Drive and Desire: Zizek and Anti-Oedipus
DRAFT VERSION
Aaron Schuster
aaron_schuster@yahoo.com
Outline
1. Introduction
2. An overview of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
3. From desire to drive: Freud and Lacan
4. Primary repression…
5. … and the birth of the symbolic
6. Against Interpretation, or Serge Leclaire on the ‘reality of desire’
7. The problem of genesis in Zizek
Introduction
In Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Slavoj Zizek rejects AntiOedipus as “arguably Deleuze’s worst book,” an easy escape from the theoretical
deadlock that traverses his earlier solo work, especially The Logic of Sense.1 This
deadlock concerns the relationship between, on the one hand, the radical gap
separating bodily causes from the immaterial field of sense (in Lacanian parlance, the
symbolic order) and, on the other, the production of discrete bodies from out of the
pure flow of becoming.2 In short, Deleuze is criticized for having abandoned,
supposedly under the influence of Guattari, the problem of the “logic of sense,” the
theory of the event as an autonomous surface-effect, in favor of—to cite Deleuze’s
book on Francis Bacon—the “logic of sensation,” the depths of chaotic flows and
forces that both constitute and tear apart bodies.
It would not be difficult to turn this argument around and claim that is it precisely
Deleuze’s ‘Guattarian turn’ that brings him into (surprising) proximity with some of
the key developments of the so-called late Lacan. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari’s
project in Anti-Oedipus could be read, in Lacanian terms, precisely as a shift from
desire to drive, and hence is consonant with one of the major themes of Zizek’s work
from the late 1990s onward: the privileging of drive over desire as the final frontier of
Lacanian theory. When Zizek criticizes his own first English book The Sublime
Object of Ideology as “endorsing a quasi-transcendental reading of Lacan, focused
on the notion of the Real as the impossible Thing-in-itself,”3 one can ask whether this
was not already, in 1972, the aim of Deleuze and Guattari’s “auto-critique of
psychoanalysis”: to disabuse Lacanian theory of the quasi-transcendental orthodoxy
that threatened to squelch its radical core. Against the heroism of failure, the somber
dictum that the subject must reconcile itself to castration, that the object is desire is
forever lost, that the dialectic of law and transgression is the ultimate horizon of
1
Slavoj Zizek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004),
p. 21.
2
Ibid.
3
Zizek, For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a political factor, “Forward to the second
edition” (London: Verso, 2002), p. xii.
1
analytic experience, and so on, Deleuze and Guattari champion the more uncanny
acephalous realm of the drive and its potential to revolutionize the established
coordinates of a given symbolic order.
There is also a third possibility. Rather than an unresolved deadlock or “inherent
impasse”4 in Deleuze’s work, the “two becomings”5 that Zizek identifies can be
viewed as a positive virtue: the achievement of Deleuze is precisely to think together
these two supposedly incompatible levels. If this is correct, then is there is less a
‘turn’ in Deleuze’s thought than a working out or an elaboration—often with
completely divergent technical vocabularies—of different ways in which these levels
relate. I will argue that the two becomings or two levels of genesis in Deleuze, one of
the surface and one of the depths (to follow the division of The Logic of Sense), can
be productively translated in Lacanian terms as follows. First there is the static
genesis, which describes the symbolic constitution of reality. This process leaves a
fissure in the world, a displaced and displaceable gap which Deleuze designates as the
sense event, aleatory point, or quasi-cause, all regarded by Zizek as synonyms for the
objet a. This evasive ‘object cause’ of desire is that point in reality more real than
reality itself, discernible in the way that it warps or distorts the latter’s smooth
functioning. Here Zizek praises Deleuze for maintaining the gap between the sense
event, described as the “emergence of New,”6 and corporeal causality as the network
of connections that comprises everyday reality. Yet he fails to see that, for Deleuze,
the very surface on which the event plays is itself the product of another genesis. This
is the dynamic genesis, which explains the origin of the surface from out of the presymbolic realm of the drives, a process that proceeds through a number of “passive
syntheses” until it forms a ‘writing pad’, i.e. a surface for symbolic inscription. This is
the domain of the untamed, non-castrated body beneath the ‘unconscious structured
like a language’ (as Deleuze and Guattari say of Lacan, “the symbolic organization of
the structure … has as its reverse side the real inorganization of desire”7). There are
two senses of the real at stake here: one as a fleeting ‘evental’ point inscribed within
yet exceeding the frame of reality, the other as a chaos of forces that precedes and
conditions the installation of the symbolic order. The first adopts the perspective of
the synchronic functioning of the symbolic, while the second inquires into the prehistory of this order. One of the confusing aspects of Zizek’s argumentation is that
while he definitely grapples with this latter problem of the passage from the real to the
symbolic, he refuses to recognize it as a key concern of Deleuze, and especially of
Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus.
This essay forms a part of a broader inquiry into the relation between psychic
individuation in Deleuze and subject formation in Lacan. Deleuze’s relationship with
psychoanalysis is complicated to say the least. He may alternatively be viewed as
deeply sympathetic to Freud, Klein, and Lacan, translating their insights into his own
metaphysical vocabulary; or else a sarcastic critic of psychoanalytic ideology, as in
his collaborative works with Guattari; or else simply indifferent to Freud and his
4
Zizek, Organs Without Bodies, p. 20.
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 165.
6
Zizek, Organs Without Bodies, p. 27.
7
A-O, p. 328.
