal point in the reception of Deleuze with which we are concerned.12 And this is as true of the textʼs presentation of Deleuzeʼs relationship to psychoanalysis as it is more generally—especially since, beyond its synthetic presentation of most of the key points of the standard ʻtheoreticalʼ view of the relationship, Bogueʼs account has the considerable virtue of seeming to dispose of a number of what might otherwise be seen as key objections. Initially, the effect of Bogueʼs text seems to be one of containment; it circumscribes the place of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theories of the

12

We have already seen the persistence of its influence in the way in which it is Bogueʼs framing of Anti-Oedipus—and not one of the later, flashier, and more commonly cited versions such as that of Massumi—which is echoed in the text of Pattonʼs we have cited above.

39

unconscious in Deleuzeʼs philosophy rather narrowly. Part of this is undoubtedly due to the synthetic nature of his discussion, which leads Bogue to maintain a relatively high threshold that must be reached before a matter becomes central enough in any of Deleuzeʼs texts to merit attention in his treatment of that text. Accordingly, while Bogue spends considerable energy working though Nietzsche and Philosophy, he makes no mention of that textʼs discussions of Freud13 or of the ʻNietzscheanʼ criticisms Deleuze levels against Freud in an important footnote (NPh 211-12n5). In fact, it is only when Bogue turns to Deleuzeʼs discussions of literary works in a chapter devoted to Proust and Signs and Masochism that the issue of psychoanalysis is explicitly raised. Even here, Bogue is at first very cautious, not stressing or even suggesting that Masochism be taken as evidence of a fundamental opposition to psychoanalysis on Deleuzeʼs part; rather, he simply says that it “is highly suggestive from both a psychoanalytic and a critical perspective” (Bogue 35). Things change somewhat as the chapter evolves, however. In Bogueʼs discussion of Proust and Signs, Deleuze is presented as having seen that the artistic essences, the discovery of which is the goal of the Proustian heroʼs ʻapprenticeship,ʼ are importantly ʻ unconsciousʼ—in other words, they must be seen as “the apprenticeʼs unconscious destination” (PS 50, quoted in Bogue 41 my emphasis).14 Following Deleuze, who makes no mention of psychoanalysis

13

Most importantly, those that appear in the beginning sections of the fourth chapter, though there are other references spread throughout the text. 14 Bogueʼs citations of Proust and Signs are from the first English edition, which only translates

40

in Proust and Signs, Bogue does not raise the question of whether “the unconscious themes, the involuntary archetypes” (PS 47, quoted in Bogue 41) involved in the Proustian work of art can or should be related to psychoanalytic notions.

However, in his discussion of the signs of love, Bogue develops a

ʻcriticismʼ of psychoanalytic readings of Proust that is never made explicit by Deleuze (see PS 67-77): “The psychoanalytic reader is mistaken, however, in assuming that Marcel simply suffers from excessive attachment to the mother, for his mother is not the origin of the series of his love, but merely the first incarnation of the essence that informs the series” (Bogue 43). This judgment is surely plausible, and it is quite true that a psychoanalytic reader who drew the conclusion Bogue suggests would find it challenged directly by Deleuze, but it is Bogue, and not Deleuze who is setting forth a direct criticism of psychoanalysis here. In Masochism, by contrast, Deleuze surely does make psychoanalysis a central issue.

Bogue follows his lead in foregrounding it, and in so doing

produces a discussion that demonstrates with remarkable clarity and depth that Deleuzeʼs central concepts are, in fact, open to a Freudian elaboration. This appears to be an unintended side-effect, however, since it is neither a point that Bogue emphasizes, nor one that will be reflected in the rhetoric of his presentation of Deleuzeʼs relationship to analysis—but that in no way changes

the first French Edition, and has a slightly different pagination than the current, complete English edition. In citing texts Bogue quotes from Deleuze here, I have provided the pagination of the current English edition of Proust and Signs, listed in the bibliography, and the page number where the citation appears in Bogueʼs text. Bogueʼs own citations will refer to a different pagination, however.

41

the extent to which this discussion is of capital importance to us insofar as we are concerned with the pattern according to which Deleuzeʼs relationship to psychoanalysis was understood in his Anglophone reception. Bogueʼs discussion is structured around a neat summary of the key points of Deleuzeʼs view regarding both Sade and Sacher-Masoch.

At first, he

emphasizes the relation between Deleuzeʼs reading and medical discourse, paying particular attention to his description of symptomatology as the “literary, artistic aspect” (CCR 115, quoted in Bogue 45) of medicine, and his view that “Sade and Masoch are great symptomatologists [...] not mere bearers of symptoms” (Bogue 46). Even though he has just been discussing the topic in relation to Proust and Signs, Bogue does not explicitly connect this to Deleuzeʼs reading of Nietzsche, wherein he prominently claims that:

“The whole of

philosophy is a symptomatology, and a semiology” (NPh 3)—which is even more striking given that Bogue will go on to make much of the connection between Masochism and Deleuzeʼs analysis of Proust. Instead, he moves on to consider the way in which Deleuze connects the descriptive language used by each author to the conception of “a superior, ideal nature” (Bogue 46-47) that appears in both Sade and Sacher-Masoch. And in his elaboration of Sacher-Masochʼs version of this, Bogue comes to consider the use that Deleuze makes of “the Freudian notion of disavowal (Verleugnung)” (Bogue 47). “Deleuze argues,” Bogue tells us, “that what is essential about disavowal is that it radically contests the validity of reality” (Bogue 47-48), in which case the fetishistic sexual practices on the

42

basis of which Freud developed the concept, and which are displayed in SacherMasochʼs writings, are now to be seen as instances of precisely this contestation. “The Masochian hero neither destroys the real nor idealizes the real, but instead disavows the real and introduces the ideal within fantasy, an intermediary realm between the real and the idea” (Bogue 48). As Bogue presents it, Deleuzeʼs view is thus that the masochistic feminine ideal reflects this disavowal insofar as it avoids the sensuality that would ordinarily be tied to sexual objectification. But Bogue is also quite clear that this makes Deleuze into a critic of psychoanalysis. “Deleuze opposes the standard psychoanalytic reading of the masochistic fantasy, in which the female torturer is treated as a substitute for the father” (Bogue 49). Bogue goes on to show with admirable clarity how Deleuzeʼs problem with this standard psychoanalytic reading has everything to do with the fact that it misses the way in which Sacher-Masochʼs fantasy disavows and contests the patriarchal order as such.15 And he also shows how Sade and Masoch are similar insofar as both are to be taken as “responding to the modern conception of law enunciated by Kant in the second critique” (Bogue 49). Both aim to subvert this law,16 the difference between them being that while the former does so ironically, the latterʼs response is humorous. Sade replaces law with institutions which function as mechanisms of the perpetual implementation of an archaic anti-law of pure negation. Masoch seems to obey the law, but his absurd contracts become parodies of legal documents. More importantly, the punishment he and his heroes undergo

15

As we will see in Chapter 3, this contestation is one of the most important aspects of Masochism for Deleuze, and was so as early as the beginning of the 1960s. 16 Which Bogue clearly distinguishes from the Platonic conception of Law.

43

subverts the legal function of punishment, for the masochistʼs pain does not prevent forbidden pleasure but provokes and ensures it (Bogue 50). And once again, psychoanalysis is said to have misunderstood this subversive operation insofar as it takes masochism to be an erotic affirmation of the suffering which the ego undergoes at the hands of the punitive functions of the superego: “If the superego is the psychic agency of the law, Deleuze cannot support the orthodox psychoanalytical interpretation of masochism as a perversion caused by an overdeveloped superego” (Bogue 50). Thus Bogue shows that it is the superego, itself the result of the internalization of the paternal or patriarchal law, that, according to Deleuze, is what is truly disavowed by the masochist—and sadism is subjected to a complementary reconfiguration. All of this, of course, entails a criticism of psychoanalysis; but the consequences of the reversal are elaborated in psychoanalytic terms as well. We are told that Deleuze offers his reading of masochism as a supplement to the Freudian theory of desexualized libido, adding “perversion” in the masochistic and fetishistic senses to the circumstances in which Freud himself had recognized this phenomenon (the narcissistic ego and the superego); and furthermore that this should lead us to recognize that masochism functions by opposing “imagination, which is fundamentally allied to the narcissistic ego and the mechanism of disavowal” to thought as “a form of sublimation that proceeds from the formation of the superego” (Bogue 51). As perversions, sadism and masochism are ʻ resexualizationsʼ that take place beginning from one of these desexualized positions.

Sadism begins with thought as a product of the 44

superego, and “the impersonal, perverse pleasure of sadism” (Bogue 51) involves “the sexualization of thought and the speculative product as such...” (CCR 109, quoted in Bogue 51). By contrast, masochism relies on the disavowal mechanism that is both “the foundation of imagination” and “central to the creation of the narcissistic ego,” so that: “The perverse pleasure of masochism [...] resides in a sexualization of the imagination and disavowal as such, under the auspices of a triumphant, idealized ego” (Bogue 51). All of this may appear as a considerable deviation from Freud; but we wonder whether that appearance is not, at least partially, the result of the extent to which it is developed by way of categories that are not strictly Freudian: that of ʻ imaginationʼ as distinct from a category ʻthoughtʼ associated with the superego and the law, and with a kind of impersonal mechanism that is absolutely hostile to the ego, narcissistic or otherwise. Far more than Freud, considerable portions of this analysis owe a considerable debt to Lacan, a debt that Deleuze makes evident in a number of places, many of which Bogue cites from directly. For example, in both his first discussion of disavowal (CCR 31-32, 136-7n18) and in his discussion of Kantʼs conception of law (CCR 83-86, 137n26), Deleuze very explicitly refers to Lacan and makes clear that the analysis he is offering will make use of elements that Lacan has added to the orthodox psychoanalytic conceptual scheme.

It is

remarkable, then, that Bogue, who is otherwise very faithful to Deleuzeʼs analysis and produces a truly remarkable synthetic account of its main points and its overall logic, completely omits all reference to Lacan in his discussion, even

45

though he will explicitly present Lacan as a major target of critique in Deleuzeʼs works with Guattari. The significance of this omission in terms of its influence on the overall trajectory of Deleuzeʼs reception in the English-speaking world appears to be all the greater insofar as, aside from Bogueʼs discussion, precious little scholarly attention has been given to Deleuzeʼs analysis of Sacher-Masoch, at least by way of attempting to demonstrate, as Bogue does, its very substantial connections to the core of Deleuzeʼs philosophical outlook. Specifically, Bogue shows how Deleuze uses Freudʼs analysis in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to link the repetitive structure characteristic of both Sadean and Masochian fantasy to a “ʼtranscendentalʼ synthesis of time”

(CCR 100, quoted in Bogue 52),

elaborating Freudʼs Eros-Thanatos pair in terms of the very same theory of temporal syntheses that Bogue has shown him developing since Nietzsche and Philosophy. Eros is an ever-repeating synthesis which constitutes the present, but Eros only emerges against the background of the larger field of the pure form of time. That field is the ground-less dimension of Thanatos, a dimension convulsed by an incessant repetition of a simultaneous past, present and future (Bogue 52). This theory of time can thus be related to other discussions of Deleuzeʼs, in particular to his presentations of the ontological significance of the eternal recurrence in Nietzsche or the pure past in Proust (or Bergson). In each case, the claim is that these forms of temporalization constitute the true genetic elements required for a viable explanation of what we encounter in present

46

experience, and especially what manifests itself in experience as paradoxical. And here, Bogue shows how the discussion in Masochism too prefigures not only what Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition but also the accounts of the ʻmetaphysical surfaceʼ constituted by sense/events and of the three syntheses of time that are developed in The Logic of Sense and then reworked at the core of the chapter on desiring production in Anti-Oedipus. Indeed, precisely because much of this material can be seen to have a long-standing genealogy in Deleuzeʼs thought, Bogue can minimize the importance of the developments to which it is subjected in Anti-Oedipus and with it the entire issue of psychoanalysis. “What is most important in Anti-Oedipus, I believe, is not its critique of psychoanalysis nor its conception of revolutionary politics, but its history of desiring-production, which may be regarded as a social history of the interrelationship of desire and power” (Bogue 105). This emphasis seems to fall in line with Lotringerʼs comment that what was driving the ʻinventionʼ of ʻFrench Theoryʼ in the post-psychoanalytic sense was the search for “a way of provoking a real debate about society” (Lotringer, in During 168).

For the

purposes of this project, Anti-Oedipus would appear to have been useful and topical precisely insofar as it was primarily conceived as presenting neither a critique of psychoanalysis (which would simply bog it down in a debate that had been inconclusive in France and which had a largely academic value in America) nor a conception of revolutionary politics (which would be largely irrelevant in America, especially insofar as avowedly revolutionary radicalism had been

47

largely discredited in the late 1960s and its remnants aggressively marginalized during the 1980s). Its value would, rather, have been as a way of analyzing, on an even more global scale, more or less the same terrain in which Foucault had been working. Even setting aside these exogenous factors (as far as possible) and thinking strictly in terms of reading Deleuze, there are a great many ways in which Bogueʼs claim appears not only to be substantially correct but also to anticipate and suggest reasonable resolutions to puzzles that would emerge in Deleuze studies in the following decades. No doubt this accounts for the manner in which its influence can be seen suffusing the subsequent literature. And surely we would have to find traces of Bogueʼs reading in the general tendency among Deleuzians to treat whatever positive use that Deleuze makes of Freud (and / or Lacan), or of the conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis, as being somehow an entirely separate matter from the unquestionable, and so largely uninteresting, fact of his opposition to psychoanalysis. What is remarkable is how little analysis or comment the real complexity of the relationship tends to elicit, many writers treating it as something frustrating and, when discussing it, seeking to get past it as quickly as possible, and only devoting considerable attention to particular matters, references, or citations without any considerable attempt to say whether it has or should have any impact on whatever view they hold about the overall compatibility or incompatibility of a “Deleuzian” position and a “psychoanalytic” one.17 For all of

17

This is not to suggest that philosophical or theoretical positions must be adopted wholesale or

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the considerable merits of Bogueʼs analysis of the details of Deleuzeʼs thought and the details of his use of a number of important psychoanalytic concepts, it also seems that he participates in a very representative way in a general pattern that disconnects these details from an overall assessment that may, absent some explanation, seem at variance with them—indeed one suspects that privileged position of his text makes him more influential in establishing this pattern than simply representative of it. The pattern, however, is of the greatest importance. If his English-language readers have, in fact, not presented a terribly consistent view of Deleuzeʼs relationship to psychoanalysis, what they have done quite consistently is treat the relationship as being of fairly minimal importance, as a subject best dealt with quickly in order to move on to more important matters.

III. As we have already noted in citing Girardʼs essay at the outset, the view of Deleuze as a generally ʻanti-psychoanalyticʼ thinker, whether implicit or explicitly stated in the literature, is not universally held and has not been above criticism. Besides Girard, who remains substantially skeptical of Anti-Oedipus, a number of more recent studies by sympathetic scholars have called into question the

not at all, any more than it is to say that they can simply be dismembered and treated piecemeal without any consideration being given to the implications of any given doctrine beyond its immediate, explicit elements. Both of these approaches are obviously flawed, over-simplistic, and rest upon indefensible assumptions about the nature of philosophical thought—assumptions that Deleuze would accept no more than any other serious philosopher.

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Deleuzo-Guattarian critique of psychoanalysis—and, more importantly, the often rather ʻManicheanʼ understanding of what it entails.

Among the first recent

statements of this type of position is to be found in an article by Jerry Aline Flieger, who claims that: “In spite of their antipsychoanalytic posturing, Deleuze and Guattari are, in my view, neither anti-Freudian nor even “anti-Oedipal,” in the most interesting and nuanced sense of the term” (Flieger 219). Fliegerʼs posture in the passages surrounding this one is that of someone who expects his thesis to be dismissed out of hand by many of his readers unless he can keep their attention by playing up its shock value for long enough to convince them that the argument at least has possibilities—he knows, in other words, not only the nature of the conventional wisdom in Deleuzian circles but also the degree to which the judgment that it expresses is doubled and reinforced in many cases by a considerable antipathy. Furthermore, he recognizes very clearly that the same attitude exists on the psychoanalytic side of the ʻ debate,ʼ which is the one from which he is in fact writing. Not surprisingly, Flieger displays a considerable amount of this same pathos in introducing his own thesis: because of the caricatural treatment of “institutionalized” psychoanalysis [in Anti-Oedipus], many readers who value Freud and take psychoanalysis seriously as an interpretive strategy read no further in Deleuzeʼs work. As an unrepentant postmodernist, premillennialist, Freudian anti-antiOedipalist, I want to appeal to my fellow Freudians, nonspecialists in Deleuzeʼs work, to read further in his remarkable oeuvre. To that end, I take on some of the (perhaps deliberately overdrawn) tendentious characterizations of Freud/Oedipus in Anti-Oedipus here, using Deleuze and Guattariʼs own theoretical apparatus to counter some of their more flagrant positions. I also respond in kind, for the sake of spirited debate 50

and fun, to the anti-Oedipalistsʼ flippant and parodic tone (as when they repeatedly refer to the complicated Oedipal configuration as “daddymommy-me”) to refute some of their willfully provocative critiques of Freudian theory (Flieger 219-220). Thus are we not only assured of Fliegerʼs deep and abiding respect for Deleuze and Guattari, but also asked us to recognize and view with sympathy—and to excuse, in the name of expanding Deleuze and Guattariʼs audience—his respect for psychoanalysis, even in its Oedipal guises. If there is more than a little bit of the strategy which During aptly labels “Active Dismantling:

Deleuze versus

Deleuze” (During 172) in all of this, that does not make it any less indicative of the general presumptions operating among Deleuzeʼs readers surrounding questions of psychoanalysis. Indeed, Fliegerʼs use of the strategy appears to have everything to do with establishing some degree of legitimacy for the point he seeks to make. This is reflected in the manner in which Flieger goes on to propose his main interpretive gambit. “Reading the stunning second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, which owes a profound and explicit debt to the most radical and interesting Freud, one wonders whether the first volume suffers from shortsightedness or malice, as seems to be the case, or serves as a preliminary strategy of sorts, a setup” (Flieger 220). ʻDeleuze versus Deleuzeʼ indeed, and coming from an avowedly psychoanalytic critic, this strategy creates an opening to use Deleuze to accuse Deleuze of the psychoanalytic sin par excellance, “the classic Freudian denial, the Verneinung, in which the patient protests too much” (Flieger 221). And needless to say it is critical for our purposes to see what the object of this denial may turn out to be 51

and whether Fliegerʼs diagnosis has merit. Fielgerʼs text is extremely dense, with literary and rhetorical elements, and with streams of terminology that give the impression of ʻblack boxingʼ all the more strongly insofar as one suspects at least some of the terms involved no longer denote precise concepts but rather functional indexes,18 and finally with detailed lists of criticisms, accusations and responses, points and counterpoints. Despite all this, his points can be restated fairly simply: everything begins and ends with the insistence that Deleuze and Guattariʼs ʻ denialʼ amounts to treating Oedipus as the foundation and organizing principle of a set of exclusive disjunctions, and thereby setting it over and against the ʻdesiringʼ unconscious as they conceive it. In fact, Flieger contends, Oedipus and the psychoanalytic unconscious both operate primarily in terms of inclusive disjunctions, that is, of logical structures of precisely the sort that Deleuze, and Guattari, both insist upon (Flieger 221-231). Thus psychoanalytic theory, properly read, and Deleuze and Guattariʼs positive view, would on Fliegerʼs view be theorizing similar objects and processes in ways that are substantially the same. Furthermore, on the basis of a suggestive, but largely undeveloped reading of Difference and Repetition, Flieger insists that Deleuze at one point knew this about psychoanalysis (Flieger 223, 229), but was already beginning to misread Oedipus: “at that early, avowedly Freudian stage, Deleuze has begun to cast Oedipus on the side of identity, stasis, sedimentation” (Flieger 223). When he comes to the question of what motive Deleuze—who he

18

And thus that, from the point of view of conceptual clarity, they are being used somewhat loosely and imprecisely, or worse.

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implies (and elsewhere explicitly claims) should have known better—could have had for engaging in or believing this distortion, his answer is quite simple: the politics of 1968 (Flieger 223).19

And with this in place, Flieger sets about

presenting Oedipus not as “a resistance, a limit, a constraint imposed on the infinite combinations produced by desire” (Flieger 221), but rather as an instance of what Deleuze and Guattari want to affirm in A Thousand Plateaus:

“The

Oedipal configuration is not just a family tree but also a rhizome, a tentacular tuber sending out shoots and crossing lines (Octopus Oedipus) [...]” (Flieger 231). This last formulation calls to mind Duringʼs explanation of the most pernicious forms of ʻblack boxingʼ, which deserves to be quoted at length: the mainstream representation of Deleuzianism revolves around a few slogans or mottos that are relentlessly recombined in the flow of commentaries [...] On one level, such concepts are not very different from those Deleuze criticized for being “as big as hollow teeth.” They can in turn be spelled out into scores of erring signifiers that the commentator is invited to assemble at will according to the avant-garde method of cut-up borrowed from Burroughs, yielding a vertiginous refrain of buzzwords and gnomic formulae [...]. At worst, this produces barely readable accounts of Deleuze. In such instances, the authors do not mimic the philosopherʼs style, but rather its most apparent and less operative aspects, its lexical singularities, its vocabulary. These tasteless glossings over, interspersed with bursts of lyrical inspiration, are the very opposite of the dry prose and overall soberness that Clément Rosset was able to discern in the apparent luxuriance of Deleuzeʼs concepts and fancy metaphors (During 169-170). Fliegerʼs playfulness may not exempt him from the criticism implied here, since

19

Unfortunately, Flieger gives us very little sense of what, specifically, in these politics would have motivated Deleuze to array himself against psychoanalysis, especially not in 1968, when he suggests it occurred. In the absence of such specifics, it is very difficult to say whether he is right.

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playfulness is in fact part of the figure. In any event, even though his completely gratuitous reference to “Octopus Oedipus” is meant humorously, it illustrates Duringʼs point beautifully, especially insofar as, to the degree that it asserts a great deal more than it demonstrates, Fliegerʼs parodic critique of what he suggests may be Deleuze and Guattariʼs parodic critique of Oedipus is constantly in danger of falling victim to its own cleverness.

That said, he also scores

enough points to cast some doubt upon precisely the parts of Deleuzeʼs (and Deleuze and Guattariʼs) opposition to psychoanalysis that have most often been taken to be obvious or uninteresting. And remarkably enough, at least the same general claim was made by Lacan himself in 1969, when he remarked in the seminar, concerning The Logic of Sense, that it presented “what is at the heart of what my discourse enunciated—and it is in no way doubtful that this discourse is at the heart of his books [...]” (S XVI, 218). But this Lacanian precursor also points to another limitation of what Flieger is up to. For the most part, he wants to suggest that any opposition between Deleuze (with or without Guattari) and psychoanalytic thinking is either illusory, symptomatic, or based on a misunderstanding that may or may not be strategic. But except for the political-strategic line, this is rather strikingly at odds with Fliegerʼs repeated suggestion, and indeed the evident fact, that Deleuze knew his psychoanalysis very well—and it is prima facie implausible in relation to Guattari. Furthermore, Fliegerʼs critique rather hastily presumes that a political opposition to anything Lacanian must have been misguided or unfortunate, and

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thus that Deleuze and Guattari could not have had any good reason for opposing any version of psychoanalysis except the generic American psychoanalysis against which Lacan had been arguing since the 1950s. Consider his statement of this last point: The Deleuzian critique is applicable only to the most rigidly construed Freudian orthodoxy, while French Freud has been dissing the APA for some time, showing that processes of ʻ organizingʼ and ʻ masteryʼ are driven as much by thanatopic and sadomasochistic impulses as by any punitive notion of law or any normative notion of cure (Flieger 231). Whatever Deleuze and Guattari are saying, they would never present their critique in the terms that Flieger attributes to ʻF rench Freudʼ—unless their view has changed to a truly extraordinary extent from the one that Deleuze is said to have articulated in Masochism and Difference and Repetition. Despite the fact that he suggests a number of points on which it may well turn out that Deleuze and psychoanalysis can be brought into agreement or at least productive debate, Fliegerʼs reading remains unsatisfying because he seems to be determined to reduce whatever opposition Deleuze and Guattari might have honestly held to Freud, Lacan, or any ʻ reasonableʼ psychoanalytic position to either a misunderstanding or a radical betrayal of their own principles. In this way, Fliegerʼs view comes to suffer from limitations that mirror those of Bogueʼs discussion; and taken together, they present an exemplary instance of the default level onto which discussions of Deleuzeʼs relationship to psychoanalysis seem to settle. In both cases, there is ultimately a disconnection between whatever is said about the ʻoverallʼ relationship Deleuze (and Guattari)

55

bore to psychoanalysis and what is said about specific cases, with regard to particular discussions or texts. This disconnection is partially neutralized by the fact that, overall, the relationship is either held to be of relatively little consequence or to have determined by ʻ politicalʼ and therefore implicitly inauthentic factors.

But the readings being produced by these mechanisms

remain unsatisfying. Indeed, Bogue and Flieger, albeit in very different ways, tend to leave the impression that some considerable aspect of the relationship they are nominally discussing is nevertheless not being accounted for.

If

Deleuze and Guattari did, in fact, oppose psychoanalysis very stridently, as it surely appears they did, then it seems that it is worth understanding why they did so and what, in particular, they objected to in the major analytic figures they discuss.

However, if that opposition is somewhat less clear, complete and

categorical than is often suggested, then a more careful accounting is certainly called for as well.20

Finally, if Deleuzeʼs attitude toward analysis was either

changeable or ambivalent, at points during his career or over the course of the whole of it, then we need to detail this more carefully and assess its significance. And so at this point we need to turn away from the literature and consider the evidence in Deleuzeʼs own texts. In the next chapter, we will focus on some representative selections from the considerable body of material supporting the

20

Though Deleuzeʼs work with Guattari will not, ultimately, be the focus of this dissertation, it is nevertheless worth remarking that there are a number of readers even of Anti-Oedipus who view the opposition as much more complex than the discussion above has made it appear, raising the possibility of and contributing valuable elements to the development of a more nuanced reading. A reconsideration of Deleuze and Guattariʼs relationship to psychoanalysis in light of what this dissertation comes to conclude regarding Deleuzeʼs pre-Guattari work will be the logical next step of the project begun here.

56

view that, nuances and local or specific appropriations of psychoanalytic concepts aside, Deleuze must on the whole be understood as being against analysis, viewing it as dangerous and repressive, both in theory and in practice.

57

Chapter 2

“Psychoanalysis is like the Russian Revolution; we donʼt know when it started going bad” (AO 55).

I. In the preceding chapter, we have considered the origins of the perception, common among Deleuzeʼs English-speaking readers, that his relationship to psychoanalysis is, above all else, a critical one. And we have suggested that this view is most often expressed superficially, in passing, or in a purely polemical mode, rather than as the result of a serious and detailed consideration of Deleuzeʼs writings. But the frequent success of these rhetorical strategies and the overall persistence of the view also speak to its inherent plausibility. Not surprisingly, it finds considerable support in some of Deleuzeʼs own writings— most commonly in his later writings, both those authored with Guattari and those written alone or with other collaborators. Among these, three texts in particular seem very clearly to mark Deleuze as a strident and unbending antipsychoanalyst: Anti-Oedipus (especially its first and second chapters), A Thousand Plateaus (especially its second ʻplateauʼ), and Dialogues (especially its third chapter). Reading these texts, oneʼs first impression is that the suggestion above seems perfectly reasonable. Especially if one takes some of Deleuze and Guattariʼs more spectacular rhetorical moments seriously, one might well be forgiven for believing that the same basic anti-psychoanalytic point is made in

58

each, the differences between the various articulations being, when all is said and done, mostly just matters of detail and presentation.1

But on closer

inspection we see that these texts do not, in fact, form a completely consistent set. While all of them have a number of features in common, the first belongs to a notably different stage in the Deleuzo-Guattarian project than the other two. The latter surely do form a set, so much so that if we include what Deleuze and Guattari develop in the fifth ʻplateau,ʼ “On Several Regimes of Signs,” alongside the second, “One or Several Wolves,” all the major points made in Deleuze and Parnetʼs third ʻdialogue,ʼ “Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyze,” turn out to be repeated in the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia,2 while Anti-Oedipus, by contrast, often makes its argument in considerably different terms—most notably, the language of ʻdesiring machinesʼ that was so characteristic of Deleuze and Guattariʼs first text was wholly abandoned later (D 101). Furthermore, although it establishes most of the themes that are elaborated in the later texts, AntiOedipus remains more ambiguous, not least because even its criticisms are often developed within the language and conceptual structure of psychoanalysis.

1

And from here it is no great leap to the conclusion that Deleuzeʼs opposition to psychoanalysis is so fundamentally obvious that the entire matter hardly requires any more thought; so that if there will be anything interesting to say about the subject at all, it will be a matter of spelling out the details of his opposition and the reasons for it. 2 Even in this case, however, the transformation is more substantial than one might think. While the development of many of the points shared between the chapter in Dialogues and the two in A Thousand Plateaus is generally more elaborate and more polished in the latter, there are a number of ways in which, considered strictly from the point of view of their role in articulating a criticism of psychoanalysis, they lose a great deal of their force in the transition, especially since most of the references to psychoanalysis in the plateau on regimes of signs are incidental or exemplary, and Deleuze and Guattariʼs critical comments are often divorced to a great extent from discussions that were offered in support of similar points in Dialogues.

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It is, then, somewhat more difficult than it at first appears to isolate a generic ʻDeleuzo-Guattarianʼ argument against psychoanalysis, so much so that it seems better to adopt a different approach to accounting for what nevertheless remain a significant set of affinities between the texts Deleuze produced with his various collaborators during the 1970s and the critiques of psychoanalysis found therein. There seem to be two basic lines of criticism elaborated during this period: a ʻ philosophicalʼ critique of the psychoanalytic view of the unconscious and a ʻsocialʼ and ʻethicalʼ critique that considers psychoanalysis from the point of view of its effects at these levels. These two orders of criticism are not by any means kept cleanly separate from one another, and they are to a very great extent mutually reinforcing. Nevertheless, they can be distinguished insofar as they proceed from different bases and can, at least to an extent, be elaborated separately. In what follows we will attempt to separate them as far as possible in order to get a clear idea of what each entails. The ʻphilosophicalʼ line of interrogation is developed in a number of ways and contexts during this period, but a first and exemplary iteration of it can be found in the presentation of the three syntheses of ʻ desiring-productionʼ that opens Anti-Oedipus. In the second chapter, these syntheses are reconsidered more directly in terms of their relation to psychoanalysis, and they will be subject to many further developments in the texts published later in the decade. But even in their initial iteration, which uses the delirium of Judge Schreber, the subject of Freudʼs “Psychoanalytical Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of

60

a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” to gain access to what Deleuze and Guattari insist must be understood as a ʻproductive unconscious,ʼ it is possible to see the germ of the critical reading of psychoanalysis that is repeated in the later texts.

The one line summary of this critique might be that despite having

discovered the productive unconscious, Freud and his heirs have misunderstood it to a very considerable degree. We will consider the origins of this view in Anti-Oedipus in the next section, but for the moment it is worth attempting a broad summary of its major points, which are presented more clearly in later texts. The first of these is that psychoanalysis misunderstands the structure and functioning of the unconscious. The second, related to but importantly distinct from the first, is that psychoanalysis misunderstands both the genetic conditions and the structural forms of statements or utterances. Versions of both claims can be found in A Thousand Plateaus and, most notably, at the beginning of the third chapter of Dialogues. “Weʼve only said two things against psychoanalysis: that it breaks up all the productions of desire and crushes all the formations of utterances” (D 77). In both cases, this amounts to saying that psychoanalysis misconstrues the unconscious, but at two very different levels. Only in the case of the first claim are we are dealing with what is principally at stake in the first chapter of AntiOedipus, the analysis of the Wolf-Man in A Thousand Plateaus, and any other text concerning not merely the manifest order of symptoms, but rather with what is simultaneously concealed and revealed thereby: the productive unconscious

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as such. Indeed, insofar as Deleuze and his collaborators see it as failing to make this distinction consistently enough,3 they will accuse psychoanalysis of misrecognizing the unconscious by seeing it as a place or a signification to be located, tracked down, recovered, and above all occupied by a subject. “On the contrary,” Deleuze and Parnet reply to this suggestion, “you havenʼt got hold of the unconscious, you never get hold of it, its not an ʻit wasʼ in place of which the ʻIʼ must come. The Freudian formula must be reversed. You have to produce the unconscious” (D 78). And even though the language of ʻ desiring machinesʼ is abandoned—and with it, though less consistently, that of ʻdesiring-productionʼ— after Anti-Oedipus, this remains, fundamentally, what is at stake in the later doctrines that account for the basic structures of the unconscious in terms of multiplicities and the assemblages composed of specific distributions of multiplicities on a body without organs (D 77-78, ATP 30-33). In psychoanalytic terms, all of this amounts, still, to what is essentially a theory of a libidinal unconscious.4 However, what Deleuze and his collaborators

3

Even though, certainly, no one could accuse Freud of not having recognized it at all, nor do Deleuze and Guattari suggest anything of the sort. 4 And this, as much as anything else, should suffice to explain why, during a certain period that extended well into the 1980s, psychoanalytic, and especially Lacanian responses to Deleuze and Guattari tended to characterize them as “libido-“ or “drive-theorists” above all else. See, for example, Ragland-Sullivan 87-89, and also 271-273 for a more extended discussion of her major objection to Deleuze and Guattari. While Ragland-Sullivanʼs text is, in fact, of considerable use for understanding Lacan, her presentation of Deleuze and Guattari, while recognizing them as addressing psychoanalytic issues and producing what can be viewed as a psychoanalytic theory, tends to oversimplification and glibness—even going so far as to approvingly cite Jacques-Alain Millerʼs 1984 claim, at a conference in Ottawa, “that Deleuze and Guattari had written the AntiOedipe as a kind of joke. They later abrogated responsibility for the book” (Ragland-Sullivan 328n31). Needless to say, if Miller actually said precisely this, then he was misrepresenting the situation rather badly indeed, and very much to his own advantage and that of Lacanian psychoanalysis. That Ragland-Sullivan did not discount it raises profound questions about the

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emphasize is that, as libidinal, the unconscious needs to be understood in terms of structures that are, fundamentally, intensive.5 One of the essential characteristics of the dream of multiplicity is that each element ceaselessly varies and alters its distance in relation to the others. [...] These variable distances are not extensive quantities divisible by each other; rather, each is indivisible, or “relatively indivisible,” in other words, they are not divisible below or above a certain threshold, they cannot increase or diminish without their elements changing in nature. [...] What is the significance of these indivisible distances that are ceaselessly transformed, and cannot be divided or transformed without their elements changing in nature each time? Is it not the intensive character of this kind of mulitplicityʼs elements and the relations between them? Exactly like a speed or a temperature, which is not composed of other speeds and temperatures but rather is enveloped in or envelops others, each of which marks a change in nature. The metrical principle is not to be found in a homogenous milieu but resides elsewhere, in forces at work within them, in physical phenomena inhabiting them, precisely in the libido which constitutes them from within, and in constituting them necessarily divides them into distinct quantitative and variable flows (ATP 30-31). Even the body without organs, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize a bit further on in the same section of A Thousand Plateaus, is merely a zero-state of intensity in relation to these other elements (ATP 31); so that the entire set of ʻ molecularʼ assemblages which compose the unconscious—and recall, all of this is developed in A Thousand Plateaus as a re-reading of the Wolf-Manʼs signature dream—cannot, in any way, be assimilated with the molar and extensive structures that are the objects ordinary, ʻ representationalʼ consciousness of the

limits of her grasp of what Deleuze and Guattari were arguing, as does her repeated assimilation of their position point by point to that of Irigaray—she treats them as being, for all intents and purposes, identical. 5 One of Ragland-Sullivanʼs decisive misunderstandings appears to be the assimilation of the Deleuzian ʻintensive,ʼ which has roots in Kant, Nietzsche, and Bergson, to the Lacanian ʻimaginary.ʼ

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sort that Kant and others have described philosophically in great detail.6 In all of this, we are dealing with elements of Deleuzeʼs philosophy that can be traced at least as far back as his early studies of Bergson in the 1950s,7 and which continue to form the essential basis of his engagement with the unconscious, psychoanalytic or otherwise.8 So it should not be surprising that where Deleuze and Guattari claim to have discovered a psychoanalytic misunderstanding of the unconscious, the problem is basically said to be a matter of reading these intensive, differential, multiple, and positive relationships in terms of extensive categories, identity, unity, and a negative or exclusive conception of difference as the fundamental principle of any relationship whatsoever.

In all three of the texts under consideration here, Freud is

consistently accused of doing just this, with the consequence that he misunderstood the structure and function of desire as the basic activity of the unconscious, of an unconscious that is fundamentally productive. This is made to bear upon so many specific points that it would be cumbersome to attempt to list them here—and in any case almost all of them are, directly or indirectly, ramifications of the claim that the libidinal unconscious, which psychoanalysis

6

At one point, Deleuze and Guattari also note that it was precisely Kant who suggests that intensities underpin all of that, as well (see DR 18-19). There have been a number of essential discussions of Deleuzeʼs relationship to Kant written over the years; especially valuable are studies by Constantine Boundas, Daniel W. Smith, and Juliette Simont. On the specific subject of intensity in Kant and its relationship to Deleuze, see Boundas, “An Ontology of Intensities” 24-27 and “What Difference does Deleuzeʼs Difference make?” 3-8. 7 See Deleuze, “Bergsonʼs Conception of Difference.” 8 As Bogue and many others have recognized, this conception is also considerably altered for coming into contact with Guattariʼs notion of ʻdesiring-machines,ʼ which is combined in AntiOedipus with a considerably revised concept of the body without organs, an arrangement which ends up setting the pattern that is elaborated in various terms throughout the decade.

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discovered, was also very considerably misunderstood by psychoanalysis. Everything truly does come back to this, over and over again.9 Before we leave it, however, we must not forget that this critique of psychoanalysis also involves the claim that psychoanalysis is as destructive of utterances as it is of desire. Considering that we are speaking about a discipline that called itself “the talking cure,” it would be difficult to imagine a more profoundly damning accusation—if, that is, we had not already seen psychoanalysis being accused of betraying its own foundations in the unconscious. Furthermore, this new accusation is closely connected to the first insofar as what is at stake in it is the refusal of psychoanalysis to recognize and allow the production of speech at the level of the “machinic assemblage.”10 Near the end of the Wolf-Man plateau (ATP 36-37), Deleuze and Guattari offer what is perhaps their clearest presentation of a basic contention that runs through AntiOedipus, Dialogues, and A Thousand Plateaus, despite the attendant variations in terminology: “there is no subject of enunciation” (D 78, 79; ATP 36-37, 130). Here, as in many other cases where the same claim is mentioned, Deleuze and Guattari add that, insofar as psychoanalysis seeks either to refer unconscious

9

And indeed, even the spareness and the restricted focus of Deleuze and Guattariʼs critique of Freudʼs analysis of the Wolf-Man in A Thousand Plateaus may seem, in this light, to be something more than an attempt on their part to dispose of the question of psychoanalysis as quickly as possible. Rather than this, we can take it, quite consistently, as an attempt to clarify the key principles of their critique, which were regrettably easy to lose track of in warren of details that characterized their earlier presentations. 10 As we become clear below, there are ways in which this second point may well be seen as the core of the strictly “anti-oedipal” critique.

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symptomatic production back to such a subject of enunciation (Lacan)11 or even to link unconscious symptomatic production to some ʻ objectʼ that functions as a signified,12 what it actually accomplishes is to make it impossible for the unconscious to speak at all, since statements (or utterances in the terminology of Dialogues) can only be products of machinic assemblages.13 “If you go to be psychoanalyzed, you believe that you will be able to talk and because of this belief you accept the need to pay. But you donʼt have the least chance of talking. Psychoanalysis is entirely designed to prevent people from talking and to remove from them all conditions of true enunciation” (D 80).

In other words,

psychoanalysis is an agent of repression in the strictest possible sense. Despite, and indeed through, its solicitation of an endless flow of words, psychoanalysis functions above all to prevent the unconscious from speaking. So that, far from anything

as

innocent

as

simply

misunderstanding

the

unconscious,

psychoanalysis actively betrays it.

11

And indeed, even and especially if it is the ʻSignifier which addresses itself to another Signifierʼ that fills this role. 12 Which Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly claim amounts to the functional equivalent of this operation, asserting that Lacanʼs distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary doesnʼt change much. 13 Or, what Deleuze and Guattari explicitly say amounts to the same thing, to “collective assemblages of enunciation” (ATP 37, 130). Strictly speaking, the Deleuzo-Guattarian contention is that this is true universally, so that even apparently individuated subjects of enunciation really arenʼt. That doesnʼt prevent them, in A Thousand Plateaus, from using this terminology (in apparent contradiction to the denial of the existence of such a thing both there and in Dialogues); but since what is actually being referred to is merely a collectivity that announces itself as individuated—essentially, subjectivity of enunciation as a mirage or a perspective distortion—no such contradiction actually occurs. There are of course, in addition to these merely apparent subjects of enunciation, any number of points of ʻsubjectificationʼ / nomadic subjects which are produced in order to pass through them on the surface of various ʻfull bodiesʼ as a result of the ʻthirdʼ synthesis (of conjunction / consummation) as it is elaborated in Anti-Oedipus and subsequently. We will discuss these subjects below.

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At this point, it becomes easy to see how this critique of the effects of psychoanalysis at the level of utterances is related to the concerns Deleuze and his collaborators have about the social function of psychoanalysis. Typically, these become most evident when their attention shifts to the institutional history of psychoanalysis and the various mechanisms through which it has operated as an apparatus of normalization in therapeutic contexts. One of the most striking features of their analysis in this regard is the claim that the (Lacanian) movement to reconstitute analytic practice on the basis of the functions of the signifier, as opposed to the signified, makes very little difference as far as its repressive function is concerned—and indeed that it may very well make things considerably worse (D 77, 81, 89). Deleuze and Parnet are particularly forceful in this regard, and there is reason to think that this may well reflect a hardening of Deleuzeʼs attitude toward Lacan in particular that came about as a result of his involvement in the events that took place in the département de psychanalyse at Vincennes in the fall of 1974, and into which Deleuze and Jean-Francois Lyotard allowed themselves to be drawn in their capacity as professors in the department of philosophy, within which the département de psychanalyse à Vincennes (DPV) was institutionally contained. What occurred was basically a ʻhostile takeover,ʼ at Lacanʼs behest, of the DPV by Jacques-Alain Miller, which was accompanied by the removal of a number of faculty from teaching duties. In a statement originally circulated as a pamphlet, Deleuze and Lyotard objected to this “purge,” contesting Lacanʼs right to instigate it, given his lack of any official position at

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Vincennes. In this, they were hardly unique.14 In fact, as Elisabeth Roudinesco notes, they rather pointedly distanced themselves from some of the more inflammatory—and deeply disproportionate—attacks being made against Miller in particular.15 But this did not prevent them from obliquely characterizing what had occurred as “Stalinist” (Deleuze and Lyotard 61). The last paragraph of this statement is particularly instructive, given its claim that “the knowledge to which psychoanalysis lays claim is inseparable from a kind of terrorism, an intellectual and emotional terrorism made to break down a resistance which psychoanalysis deems unhealthy” (Deleuze and Lyotard 62). It is impossible to miss the implied connection between this and the acknowledgement the authors make that the substance of Lacanʼs intervention amounted to a call “for a return to order in the

14

As is evident from the fact that, by January of 1975, their statement had been published in Les Temps Modernes as part of a group of materials devoted to the affair. 15 “By mid-November [of 1974], [Miller] was being called a ʻfascist,ʼ a ʻpetainist,ʼ and a ʻNaziʼ by certain members of the opposition. He was reproached for using against his “victims” purge techniques that Vichy had used for the Jews. Perhaps Millerʼs adversaries had forgotten that he himself was Jewish, and no doubt they had also chosen the wrong dictatorship. If the Vincennes power grab was indeed a coup de force, it in no way resembled a Nazi putsch. No victim had been tortured, threatened, or deported to concentration camps. There were no deaths, and no one had actually been deprived of his living. If the victims were unhappy, it behooved them to fight their adversary; the administrative means were available” (Roudinesco Jacques Lacan & Co. 576). Roudinesco is, as is evident from this passage, hardly uncritical of the manner in which Lacan and Miller conducted themselves with regard to Vincennes — even going so far as to acknowledge that what Lacan effected in the fall term of 1974 was nothing short of a coup de force, which is to say, a violent overthrow (somewhat at odds with her own emphasis on the fact that, where the Vichy-style accusations against Miller are concerned, no one was actually ʻharmedʼ by the exclusion). Her discussion of Deleuze and Lyotardʼs piece is somewhat similar: she credits them obliquely with “keeping in mind the difference in proportion” involved in the political analogy which they, very carefully, draw between the coup de force and “a Stalinist operation” (Deleuze and Lyotard 61); but ends up offering very little by way of an assessment of the merit of their claims, besides commenting that they are “much more explicitly argued” (Roudinesco Jacques Lacan & Co. 576) than those which had preceded them. Instead, Roudinesco goes on to describe the Millerian response, and to accuse Deleuze and Lyotard of having made a rather large strategic blunder by leaving themselves so wide open to it (see Roudinesco Jacques Lacan & Co. 576-7).

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name of the mysterious matheme of psychoanalysis” (Deleuze and Lyotard 61). And as we shall see, there is reason to think that, beyond the depth of the disagreements which had emerged at a philosophical level between Deleuze and psychoanalysis by the 1970s, it may well have been his increasing concern with the nature of the practical evolution that psychoanalysis had been undergoing since the early 1960s that sealed its fate in his mind. In any case, it will become evident that it is was part and parcel of the Deleuzo-Guattarian critique of psychoanalysis to recognize that its own practical evolution and the shifts in its institutional position not only reflected but also informed its more refined theoretical developments to a very considerable extent. Indeed, there may be times when it will be difficult to cleanly separate these two threads—and the same point may well be seen as belonging to both or as having distinct consequences from each point of view, or may even be articulated and rearticulated several times with different connections.

These nuances aside,

what is crucial is to recognize is that these two threads constitute the basic structure of a critique which, in its details, was developed differently over different iterations, and could itself ultimately be no more systematic than its object, which was intellectually and practically diverse and had undergone a number of developments since Freudʼs time—and would continue to do so even during the period under consideration. In what follows we will consider some exemplary texts, representing each critical thread, in some detail—with the understanding that an exhaustive inventory of Deleuze and Guattariʼs views and their evolution

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in relation to the broad sweep of psychoanalysis in France and outside of it is beyond the scope of this dissertation, let alone this chapter.

II. Even before Deleuze and Guattari get to their ʻ systematicʼ critique of psychoanalysis in the second chapter of Anti-Oedipus, they have already introduced the suggestion that, at a practical level, psychoanalysis is an agent of repression. Indeed, the claim appears as early as the first section of the first chapter, when they are still addressing the most elementary level of the unconscious, that of ʻdesiring-machinesʼ: “It is often thought that Oedipus is an easy subject to deal with, something perfectly obvious, a ʻgivenʼ that is there from the very beginning. But that is not so at all: Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines” (AO 3). Matters quickly become more ambiguous, however, when the task shifts to explaining this repression. As often as not, it seems to be a matter of a stubborn misunderstanding. Its fixation on an Oedipus complex causes psychoanalysis to persistently ask the wrong questions of those suffering psychotic illnesses: “it continues to ask questions and develop its interpretations from the depths of the Oedipal triangle as its basic perspective, even though today it is acutely aware that this frame of reference is not adequate to explain so-called psychotic phenomena” (AO 14). Deleuze and Guattari make no secret of their view that it is in psychotic deliriums that the range, scope and depth of unconscious

70

processes are most fully revealed: “A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on an analystʼs couch” (AO 2). And so it seems fairly clear that their objection amounts to the claim that, by limiting its interrogation to the Oedipal frame, psychoanalysis ensures that its view of the unconscious will remain similarly inadequate—narrow-minded psychoanalysis misunderstands the full breadth of what it has discovered. And yet, there are also passages where Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it is more than this, and that this psychoanalytic ʻ misunderstandingʼ has deeper origins in an imperative to preserve “the rights of Oedipus” (AO 13). In which case, what is at stake would no longer be a simple misunderstanding, but rather the attachment of psychoanalysis to the Oedipus complex as something it cannot or will not give up. The sense that psychoanalysis is unreasonably attached to Oedipus is certainly a persistent feature of the first several sections of the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus. Indeed it forms one of their basic elements, the others being: first, an elaboration of the three syntheses that form the core of Deleuze and Guattariʼs account of the ontological structure of the unconscious as a selfgenerating, intensively articulated desiring apparatus; and second, an extended critique of Freudʼs analysis of Daniel Paul Schreberʼs Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness. Indeed, for Deleuze and Guattari, the contents of Schreberʼs dementia beautifully reflect the range of effects produced by the synthetic operations of the unconscious ʻ primary process,ʼ which they rename “desiring production.”

