Deleuze and Ricoeur: Disavowed Affinities and the Narrative Self

254 Pages·2009·6.71 MB·English

by  Declan Sheerin

Deleuze and Ricoeur
Disavowed Affinities and the Narrative Self
Declan Sheerin
continuum
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Declan Sheerin 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publicauon Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2448-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sheerin, Declan.
Deleuze and Ricoeur: disavowed affinities and the narrative self/Declan Sheerin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-4411-2448-7 (HB: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-2448-9 (HB: alk. paper) 1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. 2. Self
(Philosophy) 3. Ricoeur, Paul. I. Title.
B2430.D454S54 2009
126.092'2-dc22
2008056033
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King's Lynn
For Anna, Barbara and Rona
Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xvi
List of Abbreviations xvii
1 Introduction to an Enigma 1
Introduction 1
Why Deleuze and Ricoeur? 2
Fields for Potential and Possible Connectors 4
Investigative Strategies 7
Towards the Cohesion of a Life: Chapter Oudine 8
2 Problematizing the Field of the Self 12
Introduction 12
Between Rigidification and Dehiscence: Context and
Counter-context 13
Ancestry for the Self in a Problematic Field 16
Conceptual Personae and the Self 19
Aporia of the Inscrutability of the Self 21
Sweeney: Philosophical Bathyscope 22
3 Critique on the Kantian Self 24
Introduction 24
Pretensions of the Kantian Self 25
Divided Self Still Surrounded by the Mad and the Replicant 28
4 The Narrative Self 31
Introduction 31
Oneself as Another or XNselves as Myself 32
The Narrative Self: Origins in Kant 33
Appearance and Exposition of the Narrative Self 34
Working through Narrative 36
Towards an Interrogation of the Narrative Self 37
viii Contents
5 Questioning the Narrative Self through its Progenitors 39
Introduction 39
Methodology: Questioning Back 40
The Narrative Self in Retrospect 41
The Poetic Composition of the Self: Threefold Mimesis 45
Summary: Problems for Narrative Identity 54
6 Interlude 56
Introduction 56
Transversals between Ricoeur and Deleuze 56
7 In the Land of the Larval Selves 64
Introduction 64
Origins in Schelling 65
Ontology of Productivity 69
The Dogmatic Image of Thought 71
The Narrative Self as Twin Multiplicities 75
8 Dis/solving the Narrative Self 82
Introduction 82
From Multiplicity to the Narrative Self 84
Obscure Stammering for a New Narrative Self 86
Between Time and the Self: A Fractured T 89
Laws in the Germplasm of Narrative: The Dark Precursor 93
Narrative Persona 103
9 From Debt to Excess 106
Introduction 106
Ricoeur's Dilemma of the Self: Substance or Illusion? 107
Deleuze and Aristotle: A Disavowed Affinity 112
10 Interzone 130
Introduction 130
Between Dark Precursor and Narrative Self: Gelassenheit 131
Inhering Problems for the Becoming-Narrative Self 133
An Unguessed Axis for Narrative Selves 135
11 From Excess to Debt: Evolving Constraints to Narrative Identity 140
Introduction - 140
Where to Start? Three Stations: Natality, Personhood, Narrative
Selfhood N 141
First Constraint: Proustian Love and Lack 143
Narrative Constraints: Implications for the Synthesis of the
Heterogeneous 148
Contents ix
12 The Poetic Imagination within the Evolving Constraints
of Narrative Productivity 149
Introduction 149
Where Deleuze Was, There Ricoeur Shall Be? 150
The Narrative Self: A Badly Posed Question 151
Second Constraint: Imagination within Structure and Obligation 153
A Self Entombed in a Debt to the Past 167
13 Conclusion 170
Notes 175
Bibliography 221
Index 233
Preface <
My intention in the work ahead is to place the narrative self in question. To
do so is to situate it within a fundamental assumption: like any philosophical or
psychological construction, it is a solution to a problem. This assumption inevi
tably invites the following question - 'To what problem are you the solution?'
This question of course spawns a multitude of other questions, somewhat like
the multiplying brooms of the sorcerer's apprentice. Soon we find the self con
fronted by demands from without and within - that it deliver answers, that it
bear witness to itself- that it testify. Yet perhaps in its attempts to provide such
testimony under cross-examination it must be accorded a privilege unheard
of in our courts. It must be allowed to shed identity in the provision of its truth,
to drop its capitalization and unhinge itself of the attestation of the utterer as
soon as it delivers its testimony. *Yes, that statement came from here a moment
ago but it did not come from me - I changed the moment you asked me the
question/ This is the self in question to which I devote this book - the self in
lowercase.
