Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  5. Lacan's Oscillation. But, Deleuze asks, was not Lacan's own thought already moving in this immanent direction in 1972? In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari identified two poles in Lacan's theory of desire (which Žižek seems to conflate): “Lacan's admirable theory of desire appears to use to have two poles: one related to ‘the object small a’ as a desiring-machine, which defines desire in terms of a real production, thus going beyond any idea of need and any idea of fantasy; and the other related to the ‘great Other’ as a signifier, which reintroduces a certain notion of lack” (AO 27n). The innovation of Anti-Oedipus was that it attempted to follow the first path laid out by Lacan (an immanent concept of desire related to the objet petit a), despite the efforts of Lacan's “first disciples” (AO 83) to push his thought in the second “Oedipal” direction (desire related to the transcendence of the phallic signifier). Deleuze and Guattari admit that the oscillation between these two poles of desire was present within Lacan's own thought:

  We owe to Jacques Lacan the discovery of this fertile domain of a code of the unconscious, incorporating the entire chain—or several chains—of sense: a discovery thus totally transforming analysis … The chains are called “signifying chains” because they are made up of signs, but these signs are not themselves signifying … If the first disciples were tempted to re-close the Oedipal [Symbolic] yoke, didn't they do so to the extent that Lacan seemed to maintain a kind of projection of the signifying chains onto a despotic signifier? … The signs of desire, being non-signifying, become signifying in representation only in terms of a signifier of absence or lack. (AO 38, 83)

  Following Lacan, Anti-Oedipus thus attempts to analyze the means by which the legitimate and immanent syntheses of desire (partial connections, inclusive disjunctions, polyvocal conjunctions—the Real production of desire, the objet petit a) are inverted and converted into illegitimate and transcendent syntheses (global connections, exclusive disjunctions, biunivocal conjunctions—the Oedipal or Symbolic representation of desire via the “phallic signifier”).

  6. Lacan's Anti-Oedipal Trajectory. But once again, despite this oscillation, was it not Lacan himself who was pushing psychoanalysis away from Oedipus and the Symbolic? Žižek complains that “what Deleuze presents as ‘Oedipus’ is a rather ridiculous simplification, if not an outright falsification, of Lacan's position” (OB 80), pointing to the constant references to “au-delà de l’Œdipe” in the last decades of Lacan's teaching. But Deleuze and Guattari would agree with this latter characterization—in their eyes, Lacan is himself the great anti-Oedipal thinker (they approvingly cite Lacan's 1970 claim that “I have never spoken of an Oedipus complex” [AO 53n]). Lacan, they write, “was not content to turn, like the analytic squirrel, inside the wheel of the Imaginary and the Symbolic” (AO 308). The Real is the internal limit to any process of symbolization, but it was not enough for Lacan to describe the Real, negatively, as a resistant kernel within the symbolic process upon whose internalized exclusion the symbolic is constituted (negation or exclusion as constitutive). Rather, Lacan was pushing psychoanalysis to “the point of its self critique” (AO 310), where the Real would be able to appear in all its positivity: “the point where the structure, beyond the images that fill it [fantasies] and the Symbolic that conditions it within representation, reveals its reverse side as a positive principle of nonconsistency that dissolves it” (AO 311). Deleuze and Guattari thus present Anti-Oedipus as continuing a trajectory that was initiated by Lacan himself. “It was inopportune to tighten the nuts and bolts where Lacan had just loosened them … The object (small o) erupts at the heart of the structural equilibrium in the manner of an infernal machine, the desiring-machine” (AO 83).