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Generally, these operations fall into three classes or orders:

the connective

syntheses that take place among the desiring machines themselves; the disjunctive syntheses that occur when desiring machines encounter the body without organs, giving rise to assemblages on its surface; and the conjunctive syntheses through which local and partial subjects arise at the margins of these assemblages. The first, connective, type of syntheses encompass a range of interactions between “desiring-machines” that, on Deleuze and Guattariʼs view, form the most elementary structures of psychic life. In psychoanalytic terms, what would be at stake here is the most elementary stage in the development of the ʻinstincts,ʼ which are seen by Freud as the psychical representatives of organic or physiological processes (see SE XIV 117-122). In the Freudian theory as it is presented in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” the stimuli produced by these organic processes can give rise to instincts just insofar as they acquire idearepresentatives that come to be invested by highly mobile “cathectic intensities” (SE XIV 177), and which will themselves be susceptible to transformations following two basic operations, condensation and displacement.16 As we will see, this Freudian operation encompasses more than Deleuze and Guattariʼs first synthesis, which only covers roughly the initial moment of this process. In this first phase, there occur a set of operations the basic pattern of which Deleuze

16

In “The Unconscious,” Freud defines condensation and displacement as follows. “By the process of displacement one idea may surrender to another its whole quota of cathexis; by the process of condensation it may appropriate the whole cathexis of several other ideas” (SE XIV 186).

72

and Guattari summarize as follows:

“For every organ-machine, an energy

machine; all the time, flows and interruptions” (AO 1-2). Several pages later, they add that the entire series of such “connective” syntheses forms the most basic level of desiring production: “The productive synthesis, the production of production, is inherently connective in nature: ʻand...ʼ ʻ and then...ʼ

This is

because there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast—the mouth)” (AO 5). This elementary pair thus forms the schema of an entire order of operations which take a multitude of forms, but which, in general, can be said to represent the earliest beginnings of the psyche, wherein it remains very much coextensive with the organic processes of the body to which it belongs—as is reflected in the fact that the mouth-breast pair becomes, to a considerable extent, the exemplary instance of a desiring machine in Anti-Oedipus.17 In addition to this generic example, Deleuze and Guattari also say that the effects of the productive synthesis are particularly evident in Schreberʼs delirium when he experiences himself coupling with or being penetrated by “sunbeams” (AO 2). However, in a manner that will be taken by Deleuze and Guattari as

17

Not surprisingly, all of this is quite resonant with the first synthesis as Deleuze describes it in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition, where it is seen both as a matter of ʻhabitʼ and even more as the drawing off of a first instance of pleasure that constitutes the first ʻbeyondʼ of the pleasure principle—and as such the basis, in its being as a ʻfirstʼ instance, of the instinct which seeks to repeat that previously experienced satisfaction. In the current case, Deleuze and Guattari are carefully avoiding anything that could situate the first synthesis within or at the origin of an order of ʻneed,ʼ such as that in terms of which the more conventional psychoanalytic account is framed. Nevertheless, the vision of primary process as being, in the first instance, a matter of ʻdrawing offʼ something specifically psychic from bodily processes appears to be shared between Anti-Oedipus and Deleuzeʼs earlier accounts.

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exemplary of the movement through a series of synthetic structures that is characteristic of the psychic process as they understand it, the value of Schreberʼs ʻsunbeamsʼ undergoes a considerable evolution.

Eventually, they

become what Schreber, Freud, and Deleuze and Guattari all refer to as “rays of God” or “divine rays,” which are themselves “nerves of God” that have “the faculty of transforming themselves into all things in the created world” (Schreber 21), and thereby function as the means by which God performs “miracles” on Schreberʼs body: “From the first beginnings of my contact with God up to the present day my body has continuously been the object of divine miracles” (Schreber 141).

Deleuze and Guattari introduce their second, “disjunctive

synthesis” (AO 12), in relation to the way in which this ʻ miraculatingʼ power seems to ʻtake overʼ the operations of the connective synthesis and redistribute them over the surface of Schreberʼs whole body. As was the case with the first synthesis, the disjunctive synthesis also corresponds to a new activity of production, “the production of recording” (AO 12); and it is as such that it also requires the theoretical elaboration of a new element, distinct form the connective structures of the desiring machines, that will be able to serve as a ʻsurfaceʼ upon which the process of recording is undertaken. Supplementing Schreberʼs testimony with that of Antonin Artaud, Deleuze and Guattari thus claim that the second synthesis differs from the first in that it involves the relation of the desiring-machines, in their productive activity, to something that manifests “an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element

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of anti-production coupled with the process, a full body” (AO 10).

When

considered at the psychic level, this is the famous ʻbody without organsʼ—a term that Deleuze originally borrowed from Artaud, and which he first used in The Logic of Sense.18

However, as Deleuze and Guattari go to explain, the

productive relationships that occur at the ʻpsychicʼ level are precisely analogous to those taking place at the broader ʻsocialʼ level of material economic production, wherein the role of the ʻfull bodyʼ is played by a “socius” (AO 10-11).19 At both levels, the “full body” first presents itself as an impenetrable surface opposed to the productive activity of the first synthesis. At the psychic level, we are told that: “In order to resist the organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier” (AO 9). At the social level, we find, in the capitalist formation, that the body is nothing other than capital as “the fluid and petrified substance of money” (AO 10), which is why “in the beginning, capitalists are necessarily conscious of the opposition between capital and labor” (AO 11), the opposition being analogous to that between the desiring

18

See LS 129, 186-209. As Bogue reminds us, the term is used somewhat differently in the earlier text, “but the central characteristics of the transcendental surface of idea/problems” from The Logic of Sense “reappear as traits of the body without organs” (Bogue 92) in Anti-Oedipus. There is considerable interest in the relationship between Deleuzian texts and Artaudʼs texts, but there is no question that the concept in both The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus is largely Deleuzeʼs. In Artaud, the term appears at least twice, in a 1948 poem cited by Deleuze and Guattari (AO 9) and in Artaudʼs radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God. The relevant text from the latter appears in a passage near the very end of the play. “Man is sick because he is badly constructed / We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animacule that itches him mortally, / god, / and with god / his organs. / For you can tie me up if you wish, / But there is nothing more useless than an organ. / When you have made him a body without organs, / Then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored to him his true freedom” (Artaud 570-571). 19 This is the analogy that forms the basis for the conjunction of the terms “Capitalism” and “Schizophrenia” in the series title of Deleuze and Guattariʼs first two works together.

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machines and the body without organs on the social level. It is important to recognize, however, that this relationship of “repulsion” (AO 9) between what plays the role of the full body and what plays the role of the machines is only one phase, and an unstable one, of the complex process that unfolds at the level of the second synthesis.

This process begins with the

emergence of the full body, which is itself a product of the connective activity of the desiring-machines: “The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product” (AO 8). The body without organs is thus a ʻ degree zeroʼ of the intensive activity of the desiring machines (AO 19), and as such it represents the outcome of desiring-production in a way that remains analogous to Freudʼs view of the psyche as a mechanism directed towards the discharge of energy. In order for such a discharge to be possible, the system must recognize and, at least in principle, seek to achieve a zero state.20 The body without organs, then, is the point of “discharge,” understood as a problematic, unresolvable aim of the unconscious process: “Everything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in place—and then the whole process will

20

It might seem that Deleuze and Guattariʼs productive account lends a degree of permanence to the effects of unconscious activity—the body without organs as “an enormous undifferentiated object” (AO 7) that is produced by the desiring-machines themselves—that is not so clearly suggested by Freud. We will see that this is not so, however, if we recall that the Freudian unconscious is structured by the wish to repeat a previous experience of satisfaction, even while the form taken by this repetition is ultimately a matter of indifference. We find this perfectly reflected in this notion of the body without organs that is: 1) a product of the synthetic activity of desire; 2) set in opposition to this activity in its immediate aims of productive discharge; but also 3) precisely what attracts or compels productive activity.

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begin all over again” (AO 7).21 To conceive of the unconscious process taking place at all, it must be possible to approach this discharge because if one could not move towards it, then the process would not be able to begin.22 And so, even though it begins as what ʻrepelsʼ the activity of the connective synthesis, the full body must also be seen to function as an attractor for that very same activity. What, precisely, is entailed by this new aspect of the disjunctive synthesis? At the psychic level, we find that: “The body without organs now falls back on (se rabat sur) desiring-production, attracts it, and appropriates it for its own. [...] An attraction-machine now takes the place, or may take the place, of a repulsion machine: a miraculating machine succeeding the paranoiac machine” (AO 11). And alternately, at the social level, we discover that: [Capital] is not only the fluid and petrified substance of money, for it will give to the sterility of money the form whereby money produces money. It produces surplus value, just as the body without organs reproduces itself, puts forth shoots, and branches out to the farthest corners of the universe. It makes the machine responsible for producing a relatively surplus value, while embodying itself in the machine as fixed capital. Machines and agents cling so closely to capital that their very functioning appears to be miraculated by it. Everything seems objectively to be produced by capital as quasi-cause (AO 10-11) And in a similar fashion, Schreberʼs rays will amount to miracles just insofar as they are seen to be a result of this ʻ quasi-causeʼ in its divine aspect (as divine “nerves” in an detached and malleable sense), and the miracles themselves will alternately be experienced as hostile depredations upon his body and as divine

21

Obviously this is also, as Deleuze and Guattari note, similar to Freudʼs “death instinct” (AO 8). As we will see, this is why Deleuze and Guattari are so virulently opposed at a clinical level to any treatment regime that tends to isolate patients suffering from delirium, since it would tend to close off all avenues of discharge. See AO 5. 22

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gifts.

In either case, the entire complex array of “miracles” that Schreber

experiences, and the way they are distributed in every possible permutation over the surface of his body,23 can be seen, in Deleuze and Guattariʼs terms, as being the result of a disjunctive synthesis that comes about when the “full body” is introduced, as a ʻthirdʼ term, into the series of couplings that result from the connective synthesis: [W]hen the productive connections pass from machines to the body without organs (as from labor to capital), it would seem that they come under another law that expresses a distribution in relation to the nonproductive element as “a natural or divine presupposition” (the disjunctions of capital). Machines attach themselves to the body without organs as so many points of disjunction between which an entire network of new syntheses is now woven, marking off the surface into co-ordinates, like a grid. The “either...or...or” of the schizophrenic takes over from the “and then” (AO 12). And so the disjunctive synthesis does not replace or supplant, but rather “comes to overlap” (AO 12) the connective synthesis, with the consequence that: “The process as process of production extends into the method as method of inscription” (AO 13). And Deleuze and Guattari insist that this extension, i.e., the disjunctive synthesis, does not alter the basic serial organization of all unconscious processes: “The full body is introduced as a third term in the series, without destroying, however, the essentially binary-linear nature of this series: 2,1,2,1...” (AO 14). The disjunctive synthesis gives rise to a more complicated serial structure, but one that remains fundamentally serial.

23

As Schreber writes, “I may say that hardly a single limb or organ of my body escaped being temporarily damaged by miracles, nor a single muscle being pulled by miracles, either moving or paralyzing it according to the respective purpose” (Schreber 141).

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This last point is of critical importance; it entails that no matter how its effects may be experienced in the form of a delirium, the process of the disjunctive synthesis remains “completely refractory to a transcription that would transform and mold it into a specifically ternary and triangular schema such as Oedipus” (AO 14). Insofar, then, as psychoanalysis can be seen to demand that even purely unconscious, primary processes should nevertheless operate in terms of such a ternary structure, Deleuze and Guattari will accuse it of betraying the unconscious that it discovered. demand?

But does psychoanalysis make such a

From the very beginning of the section we have been analyzing,

Deleuze and Guattari have been concerned with Freudʼs interpretation of the paranoiac structure in his analysis of Schreber. In particular, they began by taking issue with the status he accords to both secondary repression and the associated mechanism of projection in paranoia.24 “Projection enters the picture only secondarily, as does counter-investment, as the body without organs invests a counterinside or a counteroutside, in the form of a persecuting organ or some exterior agent of persecution” (AO 9).25 The significance of this becomes evident when Deleuze and Guattari go on to reproach Freud for insisting on the primacy

24

Freud insists upon this when seeking to explain the actual contents of Schreberʼs delirium (Freud “Schreber” 169-175). Deleuze and Guattari cite Victor Tausk as using the same notion to explain “the paranoiac machine as a mere projection ʻof a personʼs own bodyʼ” (AO 9) 25 Deleuze and Guattariʼs translators obscure the psychoanalytic reference here slightly. What is being translated as “counter-investmentʼ in this passage is the same term that appears when they are referring to the Freudian theory of primal or primary repression, and which in that instance is translated in strictly psychoanalytic language as “countercathexis.” The terms ʻcountercathexisʼ or ʻanticathexisʼ are important to the theory of repression, which Freud claims cannot be explained without supposing the existence of an “anticathexis, by means of which the system Pcs. protects itself from the pressure upon it of the unconscious idea” (SE XIV 181).

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of condensation in relation to the disjunctive operations that he nevertheless recognizes in Schreberʼs delirium. Freud stresses the importance of these disjunctive syntheses in Schreberʼs delirium in particular, but also in delirium as a general phenomenon. [...] But why does Freud [...] add that, on second thought, hysterical neurosis comes first, and that disjunctions appear only as a result of the projection of a more basic, primordial condensed material? Doubtless this is a way of maintaining intact the rights of Oedipus in the God of delirium and the schizoparanoiac recording process. And for this very reason we must pose the most far-reaching question in this regard: does the recording of desire go by way of the various stages in the formation of the Oedipus complex? Disjunctions are the form that the genealogy of desire assumes; but is this genealogy Oedipal, is it recorded in the Oedipal triangulation? Is it not more likely that Oedipus is a requirement or a consequence of social reproduction, insofar as this latter aims at domesticating a genealogical form and content that are in every way intractable (AO 13)? This brings us to the core of the problem. In the course of attempting to explain why Schreberʼs delirium falls into a pattern of decomposing the various figures that appear in it—“the persecutor is divided into Flechsig and God; in just the same way Flechsig himself subsequently splits up into two personalities, the ʻupperʼ and ʻ middleʼ Flechsig, and God into the ʻ lowerʼ and ʻ upperʼ God (Freud “Schreber” 149)—Freud ends up explaining away the very multiplicity at work in this process.

He insists, rather, that this decomposition is really just the

manifestation of a defense against the results of an earlier condensation, by means of which Schreber is supposed to have identified Flechsig and God with the forbidden object of his repressed homosexual wish-fantasy: his father (Freud “Schreber” 149-150).

As far as Deleuze and Guattari are concerned, this

amounts to nothing so much as Freudʼs willfully ignoring the given evidence of

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Schreberʼs delirium in order to impose upon it a tenuous interpretation that conforms with the supposed universality of the Oedipus complex—or, in other words, to impose Oedipus and its static, ternary structure upon the disjunctive serialities that are actually at work in Schreberʼs delirium. Insofar as this critique is justified by a careful reading of Freudʼs own analysis of Schreber, it seems, contrary to a reading like Fliegerʼs, that we can hardly say that Deleuze and Guattari are either simply inventing a Freudian tendency to “Oedipalize” or presenting what Freud says in an profoundly oversimplified way—any more than they are only referring to the sorts of readings offered by ʻ APAʼ analysts, but never by Freud himself. Indeed, if anything, the texts surrounding the one Deleuze and Guattari cite go even farther in overcoding any multi-serial organization in Schreberʼs delirium in order to make everything converge on the Oedipal figure par excellance: A process of decomposition of this kind is very characteristic of paranoia. Paranoia decomposes just as hysteria condenses. Or rather, paranoia resolves once more into their elements the products of the condensations and identifications which are effected in the unconscious.26 The constant repetition of the decomposing process would, according to Jung, be an expression of the importance which the person in question possessed for him. All this dividing up of Flechsig and God into a number of persons would have the same meaning as the splitting up of the persecutor into Flechsig and God. They would all be duplications of one and the same important relationship (Freud “Schreber” 149-150). And beyond this, things may get even worse from a Deleuzo-Guattarian point of view in the footnote where Freud refers favorably to Jungʼs view that “this

26

Deleuze and Guattari quote up to this point in the area covered by the first ellipsis inserted into the text cited above from AO 13.

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decomposition follows the general lines taken by schizophrenia in that it uses a process of analysis in order to produce a watering-down effect, and is thus designed to prevent the occurrence of unduly powerful impressions” (Freud “Schreber” 149n17). On the one hand, Deleuze and Guattari may well agree, here, that part of the function of the body without organs, and thus of this entire second stage of synthesis, is to prevent the activity of the desiring machines from reaching an intolerable level of intensity (AO 9); but everything in their analysis points to what is at stake here being an interruption, redirection, and restarting of the desiring mechanism, a transformation or a series of transformations being added to a process that is already plural, and not the breaking up of one overriding unity.27

And so, for all that Jungʼs theory may or may not be

problematic, Freudʼs citation of it in the present context shows that he does not see Schreberʼs delirium as fundamentally serial. In which case, there appears to be some real merit to Deleuze and Guattariʼs view that Freudʼs account of the mechanisms by which delirium is formed, its sources, and its ultimate significance are, at the very least, profoundly reductive.28 Furthermore, Deleuze and Guattariʼs account of the three syntheses in the first three sections of Anti-Oedipus can also be seen as their reply to Freudʼs

27

It is important in this context to recall that the body without organs cannot be said to be a unity or a totality or a whole of any sort. “The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with the image of the body. It is the body without an image” (AO 8). 28 And indeed, Deleuze and Guattari work through an even more pointed example of essentially the same thing in the course of their discussion of the two reductive procedures that Freud uses in order to substitute verbal unities (one wolf) for multiplicities of things (packs of wolves) that appear in the Wolf-Manʼs signature dream (ATP 27-28).

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assertion, in the section of the “Psychoanalytical Notes...” entitled “The Mechanism of Paranoia,” that the operative principles of the projective structure he finds in Schreberʼs delirium can be found in the dynamics of repression. Freud tells us that repression is best thought of as having three “phases, which are easily distinguishable from one another conceptually”:

“fixation,” “repression

proper,” and “the return of the repressed” (Freud “Schreber” 170-171). And while Deleuze and Guattari do not slavishly follow a schema based on this distinction, we can nevertheless see their account as being in dialogue with it.

The

rethinking of the primary process involved in their account of the first synthesis has the effect of undermining any account that would base the development of Schreberʼs illness on a fixation at a certain, narcissistic, point in an ordinary course of libidinal development.29

If the delirium manifests the traversal of

Schreberʼs body by a whole range of intensive products (nerves, rays, sunbeams and their effects), Deleuze and Guattari will insist on the productive nature of all of it, thereby resisting the idea that it represents the effects of a reflux of otherwise externally directed libido. And in their account of the second synthesis, they continue to challenge Freudʼs schema by insisting that what is at stake in the parts of the delirium that Freud has the most difficulty with is not the secondary repression of a fixated idea (homosexual attachment, narcissism) but rather the primal repression which derives from the body without organs (AO 9) and the disjunctive networks that, in turn, come to be formed on the surface of

29

Which is more or less exactly what Freud goes on to argue. See Freud “Schreber” 175-176.

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the full body when it functions as an attractor instead of a repulsor. And once again, this serves, on the whole, to distance Schreberʼs delirium, in both its persecutory and is miraculating aspects, from the basis Freud assigns them in Schreberʼs supposed narcissistic fixation and the effects of repressive processes directed towards it. We should not be surprised to find that Deleuze and Guattariʼs account of the final, conjunctive synthesis follows a similar pattern. The synthesis is the third moment in the process that began with the activity of the desiring machines and was transformed by the production of the body without organs as a recording surface that, in turn, “falls back on” production, appropriating it to itself. And just as the second synthesis was generated as a matter of course by the activity of the desiring machines in the first synthesis, so too recording gives rise to a “production of consumption” (AO 16). There is a strong sense that this is the completion of the process, the accomplishment of what it has been working towards.

Indeed, we have been anticipating it since we spoke of the body

without organs providing the forces at work in desiring production an opportunity to move toward discharging themselves. And we see a similar progression from the dynamic point of view: “[j]ust as a part of the libido as energy of production was transformed into the energy of recording (Numen), a part of this energy of recording is transformed into energy of consummation (Voluptas)” (AO 16-17). It is important to note, however, that none of this amounts to a ʻcompletionʼ or any teleological sort of finality; any accomplishment, consummation or resolution here

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is partial, at most—a result, undoubtedly, but not one that brings the process to an ʻend.ʼ Instead, an accommodation is reached among the diverse tendencies at work in the relationship between the desiring machines and the body without organs, a partial and temporary resolution that allows something to cohere and emerge. But what, precisely, is it that comes about as a result of this new phase? Discharge in the sense under discussion here seems to require the production of a subject capable of experiencing it. We can see this in Deleuze and Guattariʼs presentation of the ʻwholeʼ process as seen from the point of view of the different types of ʻmachinesʼ that have succeeded one another in the unconscious: Our point of departure was the opposition between desiring machines and the body without organs. The repulsion of these machines, as found in the paranoiac machine of primary repression, gave way to an attraction in the miraculating machine. But the opposition between attraction and repulsion persists. It would seem that a genuine reconciliation of the two can take place only at the level of a new machine, functioning as “the return of the repressed” (AO 17). Here we find, as expected, that what is at stake in the third synthesis corresponds to the remaining phase of the structure of repression by which Freud sought to account for Schreberʼs delirium, “irruption, or the return of the repressed” (Freud “Schreber” 171). For Freud, “the return of the repressed” most often carries overtones of disaster, the mechanism of irruption being closely linked to that of symptom formation. In any case, the nature what returns is clear: “This irruption takes its start from the point of fixation, and it involves a regression of the libidinal development to that point” (Freud “Schreber” 171). And

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so he will see, in the ʻ catastrophicʼ climax of Schreberʼs delirium, nothing other than the final playing out of the consequences of his narcissistic regression: “At the climax of his illness, under the influence of visions which were ʻ partly of a terrifying character, and partly, too, of an indescribable grandeurʼ (p. 73),30 Schreber became convinced of the immanence of a great catastrophe, of the end of the world” (Freud “Schreber” 171). Thus far, these visions, and their vacillation between grandiose and terrifying aspects, can be accounted for in terms of Deleuze and Guattariʼs paranoiac and miraculating machines; so that they seem to belong to the second synthesis. But Freud recognizes an additional element that becomes clearer as Schreberʼs illness progresses: The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe; for his subjective world has come to an end since he has withdrawn his love from it. [...]31 And the paranoiac builds it up again, not more splendid, it is true, but at least so that he can once more live in it. He builds it up by the work of his delusions. The delusion-formation, which we take to be a pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction. Such a reconstruction after the catastrophe is more or less successful, but never wholly so; in Schreberʼs words, there has been a “profound internal change” in the world. But the man has recaptured a relation, and often a very intense one, to people and things in the world, although the relation may be a hostile one now, where formerly it was sympathetic and affectionate (Freud “Schreber” 173-174). This sense of delirium as an attempt at a recovery and a reconstitution of the world is related to what Deleuze and Guattari call the “celibate machine” (AO

30

Freudʼs citations refer to the German edition of Schreberʼs Memoirs. See Freud “Schreber” 105. 31 Freud here inserts a citation from Part I of Goetheʼs Faust; “Woe! Woe! / Thou has destroyed it, / The beautiful world, / With mightly fist! / It tumbles, it falls in pieces! / A demigod has shattered it! / ... / Mighty / Among the sons of earth, / More splendid, / Build it again, / Build it up in thy bosom!” He is referring to these verses in what follows the ellipsis in the text cited above.

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17)32 that emerges as the successor to the paranoiac and miraculating machines. As the product of the ʻ reconciliationʼ between the forces that produce the grandiose and terrifying aspects of the earlier phase, the celibate machine brings about not only the reconstitution of the world (ʻprofoundly changedʼ) but, equally importantly, the point of entry into a new relation (ʻoften a very intense oneʼ) with the world and those who populate it.33

Deleuze and Guattari cite several

instances of this sort of paranoiac “joining forces” (AO 17) with what had been experienced as hostile before, taking them to be characteristic of the third synthesis and remarking on the manner in which Freud, too, “stresses the crucial turning point that occurs in Schreberʼs illness when Schreber becomes reconciled to becoming a woman and embarks upon a process of self-cure that brings him back to the equation Nature = Production (the production of a new humanity)” (AO 17). How does this transformation occur? For Deleuze and Guattari, this new position of Schreberʼs is exemplary of the character of the subject of the unconscious, the nomadic subject that most clearly emerges in derlium: the points of disjunction on the body without organs form circles that converge on the desiring machines; then the subject—produced as a residuum alongside the machine, as an appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine—passes from one circle to another. This subject is not at the center, which is occupied by the machine, but at the periphery,

32

While this denomination is in perfect (and humorous) accord with Freudʼs claim that the ʻcatastrophicʼ features of paranoiac delirium result from suffererʼs own withdrawal “from the persons in his environment and from the external world generally the libidinal cathexis which he has hitherto directed on to them” (Freud “Schreber” 173), it is more directly a pun, in French, on the title of Duchampʼs painting The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (“La mariée mise à nue par ses célibataires, meme”), to which Deleuze and Guattari refer on the next page. 33 The celibate machine in this sense may well reflect the Deleuzo-Guattarian development of the positive sense of narcissism that Deleuze elaborated in both Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. See Chapters 4 and 5 of the present work for an account of this earlier view.

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forever decentered, defined by the states through which it passes (AO 20). The celibate machine, then, gives rise not only to a new configuration of the desiring-machines on the body without organs, but also to this mobile, dencentered subject in which the intensities thereby produced can find discharge or consummation. But what are we to make of this form of subjectivity?

Deleuze and

Guattari emphasize that it is anything but a ʻsubject of enunciationʼ in the sense that they will later deny exists: “the subject is produced as a mere residuum alongside the desiring-machines, or [...] he confuses himself with this third productive machine and with the residual relation that it brings about: a conjunctive synthesis of consummation in the form of a wonderstruck ʻ So thatʼs what it was!ʼ” (AO 17-18). Indeed, all three syntheses and the structures they produce belong to the unconscious, including this ʻnomadicʼ subject that passes through the shifting topography of intensities distributed by the celibate machine on the surface of the body without organs: a strange subject [...] with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines, being defined by the share of the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward in the form of becoming an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state (AO 16) Not a ʻ subject of enunciationʼ then, but a consequence of the unconscious synthesis that gives rise to these “intensive quantities” (AO 18) that are the real sources of psychotic experience according to Deleuze and Guattari. Psychoanalysis, however, appears incapable of recognizing these sources 88

as such or accounting for on their own terms. In fact, it tends to declare such an account to be impossible, a claim which Deleuzeʼs and Guattariʼs account of the syntheses seems to refute in practice. There is a schizophrenic experience of intensive quantities in their pure state, to a point that is almost unbearable—a celibate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended between life and death, an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form. These are often described as hallucinations and delirium, but the basic phenomenon of hallucination (I see, I hear) and the basic phenomenon of delirium (I think...) presuppose an I feel at an even deeper level, which gives hallucinations their object and thought delirium its content—an “I feel that I am becoming a woman,” “that I am becoming a god,” and so on, which is neither delirious or hallucinatory, but will project the hallucination or internalize the delirium. Delirium and hallucination are secondary to the really primary emotion, which in the beginning only experiences intensities, becomings, transitions (AO 18-19). Following this, we can see that it is not just the ʻ cure,ʼ but ultimately the entire course of Schreberʼs delirium that is to be accounted for as a reflection of this intensive experience. “Where do these pure intensities come from? They come from the two preceding forces, repulsion and attraction, and form the opposition of these two forces” (AO 19). And Deleuze and Guattari will indeed go on to describe in detail how such an account would work, both in principle and using Freudʼs analysis of Schreber and other examples as illustrations.

For us,

however, what is most important here is the critique of psychoanalysis that this entire theory entails. The pattern of this critique begins to play itself out with Deleuze and Guattariʼs anguished demand, following a long description of the almost unbearable intensity of schizophrenic experience, to know: “How is it possible

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that the schizo was conceived of as the autistic rag—separated from the real and cut off from life—that he is so often thought to be” (AO 19-20)? The implication here is obviously that psychoanalysis is guilty of harboring such a conception,34 and that it is thereby complicit in the production of the functionally autistic institutionalized schizophrenic. But Deleuze and Guattariʼs agenda, in raising this issue, turns out to be more extensive than simply calling into question the ability of psychoanalysis to account for psychotic patients. Rather, they want to suggest a threefold connection between the analytic misconception of the unconscious in general, the clearly oppressive nature of the psychiatric treatment of hospitalized patients, and the treatment by psychoanalysis of its ʻownʼ neurotic patients. “And shouldnʼt this question compel us to raise another one,35 which at first glace seems quite different: how does psychoanalysis go about reducing a person, who this time is not a schizophrenic but a neurotic, to a pitiful creature who eternally consumes daddy-and-mommy and nothing else whatsoever” (AO 20)? On the one hand, posing this question in these terms is clearly grounded on the analysis Deleuze and Guattari have just finished.

Indeed, lest we miss the

significance of their claim that the real subject of delirium and hallucination in psychosis is the nomadic subject of the third synthesis, and not the Oedipalized figure psychoanalysis believes itself to have discovered (as exemplified by

34

As can be seen easily in Freudʼs discussions of dementia praecox, paraphrenia, or schizophrenia, as he variously calls it, in the last section of “Psychoanalytical Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia.” 35 The original context makes it clear that the ʻfirst questionʼ referred to here is that of the means by which the psychiatric treatment of schizophrenics produces ʻautistic rags.ʼ

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Freudʼs analysis of Schreber), they make it quite explicit: How could the conjunctive synthesis of “So thatʼs what it was!” and “So itʼs me!” have been reduced to the endless, dreary discovery of Oedipus: “So itʼs my father, my mother”? We cannot answer these two questions at this point. We merely see how very little the consumption of pure intensities has to do with family figures, and how very different the connective tissue of the “So itʼs...” is from the Oedipal tissue (AO 20). The connection between this failure with regard to psychotics and the question Deleuze and Guattari ask regarding the psychoanalytic treatment of neurotics is, for the moment, left implicit, but nevertheless entirely obvious. And in addition, what should be evident to us here is that, even if they do not answer it, by the very act of posing this question Deleuze and Guattari are moving from the first thread of their critique of psychoanalysis to the second. If all of this begins with a demonstration, which can only be carried out effectively in relation to psychotics, of how psychoanalysis “breaks up all the productions of desire,” the ultimate consequence of that at a practical level will be the corresponding recognition that psychoanalysis “crushes all formations of utterances” (D 77).

This is the

connection between the delirium of the psychotic and the flow of words that the analyst demands of the neurotic—under, Deleuze and Guattari argue, entirely false pretenses. And it is to this second thread that we will now turn, paying special attention to its practical ramifications, which may be seen to have transformed Deleuze and Guattari from critics to opponents of psychoanalysis.

III. Deleuze and Guattari begin the third section of the second chapter of Anti91

Oedipus with a sentence that confirms one of our basic theses as nicely as could possibly be asked for: “It is easy to see that the problem is above all practical, that it concerns above all else the practice of the cure” (AO 56). This is hardly the first time they have made such a claim. Indeed, at the very end of the first chapter, they had already invoked the authority of Foucaultʼs then decade-old Histoire de la folie in order to pass judgment, not on the concepts but rather on the therapeutic aims of psychoanalysis. Insofar as psychoanalysis cloaks insanity in the mantle of a “parental complex,” and regards the patterns of self-punishment resulting from Oedipus as a confession of guilt, its theories are not at all radical or innovative. On the contrary: it is completing the task begun by nineteenth-century psychology, namely, to develop a moralized, familial discourse of mental pathology, linking madness to the “half-real, halfimaginary dialectic of the Family,” deciphering within it “the unending attempt to murder the father,” “the dull thud of instincts hammering at the solidity of the family as an institution and at its most archaic symbols.” Hence, instead of taking part in an undertaking that will bring about genuine liberation, psychoanalysis is taking part in the work of bourgeois repression at its most far reaching level, that is to say, keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy and making no effort to do away with this problem once and for all (AO 50). Deleuze and Guattari do not bother with the question of whether this ʻrepressiveʼ aspect is a matter of deliberate choice—that is, the question of whether it is a matter of participation by default in an institutional trend or whether instead the lack of critical awareness on the part of psychoanalysts to the broader significance of tying their practice so very tightly to the specific dynamics of the bourgeois family amounts to a tacit endorsement of its use a regulatory matrix by which to determine the conditions of ʻ healthʼ for any given subject. To a very considerable extent, the answer to this question does not appear to matter, the 92

suggestion being that whatever the personal intentions of this or that psychoanalyst prove to be, at an institutional level psychoanalysis comes into being in the space created for it and confers upon each of its practitioners an unavoidable interest in ensuring the stability of its own foundations. In Dialogues, Deleuze and Parnet take up more or less the same gambit, but with a considerably greater degree of sophistication and a more consistent focus on the institutional aspects of this dynamic.

This time, instead of

psychology, the originary space for analysis is said to have been prepared by nineteenth-century psychiatry. Deleuze and Parnet introduce this genealogy in the course of a discussion of the evolution of psychoanalysis. Their basic claim therein is that two apparently opposed trends that can be discerned in the development of psychoanalysis are, in fact, “evidence of the same changes”: on the one hand, a trend toward the proliferation of psychoanalysis—its transformation into a ubiquitous element in “all sorts, of techniques of therapy, of adjustment, or even marketing”—and, on the other hand, a trend toward “harden[ing],” “refinement, a very lofty ʻ returnʼ to Freud” (D 82). They go on to demonstrate this thesis in terms of three specific sets of ʻunderlyingʼ changes: 1) “psychoanalysis has displaced its center—from the family to married life” (D 82); 2)

“psychoanalysis is acquiring an untransferable, inalienable statutory fixity,

rather than entering into a temporary contractual relationship” (D 85); and 3) psychoanalysis has made, at the core of its practice, a “transition from the signified to the signifier” (D 86)—the last theme being one we have already

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considered in the first section of this chapter. In each of these cases, Deleuze and Parnet argue that psychoanalysis becomes more rigid at the level of doctrine, and more idealist, in proportion to the degree to which it expands beyond its original institutional sphere. How this works can easily be seen in the case of the first axis of transformation, on which psychoanalytic practice shifts away from the specific context of the family in order to “[set] itself up between spouses, lovers or friends rather than parents and children” (D 82), with the consequence that “neurosis has abandoned hereditary models [...] to pursue patterns of contagion. Neurosis has acquired its most frightening power, that of propagation by contagion” (D 83). In this case, the doctrinal rigidity appears first on the side of the patients, as Deleuze and Parnet illustrate by comparing the public reticence characteristic of the social posture of neurotic patients in the early days of psychoanalysis to what they describe as the “vampiric or poisonous” behavior of “modern depressive types who cannot seem to bear anyone elseʼs ʻhealthʼ either” (D 83).36 Without discounting the degree to which this may seem even more applicable to the contemporary regime of psychiatric disorders (ADHD, SAD, PMDD and so forth), what should be emphasized is that, once established in their patients, this attitude cannot meet with any considerable resistance from psychoanalysts. Indeed, if curing these patients “would first mean destroying this will to venom in them” (D 83), Deleuze and Parnet remind us analysts, in the end, can have no actual interest in doing

36

It is worth noting in passing the similarity between this characterization of the modern neurotic and Nietzscheʼs view of ʻslave moralityʼ in the first essay of the Genealogy of Morals.

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so insofar as these patients have, in fact, become their chief recruiting agents. And so, as the contextual basis of neurosis becomes broader and less specific, the fact of illness becomes more and more a defining characteristic of the individual—an ʻ essenceʼ which the analyst is there to manage, but not to eliminate or even contain. This form of proliferation, and its consequences, furthermore prefigures the transition that occurs on the next axis, wherein the status of the analytical relationship changes from a limited contractual exchange to an unlimited “statutory fixity” (D 85).

To explain this, Deleuze and Parnet begin with a

consideration of the development of the psychiatric practices that preceded psychoanalysis. Making a point that will be also appear in A Thousand Plateaus (ATP 119-120, 129), they write: “[h]istorically, psychiatry does not seem to us to have been constituted around the notion of madness but [...] at the point where this notion proved difficult to apply” (D 83).

What they have in mind are

paranoiac and monomaniac deliriums (“delirium of interpretation” and “delirium of passion” respectively), both of which, they explain, constitute instances where the boundary between madness and sanity becomes indistinct,37 and in which the

37

“On the one hand, there are people who seem to be mad, but who are not ʻreallyʼ so, having kept their faculties, and first and foremost the faculty of properly managing their money and money and their possessions (paranoid conduct, the delirium of interpretation, etc.). On the other hand, there are people who are ʻreallyʼ mad and yet donʼt seem to be, suddenly committing an outrageous act which nothing led us to foresee, arson, murder, etc. (monomaniac conduct, the delirium of passion or revenge)” (D 83-84). In the fifth chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari will elaborate on this distinction with the principle aim of contrasting “a paranoidinterpretive ideal regime of signifiance with a passional, post-signifying regime” (ATP 120), a task which bears very little essential relation to psychoanalysis, though it can be clearly related to the analysis of the different “machines” in the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus. Psychoanalysis, by

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doctor ends up being “accused of treating as insane certain people who are not exactly so, and of not seeing in time the madness of others who clearly are” (D 84). The identification of these diseases led to the collapse of the exclusionary model of madness, forcing the recognition of “[a] whole ʻ psychopathology of everyday lifeʼ” (D 84) around which psychiatry first came into being. Accordingly, Deleuze and Parnet conclude, “it is around the failure of the notion of madness that psychiatry is constituted and that psychoanalysis has been able to link up with it” (D 84, my emphasis). Doubtlessly, this gives a further sense to Deleuze and Guattariʼs claim, at the end of the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus, that psychoanalysis is “not at all radical or innovative” (AO 50). But even so, Deleuze and Parnet credit psychoanalysis with achieving something that was beyond the abilities of medicalized psychiatry. Psychoanalysis, at its inception, succeeded in bringing off a very important manoeuvre: getting all sorts of people to go through the liberal contractual relationship who had until then seemed excluded from it (ʻmadnessʼ put all those it afflicted outside all possible contracts). The specifically

contrast, is viewed in that text as a “mixed semiotic: a despotic regime of significance and interpretation [...] but also an authoritarian regime of subjectification and prophetism” (ATP 125). Thus, in contrast to the present analysis in Dialogues, which focuses on the way that psychiatry opens up a space into which psychoanalysis will insinuate itself, in A Thousand Plateaus, considering the typical pathologies of psychiatry separately allows Deleuze and Guattari to develop accounts of these two delusional systems as ʻregimes of signsʼ in their own right. In general, A Thousand Plateaus frequently adopts such a strategy, preferring to develop positive accounts wherever possible and making its critical points in passing and in the margins of texts that fundamentally have other agendas. Not surprisingly, it is easy to see the discussion of psychoanalysis as being essentially over after the second chapter of that text; which in turn reinforces the impression, reflected in an analysis like Bogueʼs, that the critique of psychoanalysis is not what is truly important in any of Deleuze and Guattariʼs work during the 1970s, and that the best way to deal with it is to simply acknowledge the fact of it, consider its specific points where they are illustrative of some more fundamentally Deleuzian point, and otherwise move on. Insofar as we want to assess that critique, however, this also means that the best approach to considering it will be to focus principally on Dialogues and refer to A Thousand Plateaus primarily for clarification and development.

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psychoanalytic contract, a flux of words for a flux of money, was going to make the psychoanalyst someone able to insert himself into every pore of the society occupied by these doubtful cases (D 84). By itself, this claim has the important consequence of allowing us to specify more precisely how it is that the social value of psychoanalysis rested, at least initially, as much on the practical form of its therapy as on its theoretical self-justification, or even its claims to be able to generate specific—and therapeutically effective— knowledge of individuals. However, the ultimate point of Deleuze and Parnetʼs analysis is to explain the significance of the fact that psychoanalysis has moved away from this contractual basis, which turns out, once more, to connect a universalizing movement to an increasingly dogmatic posture. Still speaking of its institutional position (which was initially that of a marginal and, as we will see, “unofficial” element in the knowledge/power apparatus surrounding mental health), Deleuze and Parnet write: “But the more psychoanalysis saw that it was gaining ground, the more it turned toward the deliriums concealed behind the neuroses, the less it seems to have been happy with the contractual relationship—even if, on the face of it, it was retained” (D 84). Here we encounter the beginnings of what Deleuze and Guattari must have had in mind when they wrote “Oedipus is the idealist turning point” (AO 55): when what is at stake in a psychoanalysis becomes less a matter of what is signified by symptoms than of the signifiers themselves—what Deleuze and his collaborators come to call ʻsignifianceʼ in both Dialogues and A Thousand Plateaus—then we must say that psychoanalysis has become a

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dogmatic—or worse, an axiomatic—procedure. And this is exactly what Deleuze and Parnet claim when they come to consider their third axis of transformation, which follows just this path from signified to signifier: If we no longer look for a signified for supposedly significant symptoms; if we look, on the contrary, for the signifier for symptoms which would be no more than its effect; if interpretation gives way to signifiance—then a new shift takes place. Psychoanalysis has, in effect, its own references and has no more use for an external ʻreferent.ʼ Everything that happens in the analystʼs consulting room is true. What happens elsewhere is derived or secondary. [...] Psychoanalysis has ceased to be an experimental science in order to get hold of an axiomatic system (D 86). It is impossible, at this juncture, to miss the fact that Deleuze and Parnet are talking about Lacan, and specifically about the way in which the Lacanian ʻreturnʼ to Freud has supplanted the original Freudian procedure.

And this is by no

means their first such assault, since they have already taken an explicit swipe at the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, the school that Lacan had founded in 1964, as a perfect example of ʻ statutory fixityʼ (D 85) in the analytic situation that, they claimed, had come to replace the contractual relationship governing traditional analytic procedure as a practical consequence of the shift away from interpretation of neurotic symptoms and towards a concern with delirium as a purely signifying system. Furthermore, in both of these cases the ʻdogmatism,ʼ or the axiomatic and self-contained nature of the analytic reality, can be seen to correspond to one last transformation: “Psychoanalysis had in fact achieved what was the source of Freudʼs anxiety at the end of his life; it had become interminable, interminable in principle” (D 85-86). This is undoubtedly one of the keys to any view of the 98

Deleuzo-Guattarian critique of psychoanalysis: the idea that, as a practical matter, what psychoanalysis demands of its patients (and anyone who otherwise submits him or herself to its analytic categories) has become an in principle endless act of submission to its statutory governance. As Lacan puts it, what matters is no longer even what the analyst might or might not know, but the submission on the part of the analysand to the analyst, who occupies for them the position of a ʻ subject supposed to know.ʼ38 This would be the final, perfect completion of what we have seen Deleuze and Guattari asserting since the beginning of our discussion, that—whatever the patient might think, or even be told by the analyst about his or her obligation to produce discourse, to speak—as a practical matter,39 the actual effect of analysis is to make speaking perfectly impossible. It is no great secret to any reader of Dialogues who is conversant with the major figures in the psychoanalytic literature that Deleuze and Parnetʼs text is far more strongly and aggressively opposed to Lacan than it is to Freud, Melanie Klein, or any of the other habitual ʻDeleuzo-Guattarianʼ targets. This is not to say that the others do not come in for considerable criticism—and criticism which is largely familiar to readers of Anti-Oedipus, and which will be repeated in an even more pointed and condensed manner in the margins and interstices of A Thousand Plateaus. But in Anti-Oedipus, Lacan is somewhat regularly credited

38

See, for example, the development to which this notion of the sujet supposé savoir is subjected in the later parts of Lacanʼs Séminaire XV. 39 And, as we have seen, as a philosophical matter as well.

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with having “loosened” (AO 83) some of the restrictions of the Oedipal structure, even if his disciples are often doing something else altogether.

Even in

Dialogues, after a long excoriation of the analytic community in general, including a series of examples that are again unmistakably Lacanian in inspiration, Deleuze and Parnet nevertheless see fit to grant him an exceptional status, commenting that “only Lacan has kept a certain sense of laughter, but he admits that he is forced to laugh alone” (D 82), even as they accuse the rest of the psychoanalytic profession, tout court, of teaching “infinite resignation” and being “the last priests” (D 81-82).40 But in this case, it really is only a reference in passing. Far more important to Deleuze and Parnet is the claim that the ultimate significance of the series of developments we have just reviewed—in which Lacan plays, willing or despite himself, an absolutely essential role—is that psychoanalysis should be considered as a knowledge/power apparatus in the full Foucaultian sense of the term. At the end of their discussion of the transition in analytic practice from a focus on the signified to a focus on the signifier—a transition the Lacanian dimensions of which are almost too obvious to mention— Deleuze and Parnet raise this issue explicitly: Once again we clearly come up against the question of power, of the apparatus of psychoanalytic power—with the same inflections as before: even if this power is narrow, localized, etc. This question can only be posed in terms of very general remarks: it is true, as Foucault says, that every formation of power needs a form of knowledge which, while not dependent on it, would itself lack all effectiveness without it. Now this usable knowledge may take two shapes: either an unofficial form, so that it

40

They have hardly, then, dropped the claim that the analytic practice is to a considerable extent driven by a moralizing imperative, even if it now is only articulated in such a backhanded way.

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can set itself up in the ʻporesʼ, to seal some hole or other in the established order; or an official form, when it itself constitutes a symbolic order which gives a generalized axiomatic system to the established powers (D 87). As now becomes quite clear, the progression that Deleuze and Parnet have been following in these three axes of development through which psychoanalysis, on their account, has passed amounts to movement from an unofficial to an official role in the knowledge-power apparatus of Western liberal society. Remarkably, if one wanted to trace the lines of an exemplary career in the mental health professions that follows this movement from psychiatric engagements with paranoiac forms of ʻinsanityʼ to a psychoanalytic structure that becomes more and more universalizing, one could do substantially worse than to consider the history of one Dr. Jacques Lacan.41 If there will turn out to be an irremovable Deleuzian critique of analysis, it seems impossible for it to be separated from the assertion that there is in analysis a set of elements that led it almost inexorably along the path Lacan followed, and indeed which led Lacan along that path more or less kicking and screaming the whole way. But for our purposes, the question of the relationship between Deleuze (and Guattari) and Lacan in particular will have to remain in suspense, in order that we may pursue instead the question of Deleuzeʼs relationship to psychoanalysis more generally, which exceeds this critical instance considerably, as shall be shown in what follows.

41

Elisabeth Roudinescoʼs biography of Lacan demonstrates and explores this trajectory beautifully.

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Chapter 3

If what we have said until this point appears to support the view that Deleuze should be read as an opponent of psychoanalysis, except possibly with respect to particular issues or as a matter of transient stage in the arc of his philosophical development, it would be hasty to treat that view as if it had been conclusively established. The obvious reason for this is that most of what we have said concerns only a part of his work, and anyone with a reasonable familiarity with his career will know that there are very significant periods of his thought that fall outside the decade or so covered by the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Of course, the received attitude, as we set it forth in the first chapter, does not claim to be based in a highly developed and nuanced reading of Deleuzeʼs relationship to psychoanalysis.

Rather, to the extent that it is

argued at all, it tends to be articulated as a general sense that Deleuzeʼs stable, well thought-out position, when he finally came to it, was one of opposition to psychoanalysis. Such an attitude is more than flexible enough to accommodate contrary or divergent indications from outside the period where Deleuze seemed to be intensely engaged with psychoanalysis without finding itself seriously challenged.

