Deleuze and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Essays on Deleuze’s Debate with Psychoanalysis

160 Pages·2010·1.53 MB·English

by  Leen De Bolle

DELEUZE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS ON DELEUZE’S DEBATE
WITH PSYCHOANALYSIS
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FIGURES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 9
Editorial Board PHILIPPE VAN HAUTE
(Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)
PAUL MOYAERT
(Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)
JOS CORVELEYN
(Catholic University Leuven, Belgium)
MONIqUE DAVID-MéNARD
(Université Paris VII – Diderot, France)
VLADIMIR SAFATLE
(University of São Paulo, Brazil)
CHARLES SHEPHERDSON
(State University of New York at Albany, USA)
Advisory Board TOMAS GEYSkENS
(Leuven, Belgium)
ELISSA MARDER
(Emory University, Atlanta, USA)
CELINE SURPRENANT
(University of Sussex, United Kingdom)
JEAN FLORENCE
(Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
PATRICk GUYOMARD
(Université Paris VII – Diderot, France)
ELIZABETH ROTTENBERG
(De Paul University, Chicago, USA)
JEFF BLOECHL
(Boston College, USA)
PATRICk VANDERMEERSCH
(University of Groningen, the Netherlands)
VERONICA VASTERLING
(Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)
HERMAN WESTERINk
(University of Vienna, Austria)
WILFRIED VER EECkE
(Georgetown University, USA)
RUDOLF BERNET
(Catholic University Leuven, Belgium)
ARI HIRVONEN
(University of Helsinki, Finland)
JOHAN VAN DER WALT
(University of Glasgow, United Kingdom)
STELLA SANDFORD
(Middlesex University, United Kingdom)
CLAUDIO OLIVEIRA
(Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
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DELEUZE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Philosophical Essays on Deleuze’s Debate
with Psychoanalysis

Edited by Leen De Bolle
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© 2010 by Leuven University Press / Universitaire Pers Leuven / Presses Universitaires de Louvain.
Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium)
All rights reserved. Except in those cases expressly determined by law, no part of this publication
may be multiplied, saved in an automated datafile or made public in any way whatsoever without
the express prior written consent of the publishers.
ISBN 978 90 5867 796 9
D/ 2010 / 1869 / 4
NUR: 777
Cover illustration: Juan Uslé, Pa-ti-pan, 2004-2005 (vinyl, dispersion and pigments on canvas,
31x46 cm, Private collection, Brussels; Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp)
Cover design: Griet Van Haute
Lay-out: Friedemann BVBA
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Table of Contents
Preface: Desire and Schizophrenia
Leen De Bolle 7
You Can’t Have it Both Ways: Deleuze or Lacan
Peter Hallward 33
Desire and the Dialectics of Love: Deleuze, Canguilhem,
and the Philosophy of Desire
Christian kerslake 51
Anti-Oedipus: The Work of Resistance
Lyat Friedman 83
Literature as Symptomatology: Gilles Deleuze on Sacher-Masoch
Tomas Geyskens 103
Deleuze with Masoch
éric Alliez 117
Deleuze’s Passive Syntheses of Time and the Dissolved Self
Leen De Bolle 131
Epilogue
Leen De Bolle 157
List of Contributors 159
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Preface: Desire and Schizophrenia
Leen De Bolle
Gilles Deleuze is well-known as a philosopher who has profoundly and
extensively debated with psychoanalysis. These discussions are situated in the
aftermath of the revolutionary climate of May ’68. In spite of his detailed
and far reaching debates with psychoanalytical theory, Deleuze can hardly be
reduced to a critic of psychoanalysis alone. The universe in which he thinks
and writes is chaotic, divergent, heterogeneous, and plural. It is a universe
consisting of a variety of concepts, authors, ideas, and traditions. Not only
philosophy, but also many other disciplines, are present throughout Deleuze’s
oeuvre: literature, poetry, mathematics, physics, biology, theatre, dance,
architecture, and so on. All of these disciplines have their own points of view
or different perspectives. Instead of being opposed to each other or finding
themselves in contradiction to one another, however, all of these disciplines
contribute to the rich patchwork of Deleuze’s rhizomatic style. The rhizome
is a subterranean root that branches off into many directions without a
beginning or an end. The different disciplines, authors, or systems make up
the many different entrances or exits of the rhizome.