5
2
legacy, nourishing himself on other, largely forgotten romantic and irrationalist
philosophies of the unconscious: Jung, Bergson, D.H. Lawrence, Aleister Crowley...8
In spite of its relentless anti-Freudian polemics and seeming conceptual anarchy, I
believe that Anti-Oedipus should be read as a serious attempt to engage with Lacanian
theory. If anything, Deleuze and Guattari see themselves as faithful because
iconoclastic adherents to Lacan’s program against the stale sloganeering of his
disciples. As Deleuze explains, “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 so thoroughly misguided, and which Lacan
himself has always managed to turn on their head to bring out their limitations.”9
Anti-Oedipus might well be viewed as a monstrous offspring of Lacanian
psychoanalysis, in the sense that Deleuze conceived his philosophical enterprise as
creative buggery, producing ‘children’ of great thinkers that were misshapen and
improbable but nevertheless their own.10 Jacques-Alain Miller has claimed that AntiOedipus, with its critique of naïve oedipalism and its humor-laden praise of madness,
was indeed recognized by Lacan as a delirious progeny.11
An overview of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia in Anti-Oedipus designates less a clinical entity than the deep
ontological structure of the world, the Heraclitean flux out of which more or less
stable figures emerge like temporary islands in a ceaselessly flowing river. This flux
is the madness of creation, a maelstrom of forces which threatens to engulf
individuated things, collapsing their borders and blurring identities, but which also
holds the promise of radical renewal and revolutionary change. In The Logic of Sense
Deleuze writes of the “extraordinary … moments in which philosophy makes the
Abyss (Sans-fond) speak and finds the mystical language of its wrath, its
formlessness, and its blindness: Boehme, Schelling, Schopenhauer.”12 Anti-Oedipus
can be viewed as an attempt to give voice to the Abyss in a properly modern way: no
longer as an obscure pulsating Will or Divine fury but as an immensely complex
technical apparatus. A machinic Abyss for the modern techno-era. To fully explain
Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of machines—which makes use of, among others,
Lewis Mumford, Samuel Butler and Bruno Bettelheim’s case history of Joey the
‘mechanical boy’—would take us too far afield here. Suffice it to mention that this
theory marks a sea change with respect to the classical conception of the machine, in
particular the relation between technological artifacts and organic life. If philosophy
traditionally sought to comprehend life in terms of dead mechanism (with the clock
serving as a privileged model for the intricate machinery of living beings),
contemporary thought increasingly understands machines as quasi-living organisms,
8
For the latter approach, see Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious (London: Continuum,
2007).
9
Deleuze, “On Anti-Oedipus,” Negotiations transl. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia, 1995), p.
14.
10
Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” ibid., p. 6.
11
“L’Anti-Oedipe est une variation sur un thème de Lacan, la critique de l’oedipianisme naïf, enrichie
d’un éloge, non sans humour, de la schizophrénie. C’est d’ailleurs une progéniture que Lacan a
reconnue, tout en la taxant de délirante.” Interview with François Ewald, Magazine Littéraire no. 271
(November 1989), p. 24.
12
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 106.
3
with the capacities of evolution, reproduction and self-organization. In an essay from
1965 Georges Canguilhem summed up this momentous turn by saying “One has
almost always tried to explain the structure and functioning of the organism starting
from the structure and functioning of an already constructed machine. Yet rarely has
it been attempted to understand the very construction of the machine on the basis of
the structure and functioning of the organism.”13 Deleuze and Guattari take up this
challenge, forging a ‘living technics’ that aims to transcend the alternatives of
mechanism and vitalism by recasting the metaphysics of creation in terms of an
expanded theory of machines. “Everything is a machine … Everywhere producing
machines, desiring machines, schizophrenic machines, all generic life.”14
Anti-Oedipus tells the story, or even double-story, of how subjectivity arises from the
hurly-burly of desiring machines (Chapters I & II), and the course of universal history
as a succession of mega-machines (social forms) that organize, canalize and repress
desire (Chapters III & IV). The first story supports and subtends the second, as the
desiring machines constitute the “infrastructure” of the massive social organizations.
In psychoanalytic terms, the two stories together lay out the split between the
unconscious and consciousness, i.e. the unfathomable multiplicity of molecular flows
and partial objects on the one hand, and the realm of representation with its molar
formations and large aggregates (objectities) on the other. Though Anti-Oedipus does
not employ this vocabulary, this split could also be understood in terms of Deleuze’s
well known division between the virtual and the actual; in this comparison, AntiOedipus describes both the construction the virtual, which is never simply given but
itself the product of complex synthetic processes, and the actual as a series of concrete
social-historical forms. Though these two layers are opposed in various guises
throughout the book—production versus representation, molecular versus molar,
desiring machines versus Oedipus, schizophrenia versus paranoia, and so on—, this
opposition is too simple (and too structural) as it stands. Unfortunately, the polemical
tone reinforces the impression that the first term in these proliferating dualisms is
“good” and the second “evil,” and, even further, that the second should be done away
with in favor of its more anarchic, energetic and revolutionary cousin.15 “To overturn
the theater of representation into the order of desiring production” is a typical
formulation.16 Because Anti-Oedipus is usually read in ethico-political terms, as a
“guide to the non-fascist life,” a blueprint for the multitude, or what not, I think it is
important to emphasize its other, less flashy dimension: its descriptive task, to provide
an account of the genesis of representation from the realm of production, to show how
Oedipus comes into being through the immanent workings of desiring machines.17
The story of Anti-Oedipus culminates with the rise of capitalist civilization, which is
paradoxically close to the schizophrenic core of creation itself. In a word, capitalism
Georges Canguilhem, “Machine et organisme,” La connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1965), p.
130; my translation.
14
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 2; translation modified.
15
Here I am solidary with Zizek in his opposition to this duality of “the Good versus the Bad”; see
Organs Without Bodies, p. 28. However, I think that this duality can be undermined from within AntiOedipus, through a more attentive reading of the book. There is no need to turn to the theory of the
sense-event in The Logic of Sense to problematize the supposedly flat becoming of the real in AntiOedipus. As we shall see, the symbolic dimension is definitely not missing in the latter.