And so it has been relatively easy for Deleuzeʼs readers to

accommodate the existence of texts from various periods wherein he, in one way or another, does not seem to hold a strongly negative position toward psychoanalysis without, for all that, finding it necessary to rethink the overall

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sense of opposition that has usually been ascribed to him. Worse yet for a reader seeking to provoke a rethinking of this attitude— even if only for the sake of articulating more fully the reasons why Deleuze should be viewed as having settled definitively into an anti-analytic position— there are just enough occasional or incidental texts and, especially, interviews1 which appear to support the received attitude to make it clearly viable. No matter how compelling an argument we may otherwise make to the effect that there is some good reason for a Deleuzian to refrain from dismissing psychoanalysis tout court, there will always remain texts which genuinely appear to support the view that Deleuze advocated precisely that. Accordingly, it is likely not even possible, let alone reasonable, either to try to challenge the received view with the intention of refuting it (as if there is simply one, clearly stated argument that could be disproven on this score) or to attempt to force a rethinking on those who might be inclined to take the easy and intuitive way out of the question. On the other hand, what does seem reasonable, and also very much needed if we are going to come to a more sophisticated view on this subject, is to collect the major pieces of evidence that support a broader reading than the one we developed in the previous chapter. The purpose of doing so being, in the first place, simply to show that it supports at least some reassessment of the simple statement of the negative view, which we can summarize no better than Deleuze and Parnet themselves did: ʻ psychoanalysis breaks up all the productions of

1

Which, in any case, are rather scarce before the late 1960s and early 1970s

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desire and crushes all the formations of utterance.ʼ Even if there is no reason to deny that Deleuze indeed came to this conclusion, it should be possible, through a careful consideration of the long and ambiguous path that he traveled in order to get there, to suggest that the view which that statement condenses may well be more nuanced and complex than it is typically seen to be.

I. In his published works, Deleuze does not make reference to psychoanalysis or any psychoanalytic thinker of note until the beginning of the 1960s. But one should nevertheless be careful about hastily concluding, on this basis, that he had been unconcerned with analysis until that time.

Indeed, there is rather

substantial evidence that Deleuze had maintained an interest in psychoanalysis since at least the middle of the 1950s. According to François Dosseʼs recent biography, Deleuze was already making use of psychoanalytic material in his teaching at the Lycée dʼOrleans, where he held a position from 1952-1955. Specifically, Dosse informs us that in his classes at Orleans, Deleuze “made a non-negligible place for psychoanalysis and within that for Lacan, with a course on ʻThe Lagache/Lacan Oppositionʼ” (Dosse 129). Remarkably, this would mean that, as early as the fist half of the 1950s Deleuze was aware not only of Lacanʼs work but also of the debate within French psychoanalytic circles between Lacan and those who, like Lagache, wanted to integrate psychoanalysis and academic

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psychology.2 In the absence of some textual record, it is impossible to know what Deleuze was discussing in these courses.3 Nevertheless, the very fact that he taught them suggests that, well before he began referring to it in print, he was already developing a sophisticated acquaintance with psychoanalytic theory. This is further supported by Dosseʼs account of how Deleuze came to

2

See Elisabeth Roudinescoʼs Jacques Lacan & Co. The intellectual history of both psychology and psychoanalysis during the roughly two decades immediately following the Liberation is both fascinating and extraordinarily complex. It is not at all clear what precisely is meant by “The Lacan / Lagache Opposition,” because there are so many things that could be covered under that heading. Surely, however, as a philosopher, Deleuze was not well positioned to understand the complex institutional issues involved in the debate, first within the Societé psychanalyse de Paris and then within the Societé francaise de psychanalse between Lacan and those who were more or less allied with him and Lagache and his partisans—especially since those positions themselves were fluid, changing with the circumstances in a multi-layered intellectual and institutional struggle, and also often mediated by third parties or groups with still different agendas. 3 If one wished to speculate, it would seem that, since Deleuze was viewing all of this from wholly outside the psychoanalytic establishment, it is probable that whatever he had it mind concerned publications by Lacan and Lagache. In which case, in the early 1950s, it may well have had to do with aggressivity and transference. Lagache published several papers in the decade after the end of the war on both subjects, and especially the latter, around which he sought to construct a working model of analytic practice as a whole. In turn, Lacanʼs “Intervention on Transference,” presented in 1951 is an indirect but pointed response to Lagache, as Lacan himself announces in the prefatory note that appears in the Écrits (E 176). This is, at best, a circumstantial suggestion however. Both men had long publication histories by the early 1950s—a fact which is profoundly obscured by the importance attached to Lacanʼs Écrits, but helpfully clarified by the bibliography in Roudinescoʼs biography (Roudinesco Lacan 513-528)—and Lacanʼs association with many major figures in Parisian artistic and intellectual circles before and during the war (see Roudinesco Lacan 88-106, 121-178) suggests a very great number of possible ways that Deleuze, who had himself been drawn along with Michel Tournier into many of the same circles as early as 1943 by Maurice de Gandillac (Dosse 114-134), could have come into contact with Lacanʼs work. As such, there is truly no way to say what, specifically, Deleuze was presenting to his students or how exactly he viewed the debate, though it is almost certain that he would have found Lacanʼs positions at that time preferable to Lagacheʼs. This is also suggested by the fact that Lagacheʼs psychology was more and more being seen as problematic in the philosophical circles within which Deleuze was moving. In 1956, the year after Deleuze left the Lycée dʼOrleans for the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, one of his mentors, Georges Canguilhem (Dosse 131, 138-144), delivered a lecture, “Quʼest-ce que la psychologie?,” that was to become famous for its demolition of the intellectual bases, and its questioning of the practical aims, of the supposedly ʻunifiedʼ psychology Lagache had announced in 1949 (Roudinesco Lacan & Co. 218-222; Lacan 295; and Philosophy 25-29). By itself, this proves nothing, especially since it comes after the fact, but combined with Deleuzeʼs interest in the ʻdebate,ʼ it makes Deleuzeʼs association with Canguilhem suggest that insofar as he endorsed anything at all, it would more likely have been the Lacanian position, at least in opposition to that of Lagache.

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write the first text in which he made any substantial reference to psychoanalysis. According to Dosse, “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism”—also “the first study by Deleuze of a work of literature”—was written at the invitation of Kostas Axelos,4 who “was preparing an issue of the review Arguments on ʻ The Love Problem.ʼ He had received a great many contributions on Sade, but none on Sacher-Masoch.

He made the proposition to Deleuze” (Dosse 2007, 149).5

Surely, if Axelos saw fit to ask Deleuze to embark on what, if one were judging purely on the basis of his previous publications, would have seemed an unlikely project, he must have been aware that Deleuze was not only interested in the subject matter but also had sufficient expertise and critical skill to bring an article off. And once more, this impression is reinforced by Dosseʼs review of Deleuzeʼs teaching. Especially during the second half of the 1950s, when he moved to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Deleuzeʼs teaching displays an interest in the specific array of questions that would be involved in an article on Sacher-Masoch. And indeed, Deleuze appears to have been a very unusual hypokâgne professor, his teaching already manifesting aims that went far beyond the conventional objective of “cramming” his students for the baccalauréat exams. In addition to examples of purely philosophical adventurousness such as teaching Heidegger

4

It was actually the second piece Deleuze had published in Arguments, the first being “Sens et valeurs,” a precursor to Nietzsche and Philosophy that contained embryonic versions of several of its chapters sections, which appeared in 1959. 5 Dosse makes it seem that Axelos knew Deleuze fairly well by this point, and that the relationship grew, until it ended painfully after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, is made clear by a note the editor of Desert Islands appended to Deleuzeʼs short review of Axelosʼs Vers la pensée planétaire, which was somewhat startlingly entitled “How Jarryʼs Pataphysics Opened the Way for Phenomenology” (see DI 299n4).

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and Leibinz together within the frame of the question “What is founding?” or working through the newly issued volume of Xenophonʼs On Tyranny, with a preface by Kojève and including the latterʼs correspondence with Leo Strauss (Dosse 132), we are also told that “Deleuze spoke a great deal about literature, about Proust and Rousseau, but also about Claudel whose Le Soulier de satin is on the literature program; he commented on Protée, which he held to be one of Claudelʼs finest pieces” (Dosse 132). Nor did he restrict himself to French or ʻhighʼ literature: “He also brought up Ambrose Bierceʼs monstrous stories and notably his report “Oil of Dog” and, ignoring literary barriers, vigorously advised his students to read certain detective novels in Gallimardʼs Série noir” (Dosse 132).

Finally, and perhaps most remarkably, Deleuze displayed a similar

disregard for pedagogical strictures regarding issues related to ʻsexualityʼ: On the question of sexuality, a taboo subject during that era, he displayed a certain audacity. Freud and psychoanalysis had the right to be cited in his philosophy courses, which was rarely done in 1955. When it came to male/female relationships, he invoked the desire to “find a sexual partner,” far from the sentimental idea of great love. As far as homosexuality in Greek antiquity, contrary to the Sorbonneʼs commentaries on Plato which always avoided the question, “Deleuzeʼs at that time said: ʻ Donʼt be shocked. Greek pederasty had nothing to do with what you think. It was completely normal in the Greek world. This is totally different from Proust who presented a pederasty which was hidden.ʼ In that era, no one had the audacity to say that” (Dosse 133).6 “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,” it now appears, was quite consistent with the intellectual attitude and range of interests Deleuze had been developing for much of the decade prior to its appearance.

6

Dosseʼs quotations are from an interview with François Regnault, who was one of Deleuzeʼs hypokâgne students at Louis-le-Grande.

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For our immediate purposes, all of this establishes that Deleuze had a developed interest in psychoanalysis which precedes by a considerable margin those among his major pre-Guattari publications that involve a substantial discussion of it, all of which fall within the two year period of 1967-1969: Masochism, Difference and Repetition, and especially The Logic of Sense. Indeed, without “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” and repeated allusions to Freud that crop up throughout Nietzsche and Philosophy, culminating in a comparison of Nietzscheʼs view of the psyche at the beginning of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals and Freudʼs topographical model, it would hardly be impossible to imagine on a purely textual basis that Deleuze, having formulated his philosophical outlook to a considerable extent by the second half of the 1960s, more or less ʻgot aroundʼ to considering psychoanalysis, a currently popular and influential subject and one that seemed to bear a relationship to what he was doing in a number of respects. Indeed, even taking account of “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” and Nietzsche and Philosophy, it would be fairly easy to take Masochism as a ʻ niceʼ publication that fell into Deleuzeʼs lap and thereby write off “Coldness and Cruelty” as little more than an expansion of the earlier article, and one which furthermore retained a basically ʻ introductoryʼ function.7

And if one really wanted to minimize Deleuzeʼs engagement with

psychoanalysis, one might even go so far as to hold that Difference and Repetition, in the end, only makes scattered and often critical remarks about it,

7

This would be even more tempting in light of the French title of the volume, “Presentation de Sacher-Masoch.”

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which can surely be shown not to commit Deleuze to a psychoanalytic position to any considerable extent. All of which would leave only The Logic of Sense to be explained, and the degree to which it has been isolated would already entail that it may be just as easy to shrug oneʼs shoulders and accept it as an aberration as anything else, especially when one can point to several texts by Deleuze where he seems to suggest the same thing himself.8 But if, as the evidence we have just reviewed suggests, Deleuze had in fact been thinking about, teaching, and paying attention to what was going on in contemporary discussions surrounding psychoanalysis since the middle of the 1950s, then his engagement with psychoanalysis during last years of the 1960s suddenly seems much less anomalous and it becomes much less easily dismissed in the face of what Deleuze and Guattari wrote together afterwards. And yet, when we come to consider the text of “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,” we find that Deleuze, for all his apparent interest, was already very sharply critical of psychoanalytic theories.9 Indeed, beyond its obvious attack on

8

For example, see D 119-123. “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” predates Lacanʼs “Kant with Sade,” which was published in Critique in 1963. Even so, the fact that Deleuze makes no mention of Lacanʼs reworking of the Freudian theory in “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” remains at least somewhat significant. “Kant with Sade” grew from an earlier seminar presentation, given on December 23, 1959, wherein Lacan discussed the Kantian conception of the moral law alongside the same text of Sadeʼs that he addressed in the later article: “Yet Another Effort Frenchmen, If You Would Be Republicans” (see Sade 296-339). The absence of any hint that Deleuze was aware of Lacanʼs engagement with Sade when he wrote “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” at least suggests that, despite his relatively long-standing awareness of Lacan, Deleuze was not among those reading the typescripts of the seminar that were circulating more and more widely. By the time “Coldness and Cruelty” appeared in 1967, by contrast, Deleuze had manifestly taken account of Lacanʼs contributions to and criticisms of the psychoanalytic understanding of sadomasochism, and a number of other specifically Lacanian doctrines (see CCR 31-32, 63-68, and especially 8190). As such, “Coldness and Cruelty” will be of great value for us in determining the precise 9

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the notion of a sadomasochistic complex, which would become substantially more prominent in 1967, the essay also seems to a remarkable extent to prefigure the critique of the Oedipus complex in Anti-Oedipus, the very text from which we have just been trying to disconnect it. This is most notable when Deleuze claims, “Freudian psychoanalysis in general suffers from an inflation of the father” (SMM 128). On the basis of this, as well as statements like the claim that Freud is only really aware of “the most superficial levels of the unconscious” (SMM 128), one might well wonder whether what is really shown by “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” is not that Deleuzeʼs engagement with psychoanalysis is more substantial than many of his readers want to admit, but rather that his rejection of it is even older and more consistent than previously understood. Nevertheless, it would be entirely incorrect to say that Deleuze had rejected psychoanalysis in early 1960s. It is true that in both “From SacherMasoch to Masochism” and Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze is critical of psychoanalysis, and especially of Freud; and also that, in both cases, the criticisms offered by Deleuze resemble those that would be articulated later by Deleuze and Guattari.

But a more careful examination of the treatment of

analysis in both texts will show that these earlier readings share more with what Deleuze would say at the end of the 1960s than with what he and Guattari wrote together in the 1970s. There is nothing anti-psychoanalytic as such in either text;

nature of Deleuzeʼs relationship to Lacan.

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and in fact they operate as if psychoanalysis, especially insofar as it proves to be capable of discovering the “original Images” that Deleuze suggests are to be found at the core of the unconscious (SMM 131), has made—and may continue to make—discoveries of the most profound philosophical import.

II. After a few biographical remarks, the 1961 article begins to develop a reading of Masoch that focuses on three main points: 1) the distinction between the “milieus” and “rituals” of sadism and masochism, the one being “mechanistic and instrumentalist,” the other being “culturalist and aesthetic” (SMM 126); 2) the contractual structure of masochism, which Deleuze claims to be so essential to it that “[t]here is no masochism without a contract with the woman” (SMM 126); and finally 3) its connection to “some strange historical perspectives,” specifically, its focus on the belief in an archaic matriarchy which arose in an “epoch of beautiful Nature” that ended with “a climatic catastrophe or a glacial upheaval” (SMM 127). Deleuze points out that the last of these amounts to an “impassioned, simplified and romanticized” derivative of nineteenth-century Swiss proto-anthropologist Johan Jakob Bachofenʼs theory that early human societies passed through three stages: “hetaerism, gynocracy and patriarchy” (SMM 127). However, Deleuze goes on to emphasize that “what is properly masochist is the regressive fantasy by means of which Masoch dreams of using patriarchy itself in order to restore gynocracy, and gynocracy in order to restore primitive communism” (SMM 127).

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As we will see below, not only does Deleuze read Sacher-Masoch in terms that emphasize the centrality of this revolutionary component,10 he takes this revolutionary or transformative aim to be central to the truth of ʻ illnessʼ as it is revealed in the psychoanalytic clinic—that is, of the specific figures one encounters in the pathological discourse that analysis largely shares with the broader psychiatric establishment. For the moment, however, what is important is to recognize that for Sacher-Masoch, the submission of his hero to a fur-clad huntress (herself oppressed by the cold of this post-catastrophic patriarchal world)11 or a devouring mother, even if the hero has to provoke or push his partner into taking on the role, has a goal beyond or in addition to its purely erotic end. The submissive act also constitutes an attempt to ʻoverturnʼ patriarchy, an overturning which would itself be only the first step on a longer revolutionary path, the ultimate goal of which is the re-establishment of a primitive commune. Under the heading of ʻ aestheticismʼ or ʻ culturalism,ʼ Deleuze shows how feminine power, which patriarchy ordinarily liquidates or obscures, is first revealed to the masochistic hero in works of art. “It is through Renaissance paintings that the power of and musculature of a woman wrapped in furs is revealed to Masoch. It is when a woman resembles a statue that she can be loved” (SMM 126). In order to make himself worthy of his beloved, the hero

10

And explicitly emphasizing its place over and above any desire to simply “write a natural history of humanity” (SMM 127) 11 It is surely worth taking note, in passing, of the resonance between Nietzscheʼs repeated expressions of derision for northern Europeans and his corresponding preference for the spirit of the south and the masochistic association of patriarchy and a cold climate.

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undertakes a profound project of self-transformation, which aims to resolve the alienation that, as a product of patriarchy, he now recognizes as being characteristic of his condition.12

Deleuzeʼs explanation of the stakes of this

transformation, which are aesthetic in the oldest sense of the word, paraphrases Marxʼs declaration in the 1844 Manuscripts, that: The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object—an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa (Marx 139). In Deleuzeʼs version of the above,13 we are shown how becoming a ʻ humanʼ object of desire entails that a woman must be transformed into a work of art, and that as such she will become the agent of the heroʼs suffering: “[...] the eye becomes a human eye only when its object itself has been transformed into a human object, fashioned by and destined for man. An organ becomes human when it takes a work of art as its object. Masochism is presented as the suffering of such a transmutation. The whole animal suffers when its organs cease to be animal” (SMM 126). Later in the essay, Deleuze will also connect this theme to a

12

This transformation, incidentally, shows the whole masochistic relation to be quite different from the Sadean one, wherein the victim as merely an instrument of the torturerʼs enjoyment. The sadist really considers the victim essentially in terms of his or her body; the masochist, by contrast, is much more interested in the subject-position that his beloved occupies, and his own, and seeks a transformation in both. Here it would be profitable to consider the distinction between power-relations (masochism) and violence (sadism) that Foucault makes in “The Subject and Power” insofar as it neatly encapsulates this difference. 13 That Deleuze is alluding to Marx here is put beyond question by the beginning of the sentence quoted below: “It has been said that the senses become ʻtheoreticiansʼ and that [...]” (SMM 126).

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Jungian reading of the incest taboo as bearing upon a patriarchal fear not of the theft of the woman by the son, but of the role she might play in constituting him as independent of the father (SMM 129-130). This emancipation takes place by way of a ʻsecond birthʼ that necessitates the imposition, by the devouring mother, of “terrible ordeals upon the son” (SMM 130). Thus the same act of submission to punishment or suffering appears from multiple points of view as a condition for the achievement of a renewed, perfected mode of life. Such a transformation cannot be merely aesthetic any more than the limitations imposed by patriarchy only apply to sensibility; for both partners in the masochistic relationship, their agency is also at stake. In order for the woman to be taken as the human object of the heroʼs human desire—that is, in order for her to be lovable—the specifically feminine power and agency that the patriarchal order has dissolved and replaced with dependence on a father or a husband must be restored to her. This is why the erotic relationship must pass through a parodic and subversive double of the marriage contract. Indeed, the contract as such becomes the focus of the entire masochistic structure—something Deleuze rebukes Reik for missing (SMM 128)—insofar as it is the foundation and the expression of the demand for a specifically patriarchal mode of subjectification: in patriarchy, the contract “is made to express and even justify the notion that there is something non-material, spiritual or instituted in the relations of authority and association which are established between men, including father and son” (SMM 126). By contrast, the “tie which unites us to the woman, which unites the

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child with the mother, seems by nature to rebel against contractual expression” (SMM 126). Insofar as, seen from this point of view, her power is naturally based on anti-contractual ties—that is, on a whole set of relationships that are not structured at all in terms of spiritual, autonomous individuals—for a woman to become party to a contract ordinarily amounts to the affirmation of her own powerlessness: “When a woman enters into a contract, it is by ʻcoming amongstʼ men, acknowledging in the process her situation of dependence at the heart of patriarchal society” (SMM 126).14 But the masochistic contract overturns all of this, installing the woman at the heart of a relationship of authority that her very being, as such, ungrounds, and thereby simultaneously displacing the masochistic hero in relation to patriarchy and its laws. This reversal of the ordinarily distribution of power among the gendered subjects of the marriage contract (the duty to “love, honor, and obey” falling now to the man) is only the first stage of its subversion, however.

Even more

profoundly, the masochistic relationship becomes revolutionary precisely insofar as it deploys the contract against itself, pushing it to the limit and exposing the contradiction in its foundations.15 [T]he masochist takes up in his own way the movement by which the contract, even when it is taken as the foundation of a masculine society,

14

The paradigmatic instance of a contract in this ordinary sense being, of course, the marriage contract. 15 It would be very interesting to read the masochistic structure as it appears in this presentation of Deleuzeʼs next to Walter Benjaminʼs distinction between two forms of political violence in his “Critique of Violence.” Insofar as Benjaminʼs article suggests that the moment of pure insurrection at the heart of revolution is no more sustainable than any other temporally determined instance, it participates in a paradox very similar to the one that Deleuze describes here as the effect of the masochistic contract.

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nevertheless has to take its course in time. For every contract, in the precise sense of the word, implies in principle certain conditions like a limited duration, the non-intervention of any third parties, and the exclusion of certain inalienable rights (for example, life). But on the other hand, no society can conserve itself without postulating its own eternity, without asserting its hold over third parties who have not entered contracts, and without giving itself a right of death over its subjects. In the masochistic contract with the woman, this movement is rediscovered and intensified (SMM 126). The

masochistic

transformation

exceeds

what

would

be

required

by

ʻhumanizationʼ if that were understood simply in terms of an ordinary Hegelian dialectic of recognition—the dialectic which, it now appears, articulates the logic of ʻ patriarchalʼ spiritual autonomy to perfection.

The masochistic contract

reduces to incoherence the one that is the theoretical basis of modern (patriarchal) society. Insofar as the latter depends, in the last instance, on a sovereign authority that guarantees the contractʼs enforcement, it turns out to radically exclude the very ʻ spiritual autonomyʼ on the basis of which its citizens claim their ʻ rights.ʼ16 The masochist pushes the contract to precisely this last instance, transporting himself and his beloved beyond the grasp of the modern social order, and, because of his partnerʼs femininity, exposing its foundations in a “nature” of a radically different order.17

16

As such, the masochist is a

In Hegelian terms, the hero and his beloved, by entering into the contract, become the ʻmasterʼ and ʻslaveʼ upon whose relationship the autonomous individuality required of parties to any ʻlegitimateʼ contract is based, but yet who are fundamentally excluded from such a contract. See SMM 126. 17 There is likely a great deal to be said about the way in which, during this period of Deleuzeʼs work, the theme of an ʻarchaic natureʼ that appears to be more ontological or anthropological, i.e., supra-historical, a temporal ʻoutside,ʼ rather than any kind of actual pre-historic epoch reappears in a number of contexts. A quick survey of the ʻliteraryʼ articles he published in the first two years of the 1960s makes clear that the interest he displays in the connection of Masoch to Bachofen, who is most commonly cited in discussions of the appearance in Walter Benjaminʼs work of such

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revolutionary; as in Marx, ʻhumanization,ʼ or the overcoming of alienation requires the liquidation of a social form that produces it as a condition of subjective being.18

And, also like Marx, the ultimate goal of the movement that the

masochist seeks to initiate by precipitating this application in being of absolute dominion is anarchic, the liquidation of all relationships based on ʻrightʼ : the commune (SMM 127)—and in this case the significance of that is also, most likely, to be elaborated erotically, as in Bachofenʼs “hetaerism.” The second half of Deleuzeʼs article is devoted to showing how the above comes into conflict with Freudian views of masochism.19

This critique is

elaborated along two basic axes: that of the role of the image of the Father and of the female figures in Sacher-Masoch; and that of the role of punishment and its relation to pleasure and the law. In both cases, masochism is treated as an

an ʻarchaic nature,ʼ is not an isolated case. Reading “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Precursor of Kafka, Celine, and Ponge,” published in 1962, or the essay appended to The Logic of Sense under the title “Michel Tournier and the World without Others,” which was originally published in 1967, one finds that a set of themes recur in Deleuzeʼs work during the 1960s, all circulating around the notion of a primal, archaic, and indeed virtual ʻnatureʼ that, even as such, is seen to have a profoundly destabilizing effect on modern social relations and subject formations. The fact that “Desert Islands” (1953) shares similar themes, and that one could see at least part of this as also being at stake in an essay like “Instincts and Institutions” (1954), suggests—as does the fact that Dosse reports that the ʻgrillingʼ that Canguilhem gave Deleuze in the oral sections of the ENS exam, and on which the latter is said to have performed brilliantly, was devoted to the theme of “barbarians and the civilized” (Dosse 121)—that some of this pertained to long-standing interests of Deleuzeʼs, possibly going all the way back to his encounters with people such as Klossowski during the war. This would provide a more direct link between these themes in Deleuzeʼs work and the way in which the “surrealist anthropologists” of the school surrounding Bataille and Leiris developed them, which is especially interesting given Deleuzeʼs suggestion that Freud did not know how “to profit from what is surreal in symbols” (SMM 131). 18 Once more, the degree to which Deleuze implicitly identifies Sacher-Masochʼs ʻpatriarchyʼ with a free association of Hegelian subjects is worth remarking on: recall that in Hegel, the slaveʼs achievement of the recognition required in order to accede to the position of ʻsubjectʼ is predicated precisely upon his own self-alienation at the behest of a ʻmasterʼ who, precisely insofar as he holds the right of death over the slave and claims dominion over anyone he is strong enough to impose himself upon, will never achieve such self-consciousness in his own right. 19 Even with a version of Freudianism as expansive as Theodor Reikʼs (see Reik 6-7; 367-433).

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instance of a more general difficulty with the Freudian conception of the unconscious, and so masochism allows the nature and causes of a more general psychoanalytic mistake to be elaborated. This can easily be seen in the basic trajectory of Deleuzeʼs discussion of the Freudian emphasis on the image of the Father. He begins, quite specifically, by observing that it “seems very doubtful that the image of the Father in masochism has the role which Freud gives it” (SMM 128). But quite soon, Deleuze shifts to a discussion that takes place at a much more general level.

In quick succession, we are told that:

“Freudian

psychoanalysis in general suffers from an inflation of the father” (SMM 128) and “Freudian interpretations are often only able to reach the most superficial and most individualized levels of the unconscious (SMM 128). Despite the obvious resonances of this last assertion with nearly every subsequent elaboration of Deleuzeʼs ontology,20 it is only somewhat further on that we are told what is driving it at this particular juncture: That there are very different levels of the unconscious, of unequal origin and value, arousing regressions which differ in nature, which have relations of opposition, compensation and reorganization going on between them: this principle dear to Jung was never recognized by Freud because the latter reduced the unconscious to the simple fact of desiring (SMM 128). As Christian Kerslake helpfully points out in a note to his translation,21 what Deleuze has in mind here is the Jungian distinction between an “objective” and a “subjective” unconscious. The same distinction is at work when Deleuze credits

20

That is, between this and Deleuzeʼs consistent view that the genetic conditions of individuated and personal phenomena are always impersonal and pre-individual. 21 See SMM 132n13

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Freud with “a presentiment of this when he discovered an unconscious of identification beyond the properly “objective” [objectal] unconscious” (SMM 128). In other words, insofar as Freudʼs theory of the unconscious is limited to the order of “object-relations” of one sort or another—which is what is encompassed both by the criticism of Freudʼs reducing it to “the simple fact of desiring” and by the reference, via Jung, to an “objective” unconscious—then, Deleuze contends, not only will Freud be incapable of accounting for masochism properly, but he will also, in general, overestimate the role of the image of the Father, the effects of which have chiefly to do with prohibiting desire from attaching itself to certain objects.22 As he also will do in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze thereby turns to one of the dissident Freudians, in this case Jung, in order to find a psychoanalytic theory that can provide an adequate explanation of the phenomena at play in Sacher-Masochʼs work and the specific patterns of libidinal investment that are reflected therein. Deleuze begins by claiming that the Freudian explanation, with

22

Accordingly, Deleuzeʼs having credited Freud with a “presentiment” of the deeper structure of the unconscious on the basis of his discovery of identification mechanisms, which he finds to be at work in the dissolution of the Oedipus complex and the constitution of the super-ego, is more of a desultory acknowledgement that not everything in the later versions of the Freudian unconscious is governed by the principle of object-cathexis than it is a substantial endorsement of Freudʼs grasp of the workings of the unconscious at an impersonal or trans-personal level. Discussions of this identification mechanism can be found in The Ego and the Id, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” and “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” (See SE XIX 28-39, 167, 176-177). Clearly, given his broader doubts about the role attributed to the image of the Father by Freudian psychoanalysis, Deleuze is unlikely to be satisfied by Freudʼs concession, at the beginning of “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,” that there is “room for the ontogenetic view [of the Oedipus complex] side by side with the more far-reaching phylogenetic one” (SE XIX 174), especially because Freudʼs overall point here is that the complex, and hence the role that he attributes to the image of the Father, is “a phenomenon which is determined and laid down by heredity” (SE XIX 174).

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its focus on the Father as the figure in relation to which object-directed masochistic desires circulate (SE XVII 189), completely misreads the role played by the figure of the Woman or the Mother at an impersonal pre-objective level of the unconscious. Indeed, the Freudian theory is unwilling to account for (or even recognize) Sacher-Masochʼs women as women.23 From thence, Deleuze quickly moves on to his major point, which is that this error results from Freudʼs refusal to look beyond the ʻobjectiveʼ level of the unconscious. Freudʼs sin is to have been a reductionist, to assert that the unconscious functions only through a (patriarchal) mechanism wherein a completely individuated agent pursues objects that are fundamentally determined by the desire to repeat previously experienced satisfaction. Everything in Freud presupposes an unconscious that has been fully separated in advance,24 which is why the masochistic fantasy of

23

Deleuze ridicules the use the super-egoʼs mechanism of interiorization to salvage the central place of the Father in the masochistic fantasy as “astonishing gymnastics” (SMM 128); a claim he expands on in a devastating footnote where he takes “psychoanalysis” to task for attempting “to avoid the problem which it has itself provoked: that the feminine object would not be such at all, since it is imbued with ʻvirile qualitiesʼ” (SMM 132n12). Specifically, he blames Freud, Reik, and Sacha Nacht for “going against all appearances,” in order to postulate “that the devouring Mother, the furs, the whip, etc., were all images of the father” (SMM 132n12). In this respect, one can take Freudʼs “The Economic Problem of Masochism” as a perfect exemplary instance. Therein, Freud explicitly argues that “if one has the opportunity of studying cases in which the masochistic phantasies have been especially richly elaborated, one quickly discovers that they place the subject in a characteristically female situation; they signify, that is, being castrated or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby” (SE XIX 162). It is well known that, according to Freud, the feminine ʻsubjectʼ position is much more difficult and complex to assume than the masculine one, not least because it requires the subject to accept her castration as an accomplished fact and then to seek recompense for it in the child which she ultimately receives as a result of copulation. However, in speaking of masochistic fantasies, Freud is describing not the assumption of this position by a woman, but rather by a man (see SE XIX 161). By characterizing the masochistic subjectʼs position as ʻfeminineʼ in this way, Freud thus ensures, in accordance with a developmental logic that has been long established in his work, that the masochistic ʻobjectʼ will ultimately turn out to be the quintessential object of all feminine desire, the Father. 24 Here, it is worth noting that Deleuze emphasized many of the same points in his discussion of his friend Michel Tournierʼs novel Friday, the hero of which embarks upon a regression that—like

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overturning the paternal law is so grossly overlooked by the psychoanalytic critics.

The consequences of that overturning are, as Deleuze suggests, a

regression to a point beyond the separation upon which that law—which Freud takes to be the law of the unconscious—is established. Insofar as its characteristic movement is seen, instead, to be that of overturning the position of the father, what masochism shows is that the unconscious is in fact radically plural. Now, each image which dominates in the unconscious from the point of view of objective relations can lose all its value or signify something else in the more profound domains. Many neurotics seem to be fixated on their fathers, but are really perturbed and burdened by an image of the mother that is all the more powerful because it is not invested at the level of superficial consciousness. As a general rule, the dominant characters change according to the level of analysis on which one is operating: we should be wary when someoneʼs analysis appears to bring to light an image of an inactive, effaced or even depreciated mother. It is likely that in masochism the figure of the overwhelming father is only apparent, and is a simple means toward a more profound end, a simple step in a more far-reaching regression in which all paternal determinations are turned to the advantage of the mother (SMM 128). From here, it is largely just a matter of working out the details, many of which are already familiar to us. The law is overturned by a subversive use of the contract, its own instrument, by means of which “the application of the paternal law is delivered back into the hands of the Woman or the Mother” (SMM 128). This operation, by which the masochist ensures “that the pleasure that the law forbids be given to him precisely through the means of the law” (SMM 128), is characterized by Deleuze as “a properly masochistic form of humor” (SMM 129).

Schreberʼs delirium—proceeds beyond the boundary of individuation as it established, according to Freud, in the repression of primary narcissism.

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Deleuze also contrasts sadistic and masochistic understandings of “the operation by which the law separates us from a pleasure” (SMM 129), and shows how they inform different strategies by which the forbidden pleasure is nevertheless obtained: Either we think that it repels it and uniformly splits it off, so that we can obtain pleasure only through a destruction of the law (sadism). Or we think that the law has taken pleasure into itself, is keeping it for itself; it is then by devoting ourselves to the law, by submitting ourselves scrupulously to the law and its consequences, that we will taste the pleasure which it has forbidden us (SMM 129).25 There is an important difference between this view that Deleuze was beginning to elaborate in the early 1960s and what he and Guattari would put forward a decade later.

Beginning with “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” and

25

It seems possible to view Deleuze here, to some extent, as anticipating the analysis he and Guattari would give of Schreberʼs relation to God: “the rate of cosmic sexual pleasure remains constant, so that God will find a way of taking pleasure with Schreber, even if in order to do so Schreber must transform himself into a woman. But Schreber experiences only a residual share of this pleasure, as a recompense for his suffering or as a reward for his becoming-woman” (AO 16-17). In this respect, cannot the alliance Deleuze and Guattari speak of some schizophrenic subjects forming with the intensities traversing them (AO 17), the “celibate machine” as we described it in the previous chapter, be seen as remarkably similar to the humorous bargain the masochist makes in order to redirect the law to achieving precisely the ends which it was instituted to prohibit? Besides seeing the apparatus in Kafkaʼs “In the Penal Colony” as an exemplary celibate machine (AO 18), might it not appear to be a masochistic machine on Deleuzeʼs own terms, especially insofar as it may exemplify both the arrogation by the law of the right to take life (SMM 126) and the masochistʼs derisory strategy of opposition. One should not forget that it is knowledge, and in particular self-knowledge, the forbidden knowledge of the precise nature of oneʼs crime, oneʼs guilt before the law, that is supposedly granted by Kafkaʼs machine at the culminating instant of its operation. Still, Deleuze and Guattariʼs shift toward presenting Schreber—and psychotics generally—as avatars of this kind of resistance to a far greater extent than perverts—like Masoch—are said to be, seems somewhat more decisive than this apparent similarity. Lastly, it should also be noted that the linkage between Kafka and Masoch here has an additional point resonance, Bachofen, at least insofar as the latterʼs conception of an “archaic nature” is notably invoked by Benjamin in the course of his explanation of how, in Kafka, “It is the bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state that, insofar as it appears to promise deliverance from the world of myth and implacable fate, furnishes the medium through which these archaic forces are enabled to manifest themselves in the present” (Stuart McLean, The Event and its Terrors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004) 43). Regarding Benjaminʼs connection to Bachofen, see Joseph Mali, “The Reconciliation of Myth: Benjaminʼs Homage to Bachofen,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, 60.1 (1999): 165-187.

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continuing all the way through The Logic of Sense, Deleuze repeatedly puts forward perversion as a viable, and indeed as the preferred political strategy in a sense that is clearly exemplified by Sacher-Masoch, and also by Tournierʼs Robinson in Friday.26

By contrast, especially in The Logic of Sense, the

schizophrenic position was seen as a trap, as a catastrophic collapse into the depths of bodies which was to be avoided at all costs: as exemplified both by Artaudʼs illness and by the final onset of Nietzscheʼs madness. To a remarkable extent, these positions are exactly reversed in Anti-Oedipus and after; but for now, the masochist, the pervert, the ʻregressiveʼ is seen, at least from a libidinal point of view, as the true revolutionary, the one who can not only destabilize the law but also escape it at the level of the determination and the sense of his or her own desire. A considerable portion of the inadequacy of the psychoanalytic view of masochism stems, in Deleuzeʼs mind, from its inability to convincingly explain why the masochist seeks punishment and the function of punishment within the overall economy of the masochistic relationship. Deleuze credits Reik with doing considerably better than most in this regard, and especially with his recognition that “the masochist does not at all have a weak and submissive personality, he is not dreaming of his own annihilation: it is rather the traits of defiance, vengeance, sarcasm, sabotage and derision that seem to Reik to be the constitutional traits of masochism” (SMM 128-9). This is in accordance with Deleuzeʼs own view of

26

See Kazarian, “Deleuze, Perversion, and Politics.”

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the masochistic hero as essentially a revolutionary, and he also connects it to the humorous subversion of the paternal law we have already discussed, which uses punishment to undermine its own basis: “The masochist goes still further: it is the execution of the punishment which becomes primary and which introduces us to the forbidden pleasure” (SMM 129). According to Deleuze, “[t]he advantage of Reikʼs thesis is that it gives up trying to explain masochism simply by appealing to a desire to be punished,” which in turn makes it “impossible to confuse the satisfaction of this desire with the sexual pleasure experienced by the masochist” (SMM 129). Indeed, Reik recognizes punishmentʼs function to be a “condition of sexual pleasure,” but Deleuze thinks his explanation for this is unconvincing insofar as it gets referred to a generic sense of anxiety that the punishment allows to be resolved. Deleuze obliquely complains—“[t]his indirect reference to the feeling of guilt does not get us anywhere” (SMM 129)—that, in this respect, Reikʼs explanation takes us no farther than Freud did in “A Child is Being Beaten,” where he claimed that “a sense of guilt is invariably the factor that transforms sadism into masochism” (SE XVII 189). Deleuze dismisses this as a “functional explanation which does not take account of the ʻ topographicalʼ features of masochism,” especially the “displacement” of the task of punishing a minor transgression of the paternal law from the father to the mother (SMM 129, translation modified).27

27

Kerslake makes a decision, which Hugh Tomlinson also made when translating Nietzsche et la philosophie, to translate Deleuzeʼs ʻtopique,ʼ appearing in scare quotes and used in a clearly psychoanalytic context, without respecting the standard psychoanalytic terminological usages,

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At this point, everything comes full circle, and we find ourselves returned once more to what, it is now clear, is the overarching point of Deleuzeʼs entire reading of Masoch and his critique of every psychoanalytic view, including Reikʼs: all of them, insofar as they cling to the image of the Father that dominates the objective level of the unconscious, and insofar as they fail to explain the real function of punishment and the contract, are guilty of the same more fundamental mistake, which is precisely that of failing to grasp the deeper regression at stake in the masochistic fantasy, a regression to an impersonal level of the unconscious—Deleuze bends over backwards to avoid calling it, as Jung does, the ʻ subjectiveʼ level—that precedes the ʻ objectiveʼ level which develops on the basis of individual experience. In a long footnote headed “On Freud and Jung,” Deleuze lays out his understanding of the difference between the Jungian account of the unconscious and the Freudian one, giving an insightful genealogy of both views. Broadly connecting Freudʼs conceptual scheme to “the domain of hysteria” and remarking that his clinical “methodologies are appropriate for young neurotics whose disorders are related to personal reminiscences and whose problems are about reconciling themselves to the real [...] without regard for the role of any interior conflicts” (SMM 133n25), Deleuze points out the contrast

which make ʻtopiqueʼ the equivalent of Freudʼs German ʻtopisch,ʼ both of which are ordinarily translated into English as “topographical.” See Laplanche and Pontalis Language 449. I can find no reason besides excessive literalism to follow either translatorʼs practice, which only serves to obscure the psychoanalytic context which Deleuze is clearly referring to—a reference which is made especially clear by the fact that in both cases (SMM 129 and NPh 112) he encloses the term in scare quotes, indicating that he is preserving a specific bit of technical language. Accordingly, for clarity and faithfulness to what Deleuze obviously intends, I will modify these translations where necessary.

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between these ʻ Freudianʼ illnesses and those of “adult neurotics who are burdened by ʻ Imagesʼ which transcend every experience” (SMM 133n25). Crucially, Deleuze characterizes the relationship of these ʻJungianʼ patients—who are suffering, he says, from “neuroses of quite another type which are nearer to psychosis”—to the non-integrated parts of their psyche, with which they must be reconciled, as one of “alienation” (SMM 133n25). The term, of course, has a long history in psychiatry; but it is virtually impossible to hear it from a philosopher who we have already seen alluding directly to the young Marx without drawing the connection between what has already been said about the social agenda underlying Sacher-Masochʼs work, its revolutionary and transformative force, and contrasting this to the ʻ adaptiveʼ nature of the Freudian clinic, which is and remains a source of considerable concern for Deleuze. The true core of the philosophical significance Deleuze attributes to the Jungian view, however, is to be found when he says, of these Jungian Images, that “they are irreducible and can only be approached by a synthetic method which searches beyond the experience of the subject for the truth of the unconscious” (SMM 133n25).

If Deleuze had previously described the non-

integrated parts of the neuroticʼs personality as “parts which they neglected to develop, and which are as if alienated in Images” (SMM 133n25), then it should nevertheless be clear that the clinical goal of finding a ʻworkableʼ arrangement of the various elements at play in a personality in this fashion must not be confused with the ʻreductionʼ to which Freud is consistently trying to subject any ʻdeliriousʼ

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elements, and by which he always seeks to tie whatever is produced by the unconscious to specific individual experiences in the most direct possible way. But the crucial point here is that it is nearly impossible not to hear in this discussion of Jungʼs Images a precursor to Deleuzeʼs discussions of Proustʼs Ideas or Bergsonʼs Virtual, both of which exhibit a similarly ʻ passive syntheticʼ structure and genetic relationship with whatever sense or meaning can be discovered in direct individual experience.28 And once one has seen this, one quickly sees as well how it is that the regressive movement in Sacher-Masoch, and in the conventional psychoanalytic etiology of a great deal of both neurotic illness and perversion, begins to link up with the critical, transformative, and indeed creative and revolutionary aspects of Deleuzeʼs work—especially insofar as the most radical and far reaching aspects of this have often had to do, in one form or another, with the discovery of a ʻpureʼ past, an element that is absolutely non-actual but which makes possible the temporal synthesis of present and future as radically passing and open, and which thereby constitutes an irreducible source of difference or novelty. We should not be surprised, then, to discover Deleuze both pointedly citing Jungʼs affirmation of hidden depths belonging to neurosis (SMM 133n25) and closing his article with his own affirmation of the revolutionary and therapeutic power of the masochistic fantasy of rebirth. Each neurosis has two faces. In masochism, regression to the mother is

28

Despite the force of convention and habit, there may very well be considerable merit in Bogueʼs translation of Deleuzeʼs ʻsensʼ as “meaning” and not the standard rendering of it as “sense.”

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like the pathological protest of a part of ourselves that has been wrecked by the law; but regression also conceals and contains possibilities for a compensating or normative progression of this same part, as one can glimpse in the masochistic fantasy of rebirth (SMM 131). Here, Deleuze is clearly using the term ʻ normativeʼ in the sense Canguilhem gives it when, in The Normal and the Pathological, he argues that sickness as much as health involves a normative activity on the part of the organism in relation to its environment—though of a profoundly different sort in each case. [T]he pathological or abnormal state does not consist in the absence of every norm. Disease is still a norm of life but it is an inferior norm in the sense that it tolerates no deviation from the conditions in which it is valid, incapable as it is of changing itself into another norm. The sick living being is normalized in well-defined conditions of existence and has lost his normative capacity, the capacity to establish norms of existence in other conditions (Canguilhem Normal/Pathological 183). If health is defined by lifeʼs ability to freely and inventively carry out its fundamental activity of establishing a norm in relation to its environment, and sickness represents a restriction of that freedom and of the power of the living being to determine which norm should apply, it is not difficult, on this basis, to account for the Freudian and Jungian view that sickness arises precisely where some elements in the psychic apparatus become relatively detached from the transformations undergone by the rest, ʻ fixedʼ and resistant to integration within new norms that might be established by the psyche in its evolving relationship to itself and to its environment. Insofar as it can precipitate illness in this way, a ʻfixedʼ or ʻdetachedʼ element is, undoubtedly, pathogenic. But Deleuzeʼs point in the text above seems to be, contra Freud especially, that there is nothing about a regressive movement, per se, that necessarily terminates in a fixation. 128

Furthermore, there is a strong implication that Freud should have seen this much more clearly than he in fact did—an implication which becomes especially pronounced if one recalls here Deleuzeʼs claim that these dynamics show up best in the forms of neurosis that are closer to psychosis. And our sense of this implication is even further reinforced when we remind ourselves of both Freudʼs and Deleuze and Guattariʼs claims about Schreber and the means by which he ʻresolvedʼ his illness. This theme of a creative and self-transformative movement of regression, especially where the destination of that regressive movement is itself past or before the origin of strictly individuated experience—primary narcissism, in Freudian terms—reappears over and over again in Deleuzeʼs work during the 1960s. Once we know what to look for, it is recognizable in the ethical reading of the eternal return in Nietzsche and Philosophy, throughout the first part of Proust and Signs, and especially in Deleuzeʼs review of Tournierʼs Friday—and these are only the most obvious and striking examples. In the current text, it plays itself out especially strongly in the explanation Deleuze goes on to give of the ʻtopographicalʼ elements of the masochistic dynamic of punishment: that is, of the specific meaning of the fact that the punishment called for is, as a result of the heroʼs own very deliberate manipulation, delivered by a woman who incarnates the figure of the devouring Mother which is a feature of the deepest, most impersonal levels of the unconscious. By this point, the underlying logic of this should be evident—and in any case Deleuze makes it clear when he rebukes

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Reikʼs misinterpretation of the figure of the mother: “Reik goes wrong because he restricts himself to the apparent image of the father, and does not evaluate correctly the importance of the projection onto the mother or the regression back to the mother” (SMM 129). According to Deleuze, unless the female figure is conceived as something other than a displaced image of the father, her appearance in the masochistic fantasy continues to be inexplicable: “there is no reason why one should count in general on a greater indulgence from the devouring Mother” (SMM 129). Only when the Mother is treated as an Image in her own right does it begin to become possible to make sense of the resolution of anxiety that occurs as a result of the contractual overturning of the paternal law and the displacement of the punitive agency of this law onto a female partner, none of which Reik (or Freud before him) can simply be accused of inventing. What is at stake here is still, if one likes, Oedipal, but in a very different way, as becomes clear when Deleuze invokes Jung to confer a new sense upon the incestuous relationship that is prohibited by the paternal law: “the second birth, that is to say a heroic birth, a parthenogenesis (entering a second time into the maternal breast in order to be born anew or to become a child again)” (SMM 129130). From the fatherʼs point of view, the real motive for the fear of incest is to secure his role in the life of the child.

The maternal law, severe as it is,

demanding that the son undergo “terrible ordeals” and that he “abandon all the attributes of the father,” does so “as a condition for incest and for its success”

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(SMM 130).29 The most important of these “ordeals” is, of course, castration; and Deleuze emphasizes this same act has entirely different senses in relation to the two laws, paternal and maternal, which operate at fundamentally different levels of the unconscious: “that which from the fatherʼs point of view is a threat in order to prevent incest or a punishment which penalizes it, is on the contrary from the motherʼs point of view a condition which makes it possible and ensures its success” (SMM 130).

Only by means of a rebirth achieved through the

regression to the mother is a successful castration possible, the one that marks the transformation of the hero, his self-overcoming in relation to everything he was constrained to be by the patriarchal law. Thus, the traditional psychoanalytic interpretation remains superficial. But Deleuze is careful to emphasize that this does not make it wrong. It is very possible to read neurosis—and even masochistic perversion—in the Freudian manner up to a point.