Nevertheless, Deleuze is—like Henri Bergson—convinced of the fact that
an important author always thinks through one and the same idea. A great
author formulates an idea and remains loyal to it, exploring and refining this
idea through his entire oeuvre. This could also be said of Deleuze. In spite of
the divergent directions of his thinking, the rhizomatic pluralism, the many
references to a variety of disciplines and authors, the nervous and extremely
dense style of writing, he remains loyal to one and the same intuition. Not
only his early works, but also the later ones, are impregnated with the same
idea: philosophy needs to be liberated from the systems or those moments that
restrain it: the one, the truth, the good, the object, the subject, God, or man.
Deleuze’s philosophy is always situated in the sphere of free and unbound
thinking that is released from the burden of representation, of the primacy
of the cogito, of intentional consciousness, of phenomenology, of pathology,
of the Oedipus-complex, and so on. This all fits very well with what Deleuze
calls his ‘nomad philosophy.’ The nomad is the one, par excellence, who is freed
from a fixed place, a fixed identity. During his travels, the nomad has to create
his identity over and over again. The nomad breaks out of the given orders,
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Leen De Bolle
the institutional settings, and so forth. He carries his roots on his back. He has
no origin, no native country.
This absolute liberation can easily be associated with the revolutionary
context of May ’68. One can hardly deny that Deleuze was a product of his
time, but as is the case with all great thinkers, his original style of thinking and
his profound discussions with all kinds of authors in the history of philosophy
show that his work transgresses the boundaries of the historical context. His
discussions with psychoanalysis should be seen in the wider context of a great
thinker who has invented his own style of writing, his own vocabulary, and his
own philosophical system.
It is true that psychoanalysis became the companion, the rival, and the in-
timate enemy of Deleuze’s philosophy. But times have changed, and nowadays
it is interesting to see what we can still learn from these earlier discussions.
This volume consists of various contributions that shed new or different lights
on them. Each contribution is a different point of view or a different entrance
into the ‘rhizomatic’ thinking of Deleuze. But let us, first of all, by way of
introduction, have a closer look at the fundamental issues that are at stake in
the debate between Deleuze and psychoanalysis.
To the negative sphere of psychoanalysis, the pathological figures, traumas,
sad youths, repressions, projections, compulsive behaviours, and unfulfilled
desires, Deleuze opposes the creative and productive forces of the uncon scious.
Instead of representing the unconscious, he finds it much more interesting
to explore the wild and uncontrolled productions of the unconscious
without repressing them. In his early works, he shows a great deal of interest
in all sorts of authors or artists who do justice to the creative forces of the
unconscious: Bergson, Nietzsche, Leibniz, Artaud, Bacon, Beckett, and
Proust. Many concepts that are mentioned both in the theories of Deleuze
and in psychoanalysis, such as repetition, remembrance, desire, pleasure,
death instinct, perversion, schizophrenia, and so on, are used by Deleuze in
the context of a vitalist philosophy that accentuates the production of the new.
In this vitalism, he always stresses the positivity of desire, of the unconscious,
of being. Following Bergson, Deleuze rejects negativity as a problem that
originates from representational thinking. According to Bergson, negativity
refers to a negative judgment. Initially, he states, we experience reality in its full
plenitude, in the complete affirmation of all that is, and to which, secondarily,
the negative judgment is added. The negative judgment is the negation of
a judgment that is originally positive (Bergson 1941, 286). Deleuze is also
inspired by the Nietzschean idea of affirmation. He agrees with Nietzsche that
the greatest powers of life are instinctive, elementary forces that are original
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and authentic. All negative and reactive forces should be eliminated in favour
of a pure affirmation of life.
Deleuze’s discussions with psychoanalytical authors are always affected by
these vitalist assumptions. Insofar as psychoanalytical ideas do not agree with
them, Deleuze will call them in question. His relation to psychoanalytical
theory, however, is more complicated than merely one of opposition. To say
that Deleuze is opposed to psychoanalysis is already intrinsically problematic.