16
A-O, p. 271; emphasis added.
17
Joe Hughes emphasizes this aspect in his excellent Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
(London: Continuum, 2008).
13
4
is crazy, “mad from one end to the other and from the beginning.”18 It volatilizes
previously existing social bonds, displaces populations and geographic boundaries,
breaks up traditional belief systems, and dissolves established identities. ‘All that is
solid melt into air’: the galloping insanity of capitalism is part and parcel of its
consummate rationality, which subordinates everything to the single-minded pursuit
of surplus value, or, to parody Deleuze and Guattari’s language, its perpetual
becoming-profit. There is a kind of poetry of capital to be found here. And Deleuze
and Guattari are critical of capitalism not for its madness, which is rather a term of
praise, but because it is not mad enough. While unleashing an “awesome
schizophrenic accumulation of energy,”19 capitalism always “reterritorializes” what it
had just torn asunder: it brings back the ego (the consumer), the order of
representation (the commodity form), and the social link (Oedipus), thereby
interrupting its own schizophrenic process. Indeed, precisely because capitalist
civilization is closest in nature to schizophrenic desiring production, it mobilizes a
stronger and more devious apparatus of repression than anything hitherto imagined.20
What interests Deleuze and Guattari is the possibility of radicalizing the dynamic
unleashed by capitalism and turning it against its own order. “The schizo is not
revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process … is the potential for revolution.”21
Schizophrenia has a peculiar double status in Anti-Oedipus. It is both a ‘timeless’
ontological structure and an affliction of the human mind which emerges at a precise
historical moment. “Schizophrenia is our very own ‘malady’, modern man’s sickness.
The end of history has no other meaning.”22 Here we have a kind of clinical version of
the end of history thesis: after Hegel’s philosopher, Schelling’s artist, Nietzsche’s
prophet, and Kojève’s dictator, Deleuze and Guattari present the schizo as avatar of
pure difference bringing to a close the history of representation. (Despite important
differences with Hegel, Anti-Oedipus may justly be considered Deleuze’s
Phenomenology of Spirit). To grasp the schizophrenic’s world historical significance,
it is necessary to first rescue him from his psychiatric diagnosis. For psychiatry
confines schizophrenia to pathology, conceiving it in strictly negative terms, as
defect, deficiency or conflict. The case of psychoanalysis is more complicated, but not
much better. Deleuze and Guattari fault Freud for modeling the psyche after neurosis,
turning the schizo into a failed neurotic; Lacanian orthodoxy is similarly criticized for
tasking the psychotic with insufficient integration in the symbolic order. The aim of
Anti-Oedipus is to reverse these judgments and produce a positive portrait of
schizophrenia. No longer a mangled or lacking subject, the shattered universe of
schizophrenia instead bears witness to the miraculous powers of the body. The
schizo’s wide-ranging world delirium and fantastic organ machines provide an answer
to Spinoza’s question ‘What can the body do?’,23 and Deleuze and Guattari
approvingly quote R.D. Laing’s description of schizophrenia as a “voyage of
initiation, a transcendental experience of the loss of the Ego.”24 In Deleuze’s words,
madness is “a rupture, an eruption, a break-through which smashes the continuity of a
18
A-O, p. 373.
A-O, p. 34.
20
A-O, p. 337.
21
A-O, p. 341.
22
A-O, p. 130.
23
“However, nobody as yet has determined the limits of the body’s capabilities: that is, nobody has yet
learned from experience what the body can and cannot do…” (III, 2, Scholium). Spinoza, Ethics,
transl. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992).
24
A-O, p. 84.
19
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personality and takes it on a kind of trip through ‘more reality’, at once intense and
terrifying, following lines of flight that engulf nature and history, organism and
spirit.”25 A controlled schizophrenia is itself the cure for the forces that menace life,
chief among them the bad (neurotic) lunacy of personal identity. Like Lacanian
psychoanalysis, the end-point of Deleuzoguattarian schizo-therapy is subjective
destitution—a movement of depersonalization conceived in Anti-Oedipus as opening
onto a more profound anonymous life of scattered molecules, piercing sensations, and
aleatory events.
Since its publication Anti-Oedipus has been dogged by the criticism that it
romanticizes madness. Do its authors have no sense for the tremendous suffering of
the mentally ill? Though this is a specious accusation, one of the crucial theoretical
problems of the book is distinguishing ‘divine schizophrenia’, madness in the
profound, ontological sense, from debilitating psychopathology. Are mentally ill
schizophrenics essentially “suicided by society,” rendered sick by the forces of social
repression and the psychiatric cuckoo’s nest? Or must this classic anti-psychiatry
thesis be altered, so that the danger comes not from only from priests, judges, and
doctors but from something in the nature of the schizophrenic process itself which
threatens destructive dissolution? “Lines of flight … turn out badly on their own
account, as a result of a danger which they conceal. Kleist and his suicide pact,
Hölderlin and his madness, Fitzgerald and his destruction, Virginia Woolf and her
disappearance.”26 The successful schizos are the artistic ones, the ones who are able—
to use a more Freudian vocabulary—to sublimate their suffering and give expression
to the explosive corporeal forces precisely as a catastrophe of meaning and
representation.27 It is from such artists, rather than psychiatric manuals or hospital
wards, that we can best learn about schizophrenia. But the capacity for artistic
expression is no guarantee against cracking up. In one of their better formulations of
the problem, Deleuze and Guattari offer a cautionary note: “Schizophrenia is at once
the wall, the breaking through this wall, and the failure of this breakthrough.”28
From desire to drive: Freud and Lacan
In my opinion the title “Anti-Oedipus” is unfortunate with respect to Deleuze and
Guattari’s enterprise for at least three reasons. First it vastly overestimates the cultural
power of psychoanalysis. Even if orthodox psychoanalysis effectively is an ideology
of repression, it is hardly a socially significant one. Here the book is very local and
dated in its concerns. Second, Deleuze and Guattari are wrong about the ‘unholy
alliance’ of Oedipus and capitalism. Capitalism need not depend on a patriarchal
structure for its perpetuation: on the contrary—and to the chagrin of free market
cultural conservatives—it is capitalism that has effectively de-oedipalized society,
breaking up the traditional family unit and denigrating the father’s symbolic authority.