The real error in the Freudian approach is that it is

reductionist: it insists upon partial explanations that function to foreclose the Imagistic unconscious. Deleuze makes this point when he comes to consider what the analysis of masochism tells us about the Freudian understanding of the dynamic structure of the unconscious—that is, the point of view on the unconscious that makes it a collection of instincts, which are themselves ultimately regressive. If Freud, when he discovered ʻ primary masochismʼ and

29

Once more, it is virtually impossible not to see nearly all of these themes as being repeated beneath the apparently Sartrean surface of Tournierʼs Friday, and to see Deleuzeʼs analysis as being fully cognizant of them all.

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linked it to the ʻ death instinctʼ (SE XIX 163-165) “made a great advance in analysis, because he gave up trying to derive masochism from sadism” (SMM 130), the reason why his analyses in “The Economic Problem of Masochism” and afterward nevertheless remained ʻ unconvincingʼ is, Deleuze suggests, that Freudʼs understanding of the instincts remained fundamentally ʻ realistʼ and so reductionist with regard to the virtual or Imagistic basis of the syntheses of the unconscious: On the one hand, the explanation that Freud gave for primary masochism, on the basis of the death instinct, showed that he did not believe in symbols or in Images as such. It is a general tendency of Freudianism to dissolve Images, to make something composite of them, referring them on the one hand back to real events, and on the other back to desires or irreducible instincts which are never “symbolizing” on their own account. Accordingly, for Freud, “the sexual instinct is never symbolic”; and with the death instinct, it is a matter of real death and an instinct which is irreducible, conceived in terms of a return to matter. Nevertheless, Freud did recognize that the nature of the instinct consists solely in regression, and that the only difference between the instincts (of life and death for example) lies in the terminus of the regression. It was not left to him to grasp the role of original images; these are not explained by anything apart from themselves, on the contrary, they are at once the terminus of each regression, the determining principle of the instincts, and the principle of interpretation of events themselves. Symbols do not allow themselves to be reduced or composed; on the contrary, they are the ultimate rule for the composition of desires and their object, they form the only irreducible data of the unconscious (SMM 130-131). Instead of pushing his analysis all the way back to the ʻ virtualʼ Images, the synthetic structures, underlying the ʻ actualʼ productions of the unconscious, Freud commits essentially the same error for which Deleuze repeatedly reproaches Kant: he attempts to derive the transcendental (aka the virtual) from the actual. In so doing, Freud not only fails to adequately ground his analysis,

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leaving the ʻ realʼ to which he appeals as a principle desperately in need of explanation, he also completely suppresses the differential and creative aspects of these synthetic structures, tying them instead, by means of an overly literal interpretation of the destinations of the regressive structures that he names ʻinstincts,ʼ to a frozen ʻ realityʼ the pathogenic nature of which cannot be more pointedly indicated than by the name Freud gives the deeper one: the ʻ death instinct.ʼ If, as we will see, Deleuzeʼs reading of Freudʼs work from the 1920s has a way of being profoundly ambivalent (in a manner that is not unlike his reading of Kant), it is because with the discovery of the death instinct Freud both points the way toward something absolutely essential—an impersonal, pre-individual synthesis that, in Nietzschean terms, ensures that life at its deepest level functions as a movement of constant self-overcoming—and, at the same time, cuts off the creative and therapeutic power of that synthesis by interpreting it in a ruthlessly negative manner. Masochism becomes an exemplary instance of this, but by no means a unique one.

Contrary to the Freudian tendency to split

masochism up into a number of forms and to suggest that it is to some degree interchangeable with its ʻopposite,ʼ sadism, the recognition of the synthetic role of the Image of Mother allows Deleuze to specify the unity of masochism in all of its forms. The masochistic fantasy ascends beyond the image of the father to that of the mother, and from there to “the man of the commune”; it also includes the theme of the two Mothers, who symbolize the double birth. It is the image of the Mother, it is the regression to this image, which is constitutive 133

of masochism and forms its unity. On condition that one interprets this original image after the manner of Jung, as an archetype from the deep strata of the unconscious (SMM 130). The entire revolutionary aspect of masochism is thus connected to its regression to this image, this original synthetic structure that is not a stand-in for something in experience, an object of desire or a condition of reality. And even if it is not ʻ revolutionary,ʼ the regressive movement is essential on a therapeutic level. In a way that seems to prefigure the reproaches Deleuze and Guattari level against Freud—but which also do no more than deepen Freudʼs own understanding that a delirium like Schreberʼs is in many ways an attempt at self-healing—Deleuze insists that, if it is allowed to run its course instead of being artificially interrupted by a precipitous attempt to tie it to a (negative) ʻrealityʼ that has been encountered in experience, the regressive path outlined by Sacher-Masoch is profoundly creative. Masochism is the perception of the maternal image or of the devouring mother; it takes the detours and path necessary to perceive its own place. It is important that this path should not be lost. There always exists a truth of neuroses or disorders when they are taken on their own account. The problem of treatment is not to dissolve symbols in order to substitute for them a proper appreciation of the real, but on the contrary to profit from what is surreal in them in order to give back to the neglected elements of our personality the development they demand (SMM 131). This ʻ surrealistʼ approach to Images reflects the tendency that leads Deleuze, here and subsequently, to link the therapeutic attempt to recover for the sick person the full range and depth of that normative power in relation to the environment that is a mark of ʻhealthʼ and the philosophical, aesthetic, or critical attempt to push back from experience to the synthetic structures by which 134

meaning is constantly produced and reproduced. Insofar as psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic unconscious proves itself capable of grasping the ʻtruthʼ or the ʻsenseʼ of the unconscious at these levels, can there be any question that Deleuzeʼs engagement with it is serious and far more than merely critical?

III. If we have already suggested that crucial points and themes developed for the first time by Deleuze in the analysis presented above reappear throughout the 1960s, and even persist in more modified forms into Deleuzeʼs work with Guattari, we will not have completed our account of the major threads composing what, it is now becoming apparent, was a considerable engagement on Deleuzeʼs part with psychoanalytic thought of several sorts, until we have considered the use that he made of Freudʼs topographical model of the psyche at the beginning of the fourth chapter of Nietzsche and Philosophy.

This

discussion, published a year after the appearance of “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,” repeats many of the key movements of what we have seen above. Most importantly for our purposes, it is similarly ambiguous. In the main body of the text, Deleuze makes an insightful use of Freudʼs topographical model of the unconscious in order to extend and clarify his account of what is at stake in the Nietzschean theory of “active forgetting” that appears at the beginning of the second essay of On The Genealogy of Morals. But in a long footnote, Deleuze in turn presents a strikingly negative assessment of what Nietzsche himself might

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have thought of Freudʼs theory more generally, appealing in the process to the first part of Otto Rankʼs Will Therapy, which has been translated into English under the title Truth and Reality. While far less developed than “From SacherMasoch to Masochism,” either as a reading of Freud or as an articulation of the principles of a critical assessment of psychoanalysis, all of this nevertheless merits a brief discussion, especially insofar as it presents us with an opportunity to reinforce the points we have already made about Deleuzeʼs relationship to psychoanalysis during this period. Having demonstrated previously the extent to which, for Nietzsche, a genuinely critical philosophy must be pluralist and must take a genealogical approach to the ontology of forces entailed by such a pluralism, Deleuze turns, in the bookʼs fourth chapter, to the ʻpsychologicalʼ dimension of the problem that he had set forth at the end of his analysis of the Eternal Return: how to account for the becoming-reactive of forces (and whether we can also conceive of a corresponding movement of becoming-active). In the previous chapter, Deleuze had emphasized that the point of the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power and the eternal return was to make it possible to critically address, by way of a genealogical analysis of the succession of forces by which it is invested, the ʻimage of thoughtʼ that had prevailed in the West since Platoʼs time—and which had been elaborated in successively more extreme and reactive forms by Christian and then by modern philosophers.

At the chapterʼs end, this

genealogical analysis of the image of thought, which we have already seen to be

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dependent on a ʻtypologyʼ of forces (active, reactive) and of wills (noble, base), is further said by Deleuze in this connection to require a ʻ topologyʼ of thought— going on to remark upon the manner in which Nietzscheʼs account of the triumph of reactive forces, primarily seen as a historical phenomenon, a process of “cultural degeneration” (NPh 109), is also presented by Nietzsche as involving a literal movement:

“from being Greek it becomes German...” (NPh 109).

Commenting on this, Deleuze links the whole Nietzschean project of a critical and genealogical analysis of force relations to such a topological form of thinking: This is a way of re-emphasizing the extent to which the new image of thought implies extremely complex relations of forces. The theory of forces depends on a typology of forces. And once again a typology begins with a topology. Thinking depends on certain coordinates. We have the truths that we deserve depending on the place we are carrying our existence to, the hour we watch over and the element that we frequent (NPh 109-110). And this same theme, now concerning a psychic topography, arises in the fourth chapter, when Deleuze comes to consider the distribution of active and reactive forces within the psyche—all of which will, shortly, lead us to the point where Freud once again makes his entry onto the scene. Deleuze begins this discussion by establishing a picture of the “normal or healthy state” of the psyche—once more in a sense that appears to owe a considerable debt to Canguilhem.

Specifically, the state of psychic health is

characterized by Deleuze as a state that “expresses the ʻ normalʼ relation between a reaction that delays action and an action that precipitates reaction” (NPh 111). This definition, in turn, rests upon Deleuzeʼs prior specification that

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the normal role of reactive forces is “always to limit action. They divide delay or hinder it by means of another action whose effects we feel” (NPh 111). This amounts to saying that reactive forces ordinarily complicate the expression of active, purely creative forces30—complicate but, as Deleuze makes clear, obey. “The master is said to react precisely because he acts his reactions. The active type therefore includes reactive forces but ones that are defined by a capacity for being acted” (NPh 111). And so Deleuze suggests that in a healthy psyche, as in Canguilhemʼs healthy organism, the “active” or “creative” principle will be dominant in relation to the whole complex of forces making up the psyche and determining its overall relationship to its environment. Having thereby defined the healthy or normal state in principle, Deleuze now poses the key question of a Nietzschean genealogy, insofar as it concerns the image of thought and its ʻmoralʼ analogues: what is the relationship between these healthy reactive forces and the ressentiment that leads to the development of the structures of Bad Conscience that characterize Western “moral” life? We can see [...] that a reaction alone cannot constitute ressentiment. Ressentiment designates a type in which reactive forces prevail over active forces. But they can only prevail in one way: by ceasing to be acted. [...] If we ask what the man of ressentiment is, we must not forget this principle: he does not re-act. And the word ressentiment gives a definite clue: reaction ceases to be acted in order to become something felt (senti). Reactive forces prevail over active forces because they escape their action. But at this point two questions arise: 1) How do they prevail, how do they escape? What is the mechanism of this “sickness”?

30

Deleuze defines the role of the latter in the ʻriposteʼ formed within this normative state as follows: “[A]ctive forces produce a burst of creativity: the set it off at a chose instant, at a favourable moment, in a given direction, in order to carry out a quick and precise piece of adjustment” (NPh 111).

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2) And, conversely, how are reactive forces normally acted? “Normal” here does not mean “frequent” but on the contrary, “normative” and “rare”. What is the definition of this norm, of this “health” (NPh 111-112)? This text should resolve any lingering doubts about the extent of Canguilhemʼs influence on the sense of health and sickness involved in Deleuzeʼs work during this period; and it should make equally clear the centrality of a set of specifically ʻclinicalʼ notions, also very much at play in “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,” to Deleuzeʼs philosophy insofar as it is concerned with questions that can, in the broadest possible sense, be called “ethical”—that is, questions which concern, in one sense or another, meaning and value as basic phenomena, or the basic elements of ʻ life.ʼ These are not simply things that Deleuze has learned from Nietzsche; indeed, however apt they are as a lens through which to read Nietzsche, it is possible to specify, at least in this case, the precise notions that Deleuze is bringing to Nietzscheʼs text—though we have no doubts that the result of this importation is the discovery of a profound resonance. And something similar occurs, in the next section, with Freud, whose texts Deleuze proceeds to put to work in order to more fully specify the dimensions of the problem he has just posed to, and through, Nietzsche. This time, Deleuze gladly appropriates more or less wholesale a generic version of Freudʼs first topography, amalgamated from accounts in the seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, “The Unconscious” and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (NPh 211n2)—all of which he refers to as a “schema of life” (NPh 112).31 What

31

We should hear the resonance between this phrase, in this context, and the term “biopsychical

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interests him, in particular, is the notion that the perceptual and mnemic apparatuses must be separated from one another, and that this forms a basic condition for the functioning of either system. “The system which receives an excitation is not the system which retains a lasting trace of it: the same system could not at one and the same time faithfully record the transformations which it undergoes and offer an ever fresh receptivity” (NPh 112).32 Following Freud, and citing passages from each of the three texts named above, Deleuze goes on to associate the ʻ receptiveʼ system with (perceptual) consciousness and the recording system with the unconscious. And then, as if to excuse himself for whatever liberties he might be accused of having taken with Freud, Deleuze notes, without explanation, that “Freud is far from accepting this topographical hypothesis without reservations”

(NPh 112, translation modified)—and then

moves directly to his explanation of how it can be used to illuminate the

life” that Deleuze uses in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition to denote the form of being in which the various synthetic operations he discusses there will unfold. See DR 96ff. 32 Deleuze is, here, almost directly paraphrasing Freud, who writes, in the fourth chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “On the basis of impressions derived from our psycho-analytic experience, we assume that all excitatory processes that occur in the other systems leave permanent traces behind in them which form the foundation of memory. Such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the fact of becoming conscious; indeed they are often most powerful and enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never entered consciousness. We find it hard to believe, however, that the permanent traces of excitation such as these are also left in the system Pcpt-Cs. If they remained constantly conscious, they would very soon set limits to the systemʼs aptitude for receiving fresh excitations. If, on the other hand, they were unconscious, we should be faced with the problem of explaining the existence of unconscious processes in a system whose functioning was otherwise accompanied by the phenomenon of consciousness. We should, so to say, have altered nothing and gained nothing by our hypothesis relegating the process of becoming conscious to a special system. Though this consideration is not absolutely conclusive, it nevertheless leads us to suspect that becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory-trace are processes incompatible with each other within one and the same system. Thus we should say that the excitatory process becomes conscious in the system Cs. but leaves no permanent trace there, but that the excitation is transmitted to the systems lying next within and that it is in them that its traces are left” (SE XVIII 24-25).

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unconscious which Nietzsche postulates in The Genealogy of Morals and the role it plays in the solution to the questions of ressentiment and, more generally, of health and sickness. For our purposes, what is remarkable about this is the extent to which Deleuze clearly believes that a fairly generic Freudian topography, despite all the limitations he appears to think it has in “From SacherMasoch to Masochism,” can still be useful both in specifying the mechanism by which Nietzsche poses “clinical” questions concerning the way in which the reification of the life of consciousness in Western cultural and intellectual history has led to a generalized sickness of the will, and in specifying what the ʻsolutionʼ to this sickness might be. Specifically, Freud provides a structure in terms of which Nietzscheʼs own specification of the problem can be given a more systematic form. Referring to two crucial sections in the Genealogy (see NPh 211n3), Deleuze argues that “all the elements” of the Freudian hypothesis can be found in Nietzsche (NPh 112). He first claims that “Nietzsche distinguishes two systems within the reactive apparatus: the conscious and the unconscious” (NPh 112). These correspond to: 1) the perceptual (and motor) system above, as is clear from Deleuzeʼs indication that in the system that is inseparable from consciousness “reaction is not a reaction to traces but becomes a reaction to the present excitation or to the direct image of an object” (NPh 112-113); and 2) the ʻrecordingʼ system, which is described using Nietzscheʼs own language from the first section of the second essay: “the purely passive impossibility of escaping from an impression once it is

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received” (Nietzsche, as cited in NPh 112).33 So far, the entire Freudian psychic apparatus is thus placed on the side of reaction in the Nietzschean schema. This appears to be perfectly correct given the manner in which Freudʼs theory, especially in the Interpretation of Dreams, begins with the functions of the reflex arc and the essentially receptive initial state of the sensory-motor apparatus. Furthermore, Deleuze emphasizes the specific role of consciousness, in this Nietzschean schema, as that which, initially, makes it possible for reaction to be acted: “when reactive forces take conscious excitation as their object, then the corresponding reaction can be acted” (NPh 113).

This ʻactingʼ of reaction

corresponds to the functions on the motor side of Freudʼs ʻ sensory-motorʼ apparatus, which can only be exercised in relation to objects of perceptual consciousness. And so we can see the manner which Deleuzeʼs appropriation of the Freudian schema allows the ʻ psycheʼ (or the lived body) at these sensorymotor and mnemic levels to be correlated to Nietzscheʼs general catalogue of forces. The real payoff of all of this, however, comes in the next paragraph, where Deleuze uses Nietzscheʼs references, in both sections of the Genealogy under

33

As far as I can tell this is a different version of Kaufmann and Hollingdaleʼs sentence translated thus: “This involves no mere passive inability to rid oneself of an impression, no mere indigestion through a once-pledged word with which one cannot have done [...]” (Nietzsche GM II, 1). The context, an explanation of the memory required for promising and a comparison of it to the memory automatically produced in the form of ʻmemory-traces,ʼ is completely obliterated by Deleuzeʼs citation. It is unclear whether this is an unannounced revision by Tomlinson of Kaufmann and Hollingdaleʼs translation in order to make it correspond to Deleuzeʼs citation, or whether it is something else entirely. In any event, I cannot find any text in Nietzsche more closely corresponding to the one Deleuze cites.

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discussion, to a forgetfulness that is the specific province of the noble type34 who is governed by active forces in order to give a specific place to what, in Freud, would be viewed as the censoring or repressive agency in the psyche. But the two systems or the two kinds of reactive forces must still be separated. The traces must not invade consciousness. A specific active force must be given the job of supporting consciousness and renewing its freshness, fluidity and mobile, agile chemistry at every moment. This active, super-conscious faculty is the faculty of forgetting. Psychologyʼs mistake was to treat forgetting as a negative determination, not to discover its active and positive character (NPh 113). Deleuze goes on to cite several texts from Nietzsche supporting the attribution to him of such a theory and emphasizes that there are two distinct reactive processes: reaction that can be acted in relation to conscious excitation, and reaction that cannot be acted because it is directed toward the traces, and so must, as a condition of health, be made to remain “in the unconscious, imperceptible” (NPh 113). In other words, it must be repressed. Here it should be noted that, unlike Freud, Deleuze nowhere mentions a need to ʻ adaptʼ to reality or to accommodate desire to its conditions as driving the development of an active faculty of forgetting.

On the contrary, such a faculty must exist

precisely in order to make any active reaction to the environment, or even

34

The texts in question are as follows, in Kaufmann and Hollingdaleʼs translation: “To be incapable of taking oneʼs enemies, oneʼs accidents, even oneʼs misdeeds seriously for very long—this is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget [...]. Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others [...]” (Nietzsche GM I, 10). “Forgetting is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression, that is responsible for the fact that what we experience and absorb enters our consciousness as little while we are digesting it (one might call the process ʻinpsychcationʼ) as does the thousandfold process, involved in physical nourishment—so called ʻincorporationʼ” (Nietzsche GM II, 1).

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perceptual consciousness of it, possible for the organism in the first place. The need for it is above all ontological, and it serves a purpose that will have become familiar to anyone well acquainted with Deleuze: the synthesis of a ʻ pureʼ past that has the function of making the present pass, of constantly renewing consciousness. Furthermore, based on Deleuzeʼs next set of comments, it is very tempting to assimilate this repressive agency directly to the force of ʻprimal repressionʼ in Freud. But this faculty is in a very special situation: although it is an active force it is delegated by activity to work with reactive forces. It serves as “guard” or “supervisor,” preventing the two systems of the reactive apparatus from becoming confused. [...] And in order to renew consciousness it constantly has to borrow the energy of the second kind of reactive forces, making this energy its own in order to give it to consciousness (NPh 113). Especially in the absence of much more direct citations of what, precisely, Deleuze has in mind in Nietzscheʼ, it is indeed difficult to avoid suspecting that he has just imported the Freudian theory of repression into the space created by Nietzscheʼs comments about active forgetting.

And if so, it is remarkably

successful. After a few quotations from Nietzsche to establish how he portrays the situation that would ensue when his faculty of ʻ active forgettingʼ fails to operate as it should, Deleuze goes on to explain how reactive forces come to triumph in the psyche because of the ease with which the repressive system, as he has used Freud to explicate it, falls victim to “variations, failures, and functional disturbances” (NPh 113). Once he gets to this point, he seems to be back on firmly Nietzschean ground, except that the language in which he 144

develops this next move is once again riddled with Freudianisms. When the repressive apparatus fails: it is as if the wax of consciousness were hardened, excitation tends to get confused with its trace in the unconscious and conversely, reaction to traces rises into consciousness and overruns it. Thus at the same time as reaction to traces becomes perceptible, reaction ceases to be acted. The consequences of this are immense: no longer being able to act a reaction, active forces are deprived of the material condition of their functioning, they no longer have the opportunity to do their job, they are separated from what they can do. We can thus finally see in what way reactive forces prevail over active forces: when the trace takes the place of the excitation in the reactive apparatus, reaction itself takes the place of action, reaction prevails over action (NPh 114). What else does this amount to but a description of the consequences, in fairly strictly Freudian terms, of the return of the repressed? Indeed, the failure of repression is precisely the cause of illness in nearly every Freudian presentation of the matter.

And it is very difficult indeed to avoid concluding that in this

passage Deleuze essentially explains the beginning of Nietzschean bad conscience as if it were the onset of neurosis. This is not to say that Deleuze is making up a reading of Nietzsche out of whole cloth or that he was somehow completely insensible to the differences between Freud and Nietzsche in the early 1960s.

On the contrary, what is

remarkable about this section—and indeed this entire chapter—of Nietzsche and Philosophy, is the extent to which such a reading, while at times more or less manifestly psychoanalytic, also appears to be very much faithful to the letter and spirit of Nietzscheʼs On the Genealogy of Morals. This becomes even more evidently so when we take note of the footnote that Deleuze suspends over the

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next section—a section in which he also remarks that the “essential link between ressentiment and revenge resembles the Freudian anal-sadistic complex” (NPh 116). In that footnote, Deleuze makes the appeal we have already mentioned to Otto Rank, who he praises as an “authentic Nietzschean,” in order to show precisely how Freud in fact comes out poorly when one takes notice of the “fundamental differences” that separate him from Nietzsche:

“Otto Rank

criticized the ʻflat and dull idea of sublimationʼ in Freud. He accused Freud of not knowing how to free the will from bad conscience or guilt. He wanted to rely on the active forces of the unknown unconscious of Freudianism and to replace sublimation by a creative and artistic will” (NPh 211-212n5). Undoubtedly, as we have seen, Deleuze is in full agreement with many of these criticisms. And yet, despite these suspicions, he will also continue to use the language and conceptual structure of psychoanalysis to explain what he presents as Nietzscheʼs intention: “to produce a psychology that is really a typology, to put psychology ʻ on the plane of the subjectʼ” (NPh 116). This time, by now almost predictably, Deleuze footnotes the phrase cited and attributes it to Jung (NPh 212n8)—and we can see that Nietzscheʼs ʻ typesʼ now appear to correspond to Jungʼs Images. And so once more we are confronted with the same question: does this entail a rejection or an acceptance, albeit with modifications, of psychoanalysis? However much we might want to take some of the criticisms above—those made on the basis of the reading of Sacher-Masoch, those attributed to Jung and Rank, and those which are made or hinted at in Deleuzeʼs

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own voice—as evidence that his rejection of psychoanalysis is of far longer standing than his encounter with Guattari, it seems more and more evident that what they really amount to is a broad based but critical engagement with a fairly wide range of psychoanalytic thinkers. In the first years of the 1960s, Deleuze was for the most part citing classical, German-speaking psychoanalytic authors, though his use of the language of “imaginary and symbolic” to describe the “spiritual” nature of “ressentimentʼs revenge” (NPh 116) reminds us that he was, by the time he wrote Nietzsche and Philosophy, already familiar with Lacan and other major French theorists.35 But the identify of his particular interlocutors is ultimately less important here than the fact that all of these references suggest that, somewhat surprisingly, we should perhaps take him very much at his word when we find him saying, in an interview conducted in 1988: Oddly enough, it wasnʼt me who rescued Félix from psychoanalysis; he rescued me. In my study on Masoch, and then in The Logic of Sense, Iʼd thought Iʼd discovered things about the specious unity of sadism and masochism, or about events, that contradicted psychoanalysis but could be reconciled with it. Félix, on the other hand, had been and still was a psychoanalyst, a student of Lacanʼs but like a “son” who already knew that reconciliation was impossible (N 144). As we have seen, the engagement with psychoanalysis in question actually precedes what Deleuze acknowledges here, but aside from that bit of self-editing, there seems to be a real sense in which the relationship that is suggested by these comments concerning the late 1960s also seems to have existed, and

35

One should not forget, as well, that he cited Sacha Nachtʼs Le Masochisme prominently in “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” or that he clearly had some familiarity with Lagache, as well.

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displaying the same general tone, at the beginning of the decade. But if that is so, then our next task must be to move on to a consideration of these key years at the end of the decade where Deleuzeʼs engagement reached its peak and try to determine what, exactly, psychoanalysis may have contributed to Deleuzeʼs philosophy.

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Chapter 4

“Psychoanalysis in general is the science of events, on the condition that the event should not be treated as something whose sense is to be sought and disentangled. The event is sense itself, insofar as it is disengaged or disentangled from the states of affairs which produce it and in which it is actualized” (LS 211).

By now, it will feel like we have already seen a number of such formulations, where Deleuze acknowledges the power or potential of psychoanalysis, but only on some ʻconditionʼ that does not seem to correspond to what is usually true of psychoanalytic practice. For instance, near the end of “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” he tells us that: “It is the image of the Mother, it is the regression to this image, which is constitutive of masochism and forms its unity. On condition that one interprets this original image after the manner of Jung, as an archetype from the deep strata of the unconscious” (SMM 130, my emphasis). Based on what we have already seen in the previous chapter, it is does not seem that Deleuze is thereby suggesting an outright rejection of the Freudian view, but rather a relativization of it. Specifically, Deleuze is claiming that because Freud confuses what occurs at “the most superficial levels of the unconscious” (SMM 128) with what occurs at all levels of the unconscious, he often tends to confuse a superficial, derivative and secondary formation (in this case, the Image of the Father) for one that is primary (the Image of the Mother). The cure, in this case, seems simple enough, namely the acknowledgement by psychoanalysis that its current (Freudian) models are only applicable in certain cases and that these are 149

certainly not the cases which reflect most clearly the effects that occur at the deepest levels of the psyche. But we should be careful about jumping to such a conclusion too quickly. If both of the early sets of criticisms that we have reviewed so far, those in “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” and those in Nietzsche and Philosophy, seem to point at more or less the same difficulty with Freudian psychoanalysis, they also seem to entail that this is not a value-neutral mistake on Freudʼs part. Indeed, it seems that what is at stake here is considerably more serious than a simple limitation of our knowledge, since the misconceptions involved tend to support sociopolitical or moral and ethical formations that are deeply problematic. This recognition has important consequences, since it allows us to see Deleuze as subjecting psychoanalysis to a criticism that he was also wont to level against philosophers during the 1960s.

We have already seen that Deleuze saw

Nietzscheʼs genealogy as bearing, critically, upon a conventional “image of thought” from which the philosophy of the future must escape in order to realize itself. This received considerable development in Difference and Repetition, one of the basic points of which is claim that Western philosophy at least since Plato has consistently confused the conditions of representative consciousness with genuine genetic or ontological principles. This confusion has led to the formation of an “Image of Thought” to which philosophy has granted a normative force that is all the more absurd, according to Deleuze, insofar as the image is ultimately

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moral in origin (DR 265).1 Once more, this can be seen as a development of the Nietzschean critique of the will to truth as an expression of a certain form of life: philosophy, for all of its pretentions to critical openness and an absence of presuppositions, in fact always operates on the basis of a set of “subjective or implicit presuppositions” (DR 129-30)—or, in other words, on the basis of a set of pre-reflective conventions that get introduced into philosophical reflection under the general form of “Everybody knows...” (DR 129).

With regard to

psychoanalysis, Deleuze was fairly clearly arguing something similar at the beginning of the 1960s. This is evident when we find him suggesting, sometimes obliquely, that the restrictions characteristic of the Freudian view of the unconscious are likewise determined by an unwillingness to abandon the form of representative consciousness, as when he complains that Freud never truly gets beyond his so-called “objective” unconscious. And it can also be seen in the more direct suggestion, reflected in Deleuzeʼs citation of Rankʼs claim that Freudʼs conception of “sublimation” remains ʻ flat and dull,ʼ that psychoanalytic practice is largely operating in support of conventional morality despite Freudʼs protestations against the unreasonableness of the moralizing objections that were often made against psychoanalysis. But once again, it would be hasty to conclude that this is the whole story

1

Deleuze spends a considerable amount of time ramifying this suggestion throughout the book: demonstrating, for instance, that in Plato this mistake took the form of seeking to link ontological genesis to the Idea construed as a figure of the Same, while in Kant it amounted to framing everything in terms of a relationship of external conditioning, and thereby turning the transcendental, understood as the condition of possibility of the empirical, into nothing more than the duplicate of the empirical.

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either. Indeed, Deleuze was not yet, in the early 1960s, convinced that this reductive view was the only possible interpretation of the psychoanalytic unconscious, as we can see from the doubts expressed in his tentative and more or less undeveloped endorsements of both Jung and Rank, insofar as both seemed to him to provide a model that was less ʻobjectiveʼ and less ʻ reactiveʼ than Freudʼs own. But it also appears that, as the decade progressed, neither of those alternatives was to prove acceptable.

Rank is essentially forgotten in

Deleuzeʼs work after the mention in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Jung, though he was endorsed in 1961 as providing a fruitful alternative to Freudʼs notion of phylogenesis, has his notion of archetypes condemned right along with the latter in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition (DR 104). And yet, that same work presents one of the most extensive development of a psychoanalytic view to be found in Deleuzeʼs oeuvre—more so, because of its breadth, than “Coldness and Cruelty” and even, perhaps, more far reaching than the later sections of The Logic of Sense, if only because of the scope and systematicity with which psychoanalysis is articulated there in terms of Deleuzeʼs transcendental philosophy. Indeed, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that the unconscious includes the domain of the transcendental, insofar as the latter is understood as a field of questions and problems that have a genetic relationship to the empirical, rather than as a set of conditions to which the empirical must conform. And this is no merely general claim. Deleuze gives a detailed presentation of the basic articulations of the unconscious as

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transcendental instances in his own specific sense. Therein, the three syntheses of time that form the principle structures of his transcendental philosophy (habitliving present, memory-pure past, and eternal recurrence-empty form of time) are shown to correspond precisely to an entire series of basic Freudian structures: the elements of the late topography (Id, Ego, Superego); the principle stages of infantile sexual development (auto-erotic, pre-genital, and genital); and the three essential ʻfoundingʼ moments of the psyche that Freud comes to theorize in the crucial period between 1914 and 1921 (the compulsion to repeat, primary repression, and primary narcissism). Obviously, before we can come to any conclusions about the philosophical significance of psychoanalysis for Deleuze overall, all of the above must be considered in more detail—especially insofar as it reflects a number of developments in Deleuzeʼs philosophical views since the beginning of the 1960s.

I. It seems that, as the 1960s progressed, Freudʼs difficulties surrounding the “compulsion to repeat” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle took on a central importance in Deleuzeʼs assessment of psychoanalysis.

Freudʼs solutions,

especially the postulation of a ʻdeath instinctʼ tied to a literal tendency to seek a return to a state of inorganic matter, are hardly optimal in Deleuzeʼs mind. And yet, there is ample evidence that they nevertheless proved to be susceptible to a reading which brings much of Freudʼs metapsychology in line with Deleuzeʼs

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conception of life and thought as having their basis in an unconscious, impersonal transcendental field.2 Prior to the emergence of anything like the synthetic structures of representative consciousness, Deleuze claims that the transcendental field will have already been structured through a series of ʻpassive synthesesʼ—two of which he explicitly correlates, in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition, with distinct ʻ beyondsʼ of the Freudian pleasure principle. Even without raising the vexed question of the death instinct—which, as we shall see, is most closely connected to a ʻthirdʼ synthetic structure that Deleuze also ties to Nietzscheʼs eternal return—it thus becomes possible to see Deleuze making use of the openings that Freud creates in his own framework in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in order to account for the manner in which these unconscious transcendental structures are lived, even and especially if they do not directly appear in the field of conscious experience. This connection initially arises in the case of the first and most basic of Deleuzeʼs synthetic structures, the passive synthesis of habit or the living present. Freud claims that Beyond the Pleasure Principle arose in response to the problem of how to account for a phenomenon he had encountered in patients suffering from some traumatic neuroses:

an apparent compulsion to repeat

certain elements in their dreams in a manner that appeared to be inexplicable, given his current principles, since the objects of these repetitions were, to all

2

See LS 98-99, 100-108, as well as Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, to which Deleuze refers as the origin of this notion, and Constantine Boundas, “Foreclosure of the Other,” the value of which as a discussion of these issues from a phenomenological standpoint has not diminished in the time since its original publication.

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appearances, totally unconnected to pleasure.

These dreams caused

considerable theoretical difficulties for Freud, who, as is well known, had strenuously insisted since The Interpretation of Dreams that the visible products of the unconscious (such as dreams) are always structured to provide for the fulfillment of a wish—a claim which correlated to the Freudian conviction that, by itself, the unconscious is governed primarily by the pleasure principle. So it is hardly surprising that considerable parts of Beyond the Pleasure Principle are given over to attempts to explain away a number of apparently ʻ paradoxicalʼ instances of repetition, the most famous of which is surely that of the “Fort-Da” game. In fact, Freud rather easily disposes of the childʼs game in terms that are consistent with the pleasure principle,3 along with a number of nightmares and other dreams and phantasies that, he finally concludes, only appear to express a ʻwishʼ for something unpleasant. Despite these successes, Freud finds that the question of whether there are exceptions to the pleasure principle is given renewed force by a set of observations concerning the psychic effects of painful physical injuries.4 In such traumatic events: the pleasure principle is for the moment put out of action. There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead—the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can be disposed of (SE XVIII 29-30).

3

He actually suggests several ways in which the act of playing the game that could be pleasurable, and so become an object of repetition on that, ordinary, basis (SE XVIII 15-17). 4 It is important to distinguish what is at stake here from psychic ʻtraumasʼ such as those Freud postulated while he subscribed to the so-called ʻseduction theory.ʼ

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Here, Freud finds himself forced to concede a genuine exception: the pleasure principle is, at least temporarily, suspended in such cases. And having thereby established its occurrence, Freud proceeds to use the same formula of a ʻsuspensionʼ of the pleasure principle in explaining the compulsively repeated dreams of patients suffering from anxiety neuroses.5 Once again, he claims that what is driving the repetition of the traumatic elements in these dreams is energy that has been introduced into the psychic system by the traumatic event but remains unbound. There really is no ʻpleasure principleʼ operative at the heart of these dreams, no ʻ wishʼ to be fulfilled; rather, they are “helping to carry out another task, which must be accomplished before the dominance of the pleasure principle can even begin. These dreams are endeavoring to master the stimulus retrospectively” (SE XVIII 32).

As we will see, this will have significant

implications, for both Freud and Deleuze. These begin with the fact that it in the instance of this ʻsuspensionʼ of the pleasure principle that we find what makes it a principle at all, what makes it ʻnecessary.ʼ In other words, the discovery of this process of the binding of excitation reveals that very process as a precondition for the functioning of pleasure as a principle. So it is that Freud continues on to say that the dreams in question: “afford us a view of a function of the mental

5

See SE XVIII 30-33. The patients in question are those who have been overwhelmed by a trauma which came upon them unprepared, so that that they were unable to attach the energy of the traumatic stimulus to any pre-existing psychic cathexes, as would ordinarily be done through the anxiety one feels in anticipation of being hurt. It is worth remarking here that what Freud is discussing under the sign of ʻanxiety neurosesʼ bears a strong relation to what contemporary clinical psychologists and psychiatrists call post-traumatic stress disorder. Surely, whatever their differences may be, the latter preserves the strong and ambivalent element of ʻrepetition,ʼ oftentimes in a very compulsive fashion, of the traumatic situation that the dreams Freud mentions here exhibit.

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apparatus which, though if does not contradict the pleasure principle, is nevertheless independent of it and seems to be more primitive than the purpose of gaining pleasure and avoiding pleasure” (SE XVIII 32). Totally devoid of any structure of ʻ desire,ʼ these dreams and other such phenomena “arise, rather, in obedience to the compulsion to repeat” (SE XVIII 32). And it is precisely this last point that Deleuze will isolate and extract from Freudʼs analysis in order to develop it in terms of his own ontology:

pleasure, as a principle, becomes

possible only on the basis of a prior operation of repetition. A list of the crucial characteristics attributed to the unconscious by Deleuze in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition would undoubtedly include its characteristic of functioning on the basis of a series of syntheses of repetition. For us, the immediate importance of this point is fact that the first of these syntheses performs precisely the operation of ʻ bindingʼ that has been in question above. Deleuze situates this operation at what he calls the ʻ primaryʼ layer of the Id—the Id which, in turn, he defines as a “totality” made up of “mobile distribution of differences and local resolutions within an intensive field” (DR 96). While such a distribution surely amounts to an instance of ʻlife,ʼ this is so only in the barest and most incomplete sense.6 For any life that is to persist or sustain itself will need to organize itself and thereby become able to deal in a regular and appropriate way with its environment. Like many thinkers before him, Freud saw this requirement as necessitating that the organism become able to perform a

6

For a later exploration of ʻlifeʼ in this barest of all senses, see Deleuzeʼs famous final essay: “Immanence, a life.”

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number of operations that Deleuze classes under the heading of an “active” type of synthesis: beginning with simple perceptual recognition and possibly extending as far as complex and sophisticated operations of memory and understanding (DR 71, 73, 75-78). However, the development of these capacities cannot be explained simply by a retroactively posited need for them to develop. Indeed, there is at first nothing about life at this ʻ bareʼ level that, as such, “needs” to continue at all; it could just as easily be a fleeting and transient phenomenon. So it is that lifeʼs need for its own perpetuation, and for the acquisition of the capacities to ensure this must, first of all, itself be explained. And it is precisely here that Deleuze intervenes, arguing that “need” in this organic sense is the result of a passive synthesis which creates the sense of life, as such, for the organism in question, thereby giving that being its orientation in relation to the flow of stimuli, impressions, or excitations which it encounters—a passive synthesis, then, of time, and in particular, of a “lived, or living present” (DR 70). In Difference and Repetition, the notion of this first passive synthesis is given a complex development that incorporates concepts derived from Hume, Bergson, Samuel Butler, Gabriel Tarde, Samuel Beckett, and Condillac (see DR 70-79). Nevertheless, its basic form can be grasped fairly easily. Starting from the “mobile distribution of differences and local resolutions within an intensive field” (DR 96) referred to above, and conceiving of this as a field of purely instantaneous events, it is easy to see that the emergence of any organization within such a field will require that some operation of synthesis has taken place.

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And furthermore, such a synthesis can take no other form than that of a synthesis of differentiation applied to some of the previously indifferent events occurring within the intensive field. So it is that when, at the beginning of the second chapter, Deleuze invokes the Humean theory of imagination,7 he does so precisely in order to suggest that the only form that can be taken by such an operation of synthesis is that of repetition. And repetition, in turn, requires time— or more specifically, duration as it belongs to a present in which repetition can appear or distinguish itself as such. Accordingly, the present in which repetition takes place must retain a trace of the prior instances that are being repeated in order for any current instance to count as ʻ another one.ʼ

At its very core,

repetition involves the synthesis of a present that contains the past as one of the presentʼs own “dimensions.” But not only the past; the present of repetition must also include the future.

The reason for this becomes clear as soon as one

considers repetitions composed of complex ʻcasesʼ (AB, AB, AB, A...) rather than simple ʻelementsʼ (A, A, A, A).8 These ʻclothedʼ repetitions of cases require the production, not only of a retention, but also of an expectation that, given the first element of a case, the second element will follow.

And so the present of

repetition must include not only the past, but also the future, once again as a dimension of the present. Finally, having thus specified the form of the synthesis in question, what remains to be answered are the questions of “who?” performs

7

And, more broadly, the whole ʻempiricistʼ theory of the progressive development of the faculties from a series of individual, local impressions. 8 And Deleuze insists that the former ʻclothedʼ repetition is always behind the latter ʻbareʼ variety, and vice versa (DR 72, 76).

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it, and under what circumstances.

If Deleuze repeatedly emphasizes the

ʻpassivityʼ of this first synthesis, this is because while a synthesis of this sort must take place in something having the status of a mind or a psyche, it cannot be said to have been carried out by the mind as an action distinct from the mere ʻcontemplationʼ that is the most basic distinguishing feature of life as such (DR 70-71). He further clarifies this by referring to the synthesis as an operation of the imagination, understood “as a contractile power: like a sensitive plate, it retains one case when the other appears” (DR 70). In which case, we can see how “time,” in this first passive synthesis, “is subjective, but in relation to the subjectivity of a passive subject” (DR 71).9

And so the first synthesis is,

precisely, the synthesis of a “living present,” that is: a present containing traces of a past and the expectation of a similar future, the present belonging to a ʻlarval subjectʼ the being of which is defined, first of all, by a “habit of living, the expectation that ʻitʼ will continue” (DR 74). So defined, it is easy to see how this passive synthesis of habit would be the one that is characteristic of ʻlifeʼ seen as what organizes itself on the basis of the most elementary and undifferentiated ʻ sensitivityʼ: “We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air—not merely prior to the recognition or representation of these, but prior to their being sensed. Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of

9

This qualification is crucial, because it allows Deleuze to distinguish this subject from the one that would be implied by the “active syntheses of memory and understanding,” both of which are “superimposed upon and supported by the passive synthesis of the imagination” but which, unlike imagination, involve a necessarily reflected moment, a moment of consciousness (DR 71).

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contractions, of retentions and expectations” (DR 73). The ʻ sensibilityʼ of any organism, composed in this way, is made up of any number of complex sets, layers, and series of passive syntheses, of chains of habits giving rise to local or distributed subjectivities or ʻpassive selves or egos.ʼ And these ʻpassive selvesʼ correspond, first, to the organismʼs various tissues and organs long before they may come to be organized as faculties of ʻmindʼ in the active sense that is usually involved in philosophical discussions of perception, memory, understanding, and so on. These thousands of habits of which we are composed—these contractions, contemplations, pretensions, presumptions, satisfactions, fatigues; these variable presents—thus form the basic domain of passive syntheses. The passive self is not defined simply by receptivity – that is, by means of the capacity to experience sensations – but by virtue of the contractile contemplation which constitutes the organism itself before it constitutes the sensations. This self, therefore, is by no means simple: it is not enough to relativize or pluralize the self, all the while retaining for it a simple attenuated form. Selves are larval subjects; the world of the passive synthesis constitutes the system of the self, under conditions yet to be determined, but it is the system of a dissolved self (DR 78). In nearly every respect that matters, this ʻ dissolved selfʼ can be seen to correspond both to what Freud says, in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality about the earliest stages of “infantile” sexuality (SE VII 173-206), and to his description in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” of the first stirrings of instinctual pressure insofar as they are related directly to organic functions (SE XIV 119-120, 123). More importantly, Deleuze continues be consistent with Freudʼs view when he goes on to assert that ʻpleasureʼ only functions as a principle in and through

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the contemplative operations that occur in these passive syntheses, thereby linking them to the auto-erotic character of the earliest stages of infantile sexuality (SE VII 181-185) and specifying a “first beyond” of the pleasure principle (DR 98): “Pleasure is a principle in so far as it is the emotion of a fulfilling contemplation which contracts in itself cases of relaxation and contraction. There is a beatitude associated with passive synthesis, and we are all Narcissus in virtue of the pleasure (auto-satisfaction) we experience contemplating, even though we contemplate things quite apart from ourselves” (DR 74). With this last point, Deleuze introduces an important qualification into the Freudian theory: if infantile pleasure, as the pleasure of contemplation, is ʻauto-erotic,ʼ this is less because it is produced by a self acting with respect to itself and more because it is the result of a spontaneity which gives rise to the self at the same time as the enjoyment which it experiences.10 And it is precisely on this basis that Deleuze will conclude that the Freudian ʻcompulsion to repeatʼ is largely equivalent to what he postulates as the first, foundational moment of any psychic organization: the drawing off a ʻ differenceʼ (DR 73-74, 76) in the form of the pleasure and installing it as a “need” to be repeated. Indeed, as Deleuzeʼs account progresses, the “component instincts” of Freudian infantile sexuality, linked as they are to various tissues and organs, will find their basis in these passive selves—which can, in turn, be thought of as the distributed being

10

It is not clear that this is meant as a criticism of Freud, however, and it is in any case largely consistent with what Freud suggests about the organization and dynamics of psychic processes at the infantile level.

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of “the imagination, or the mind which contemplates in its multiple and fragmented states” (DR 76). For the moment, we can see that across the entire sensitive surface of the body, which would constitute the implicit ʻ totalityʼ of the “field of individuation” that Deleuze says is characteristic of “biopsychic life” (DR 96), passive syntheses of this first type are constantly at work, drawing off moments of enjoyment which, in turn, form the basis of the pleasure principle and thereby become nothing less than the ʻsubjectiveʼ origin of anything that may be called “need” (DR 77). Furthermore, when considered from the transcendental point of view, need in this sense can, in turn, be understood as the biopsychic “expression” of the temporality of the living present (DR 77) and as the structuring instance of a whole complex mechanism of vital ʻ significanceʼ (DR 73, 77) that shows life— precisely insofar as it is what makes pleasure into a principle—to be an instance of Being in Deleuzeʼs ʻproblematicʼ sense: Need expresses the openness of a question before it expresses the nonbeing or the absence of a response. To contemplate is to question. Is it not the peculiarity of questions to ʻdrawʼ a response? Questions present at once both the stubbornness or obstinacy and the lassitude or fatigue which corresponds to need. ʻ What difference is there...?ʼ This is the question the contemplative soul puts to repetition, and to which it draws a response from repetition. Contemplations are questions, while the contractions which occur in them and complete them are so many finite affirmations produced in the same way as presents are produced out of the perpetual present by means of the passive synthesis of time. [...] Moreover, if we reconsider the active syntheses in light of this basis which they presuppose, we see that they signify rather the constitution of problematic fields in relation to questions. The whole domain of behavior, the intertwining of artificial and natural signs, the intervention of instinct and learning, memory and intelligence, shows how the questions involved in contemplation are developed in the form of active problematic fields. To 163

the first synthesis of time there corresponds a first question-problem complex as this appears in the living present (the urgency of life). The living present, and with it the whole of organic and psychic life, rests upon habit (DR 78). ʻBiopsychic life,ʼ as what encompasses this entire movement from passive syntheses to active ones, from the most basic ʻquestionsʼ to the determination of ʻproblems and solutions,ʼ thereby finds its basis in the “Id” that Deleuze describes later in the chapter (DR 96). At that time, he reinvokes the problem of the ʻoriginʼ of the pleasure principle (DR 96-97)—reminding us that the constitution of pleasure as a principle, according to Freud, requires that “excitation in the form of free difference must, in some sense, be ʻ invested,ʼ ʻ tiedʼ or ʻ boundʼ in such a manner that its resolution becomes systematically possible” (DR 96)—and concludes that the Freudian solution to this problem amounts to the postulation of a “genuine reproductive synthesis, a Habitus” (DR 96). In fact, nearly everything we have just seen Deleuze develop more or less independently of Freud is later redeveloped in strictly Freudian terms. Thus we move through two layers of the id, one disorganized and one manifesting the “beginnings of an organization” as the result of the synthesis of habit as a “binding or investment of difference” (DR 96).11 Soon after that, we find, as well, that “[d]rives are nothing more than bound excitations” (DR 97) and that each moment of synthesis, insofar as it

11

Deleuzeʼs example here—for instance, that of the manner in which an “animal forms an eye for itself” (DR 96)—emphasizes that we begin in the strictly organic order of life, syntheses taking place on this first level providing, in turn, the basis for others: “Excitation as a difference was already the contraction of an elementary repetition. To the extent that the excitation becomes in turn the element of a repetition, the contracting synthesis is raised to a second power, one precisely represented by this binding or investment” (DR 97).