His critique of representational thinking does not allow notions such as
‘opposition,’ ‘contradiction,’ ‘negation,’ and so on. Consequently, it would be
unjust to state that Deleuze opposes himself to psychoanalysis for the sake of
opposition, as would be the case in a dialectical strategy. Nowadays, opinions
about Deleuze’s relation to psychoanalysis are mixed. Deleuze’s own attitude
towards it evolved over the years, from more or less sympathetic to more or
less hostile. But in any case, the basic assumptions of psychoanalytical meta-
psychology do not easily reconcile with Deleuze’s vitalist ideas. The question
is, then: why did Deleuze debate so often with psychoanalysis, if it was not
for the sake of opposition? The answer has to do with the specific themes that
are treated by both psychoanalysis and Deleuze. A theory of desire, of the
unconscious, of repetition, of the dissolution of the ego, is at stake. These are
all the concepts that make up parts of Deleuze’s philosophy of ‘a life.’ Whereas
Freud and his successors tried to discipline the forces of the unconscious,
to enfeeble them, and to put them out of action, Deleuze, on the contrary,
stresses the rich, creative, and even artistic forces of a productive unconscious.
This suggests that his fundamental critiques of psychoanalysis are the necessary
conditions for the development of his own theories of desire, of repetition, of
the unconscious.
In regard to the problematic notion of ‘opposition,’ it is interesting to
mention the proper style of Deleuze’s philosophy, the specific method that he
developed and that he elucidates in Dialogues, the method of ‘pick-me-up’ or
‘pick-up’: “in the dictionary = collecting up, chance, restarting of the motor,
getting onto the wavelength” (Deleuze 1977, 8). Instead of arguing with
psychoanalysis by means of logical argumentation, for the sake of being right,
he picks up what is of interest to him and moves on. Instead of discussion,
or polemic, philosophy thereby becomes a series of coordinations. Rather
than saying ‘Deleuze against Freud’ or ‘Deleuze against kant’ or ‘Deleuze
against Lacan,’ we should say ‘Deleuze and Freud’ ... and kant ... and Lacan.
In Dialogues, Deleuze says that “the conjunction AND” is not “a union, nor
a juxtaposition, but the birth of a stammering, the outline of a broken line
which always sets off at right angles, a sort of active and creative line of flight?
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AND... AND... AND...” (Deleuze 1977, 7–8). These lines of flight must
enable the thinker to get past a problem. For Deleuze, it does not matter that
much to find a solution to a problem, but rather to find a line of flight, to get
past a problem and to go on ... In his approach to the great thinkers of the
history of philosophy and other authors, he is more interested in the creative
outcome of the encounter between those theories and his own assumptions,
rather than in opposing himself to them or elaborating their diverging views.
Deleuze never gives the impression of wasting time on endless discussions for
the sake of being right. He replaces the dominant notion of ‘truth’ in classical
philosophy with the notion of creativity. What matters is not that something
would be true or false, but rather whether something is strong enough to
be productive. In his philosophical method, Deleuze really functions as
a philosophy-machine. This philosophy-machine continuously produces
thought as the result of an encounter with various systems, authors, streams of
thought, or styles of thinking. This means that Deleuze’s theories of desire are
also the product of an encounter with, among other things, psychoanalysis.
But whereas he indeed ‘picks-up’ some basic ideas from psychoanalysis in the
early works, he gradually finds out that it cannot ultimately be reconciled with
his own thoughts.
In the early works Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, Freud,
klein, Lacan, Ferenczi, Jung, and Laplanche appear in the context of Deleuze’s
critique of ‘the image of thought’ that consists in representational thinking.
In Difference and Repetition, Freud in particular is sometimes mentioned as
a welcome companion who is of great use to Deleuze, in order to clarify his
own theories of repetition. Some other times Deleuze finds himself strongly
opposed to Freud’s theories of death drive, desire, repetition, and so forth.
Already in the introduction of the book, Deleuze discusses Freud’s conception
of repetition.
Freud and repetition
Generally speaking, Deleuze does not agree with the idea that repetition would
be a reaction formation that appears as a result of a failure of remembrance or
recognition, as Freud claimed in his earlier work. According to these earlier
writings, repetition is inversely proportional to remembrance. The less one
can remember a representation under the condition of resistance, the more
one will repeat oneself. Repetition then, has a compulsive character. It has no
meaning in itself. It is not an original, autonomous movement, but appears to
be a mechanism of reaction or of defence.
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