Far from opening onto a new freedom, this liberation from oedipal constrains has
generated even worse superego pressures: the neurotic Oedipal subject, guilty for its
inevitable betrayal of the introjected ideal, has given way to the hollow ‘narcissistic’
25
Two Regimes of Madness, p. 27.
Dialogues, p. 140.
27
See Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks on the final paintings of William Turner, A-O, p. 132.
28
A-O, p. 136.
26
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character type bombarded by images of enjoyment.29 Third, the ‘Oedipus’ that the
book so vehemently attacks is far from being the most interesting or nuanced one in
the dramatis personæ of psychoanalytic theory. Lacan too criticized the naïve version
of the Oedipus complex, and, like Deleuze, focused more on Oedipus at Colonus—the
outcast, the human waste, the inassimilable remainder—than Oedipus ‘the family
man’.30
What, then, is the real aim of their criticism? It should be emphasized that Deleuze
and Guattari’s critique of Oedipus is an immanent one. Their goal is not to tear down
psychoanalysis (“Freud is dead!”) but to recover its properly subversive core, a rescue
operation that takes aim not only at later orthodoxies but, more fundamentally, at the
reactionary tendencies of Freud himself. Deleuze and Guattari actually poke fun of
themselves here, comparing their difficulty to that of the dogged Marxist separating
the good communist wheat from the Stalinist shaft. “Psychoanalysis is like the
Russian Revolution; we don’t know when it started going bad.”31 (One thinks also of
Heidegger’s quest to uncover the precise moment when authentic Greek thought was
infected by metaphysics). So, when did psychoanalysis go off the rails? “Oedipus is
the idealist turning point.”32 On the one hand, “what Freud and the first analysts
discover is the domain of free syntheses where everything is possible: endless
connections, nonexclusive disjunctions, nonspecific conjunctions, partial objects and
flows.”33 This is the revolutionary Freud who denied the psychiatric distinction
between normality and pathology and demolished the teleological conception of
sexuality, the theorist of the psyche’s polymorphous perversity as a riot of partial
drives ruled not by self-preservation or any egoistic striving but by the blind
imperative of pleasure. There is, however, another Freud, the Freud who re-inscribes
his subversive insights back into a familiar normative scheme, turning the drives into
developmental stages and superimposing on the dispersed domain of infantile
sexuality an adult drama of love and hatred, law and transgression.34 To recover the
early subversive Freud against the later gentrifying one is the goal of Deleuze and
Guattari’s critique. In a word, what Anti-Oedipus aims to salvage is the Freudian
notion of Trieb from its Oedipal domestication.
The same logic of immanent critique guides Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Lacan.
Broadly speaking, Anti-Oedipus engages Lacan in a double manner, vehemently
See Christopher Lasch’s valuable essay “The Freudian Left and Cultural Revolution,” New Left
Review no. 129 (September-October 1981). See also Zizek’s “Whither Oedipus?” in The Ticklish
Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999).
30
“We remember Oedipus’ dirty little secret, not the Oedipus of Colonus, on his line of flight, who has
become imperceptible, identical to the great living secret.” Deleuze, Dialogues p. 46. Deleuze and
Guattari in fact credit Lacan throughout Anti-Oedipus with deconstructing the Oedipal myth.
31
A-O, p. 55.
32
A-O, p. 55.
33
A-O, p. 54.
34
Along these lines, Philippe Van Haute offers a Deleuzoguattarian reading of Freud, showing how the
later introduction of Oedipus occults Freud’s earlier insights into infantile sexuality, and is responsible
for a veritable “turn” in his work. “The Oedipus complex, as Freud defines it, undoes the radical
opposition between infantile and adult sexuality, and as a result makes it possible to think in
developmental terms. More specifically, the reintroduction of a normative and essentialist definition of
‘normality’ is the inevitable counterpart of this shift. It is therefore—at least this is my hypothesis—the
introduction of the Oedipus complex in the 1920s which explains the Kehre in Freud’s text.” “The
introduction of the Oedipus Complex and the reinvention of instinct: Freud’s Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality” Radical Philosophy no. 115 (September-October 2002), p. 8.