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represents the drawing off of a difference from the contemplation of a repetition (tissue differentiation to capture certain kinds of stimuli, the feeling of pleasure associated with the actual binding of an experienced stimulus, and so on), leads to the formation of “an ego [...] in the id; a passive, partial, larval, contemplative and contracting ego” (DR 97). No informed reader of Freud could miss the way in which Deleuze is thereby essentially correlating the elements of his theory outlined above to the categories of the psychoanalytic unconscious.

On the

basis of this correlation, he concludes precisely that “binding,” in the psychoanalytic sense, “is a pure passive synthesis, a Habitus which confers on pleasure the value of being a principle of satisfaction in general” (DR 97). And this point, which he restates by saying that “[h]abit underlies the organization of the Id” (DR 97), in turn allows Deleuze to both: 1) reject any psychoanalytic theory that would tend to make habit depend, instead, on pleasure (DR 97-98)—that is, which would presume the pleasure principle as an absolute foundation, thereby basing the organization of the psyche on a universal tendency toward reproducing the same experience of satisfaction over and over again, as superficial readers of Freud surely do;12 and 2) to show how this same theory can be said to amount to a reworking of the Kantian ʻ Transcendental Aesthetic”—that is, to use his transcendentalized psychoanalysis as a basis for criticizing Kant.

12

If Freud himself seems to do this at times, the entire question of the principle of constancy as a prior basis upon which the pleasure principle could be constructed, as it is developed in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” obviously exempts him from the charge that it is his only view.

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If this aesthetic appears to us more profound than that of Kant, it is for the following reasons: Kant defines the passive self in terms of simple receptivity, thereby assuming sensations already formed, then merely relating these to the a priori forms of their representation which are determined as space and time. In this manner, not only does he unify the passive self by ruling out the possibility of composing space step by step, not only does he deprive this passive self of all power of synthesis (synthesis being reserved for activity), but moreover he cuts the Aesthetic into two parts: the objective element of sensation guaranteed by space and the subjective element which is incarnate in pleasure and pain. The aim of the preceding analysis, on the contrary, has been to show that receptivity must be defined in terms of the formation of local selves or egos, in terms of the passive synthesis of contemplation or contraction, thereby accounting simultaneously for the possibility of experiencing sensations, the power of reproducing them, and the value that pleasure assumes as a principle (DR 98). From this, we can see that there are strictly philosophical reasons for Deleuze to frame the unconscious of biopsychic life in terms of a synthesis of time, carried out by a dissolved self, and why the fact that psychoanalysis allows him to do so gives it real philosophical value in Deleuzeʼs eyes. But we must take note of something more. This notion of the ʻ splitʼ within aesthetics is also a theme in Deleuzeʼs work of this period and a point of continuing concern—he will return to it at the conclusion of Difference and Repetition, and again in The Logic of Sense, and had already invoked it in “Michel Tournier and The World without Others.”

But in none of these other cases is what he means by the ʻ splitʼ

explained quite as clearly as it is here—in the midst of his psychoanalytic elaboration of the transcendental.

Kant, according to Deleuze, divides

temporalization from affect, thereby creating an order of ʻ objectiveʼ perception and the judgments involved in it, that is disconnected from the dynamic of pleasure and pain—and from the dynamic of need, and more generally from that 166

of value as far as it relates to the specific form of life belonging to the being which feels.

More than anything else, this division—and the extent to which it is

baseless and illusory—is exactly what is at issue in Deleuzeʼs challenge to the “Image of Thought” in Difference and Repetition, as it was in his interrogation of the “will to truth” in Nietzsche and Philosophy, as well as his claim, there, that the Kantian critique remained inadequate because Kant failed to perceive what is at the core of Nietzscheʼs philosophy, that a genuine critique must, first and foremost, be directed towards sense and value (NPh 1).

II. If the passive synthesis of habit corresponds to the unconscious of the Id and of infantile auto-eroticism, something more will be required in order to account for the development of a ʻglobalʼ ego and the active processes by which the instincts are directed to objects that can be viable sources of instinctual satisfaction just in case they can be posited as ʻ real.ʼ Deleuze acknowledges as much when he claims that the first passive synthesis is succeeded by “a twofold development [...], in two very different directions” (DR 98). The first direction is that of “an active synthesis,” which “consists in relating the bound excitation to an object supposed to be both real and the end of our actions (synthesis of recognition, supported by the passive synthesis of reproduction)” (DR 98).

Thereby

beginning with the advent of the reality principle, this arc of development leads eventually to the unification of the Ego and its distinction from the Id. “Active

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synthesis is defined by the reality in an ʻ objectalʼ relation, and it is precisely according to the reality principle that the Ego tends to be ʻ activated,ʼ to be actively unified, to unite all its small composing and contemplative passive egos, and to be topologically distinguished from the Id” (DR 98). Deleuze emphasizes, however, that the “real objects” produced in this active synthesis of recognition are nevertheless “not the only objects of the ego, any more than they exhaust the totality of so-called objectal relations” (DR 98). The other kind are those involved in a second direction or line of development beyond the first passive synthesis, which forms the complement of “the movement [...] towards an active synthesis”: the extension of the passive or contemplative synthesis in the direction of a “virtual” object (DR 99).

In addition to its obvious resonances with crucial

Deleuzian concepts, this second movement that will be of the most interest for our particular investigation, since it will lead us to the recognition of a second passive synthesis and a second ʻbeyondʼ of the pleasure principle. As a developmental matter, Deleuze insists that both of the above developments beyond the passive synthesis of habit, by way of active synthesis toward a real object and by way of passive synthesis toward a virtual object, must occur simultaneously—and he illustrates this point with a genuinely remarkable example: A child who begins to walk does not only bind excitations in a passive synthesis, even supposing that these were endogenous excitations born of its own movements. No one has ever walked endogenously. On the one hand, the child goes beyond the bound excitations towards the supposition or the intentionality of an object, such as the mother, as the goal of an effort, the end to be actively reached ʻ in realityʼ and in relation to which 168

success and failure may be measured. But on the other hand and at the same time, the child constructs for itself another object, a quite different kind of object which is a virtual object or centre and which then governs and compensates for the progress and failures of its real activity: it puts several fingers in its mouth, wraps the other arm around this virtual centre, and appraises the whole situation from the point of view of this virtual mother (DR 99). We should take note, first of all, of the manner in which the entire operation of the psyche comes, at this stage, to be laid out by Deleuze in terms of two distinct series that are united by a contemplative activity that relates them to one another. In fact, we are presented with a number of apparatuses all displaying the same overall structure. Starting with the correlation Deleuze points out between the pair of series involved in this childʼs first steps, we can we can move all the way to “the differentiation between the self-preservative and the sexual drives” (DR 100)—the former still being tied to the series of active syntheses, while the latter “are no less inseparable from the constitution of virtual centers, or the extension of passive syntheses and the passive egos which correspond to them” (DR 100).13 So it is that, at this second level, two things are always occurring at once—or, alternately, two distinct series are simultaneously being elaborated by way of two different types of synthesis, which produce very different sorts of ʻobjectalities.ʼ In the first of these series, the self-preservative drives are expressed in the development of the structures that allow for the apprehension of particular

13

This text concludes, in a way that should not be overlooked: “in pre-genital sexuality, actions are always observations or contemplations, but it Is always the virtual which is contemplated or observed” (DR 100)

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cases as instances of a reflected generality: an active synthesis of recognition. And this development will lead, in turn, to two more: that of an active synthesis of a memory addressed to a past that is “no longer the immediate past of retention but the reflexive past of representation, of reflected and reproduced particularity” (DR 71); and that of an active synthesis of understanding that is addressed to a future that “ceases to be the immediate future of anticipation in order to become the reflexive future of prediction, the reflected generality of understanding” (DR 71).14 Through these various active syntheses there will thus be elaborated an entire order of actual or empirical ʻrealityʼ that, as such, will be apprehensible in representative consciousness. But according to Deleuze, this order of actuality will not develop at all except under the following conditions. First, it can only come into being on the basis of a prior passive synthesis that is the foundation for the active syntheses.15 This is the ʻ habitualʼ constitution of a pleasure principle in the Id: “the first synthesis” which “expresses the foundation of time upon the basis of a living present, a foundation which endows pleasure with its value as a general empirical principle to which is subject the content of the psychic life in the Id” (DR

14

For a much more thorough discussion of the structure and development of the two active syntheses, see DR 80-81. 15 Here, it does not ultimately matter whether these are understood ʻphilosophicallyʼ as syntheses of imagination (habit), memory and understanding, or ʻpsychoanalyticallyʼ as a synthesis of reproduction (a Habitus) which founds the pleasure principle in the Id and a synthesis of recognition (reality testing) on the basis of which the Ego is integrated as an active self and which seeks to “move beyond the binding in the direction of a substantive which serves as support for the connection” (DR 98). Though once more, it is important to note that Deleuze emphasizes that reality is ʻobjectalʼ here, that is, the product of a synthesis and not something that “impinges” on the psyche (DR 98) and forces its evolution.

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114). This first passive synthesis, however, is only the beginning of what active synthesis requires.

Besides the synthesis of habit or the living present, the

development of the active syntheses will also entail a corresponding extension of a new set of passive syntheses toward their own, virtual objects.

Thus the

ʻactiveʼ series of the various forms of consciousness will necessarily be doubled by ʻ passiveʼ series in which the unconscious is developed and ramified. As a whole, and in perfect accordance with Freud, the psyche will be composed of both active series wherein the ʻrealʼ is synthesized according to the requirements of a drive for self-preservation and passive series in which ʻdesireʼ is synthesized in a manner that does not in any way respect the conditions of ʻreality.ʼ What is at stake in this second order or phase of syntheses is, therefore, nothing less than the structural development of a psyche that encompasses both a conscious elaboration of life and a whole series of unconscious elaborations on which the conscious elaboration is based even as it is differentiated from them—that is, as we shall see, a psyche in which the pleasure principle comes to be applied “to the contents of the Ego” (DR 114) which is nevertheless developed primarily on the basis of a modification of the pleasure principle, as a correlate of its conditioning by the reality principle. However, we have not yet seen the ego make its appearance. Instead, everything so far has involved various series of objects that appear to have, at best, a problematic relationship to any ʻselfʼ whatsoever. And the same is true in our example.

The two series produced by the child beginning to walk are

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extended in the direction of two distinct objects, one actual and the other virtual. Deleuze insists that neither of these ʻ centersʼ should be confused with the ego. “Both series are objectal: one series comprises real objects which serve as correlates of active syntheses; the other virtual objects which serve as correlates of an extension of passive syntheses. The extended passive ego fulfills itself with a narcissistic image in contemplating the virtual centers” (DR 100). And the active syntheses find their fulfillment, or fail to do so, in concrete motor discharge that they are, or are not, able to achieve in relation to ʻthe real.ʼ The ego, then, remains ʻ doubled,ʼ being for the moment nothing other than the correlate of the two ʻobjectiveʼ series, the one passive, contemplative, and unconscious, the other active, motile, and essentially indissociable from consciousness. This is why Deleuze approvingly cites Henri Maldineyʼs description of “the infantile world” as being “in no way circular or egocentric but elliptical; [...] it has two centers and [...] these differ in kind, both nevertheless being objective or objectal” (DR 100). And it is within this ʻellipticalʼ structure that the Ego—in the full sense of the term that designates “an attempt at global integration” (DR 98) of the various passive egos within the active series, the series correlated to the self-preservative drives and the reality principle16—can finally make an appearance. Not surprisingly, it does so at precisely the point where these two series can be made to cross over one another and intersect: “What, then, would be the ego, where would it be, given

16

“The self-preservative drives are, after all, inseparable from the constitution of the reality principle, from the foundation of active synthesis and the active global ego, and from the relations with the real object perceived as satisfying or menacing” (DR 100).

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its topological distinction from the Id, if not at the crossing of the 8, the point of connection between these two intersecting asymmetrical circles, the circle of real objects and that of the virtual objects or centers” (DR 100)? Far from being presupposed by the structure of object-relations, the Ego is rather a product of it—not an agent, but the result of a complex synthetic process that takes place more or less entirely on the side of the objects.17 And the asymmetry between the two circles in the description above is crucial, being determined by the difference in the nature of the objects which populate them: actual or real objects, on the one hand, and virtual objects on the other. The former should not be confused with the ʻrealʼ in any ordinary or literal sense. Deleuzeʼs repeated insistence that what counts as “real” here is “objectal” entails that the real is a synthetic product from beginning to end. As such, it is already subject both to the intentionality involved in what Deleuze calls the first “passive synthesis of connection”18 (DR 100), and also to that involved in its apprehension as a “real object,” validated by the instincts of self-preservation as an appropriate goal of motor activity. And even this ʻ objectalʼ real is not yet exhaustive, because it is doubled by another, virtual objectality composed on the basis of passive synthesis. We must consider the nature of the objects in this virtual series very carefully. Deleuze describes them as “partial objects,” making reference to Melanie Kleinʼs account of the role of ʻpart-objectsʼ in early infantile

17

Among which the Ego, in the end, will turn out to be no more than a certain privileged case. Thereby anticipating for the first time the terminology that he and Guattari will use for it in AntiOedipus. 18

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development.19

Kleinʼs “part-objects” are famously subject to a vacillation

between multiple, incommensurable aspects (good/bad) and Deleuzeʼs ʻ partial objectsʼ are similarly paradoxical, not simply with respect to their sources but also with respect to their value in relation to whatever ʻ groupʼ or series they are associated with. This is why Deleuze claims that the ʻ partialityʼ of these virtual objects is not simply the result of “subtracting a part from the real, since the subtracted part acquires a new nature in functioning as a virtual object” (DR 100).20 In terms of the example cited above, for all that the ʻvirtual motherʼ21 is clearly modeled after the childʼs previous relationships with its actual parent, there is, by virtue of her portability and timelessness, no way that the virtual mother could ever be made to coincide with the mother of the childʼs experience. Like all virtual objects, she is completely distinct from anything that could appear as such in the experiential series—that is, from any thing that could simply be identified as such in an empirical fashion. More generally, virtual objects are defined by this paradoxical nature, this constitutive incompleteness and permanent displacement in relation to itself—its being as what Deleuze, though in a very different sense than Kantʼs use of the same terminology, calls an “object=x” (DR 103, 105).22 The virtual object is a partial object—not simply because it lacks a part

19

See Klein The Psychoanalysis of Children, Chapter 8 and “The Psychogenesis of ManicDepressive States.” 20 In terms of Deleuzeʼs own example, the childʼs fingers becoming part of the virtual mother. 21 The one which doubles the ʻrealʼ person who is the goal of the childʼs activity of walking. 22 Furthermore, it is perfectly appropriate to speak of the virtual mother, in the Kantian terms Deleuze appropriates, as the ʻmother = x.ʼ

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which remains in the real, but in itself and for itself because it is cleaved or doubled into two virtual parts, one of which is always missing from the other. In short, the virtual is never subject to the global character which affects real objects. It is—not only by its origin but by its own nature—a fragment, a shred or a remainder. It lacks its own identity (DR 100-101).23 This has momentous consequences, beginning with the fact that virtual objects, and by extension the virtual series of such objects, are radically asymmetrical. They are asymmetrical not only in relation to the objects of actual experience and the empirical series of such objects but also in relation to themselves.

And

indeed, this asymmetry is a property of the virtual objects themselves before it comes to characterize their relationship to actual objects.24 This is why they cannot be said to have been simply derived or deducted from the real.25 Rather, the paradoxical character of virtual objects, and of the structures which they inaugurate or demarcate, means that they can only be the product of an original synthetic operation taking place in the unconscious: another passive synthesis of difference within repetition.

And insofar as it is what makes the difference

23

It should be remarked that this virtual object, the very nature of which is to circulate between several different series without properly belonging to any of them, is itself an instance of a trope that appears repeatedly throughout Deleuzeʼs thought in the late 1960s. In Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense it finds a number of avatars: the aleatory point, the empty square, the paradoxical object, the dark precursor, and also examples borrowed from other authors: the ʻPurloined Letter” in Lacanʼs reading of Poe is one; and Deleuze cites a multitude of cases in the works of Lewis Carroll, whom he also mentions in Difference and Repetition (DR 124); and finally one should not overlook Witold Gombrowiczʼs Cosmos (DR 122-3). This beautiful novel has always struck me as being one of the best literary illustrations of the psychic effects of the sorts of serialities that Deleuze seeks to describe philosophically. Along with Tournierʼs Friday, I would suggest that it is one of the literary works that goes farthest towards clarifying and exemplifying the ethical and aesthetic effects of the forced movement of thought that we will consider below. 24 In other words, virtual objects are, primarily, differential in the positive sense of the term for Deleuze. They differentiate themselves. The consequences of this will become clear below. 25 And it is also why they cannot function as simple ʻconditionsʼ with which real objects must find themselves in accord.

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between the two asymmetrical ʻ circlesʼ that are formed by the virtual and the actual series, then we can see that this second passive synthesis will also amount to the ground upon which the entire repressive constitution of the Ego becomes possible. Freud, of course, is well known for having said that the Ego is constituted on the basis of a series of repressive operations.

But in affirming that its

constitution is repressive, we also find ourselves returned to the Nietzschean recognition of the unconscious nature of the power of forgetting by which consciousness is allowed to act its reactions to the flow stimuli, rather than simply experiencing it as an overwhelming, unbearable flood.26 In the theory we are now considering, part of this can be accounted for by the first passive synthesis, insofar as it makes it possible for the psyche to bind the influx of excitations. But only part of it, since binding alone does not create the conditions for an active response to excitatory stimuli or for the discharge of the bound excitations. For both of these to occur, it must become possible for the bound excitations, the bound energy, to be discharged in motor activity without necessarily having become conscious as such. It must become possible, that is, for the Ego—and in particular for the repressive agency—to operate as a genuine principle of selection, determining which among its various component impulses

26

The similarity between this and Freudʼs example of the traumatic flood of unbound excitations associated with painful injury should be evident. The development via Nietzsche of the necessity of repression to prevent this ʻfloodingʼ—that is, of the necessity of ʻprimary repressionʼ—has the benefit of showing with great clarity that what is at stake here is a general principle of the psyche, not merely a mechanism that comes into operation in the case of traumatic events.

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should be allowed to dominate and control the discharge of all—prescribing, as would Nietzscheʼs truly autonomous individual (Nietzsche Genealogy II, 1-2),27 what should count as ʻ realityʼ and simply ʻf orgettingʼ what that stands in contradiction to it. But forgetting of this sort—that is, one which enables rather than impedes instinctual discharge in the real—only becomes possible on the basis of a second passive synthesis of repetition, insofar as it is this synthesis which allows for the displacement of the impulses repressed by forgetting onto new objects within the unconscious and their attachment in disguised form to real objects in order that they may be discharged. If the first [passive synthesis] makes use of repetition in order to draw off a difference, the second passive synthesis includes difference at the heart of repetition, since the two figures of difference, movement and disguise— the displacement which symbolically affects the virtual object and the disguises which affect, in imaginary fashion, the real objects in which it is incorporated—have become the elements of repetition itself (DR 109). And having noted the link between forgetting and this second figure of differential repetition, we are now in a position to show how both—and with them the constitution of the Ego—are tied to what Deleuze sets out in transcendental terms as the second passive synthesis of time. The temporality in question is no longer simply that of a present that is lived in the psyche as habitual, autoerotic, and hallucinatory; it is no longer the living present of the Id. Now, by contrast, it must encompass these ʻshredsʼ of a

27

If there is a place where Rank, despite his more or less total oblivion in Deleuzeʼs work after Nietzsche and Philosophy, might continue to be seen as having some influence, it would have to be in connection with this notion of individual autonomy, which is the key focus of what Rank, in Truth and Reality, proposes as a revision of analytic practice that would orient it toward the goal of producing a healthily creative individual.

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pure past that are lived ʻ eroticallyʼ as virtual objects of desire.28 These virtual objects, as we have seen, are just the problematic correlates of the real objects of active synthesis—and as such they arise as part of the development of the psyche as a whole beyond the initial stage of the first passive synthesis, beyond the Id and along a pathway that leads, among other things, to the development of the Ego. That is why we can also say that it is the appearance of the Ego—and its significance as an attempt to perform a global integration of the passive egos that already existed in the dissolved self by extending the synthesis of habit through a series of active synthesis directed toward ʻ realʼ objects—which is balanced by this corresponding extension of passive syntheses through new series directed towards these ʻ virtualʼ objects. Strictly speaking, however, it is this Ego that appears, or is differentiated, at the intersection of these two ʻobjectalʼ series. And what occurs at this point of intersection, in this moment of differentiation between the two series, is at first nothing other than an operation of ʻrepressionʼ in the psychoanalytic sense. And in accordance with well-known aspects of the Freudian view dictating that the repressed cannot, as such, enter consciousness,29 we can see that this operation must be effected entirely by the passive or virtual series. This is why what is at stake in this second synthesis

28

If what has emerged thus far does not yet amount to fully developed, genitally structured object relations, it nevertheless represents their earliest precursors: the series of partial objects and component instincts the emergence of which corresponds to the first beginnings of repression and reality testing. 29 Or, at least, it cannot do so without threatening the integration of the Ego to a very considerable extent.

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appears to correspond to “primary repression.”30 And it is also why everything at this stage seems to happen on the side of the ʻunconscious,ʼ or on the side of the passive, virtual, and erotic series.31 But having said this, we must also recognize that there is an ambiguity involved here that prevents Deleuze (and Freud) from saying that these developments are just a matter of more or less local, partial, or ʻeroticʼ virtualities. Indeed, what is at stake here is not exclusively the vicissitudes of early infantile sexuality; it could, in a way that must be accounted for in the theory of the second passive synthesis, just as easily be the sort of reminiscence one encounters not only in Proustʼs in Search of Lost Time, but also in Platoʼs Phaedo and in Book VII of the Republic. Even for the child in the example above, what is at stake is not only desire, but also learning. Like desire, learning involves more than just habituation, and also more than just the extension of habit in the direction of some set of ʻ recognizableʼ ʻ realʼ objects. As Deleuze puts the basic point, “no one has ever walked endogenously” (DR 99). And so the childʼs learning is directed, first of all, toward the actual empirical objective of its mother; but if it is able to master its anxiety at her distance and maintain the focus required in order to overcome its own lack of motor coordination in order to cross that distance, this is because, throughout the course of the entire undertaking, the child has, on another series, already safely reached the virtual mother from whom it draws a

30

The significance of which, for Deleuze and Guattari, has already been discussed in Chapter 2. And, finally, it is also why Melanie Kleinʼs ʻdepressive positionʼ and the notion of ʻpart objectsʼ in terms of which it is elaborated are so appealing to Deleuze when he is seeking to offer a description of the manner in which this synthesis is lived in the psyche. 31

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compensatory, contemplative satisfaction.32

Indeed, the child is only able to

begin walking insofar as he or she performs this second passive synthesis, supplementing the real object of his or her activity with a virtual object, a shred of pure past. And it is at this juncture that the ambiguity arises. If the pure past can be shredded in this way in the constitution of virtual objects—if forgetting can be operated selectively, and ʻ realʼ objects continually balanced by variable virtual doubles—then a pure past must also insist as a whole in each of the shreds. And so we finally encounter the full range of the second passive synthesis, which gives rise not only to partial or virtual objects on the erotic series, but also to a pure past as a whole, a pure past that forms the object of the mnemonic series of recollection. Seen from the point of view of the transcendental theory of temporality, what is at stake here is a passive synthesis that constitutes “another time in which the first synthesis of time can occur” (DR 79). This has nothing to do with the delimitation of the scope of the living present, which proceeds from the physical impossibility of a living being encompassing a present of unlimited duration (DR 77). Rather, it follows from the ontological requirements of the presentʼs being a moment in time. Seen in this light, the living present, even as the “foundation” of time, nevertheless cannot be self-sufficient because it is

32

To extend the series here one last step: in Nietzschean terms, the child is able to act its reactions precisely insofar as it can subordinate any other impulses which would prevent it from carrying out the action if they were expressed directly by ʻforgetting themʼ and allowing them to be expressed through a series of supplementary gestures (the virtual series and its expression in configuration of arms, hands, and mouth).

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incapable of escaping “the paradox of the present,” which expresses the problem of how “to constitute time while passing in the time constituted” (DR 79). The living present cannot encompass the whole of time and it must pass; but if the only time that existed were a present that contains its own past and future, then there would be no time into which the present could pass.

Accordingly, it

becomes necessary to postulate a second passive synthesis that composes another temporality, one that allows, not for duration, but rather for the passage of time.33 Following Bergson, Deleuze now goes on to develop a series of paradoxes that apply to the temporality of the past34 and which show that the past composed by this second passive synthesis must be a “pure past”: The past does not cause one present to pass without calling forth another, but itself neither passes nor comes froth. For this reason the past, far from being a dimension of time, is the synthesis of all time of which the present and the further are only dimensions. We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it does not exist but it insists, it consists, it is. It insists with the former present, it consists with the new or present present. It is the in itself of time as the final ground of the passage of time. In this sense it forms a pure, general, a priori element of all time. [...] There is thus a substantial temporal element (the Past which was never present) playing the role of ground (DR 82).

33

Deleuze presents the overall relation between the active and passive syntheses of memory, and the passive syntheses of habit and memory, as follows: “Far from being derived from the present or from representation, the past is presupposed by every representation. In this sense, the active synthesis of memory may well be founded upon the (empirical) passive synthesis of habit, but on the other hand it can be grounded only by another (transcendental) passive synthesis which is peculiar to memory itself. Whereas the passive synthesis of habit constitutes the living present in time and makes the past and the future two asymmetrical elements of that present, the passive synthesis of memory constitutes the pure past in time, and makes the former and the present present (thus the present in reproduction and the future in reflection) two asymmetrical elements of this past as such” (DR 81). 34 Specifically, the consequences of these paradoxes are that: “each past is contemporaneous with the present that it was, the whole past coexists with the present in relation to which it is past, but the pure element of the past in general pre-exists the passing present” (DR 82).

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Insofar as the second phase of the development of the psyche is centered on repression, it is founded on the synthesis of such an “immemorial” past, of a past in this sense of being what has never been present—the past that is the basis of forgetting.

But such a past cannot be a simple principle of oblivion.

Its

effectiveness and its value also depend on the possibility of its being ʻrecalledʼ as a partial or virtual object—that is, of its being ʻrememberedʼ within ʻForgettingʼ— which is why Deleuze associates this pure past with reminiscence in both the Platonic and the Proustian senses of that term. Indeed, Deleuze goes on to insist on precisely the permanent possibility of ʻ recallingʼ this virtual past, this immemorial, in a manner that points the way toward the account he will give of the philosophical and artistic apprehension of the Ideas in Chapter IV of Difference and Repetition. The entire past is conserved in itself, but how can we save it for ourselves, how can we penetrate that in-itself without reducing it to the former present that it was, or to the present present in relation to which it is past? How can we save it for ourselves? It is more or less at this point that Proust intervenes, taking up the baton from Bergson. Moreover, it seems that the response has long been known: reminiscence. In effect, this designates a passive synthesis, an involuntary memory which differs in kind from any active synthesis associated with voluntary memory. [...] Former presents may be represented beyond forgetting by active synthesis, in so far as forgetting is empirically overcome. Here, however, it is within Forgetting, as though immemorial, that Combray reappears in the form of a past which was never present: the in-itself of Combray” (DR 85). But if Combray, or the pure past as a whole, is the goal of the entire movement of ʻinvoluntary memoryʼ so described—or that which the movement of thought along the line traced out by the passive syntheses would seek to reach at its ultimate

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extreme— this recalled ʻ objectʼ is considerably different from the partial object which is given in the first place, the one which serves to balance the active syntheses directed toward particular empirically given real objects.

Deleuze

appeals to Bergson to account for the difference between these two cases, which he qualifies as contracted and relaxed forms of the pure past, and goes on to name Eros and Mnemosyne respectively.

Furthermore, Deleuze claims that

these two cases are bound together in a problematic relationship wherein they repeat one another in a “virtual” or “spiritual” form that Deleuze contrasts to “material” repetition (DR 84)—and which will also be consistent with his psychoanalytic account of ʻ repressiveʼ repetition as being fundamentally composed of operations of displacement and disguise.35 And so what takes place on the unconscious, “repressed” and virtual series that doubles and grounds our active, egological investments in the objects we apprehend as ʻreal,ʼ

35

It is important to note here that the ʻcontractileʼ repetition of the first passive synthesis (Habitus), which forms the basis for the representative apprehension of repetition in the active syntheses of memory and understanding, stands between these other two repetitive instances, material and spiritual, bare and clothed, “that of the elementary instants from which difference is subtracted, and that of the levels of the whole in which difference is included” (DR 84). The importance of this point for understanding Deleuzeʼs entire theory in Difference and Repetition cannot possibly be overstated. The passive synthesis of habit—the organizing synthesis of life, which also forms the basis of representative consciousness as it is composed in the active syntheses—stands between two unrepresentables: the purely material succession of ʻindifferentʼ instants and the ʻspiritualʼ whole of the pure past. The latter contains in itself every possible ʻdifferenceʼ—that is, every possible present—that the passive synthesis of habit could extract from material repetition, but in an entirely different, virtual or spiritual, form wherein these differences become pure degrees of intensity that cannot be assimilated to the extensive coexistence, retention and projection of the lived present. And so the present has both a phenomenal form, founded on the first passive synthesis (Habitus) and extended in the active syntheses, and a noumenal form of the present (Eros) that is extended and grounded by its relation to a virtual series of immemorial pasts (Mnemosyne). Thus, the pure past, in its entirety, in all of its intensive degrees, and in a manner that defies representation but is equally effective for all that, stands in a productive or ʻgeneticʼ relationship to all concrete experience as well as everything that can be found in the unconscious.

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thus amounts to the apprehension of what is not given in that ʻ phenomenalʼ present, what Deleuze calls the ʻ noumenon,ʼ which deducts itself from the empirically given and thereby becomes nothing other than the object of desire.36 But not the ʻ realʼ object! On the contrary, this is the object of phantasy: the partial, paradoxical, noumenal, incomplete object = x; the object which is “lacking on the one hand the part which, on the other hand, it is at the same time” (DR 102), which is “displaced while still in place,” “found only as lost,” and that can be said to “exist only as recovered” (DR 102); and which has any number of psychoanalytic exemplars, such as “Melanie Kleinʼs good and bad object, the ʻtransitionalʼ object, the fetish object, and above all Lacanʼs object a” (DR 101). What the Bergsonian reference shows, much as do the Proustian and Platonic references, is that the ʻ eroticʼ series constituted in relation to the ʻnoumenalʼ present is nothing but the correlate of the past, the compressed and disguised repetition of the pure past as a whole.37

In the context of this

circulation, it is the virtual object, constituted as being “past as the contemporary of the present which it is, in a frozen present” (DR 102), that is able to function as “the link between Eros and Mnemosyne” (DR 103).38 If all of this is said to be the

36

From the point of view of life, just as it is habit which allows us to see the way in which we are composed of a multitude of local repetitions and enjoyments which are drawn from them by countless larval subjects, Deleuze now says that it is “Eros, the noumenon, who allows us to penetrate this pure past in itself, this virginal repetition which is Mnemosyne” (DR 85). 37 The timelessness that Freud famously attributes to the unconscious and to the logic of fantasy seems particularly apt here, insofar as the present in this sense is literally equivalent to the whole of time, merely in a disguised form. 38 All of which leads Deleuze to consider one more instance, perhaps the most exemplary, of this object. “Eros tears virtual objects out of the pure past and gives them to us in order that they may be lived. Lacan discovers the ʻphallus,ʼ understood as a symbolic organ, behind all these virtual

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ground of the Ego, if its entire basis ultimately turns out to be fantastic and even, as Deleuze points out a bit farther on, mythical—as in the case of Oedipus (DR 107), but also of the various myths that appear at the extreme, terminal points of Platoʼs accounts of the movement of recollection with their necessarily circular form, constantly passing through this present which exists in a paradoxical relationship to the living present (DR 87-88)39—that is because it is only on the basis of the independent elaboration of a selectively constituted series of ʻdesire,ʼ a series grounded in this ʻ recollection in Forgettingʼ which amounts, not to lack but to a wholly differential repetition and productive variation (DR 102), that it should be possible for the series of ʻ realʼ objects to be constituted, and for the series of active syntheses of ʻ recognition,ʼ active, reflective memory, and active conceptual understanding which postulate these objects, to be elaborated. If the Ego is the result of an ʻattemptʼ at a global integration of our active relationships to the objects in the ʻrealʼ series, that is only possible because, alongside the Ego

or partial objects. He is able to give this extension to the concept of the phallus (such that it subsumes all the virtual objects) because the concept effectively comprises the preceding characteristics: testifying to its own absence and to itself as past, being essentially displaced in relation to itself, being found only as lost, being possessed of an always fragmentary identity which loses its identity in the double; since it may be searched for and discovered only on the side of the other, and since it has the paradoxical property of changing its place, not being possessed by those who have a ʻpenis,ʼ yet being possessed by those who do not have one, as the theme of castration shows. The symbolic phallus signifies no less the erotic mode of the pure past than the immemorial of sexuality. The symbol is the always-displaced fragment, standing for a past which was never present: the object=x” (DR 103). 39 See the examples in the Republic (523b ff) and the Phaedo (73c-74d), and Deleuzeʼs discussion of them in the third chapter of Difference and Repetition (DR 138-144). Here it is important to note that in his translation of Differénce et répétititon, Patton mistakenly cites this first text Deleuze discusses in this section as appearing at Republic 532b. In the French, what Deleuze is referring to is correctly cited as Republic 523b ff. The transposition is perhaps more easily excused than failing to accurately indicate that Deleuzeʼs reference was not only to the specific lines he cited, but also to the development that follows.

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there is constituted a desiring series, directed toward a series of partial, noumenal objects that are never present without also being absent, and which can never appear or be thought as such in empirical consciousness. More, only insofar

as

this

unconscious

series

passively

differentiates

itself

can

consciousness invest in ʻ realʼ objects and have them invested, in turn, by the unconscious itself. If psychoanalysis has a unique philosophical value in regard to all of this, it may not turn out to be that it provides a way of elaborating structures or transcendental processes that cannot be approached in any other way. Indeed, one need only read the second chapter of Difference and Repetition from beginning to end to realize that Deleuze would likely be capable of elaborating all of this at a transcendental level without mentioning psychoanalysis at all.40 Rather, if psychoanalysis plays such a central role, one suspects it is because it still does a better job than the vast majority of philosophical discourses, not only of exemplifying but also of accounting for this entire unconscious transcendental domain, and of presenting it as the genetic element which gives rise not only to our determinate experience of ʻrealityʼ but also to the entire range of meaning and value with which our lives are invested. Indeed, the power of psychoanalysis for Deleuze seems to lie precisely in the fact that—almost uniquely in the history of

40

In fact, he does something very close to that in his development of a doctrine of Ideas and his presentation of a complex genetic process of “the synthesis of difference” in Chapter IV, elaborating therein a concept of ʻstructureʼ general enough, and sufficiently well grounded in the history of philosophy stretching as far back as Plato, to vitiate any need we might feel to claim that he owes an unavoidable debt to Lacan in even this regard.

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philosophy, at least, and surely also of clinical discourses about madness, insanity, or mental life generally—it shows how, in the concrete production of phantasies everything begins in an encounter with something that, in the course of our ʻ objectalʼ production of ʻ realʼ experience, takes on the value of a paradoxical object—like simulacra in Plato or the madelaine in Proust—and in so doing inaugurates a “forced movement” (DR 139) that violently transports us “above” what Bergson called “the turn in experience” (Bergson Matter and Memory 184-185) and forces the faculties into a “transcendent exercise” (DR 143 ff), one that is wholly incompatible with their ordinary coordination according to the rules of empirical “common sense” and in which they resonate across their difference in “discordant harmony” (DR 146); all of which brings us face to face with a transcendental order that functions in and through difference as the determining activity of a problematic being.41

III. By now, it should not come as a surprise if we find that the first two of Deleuzeʼs temporal syntheses have corresponded to the first two major stages of Freudʼs developmental schema of sexuality.

The first passive synthesis of habit

(Habitus) corresponds to the earliest infantile autoerotic phase in the Id. It also constitutes the first beyond of the pleasure principle insofar as it amounts to the initial synthesis of pleasure as something ʻto be repeatedʼ (compulsion to repeat),

41

On this transcendental order and its consequences, see Chapters 4 and 5 of Difference and Repetition.

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and therefore as need, even if its satisfaction may well remain entirely hallucinatory. The second passive synthesis of memory (Eros-Mnemosyne), in turn, constitutes the second beyond of the pleasure principle (primary repression) and corresponds, initially, to what is elaborated in the pre-genital phases of infantile sexuality—though it ultimately comes to encompass the entire scope of sexuality, up to and including the Oedipal complex, its crisis and its resolution. These phases are structured around the investment of series composed of virtual or partial objects that differentiate themselves from the series of ʻ realʼ objects, which are constituted as such by the active syntheses of recognition, memory and understanding in conformity with a possibility of a globally integrated Ego. As constitutively displaced and disguised ʻ shredsʼ of pure past, these virtual objects govern the formation of phantasies and dreams, by which the libidinal impulses attached to them become susceptible to displaced and disguised expression and discharge.42

And in addition to these two, anyone who is

sufficiently familiar with the second of Freudʼs Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and with the tripartite topography of The Ego and the Id43 will recognize that there must be a third position—corresponding, roughly, to the narcissistic withdrawal of libido from the external world, the Superego, and Thanatos or the death drive—which they will also expect to correlate to the third of Deleuzeʼs

42

Insofar as these impulses are satisfied in the infantile development, Freud will typically characterize the mechanism of that satisfaction as masturbatory (rather than hallucinatory) precisely insofar as the mechanism of their expression typically involves the cathexis of some part of the childʼs own body: thus the oral stage, the sadistic anal stage, and so on. 43 Not to mention Freudʼs second theory of drives and Lacanʼs distinction between the Imaginary (Habitus), Symbolic (Eros-Mnemosyne), and Real.

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syntheses, wherein time becomes a pure, empty form. But before we turn to the third synthesis in either is transcendental or its psychoanalytical forms, we need to get clearer about the critical concerns that are reflected in the discussion we have considered up until this point. The nature of these concerns becomes evident in Deleuzeʼs reference to the ʻambiguityʼ that characterizes the Eros-Mnemosyne series, and also in the persistent question of whether this series should be taken to refer back to an origin or a beginning in time—irrespective of whether this would be conceived of as an “ancient mythical present” (DR 88, 109) or, more prosaically, as an “ultimate or originary fixed term” (DR 105) that would be the source of all repetition. This concern is not precisely new; we have already seen Deleuze expressing versions of it at the beginning of the decade, there being many respects in which it is precisely what underlies Deleuzeʼs worries that Freudʼs unconscious, even of his conception of phylogenesis, remains overly ʻ subjective,ʼ or overly tied to an actual, empirical reality—even if it is an apparently mythical one.44 But if it is not new, that does not mean that Difference and Repetition does not offer us an opportunity to substantially clarify and develop our understanding of its connection to the larger issue surrounding the “image of thought” from which Deleuze seeks to

44

Indeed, if Deleuze can be said to have endorsed Jungʼs view at the beginning of the decade, that was largely because he thought that offered the potential of escaping what he considered Freudʼs overly strong insistence that the various primal ʻ imagesʼ that govern the production of fantasies and the structure of object relations should have some actual correlate. At that time, Deleuze clearly thought that Jung could be seen as performing an operation like the one that Deleuze wants to assign to Sacher-Masoch, the elevation of a phantasmatic image to the status of an transcendental instance of pure difference which, to the extent that we are able to ʻrepeatʼ it, dissolves all the constituted forms of identity, all the instituted hierarchies of authority, and all the legal prohibitions on enjoyment.

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disconnect philosophy—and also, perhaps, psychoanalysis. For our present purposes, the key feature of the ʻimage of thoughtʼ is its opposition to simulacra or phantasms—which, in turn, can be defined in this context as instances of repetition or copies without a model, pure iterations or objects=x.45 As Deleuze notes on several occasions, simulacra of this sort have been problems in both political life and philosophy for some time: pretenders to thrones and sophists, if Plato is to be believed, both constitute important exemplary cases.

Indeed, well before Difference and Repetition appeared,

Deleuze had been pointing out that Plato was absolutely determined to exorcise ʻsimulacra,ʼ so much so that he organized his later philosophy around constructing a method that would allow him to ground the distinction between ʻlegitimateʼ and ʻ illegitimateʼ copies in terms of an internal resemblance of the

45

For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that we may, further, think of simulacra as presentations or objects which have a ʻsenseʼ and express a meaning but are utterly devoid of the features which would make it possible to determine whether or not they were true (DR 153), and which, as such, are completely coextensive with ʻeventsʼ in the sense that Deleuze develops both in the third chapter of Difference and Repetition (DR 153-164) and throughout The Logic of Sense. All of this is directly or indirectly contained in the following passage from the conclusion of Difference and Repetition. “The primary distinction which Plato rigorously establishes is the one between the model and the copy. The copy, however, is far from a simple appearance, since it stands in an internal, spiritual, noological and ontological relation with the Idea or model. The second and more profound distinction is the one between the copy itself and the phantasm. It is clear that Plato distinguishes, and even opposes, models and copies only in order to obtain an effective criterion with which to separate copies and simulacra, the former founded upon their relation to the model while the latter are disqualified because they fail both the test of the copy and the requirements of the model. [...] This Platonic wish to exorcise simulacra is what entails the subjection of difference. For the model can be defined only by a positing of identity as the essence of the Same [auto kathʼ hauto], and the copy by an affection of internal resemblance, the quality of the Similar. Moreover, because the resemblance is internal, the copy must itself have an internal relation to being and the true which is analogous to that of the model. Finally, the copy must be constructed by means of a method which, given two opposed predicates, attributes to it the one which agrees with the model. In all these ways, copies are distinguished from simulacra only by subordinating difference to instances of the Same, the Similar, the Analogous and the Opposed” (DR 264-5).

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former to a model, the Idea, that is a genuine ʻin-itself,ʼ a pure, originary instance of the Same.46 Not surprisingly, given this derivation, Deleuzeʼs takes Platoʼs stance to be essentially moral. “In [Platoʼs] case [...] a moral motivation in all its purity is avowed: the will to eliminate simulacra or phantasms has no motivation apart from the moral” (DR 265).

He goes on to claim that “the world of

representation” which develops on the basis of this Platonic operation “will more or less forget its moral origin and presuppositions” (DR 265), presuming instead that it simply expresses a basic truth and a reality that is accessible to “common sense as Cogitatio natura universalis” (DR 131). But having been so ʻforgottenʼ will hardly prevent those values from governing the world of representation in a manner to which, as we have seen, both Sacher-Masoch and Nietzsche were sensitive. Indeed, more than sensitive; both would find it absolutely necessary, insofar as they were capable of diagnosing the problem and attributing it to a specific cultural and historical form, to envision a revolutionary overturning that would take place by means of the reversion to or reactivation of what is figured, variously, in terms of an archaic, immemorial past, a higher or superior Nature, or the sort of mythical structures to which Nietzsche is wont to appeal.47 And of

46

Deleuze first developed the notion of philosophy as a ʻreversal of Platonismʼ in a systematic way in an essay, entitled “Renverser le Platonisme,” which appeared in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1966. It was republished in revised form as an appendix to The Logic of Sense under the title “Plato and the Simulacrum” (LS 253-266)—but it is worth nothing that its elements can be found well before that, the theme of the ʻreversal of Platonismʼ as the basic task of philosophy being, he claims at the outset of the essay, a Nietzschean coinage (LS 253). 47 Though he also tends to discuss the past less in terms of what can be clearly localized historically and more in terms of events that are disconnected from any discrete actualization. In this regard it may well seem that a text like Zarathustra, with its apparently ʻfictionalʼ structure,

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course, by the late 1960s, Deleuze clearly affirms both the ʻ philosophicalʼ aims involved here and the far more general overturning that the achievement of these aims might entail—as long as what is entailed in these various ʻreversalsʼ is not taken to be a literal ʻregression.ʼ But, once more, this issue of ʻ regressionʼ is indeed precisely what is in question, not only in the criticisms Deleuze levels against psychoanalysis when he is considering the second passive synthesis, but also in relation to the third synthesis insofar as the pure, empty form of time which it introduces48 offers the basis for a Deleuzian interpretation of the “death drive” that is radically at odds with the literalism of some of Freudʼs formulations. Setting aside for the moment the complexities and ambiguities involved in their relations to one another, Eros and Mnemosyne can be seen to have two distinct values depending on whether they are considered from a ʻsubjectiveʼ or an ʻobjectiveʼ point of view. In relation to the first passive synthesis of Habitus, the series of the real (or the presents which pass in the real) and the series of the virtual (or of a past which differs in kind from any present) form two divergent circular lines, two circles or even two arcs of the same circle. But in relation to the object = x taken as the immanent limit of the series of virtuals, and as the principle of the second passive synthesis, these are successive presents of the reality which now forms coexistent series, circles or even arcs of the same circle (DR 109). In other words, as extensions of the first passive synthesis, the real and the virtual series diverge; but in relation to the paradoxical object in terms of which

cannot after all be so easily separated from Nietzscheʼs other philosophical works, either those written in an aphoristic style or even a text like On the Genealogy of Morals, which appears to develop a fairly linear argument. 48 At least initially, in order to answer the question left open by the second synthesis: “In what form does reminiscence introduce time” (DR 87)?

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the second passive synthesis is carried out, they converge. Deleuze takes note of the fact that confusion of “these two references” is almost “inevitable,” with the consequence that “the pure past” is mistakenly treated as “a former present, albeit mythical, [...] reconstituting the illusion it was supposed to denounce, resuscitating the illusion of an original and a derived, of an identity in the origin and a resemblance in the derived“ (DR 109). But such a mistaken ʻrealismʼ will be potentially catastrophic, given the nature of the subsequent step in the development of the psyche. And indeed, we have reached the point in Freudʼs developmental schema where we must confront the effects of the preceding synthesis. At the beginning of the third chapter of The Ego and the Id, Freud neatly summarizes the path we have followed to the present point: At the very beginning, in the individualʼs primitive oral phase, objectcathexis and identification are no doubt indistinguishable from each other. We can only suppose that later on object-cathexes proceed from the id, which feels erotic trends as needs. The ego, which to begin with is still feeble, becomes aware of the object-cathexes, and either acquiesces in them or tries to fend them off by the process of repression (SE XIX 29). Insofar as the repressive apparatus produced by the second synthesis begins to function, and ultimately gives rise to an Ego ʻstrongʼ enough to enforce the results of reality testing, the inevitable result will be the need for the organism to abandon some of its objects—or better, to find another way of coping with the energy which has been bound in terms of the investments in those objects. Reading Freudʼs next few pages, one begins to understand the source of Deleuzeʼs concern that Freud might tend to interpret the repetition that occurs in 193

the second passive synthesis in overly ʻliteralʼ terms, and thereby ultimately refer the partial objects back to determinate, previously encountered things—or to a ʻprehistoric,ʼ but very much empirical past. Rather than envisioning an improvisational extension of the unconscious erotic cathexes alongside or in resonance with the self-preservative cathexes of real objects, such as we find in the example of the child learning to walk, Freud follows the path of coincidence, whereby erotic drives are taken to be invested not in virtual objects but in real ones. Next, he tells us that insofar as those investments are subsequently prohibited by reality-testing, we will be forced to give up the ʻ real objectʼ and incorporate it, via the melancholic mechanism of identification, within our own Ego, thus giving the rejected cathexis a new, narcissistic point of investment, which, at the same time, is presumed to be desexualized or “sublimated” (SE XIX 29-30).49 Needless to say, Deleuze will not be pleased with this, any more than he will be with the manner in which, having already suggested that these “identifications” may even cause a “disruption of the ego” if they “obtain the upper hand and become too numerous, unduly powerful, and incompatible with one another,” and especially if they are “cut off from one another by resistances” (SE XIX 30), Freud now goes on to suggest that: whatever the characterʼs later capacity for resisting the influences of abandoned object-cathexes may turn out to be, the effects of the first identifications made in earliest childhood will be general and lasting. This leads us back to the origin of the ego ideal; for behind it there lies hidden an individualʼs first and most important identification, his identification with

49

This is the famous process by which the Ego is ʻbuilt upʼ out of abandoned object cathexes, thus inviting the Superegoʼs continual punishment for what it has already given up.