  7. The Real and Schizophrenia. Deleuze's term for the Real is “schizophrenia as a pure process” (which must be distinguished from the schizophrenic as a clinical entity), and it is with this concept that Deleuze takes Lacan's thought to its limit and conclusion. “It is this entire reverse side of the [symbolic] structure that Lacan discovers … schizophrenizing the analytic field, instead of oedipalizing the psychotic field” (AO 309). Following directions indicated by Lacan himself, Anti-Oedipus attempts to describe the Real in all its positivity: differential partial objects or intensities that enter into indirect syntheses; pure positive multiplicities where everything is possible (transverse connections, polyvocal conjunctions, included disjunctions); signs of desire that compose a signifying chain, but which are themselves non-signifying, and so on (AO 309). The domain of the Real is a “sub-representative field” (AO 300), but Deleuze does not hesitate to claim that “we have the means to penetrate the sub-representational” (DI 115). Conversely, if the Real is the sub-representative, then “illusion” (if one wants to retain this word) only appears afterwards, in the actual: it is only within the symbolic (representation) that desire appears negatively as lack, as castration. It is for this reason that Deleuze suggests that schizophrenia provides a better clue to the nature of the unconscious and the Real than neurosis: psychotics resist therapeutization because they have a libido that is too liquid or viscous, they resist entry into the symbolic (foreclosure), mistaking words for things. But “rather than being a resistance of the ego, this is the intense outcry of all of desiring-production” (AO 67). Some of Deleuze's most profound texts, such as “Louis Wolfson; or, The Procedure,” are those that analyze the specifically schizophrenic uses of language, which push language to its limit and lay waste its significations, designations, and translations.11 Deleuze suggests that the usual negative diagnostic criteria that have been proposed for schizophrenia—dissociation, detachment from reality, autism—are above all useful terms for not listening to schizophrenics. But in the end, this problem is not specific to schizophrenics: “we are all libidos that are too viscous and too fluid … [which] bears witness to the non-oedipal quality of the flows of desire” (AO 67; cf. 312).

  8. The Body Without Organs. Hence, whereas Logic of Sense was content to remain at the surface of sense (like Lewis Carroll), Anti-Oedipus can be said to have plunged into the depth of bodies (Artaud); the logic of the passive syntheses (the Real) ultimately finds its model in the body—or more precisely, the “body without organs.”12 This well-known but complex Deleuzian notion has three fundamental components. Schizophrenics experience their organs in a non-organic manner: that is, as elements or singularities that are connected to other elements in the complex functioning of a “machinic assemblage” (connective synthesis). But the breakdown of these organ-machines reveals a second theme—that of the body without organs as such, a non-productive surface upon which the an-organic functioning of the organs is stopped dead in a kind of catatonic stupor (disjunctive synthesis). These two poles—the vital an-organic functioning of the organs and their frozen catatonic stasis, with all the variations of attraction and repulsion that exist between them—can be said to translate the entire anguish of the schizophrenic, which in turn points to a third theme, that of intensive variations (conjunctive synthesis). These poles are never separate from each other, but generate between them various forms in which sometimes repulsion dominates, and sometimes attraction: the paranoid form of schizophrenia (repulsion), and its miraculating or fantastic form (attraction). Schizophrenics tend to experience these oscillating intensities (manic rises in intensity, depressive falls in intensity …) in an almost pure state. Beneath the hallucinations of the senses (“I see,” “I hear”) and the deliriums of thought (“I think”), there is something more profound, a feeling of intensity: that is, a becoming or a transition (“I feel”). A gradient is crossed, a threshold is surpassed or retreated from, a migration is brought about: “I feel that I am becoming woman,” “I feel that I am becoming god,” “I feel that I am becoming pure matter ….” The innovation of Anti-Oedipus is to have penetrated into this sub-representative, schizophrenic domain of the body without organs, and made use of it as the model for the unconscious itself. The analysis of this unconscious entails a corresponding practice that Deleu
ze and Guattari will term “schizoanalysis.”