29
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rejecting the so-called orthodox aspects of his theory (the bad ‘Lacanism’ of lack and
the signifier), while elaborating what Deleuze and Guattari take to be his most
original and productive concepts (notably, the objet a). “Lacan’s admirable theory of
desire appears to us to have two poles: one relation to ‘the object small a’ as a
desiring-machine, which defines desire in terms of 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.”35 This brief statement sums up
the essentials of Deleuze and Guattari’s approach. Lacanian theory is effectively
bifurcated: the imaginary and the symbolic (along with the concept of fantasy) are
denigrated, and the real developed in a new (delirious) direction. For Deleuze and
Guattari the real is the only ‘real’ domain; the imaginary and symbolic are realms of
illusion and alienation, falsifying the chaotic dynamics of real experience, i.e. the
machinic productions of the unconscious. “Anti-Oedipus was about the univocity of
the real, a sort of Spinozism of the unconscious […] The people who hate ’68, or say
it was a mistake, see it as something symbolic or imaginary. But that’s precisely what
it wasn’t, it was pure reality breaking through.”36 As they state unequivocally: “For
the unconscious itself is no more structural then personal, it does not symbolize any
more than it imagines or represents; it engineers, it is machinic. Neither imaginary not
symbolic, it is the Real in itself, the ‘impossible real’ and its production.”37 Correcting
Lacan on this last point, Deleuze and Guattari explain that the real is the domain
where “everything becomes possible” since it is a “sub-representative field”: only in
the symbolic is “the fusion of desire with the impossible is performed, with lack
defined as castration.”38 We are thus left with the (libidinal) object without the
(signifying) Other—which could well serve as motto for Deleuze and Guattari’s
selective appropriation of Lacan: a theory of pre-personal intensities and desiring
machines in opposition to the subject split by language, the order of signifiers (the
Other) in which it finds its identity as barred, inconsistent, lacking. Such is the
“reverse side of the structure” uncovered by Anti-Oedipus.39
Arguably, the development of Lacan’s own thought moves in exactly the same
direction. There are two passages in particular in Lacan’s oeuvre that seem to jibe
with Anti-Oedipus, both from what is usually considered Lacan’s middle period in
which he undertakes a reappraisal of the Freudian concept of the drive. First is
Lacan’s characterization of the drive in Seminar XI as a montage of heterogeneous
fragments, a kind of “surrealist collage”: “If we bring together the paradoxes that we
just defined at the level of Drang, at that of the object, at that of the aim of the drive, I
think that the resulting image would show the workings of a dynamo connected up to
a gas-tap, a peacock’s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who
is just lying there looking beautiful.”40 Large portions of Anti-Oedipus might be read
as an extended riff on this passage. As Lacan elaborates in that seminar, the drive
should be conceived as a headless (acephalous) circuit turning around a partial object,
a “radical structure in which the subject is not yet placed.”41 Subjectivity proper—the
35
A-O, p 27fn.
“On Philosophy” in Negotiations, pp. 144-45.
37
A-O, p 53.
38
A-O, pp. 27, 300, 306. See also p. 83.
39
A-O, p 309.
40
Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 169.
41
Ibid, pp. 181-82.
36
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split subject of the signifier—is a secondary development which emerges from out of
the circular loop of the drive. Second is the distinction between drive and desire
proposed in the écrit “On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire”: “[D]esire
comes from the Other, and jouissance is located on the side of the Thing”; “the drive
divides the subject and desire, the latter sustaining itself only by the relation it
misrecognizes between this division and an object that causes it. Such is the structure
of fantasy.”42 This distinction would appear to provide a relatively clear-cut scheme
for understanding the relationship between jouissance and subjectivity. On the one
hand, enjoyment is linked to the Thing and its corporeal figures, the various objets a:
this is the ‘immanent’ domain of the drive, radically closed in on itself in an
autoerotic loop. Desire, on the other, is bound up in an intersubjective dialectic whose
very essence is interpretive openness: desire is desire of the ‘transcendent’ Other,
turning around the unfathomable question ‘what does the Other want?’. These two
levels meet in the fundamental fantasy, which provides a kind of (unconscious)
answer to the enigma of the Other’s desire by ciphering it in a bizarre bodily
scenario—fantasy is the imaginary side of the partial objects, i(a). By doing so,
however, it obscures what Deleuze and Guattari would call the real desiring
production, so that the subject ‘misrecognizes’ its non-fantasmatic real ‘cause’. Much
more important than the trumpeted critique of Oedipus and allegorical-style
interpretation (truck = Daddy, etc.), Anti-Oedipus is, in Lacanian terms, a theory of
the drive against desire (to avoid possible confusion: what Deleuze and Guattari call
desire is referred to by Lacan as drive).
Zizek presents the relationship between the Other and the object in the following way:
“Identification takes place at the level of logos, it is always identification with a
signifier; as such it comes after the ‘impossible’ relationship between a drive qua real
and its object, objet petit a … symbolic identification (ultimately identification with
the Master-Signifier that represents the subject) compensates for the ‘impossibility’,
the structural failure, of the subject’s traumatic relationship towards objet a.”43 This
schematization of Lacan’s mature theory, setting the drive and its object on one side
and the subject’s constitution via symbolic identification on the other, agrees with the
bifurcation made by Deleuze and Guattari. Except for one major difference. For
Zizek, the origin of subjectivity is explained as an escape from an unbearable trauma
at the level of the drive. The relation to the object is failed, impossible; it can only be
dealt with (i.e. elaborated symbolically) in the field of the Other. As we have seen,
Deleuze and Guattari abjure this vocabulary of impossibility. In the sub-representative
realm everything is possible; it is the Other that introduces the notions of lack and
castration, thereby crushing the free productivity of desiring machines. Instead of a
story of escape, Anti-Oedipus presents one of alienation and capture—or so it seems.
Primary repression…
Could the aim of schizoanalysis, then, be reformulated as liberating the creative
power of the drives from crushing grip of Oedipal desire? Such is the persistent hippie
misreading of Anti-Oedipus, which transforms Deleuze and Guattari into blissed out
prophets of a ‘summer of desire’. Though not their intention, Deleuze and Guattari are
Lacan, “On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire” in Écrits, transl. Bruce Fink (New York:
W.W. Norton, 2006), p. 724.
43
Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), p. 48;
emphasis in original.