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the father of his own personal prehistory. This is apparently not in the first instance the consequence or outcome of an object cathexis; it is a direct and immediate identification and takes place earlier than any objectcathexis. But the object-choices belonging to the first sexual period and relating to the father and mother seem normally to find their outcome in an identification of this kind, and would thus reinforce the primary one (SE XIX 31).50 What is crucial in this is the extent to which these origins of the ego-ideal— themselves built upon ʻ identificationsʼ said to be pre-historic from the point of view of the individual, are nevertheless conceived very literally, being based phylogenetically in encounters that are taken to belong to the real series—are used by Freud to establish the foundation, within the Ego, of a conflict that appears to mirror, and reify, the one that he posits, at the heart of repression, between the Ego and the Id: the ʻconflictʼ between the ego and the “modification” of it, mediated by Oedipal identifications, which “confronts the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal or super-egoʼ (SE XIX 34). If Deleuzeʼs first two principal criticisms of psychoanalysis concern its unnecessary ʻ realism,ʼ especially as manifest in a doctrine of invariant origins, and its over-reliance on a ʻconflictualʼ model (DR 103-108), they clearly apply to texts like these, at the core of Freudʼs own work, and not only to some faithless reduction that comes later (ʻAPA analystsʼ and so forth) or even to a series of theories with respect to the origins of neurotic symptoms, phantasies, and ultimately sexuality as a whole that Freud had considered and ultimately discarded (the seduction theory, certainly, but not

50

The significance that the last portions of this text will take on for Deleuze and Guattari, at least where its magnitude is concerned, is too obvious to merit comment at this juncture.

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just this).51 Consider how Deleuzeʼs complaint that “[t]he traditional theory of the compulsion to repeat in psychoanalysis remains essentially realist, materialist and subjective or individualist” (DR 104) proceeds from his view that even

51

See Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality.” This translation of the French title of this essay, “Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origins, origin du fantasme,” is utterly inexcusable given that “original fantasy” is clearly one of the key conceptual terms being discussed. Besides those that he acknowledges clearly (DR 124, 316n27), there are a number of resonances between Deleuzeʼs view—both in its critical and also in its positive aspects with regard to psychoanalysis—and what Laplanche and Pontalis put forward here. Early in their text, Laplanche and Pontalis emphasize that whatever may be at stake at the level of consciousness, the unconscious “knows no [reality] judgments” (Laplanche and Pontalis Fantasy 2). That said, they postulate, following Freud, the importance of a “psychical reality” that would be distinct from either the materially real or the wholly imaginary, and spend considerable energy tracing the vicissitudes of Freudʼs attempts define this and situate it in respect to broader material reality. Part of this story involves the history of Freudʼs ʻseduction theory,ʼ which, they suggest, had, in this regard, the benefit of postulating “a pre-subjective structure, beyond both the strict happening and the internal imagery” (Laplanche and Pontalis Fantasy 7). One suspects that Deleuze might well have had some sympathy with this view—and that Deleuze and Guattari might well have even more—insofar as it postulates hysterical symptom formation as being a matter of the effects not of a literal repetition of a trauma but rather of a differential replaying of impulses that are already present in the psyche as a result of he intervention or irruption of an external force into that ʻinterior.ʼ On the other hand, Deleuze, as did Laplanche and Pontalis and ultimately Freud— although all for somewhat different reasons, we suspect—would surely also have found all of this to be far too literal, despite its promising aspects. In any case, Laplanche and Pontalis show Freud, having abandoned that first conception in order to develop a conception of fantasy as an “autonomous, consistent and explorable field,” left with the problem of determining its “origin, not only with regard to structure, but also to content and to its most concrete details” (Laplanche and Pontalis Fantasy 8). Freud is shown to have attempted to situate this origin both within individual experience (in infantile scenes) and later “in something which transcends both individual experience and what is imagined” (Laplanche and Pontalis Fantasy 9). As does Deleuze, Laplanche and Pontalis will have little use for this conception of phylogenesis, but they find much more promising the conception of an ʻoriginal fantasyʼ which can be related to the unconscious constituted by primal repression (Laplanche and Pontalis 10-14). They also suggest that fantasy bears an essential relationship to the process by which it is varied (Laplanche and Pontalis 13) and that its interruption into our relationship with a ʻnatural objectʼ is what “occasions the disjunction of sexuality and need” (Laplanche and Pontalis 16). Many of these points seem to be importantly related to the entire Deleuzian problematic of repression as a matter of differential repetition and of the logic of fantasy as being essentially related to the operations of displacement and disguise in terms of which that repetition is structured insofar as it is elaborated in an ʻobjectalʼ series. But one also suspects, though a more careful consideration would be required in order to reach and defend a final conclusion in this regard, that Deleuze would continue to believe that the notion of ʻoriginal fantasyʼ as Laplanche and Pontalis develop it, in terms of a notion of structure which owes much to Lacanʼs, nevertheless remains dangerously ambiguous with regard to the degree to which it might ultimately an original term, which it varies, rather than an original power of variation that does not allow for any of the series to which it gives rise “to be designated as the original or the derived” (DR 105).

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repetition in the objective series must be a result of the second passive synthesis of time. In such a case of repetition, “the two presents, the two scenes or the two events (infantile and adult) in their reality, separated by time” are not, Deleuze claims, in fact “successive” but “form, rather, two real series which coexist in relation to a virtual object of another kind, one which constantly circulates and is displaced in them (even if the characters, the subjects which give rise to the positions, the terms and relations of each series, remain, for their part, temporally distinct)“ (DR 104-105). In any such structure, the repetition only occurs at all because the “object = x taken as the immanent limit of the series of virtuals, and as the principle of the second passive synthesis” (DR 109) causes the production of an entire order of differential repetition, giving rise not only to our erotic investments in the ʻ real,ʼ but also to an entire order of desire that is purely fantastic—and here we are reminded of Lacanʼs notion of the perpetual metonymic slippage among signifiers themselves. Without this, the events could literally never be brought into contact; but, conversely, insofar as we invest it libidinally, as a possible object of satisfaction for our desires, the ʻrealʼ is drawn into all of this ceaseless variation and substitution, not the other way around. And thus these ʻrealʼ series are just as much ʻobjectalʼ products of the synthetic activity of the transcendental unconscious as the virtual series,52 the only difference having to do with whether the series is mediated by the active syntheses of recognition or not. Furthermore, due to the fact that it is as a result

52

This is why, in Lacanian terminology, the real is strictly identified with what cannot be either imagined or symbolized. We are using the term in a looser sense, obviously.

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of the operation of the unconscious, passive synthetic structure centered on the object=x as a shard of the pure past, there can be no question of this repetitive structure having “an original, fixed term”—neither the infantile nor the adult series, as ʻobjectalʼ in this respect, can any more be said to serve in this capacity. And so, insofar as psychoanalysis—and in this respect it is not different from philosophy—nevertheless insists on trying to discover such a term and conceives of repetition as a passage between temporally successive presents, it ends up, exactly as Deleuze says, attempting to retroactively impose the conditions of representation on the unrepresentable (the object = x). When it does this: “The whole theory of repetition is thereby subordinated to the requirements of simple representation, from the standpoint of realism, materialism and subjectivism. Repetition is subjected to a principle of identity in the former present and a rule of resemblance in the present one” (DR 104). And this, essentially, amounts to saying that none of the pre-Lacanian analysts, at least, were able to escape the “image of thought,” which is only willing to conceive of repetition insofar as what is repeated is the “Same,” that is, what can be brought under the same concept. Furthermore, insofar as he falls prey to the ambiguity in the Eros-Mnemosyne formation, seeking an ʻ original caseʼ as the referent of desire, Freud makes the same error with respect to the unconscious as Kant did regarding the transcendental: conceiving it as a condition—and thus as a ʻduplicateʼ of the empirical which is able to perform the operation of conditioning only by virtue of an internal “resemblance” that obtains

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between the two terms—and not as a genetic element which in no way resembles what it determines.53 There is a thread running through Difference and Repetition which proposes to trace a linkage between the Platonic method of division and the Kantian transcendental philosophy; and just as Freudian psychoanalysis, in a Platonic mode, appears to betray the ʻsimulacralʼ nature of the unconscious insofar as it seeks to understand phantasy in terms of a representative relationship to an originary instance or model, its transcendental articulation of time appears to be constituted far too much on the model of an empirical temporality. This last point determines the crucial significance of the third synthesis, the last transcendental iteration of time in the unconscious—which coincides, broadly, with the transcendental subjectʼs narcissistic formation and with the splitting of the ego against itself.

In a sense this brings us full circle.

The

habitual synthesis of the living present, as we have seen, supposed the production of a ʻd issolvedʼ self as a result of myriad local contemplative subjectivities drawing difference, in the form of affective yields corresponding to local excitations and their resolutions, from the repetitively constituted accretion of traces in their sensitive tissues. In essence, this is nothing more than a state

53

Importantly, the extent to which Deleuze is already committed to this criticism means that, however he may feel about the Lacanian structural unconscious, he clearly does not accept Lacanʼs earlier suggestion—which he had largely abandoned by the mid-60s in any case—that his work was a faithful reproduction of the core of what Freud was putting forward. In this, Deleuze was surely not alone, though rejecting, even implicitly, the notion that Lacanʼs presentation was equivalent to Freudʼs does not entail that Lacan is wrong to have asserted that what he was presenting was the core or the truth of the Freudian discovery. That, indeed, may well be correct in Deleuzeʼs estimation at this time, if the texts cited above are any indication.

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of pure, primary narcissism corresponding to the fact that, in the life of the psyche: “At the very beginning, all libido is accumulated in the id, while the ego is still in the process of formation or is still feeble” (SE XIX 46). Insofar as this first synthesis is differential and contemplative, the passive selves to which it gives rise being subject to a mobile and variable distribution across the sensitive surface of its organic body, and its ʻ subjectʼ remaining always larval, then, as Deleuze puts it at the very beginning of the chapter: “it is always a third party which says ʻmeʼ” (DR 75). The second passive synthesis, by contrast, is composed of the next step that Freud describes: “The id sends part of this libido out into erotic objectcathexes [...]” (SE XIX 46). As Deleuze puts it: “if the first passive synthesis constitutes an ʻaesthetic,ʼ the second may properly be defined as the equivalent of an ʻanalyticʼ ” (DR 109). In the complex composed of this synthesis and its active correlates, the ego is composed as the global integration of our intentional relationships to a ʻ realʼ world, but only on the basis of the differentiation perpetually reintroduced into the system by the doubling of this active, real series with a passive, virtual series—and by distributing them according to a differential synthesis which determines “[t]he essentially lost character of virtual objects and the essentially disguised character of real objects” (DR 109).

The ego is

established as the point of division between the series, since it is just that division that allows for the conscious integration of the local egos along a single line of ʻrealityʼ—even the objects existing on that line are always more heavily invested

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than the ʻtrueʼ judgments about them make it appear. It is here that something new arises, since, due to the ambiguity that affects this second synthesis as a whole, the line of division can also, from the side of consciousness, acquire the value of a convergence: “whereupon, the ego, now grown stronger, tries to get hold of this object-libido and to force itself on the id as a love-object. The narcissism of the ego is thus a secondary one, which has been withdrawn from objects” (SE XIX 46). Or, as Deleuze puts the same point:

“it is by interiorizing the difference between the two lines and

experiencing itself as perpetually displaced in the one, perpetually disguised on the other, that the libido returns or flows back into the ego and the passive ego becomes entirely narcissistic” (DR 110). In order to understand the last few turns of Deleuzeʼs reading of psychoanalysis—and how they involve us in a final synthesis which will impose an ethical task on us in a manner that is strictly equivalent to that under which both Hamlet and Zarathustra labored, that of “becoming equal to” the event (DR 89-90)—we must grasp what occurs here in its difference from the Freudian presentation. On account of its conscious aspect, Freud, in the theory of narcissism, takes the Ego as an object that would be analogous to the others that appear on the real series. This is an illusion, and Freud is well aware of it—as is evident from the fact that he acknowledges that the Ego may become ʻ disruptedʼ precisely as a result of any number of unconscious identifications. But Freud perpetuates the illusion in a manner that tends to obscure what Deleuze, by

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contrast, emphasizes, that “[t]he narcissistic ego is inseparable not only from a constitutive wound but from the disguises and displacements which are woven from one side to the other, and constitute its modification. The ego is a mask for other masks, a disguise under other disguises. Indistinguishable from its own clowns, it walks with a limp on one green and one red leg” (DR 110). As colorful as this formulation is, Deleuzeʼs point is of inestimable importance insofar as it makes clear that, above all else, the ego is also, in its passive, unconscious aspect, the paradoxical object—the object = x, the objet a, but also the phallus— seen from the point of view of its own constantly displaced, totally incommensurate, impossible interiority. Once more, this connects Freud to Kant.

The transcendental analytic

refers everything in the sensibility and the understanding back to the position of the ʻIʼ as the transcendental unity of apperception, to a cogito as the absolutely elementary instance of the activity of that subject, and here too we encounter that movement, except that it takes the form of “a complex whole that Paul Ricoeur aptly named an ʻ aborted Cogitoʼ” (DR 110),54 or what Deleuze, earlier, has

54

It is likely that the development we have been tracing owes some debt to Ricoeurʼs analysis in the second chapter of Book III of Freud and Philosophy, especially its first section, entitled: “Freud and the Question of the Subject.” The phrase Deleuze cites appears in the following passage, where Ricoeur is discussing what he calls ʻthe dispossession of immediate consciousnessʼ: “The third step of the dispossession is characterized by the introduction of narcissism into psychoanalytic theory. We are now forced to treat the ego itself as the variable object of an instinct and to form the concept of ego-instinct (Ichtrieb) in which, as we have said, the ego is no longer the subject of the Cogito but the object of desire. Furthermore, in the economy of the libido, the values of subject and object are constantly being interchanged; there is a pleasure-ego (Lust-Ich), correlative to the ego-instinct (Ichtrieb), which exchanges itself for object values on the market of libidinal investments or cathexes. This is the supreme test for a philosophy of reflection. What is in question is the very subject of immediate apperception.

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characterized, this time following Rimbaud, as “a long an inexhaustible story: I is an other, or the paradox of inner sense” (DR 86). In what follows this text, Deleuze demonstrates that the fractured “I” which emerges here, and which has always already had its place stolen by a paradoxical object, becomes the “I” which is truly capable of thinking—even and especially if thinking is difficult, frightening, and in no way at all a matter of ʻ friendshipʼ in the classical philosophical sense of the word. This is because the narcissistic moment, in its secondary form as a ʻ withdrawal,ʼ points toward the linearity and succession of time that have been lost in the circular and oscillatory form of the passive synthesis of memory. Or, in other words, the passive syntheses still cannot account for the temporality of action, of the I as precisely what is not me, either in the sense of the ʻ undeterminedʼ contemplative self of the first synthesis or completely determined, and indeed overdetermined mnemonic self of the second synthesis. Formally, Deleuze demonstrates this by considering

“the difference

between the Kantian and the Cartesian Cogito” (DR 85)—although, to be clear, what is at stake here is not simply the cogito considered as an act of thought which may be apodictically true, but what, if any consequences we can draw from

Narcissism must be introduced, not only in psychoanalytic theory, but into reflection. I then discover that as soon as the apodictic truth I think, I am is uttered, it is blocked by a pseudo evidence: an abortive Cogito has already taken the place of the first truth of reflection, I think, I am. At the very heart of the Ego Cogito I discover an instinct all of whose derived forms point toward something altogether primitive and primordial, which Freud calls primary narcissism. To raise this discovery to the reflective level is to make the dispossession of the subject of consciousness coequal with the dispossession, already achieved, of the intended object” (Ricoeur 425).

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it. Accordingly, Deleuze remarks that Descartesʼ cogito only involves “two logical values:

determination and undetermined existence” (DR 85), which are,

respectively, the correlates of ʻ I thinkʼ and ʻ I exist.ʼ In the “Second Meditation,” Descartes begins by claiming that his own activity of thinking immediately entails his existence, but then goes on to argue that the nature of his existence has thereby been directly determined as res cogitans (Descartes Meditations 25-27). “The determination (I think) implies an undetermined existence (I am, because ʻin order to think one must existʼ)—and determines it precisely as the existence of a thinking subject” (DR 85).

But, as Deleuze, and many others, have noted,

“Descartes could draw his conclusion only by expelling time, by reducing the Cogito to an instant and entrusting time to the operation of a continuous creation carried out by God” (DR 86). Kant was one of those who saw this problem, objecting that it is “impossible for determination to bear directly upon the undetermined” (DR 85) in the cogito. This is because insofar as what is to be determined in the cogito—that is, in thought (the “I” as subject)—is the existence of that subject (the “I” as object), then this determination “cannot take place without inner sense, the intuition of which presents the object not as thing in itself but merely as appearance. There is here, therefore, not simply spontaneity of thought, but also receptivity of intuition, that is, the thought of myself applied to the empirical intuition of myself” (Kant Critique of Pure Reason 382). And, of course, once intuition becomes involved, then time will be introduced as that which makes possible the synthesis of the manifold of intuition and as what

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allows for the application of the categories to empirically given objects. And this is precisely what Deleuze makes clear in his summary of the logical structure of Kantʼs cogito: The determination (ʻI thinkʼ) obviously implies something undetermined (ʻI amʼ), but nothing so far tells us how it is that this undetermined is determined by the ʻ I thinkʼ [...] Kant therefore adds a third logical value: the determinable, or rather the form in which the undetermined is determinable (by the determination). [...] Kantʼs answer is well known: the form under which undetermined existence is determinable by the ʻI thinkʼ is that of time... (DR 85-86). Of course, this inclusion of time within the cogito means that the subject will never be able to coincide with itself, making it the paradigmatic instance both of the division between the virtual and the actual series in the second passive synthesis and of the circular form taken by their convergence in the movement of reflective self-apprehension.

But then, insofar as what the active subject

apprehends is not itself but that which has produced it by disguising and differing from itself, the object=x, then the cogito collapses in abject failure. What is the upshot of this collapse? For a philosopher of Descartesʼ ilk, or Kantʼs, insofar as they are operating in the service of the image of thought, it would undoubtedly be a disaster. For Deleuze, by contrast, it represents the most profound and creative moment of philosophical thinking, the moment at which thinking in a truly positive sense becomes possible. This difference in attitude is of the most profound possible importance to us insofar as it is not, as far as Deleuze is concerned, a matter of trivial preference. For Deleuze, the discovery of the “third value” in the logic of the cogito, determinability:

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suffices to make logic a transcendental instance. It amounts to the discovery of Difference—no longer in the form of an empirical difference between two determinations, but in the form of a transcendental Difference between Determination as such and what it determines; no longer in the form of an external difference which separates, but in the form of an internal Difference which establishes an a priori relation between thought and being (DR 86). It should not require any argument to establish that Difference in this sense is what Deleuze has endeavored to bring to light as the core aim of his entire philosophical project, rescuing it from a sort of philosophical oblivion that corresponds eerily with the situation of the archaic, immemorial past in SacherMasochʼs fantasies, both insofar as it is not something that can be reached by an empirical movement or transformation and also insofar as it has been covered over by a ʻspiritualʼ image or law of the Same. Accordingly, and this is the upshot of Deleuzeʼs Nietzscheanism, Difference is at once: 1) an ethical phenomenon insofar as it insists on the order of meaning and value, rather than being what exists in empirically determined states of affairs; and 2) the object of an ethical imperative insofar as it, above all else, is to be affirmed. And this is why the most important philosophical arguments for Deleuze will have less to do with whether or not this or that philosopher, scientist, or artist is capable of perceiving or articulating ʻwhat is truly the case,ʼ and much more to do with the extent to which his or her work affirms Difference or seeks to exclude, cover over, suppress, hide, and constrain it. In this respect, like Plato, and Kant, as well as Spinoza, Leibiniz, Hume, Nietzsche, and Bergson, and a great many others, Freud was capable of perceiving a truly extraordinary amount of the

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transcendental structure of Difference, working from the point of view of a reflection on the biopsychic life of human beings. It seems impossible at this point to avoid the conclusion that Deleuze would affirm a great deal of what Freud recognized in that respect—though not all of it, and we have already taken note of a number of points of criticism. What is more dubious, and in this respect Freud is more like Plato and Kant than Spinoza and Nietzsche in Deleuzeʼs mind, is whether and to what extent Freud is capable of affirming difference, and to what extent he will work to contain it.

IV. What remains to be considered, accordingly, is the third synthesis itself, and Freudʼs response to it, insofar as his conception of the death drive (Thanatos) seems to amount to a more or less clear eyed recognition of what it could mean to live out the third synthesis: the confrontation with the pure and empty form of time as an object of thought.

Deleuze summarizes the

components of the synthetic structure beautifully when he writes that: The activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself rather than enacts it, which experiences its effect rather than imitates it, and which lives it like an Other within itself. To the ʻI thinkʼ and the “I amʼ must be added the self— that is, the passive position (what Kant calls the receptivity of intuition) to the determined and the undetermined must be added the form of the determinable, namely time (DR 86) We will pass over Deleuzeʼs remarks relating this structure to the Death of God (DR 86-87) in order to focus on the manner in which recognizing this point of

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irreducible alterity within the self appears, at least philosophically, to operate as an immediate injunction to obscure it or find some way of “filling” the fracture or closing this “constitutive wound” (DR 110). This is the response demanded by the image of thought, and Deleuzeʼs ʻoppositionʼ to Kant is clearly associated with the extent to which he worked to overcome the fractured I by postulating “a new form of identity—namely, active synthetic identity; whereas the passive self is defined only by receptivity and, as such, endowed with no power of synthesis” (DR 87). We have seen the results of this strategy a number of times above, and often associated with criticisms of psychoanalysis, though usually the consequences there are mostly restricted to Freudʼs inability to find a satisfying explanation of the ʻbeyondsʼ of the pleasure principle and the origins of fantasies that did not depend on some kind of external ʻrealism.ʼ If, as Deleuze suggests, this attempted elision of the fracture in the I and the corresponding recognition of the necessity of the third synthesis as a structuring element of the subject amounts to denying any synthetic power to passivity at all, and reducing it to the position of a simple receptivity (DR 87), then it is very easy to see the philosophical force behind his criticisms of Freud for seeking a “primal scene,” an “originary fixed term” (DR 103-105) and so forth all ultimately derive from an unwillingness to differentiate between a genuinely synthetic activity of the unconscious and simple illusion.55 Once more however, in both the philosophical series and the

55

See Laplanche and Pontalis “Fantasy” on this point.

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psychoanalytic one that repeats it in the second half of the chapter, these almost inevitable, and certainly very commonplace and frustrating misunderstandings are not said by Deleuze to be either irremovable or disqualifying of the bodies of thought which articulate them. Indeed, he seems willing to give even Kant much more of a benefit of the doubt than many of his readers were wont to acknowledge for some time.56 “The Kantian initiative can be taken up, and the form of time can support both the death of God and the fractured I, but in the course of a quite different understanding of the passive self” (DR 87). Would the psychoanalytic unconscious qualify as such a ʻdifferent understanding?ʼ There is reason to think it could given that, in order to provide a ʻ poetic formulaʼ for the third synthesis, Deleuze turns to Hamletʼs famous pronouncement at the end of the first act that: “time is out of joint” (Hamlet, Act I, Sc. V, quoted in DR 88).57 Deleuze goes on to compare Hamlet, as the “northern prince” to Kant, as the “northern philosopher,” and wonders whether they say “the same thing” and whether Kant “should be Hamletian because he is Oedipal” (DR 88). Once more we come upon a scene where, in contemplating the affirmation of difference, we are asked to consider an incestuous situation that varies the Oedipal framework enormously, putting it to a very different use. In Sacher-

56

At this point, the value of the overall recognition within Deleuze studies of the extent of the debt that he owes to Kant has been well established, but it is also worth remembering how much in Deleuzeʼs philosophy remained powerfully obscure for a very long time until it was. 57 It is worth remembering the whole context of Hamletʼs statement, and the point at which it comes in the play. Having just been informed by his fatherʼs ghost that his uncle and his mother had conspired to murder his father, and been enjoined to effect revenge in order that the ghost may be laid to rest, Hamlet swears his companions to silence about the matter and then, as an aside while bidding all to go back inside the castle, remarks: “The time is out of joint;—O cursed spite,/That I was ever born to set it right!—“ (Hamlet Act I, Scene v).

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Masoch, the incestuous return to the mother is used to disconnect the son from the authority of the father, the model, and allow him to stand on his own. In Hamlet, the series is even more tortured58 and its overall effect is once again narcissistic59—Deleuze being careful to highlight the relationship between narcissism and the death-instinct through the mechanism of the withdrawal of libidinal connections (DR 111).

In any case, what is at stake in the linkage

between Hamlet and Oedipus is murder—and the manner in which, as an event, it is played out in order to illustrate a different synthesis of time. This is no longer the cardinal time of life, and the erotic and mnemonic series that are built upon it and give it content—a time wholly subordinated to movement (DR 88). Rather, it is a “pure order” of time, linear and “distributed unequally on both sides of a ʻcaeseuraʼ, as a result of which the beginning and end no longer [coincide]” (DR 88-89). This third synthesis leaves us with the following: We can distinguish a more or less extensive past and a future in inverse proportion, but the future and the past here are not empirical and dynamic determinations of time: they are formal and fixed characteristics which follow a priori from the order of time, as though they comprised a static synthesis of time. The synthesis is necessarily static, since it is no longer subordinated to movement; time is the most radical form of change, but the form of change does not change. The caeseura, along with the before and after which it ordains once and for all, constitutes the fracture in the I (the caeseura is exactly the point at which the fracture appears) (DR 89). And we can see how this abstract, static time, divorced from the rhythms of life—

58

The father has already been killed, and the son is wholly innocent of the crime, even while his mother is committing incest with his uncle. Nevertheless, Hamlet, soon after these lines are spoken, will end up mistakenly killing Polonius, the father of Ophelia, who he might once have loved, and who will commit suicide in a paroxysm of grief over Poloniusʼs death. 59 Throughout the play, Hamlet remains entirely chaste, all of his erotic cathexes having been thoroughly withdrawn.

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and thus from the erotic series and the habitual series—becomes the time of the event in a sense that refers us to both death and the eternal recurrence. To do so, we need to consider the meaning of Deleuzeʼs claim that this pure, empty form of time, even though it has no “empirical content” or “ground,” like the previous passive syntheses, is nevertheless “defined not only by a formal and empty order but also by a totality and a series” (DR 89). Having been completely divorced from the sensory-motor and mnemonic orders of life, time must now be synthesized entirely as a matter of thought, in which case it will have to take on a total symbolic value (an overall meaning) and be played out in an organization that is determined by its relation to that symbol (DR 89). The examples that Deleuze chooses of “a symbol adequate to the totality of time” (DR 89) once again make clear that the primary value of this synthesis is not to be found in its abstract systematicity but rather in its ethical force; the time of the third synthesis, the pure and empty form of time, is the time of revolution. The value of Hamletʼs and Oedipusʼs acts now appear in all their exemplary power when Deleuze goes on to show how they distribute the whole of time into three series, past, present and future, which have significance wholly in relation to the Symbol/Act/Event: the time in which “the act is ʻtoo big for meʼ” (DR 89), the “time which relates to the caesura-itself, [...] the present of metamorphosis, a becoming equal to the act and a doubling of the self, and a projection of an ideal self in the image of the act” (DR 89), and finally a time that: signifies that the event and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self; [...] they turn back against the self which has 211

become their equal and smash it to pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth: what the self has become equal to is the unequal in itself. In this manner the I which is fractured according to the order of time and the Self which is divided according to the temporal series correspond and find a common descendent in the man without name, without family, without qualities, without self or I, the ʻplebianʼ guardian of the secret, the already-Overman whose scattered members gravitate around the sublime image (DR 89-90). Once more, the time of revolution, but passive, unconscious, affective revolution—the revolution which is at stake in Marxʼs ʻaestheticʼ transformation as much if not more than any actual ʻpolitics.ʼ And psychoanalysis?

It is not difficult to see in the first phase the

narcissistic withdrawal and the desexualization of the libido that, according to Freud, is characteristic of the narcissism that occurs in the work of mourning insofar as the withdrawal of cathexis is necessary in order to ʻ give upʼ the lost object—or perhaps to become equal to it. The second phase is just as obviously the splitting of the ego, the setting up of the super-ego constructed from all the identifications and incorporations with which one managed to give up all that was lost—but again, rather than functioning as an agency of repression, surely this ideal serves to test and prepare in much the way that a Nietzschean enemy would. And the third phase: the death instinct—except not in the literal sense which, according to Deleuze, Freud seems to have been all too caught up in. Over the course of several pages later in the chapter, once more, Deleuze will ʻ replayʼ the literary and philosophical development we have just followed in more strictly analytic terms (DR 111-114). At this point, we will learn more from

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passing over a detailed development of the correlation he establishes between the two iterations of the synthesis and focusing instead on the critical interrogation which he conducts of Freudʼs reasons for differentiating Eros and Thanatos. Deleuze summarizes the problem as follows. With the withdrawal of cathexes from objects and their attachment to the narcissistic ego, the whole process of fantastic, that is, disguised and displaced repetition collapses. “It is as though time had abandoned all possible mimetic content, and in so doing had broken the circle into which it had been led by Eros” (DR 111). Lived as such, empty time becomes equivalent to the death instinct and the ego with which it coincides loses its memory (DR 111).60 From here, things play out much as one would expect: “The narcissistic ego has no more than a dead body, having lost the body at the same time as the objects. It is by means of the death instinct that it is reflected in the ego ideal and has a presentiment of its end in the superego, as though in two fragments of the fractured I” (DR 111).

60

Deleuze has no

It is difficult here to imagine a better example of this dynamic than the central apex of Michel Tournierʼs Friday. In the course of the novel, which retells Defoeʼs Robinson Crusoe, Tournierʼs hero has proceeded as if he were moving through the first two syntheses. In the aftermath of the wreck, he spends a considerable, and wholly indeterminate period of time wallowing in the mud, learning or relearning the bare fact of enjoyment, which is a precondition for his advancement to the second stage wherein he elaborates a whole series of object-relations, while at the same time extracting from the wreckage the materials with which not only to survive but also to construct a ʻmemoryʼ for himself in the form of a journal. This process culminates in an erotic copulation with the island that in fact leads to the birth of a hybrid, impossible species of flowers after which Robinson loses interest. At that point, his relationship to the island undergoes another profound change, this time a retreat, accompanied by the withdrawal of all of his erotic investments, into a cave at the heart of the island where, completely cut off from sensory stimulus in a way that is very different from the undifferentiated sensory contemplation of his ʻwallowingʼ phase, he undergoes what, for all intents and purposes, appears to be a second ʻgestation.ʼ Deleuze and Tournier were lifelong friends, and Deleuze had written a review of Friday when it was published in 1967, so it is not absurd to imagine a resonance between this ʻnarcissisticʼ phase of Robinsonʼs, which seems to form the essential precondition for the adventure of creative affirmation within a quotidian life that follows it, once Robinson has learned to live with the presence of Friday on the island.

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difficulty, at this point, with the theory of narcissism insofar as it involves the postulation of the neutralization and displaceability of any libido that “returns” from abandoned object cathexes; but he is disturbed by what he takes to be Freudʼs reasons for proposing “a death instinct existing prior to that desexualized energy, independent of it in principle,” since he takes them to bear upon “the persistence of the dualistic and conflictual model which inspired the entire theory of drives” and of “the material model which presided over the theory of repetition” (DR 111).

Once again, the same basic complaints.

In this case, the first

becomes the principle of the apparent contradiction between Eros and Thanatos, and the second for the idea that the instinct is simply directed toward a “return of the living to inanimate matter,” which Deleuze reminds us amounts to a return to “brute repetition that the vital differences arising from Eros are supposed to only cover or contradict” (DR 111). If one recalls, here, Freudʼs description of life as merely an extended detour on the way to death (SE XVIII 39), it becomes very difficult to argue with Deleuzeʼs suggestion here. After this, Deleuze appears to have more or less had enough. He begins several pages of rather pointed remarks that sketch out an alternative interpretation of the unconscious, beginning with death, which he insists is not based on a material model at all. Rather, “it is present in the living in the form of a subjective and differenciated experience endowed with its prototype [...] a pure form—the empty form of time” (DR 112) that in fact constitutes the most profound instance and site of thinking.

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For death cannot be reduced to negation, neither to the negative of opposition nor to the negative of limitation. It is neither the limitation imposed by matter upon mortal life nor the opposition between matter and immortal life, which furnishes death with its prototype. Death is, rather, the last form of the problematic, the source of problems and questions, the sign of their persistence over and above every response, the “Where?” and “When?” which designate this (non)-being where every affirmation is nourished (DR 112). Insofar as Freud ultimately fails to conceive of this—and to do so he would have had to conceive of being in this problematic mode—then he has in fact misunderstood all three syntheses and the unconscious as a whole. Generally, Deleuzeʼs criticisms, as we have seen, consistently reflect the same misunderstanding, which coincides with what would be prescribed by the philosophical image of thought and its moral precursors.

But if he thereby

appears to have been critical of psychoanalysis in relation to many if not most of its key concepts—and we could continue to develop this critique in more detail and with respect to domains we have only sketched out or passed over entirely for some time yet—it nevertheless remains the case that in every instance, including this one, he also proposes what he takes to be a relatively achievable revision.

As he has with all of the other structures of the unconscious, he

proposes here a revision of narcissism, the superego, and the death drive, all of which essentially make them coincide with the Nietzschean test of the eternal recurrence, considered in an ethical sense (DR 114-122). What this amounts to, and what we will sketch in the next chapter, is a differential and positive vision of the psychoanalytic unconscious. It is built around the phantasm, but not as that which needs to be referred to an origin, and therefore ʻdisentangled.ʼ Rather the 215

phantasm is taken to be what initiates the forced movement that causes us to move, in life and thought, through a problematic series, to reconnect with that inexhaustible source of the urgency of life: the event, not as something to be sought and disentangled.

Postcript In everything we have just presented, there remains a somewhat obvious omission—or at least an elision of sorts—concerning the role of Lacan and ʻstructuralismʼ more generally. If we have, largely following Deleuze, presented the three transcendental synthesizes of time and their application to the psychoanalytic unconscious, now considered as a transcendental field of individuation, largely in terms of Freudʼs own categories and concepts, this should not lead us to overlook either the degree to which what makes this elaboration possible is precisely what Deleuze summarizes in his 1967 article “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” often with reference to Lacan. Lacan is, in fact, a frequent and almost exclusively positive subject of multiple references by Deleuze in a series of texts, written in the second half of the 1960s, that involve the transcendental conception of the unconscious that we have just described, as well as a number of other extensions of it. Lacan himself, as we have remarked, was certainly aware of an affinity between what Deleuze was producing during this period and his own work—and this was reflected in the seminar, where Deleuzeʼs work was raised and discussed both in 1967, when

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Lacan spoke of “Coldness and Cruelty” and in 1969, when he heaped praise on Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense in the manner we remarked upon previously.61 If we have nevertheless deferred a consideration of Lacan, it is largely on account of the manner in which he occupies something of an exceptional position in relation to the larger body of psychoanalytic thought, both in general and in Deleuzeʼs consideration of it. Referring only to the latter, we can see that while Deleuze only registers one apparently serious disagreement with the Lacanian view during the 1960s, and this concerning the summary of that position offered by Laplanche and Leclaire, rather than any text of Lacanʼs own—much to Lacanʼs chagrin—Deleuze also seems quite careful not to accord Lacan any particular precedence over other post-Freudian psychoanalysts to whom he makes frequent reference: Jung, Rank, Reik and most notably Klein, but also a number of other French analysts including Daniel Lagache, Jean Laplanche, Serge Leclaire, J. C. Milner, Jacques-Alain Miller, and J.-B. Pontailis, only some of whom could strictly be defined as Lacanians or members in good standing of Lacanʼs circle—something which would have been very obvious in at least some of the texts that Deleuze explicitly references. If Deleuze, for all that, does not treat Lacan as merely an expositor of Freud, any more than he does Jung or Klein, he also does not, at least in the late 1960s, accord him any explicit

61

According to Henry Krutzenʼs Index référentiel, Deleuze is mentioned by name on four separate occasions in Lacanʼs seminars: once in Seminar XIV (April 19, 1967), regarding “Coldness and Cruelty”; and three times in Seminar XVI (March 12, 19, and 26, 1969), regarding The Logic of Sense (Krutzen 19).

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precedence over Klein where it is a matter of discussing the unconscious of the second synthesis—and he surely does not credit Lacan with the discovery and elaboration of the fractured subject as it is manifest in the third synthesis, even if Lacanʼs elaboration of the issues involved is acknowledged to be an important one. If, then, it might seem very tempting to label the version of the psychoanalytic unconscious which Deleuze elaborates, and endorses, near the end of the 1960s as a “structural” version, in order to distinguish it from the symbolic version which he had developed in his treatment of Masoch, and then largely left dormant until the later years of the decade, we do so only with the caution that this should not lead us to see what Deleuze is doing with psychoanalysis at the end of the decade as standing or falling in relation to his estimation of Lacan. If the preceding consideration has shown anything, it is that Deleuze saw psychoanalysis as being susceptible to a philosophical elaboration which made it consistent with the transcendental theory which he was elaborating in his own right and through which he was systematizing and unifying a number of his own concerns—including and especially those which relate to the question of how it should be possible to approach thought and life in a manner that is affirmative and creative of difference. Part of the overall movement of Difference and Repetition, in particular, is to double the articulation of the philosophy which supports that project of living with an extensive critique of the way in which philosophy has, historically, often worked against it—the critique of an “image of

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thought” which, just like philosophy as a whole, is also seen to have ramifications outside of the strictly philosophical domain.

Where Deleuze is critical of

psychoanalysis, it seems to be very much in line with his criticisms of the image of thought and his broader project to reverse its effects. It seems to be basically indisputable that the last mentioned project is a basic feature of Deleuzeʼs work over the course of his entire career, whether it is conceived as a ʻrevolutionʼ in any of a number of senses in which Deleuze uses the term, or simply as a ʻ reversal of Platonism,ʼ which would force it to take account of, affirm, and elaborate the consequences of the production of simulacra, or phantasms, or even of the ʻ eventʼ which ungrounds time and is reflected in the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious.

Indeed, more, it

amounts to the standard or the criterion on the basis of which Deleuze ultimately evaluates the value of various bodies and instances of thinking:

his own

alternative to the ʻwill to truth.ʼ As such, the interest of Lacanʼs exceptional status resides less in how he may appear during the late 1960s, when Deleuze was broadly affirming psychoanalysis, than in how he appears in the second chapter of Anti-Oedipus, where he seems almost unique as the only psychoanalyst to whom Deleuze and Guattari are still affording some measure of the benefit of the doubt—but accounting for that in terms of the specificity of Lacanʼs thought as distinct from the broader range of psychoanalysis will, in the end, belong to the scope of a different project than this one.

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Chapter 5

“The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use” (AO 109).

I. Despite the fact that our case has been presented in a manner that is far more exemplary than comprehensive, we feel confident in having established some general parameters in terms of which Deleuzeʼs relationship to psychoanalysis should be understood. The first of these involves simply the range of material that should be involved in such a consideration.

When considering his

relationship to psychoanalysis, it is tempting to focus primarily on Deleuzeʼs writings with Guattari, or at least to begin only with his writings of the late 1960s. And of these, the text most directly and obviously concerned with psychoanalysis is also the most critical: Deleuzeʼs 1967 return to Sacher-Masoch in “Coldness and Cruelty.”

Most of the major ideas in that text, however, are either

developments of the 1961 article we have considered above or are included in other texts from the same period, such as Difference and Repetition or The Logic of Sense—texts which, while at times openly critical of psychoanalysis, cannot in any way be said to manifest a dismissive or oppositional attitude toward it. Indeed, as we have seen, the more one considers the tone and terms of Deleuzeʼs engagement with Freud, the members of his school, and their various intellectual heirs, the more it appears to resemble the complex and critical

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relationship in which Deleuze finds himself during the same period with philosophy as such. This seems to be especially true if we recall that the notion of a dogmatic or philosophical “image of thought,” against which Difference and Repetition as a whole is set forth by Deleuze, nevertheless precedes that text by a number of years, the term having made its first prominent appearance at the end of the third chapter of Nietzsche and Philosophy (NPh 103-110).

There, Deleuze

summarizes the image in terms of three key points: 1) We are told that the thinker as thinker wants and loves truth (truthfulness of the thinker); that thought as thought possesses or formally contains truth (innateness of the idea, a priori nature of concepts); that thinking is the natural exercise of a faculty, that it is therefore sufficient to think “truly” or “really” in order to think with truth (sincere nature of the truth, universally shared good sense). 2) We are also told that we are “diverted” from the truth but by forces which are foreign to it (body, passions, sensuous interests). [...] 3) We are told, finally, that all we need to think well, to think truthfully, is a method. Method is an artifice but one through which we are brought back to the nature of thought, through which we adhere to this nature to ward off the effect of the alien forces which alter it and distract us. [...] (NPh 103). In Difference and Repetition, and a number of other texts from the same period, what Deleuze opposes to thought governed by this image is thought based on or inaugurated by the ʻ phantasmʼ or the ʻ simulacrum.ʼ

Rather than being the

voluntary consequence of a supposedly natural love for ʻ truth,ʼ this other sort thought follows the path of a discordant exercise of the faculties, a path which begins with the ʻ forced movementʼ induced by the encounter with a paradoxical or incommensurate object in experience. And, in Difference and Repetition, it leads to the discovery of the various passive syntheses that form the genetic 221

principles of a fully realized transcendental philosophy. Further developed, such a philosophy supports a conception of thought which, above all else, establishes the primacy of questions and problems over solutions, both from an ontological and from an ethical point of view, insofar as the value of various ʻ solutionsʼ— phenomenal things or events—can only be properly determined with reference to the problems they are attached to and the questions driving the specification of those problems. By contrast, the philosophical image of thought amounts to the foreclosure of this entire order of inquiry by means of a series of “subjective presuppositions,” as Deleuze puts it in Difference and Repetition, that fall into two broad classes: under the name of ʻ common sense,ʼ they presume in advance that what is thinkable is limited to what can be grasped by the active syntheses— that the only sort of synthesis is an active one; and under the name of ʻ good sense,ʼ they presume that the highest object of thought is just the truth, which is equated with the identical or the same. It is this “will to truth” that, above all else, has been the principle target of Deleuzeʼs philosophy at least since Nietzsche and Philosophy, and which he associates with a genuine realization of ʻcritique.ʼ Advancing the interests of such a critical mode of thought will require that in certain instances Deleuze positions himself, as a philosopher, over and against at least the main stream of the philosophical tradition. But opposing the dogmatic image of thought, even insofar as it has largely been determinative of the historical practice of philosophy, does not make Deleuze an opponent of philosophy per se or entail the rejection of is major figures tout de suite. Indeed,

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he would likely dismiss the suggestion that it should as another instance of the restricted image of philosophical thought that is at issue—an image that Deleuze makes a point of showing to be inadequate to account even for the actual productions of philosophers like Plato and Kant.1 Deleuze credits Nietzsche with recognizing this inadequacy, as we can see from a very brief consideration of the latter sections of the third chapter of Nietzsche and Philosophy, beginning with the claim that “Nietzsche, in the Genealogy of Morals, wanted to rewrite the Critique of Pure Reason” (NPh 88). Deleuze credits Kant with having the “genius [to] conceive of an immanent critique” (NPh 91), but reproaches him for having nevertheless failed to “realize” it.

The problem is that: “Transcendental

philosophy discovers conditions which still remain external to the conditioned. Transcendental principles are principles of conditioning and not of an internal genesis” (NPh 91). Nietzscheʼs singular importance, according to Deleuze, does not stem simply from his recognition of the existence of this problem, since the claim that Kantʼs philosophy was incapable of accounting for ʻreasonʼ itself was a commonplace among the post-Kantians, as Deleuze notes repeatedly; rather it begins at the point where he recognizes its source in the will to truth, which he proceeds to criticize in terms that did not in fact presuppose it. This is why Nietzscheʼs entire critical position abandons the perspective of “transcendental conditions,” conceived as first or primary synthetic instances, and replaces it with

1

See MD 95 for an exemplary instance of comments that reflect this. In the discussion that follows, Deleuze defends a similar claim with regard to Kant under questioning from Ferdinand Alquié (MD 105-107).

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“genealogy.” “Only the will to power as genetic and genealogical principle, as legislative principle, is capable of realizing internal critique” (NPh 91, my emphasis). From the point of view of Deleuzeʼs relationship to transcendental philosophy, the consequences of all this have been analyzed thoroughly and with more subtlety than would be possible here.2 points.

We need only emphasize two

The first is that this criticism in no way entails a rejection of the

transcendental as such, or the denial of Kantʼs essential importance, both insofar as he discovered it and insofar as he gave it a first philosophical formulation. Secondly, the value of any critical philosophy, as far is Deleuze is concerned, is found in its actual capacity to supersede the constraints or the limitations of the image of thought. Given the moral roots of the image, getting beyond it will entails a critique of sense and values—a critique, that is, which points us to the will that is at work in the exercise of thought, in a certain use of thought, and which considers the question of how that will might be transformed. This is why Deleuze tells us that “[t]he Nietzschean and the Kantian conceptions of critique are opposed on five main points” (NPh 93), the first being just the substitution of genetic principles for transcendental conditions that we have been discussing. But the others merit our consideration as well: 2) A thought which thinks against reason rather than a thought that believes itself to be legislative because it is subject to reason alone [...] Because it is reason which receives and expresses the rights of that which

2

See Simont Essai, much of Daniel W. Smithʼs work, beginning with Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference, and Constantine Boundas, “An Ontology of Intensities.”

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dominates thought, thought reqconquers its rights and becomes a legislator against reason: the dicethrow, this was the sense of the dicethrow. 3) The genealogist rather than the Kantian legislator. [...] 4) The reactive man serving himself rather than the reasonable being, functionary of current values, both priest and believer, legislator and subject, conquering and conquered slave. But, in that case, which one undertakes critique? What is the critical standpoint? The critical instance is not the realized man, or any sublimated form of man, sprit, reason or self-consciousness. [...] The critical instance is the will to power, the critical perspective is that of the will to power. But in what form? Not that of the Overman who is the positive product of critique itself. But there is a “relatively superhuman type” (EH IV 5): “the critical type, man insofar as he wants to be gone beyond, overcome... [...] 5) The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the Overman, the overcome, overtaken man. The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility (NPh 94). For Deleuze as for Nietzsche, critique is the true heart of philosophy; and as such, it is, immediately, revolutionary in exactly the sense that Deleuze had alluded to the year before in his article on Masoch, the one that involves the overcoming of ʻmanʼ in the course of the production of ʻa new sensibility.ʼ Rather than determining the conditions under which sensibility, experience, bodily life, and so on can be made to function in conformity with the dictates of a rationality subordinated to the conditions of identity in representation, philosophy, according to Deleuze, must take off its priestly mask, becoming the form of thought that wills not truth, but rather life as what “ʼ[...] aims to mislead, to dupe, to dissimilate, to dazzle, to blindʼ” (NPh 96): art, as the affirmation of the activity of life and “the highest power of falsehood” (NPh 102). But we must also recognize that this sort of thinking is “never the natural exercise of a faculty” (NPh 108). Rather, it is forced upon us, something that we

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find ourselves constrained to do, and it requires a set of more or less liberatory developments at a concrete level that Deleuze describes as cultural. Thinking depends on forces which take hold of thought. Insofar as our thinking is controlled by reactive forces, insofar as it finds its sense in reactive forces, we must admit that we are not yet thinking. Thinking means the activity of thought; but thought has its own ways of being inactive which can occupy it and all its forces entirely. [...] We are awaiting the forces capable of making thought something active, absolutely active, the power capable of making it an affirmation. [...] But it will never attain this power if forces do not do violence to it. Violence must be done to it as thought, a power, the force of thinking, must throw it into a becoming-active. A constraint a training of this kind is what Nietzsche calls “Culture” (NPh 108). What is meant by culture here?