For many years I have worked with children and their families as a psychiatrist
and psychotherapist. Before that however, I worked in the psychiatry of adult
hood where the core disorder upon which the chronic hospital wards were
established was schizophrenia. It was 'first philosophy* in psychiatry. Beneath its
multifarious and often alarming presentations a central feature was though to
inhere - a disturbance of the sense of self. Somehow, the self of the schizo
phrenic had become fragmented, porous and permeable to the selves of
others, its secret thoughts available to the mind-reading abilities of the neigh
bours and its bony vault a useless barrier to the infestation of other people's
thoughts. Indeed, the antipsychotic medications used in those days were rather
scurrilously referred to as 'ego-glue* by some practitioners, insofar as they stuck
the self together again or built up the boundary between oneself and another.
Nowadays we are less vulgar with our terminology, but the self remains a critical
venture for psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists.
In child mental health services, therapies teem with self-practices - self-
awareness groups, self-esteem groups, self-actualization groups; one-week train
ing programmes entitled 'Construct"a New Self allegedly offer practitioners
the requisite skills in enabling the disoriented patient to become someone else.
xu Preface
This self that is so much part of the parlance of the mental health services has
become over the years something of a fascination to me. We appear to speak of
it with the presumption of knowing it, treat it with the presumption of under
standing its inner processes and create it when required for those who wish for
a new model of the self with the presumption that we have its essence in a
manual for therapy. We seem to know this self without in fact knowing it at all.
Mental health practitioners have repeatedly failed to ask themselves what is this
self that we so precipitously operate upon; what is its form, its matter, its essence.
Is it one, is it two, is it several or is it nothing? Is it genetically preformed or an
epiphenomenon of cerebral action potentials, or is it simply a cultural product
of language and the implantation of memes? Indeed, these health professionals
might be astonished, even amused, were they to listen to a group of philoso
phers discuss the self. What is all the fuss, one of them might ask; I will tell you
what the self is - it is me! And therein lies the problem.
I began to question the nature of the self several years ago when I read Charles
Rycroft's A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, a little book of only 198 pages.
Like Laplanche and Pontalis' The Language of Psychoanalysis, it is an introduc
tion to psychoanalytic theory in dictionary form. The layout is simple: after a
brief introduction, the body of the text begins with A for 'ABREACnON' as
follows:
ABREACTION The DISCHARGE of EMOTION attaching to a previously
repressed experience (see REPRESSION). In the early days of psychoanaly
sis, abreaction was held to be in itself therapeutic, regardless of whether the
patient understood the significance of the repressed experience. See Freud
(1895). See INSIGHT.
The text ends with Z for ZOOPHILIA' as follows:
ZOOPHILIA Bestiality. Excessive love of animals.
Almost all entries contain within them words in uppercase. Naturally, this book
can be read linearly, simply by moving from ABREACTION to ABSTINENCE
to ACTING OUT and so on through the alphabet, advancing as one does
traditionally with a book. This is reading by convention, the standard narrative
strategy that ensures every word in the book has been read. It is part of what
Ricoeur refers to as the operatives of that opaque ideological process that, at its
deepest level, integrates our shared world by way of 'symbolic systems imma
nent in action' and acts in this manner as the guarantor of identity in the face
of factors that would sunder the organic relations between the whole and the
parts of that identity.1
There are however alternative approaches to reading A Critical Dictionary of
Psychoanalysis that would ensure the same coverage. For instance, one could
Preface Xlll
read the first entry under every letter of the alphabet from A-Z (i.e. ABREAC-
TION BAD CASTRATING DEAGGRESSIFICATION) and then return to A and
read the second entry under each letter. You would then finish under the letter
with the most entries, which is P. Again, we have ensured that the book has
been read from cover to cover, but yet again we have entirely missed the point
of a dictionary such as this, for this dictionary contains cross-references or
transversals throughout the text. ABREACTION has four. ZOOPHTT.TA has
none. Which of ABREACTION's cross-references do you take: DISCHARGE,
EMOTION, REPRESSION or INSIGHT? If you cross-reference DISCHARGE
you are provided with a further nine words in uppercase. If you follow each
of these you will have accumulated a staggering eighty-nine cross-references,
some of which return you to ABREACTION. Very soon you are truly lost in the
book. If you read it this way there is no beginning and no end, for you can
never be sure that you have covered ever single entry. No reading will be the
same; each one rearranges the book in its unique connections with the reader.