42
9
partly responsible for this flaccid interpretation, in the same way that Lacan bears
some responsibility for the misconstrual of his theory as preaching tragic resignation
before the impossibility of jouissance, the humble acceptance of castration, finitude,
etc.44
We need to examine in greater detail what I’ve been calling Deleuze and Guattari’s
conception of the drive. A distinction from Lacan can help us out here. In Television
Lacan distinguishes between suppression and repression, in a way which at first
sounds like an ironic refutation of Anti-Oedipus. “Freud didn’t say that repression
comes from suppression: that (to paint a picture) castration is due to what Daddy
brandished over his brat playing with his wee-wee: ‘We’ll cut it off, no kidding, if
you do it again’.”45 So much for the supposed primacy of mommy-daddy-me: for
Lacan, the classic image of the castrating father—along with all other forms of
suppression emanating from the social sphere—is founded on a more primordial
instance of psychic repression which has nothing to do with the family per se. “Why
couldn’t the family, society itself, be creations built from repression? They’re nothing
less.”46 A succinct formulation of this same idea was already put forward by Freud’s
colleague Victor Tausk: “For the living organism reality is unbearable, and [...] the
task is incumbent upon it of creating a substitute for reality formation that is more
bearable: culture.”47 In short, all of culture is a gigantic collective defense mechanism
that allows human beings to live with the otherwise intolerable reality that is their
libido. And Deleuze and Guattari say exactly the same thing: “if the family is able in
this manner to slip into the recording of desire, it is because the body without organs
on which this recording is accomplished already exercises on its own account, as we
have seen, a primal repression of desiring-production. It falls to the family to profit
from this, and to superimpose the repression that is properly termed secondary.”48 In
order to understand this, it is necessary to backtrack a little and explain how the
mechanism of primary repression works and its relation to the desiring machines.
Everything begins in Anti-Oedipus with the chaotic realm of partial objects, what
Deleuze calls in his study of Hume ‘the delirium of the given’: “a collection without
an album, a play without a stage, a flux of perceptions … The depth of the mind is
indeed delirium.”49 This pre-Oedipal universe is described in The Logic of Sense as
one of unspeakable violence where “bodies burst and cause other bodies to burst in a
universal cesspool.”50 Clearly we are far from a blissful Eden. The problem that
Deleuze and Guattari confront is essentially the same as the one set forth in the Hume
book: how can the given transcend itself, through what processes does the
disconnected medley of the mind become subject? This problem is all the more
imperative given the brutal and dizzying nature of partial objects: their pounding and
44
As Philippe Mengue argues, in the confrontation between Deleuze and Lacan we must guard against
both a negative and pessimistic vision of desire and an affirmative vitalist politics bereft of any sense
of the tragic. Gilles Deleuze ou le système du multiple (Paris: Kimé, 1994), p. 107.
45
Lacan, “Television,” transl. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, October no. 40
(Spring 1987), pp. 31-32; emphasis in original.
46
Ibid., p. 32.
47
Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society Volume II1: 1910-1911, ed. Herman Nunberg and
Ernst Federn, transl. M. Nunberg (New York: International University Press, 1962), p. 30.
48
A-O, pp. 120-21; emphasis in original.
49
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, transl.
Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia, 1991), p. 23.
50
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 187.
10
throbbing is too much and must be somehow neutralized, evaded. In Anti-Oedipus the
movement of transcendence is first initiated through the creation of a body without
organs which repels the noxious flux. And this is what primary repression is about,
the “repulsion of desiring-machines by the body without organs.”51 At this point the
“paranoiac machine” is born, wherein the drives become “an overall persecution
apparatus” emanating from some alien exterior.52 As bad as this may sound, the new
configuration at least provides for a margin of breathing room compared to the
previous state. For that primordial schizophrenic pandemonium is strictly untenable:
subjectivity is made possible by a minimal paranoia that keeps the purely corporeal
forces at bay. Desiring production is opposed by a liberating moment of “antiproduction.”53
In an interview from 1980 Deleuze described Anti-Oedipus as a kind of Russian
Constructivism of the unconscious.54 In the same spirit, there are two fundamental
trends at work in Deleuze and Guattari’s material unconscious, which we could name
after Stakhanov (the hero of Soviet socialist productivity) and Oblomov (the lazy
aristocrat of Ivan Goncharov’s eponymous novel). In its Stakhanovist mode, the
unconscious is endlessly productive and creative, forging new connections and
proliferating flows; this overwhelming output, however, is opposed by the
Oblomovist tendency to absolute indolence, which brings all the feverish activity to a
crashing halt. It does not eat, breathe, shit, and fuck; it stays in bed. Or to quote
Deleuze and Guattari: “From a certain point of view it would be much better if
nothing worked, if nothing functioned.”55
In the reception of Anti-Oedipus relatively little attention has been paid to “antiproduction,” even though it is here that can be found the Deleuzoguattarian equivalent
of the death drive.56 Five years earlier, in Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze recast
Freud’s speculations in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in terms of transcendental
philosophy. According to Deleuze, Freud is effectively both Newton and Kant: at the
empirical level, he demonstrates how pleasure is, without exception, the regulating
principle of psychic life and at the transcendental level he describes the operations of
binding and unbinding as the necessary conditions for the pleasure principle’s reign.57
This constitutive activity is now renamed ‘machinically’ as production and antiproduction, but Deleuze and Guattari do not intend these terms to taken as a new
dualism à la Eros and Thanatos. Rather, the desiring machines work by breaking
down, or break down because they work too well: the risk of collapse, destruction,
and exhaustion is intrinsic to their excessive driving force. Production and antiproduction (which is equality to the polarity: organs-without-bodies and bodywithout-organs) are two facets of one and the same desiring production. Taken
together they are opposed to the organizational forms and larger totalities that use
their power for their own purposes (self-preservation, social reproduction, etc.). “The
body without organs and organs-partial objects are opposed conjointly to the
51
A-O, p. 9; emphasis in original.
Ibid.
53
A-O, p. 8.
54
Two Regimes of Madness, p. 175.
55
A-O, p. 7.
56
An exception to this neglect is Jean-François Lyotard’s essay “Energumen Capitalism,” transl. James
Leigh, Semiotext(e) vol. II no. 3 (1977), pp. 25-26.
57
See Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty in Masochism, transl. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone, 1991), pp.
111-117.
52
11
organism.”58 Or, put in Zizekian terms, the death drive qua hyperbolic exuberance is
opposed to the domesticating force of the symbolic structure.