  9. Psychoanalysis and Schizoanalysis. What then is the difference between psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis? “Psychoanalysis settles on the imaginary [fantasy] and structural [symbolic] representatives of reterritorialization, while schizoanalysis follows the machinic indices of deterritorialization” (AO 316). One can only admire the enthusiasm with which Žižek analyzes the first movement, particularly in his section on the “phallus” (the “organ without a body” of the title) (see OB 87–95). The phallus, as the signifier of castration, is what effects a desexualization of the libido, and makes possible the “impossible” passage of the body (the drives) into symbolic thought, the passage from bodily depth to surface event (symbolic castration). Deleuze and Guattari could no doubt even agree with Žižek's claim that Oedipus is an “operator of deterritorialization” (83), in so far as every movement of deterritorialization (of the drives) is accompanied by a reterritorialization (on to the symbolic). “Schizophrenia as a process, deterritorialization as a process,” they write, “is inseparable from the stases that interrupt it, aggravate it, or make it turn in circles, and reterritorialize it into neurosis, perversion, and psychosis” (the latter being the three main categories in Lacan's diagnostic schema) (AO 318). Oedipus and castration are indeed realities that psychoanalysis did not invent. But schizoanalysis, by contrast, moves in the exact opposite direction, and seeks to locate the indices of deterritorialization, within these reterritorializations, in a completely different manner than psychoanalysis: “not the gaping wound represented in castration [the gap in immanence], but the myriad little connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions” that constitute the real movement of the immanent process of desire (AO 314). Put crudely, psychoanalysis begins with the symbolic and seeks out the “gaps” which mark the irruption of an “impossible” Real, whereas schizoanalysis starts with the Real as the immanent process of desire, and seeks to mark both the interruptions of this process (reterritorializations) and its continuations and transformations (becomings, intensities …).

  10. The Assembling of Desire. The fundamental concept in Deleuze's theory of desire is thus the concept of the assemblage [agencement]. There exists a common but misguided critique of Deleuze and Guattari which claims that, in subtracting desire from lack, the law, and castration, they wind up invoking a state of nature, a desire that would be a natural and spontaneous reality that winds up being repressed by society.13 But Deleuze and Guattari's argument is precisely the opposite: there is no desire other than assembled [agencé] desire. “Desire is never either a ‘natural’ or a ‘spontaneous’ determination … never a ‘natural reality,’” writes Deleuze, but always results from “a highly developed, engineered setup [montage] rich in interactions,” and it can neither be grasped nor conceived apart from a determinate social assemblage or apparatus.14 Desire, as “desiring-production,” is both productive and produced. Within any given assemblage of desire, there are, on the one hand, rigid lines of sedimentation and reterritorialization that tend to “normalize” desire, to “represent” or “symbolize” it; and then, on the other hand, there are supple lines of creativity and deterritorialization (lines of flight or escape) that allow the assemblage to transform itself, or even to break down in favor of a future assemblage. These two types of vectors are immanent to any process of desire, to every “desiring-machine.” What mechanisms of repression crush is not desire as a natural given, but precisely these cutting edges of assemblages of desire (the production of the new).15 The question, at every moment, concerns the vector that desire is in the process of constructing or assembling (deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or—put in mathematical terms—continuity and discontinuity). But yet again, one must stress that it was Lacan himself who posed the question of desire in terms of these two poles or vectors: “In Lacan, the symbolic organization of the structure, with its exclusions that come from the function of the signifier, has as its reverse side the real inorganization of desire” (AO 328; cf. 39).

  11. Desexualization and Political Philosophy. Finally, a brief comment about the relationship between Deleuze's political philosophy and his theory of desire. Freud held strongly to the hypothesis that the libido does not invest the socio-political field except on the condition that it be “desexualized” or “sublimated”—a hypothesis that Žižek takes up and defends (“Sexuality can universalize itself only by way of desexualization” [OB 91]). Deleuze and Guattari explicitly reject this Freudian principle. “Our entire hypothesis is, on the contrary, that the social field is invested by a sexual libido as such, and that this is in fact the fundamental activity of the libido” (21 Dec 1971). The concepts of sublimation and desexualization are linked to the implicit familialism of psychoanalysis. “At least in the beginning,” the argument goes, the unconscious is expressed in familial relations, and social relations only arise afterward. “‘Symbolic castration’ is a way for the subject to be thrown out of the family network, propelled into a wider social network” (OB 83). Against this familiar Freudian notion, Deleuze and Guattari not only argue that the libido directly invests social relations without any mediation (such as introjection / projection, desexualization / sublimation, or symbolization), but that this investment is there from the start, at the level of the drives. One of the most profound and far-reaching theses of Anti-Oedipus is that the libidinal economy of Freud and the political economy of Marx are one and the same economy (“affects or drives form part of the infrastructure itself” [AO 53]), even if they have different regimes. The concept of the assemblage is itself derived from this insight. It is not through a desexualizing extension that the libido invests socio-political relation; “on the contrary, it is through a restriction, a blockage, and a reduction that the libido is made to repress its flows in order to contain them in the narrow cells of the type ‘couple,’ ‘family,’ ‘person,’ ‘objects’” (AO 293). In effect, this thesis is the basis of the political philosophy Deleuze begins to develop in Anti-Oedipus and continues in A Thousand Plateaus, although Žižek seems largely oblivious to it. Hence, it is hard to know what Žižek means when he characterizes Deleuze as “the ideologist of late capitalism” (184), since he says nothing of either Deleuze's analysis of capitalism or his critique of the concept of ideology.