Reader and book become a burgeoning multiplicity and the reading becomes
a 'rhizome'2 - to use a Deleuzian term. The text divides up through the read
ing, becoming fragmented and re-fragmented. New syntactical series are taken
up in the reading and the conscious or unconscious decisions to follow one
uppercase rather than another each form further conjunctions with the reader,
further roots and radicles. Were you to depict the course taken in this reading,
it would not describe a two-dimensional line in a Euclidean space but a three-
dimensional tangle, a Brownian movement in a curved Reimannian space.
After never quite finishing A Critical Dictionary I wondered why a good writer
had not created a literary work in just such a manner, a novel about a world or
a person presented as a Brownian dictionary in which entries were alphabetized
and cross-referenced. Imagine the experience of reading such a book, of never
knowing if everything you needed to know in order to understand a certain
part of the book were present to mind. The reader is immersed in a circular
process, whether controlled, random or chaotic, that falls under what might
faithfully be termed a * cybernetics of reading', where the elements of the sys
tem, in this case the narrative, 'are reciprocally contingent and influence each
other's behaviour in a complex manner'.3
In fact, such a book exists - or partly. In See Under. Love,* David Grossman
recounts the extraordinary tale of Momik, a child haunted by the Holocaust
past of his parents. Grossman interrupts his linear narrative when he attempts
to present 'the events in the life of a single individual', that of Kazik, an ancil
lary character. In chapter four entitled 'The Complete Encyclopaedia of Kazik's
Life - First Edition', the narrator orders his entries regarding the life of Kazik
according to the Hebrew alphabet. Furthermore, he invites the reader to 'feel
free to read the encyclopaedia entries m any sequence he chooses, skipping
forward and backward at will'. Might not the self be similarly structured,
similarly read?
XIV Preface
This is one of the central questions of this book. However, in addressing this
through the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Paul Ricoeur I was tempted to
present this book in dictionary or encyclopaedic format. It could be argued that
it is insufficient to the task at hand to organize it solely as a linear argument. It
appeared to need more than this, for otherwise one risked throwing the self out
with the bad argument. I considered an additional structural model - and I was
not without precedents from the protagonists themselves. Ricoeur, in Oneself as
Another, invites us to enter his book 'at any point', given that each study (he
emphasizes that these are not chapters) constitutes a total part. He does this to
challenge 'the indecomposable simplicity of the cogito'. It is a strategy also
employed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, a book 'composed
not of chapters but of "plateaus" ... [which] ... may be read independently of
one another, except the conclusion which should be read at the end'.5 This
approach is also taken by at least one literary writer, J. G. Ballard in his book,
The Atrocity Exhibition. In an author's note to the 2001 edition, Ballard suggests
to his readers the following strategy:
Rather than star^at the beginning of each chapter, as in a conventional novel,
simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye. If the ideas or
images seem interesting, scan the nearby paragraphs for anything that
resonates in an intriguing way. Fairly soon, I hope, the fog will clear, and the
underlying narrative will reveal itself6
I decided however to resist the temptation of departing radically from a linear
model of narrative - at least for the bulk of this book. Why? To a large degree
I was influenced by Jacques Lacan's distinction between the four fundamental
discourses; to forego the 'University Discourse' for something else would almost
inevitably invite to the surface one of the other discourses, and given my profes
sional background, this would more than likely be that of the 'Analyst' or even
the 'Hysteric'.7 To combine discourses would also have been problematic since
there would be no basis for making any truth claims within a given discourse,
given that what might be true in one philosophical position or discourse could
well be false in the other. Besides, it would never be clear in any case from
which discourse one was speaking.
Yet, a philosophical work should reflect a creative process if that creative pro
cess is its prey. Translating the Deleuzian world into a linear narrative of the self
will only work under certain conditions and it will be at its most vulnerable
when we attempt to place it within narrative itself. It is in the ontogenesis of the
narrative self that one needs to be most alert to non-narrative, to non-linearity,
to rhizomatic elements. If in creating transversal conjunctions that appear
like flight paths out of the text we disrupt cogent argument, it is solely with a
view to supporting that very argument by way of demonstrating that there is no