This leads to an important correction of the standard portrait of Anti-Oedipus.
Contrary to Zizek, for Deleuze and Guattari evil does not consist only in “the
subordination of the flux of desire to an Ideal which truncates its assertive life-power,
its multiple productivity.”59 Rather there is an evil, ‘anti-productive’ dimension of
desire as such, that “profound and almost unliveable Power”60 which constitutes
psychic life. This insight leads to a new appreciation of Oedipus. Though Oedipus is
tirelessly condemned throughout the book, it nonetheless plays a crucial (even
necessary?) protective function, taming the anarchic schizophrenic forces while never
fully mastering them.61 Oedipus, as the hegemonic form of social repression, leans on
and is built from that primary repression which renders psychic life possible in the
first place. “Oedipus is a requirement or consequence of social reproduction, insofar
as this latter aims at domesticating a genealogical form and content that are in every
way intractable.”62
… and the birth of the symbolic
Let us take our reading of Anti-Oedipus a little further. Despite its ‘rhizomatic’
appearance as a hodgepodge of concepts and references, Anti-Oedipus has in fact a
classical philosophical structure, full of sharp distinctions and tripartite schemas.
(Guattari complained about not being able to recognize himself in Anti-Oedipus
because of it “polishedness” and “perfection” 63 —indeed, Anti-Oedipus is a nightmare
not of chaos but of order). It may be read as an socio-historical elaboration of
Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, and in fact displays a remarkable continuity
with his earlier work despite the book’s novel vocabulary. Without excavating the
whole philosophical background of these notions, let us look at how Deleuze and
Guattari describe the process whereby the unconscious is constituted. The
unconscious is composed, they tell us, by three passive syntheses. “Desire is the set of
passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies … The real is the
end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the
unconscious.”64 These syntheses operate freely and blindly, without a master plan or
directing instance (which is why they are called “passive”: they happen to and
through the unconscious, rather than being carried out by a transcendent agent). To
give a brief summary of their operation and how they build upon one another:
● The first connective synthesis involves the proliferation of partial objects and their
polymorphous connections, and how their unbearable frenzy is countered by the body
with organs. The body without organs repels the partial objects, setting up a “counter
58
A-O, p. 326.
Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, p. 113.
60
Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation transl. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University
Minnesota, 2003), p. 39.
61
On this important point, see Steven Shaviro, “God, or the Body Without Organs,” p. 23fn; available
at http://www.dhalgren.com/Othertexts/God.pdf
62
A-O, p. 13.
63
Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, ed. Stéphane Nadaud, transl. Kélina Gotman (New York:
Semiotext(e), 2006), p. 404.
64
A-O, p. 26.
59
12
flow of amorphous and undifferentiated fluid.”65 This is the first step towards
subjectivity as liberated from the obscure and suffocating corporeal depths: the
“paranoiac machine.”
● In the second disjunctive synthesis, the body without organs appropriates the partial
objects as its own, recording their connections on its smooth surface. The “associative
flow” of partial object is thereby turned into “signifying chains,” yet the sign elements
are “not themselves signifying. The code resembles not so much a language as a
jargon, an open-ended, polyvocal formation.”66 These primitive inscriptions are
similar to what Lacan calls lalangue, signifiers coagulated with enjoyment, and what
Zizek designates via Schelling as the interstitial domain of “spiritual corporeality”:
material fragments no longer purely bodily but not yet fully meaningful.67 At this
point the body without organs undergoes an important transformation: it becomes a
“miraculating machine,” “arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the
process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi-cause.”68 This is the same
quasi-causality that Zizek affirms in The Logic of Sense as responsible for
maintaining the autonomy of the symbolic order. On the surface there exists a quasicause (aleatory point, the phallus as signifier of castration) that liberates it from strict
material determination and provides a new orientation; in Anti-Oedipus this function
is taken over by the body without organs, which in the second passive synthesis
presents itself as the source of production, ‘miraculating’ the partial objects, even
though it is their material product.
● In the third synthesis of consumption and consummation the body without organs is
submitted to a further development, becoming a field of intensities. These intensities
are based on gradients of attraction and repulsion produced by the prior two
syntheses: the repulsion of the partial objects in the first synthesis, and their attraction
onto the recording surface in the second. “The forces of attraction and repulsion, of
soaring ascents and plunging falls, produce a series of intensive states based on the
intensity = 0 that designates the body without organs.”69 On this field of intensities is
also produced “something of the order of a subject”70 who enjoys (consumes) them:
this is the “celibate machine.” This subject is not yet a symbolic one, it is not Lacan’s
split subject of the signifier. It is rather the autos of auto-erotism, the acephalous
subject of the drive, the subject of an “I feel” that is at a deeper level than the “I see, I
hear” of hallucination and the “I think” of delirium.71 “Here it is not a case of the
hallucinatory experience nor of a delirious mode of thought, but a feeling, a series of
emotions and feelings as a consummation and a consumption of intensive quantities,
that form the material for subsequent hallucinations and deliriums.”72 The body
without organs now figures as the pure form of auto-affection (intensity = 0), and the
nomadic subject the base for the elaboration of more complex psychic processes
(hallucinations, delirium).
65
A-O, p. 9.
A-O, p. 38.
67
Zizek, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997), p. 47.
68
A-O, p. 10.
69
A-O, p. 21.
70
A-O, p. 16.
71
A-O, p. 18.
72
A-O, p. 84.
66
13
In his comments on Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze distances himself from the way he
distinguished surface and depth in his prior work, particularly The Logic of Sense.