  These points, to be sure, hardly constitute a reading of Anti-Oedipus, one of Deleuze's most difficult and ambitious texts, and can do little more than point toward the direction of future work. But what is striking about Anti-Oedipus is the degree to which Deleuze and Guattari fully admit their indebtedness to Lacan, and describe their project as an attempt to take Lacan's profound thought to its differential and immanent conclusion. As Deleuze explained:

  Félix had talked to me about what he was already calling “desiring-machines”: he had a whole theoretical and practical conception of the unconscious as a machine, of the schizophrenic unconscious. So I myself thought he had 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 didn't even come from Lacan's creative side, but from an orthodoxy built up around him. 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 [mauvaises], and which Lacan himself has always managed to turn on their head in order to show their inverse side (N 13–14)

  In this sense, Deleuze can be seen as one of Lacan's most profound, but also most independent, disciples, inventing a whole new set of concepts to describe the inverse side of the symbolic structure (the real). He followed a completely different path than the other disciples, such as Jacques-Alain Miller, the keeper of orthodoxy; Alain Badiou, who gives an ax
iomatic treatment of the symbolic; or Žižek himself, the Lacanian reader of contemporary culture. The admiration Lacan and Deleuze had for each other's work was obviously deep and full of respect. Deleuze once wrote: “My ideal, when I write about an author, would be to write nothing that could cause him sadness” (D 119), and this was no doubt true of his treatment of Lacan in Anti-Oedipus. In return, Lacan once said of a book critical of his work, “I have never been so well read—with so much love,” and one can almost imagine him making the same remark of Anti-Oedipus.16 Perhaps one day, we will be provided with a more complete reading of the way in which Deleuze took up and developed Lacan's thought—and perhaps the way in which Lacan took up and develops Deleuze's insights in his later work. Žižek, unfortunately, is not that person. Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences is a fascinating romp through the Žižekian universe, full of penetrating insights and illuminating jokes, but as a reading of Deleuze it adds little to our understanding. The best place we have to go, still, for a Lacanian appreciation of Deleuze is not Žižek, but rather … Lacan himself.

  ESSAY 19

  Pierre Klossowski

  Klossowski's Reading of Nietzsche: Impulses, Phantasms, Simulacra, Stereotypes

  I

  n his writings on Nietzsche, Pierre Klossowski makes use of various concepts—such as intensities, phantasms, simulacra and stereotypes, resemblance and dissemblance, gregariousness and singularity—that have no place in Nietzsche's own œuvre.1 These concepts are Klossowski's own creations, his own contributions to thought. Although Klossowski consistently refused to characterize himself as a philosopher (“Je suis une ‘maniaque,’” he once said. “Un point, c'est tout!”),2 his work in its entirety was marked by an extraordinary conceptual creation. From this point of view, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle can be read as a work in philosophy—at least in the idiosyncratic sense given to this term by Deleuze, who defined philosophy as the creation or invention of concepts (WP 2). No doubt, Klossowski remains an almost unclassifiable figure—philosopher, novelist, essayist, translator, artist—and attempting to analyze his work through the prism of philosophy may seem to be a reductive approach that belies the complexity of Klossowski's exceptional œuvre. Reading Klossowski as a conceptual innovator, however, at least has the advantage of allowing us to chart a consistent trajectory through Klossowski's difficult and often-labyrinthine text, without denying its other dimensions (affective, perceptive, literary, etc.). In what follows, then, I would like to examine three of Klossowski's most characteristic and important concepts—impulses and their intensities, phantasms, and simulacra and their stereotypes—as well as the precise interrelations he establishes among them. Taken together, these three concepts describe what Klossowski terms the tripartite economy of soul, which constitutes the implicit model through which he interprets Nietzsche's thought.