Deleuze contrasts it to ʻ methodʼ in a

conventional philosophical sense, a “paideia [...] thought does not think on the basis of a good will, but by virtue of forces that are exercised on it in order to constrain it to think” (NPh 108), and goes on to cite as an example the violence involved in the journey of the prisoner in Platoʼs allegory of the cave. Here we have an instance of precisely the sort of nuance that governs Deleuzeʼs entire relationship to philosophy: for all that it often gets caught in the role of the priest or the sage, philosophy has a potential, often unrealized but always persistent, an opening that never fully disappears, to initiate and pursue a genuine activity of thinking. If Deleuze is very careful to emphasize that Nietzscheʼs vision is of a thinker and a form of thought that does not yet exist, and that the ʻcultureʼ under discussion is only humorously that of the entire progression from Greece to Germany, he does so only to show the degree to which the violence that inaugurates the activity of thinking at the heart of philosophy is both: 1) what

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results from a constraint that, if it is to occur at all, must do so within the confines of the cultural space we actually occupy; and 2) what, when it arises, will be revolutionary, and therefore absolutely foreign to that same cultural space. Philosophy can fail to make itself equal to that movement, that opening, but so long as it is philosophy it will nevertheless retain a fundamental linkage to it. And Deleuzeʼs attitude towards any given philosophy seems to depend, to a very considerable extent, upon the degree to which it is tending in one or the other direction—with the caveat that almost any philosophy will contain elements that are revolutionary, and elements that are not, and that the task of the reader of philosophy insofar as he or she wants to pursue the path of thought is to separate those from one another. The extent to which this appears to be the case with Deleuzeʼs reading of psychoanalysis as well is remarkable—as, correlatively, is the extent to which psychoanalysis, at least until the late 1970s, is never treated by Deleuze simply as if it were a dogmatic practice or disciplinary mechanism, belonging entirely to a repressive apparatus, any more than it is given an uncritical treatment in any instance whatsoever. We have seen this quite clearly. At the beginning of the 1960s, Freud is sharply rebuked for an excessive focus, in his conception of the unconscious, on the levels that are more or less directly connected to the life of the particular individuals under analysis. What is at stake in this, as we have seen, is what Deleuze considers to be an unacceptable limitation of the scope of the masochistic fantasy, which in the Freudian conception is made not only to

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convert all objects, no matter how they are actually presented, into representatives of the Father, but also, and by virtue of that operation, to lose its socio-historical and revolutionary sense. By contrast, Deleuze emphasizes these latter elements, presenting an alternative reading, grounded in a dissident psychoanalysis—this time Jungʼs—that considers both the object and the aim of masochistic fantasies in terms of a process by which the subject attempts to free himself from the paternal law and indeed to supplant that law, and its ʻ spiritualʼ definition of personhood, with a very different order altogether. And this takes place precisely by means of the masochistic subjectʼs undergoing a violent, forced self-transformation at the hands of a beloved who is herself made to incarnate an image of femininity and feminine power that is drastically different from the one that accompanies the patriarchal order. And this image, to which the subject is introduced in an encounter that fundamentally shatters whatever has previously been established in his libidinal investments, is taken by Deleuze to be of a fundamentally different nature than the Image of the Father that structures the ʻobjectiveʼ unconscious of Freud. In an oblique reference to Klein, we are reminded that the investment of the motherʼs body (or its parts) precedes the integration of the Ego, and with it the clear distinction either between self and other or between reality and phantasy; so that attachment of desire to a ʻmotherʼ figure in this case involves a regression to a point that has no ʻ placeʼ in the individualʼs ʻ personalʼ history. And the socio-historical content with which these masochistic desires are invested is likewise placed, in the ʻ romanticʼ reading of

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Bachofen given by Sacher-Masoch, totally beyond the realm of any ʻ historicalʼ past, of any past that could be said with any confidence to be a ʻformer present.ʼ Masochism is thus explicitly set up as a repetition, but only in the sense that it repeats a past which was never present—or, better, mobilizes the Image of such a past in order to disrupt the constituted order of patriarchal rationality, which functions as an analogue for the ʻ image of thoughtʼ described above.

And

psychoanalysis, as we have seen, makes possible in its dissident variants a theoretical elaboration of the effects of such an Image but also, in its traditional forms, has a tendency to liquidate the Imageʼs specifically revolutionary power by demanding that it subordinate itself to the Oedipal economy. Many of the elements of the same nuanced attitude are repeated in the elaborate mapping of several different sets of psychoanalytic concepts onto Deleuzeʼs transcendental theory structured around three passive syntheses of time in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition.

In essence, the

syntheses get considered twice, once as modes of temporalization and once as moments or levels in the elaboration of an unconscious. And by virtue of its place at the heart of second of these series, psychoanalysis is presented as being directly parallel to a philosophy of the faculties—each are shown to have similar potential, and similar pitfalls. From the point of view of the philosophy of the faculties, we have considered the syntheses as modes of temporalization— modes which, Deleuze shows, can be understood in accordance with the image of thought only at the cost of obscuring what is truly genetic in each of them

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behind a model of conditionality that surreptitiously reifies the given empirical state of affairs by presenting it as its own condition of possibility.

That

interpretation is, of course, a failure at the ontological level and needs to be replaced with one that takes proper account of difference as the only possible ontological ʻoriginʼ—which is precisely the model that Deleuze proposes to offer. The imagination, viewed as a ʻconnectiveʼ synthesis, draws a habit of living from the instantaneity of purely material succession, establishing an organic temporality that grounds an order of need and a ʻ dissolvedʼ subject that corresponds to the various rhythms, projections and retentions, and developed sensitivities of bodily life. This synthesis grounds, but is completely distinct from, the active syntheses of perceptual recognition, understanding and memory. Nevertheless it is partly the requirements of these latter which produce the paradox whereby the fact that the present passes demands a second, ʻdisjunctiveʼ synthesis of time that composes a noumenal double of the present (as distinct from its phenomenal, that is to say present, appearance, that is to say, presence) and a pure past that has never been present. These doubles, in turn, are found to be in an irreconcilably ambiguous relationship to one another, the former being only a differentiated or disguised version of the latter, even while the latter is itself merely a displaced version of the former—or indeed, the essential displacement which makes the former a ʻ presentʼ as part of time. Furthermore, this synthesis establishes an order of desire that is irreducible to vital needs and only problematically related to ʻ recognizableʼ states of affairs.

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And in so doing it grounds the meaning and value which are attached to objects in our experience in the possibility of a ʻrecollectionʼ of what exceeds the scope of any present whatsoever: a purely problematic or Ideal instance. Once again, however, there arises a paradoxical instance that requires the formation of a third, ʼ conjunctiveʼ synthesis: the active synthetic attempt to grasp the I as an object of recognition revealing a fissure within the cogito that divides the ʻI amʼ as undetermined existence and the ʻI thinkʼ as its determination. That these cannot be made to coincide immediately, but only in reflective apprehension, entails a third sense of time as what fills the gap in the reflective subject by unfolding a ʻpure formʼ of the determinable or an order of succession in which the determination of the undetermined is worked out: the ʻeternal recurrenceʼ as the mechanism by which chance is affirmed once and for all, and completely, and by which the present is constituted as a break or a division that prevents time from collapsing into a circularity—it is always worth recalling, in this regard, that insofar as recurrence takes time, qualifying it as ʻeternalʼ amounts to dictating the impossibility that it should ever be accomplished. Finally, as opposed to both need and desire, this third synthesis finally becomes one of thought, where this is strictly possible only insofar as both the agent and the circumstances that make it possible are superseded and left behind utterly (DR 90-91). In presenting these three passive, unconscious syntheses, Deleuze emphasizes that, in each case, what is synthesized, what is produced, is an instance of difference that defies the rules governing representative common

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sense (DR 143-147). But perhaps even more important is the manner in which his analysis shows that need and desire constitute the secret foundation and ground, respectively, upon which the active, conscious syntheses of recognition, memory, and understanding, on the one hand, and of the traditional Kantian ʻIdeasʼ of reason, Self, World, and God as undetermined, determinable, and the ideal of complete determination (DR 168-170), on the other hand, become possible at all. Insofar as ʻ making a differenceʼ in this synthetic sense can be equated with the operation of ʻevaluationʼ that Deleuze situates at the core of the will to power in Nietzsche and Philosophy (NPh 6-8), then we can understand how the account of the first two syntheses already functions as a genealogy— especially insofar as it can be used to show the manner in which the elevation of a more or less empirical memory to a very specific function becomes absolutely critical to the concrete operations by which reactive forces come to dominate active ones (NPh Chapter 4). Something essentially similar is at work when Deleuze identifies the principle of the dogmatic image of thought as ʻ the Sameʼ and its analogues, connecting their elevation to an essentially moral imperative in Plato. And here it becomes clear that, just as the will to power as ʻgenealogicalʼ element represents, for Deleuze, the terrain upon which it becomes possible for philosophy to conduct a genuinely immanent critique, so his insistence that the most profound sense of the eternal recurrence is the “ethical and selective” sense (NPh 68-71) proceeds from the fact that he takes the affirmation of difference to be the philosophical act par excellance.

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Performing this act is, of course, not easy. It is something that philosophy tends to shy away from and cover over, even if it is also implied as such by the very existence of philosophy—and one of the persistent problems in Deleuzeʼs thought at least since the beginning of the 1960s is that of precisely who is capable of performing it, or, more precisely, of what would have to occur in order for someone to become capable of performing it.

This is the sense of the

problem of the Overman in the fifth chapter of Nietzsche and Philosophy, and it is also the problem that Deleuze uses Hamlet to exemplify in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition. Both instances show the same thing that is also made manifest in Deleuzeʼs reading of the masochistic fantasy:

the affirmation of

difference, of becoming, requires a self-transformation or self-overcoming, the effect of which is to separate thinking from the image of thought, the desiring subject from the patriarchal law. What the examples of Nietzsche and SacherMasoch make, perhaps, even more clear than the transcendental elaboration of this view in Difference and Repetition is that this self-overcoming demands a revolutionary transformation in a sense that fundamentally alters the individualʼs relations with others—or perhaps constitutes a relationship analogous to that between Robinson and Friday in Tournierʼs version of the story, one which no longer passes through the intermediary of the structural presuppositions of the active syntheses which would inevitably precipitate them into that struggle for ʻrecognitionʼ which is a condition of ʻ intersubjectiveʼ relations.3 Instead, in the

3

See Boundas “Foreclosure of the Other” and Kazarian “Deleuze, Perversion, and Politics,” but

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aftermath of the third synthesis, as a result of the affirmation of becoming through which one passes the test of the eternal recurrence: “the I which is fractured according to the order of time and the Self which is divided according to the temporal series correspond and find a common descendent in the man without name, without family, without qualities, without self or I, the ʻplebianʼ guardian of a secret, the already-Overman whose scattered members gravitate around the sublime image” (DR 90). Here, too, is that ʻother sensibilityʼ that Deleuze invokes through his allusion to Marx in “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,” but which can also be found at work throughout his reading of Nietzsche and in the transcendental empiricism that he elaborates at the end of the decade.

Its

realization constitutes a revolutionary aim that is coextensive with the proper activity of philosophy—and which, as such, demands an overthrow of all absolute, original, or invariant orders of meaning and value, and a critique of philosophy insofar a it continues to underwrite and support the postulation or imposition of such orders on thought. Much of what we have done in the foregoing amounts to the demonstration that exactly the same sort of dynamic and critical reading takes place when Deleuze turns his attention to psychoanalysis. Indeed, it is tempting to suggest that in reading psychoanalysis, Deleuze never really leaves the terrain

one should also recognize that if Deleuze is here offering what can be seen as an affirmative vision of a ʻpsychoticʼ mode of life, he does not have to do so by way of a repudiation of psychoanalysis in general or of Freud and Lacan in particular. Doubtless, neither of them envisioned any such life directly, but it remains, in Deleuzeʼs estimation during this period, a possibility implied by their systems. One furthermore suspects that if Rankʼs Truth and Reality has a lasting importance to Deleuze, it will be in relation to these issues.

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of philosophy, but rather considers psychoanalysis in philosophical terms— especially insofar as he is more than willing to acknowledge, particularly in his readings of Nietzsche, a clinical dimension belonging to philosophy as such. This is, surely, how things are initially presented in Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze tells us, not only that the unconscious is the ʻpsychicʼ correlate of his three passive syntheses, but indeed that its major distinguishing features— that it is “ignorant of three important things: Death, Time and No” (DR 114)—in fact correlate to the principle elements of Deleuzeʼs whole ontology. Yet it is a question only of time, death and no in the unconscious. Does this mean merely that they are acted without being represented? Futhermore, the unconscious is ignorant of no because it lives off the (non)-being of problems and questions, rather than the non-being of the negative which affects only consciousness and its representations. It is ignorant of death because every representation of death concerns its inadequate aspect, whereas the unconscious discovers and seizes on the other side, the other face. It is ignorant of time because it is never subordinated to the empirical contents of a present which passes in representation, but rather carries out the passive synthesis of an original time. It is these three syntheses which must be understood as constitutive of the unconscious (DR 114) This correlation begins with the fact that, as the product of ʻbiopsychic life,ʼ or as a ʻ field of individuationʼ in the sense we discussed in the last chapter, the unconscious ʻ lives offʼ (non)-being as the very being of becoming to which Nietzschean philosophy is oriented. And it proceeds through the fact that, at the extreme limit of its operations, the unconscious makes a principle of death, makes it the very source of libido insofar as death is nothing more than “a state of free differences when they are no longer subject to the form imposed upon them by an I or an ego, when they assume a shape which excludes my own coherence 235

no less than that of any identity whatsoever” (DR 113), or alternately, insofar as death is just what is constituted in the movement of desexualization of Eros, “with the resultant formation of that neutral and displaceable energy of which Freud speaks” (DR 113). And so we find that we have arrived at an unconscious that, in its topography and its dynamics, is elaborated through the very syntheses we have described—which can now be seen not merely as syntheses of the particular instances of habit, memory, and eternal recurrence, but as constitutive of both the functional principles and distinguishable structures or domains of the unconscious as a whole. Thus, in the first synthesis, the living present functions as “a foundation which endows pleasure with its value as a general principle to which is subject the content of the psychic life of the Id” (DR 114); while in the second, in turn, the pure past serves as “a ground which conditions the application of the pleasure principle to the contents of the Ego” (DR 114). But neither of these syntheses is possible, need and desire can neither arise nor be elaborated as functions of life, except insofar as there is a synthesis of life itself in its most impersonal, preindividual sense—in the sense in which life is indistinguishable from death as a formless limit-instance, in the sense of life as the most radical contingency, and so as what undoes the previous syntheses. In one sense the third synthesis unites all the dimensions of time, past, present and future, and causes them to be played out in the pure form. In another sense it involves their reorganization, since the past is treated in function of a totality of time as the condition by default which characterizes the Id, while the present is defined by the metamorphosis of the agent in the ego ideal. In the third sense, finally, the ultimate synthesis concerns 236

only the future, since it announces in the superego the destruction of the Id and the ego, of the past as well as the present, of the condition and the agent. At this extreme point the straight line of time forms a circle again, a singularly torturous one; or alternatively, the death instinct reveals an unconditional truth hidden in its ʻotherʼ face—namely, the eternal return in so far as this does not cause everything to come back but, on the contrary, affects a world which has rid itself of the default of the condition and the equality of the agent in order to affirm only the excessive and the unequal, the interminable and the incessant, the formless as the product of the most extreme formality. This is how the story of time ends: by undoing its too well centered natural or physical circle and forming a straight line which then, led by its own length, reconstitutes an eternally dencentered circle (DR 114-115). Life in this sense can no longer be ʻexperienced,ʼ but only thought, and it is only apprehended in thought to the extent that both the I and the Self are superseded. This is why Deleuze insists that the third synthesis, and Thanatos, as the ʻungroundingʼ of the first two syntheses, nevertheless articulates their most profound meaning, a revolutionary meaning which belongs to them insofar as they represent not only the possibility but indeed the necessity of becoming, change, and the perpetual remaking of persons and things: the event.

II. But none of this yet accounts for the specificity of psychoanalysis as an approach to this event. How does it become a ʻscienceʼ of events? The answer is twofold. First, psychoanalysis, for Deleuze, is the ʻ scienceʼ of the concrete forms or syntheses of repetition in the unconscious, that is, of the various serialities that are developed therein, insofar as they are considered as the products of a “dynamic genesis.” It is possible, and Deleuze often does this, to describe in

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either ontological or logical terms a “static” genesis of sense and value, showing that language, life and thought depend on the constitution of a ʻsurfaceʼ of events distinct from the conditions and agents involved in speaking, living, and thinking. But static genesis of this sort leads “from the presupposed event to its actualization in states of affairs and to its expression in propositions” (LS 186). In the terminology of Difference and Repetition, what is at stake here is simply the process of ʻdifferent/ciationʼ by which the virtual question-problem complex gives rise to the actual solutions, which it continues to transcend insofar as it is never resolved or exhausted by them, but in which it nevertheless inheres or insists as their transcendental genetic element. But such a procedure remains abstract because thinking must nevertheless begin from a set of actual conditions, involving actual agents, even if only in order to supersede them.4

And so

Deleuze also postulates “a dynamic genesis which leads directly from states of affairs to events, from mixtures to pure lines, from depth to the production of surfaces which must not implicate at all the other genesis” (LS 186). In relation to the specific problematic with which Deleuze is concerned in The Logic of Sense, the problem of dynamic genesis is said to concern the question of “how speaking is effectively disengaged from eating, how the surface is itself produced, or how the incorporeal event results from bodily states” (LS 186-

4

This supersession may call to mind Diotimaʼs description of the philosophical approach to Eros in the Symposium. Even if Deleuze will reject the substance of Platoʼs understanding of the destination of that movement of thinking—and will claim that the link between Eros and Recollection that is suggested by it needs to be superseded in its turn—there is a profound sense in which the form of its trajectory remains operative in his philosophy. The first part of Proust and Signs bears witness to this particularly clearly, showing an operation of recollection that begins in the encounter, and is composed by the entire apprenticeship with signs that follows it.

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187)—and we feel like we have already seen the answer to this question, at least in principle, as soon as we began considering how purely contractile pleasure of habit gives way to a virtual order of objectalities in the Eros-Mnemosyne synthesis, and perhaps even before that. This correlation becomes more and more obvious in the texts that follow, and does so in a way that, finally, allows us to grasp how the specifically psychoanalytic field, the one constituted by the order of ʻ phantasyʼ that is constitutively bound up with sexuality allows us to account for this dynamic genesis in a singularly powerful way. As we have seen, the first passive synthesis of habit, insofar as it is productive of pleasure, can be correlated to an infantile sexuality wherein both subject and object are at best larval, relations taking place through processes of introjection and projection rather than object-cathexis properly so called—what Melanie Klein called the “paranoid-schizoid position.” In The Logic of Sense Deleuze begins to develop this correlation in his discussion of orality (LS 186195), wherein we encounter the beginnings of the multi-serial organization that will be characteristic of all unconscious processes. Orality, mouth, and breast are initially bottomless depths. Not only are the breast and the entire body of the mother split apart into a good and a bad object, but they are aggressively emptied, slashed to pieces, broken into crumbs and alimentary morsels. The introjection of these partial objects into the body of the infant is accompanied by a projection of aggressiveness onto these internal objects, and by a re-projection of these objects onto the maternal body. Thus, introjected morsels are like poisonous, persecuting, explosive, and toxic substances threatening the childʼs body from within and being endlessly reconstituted inside the motherʼs body. The entire system of introjection and projection is a communication of bodies in, and through, depth (LS 187)

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This begins a series of developments, still in the depths of the body, by which these two series are extended by means of the excretory function. To all of this, Deleuze attaches “simulacra” as the defining term for “this world of introjected and projected, alimentary and excremental partial internal objects” (LS 187). And from here, he now proceeds to initiate the elaboration of what will, ultimately, become his and Guattariʼs schema of the productive unconscious. It begins with Deleuzeʼs criticism of Kleinʼs conception of the ʻgoodʼ object as an introjected partial object just like the bad one. Contrary to Klein, Deleuze claims that the mechanism of “introjection does not allow what is wholesome to subsist,” and proposes as an alternative to the introjected and projected “bad partial objects” to “an organism without parts, a body without organs” (LS 188). The opposition of partial objects to body without organs, on this account, constitutes the point at which “the tension between the ego and the id is formed” (LS 188)—that tension amounting to an opposition between “two depths,” one “hollow [...] wherein bits whirl about and explode” and the other “full” (LS 188189). And it is to both of these depths that Deleuze opposes the good object, which is “not introjected as such, because it belongs from the very start to another ʻ positionʼ. It belongs to the heights, it holds itself above and does not allow itself to fall without also changing its nature” (LS 189).5 Making reference to the “transference from depth to height” that Freud “insisted upon” when

5

In this presentation, the good/bad object dichotomy is developed somewhat differently from Deleuzeʼs general definition of a partial object in Difference and Repetition, which makes reference to Klein, as that which possesses neither a stable ʻplaceʼ nor a consistent nature or identity.

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discussing the relation between the Superego and the Id,6 Deleuze now identifies the good object as the “complete object” that would be the ʻidealʼ correlate of the Ego, and which is fundamentally different as such from the partial and divided objects that subsist in the Id (LS 190).7 Needless to say, the good object in this sense will be the principle of a new ʻ positionʼ—Kleinʼs “depressive position” in which “the child strives to reconstitute a complete good object and to identify himself with this object.

The child strives thus to achieve a corresponding

identity, even if in this new drama he has to share the threats, sufferings, and all the passions undergone by the good object” (LS 187-188). Deleuze is careful to note that this passage from the former, schizoid to the current, depressive position only occurs after the basis of the Superego have been formed—and we should recognize that the movement between the positions also involves the shift from a dynamic of introjection and projection to one of identification, both with the ʻotherʼ and, on that basis, with ʻoneselfʼ in the course of the attempt to achieve an identity.8 At stake in this entire movement is what Deleuze calls the “first stage of the dynamic genesis” (LS 193), which takes place entirely within the infantile

6

Clearly what Deleuze has in mind here are the repeated comments where Freud remarks that the superego, not being subject to censorship in the manner that the conscious parts of the ego are, ends up holding the ego responsible for cathexes which, properly speaking it has given up precisely insofar as it has withdrawn them from objects and allowed them to be attached instead to identificatory structures. 7 “In fact, the good object has taken upon itself the two schizoid poles—that of partial objects from which it extracts its force and that of the body without organs from which it extracts its form, its completeness and integrity” (LS 190). 8 The relationship between this and Lacanʼs ʻmirror stageʼ will be evident to anyone familiar with the latter. See E 75-81.

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unconscious, but which already contains primitive versions of all the familiar structures of the psychoanalytic unconscious as they are developed in the two “positions” we have identified. The first of these was organized ʻin depthʼ around ʻsimulacra,ʼ the partial objects that circulate between the childʼs body and the motherʼs body, always remaining in opposition to a body without organs which functions as a pure, undifferentiated ego. The second, by contrast, is organized in ʻ the heightsʼ and confronts the ego with a complete object—no longer the proliferation simulacra but the unique “idol” (LS 193)—that has distinct valences depending on how it is approached by the ego. The good object is by nature a lost object. It only shows itself and appears form the start as already lost, as having been lost. Its eminent unity lies here. Only as lost, the good object confers its love on the one who is able to find it for the first time as “found again” (the ego which identifies with it); and it confers its hate on the one who approaches it as something “discovered” or “exposed,” and yet already there (the ego taking the side of internal objects). Coming about in the course of the schizoid position, the good object posits itself as having always preexisted in this other dimension which now interferes with depth (LS 191). Obviously, all of this entails the achievement not only of an embryonic version of the first passive synthesis, but also of the second—and indeed, insofar as love and hate are found to be grounded on frustration,9 also the third. This is why Deleuze, in fact, differentiates the positions in terms of two distinct splits within the ego:

9

“This is why, higher than the movement though which it confers love and blows, there is the essence through which and into which it withdraws and frustrates us. [...] It is therefore as a result of frustration that the good object, as a lost object, distributes love and hatred. [...] The good object is cruel (the cruelty of the superego) to the extent that it ties together all those movements of love and hate conferred from on high with an instance which turns its face away and offers its gifts only as gifts offered before” (LS 191).

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The schizophrenic split is a split between the explosive introjected and projected objects, or rather the body which is fragmented by these objects, and the body without organs and mechanisms renouncing projection as well as introjection. The depressive split is between the two poles of identification, that is identification of ego with internal objects and its identification with the object of the heights (LS 192). One cannot overemphasize the importance of what becomes clear at this point: that not only does the genesis of sense/events take place in an impersonal transcendental field (LS 102), but that this field corresponds to the ʻ fractured I,ʼ wherein what occurs or is constituted in the fracture is precisely the structuring element. In the two cases we have just considered, it is the ʻ simulacrumʼ (the partial object par excellance) and the ʻidolʼ (the complete object par excellance) which are made to serve as organizing instances in this sense, around which are articulated complex serial structures.

And the whole ʻ first stageʼ manifests a

similar sort of organization, wherein the resonance between the two series of depths and heights, the reaction of the ʻ good objectʼ on the sonorous series of the depths of bodies, gives rise to an as yet inarticulate “voice” (LS 193-194), which “has the dimensions of a language without having its condition” (LS 194). But if this first, oral stage10 that we have just described gives rise to a “rough sketch” (LS 193) of the entire structure of the Freudian psyche—and thus anticipates the fully realized products of all three syntheses in the form of the id, ego, and superego—then, from the point of view of its most concrete effects, it nevertheless can be said to go no farther than the first synthesis.

10

This is

See Deleuzeʼs distinction between ʻpositionsʼ as phenomena of the surface correlated to ʻzonesʼ or ʻterritoriesʼ on the body and ʻstagesʼ as being “characterized by a type of activity which assimilates other activities and realizes in a certain mode a mixture of drivesʼ (LS 196).

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because the voice, the cry, which is its product remains, strictly speaking, the correlate of the needs synthesized in the formation of habit. To account for the dimension of speech and language, another “position” will therefore need to be constituted: that of the surface, which Deleuze strictly identifies with the event and which will constitute the particular domain over which psychoanalysis—as concerned with desire and its relationship to language—will preside as its characteristic ʻscience.ʼ As we will have, by now, come to expect, this “surface” will first be constituted as an order of sexuality (Eros) which corresponds to a new “position, the sexual perverse” which can be defined “[i]n conformity with the Freudian theory of erogenous zones and their relation to perversion” (LS 197). In other words, as ʻ perverse,ʼ the ʻ sexualʼ position begins with a plurality of erogenous zones spread over the surface of the body, zones which correspond to the organic functions of the ʻdissolvedʼ subject of the first passive synthesis, except that these ʻzonesʼ do not belong to the depth of bodies but rather to the surface that is constituted by their distribution as such.

Deleuze describes this

development in terms of a proliferation of singular points and their extension in series spreading out and investing the whole body: Each erogenous zone is inseparable from one or several singular points, from a serial development articulated around the singularity and from a drive investing this territory. It is inseparable from a partial object ʻprojectedʼ onto this territory as an object of satisfaction (image), from an observer or an ego bound to the territory and experiencing satisfaction, and from a mode of joining up with other zones. The entire surface is the product of this connection, and, as we will see, this poses specific problems (LS 197). 244

By all appearances, the starting point of this third ʻ positionʼ is, thus, the final outcome of the first passive synthesis in the sense that we have already encountered it in Difference and Repetition, as “sexuality in its first (pregential) aspect [...] defined as a veritable production of partial surfaces (LS 197). In what follows, Deleuze traces the manner in which the previous two positions, and the organization of drives within each, react against one another in order to give rise to this first, distributed surface. If “the sexual or libidinal drives were already at work in the depths” then this was only the case insofar as they were mixed “with the drives of preservation, on the one hand, and the drives of death, on the other” (LS 198). This is true starting from the earliest infantile organization, wherein the sexual drives emerge in order to provide a compensation for the powerlessness of the infant to attain satisfaction for the real aims of its self-preservative (alimentary) drives in relation to their proper objects—in which case there is a “strict complementarity [...] between sexual drives and simulacra” (LS 198). These partial objects are constituted through the agency of the destructive instinct, which bears no relation to the “real object” but “qualifies rather the entire mode of the formation of the internal partial object (pieces) and the entire relation to it, since the same thing is destroyed and destroyer, and serves to destroy the ego as much as the other, to the point that destroying/being destroyed covers all internal sensibility” (LS 198-199). But this connection to the death drive means that the entire ʻsexualʼ system, so constituted, inevitably comes to ʻthreatenʼ the aim of self-preservation—and this requires another shift, wherein “we see the 245

whole system being displaced; death is recovered as a drive inside the body without organs at the same time that this dead body is eternally conserved and nourished while sexuality is born of itself” (LS 199). On account of this entire movement, Deleuze will conclude that ʻsexuality,ʼ in its first constitution, is the result of an “apparent double liberation” of the “libidinal drives” (LS 199). In this movement, the libidinal drives “free themselves from the alimentary model of the drives of preservation, since they find new sources in the erogenous zones and new objects in the images projected onto these zones,” but as soon as this happens, they find that they must also “free themselves from the constraint of the destructive drives” which they do “to the extent that they get involved in the productive labor of surfaces and in new relations with these new pellicular objects” (LS 199). Deleuze exemplifies this entire complex transformation by reference to the manner in which the activity of ʻsuckingʼ as a source of pleasure in its own right comes to be detached from the entire self-preservative economy entirely and elaborated in its own terms. And, correlatively, he emphasizes the manner in which the oral ʻ zoneʼ thereby constituted at the surface of the body—as a strictly erogenous formation—is radically different from the instinctual ʻ stageʼ we have previously considered, most notably because it is directed toward a new kind of object, an “image” as opposed to the “simulacra” that corresponded to the partial objects at the depths. At this point, it thus becomes possible to speak of libido as an independent, “superficial energy” as long as it is recalled that “the other drives

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[...] continue their work in depth” and also “find an original position in the new system” (LS 199). And the elaboration of this process gives rise to the various pre-genital erogenous zones, which originally operate more or less independently of one another—all of which, not surprisingly to anyone familiar with the first of Freudʼs Three Essays, ends up leading to “the problem of their coordination” (LS 200). Deleuze makes a point of describing a number of mechanisms of such coordination that operate more or less fortuitously among the series themselves before he acknowledges that: It is nevertheless true that the direct and global function of integration, or of general coordination, is normally vested in the genital zone. It is this zone which must bind all the other zones, thanks to the phallus. And the phallus, in this respect, does not play the role of an organ, but rather that of a particular image projected, in the case of the littler girl as well as the little boy, onto this privileged (genital) zone (LS 200). Nothing Deleuze says here—or in Difference and Repetition, where he also considers the role of this phallic image—suggests that he is, in any way, concerned by its role as a global integrator of the partial drives scattered across the various zones, even though he also makes it clear that this strictly Oedipal function of the phallus is made possible by “the transition form bad penis to the good” (LS 200), which takes place in the shift from the depths to the heights involved in the Klienian depressive position. In other words, Deleuze has no doubt that the constitution of the specifically phallic image is prepared by the establishment, in the heights, of a “wholesome and good organ” (LS 200). Indeed, he emphasizes the connection between operations of healing and reparation and this phallic image—which, he notes, arises at the point where the 247

child not only distinguishes its own sexual drives “from alimentary and destructive drives” (LS 200) but also draws “a sharp distinction” between his parents: “the mother taking on the aspect of an injured body to be mended, and the father taking on the aspect of the good object to be made to return” (LS 201). Thus, the phallus as good object first corresponds to Oedipusʼ “conviction that he is free of fault and his assurance that he had arranged everything to evade the prediction” (LS 201).

It is not the correlate of anxiety and guilt, but the object which

employed in an attempt to resolve them insofar as they are inherited from the earlier positions; its function in relation to the series produced by the various erogenous zones being “to trace a line at the surface [...] which tries together all the erogenous zones, thus ensuring their connection or ʻinterfacingʼ, and bringing all the partial surfaces together on the body of the child. Moreover, it is supposed to reestablish a surface on the body of the mother herself and bring about the return of the withdrawn father” (LS 201). In sum, the phallic image first arises in an attempt to coordinate all the series which precede it on an organized surface that, to the extent that it could be constituted, establish a harmonious relation, not only within the childʼs own body, but also between the parental figures who have been wounded by the childʼs pre-genital activity or who have withdrawn at the sight of it. For us, it is crucial to notice the fact that the “image” here constitutes a third type of object-correlate to these multi-serial relationships, one which seeks to coordinate in this way, and which is specific to the sexual surface and to the

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order of ʻ desireʼ as distinct from ʻ needʼ. But it is also at this point where the complexity of the relations of ʻ desireʼ becomes evident; for if this image first comes into being in order to perform a function that is reparatory and recuperative, the balance it seeks to establish is fragile and unstable, inevitably turning against the child—the basic Oedipal desire, as incestuous, but also as premature, cannot turn out well.

On some interpretations, the problem here

would be the result of contingent prohibitions or developmental inadequacies; but Deleuze argues that this “turning against” the child of its own “good intentions” cannot simply be seen as a result of external factors, such as the fragility of the surface constituted by the phallic image, which remains always at risk of “castration through preoedipal regression” wherein it would be “recuperated by the penis of the depths or the penis of the heights” (LS 202). Castration, in other words, is never simply or primarily an external threat. This is why, on Deleuzeʼs account, the real problem of the Oedipal stage, quickly becomes that of explaining the internal dynamics of its affective transformation. Specifically, it has to do with explaining why the superego, originally sympathetic to the aim of constituting the surface, separating “sexual drives form destructive drives from the depths,” comes to “abandon its original benevolence [...] when we go from the organization of pregenital partial surfaces to their genital integration and coordination under the sign of the phallus (LS 203). This coordination involves “secondary narcissism,”11 which comes about “when the libido as superficial

11

He reminds us that at stake in this is the “coordination” of the ego after its elevation from the

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energy invests” the ego as part of “the phallic coordination of surfaces, and of the ego itself” (LS 203). The libidinal investment of the ego in secondary narcissism, then, involves Oedipal operations insofar as it depends upon the investment of the genital organ as a coordinating erogenous zone, which in turn depends on the mediation of the parental images, and their division (LS 203-205)—but in that case, precisely because of what the child is forced to recognize about the nature of the ʻwoundʼ in the motherʼs body, the cost of this investment of self becomes castration “as a surface phenomenon” (LS 206, my emphasis), and thus the desexualization of the energy that is returned. It is at this point, and not before, that we finally encounter the specifically psychoanalytic domain, that of the entire complex order of desire insofar as it bears upon something that it also constitutes, and which is wholly different than—even if it is also to a certain extent derived from—both need as a more or less direct product of physical processes, and the ideal as what, while it remains external to us, can only be approached through structures of identification because it is not accessible to our activity, to our agency. And so, it is only insofar as we become agents in an “ethical” (LS 206) sense that the entire Oedipal drama becomes possible at all. And conversely, as a condition for our agency we become subject to the entire tragic scenario, in its inevitable relation to the death drive, its precipitation of sexuality (Eros) into a trap laid by memory

depths of the body (without organs) to an independent position on the surface—form “ʼprimary narcissismʼ” to “the ʻauto-eroticismʼ of partial surfaces and the small egos which haunt them” (LS 203).

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(Mnemosyne) whereby the ʻ good intentionsʼ of the former in fact turn out to be deserving of punishment, and so into an impasse which demands the liquidation of the self as a consequence of its liquidation of the other (Thanatos). What makes the difference here is precisely the category of intention, which corresponds to the assumption by the child of the position of agency in the ethical sense, and which therefore makes the entire order of Oedipal-perverse relations into a matter of something completely different than the actual bodies that are invested—a “metaphysical surface” rather than the “physical surface” of bodies (LS 207). But intention, in this sense, can also be seen to depend on the constitution of the unconscious as a domain of ʻimagesʼ—not merely ʻsimulacraʼ or ʻidolsʼ: It would be a mistake [...] to think of good intention, and its essential perversity, in the framework of a simple opposition between two determined actions—an intended action and an accomplished action. Indeed, on the one hand, the willed action is an image of action, a projected action; and we do not speak of a psychological project of the will, but of that which renders it possible, that is, of a mechanism of projection tied to physical surfaces. It is in this sense that Oedipus can be understood as the tragedy of Semblance (Apparence). Far from being an agency of the depths, intention is the phenomenon of the entire surface or the phenomenon which adequately corresponds to the coordination of the physical surfaces. The very notion of Image, after having designated the superficial object of a partial zone, and then the phallus projected on the genital zone, comes finally to designate action in general. The latter concerns the surface—not at all of a particular action, but any action which spreads itself out at the surface and is able to stay there (to restore and to evoke, to restore the surface and to summon to the surface). But, on the other hand, the action effective accomplished is no more a determined action which would oppose the other, nor a passion which would e the repercussion of the projected action. Rather it is something that happens, or something which represents all that can happen; better still, it is the necessary result of actions and passions, although of an entirely different nature, and itself neither action nor passion: event, pure event, Eventum 251

tantum (to kill the father and castrate the other, to be castrated and to die). But this amounts to saying that the accomplished action is projected on a surface no less than the other action. This surface, though, is entirely different; it is metaphysical or transcendental. One might say that the entire action is projected on a double screen—one screen constituted by the sexual and physical surface, the other by an already metaphysical or “cerebral” surface (LS 206-207). If we cite such a long passage, it is because of the manner in which it allows for the coordination of so many of the elements at play in Deleuzeʼs relationship to psychoanalysis during the 1960s. The event is now comes to correspond to the image, which is itself what connects or implicates these two intentional series, the one physical or actual and the other metaphysical, transcendental, or virtual. Far from being anything like a simple psychological determination, something that would inevitably fall to the philosophical epoche, the event in this sense brings into play all the syntheses we have been following, the products of habit and memory being coordinated along the line traced by the third synthesis in the form of the narcissistic wound, a synthesis which encompasses both the intention to heal the division that fissures the self, to overcome the asymmetry between oneʼs dependent origins (oneʼs being undetermined) and an ideal of completeness or wholeness (of complete determination), but also the reflux of that intention, that projected action, in the form of a pure product that exceeds the intention of the agent and the circumstances of the action (chance, and finitude as the content of the empty form of time).12

12

“In short, intention as an Oedipal category does not at all oppose a determined action to another, as, for example, a particular willed action to a particular accomplished action. On the contrary, it takes the totality of every possible action and divides it in two, projects it on tow

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The constitution of this metaphysical surface, which Deleuze identifies with “pure thought” (LS 208) is of course strictly bound up with the manner in which the third synthesis comes into play here. “Death and castration” are said by Deleuze have a “dual value,” first “with respect to the preservation or liquidation of the Oedipus complex in the organization of the definitive genital sexuality,” and secondly “the value which they take on as the origin of desexualized energy and the original manner by which this energy reinvests them on its new metaphysical surface, the surface of pure thought. This second process [...] corresponds in its first aspect to what is called ʻ sublimation,ʼ and in its second aspect to what is called ʻsymbolizationʼ” (LS 208). In both Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, Deleuzeʼs consideration of analysis culminates at the point we have now reached, where the synthetic processes of the unconscious have been seen to progress to the point of constituting a desexualized order of pure thought, which leads him to the postulation, within that order, or as a result of it, of the structure of ʻphantasyʼ or the ʻphantasmʼ as the specifically psychoanalytic object. The phantasm, as Deleuze goes on to define it, has “three main characteristics” (LS 210): 1) that “it represents neither an action nor a passion, but the result of an action and passion, that is, a pure event” (LS 210); 2) that it amounts to “the movement by which the ego opens itself to the surface and liberates the a-

screens, as it determines each side according to the necessary exigencies of each screen. On one hand, the entire image of action is projected on a physical surface, where the action itself appears as willed and is found determined in the forms of restoration and evocation; on the other, the entire result of the action is projected as a metaphysical surface, where the action itself appears as produced and not willed, determined by the forms of murder and castration” (LS 207208).

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cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual singularities which it has imprisoned” (LS 213), so that “the individuality of the ego merges with the event of the phantasm itself, even if that which the event represents in the phantasm is understood as another individual, or rather as a series of other individuals through which the dissolved ego passes” (LS 213-214); and finally 3) that it represents the event as “that which may be expressed in the proposition” (LS 214), “the infinitive form of the verb” (LS 214), as what is open to or connected to the ontological domain of problems and questions (LS 215). Psychoanalysis, as the science of phantasy, is thus the science of events. However, we have been told that, precisely as the “science of events,” psychoanalysis should not treat the event “as something whose sense is to be sought and disentangled” (LS 211). But if not this, which is to say, if the event and its phantasmatic representative are not to be tied to some “ultimate, original fixed term” and therefore cannot be said to have a global meaning available to interpretation, then we ask, once more, what is the scientific task of psychoanalysis? Deleuze seems to give the elements of a response when he suggests that, with the abandonment of the interpretive project, “a simpler task is imposed, namely, to determine the phantasmʼs point of birth and, through this, its real relation to language” (LS 215). The ʻpoint of birthʼ in question here is not, obviously, an origin in the sense of an interpretive referent.

Rather, what is at stake is the question of the

elements and the mechanisms involved in the production of the phantasm. In a

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general way, Deleuze goes on to answer this question shortly afterward: “the phantasm, properly speaking, finds its origin only in the ego of the secondary narcissism,

along

with

the

narcissistic

wound,

the

neutralization,

the

symbolization, and the sublimation which ensue” (LS 216). As such a “surface phenomenon and, moreover, a phenomenon which is formed at a certain moment in the development of surfaces” (LS 216), the phantasm needs to be distinguished

from

simulacra,

idols,

and

images;

and

the

activity

of

psychoanalysis, correlatively, needs to be tied to nothing other than the manner in which the event plays itself out on the metaphysical surface of thought—and does so in a way that is “independent of” the serial structures that give rise to simulacra, idols, and images, since “it is not directly proportional to the success or failure of the liquidation of Oedipus” (LS 208). This last point is crucial, and only insofar as we fully appreciate its significance will we be able to see the extent to which even this last, most apparently orthodox iteration of psychoanalytic theory which Deleuze produced in the 1960s is nevertheless still a critical version, consistent with the ʻ revolutionaryʼ agenda we have been following since “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism.” In a veiled way, but one which is nonetheless unmistakable, what Deleuze insists on at this point is that the properly ʻscientificʼ dimension of psychoanalysis, and its truly perverse aspects, are precisely those that go “beyond the pleasure principle” in the most radical fashion: the dimension of what gives rise to the production of phantasms, understood as a type of semblances (or objectalities)

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that can only be invested by energy which has been detached from the perverse investments structured by Oedipus, and which are themselves are caught between the ʻsuperficialʼ double bind of the depths of bodies (the undetermined) and the heights of the compete object (complete determination). As we have seen repeatedly, and as Deleuze repeats throughout his philosophy in one form or another—whether in relation to Plato, Kant, Nietzsche or Proust—the entire Eros-Mnemosyne structure is a double bind, a trap both at the level of philosophy and at the level of life. Even as it seeks to give the domain of appearances a ground in something noumenal and complete, desire at this level remains unable to ground itself, being forced instead to content itself with the imposition of a “moral” law, series of absolute and pre-emptive prohibitions which it grounds on a purely ideal postulate of the Same (the Good) that can only function as a regulatory instance, the arbitrary and conventional imposition of a law which can only give rise to a repressive procedure, a demand that Oedipal sexuality ʻresolveʼ itself through the mechanisms of sublimation and displacement. That ground, however, is an illusion, doing nothing in reality to cover over the wound, the fracture in the I and the corresponding groundlessness of the entire EroticMnemonic series. But it is only the phantasm, as the semblance of the event, which keeps pointing beyond Oedipus and its empirical outcome, pointing up the inability of any empirical outcome of Oedipus to ʻresolveʼ the series at play in the psyche. Like philosophy, which must submit itself to the forced movement of thought, which occurs as a result of the paradoxical instance that appears in the

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encounter, psychoanalysis must follow the phantasm exclusively, and to the end of its path, if it wishes to avoid degenerating into a dogmatic procedure of interpretation.

III. But how is it possible to avoid this confusion, to exploit the ethical potential of the event while avoiding the moral trap of a dogmatic image of thought or a dogmatic practice of interpretation? In both Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, Deleuze draws a distinction between two figures or instances of death, suggesting that the confusion of the two comes with the gravest of consequences.

In Difference and Repetition, this distinction is made by

appealing to Blanchot, who, we are told, distinguishes between an aspect of death that is “personal, concerning the I or the ego, something which I can confront in a struggle or meet at a limit, or in any case encounter in a present which causes everything to pass,” and another aspect which is “strangely impersonal, with no relation to ʻme,ʼ neither present nor past but always coming, the source of an incessant multiple adventure in a persistent question” (DR 112). This distinction is of the greatest importance when considered from the point of view of difference, as the first aspect of death “signifies the personal disappearance of the person, the annihilation of this difference represented by the I or the ego,” while the second “refers to the state of free differences when they are no longer subject to the form imposed upon them by an I or an ego,

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when they assume a shape which excludes my own coherence no less than that of any identity whatsoever” (DR 113). Death in the second sense, then, can be an object of affirmation in a way that simply amounts to self-overcoming, rather than the kind of active nihilism that would be involved in the affirmation of the first. Insofar as the first is also necessarily extrinsic, a death that “always comes from without [...] and from the past” (DR 113), it represents not an action or the result of an action of my own, but rather the annihilation, the final suppression, of any active forces whatsoever in the course of my “return to inanimate matter” (DR 113).13 The second, impersonal sense of death is, for Deleuze, the true shape of what is at play in the death instinct, the one that can be affirmed and which is explicitly distinguished in Difference and Repetition from “the Freudian conception” (DR 113), which never manages to escape being conceived in terms of to the first, personal sense of death. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze is a bit more kind, affirming “the Freudian idea that the death instinct is an affair of speculation” (LS 209), while arguing that the position of ʻ pure thoughtʼ inaugurated by secondary narcissism, the unconscious of the metaphysical surface: runs the same dangers as the others, and perhaps in a more acute manner: the crack, in a singular fashion, risks breaking up the surface from which it is nevertheless inseparable. It runs the risk of encountering again on the other surface the simple trace of castration. Or even worse, it runs the risk of being swallowed up in the Spaltung of the depths and heights—carrying with it all the debris of the surface in this generalized debacle where the end finds again the point of departure and the death

13

The allusion to Freudʼs famous phrase in Beyond the Pleasure Principle being, of course, entirely unmistakable.

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instinct, the bottomless destructive drives. All this would follow from the confusion we previously noted between the two figures of death: this is the central point of obscurity which raises endlessly the problem of the relations of thought to schizophrenia and depression, to the psychotic Spaltung in general as well as to neurotic castration. “For, of course, all life is a process of demolition...,” including speculative life (LS 208-209). To the extent that we fail to appreciate the speculative nature of the death instinct, or allow ourselves to confuse the personal and the impersonal senses of death, or the physical and the metaphysical surfaces as the site of narcissistic investment, then thought runs the risk of collapsing back into a literal regression in which the Ego is consumed in the primitive destructive forces. This would surely be schizophrenia in the bad sense, the one into which Nietzsche, perhaps, fell,14 and which represents as well the “sufferings of madness” that Deleuze identifies as one of the modes in which the event, when it ʻappearsʼ “is [...] quickly covered over” (LS 249). The trick is to avoid this, and also the correlative danger of a covering over “by everyday banality” (LS 249), that would occur as a result of the interpretation of the products of the unconscious strictly in terms of what can be “made conscious,” what can be remembered within the terms of ordinary representation. For Deleuze, the only possible way to guarantee that psychoanalysis will avoid this trap will be if it is made to recognize that it must function at the level of the metaphysical surface, not the physical one. So it is that he emphasizes “[t]he extreme mobility of the phantasm,” and accordingly its capacity as such to “cover

14

Though Deleuze remarks that his illness was, at least initially, more likely manic-depression, a sickness of the heights

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the distance between psychic systems with ease” as well as the fact that “the phantasm returns easily to its own origin and, as an ʻ originary phantasm,ʼ it integrates effortlessly the origin of the phantasm (that is, a question, the origin of birth, of sexuality, of the difference between the sexes, or of death ... )” (LS 217). It is not difficult to see the degree to which this entire elaboration of the notion of an “originary phantasm” as well as the notion of an origin of the phantasm is derived from Laplanche and Pontalisʼs “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” and Deleuze makes multiple references to it in the sections we are discussing. But Deleuze rejects their notion that the phantasm belongs to the same stage as “auto-eroticism,” preferring instead to link it to the movement of secondary narcissism (LS 216), and thus to the break between the ʻinfantileʼ and the ʻadultʼ series, and so to thought. Indeed, it must be thought because precisely insofar as the phantasm is originary, the ʻoriginʼ is nothing other than the phantasm—no ʻrealʼ origin at all, but rather one that is “a result of the action [...] which is quite different from the action itself. [...] The result will develop on a second screen, and thus the beginning of the phantasm will find its sequence elsewhere” (LS 218).

