Luke Caldwell: “Schizophrenizing Lacan: Deleuze, [Guattari], and Anti-Oedipus” Abstract: “In 1972, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus unleashed an extended polemical attack on the foundations of Marxist and psychoanalytic orthodoxy. While the primary target of the book was Sigmund Freud, the innovative theories of Jacques Lacan did not emerge unscathed. Because of the brevity of their critique, many have interpreted Deleuze and Guattari’s relationship to Lacan as one of antagonism and rejection. This, however, obscures many important connections that they maintained with Lacan. Deleuze and Guattari insisted that they were actually extending Lacan’s theories to their necessary conclusions. Through an analysis of Anti-Oedipus in relation to core Lacanian theories, I investigate how Deleuze and Guattari transform Lacan, both faithfully and unfaithfully, to give support to their utopian project.” ‘Intersections’ 10, no. 3 (2009): 21-30. *** ... “In a style that Deleuze and Guattari would affirm, we will not start in the 70’s—in history—but rather with more contemporary events to elucidate the stakes motivating this inquiry. In the Fall 2004 edition of the journal Criticism, a debate unfolded about the relationship between Deleuze and Lacan. Centering around two reviews of neoLacanian Slavoj Žižek’s subversive study of Deleuze, Organs without bodies, and a response by the author, the short debate ironically revolved around a largely absent signifier—one might even say a phallus-like ‘organ without a body’—that established or dissolved the connections between the Deleuzian and Lacanian projects. That bracketed term was [Guattari], the man who tore Deleuze from a ‘good’ Lacanian trajectory, or the man who helped him realize it. In Organs without bodies, Žižek polemically took up the former position, saying that Deleuze was infected by his collaborations with Guattari—’guattarized’ in Žižek’s terms—and that Deleuze only turned to him for help because he had reached a philosophical impasse and was looking for an ‘easy escape’. Žižek reads in Deleuze’s corpus two different ontologies, one engaged with in his solo work and the other in his collaborations with Guattari. The first—the proper Lacanian position—presents the event as an effect of primordial causes, or rather, as the ‘irruption of the [Lacanian] Real within the domain of causality’. The second—the philosophically contaminated position—affirms the event as a continuous, virtual process of production that creates the discontinuous structures of the actual. Žižek sees Deleuze struggling between these two positions in his last book prior to meeting Guattari, The logic of sense, but the publication of Anti-Oedipus marks a decisive turn away from the former position in favor of the latter—a turn that Žižek sees as largely precipitated by Guattari’s radical politics. Anti-Oedipus, in Žižek’s eyes, therefore marks a critical turn away from Lacan and is worthy of being dismissed as ‘arguably Deleuze’s worse book’. “Smith, in his review of Žižek, challenges this perspective, calling into question whether Deleuze’s move toward Guattari and Anti-Oedipus was really a rejection of Lacan. Citing an interview Deleuze gave shortly before his death, Smith argues that Lacan actually saw the transgressions of Anti-Oedipus as a continuation of his work. In the interview, Deleuze recounts being summoned by Lacan a few months after the publication of Anti-Oedipus. In their meeting, Lacan denounced all of his disciples (with the exception of one), calling them ‘all worthless’ and then told Deleuze, ‘What I need is someone like you’. Lacan biographer Elisabeth Roudinesco recounts the same story, but complexifies the issue, claiming that at the same time Lacan was praising Deleuze, he was also ‘grumbling about him to Maria Antonietta Macciocchi: [Lacan] was convinced Anti-Oedipus was based on his seminars, which already, according to him, contained the idea of a ‘desiring machine’’. From these stories, we can see that Lacan himself saw a clear connection between his project and that of Deleuze and Guattari. “In several interviews after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari reiterated their belief that they saw themselves as remaining faithful to the Lacanian project and that they both ‘owed so much to Lacan’. This however, did not stop them from transforming certain problematic notions that they saw as barriers to the development of a truly materialist psychiatry. As Deleuze put it, ...Lacan himself says ‘I’m not getting much help.’ We thought we’d give him some schizophrenic help. And there’s no question that we’re all the more indebted to Lacan, once we’ve 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. “While Deleuze is being a bit facetious—such a transformation of Lacan would seem to leave him rather amputated—this interview illustrates the complicated relationship that Deleuze and Guattari maintained with psychoanalysis generally. Even though Anti-Oedipus was a polemic attack on key psychoanalytic theories, it was more of an internal reversal than a rejection and it was their intention to move beyond psychoanalysis to what they call ‘schizoanalysis’. Deleuze and Guattari therefore maintain many key analytic concepts like the unconscious and repression, transforming them to give support to their revolutionary and utopian paradigm. “To gain a sense of appreciation for the transformative potential of Anti-Oedipus, one must set aside Žižek’s call for a rejection of Guattari in the name of saving Deleuze’s Lacanianism and instead engage with the multiple becomings that were produced through the introduction of Guattari into the equation.... Making Machines Desire: The Cure is Just a Little Schizophrenia “A bizarre book, Anti-Oedipus’s mode of argumentation is elliptical and, in many places, seems caught in a schizoid performance.... The central concepts it addresses and transforms are the psychoanalytic construction of unconscious desire, the role of the symbolic/culture in shaping subjectivity, and the Oedipus complex. “Deleuze and Guattari most directly address Lacan in their reformulation of desire as a form of productivity rather than a manifestation of lack—the core element of Žižek’s critique. For Lacan, subjectivity is permeated by lack, and desire is directed toward regaining a completeness that is impossible to attain. As the subject gradually emerges through the ‘mirror stage’ (the Imaginary), the Oedipus complex (the Symbolic) and into culture, it is increasingly fragmented and divorced from the Real—the unformed abyss of primordial non-being....As Lacanian disciple Jacques-Alain Miller puts it, Lacan ‘took the unconscious not as a container, but rather as something ex-sistent—outside itself—that is connected to a subject who is a lack of being’. Unconscious desire is caused by this ‘lack of being’ in the Other/self and is directed toward attaining the absolute recognition of its impossible completion in the eyes of the (m)Other.... Lacan’s formulation for this was that ‘desire is the desire of the Other’ and he came to symbolize it as the ‘objet petit a’— ‘the object which can never be attained...’ As a force beyond both the Symbolic and the Imaginary, the ‘objet petit a’ is the residual of the Real that resists completion. “...By defining desire in terms of lost objects, Lacan—and psychoanalysis generally—forces desire into ‘an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception’. Rather than remaining stuck within this pessimistic formulation, however, Deleuze and Guattari see Lacan’s idea of the ‘object a’ as a means through which to bring about a reversal of this situation, making desire an instrument of liberation rather than ressentiment.... ... “Doing away with the Lacan’s language of the ‘subject’ and collapsing his ontology of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and the Real, Deleuze and Guattari argue that everything is Real and that everything is a machine. Liberating the ‘objet petit a’ from its subordination to lack, they transform Lacan’s concept into a primordial source of energy that transforms and is transformed through the ways it is organized. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this energy as a hylè—a pure continuous flux or material flow—and define a machine as a ‘system of interruptions or breaks’ in this flow. In the opening lines of Anti-Oedipus, they claim, Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.... “Through the connection of one machine to another, desire produces reality. This should not, however, lead one to believe that they fall into a naïve realism of concrete identities. Rather, because all machines consist of other machines, which consist of other machines…ad infinitum, there is never any whole that actually unifies an object in a complete way. Identities are only ‘produced as a residuum alongside the machine, as an appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine’ and subjects are, following Lacan, ‘not at the center…but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered, defined by the states’ that they pass through. “...This allows Deleuze and Guattari to collapse the difference between the libidinal economy and the political economy—the latter being merely a more complex machine that emerges from the former and feeds back to shape flows of desire in specific ways.... “...Deleuze and Guattari turn the schizophrenic against the stability of the psyche and develop a form of schizoanalysis to revolutionize psychoanalysis. While Freudian analysis aims to treat the psychotic by helping them acknowledge and control their unconscious desires in the name of securing stable subjectivity, schizoanalysis aims to free the process of desiring-production from social constraints. To this end, Deleuze and Guattari celebrate the process of schizophrenia as a force that breaks through the rigid codifications of the social field and resists being trapped in any singular identity. Rather than helping people, they see psychoanalysis an extension of the repressive society that introduces lack into desire, thereby restraining it in subordination to an abstracted complete object... ... “One of the strongest ways that psychoanalysis fulfills this function is by forcing the schizo into the Oedipus complex. In order to escape the trap of Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari historicize psychoanalysis to expose it as an ideology that is anachronistic and repressive. Looking historically at how different modes of social organization (‘social machines’) codify desire in specific ways, Deleuze and Guattari examine what they call the ‘savage territorial machine’, the ‘barbarian despotic machine’ and the ‘civilized capitalist machine’.... “One of the ways that capitalism desperately avoids dissolving the power differential that maintains social hierarchies is by fortifying the patriarchal family. While the deterritorializing power of capitalism is so strong that even the organization of the family is not safe from its grips, psychoanalysis, wielding the Oedipus complex, serves as an important vector through which desire that escapes the family is suppressed.... As a throwback to the despotic machine, the psychoanalyst pushes the analysand to renounce their schizophrenic desire and internalize the totalitarian signifier of the father and his law. Instead of placing blame on the vested powers that maintain the conditions that repress desire, psychoanalysis secures these repressive conditions by ‘socializing’ those that harbor the capacity to break free from their chains. The ideological misconception of psychoanalysis resides in its failure to recognize that Oedipus—not the father—is the agent of castration and that the cure is really the disease; as Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘castration as an analyzable state…is the effect of castration as a psychoanalytic act’. “While this critique directly implicates Freudian analysis as a form of ideology, Deleuze and Guattari believed that Lacan was actually heading in this direction and, in fact, paved the way for the destruction of Oedipus. By making the Oedipal structure symbolic, yet organizing this structure around the absent signifier of the phallus, Lacan showed that ‘Oedipus is imaginary, nothing but an image, a myth’ and that ‘these images are produced by an oedipalizing structure’ (capitalism) that ‘reproduces the element of castration’. Lacan’s work therefore illuminated how the whole Oedipal house of cards was founded upon a ‘despotic Great Signifier acting as an archaism’ and led psychoanalysis ‘to the point of its self-critique’.... “With the house blown down and a new world constructed, we find not Oedipus but the schizophrenic at the root of our desire, and see the unconscious not as a theater but as a factory mobilized toward continual transformation and social revolution. Rather than rejecting the insights of Lacan, as Žižek claims, Deleuze and Guattari radicalize him in an effort to overturn the ideological apparatus of capitalism and liberate desire from reactivity....What we find in Anti-Oedipus is an example and an inspiration for how revolution could work if we move outside ourselves and embrace the creative and subversive potential of the desire coursing in and through the world of which we are a part. Let’s give it a try, incipit schizophrenia!” depts.washington.edu/chid/intersections_Autumn_2009/Luke_Caldwell_Schizophrenizing_Lacan.pdf
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 14:55:16 +0000
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