As we have seen above, in terms of the Oedipal series, secondary

narcissism appears at the point where the phallic investment that constitutes the genital stage encounters the betrayal of the superego in the form of the threat of castration. But castration cannot be the beginning of the phantasmatic series because, as a threat, castration “concerns always the physical surface of the body [...]. Thus the beginning is truly in the void; it is suspended in the void. It is

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with-out. The paradoxical situation of the beginning, here, is that it is itself a result, and that it remains external to what causes it to begin” (LS 218). Accordingly, the narcissistic transformation of libido into desexualized energy, and the associated constitution of a ʻmetaphysical surfaceʼ on which that energy is invested, amounts to “a leap" (LS 218). “The Phantasmʼs formula is this: from the sexual pair to thought via castration” (LS 218).15 And yet, despite the confusion into which it constantly threatens to precipitate psychoanalysis, the language of origins is not entirely misguided. But if it is not to become so, it is crucial to see that the phantasm, the specific domain of psychoanalysis, is a return to origins only in a sense that is ultimately differential and creative—a return in the form of thought that is no longer simply memory, even of the immemorial, but rather counter-memory. The Phantasm returns to its beginning which remained external to it (castration); but to the extent that the beginning was itself a result, the phantasm also returns to that from which the beginning had resulted (the sexuality of corporeal surfaces); and finally, little by little, it returns to the absolute origin form which everything proceeds (the depths). One could now say that everything—sexuality, orality, anality—receives a new form on the new surface, which recovers and integrates not only images but even idols and simulacra (LS 219). And so the metaphysical surface thus constituted by the phantasm takes up everything that has preceded it and transforms it—the event, by constantly repeating its original moment, its intrinsic beginning in castration, “integrates its

15

Importantly, Deleuze here points out that there are really ʻthreeʼ kinds of thinkers, one for each dimension: “If it is true that the thinker of the depths is a bachelor, and that the depressive thinker dreams of lost betrothals, the thinker of the surfaces is married or thinks about the ʻproblemʼ of the couple” (LS 218).

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other, extrinsic beginning” (LS 220)—but what is crucial is to recognize what is “produced” at this level, what is entirely new here, what is produced along the specifically “speculative” path that concerns “the part of the event that we should call non-actualizable” (LS 220).16 It is important to realize that this is not a ʻone wayʼ path, any more than the multi-seriality which we first saw at the level of the second synthesis in difference and repetition—and which we now know corresponds to the ʻ imageʼ as what is originally invested in the constitution and coordination of the erotic body—can be said to have traced a path that simply went from actual to virtual just because the virtual series doubled the actual series. Indeed, the image (the object =x) in that sense was what occurred between the series and caused them to resonate; and nothing changes in this respect when that image becomes a phantasm that

16

This is why Deleuze also emphasizes, in Difference and Repetition, the problem, at stake in the entire notion of phantasy, of the “ʻdelayʼ which is involved in the time it takes for the supposedly original infantile scene to produce its effect at a distance, in the adult scene which resembles it and which we call ʻderivedʼ” (DR 124). What he argues there, in a manner that is perfectly consistent with the theory of the phantasm we have been developing here, is that the ʻdelayʼ is an illusion dependent on the belief that “the solipsistic unconscious of the individual in question” (DR 124) actually contains these two ʻsuccessiveʼ series, infantile and adult. On the contrary, Deleuze claims, ʻthe two series [...] are not distributed in the same subject. The childhood event is not one of the two real series but rather, the dark precursor which establishes communication between the basic series, that of the adults we knew as a child and that of the adult we are among other adults and children” (DR 124). In this case, fantasy is what establishes the coordination of multiple real series; it is a temporal synthesis, a bringing into resonance; it is “originary” not insofar as it is “one series in relation to the other” but rather as “the difference between series insofar as this relates one series of differences to another series of differences, in abstraction from their empirical succession in time” (DR 125). In this respect, “the system excludes the assignation of an originary and a derived as though these were a first and second occurrence, because the sol origin is difference, and it causes the different which it relates to other different to coexist independently of any resemblance” (DR 125). This differential origin, this originary phantasm, is, not surprisingly, nothing other than a figure of the eternal return, which “has o other sense but this: the absence of any assignable origin—in other words, the assignation of difference as the origin, which then relates different to different in order to make it (or them) return as such” (DR 125).

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constitutes a second, metaphysical surface: the body is still reinvested with all that arises at this level as well, even if it is an ʻimpersonalʼ product, one which is no longer tied to the figure of the ego. So it is that Deleuze references the same distinction of Blanchotʼs regarding the two senses of death once more in The Logic of Sense, correlating it now to the distinction between two sides of sexuality—one turned toward the physical surface which ultimately leads toward the depths of the body, the other turned toward the metaphysical surface—and assigning positions to psychosis, sublimation, and neurosis in the complex area between the one and the other (LS 222). And from here on, everything accelerates. In the next chapter, Deleuze establishes the extent to which psychoanalysis is always constructed, even in its earliest guises, around these serial structures, from which the event is what is disengaged as the point of resonance (LS 226). He emphasizes that the body in depth is not serial, though the partial objects that appear there still follow the rules of “displacement and condensation” (LS 224); and that it is at the surface, in the various stages of its libidinal investment, that properly serial structures emerge. The first of these will involve the ʻ connectiveʼ synthesis (contraction, habit) centered on each of the erogenous zones in the form of “a series of images [...] projected over the zone, that is, a series of objects capable of assuring for the zone an auto-erotic satisfaction” (LS 225). But this ʻsimpleʼ form is complicated by “the problem of the phallic coordination of the erogenous zones” (LS 225). Even though “the genital zone has its own series,” it turns out

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that it cannot be separated “from a complex form which subsumes it under heterogeneous series, now that a condition of continuity or convergence has replaced homogeneity; it gives rise to a synthesis of coexistence and coordination and constitutes a conjunction of the subsumed series” (LS 225). Interestingly, we thus get, from the point of view of genesis, the first and the third of the syntheses that Deleuze and Guattari identify in Anti-Oedipus before we get the disjunctive synthesis, which comes second in the later work (and also in Difference and Repetition, where it is identified with the Erotic-Mnemonic synthesis as such), but last here. But this is because we are concerned with the manner in which these syntheses are lived, and so with the series of dynamic stages by which the psyche as a whole is elaborated, its surfaces developed between the first two positions. That is why, even though we are discussing the distinction between the physical and the metaphysical surfaces, and the two figures of death that arise in conjunction with them, we remain concerned primarily with sexuality and the operation by which the metaphysical surface is detached from the physical one. This separation is what is achieved as a result of the ʻthirdʼ figure of seriality that Deleuze mentions, which corresponds not simply to the phallus but to Oedipus, and through it, to object choice (LS 226). In the development proper to Oedipus, therefore, these images enter into one or several series—a heterogeneous series with alternating terms, father and mother, or two coexisting series, maternal and paternal [...]. Moreover, this or these Oedipal series enter into relation with the pregenital series, with the images which corresponded to them, and even with the groups and persons wherefrom these images were extracted (LS 226) 264

He goes on to explain that this moment “animates the Freudian theory of the event, or rather of the two series of the events” (LS 226), referring to the manner in which every Freudian theory of etiology and symptom formation (both the trauma and the phantasy theories) involves a relationship between series, in the latter case between “two series of independent images, whereby the Event is disengaged only through resonance of the series in the phantasm” (LS 226). The important feature of these series, and what distinguishes this form from the earlier one, is that “they diverge and resonate only on this condition” (LS 226). Deleuze accounts for this resonance by showing how the phallus acquires, in the Oedipal instance, the function we have previously seen attributed to the paradoxical object in the second synthesis in Difference and Repetition: that of the object=x.17 Rather than repeating Lacanʼs analysis of the manner in which this paradoxical object circulates between the divergent series, to which he alludes in both texts, Deleuze accepts it and then asks, nevertheless, “how does this phallus, as the object=x, that is, as the agent of castration, cause the series to resonate” (LS 228)? In truth, this is the only important question, both because in discovering the answer he will be able to demonstrate the manner in which the phallus, as an instance of ʻ non-senseʼ nevertheless functions as the genetic principle of the entire metaphysical surface of sense / events as that which allows for the resonance and coordination of the divergent series of which that surface is

17

As distinct from its earlier function as that which unites the series or causes them to converge. See LS 227-8.

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composed, and also because it is only insofar as it is conceived in this way that we can grasp the profound sense of negation, foreclosure, and the other operations by which the psyche relates to the event as something fundamentally divergent with respect to subjective actuality.

As we have seen repeatedly,

insofar as these terms are interpreted negatively, they will be extremely problematic for Deleuze—essentially amounting to nothing other than the liquidation of the genuinely creative principle of difference, which is expressed in the impersonal sense of death as much as it is in the life that is affirmed along with death in the ethical test of the eternal recurrence: the affirmation of all of chance at once. For Deleuze, even here, the problem is not whether what Lacan describes is correct, but that of the use to which it is put, and whether his analysis can be understood in such a way as to make it conducive to the intellectual encounter with the event in its most productive and creative sense, the truly affirmative form of the encounter. Posed more generally, to psychoanalysis as a whole, this question also forms the persistent subtext of the last twenty pages of The Logic of Sense, wherein Deleuze draws the various threads of his analysis—and not merely the psychoanalytic ones—together. With sexuality, we have come to a second stage of “dynamic genesis.” The first stage, he reminds us, went “from the schizoid to the depressive position, went from noises to the voice: form noises as qualities, actions and passions of bodies in depth, to the voice as an entity of the heights, withdrawn into heights, expressing itself in the name of that which preexists, or

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rather posing itself as pre-existing” (LS 229). The next stage, the current one, entails the production of a “speech” that anticipates language without fully realizing it: “in the series of sexuality, something begins to be grasped as a premonition before being understood. [...] If the child comes to a preexisting language which she cannot yet understand, perhaps conversely, she grasps that which we no longer know how to grasp in our own language, namely the phonemic relations, the differential relations of phonemes” (LS 229-230). In the following discussion, Deleuze follows Lacan and Serge Leclaire in developing an account of the correlation between phonemes and erogenous zones insofar as both function as “cluster[s] of distinctive traits or differential relations,” going on to describe ways in which proto-linguistic phenomena such as “esoteric words” and “portmanteau words” can be seen as corresponding to the conjunctive and the disjunctive syntheses, respectively, as they occur at this stage (LS 231-232). Once more, we are principally concerned with the overall point that he draws from this, which is that as long as we remain at the level of sexuality, and the verbal phenomena to which it corresponds in the developmental trajectory, we fall short of the event, of the separation between the impersonal character of language and the personal operation of speech. And this is true despite the fact that the physical surface requires all three syntheses in order to be fully organized. “The organization of the physical sexual surface has three moments which produces three types of syntheses or series,” the connective, conjunctive, and disjunctive syntheses corresponding to the

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erogenous, phallic, and Oedipal series; and these, in turn, “condition the three formative elements of language—phonemes, morphemes, and sentamemes—as much as they are conditioned by them in a circular reaction. Nevertheless, there is still no language; we are still in a prelinguistic domain. These elements are not organized into formed linguistic units which would be able to denote things, manifest persons, and signify concepts” (LS 232). Accordingly, as long as we remain at the sexual level, we have not yet reached the point where the ʻevent,ʼ ʻsense,ʼ or the “result” manifests itself. In other words, as long as psychoanalysis remains determined to refer strictly to the sexual surface as it is incarnated on the body of the individual, it will fail to become the science of events. We must be careful however, as Deleuze is, not to allow this to lead us into the trap of rejecting the psychoanalytic claims about the sexual significance of what is produced by our actions and our speech—especially insofar as this denial is often made in the name of the most narrow and repressive sorts of conventional morality. The problem is simply that nothing can take on a ʻsexual senseʼ until ʻ senseʼ itself is truly established, which requires yet something beyond the merely physical surface. The organization of the physical surface is not yet sense; it is, or rather will be, a co-sense. That is to say, when sense is produced over another surface, there will also be this sense. Sexuality, according to the Freudian dualism, is that which also is—everywhere and always. There is nothing the sense of which is not also sexual, in accordance with the law of the double surface. But it is still necessary to await this result which never ends, this other surface, for sexuality to be made the concomitant and the co-sense of sense, so that one might say “everywhere,” “for all times,” and “eternal truth” (LS 233).

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Everything hints at the final step in this trajectory—the eternal recurrence. Before we arrive there, however, Deleuze takes us on one more detour through Lewis Carrollʼs work, showing that both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass play out a scenario where this entire genetic process of language, beginning in the depths, rising to the heights and then working through several types of series at the surface, only to run up against the impasse of the phallus as agent of castration (LS 234-237). More significantly, he turns to the question of how psychoanalysis should approach artists, and art, and the relation between the two. In a reprise of a claim we have also seen him articulating in “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,” Deleuze here suggests that it would be better to treat authors as being “more like doctors than patients,” since “they are themselves astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists” (LS 237). Given the importance we have already accorded to creativity as an ethical standard for Deleuze, it should not be surprising that several points of importance follow from this. In this first place, psychoanalysis, still under consideration as a potential science, is now being deliberately treated as similar to a characteristic activity of art—as if the two domains, at least where the event and the question of how it is lived are concerned, are not nearly so clearly divided as they are usually taken to be when science is directed toward what can be denoted or signified ʻtruthfully.ʼ18

18

As early as Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze can be found strongly criticizing a sense of science too closely connected to the most moralizing aspects of the ʻwill to truth.ʼ See NPh 7375.

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From this follows, secondly, that what is at stake in both practices, ʻartʼ and ʻscienceʼ is an activity of interpretation, but only in the sense of interpretation that Deleuze develops in the first chapter of Nietzsche and Philosophy, one that seeks to discover the forces that are at play in a phenomenon, and to determine which are dominant and distinctive, as well as the dynamic relations between them—in other words, an activity of interpretation, but one that is genealogical rather than being simply referential or conceptual. Thirdly, this means, as was also suggested by the comparison of artists to symptomatologists, that the point of convergence between the ʻartʼ and the ʻ scienceʼ involved in psychoanalysis bears specifically on the domain of the clinical: There is always a great deal of art involved in the grouping of symptoms, in the organization of a table where a particular symptom is dissociated from another, juxtaposed to a third, and forms the new figure of a disorder or illness. Clinicians who are able to renew a symptomatological table produce a work of art; conversely, artists are clinicians, not with respect to their own case, nor even with respect to a case in general; rather, they are clinicians of civilization. [...] It seems, moreover, that an evaluation of symptoms might be achieved only through a novel. It is not by chance that the neurotic creates a “familial romance,” and that the Oedipus complex must be found in the meanderings of it. From the perspective of Freudʼs genius, it is not the complex which provides us with information about Oedipus and Hamlet, but rather Oedipus and Hamlet who provide us with information about the complex (LS 237). And it is at precisely this point that Deleuze plays his crucial gambit, holding up the artist as a model for our practice, and suggesting, obliquely but nevertheless clearly, that it is precisely the artistic side of psychoanalysis that we need to take most seriously—cautioning us not to “neglect the specificity of the artist both as patient and as doctor of civilization” (LS 237).

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But in almost the same breath, Deleuze warns against misconstruing this relationship and thereby, as Freud himself often appears to,19 conflating the entire artistic scenario and that of the neurotic.

And what, precisely is the

difference? The neurotic is incapable of variation, only being able to “actualize the terms and the story of his novel: the symptoms are this actualization and the novel has no other meaning” (LS 238). The artist, by contrast, goes in exactly the opposite direction, not towards but away from the actual, the novel having nothing at all to do with seeking out an actual, empirical referent or origin of the symptom, no matter whether this would be a trauma or an unacknowledged, displaced and disguised “wish.”20 On the contrary, to extract the non-actualizable part of the pure event from symptoms (or, as Blanchot says, to raise the visible to the invisible) to raise everyday actions and passions (like eating, shitting, loving, speaking, or dying) to their noematic attribute and their corresponding pure Event, to go from the physical surface on which symptoms are played out and actualizations decided to the metaphysical surface on which the pure event stands and is played out, to go from the cause of the symptoms to the quasi-cause of the oeuvre—this is the object of the novel as a work of art, and what distinguishes it form the familial novel. In other words, the positive, highly affirmative character of desexualization consists in the replacement of psychic regression by speculative investment. This does not prevent the speculative investment from bearing upon a sexual object—since the investment disengages the event from it and poses the object as concomitant of the corresponding event: what is a little girl? An entire oeuvre is needed, not in order to answer this question but in order to evoke and to compose the unique event which makes it into a question (LS 238).

19

An accusation that is also a favorite of Rankʼs in Truth and Reality, being especially prevalent throughout its first chapter. 20 This entire dynamic could not possibly be made clearer than it is by Deleuzeʼs entire analysis in the first part of Proust and Signs, to which he also makes frequent reference when discussing the second synthesis (Eros-Mnemosyne) in Difference and Repetition and also throughout The Logic of Sense.

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At this point we can no longer avoid drawing a basic conclusion: psychoanalysis can be a science of events precisely insofar as can be made to avoid the trap of literalism or of an overly ʻempiricistʼ positivism. If there is always something tentative in Deleuzeʼs affirmations of psychoanalytic notions, or perhaps a bit strident in the manner in which he imposes conditions on those affirmations, it seems to have its origins here, in Deleuzeʼs concern over what now appears to be the characteristic point of potential failure belonging to the psychoanalytic approach.

Above all,

psychoanalysis must avoid the trap of fixating too strongly on what Deleuze called “desire” in 1961, but which we can read in the current context as “what takes place on the physical surface.” To the extent that it does so, it will expose itself to the risk of missing or blocking what is made possible by desexualization, namely the “leap” or “passage” from that physical surface to a metaphysical, transcendental, or virtual surface. If psychoanalysis fails to follow this passage, it will similarly fail to be the science of events precisely because that metaphysical surface is that of the Event, understood in its pure form, as a result that can be completely detached from the agents and circumstances, the persons and objects in terms of which it may be actualized: the Event as a question, as what precedes, at the ontological level, even the “problems” which compose the Ideas that are the objects of philosophical speculation.21

21

If we were drawing correspondences to Platoʼs metaphysics, clearly the Event-question in this sense corresponds precisely to the Good that Plato situates “beyond being” (Republic 509b).

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Very clearly, this situates Deleuze as a critic of a great deal of what passes for clinical psychoanalysis.

And we have seen a great many critical

remarks, dating as far back as 1961, that all center in one way or another on a too positivist approach, especially by Freud. And the same is true going forward: the criticisms in Anti-Oedipus of the interpretation of Schreber as seeking to force his delirium into the clinical container of a regression inaugurated by a failure at the Oedipal stage begin to seem, in this regard, startlingly similar to Deleuzeʼs dismissal as ridiculous of a clinical approach to Lewis Carroll that would, again, begin with the accusation that his work reflected “the impossibility of confronting the Oedipal situation” (LS 237). How much more is the same thing reflected in the generalized critique that Deleuze and Parnet launch, arguing that Freud and Lacan equally, and more or less everyone else in between, have, especially in their clinical work, given themselves over to a practice that has no other effect but that of ʻ crushing the productions of desire and preventing the formation of utterances?ʼ But does this truly amount to anything so very different from what Deleuze roundly endorsed in Rankʼs critique of the Freudian notion of sublimation in 1962? Or what he put in even more derisive terms in “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,” when he accused various Freudians of performing “astonishing gymnastics” in order to reach some of their more improbable conclusions about the nature of the female figure in masochistic fantasies? As many of his readers have noted, Deleuze always had serious reservations about psychoanalysis, and they remained remarkably consistent over the course of his career. So how are

273

we to account for the evolution that we have observed, the clear sense that despite

these

consistent

elements,

Deleuzeʼs

position

in

relation

to

psychoanalysis is, over the two decades between 1960 and 1980, both variable and considerably more complex and subtle than it is often credited with being? What changes, it seems, is not the critical element, which is consistent and, as we have shown, rooted in philosophical considerations that form core elements of Deleuzeʼs outlook. Instead, what varies is the relationship between the critical concerns and what Deleuze took for a time to be the positive and useful value of the Freudian conception of the unconscious and the understanding of the topography and dynamics of psychic life which he built on top of it: the ʻscience of events.ʼ Towards the end of the 1960s, and especially in these last chapters of The Logic of Sense, Deleuze goes so far as to sketch out at least the opening movements of a psychoanalytic science that, like the one Rank proposed, would be much more Nietzschean and much more artistic in its aims—if rather less, at least rhetorically, egological.22

22

Even a fairly brief perusal of the first chapter or two of Truth and Reality will make it excruciatingly clear why Rank, for all the accuracy of his sense of where Freud failed from a Nietzschean perspective, would also not have made a particularly valuable ally for Deleuze. While it is unclear whether Deleuze would ever have had any intention of constructing anything resembling therapeutic method had he not met Guattari, or frankly whether he had much interest in it even though he did, there can be no doubt that the therapy Rank proposes, based as it is in one way or another upon strengthening the ego and affirming its creative power, would be in profound tension with far too much of the explicit content of Deleuzeʼs though and of Deleuzeʼs reading of Nietzsche to be acceptable. That is not to say that the manner in which Rank and Deleuze would both very much seek to find ways of endorsing the Nietzschean vision of the coming forth of a ʻsovereign individualʼ as the ʻproductʼ of the historical constitution of biopsychic life, especially insofar as this would amount in both cases to discovering a manner to truly act oneʼs own reactions rather than being governed by reactive forces in the psyche. The problem is just that the way Rank develops these notions would, to the extent that Deleuze were to appeal explicitly to it, likely be the source of more, rather than less, confusion about the aims, basis, and

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That gambit, again like Rankʼs, fairly consistently takes this leap from the physical to the metaphysical surface as its point of departure—or better, its primary critical instance. But if this is the case, then, Deleuze also acknowledges that the leap is at the same time the genuinely paradoxical point, the moment of real difficulty: “the mystery lies in this leap, in this passage from one surface to another, and in what the first surface becomes, skirted over by the second” (LS 238). Part of what is mysterious about this movement is just the “perverse” pleasure that seems to be associated with making it, at least when it is approached creatively, as can be seen not only in Carrolʼs case (LS 238), but also in those of Sacher-Masoch and Sade, and Klossowski—and it also seems to be a crucial theme of the second half of Tournierʼs Friday, especially in the scene where Friday undertakes to make “the dead goat [...] fly and sing” (LS 301-2) with which Deleuze opens his review article, and also of Grombowiczʼs Cosmos, with its uncanny and magical series that emerge at precisely the moment when the protagonists retreat to a country house in order to study for their examinations. But, as it is in Nietzscheʼs concern with the test of the Eternal Recurrence, and also the case of Tournierʼs version of Robinson, the real problem seems to be accounting for how the leap can be made and a catastrophic collapse avoided. At this point, psychoanalysis enters fully onto the terrain of the philosophical.

In discussing Difference and Repetition, we have seen the

importance for Deleuze of the ʻ encounterʼ with a paradoxical object and the

nature of the ʻthinkingʼ that he sought to affirm and provoke.

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ʻforced movementʼ that it provokes within the faculties, driving each back toward a ʻtranscendent exercise.ʼ And we further saw Deleuze acknowledge the extent to which this encounter can be seen as at least one of the elementary ʻbeginningsʼ of philosophy—as when Socrates, in both the Phaedo and the Republic, refers the beginnings of recollection to an encounter with an object that demands to be ʻthoughtʼ in terms that go beyond what is given in experience. In The Logic of Sense, the object of this encounter appears to be the phantasm, and the entire trajectory of the forced movement of the death drive.

To

demonstrate this, Deleuze begins by distinguishing an “extrinsic beginning” of the phantasm—“the two basic [divergent sexual] series (along with the object = x which traverses them and causes them to resonate)”—from the resonance that occurs between these series, which he calls the “intrinsic beginning” (LS 239).23 What Deleuze goes on to describe is a situation in which the “resonance,” functioning in a manner that we must connect to the notion of the “dark precursor” in Difference and Repetition, gives rise to the phantasm insofar as it “induces a forced movement that goes beyond and sweeps away the basic series” (LS 239). The “amplitude” of this forced movement, Deleuze tells us, exceeds that of the erotic movement on the physical surface; as such, “the forced movement which represents desexualization is Thanatos and ʻ compulsionʼ” (LS

23

Up to this point, we have tended to assimilate the phantasm, the “dark precursor,” and the “object=x” since all of them are in the same basic relation to the divergent series which they serve to ʻrelate.ʼ For the most part, that seems fine, but this text seems to suggest that the ʻdark precursorʼ would be the resonance, and that it should be distinguished both from the phallus / object = x, as what cause the coordination of the various erogenous series on the physical surface and the phantasm as the Event that occurs on the metaphysical surface.

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239). The ʻleap,ʼ then, moves from Eros to Thanatos, by pushing the amplitude of the oscillation that already occurs at the sexual level to encompass “the two extremes of the original depth and the metaphysical surface, the destructive cannibalistic drives of depth and the speculative death instinct” (LS 239). “We can therefore name the entire forced movement ʻdeath instinctʼ and name its full amplitude ʻ metaphysical surfaceʼ”(LS 240).

In other words, when the erotic

series become divergent in the Oedipal structure, and the price of the genital coordination of the erotic surface becomes manifestly that of accepting limits on the objects and modes of satisfaction, the phantasm begins to be constituted as a result of the energy that is thereby desexualized. And accordingly, Deleuze repeatedly suggests that the death instinct gives birth to thought, and is itself ʻspeculativeʼ in its very nature. And this ʻ forced movementʼ that corresponds to the constitution of the phantasm gives rise to the opposition that is at the core of The Logic of Sense as a whole, “to eat or to speak” (LS 23)—or the beginnings of it—and in so doing sets the stake involved in the entire ethical ʻ testʼ to which thought is almost invariably drawn: At any rather, the forced movement is not established between the basic sexual series, but rather between the two new and infinitely larger series— eating, on the one hand, and thinking, on the other, where the second always risks disappearing into the first, and the first, on the contrary, risks being projected onto the second. Thus, the phantasm requires four series and two movements. The movement of resonance of the two sexual series induces a forced movement which extends beyond the base and the limits of life, plunging into the abyss of bodies. But it also opens onto a mental surface, giving birth thereby to the two new series between which the entire struggle that we attempted to describe is waged (LS 240). 277

Deleuze has, throughout the text, been unapologetic about remarking that the former outcome—which he associates frequently with Nietzscheʼs collapse24—is not desirable in the least; while suggesting, as he now makes clear, that insofar as “the mental or metaphysical surface has the upper hand in this pendular movement,” then all the conditions necessary for the detachment of the event from its conditions are fulfilled.

Specifically, those conditions are the

establishment of a fully linguistic or symbolic order: “the verb is inscribed on this [metaphysical] surface—that is, the glorious event enters a symbolic relation with a state of affairs, rather than merging with it; the shining, noematic attribute, rather than being confused with a quality, sublimates it; the proud Result, rather than being confused with an action or passion, extracts an eternal truth from them” (LS 240). Deleuze goes on to develop the correspondence between the Event in this sense and the linguistic function of the infinitive verb, upon which he has hung a great deal of his analysis of Carroll and of sense as a specifically linguistic function. In this regard, once more, he insists that this function be connected to the death instinct, and that the latter, in its ʻsilenceʼ (as opposed to the ʻ sonorityʼ of Eros), be connected to the verb corresponding to “a secondary organization” from which “the entire ordering of language proceeds” (LS 241). And at this point, having thereby passed through the more general

24

Though not as unambiguously with schizophrenia as a causal reader might think, since this is not exactly the same as the pre-genital schizoid position, to which it might seem a reversion.

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philosophical regions of these questions,25 Deleuze can now, in turn, pose the psychoanalytic question of the relationship between this entire symbolic order and that ʻ sexualʼ domain from which it arose, and which is so often mistakenly treated as the ʻ referentʼ of and by psychoanalysis.

“It is certain that sexual

organization is a prefiguration of the organization of language, just as the physical surface was a preparation for the metaphysical surface” (LS 241-242). But ʻ prefiguringʼ here is a complex and ambiguous relationship, since the elements of the sexual surface (phonemes, morphemes, sentamemes) that “turn up” on the metaphysical, cognitive or linguistic surface seem to do so only insofar they “lose their sexual resonance,” or have it “repressed or neutralized” (LS 242). Deleuze cautions against drawing conclusions too hastily, insisting that the leap to the symbolic is not simply a matter of a desexualization in which sexuality is retained “only as an allusion, as vapor or dust, showing a path along which language has passed” (LS 242).26 In fact, the matter does not end with such a simple desexualization, since those very traces are reinvested along with everything else on the metaphysical surface.27

Once more, the role of the

phantasm / phantasy becomes crucial. Recall that it is the immanent product of the resonance of the various series among which it circulates—and between which it composes the ʻ metaphysicalʼ surface “which precedes all relations

25

Those having to do with the logical and ontological status of language and thought in relation to states of affairs and bodies—most of which Deleuze has disposed of during his discussion of the ʻstatic genesisʼ earlier in the text in any case. 26 If this were all that remained, psychoanalysis would truly appear to have very little applicability, since the pervasive value that it accords to sexuality when considering the effects of the unconscious on speech would truly seem to become reduced to that of a dead letter. 27 Albeit, in a ʻperverseʼ manner.

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between states of affairs and propositions” (LS 242). Indeed, it is by separating the terms in them that the phantasm makes such relations possible at all; and so the phantasm does not simply detach, extract, or disinvest elements from all the series from which it is composed, it also “strives to project” these events which it detaches “onto this metaphysical surface” (LS 242), irrespective of whether the events in question correspond to sexual, alimentary, or other processes. So it is that “the phantasm does not eternally recommence its intrinsic movement of desexualization without turning back on its extrinsic sexual beginning” (LS 242), giving rise to corresponding reinvestments at the level of thought. But it would be drastically short sighted to account for this movement simply in terms of sublimation or, in the case of more unconventional productions, symptom formation. This is precisely what Deleuze objects to in the reading of Carroll—and it is important to recognize that a major part of his point in that regard is to establish that there is a ʻperversionʼ that operates at the level of thought in a manner that is entirely positive and creative.

This is the case

because thought, like sexuality, is an effect of the surfaces; and since sexuality is already a surface effect—albeit at a different level—we should not be surprised to find that it has unique effects at on the metaphysical surface (as opposed to the simulacrum, the idol, and the image). “This paradox has no equivalent in the other instances of projection on the metaphysical surface:

a desexualized

energy invests an object of sexual interest as such and is thereby resexualized in a new way. Such is the general mechanism of perversion; on the condition that

280

perversion be distinguished as an art of the surface form subversion as a technique of depth” (LS 242-243).

Can there be any doubt that it is in this

perverse reinvestment, by way of the phantasm, that psychoanalysis, as a pure ʻscience of eventsʼ finds its proper and specific object? But if this is so, then psychoanalysis becomes a science of precisely these sorts of wholesale transformations of sense and value that take place at the surface, the manner in which, precisely by way of the death drive, secondary narcissism, the ethical confrontation with the eternal recurrence, etc., it becomes possible for us to perform the operation that Deleuze attributed to the masochistic hero in 1961, that of detaching ourselves from the law and the spiritual order to which it subjects us and rearticulating in the process our entire relationship to the world, our entire ʻsensibilityʼ—and not just at a personal level, but also at a level which is, for all that it exceeds anything that is or can be actualized, inherently political. Not only that, but if philosophy is principally concerned with thought, and psychoanalysis with speech insofar as it reflects the effects that occur on the metaphysical surface, it is psychoanalysis that shows us how to return from this level to the order of ʻlivingʼ where these reinvestments are played out in a transformed sensibility—psychoanalysis and, even more, art, which teaches us, among other things, “how to free the elements in order to make the dead goat fly and sing.” The question, as always, is what ʻfreesʼ us to affirm difference in this way, to approach life playfully? The shape of Deleuzeʼs answer becomes clear in the textʼs final pages,

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where he works to connect perversion with Freudʼs Verleugnung in terms that are very much reflective of a Lacanian influence.28 In the classical construction, what is at stake here is the operation by which the pervert “disavows” the womanʼs lack of a penis, thereby effectively foreclosing upon the possibility of a relationship to the other, both in the actual sense of acknowledging the other person as one who exists under the threat (accomplished or not) of castration (and thus as subject to the Law) and in the virtual or ideal sense whereby the ʻbig-Oʼ Other, the complete object, imposes precisely that lack on every individual subject. Deleuzeʼs gambit, reading Carroll and much as Sacher-Masoch and Tournier, is to argue as follows. But if Verleugnung is a question of maintaining the image of the phallus in spite of the absence of the penis, in the case of women, this operation presupposes a desexualization as the consequence of castration, but also a reinvestment of the sexual object insofar as it is sexual by means of a desexualized energy: Verleugnung is not an hallucination but rather an esoteric knowledge (LS 243) Everything else follows from this. The sexual pervades or mimics the order of language, doubling it at every turn. “Caught up in the system of language, there is thus a co-system of sexuality which mimics sense, nonsense, and their organization:

a simulacrum for a phantasm” (LS 243).

And so, sexuality

becomes the unique object of repression, which, Deleuze says, is not only “topographical [topique]: it is topological [...] always the repression of one

28

Deleuze acknowledges this very explicitly both here and in his analysis of Tournierʼs Friday. See LS 360n2 and 367n27.

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dimension by another” (LS 243, translation modified).29 By this Deleuze means that repression has less to do with the specific psychical agencies that may or may not be constituted correlatively with its occurrence and more to do with the character of the orderings that take place in the various ʻ positionsʼ he has described in his account of the dynamic genesis. Thus “height” reacts against “depth” precisely insofar as the complete object definitive of the latter is incompatible with the partial structure of the former, as well as being opposed to the destructive drives that are linked to it (LS 243).

Correlatively, what is

repressed at first, in “primary repression,” are just these destructive drives insofar as they give force to this incompatibility, preventing the ʻcoordinationʼ that takes place in accordance with the “good intentions” of the first moment of Oedipus that occurs on the third position, the surface (LS 244). One of the virtues of this is that it allows Deleuze to argue, next, that the “secondary repression,” by which the metaphysical surface will be constituted, “is not [...] the least bit identical to consciousness” (LS 244).

And here, indeed, we come to the “impersonal,

transcendental field” that is both the site of “thinking” in sense that Deleuze claims, in Difference and Repetition, to be provoked by the encounter, and also the locus of the Event as a pure ʻresultʼ independent of the conditions and agents

29

Once more, Deleuzeʼs English translators seem determined to misrecognize his use of ʻtopiqueʼ in a technical, psychoanalytic sense that corresponds to ʻtopographicalʼ in English, clearly referring to the activity of the various ʻagenciesʼ in the Freudian psyche, whether that be the systems Ucs., Pcs., and Cs., or the later Id, Ego, and Superego that Deleuze refers to here. The very persistent elision of this obvious connection has the effect of making at least some of the assertions that ʻall of this isnʼt really about psychoanalysisʼ where Deleuze is concerned take on the aspect of self-fulfilling prophesies. Furthermore, it seems difficult to imagine how all of these translators could have remained collectively ignorant of this standard psychoanalytic usage. Foreclosure indeed, though in a less creative sense than the one discussed above.

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that gave rise to it, a completely non-actual transformational instance. And finally, here, at nearly the extreme terminus of his last major work of the 1960s, Deleuze plays his final ethical gambit, the one which has informed all of his writings up until this point about psychoanalysis, but also his consideration of various artistic and literary figures whose lives and work has exemplified both the joys and perils of the event. If repression produces an initial moment of separation that constitutes the basis of the metaphysical surface, it is the reinvestment of everything that is ʻ liberatedʼ in that movement that gives rise to the truly affirmative, active space of thinking.30

This movement is surely

accompanied by the permanent threat of the ʻ return of the repressedʼ and the corresponding collapse of the metaphysical surface into a regressive movement that, in its most extreme instances, leads all the way to the depths of bodies.31 But despite the fact that much of the clinical work of psychoanalysis, indeed the vast majority of it, has surely been devoted to the complexities and the vicissitudes of these sorts of collapses—and on the notion that successful repression is the obvious ʻ safeʼ solution or antidote to them—Deleuzeʼs major point of emphasis remains elsewhere.

30

It is worth noting here how different this is from Freudʼs own more limited conception, wherein thinking is first posited in strictly utilitarian terms as a capacity we develop in order to allow us to more successfully adjust reality to accord with the needs of the self-preservative drives and ends with a conception that reduces all speculative and artistic activity largely to sublimation as a compensatory mechanism—this being, of course, the ʻflat and dullʼ conception of sublimation that both Deleuze and Rank decry, loudly. 31 “Without doubt, the mechanisms of regression are very different depending on the accidents proper to particular dimensions (the drop from the heights, for example, or the holes in the surface). But what is essential is the threat that depth brings to bear on all the other dimensions; thus, it is the locus of primitive repression and of ʻfixationsʼ—the ultimate terms of regressions” (LS 244-245).

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One final distinction is left between regression as the movement by which a dimension falls back on those which have preceded it and this other movement by which a dimensions reinvests, in its own way, the one preceding it. Alongside regression and the return of the repressed, we must save a place for these complex processes through which an element characteristic of a certain dimension is invested as such with the very different energy corresponding to another dimension (LS 245). This amounts, as Deleuze notes, to a distinction between two senses of fixation, the one regressive or subversive and the other perverse and superficial. And he now goes on to connect the very possibility of his ʻ secondʼ option to the entire ʻsecondary organizationʼ of language that he has been tracing, and the manner in which it “must be carefully distinguished from ʻobject representation,ʼ because it concerns an incorporeal event and not a body, an action, a passion, or a quality of bodies” (LS 245).

Insofar as it is opposed to “subversion”—and to the

“fixation” involved in regression wherein one becomes a “patient,” someone trapped in a brute cycle, passing endlessly through the same elements, which they are condemned to play out over and over—perversion is a phenomenon of meaning, but in a very special sense that occurs prior to the “static genesis” of all the objectalities that are proper to the order of language as such (LS 245): “what matters here is the preliminary, founding, or poetic organization—that is, the play of surfaces in which only an a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual field is deployed, this exercise of nonsense and sense, and this deployment of series which precede the elaborate products of the static genesis” (LS 246). The point here is to distinguish the ʻpoeticʼ organization involving only the pure surface-effects of language, and which is essentially perverse, from both a

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brute, corporeal swallowing of meaning and value, and from “the whole order of language [...], with its code of tertiary determinations founded in turn on ʻobjectal representationsʼ” (LS 245). If the effects produced on the superficial, poetic level are revolutionary, those that occur elsewhere are quite explicitly denied the same potential.

And so, for instance, Deleuze dismisses both the “satire” that he

associates with the “primary order, where words are directly actions and passions of the body, or even withdrawn voices” (LS 246) and the “irony” that “appears each time language deploys itself in accordance with relations of eminence, equivocity, and analogy” (LS 246) and which “will find a natural application in the tertiary order of language—the whole comparative play of self, world, and God, in the relation of being and the individual, representation and person, which constitute the classical and romantic forms of irony” (LS 247). If the dilemma with which Alice—and the rest of us—are constantly confronted is that of deciding between “to eat / to speak,” the ʻperverseʼ strategy, the creative response, is to do both and neither, to follow the path of the surface and the endlessly renewable production of meaning that takes place there, precisely insofar as sense is disengaged from denotation, manifestation, and signification. It is not clear, however, that so much has really changed since the early part of the decade. Perversion has always been, for Deleuze, a matter of the ʻdifferentialʼ or humorous reinvestment of elements detached from both the physical order and the ʻ spiritualʼ order—that is, precisely, neither a satirical collapse into the brute immediacy of the body nor an ironic dismissal of it. These

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two options, and especially the latter, which Deleuze consistently associates with Platonism in the sense that he wants to overturn it, are just as clearly rejected in “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism” and Nietzsche and Philosophy as they are here.

If anything, what the more elaborate development of a reading of

psychoanalysis32 to be found in his works from the end of the decade has done is to make it possible for Deleuze to specify more precisely where his own philosophical project intersects with the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious.

That intersection occurs at the point where the psychoanalytic

theory of the unconscious allows for the conception of something that goes beyond the point at which sexuality, and the ʻ voiceʼ to which it gives rise, becomes the ultimate figure of precisely the “equivocity” or “equivocation” that governs the ʻ ironicʼ series, and which condemns everything that we live within that series to being ʻ merelyʼ similar, and therefore always ʻlackingʼ in relation to an ideal instance of the Same—i.e., Platonism. If psychoanalysis has value to Deleuze it is because it goes beyond Platonism in the same sense that philosophy struggles to do, because it follows the sexual series closely enough to see what emerges at the point where its equivocal movement is pushed or amplified beyond the limits which the ironic strategy is able to integrate, revealing the persistence of the fracture which was to serve as the ground for the entire ideal structure, and, in the form of the speculative death instinct, constituting another surface, an impersonal,

32

Aided considerably by Deleuzeʼs use of the Lacanian notion of a ʻstructuralʼ unconscious, but by no means exclusively identified with it.

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problematic surface that gives birth to something else entirely, a univocal instance of difference to supplant the equivocal instances of the same. There is therefore an excessive equivocation from the point of view of the voice and in relation to the voice: an equivocation which ends equivocity and makes language ripe for something else. This something else is that which comes from the other, desexualized and metaphysical surface, when we finally go from speech to the verb, or when we compose a unique verb in the pure infinitive—along with the assembled words. This something else is the revelation of the univocal, the advent of Univocity— that is, the Event which communicates the univocity of being to language (LS 248). Literature, Deleuze goes on to tell us, approaches this event, and deploys its creative potential, by way of forms of humor distinct from satire and irony. This, as we have seen, has been his persistent claim since “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,” distinguishing his ʻperverseʼ strategy, as a mode of criticism and as a mode of resistance and self-transformation. The humorous moment, and it is only a moment, thus releases us to the Event which appears as a question, itself a beautiful and terrifying figure of pure undetermined potential, inexhaustible renewal, the eternal return as the singular object and limit of thought, and of course the Revolution ”—even if this question must be replaced with the problem of a work of art yet to come, which alone would give the answer” (LS 248).

IV. In conclusion, at least provisionally, we may say the following. Very much like philosophy in Deleuzeʼs estimation, psychoanalysis suffers from a fundamental ambiguity. It can be a ʻscience of events,ʼ but only just insofar as it tends to open

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up this question referred to above and aid in the artistic determination of this problem, rather than aiding in the process by which “[t]his event is, of course, quickly covered over by everyday banality or, on the contrary, by the sufferings of madness” (LS 249). Indeed, in this regard psychoanalysis may have an even more difficult task, because walking the path traced by the Event along the metaphysical surface of thought will be both necessary for its therapeutic aims— especially if Deleuze and Guattari are right—while simultaneously appearing to run counter to those aims insofar as not only the most extreme ravages of madness, but also the more ʻ superficialʼ suffering of the neurotic seem to be problems for which ʻeveryday banalityʼ would be a perfectly acceptable cure. The extent to which even this is an illusion, however, is surely what is at stake in Deleuze and Guattariʼs increasing alarm, as the 1970s progressed, over what Freud, and his inheritors, made of the problem of the interminability of analysis. And it is well known that, at a certain point, Deleuze and Guattari came to the conclusion that, in practice, the cure was very much worse than the disease—and indeed that it was quite possible that the clinical practice of analysis was itself productive of the disease, as much if not more so than the psychiatric clinic had been and continued to be productive of the worst horrors of the institutional figure of madness. So it is that Deleuze, looking back at the end of the 1980s, would eventually say “…it wasnʼt me who rescued Félix from psychoanalysis: he rescued me” (N 144). The foregoing shows that this judgment, for all that some of his readers

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would very much like it to do so, does not exhaust the question of psychoanalysis in Deleuzeʼs philosophy. Remarkably, for all that he would come to progressively more pessimistic conclusions about the ability of psychoanalysis, per se, to aid us in negotiating the treacherous path of the Event, in holding open the gap between repression and the return of the repressed—and he surely did so, all the way to the point of dismissing it entirely by the end of the decade—the aim of doing precisely this remains a consistent feature of Deleuzeʼs philosophy. If the specification of this aim—and indeed a considerable part of Deleuzeʼs understanding of what achieving it would amount to, insofar as that would represent a genuine affirmation and a truly creative engagement with the products of the unconscious—takes place in the course of an extended and serious philosophical dialogue with psychoanalysis, then surely psychoanalysis cannot be said to disappear so completely from his work as it seems to do. Even if the results of the dialogue are ultimately detached from psychoanalysis per se and subsumed in or distributed among other conceptual schemes and modes of expression in Deleuzeʼs later work, that does not immediately obviate the value of the more explicitly psychoanalytic elaborations of more or less the same ideas. Where they differ—and determining how and to what extent they do is the next obvious phase of the project begun here—what is needed, first of all, is a careful assessment of the reasons for that difference, at which point we can begin to ask seriously about the applicability of those reasons to our own situations as readers, and users, of Deleuzeʼs thought.

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In the mean time, what our investigation, while remaining partial and preliminary in many respects, has nevertheless shown is that even if the critique that Deleuze and Guattari and Parnet develop in the 1970s is considerably more elaborate and sophisticated than what Deleuze himself proposed at the beginning of the 1960s, its major points are not considerably incompatible with the earlier versions. Furthermore, we have recognized the extent to which a similar critique is applied by Deleuze to many major philosophical figures, and to the philosophical tradition as a whole under the guise of a genealogical interrogation of the image of thought. Indeed, it seems, the more we pursue it, that philosophy and psychoanalysis have problems or characteristic dangers that are parallel, if not entirely the same. To the extent that Deleuze never abandons philosophy, even if it has a much longer history of failing to live up to its critical and revolutionary potential, one would be justified, indeed, in wondering why psychoanalysis, by contrast, is more or less summarily abandoned. One would furthermore be at least somewhat justified in thinking that at least part of the explanation for this abandonment has to do with transient situational matters that may be less relevant to those operating in contexts other than that of France in the 1970s and 1980s. On the other hand, at least part of the critique that we have seen Deleuze and Parnet articulating aims more fundamentally at the more or less universal core conditions of psychoanalytic practice—the elements which distinguish it from any more or less ʻ portableʼ theory and link it to a standard practical setting and procedure, both governed by an institutional structure that

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demands a certain regular order, that makes it appear to be more of a power/knowledge formation. Of course, as Deleuze and Parnet themselves note in the first chapter of Dialogues, philosophy also has its institutional powerstructures and its links to forms and mechanisms of governmentality; so that it truly is not immediately clear why a similarly perverse use of psychoanalysis to the one that Deleuze so famously imagines for philosophy in his “Letter to a Harsh Critic” should remain unimaginable in principle. Resolving these questions is the work of a further investigation. For the moment, what we take ourselves to have established is that at least until the beginning of his collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze was willing to envision—at least on one occasion under the title of ʻthe science of eventsʼ—a ʻ perverseʼ deployment of psychoanalysis that was critical, creative, and indeed possessed of revolutionary aims in a sense that was very similar to what had formed the core of his own vision for philosophy since the beginning of the 1960s, and would by all appearances continue to do so for the rest of his career.

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Bibliography

The following does not attempt to present an exhaustive inventory of works that may be relevant to the relationship between Deleuze and psychoanalysis. Such a list would be unwieldy and, furthermore, difficult to delineate in any consistent manner. Rather, it lists the texts that are referenced in this dissertation or which have been of substantial use in its preparation. There are two deviations from standard citation protocols. The first is that, for Deleuze and his collaborators, and for Lacan, I have included the dates of the original publication or presentation of the works listed in parentheses after the authorʼs name.

This is important for establishing the sequence in which

Deleuzeʼs views on psychoanalysis and related matters developed. The second is that I have followed the same practice in the case of Freud, but have listed the accepted sequence dates, as used in the standard psychoanalytic citation practice and established in the Standard Edition, in the parentheses.

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