“Anti-Oedipus no longer has height or depth, nor surface. In this book everything
happens, is done, the intensities, the events, upon a sort of spherical body or scroll
painting: The Organless Body.”73 “I’ve undergone a change. The surface-depth
opposition no longer concerns me. What interests me now is the relationship between
a full body, a body without organs, and flows that migrate.”74 It is this shift to pure
materialist becoming that Zizek denounces in Organs Without Bodies, accusing it of
being but a variant of idealist ‘empiriocriticism’, a species of irrationalist
Lebensphilosophie.75 As should be already clear, however, the situation is not so
simple. Pace Deleuze, in Anti-Oedipus the surface/depth distinction is not so much
abolished as historicized. The three levels in The Logic of Sense of the schizophrenic
depths, the surface of sense, and the tertiary order of propositions are transformed by
Anti-Oedipus into the flux of desiring machines, the recording surface of the body
without organs, and the universal history of socio-political forms.76 More precisely, it
is in the second passive synthesis that there is an initial constitution of the symbolic,
as a recording surface whose autonomy is guaranteed by the body without organs qua
quasi-cause. But the surface proper does not emerge until much later, with the rise of
Despotic Regime and the advent of the master signifier. “It is perhaps at this juncture
that the question ‘What does it mean?’ begins to be heard, and that problems of
exegesis prevail over problems of use and efficacy.”77 (In terms of the The Logic of
Sense, this is the tertiary realm, the point at which full-fledged propositions can be
formed). What follows in Anti-Oedipus is the story of the breakdown of this order.
The passage from the ‘closed’ Barbarian Empire to the ‘infinite’ universe of Capitalist
Civilization (or, in Lacanian terms, from the master’s to the capitalist discourse)
entails a fateful mutation of the symbolic surface. The master signifier can no longer
guarantee the consistency of meaning. We enter into a condition of generalized
slavery, where the reigning despot or figure of authority is replaced by the abstract
law (axiomatic) of Capital. “‘I too am a slave’—these are the new words spoken by
the master.”78 It is this partial collapse of the symbolic order—the destruction of
social codes by the capitalist axiomatic—that gives birth to the schizophrenic as the
monstrous child of modernity.
Against Interpretation, or Serge Leclaire on the ‘reality of desire’
One of the central motifs of Anti-Oedipus was perfectly well spelled out by Susan
Sontag in her famous 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” a text whose Nietzschean
polemics fit well the categorical style of Deleuze and Guattari. Interpretation, whose
most fundamental operation is that of substitution, ‘A is really B’, is derided for its
contempt of appearances and metaphysical ressentiment: “To interpret is to
impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’.”79
Criticism should show how an artwork functions, how it creates it effects, its unique
intensive experience, and not tell the story of what it means. “In place of a
73
Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 65-66.
Deleuze, Desert Islands, p. 261.
75
Zizek, Organs Without Bodies, pp. 22-23.
76
On this parallelism, see Joe Hughes, Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation.
77
A-O, p. 206.
78
A-O, p. 254.
79
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1966), p. 7.
74
14
hermeneutics we need an erotics of art”80—the phrase is eminently Deleuzoguattarian,
and schizoanalysis may be quite accurately conceived as an erotics rather than a
hermeneutics, i.e. an analysis of interacting drive-intensities and flows instead of a
translation of one set of representations into another. “The unconscious poses no
problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The question posed by desire is not
‘What does it mean?’ but rather ‘How does it work?’”81
In their critique of allegorical interpretation Deleuze and Guattari are in fact deeply
Lacanian, if not Freudian. For Freud had already emphasized that analysis is not an
infinite interpretive endeavor: if it is interminable it’s not because the web of
meanings is inexhaustibly rich, but because interpretation inevitably runs up against
stubborn ‘sticking points’ which it cannot dissolve or move beyond—hence the
importance of what Freud called the economic factor. Lacan similarly argued that, far
from multiplying meanings, the aim of analytic interpretation is to reduce meaning to
nonsense. Not any nonsense, however, but that very precise and singular nonsense
that organizes the subject’s libidinal existence. “Interpretation is directed not so much
at the meaning as towards reducing the non-meaning of the signifiers, so that we may
rediscover the determinants of the subject’s entire behavior … not … in its
significatory dependence, but precisely in its irreducible and senseless character qua
chain of signifiers.”82 One of the major difficulties Lacan faced was clarifying the
exact status of these pregnant nonsensical elements, “the paradoxical grounding point
of the Symbolic”83 at once interior and exterior to it. Anti-Oedipus can be read as one
long explanation of where these elements come from, how they are put together, and
how they become entangled in larger circuits of meaning that distort their true
machinic nature.
In the context of the above quotation Lacan refers approvingly to Serge Leclaire’s
work on interpretation, which also plays an important role in Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze
and Guattari specifically cite his essay “La réalité du désir” as crucial to their
understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis and a key influence on their own theory of
desiring machines. It is therefore instructive to review Leclaire’s main line of
argument, and examine how Anti-Oedipus re-interprets it.
Taking up Freud’s distinction between the plasticity and adhesiveness of the libido—
in spite of the libido’s incredible openness, it tends to get stuck on the same dumb
satisfactions that repeat throughout a person’s life—, Leclaire describes a realm of
“pure singularities,” fixed elements that compose the final syntax of the subject’s
desire: the odor of a woman’s neck, the modulation of an echoing voice that seems to
say ‘You’, the hint of acidity in baked apples, the fullness of the hand as it seizes a
ball, a beauty mark.84 He calls this collection of irreducible elements the “pure being
of desire,” a “fiction” of the unconscious in-itself without any conscious or
preconscious entanglements. This is the most primordial level of the psyche, the
80
Ibid., p. 14.
A-O, p. 108; emphasis in original.
82
Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 212.
83
Dominiek Hoens and Ed Pluth, “The sinthome: A New Way of Writing an Old Problem?,” in
Reinventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan, ed. Luke Thurston (New York: Other Press,
2002), p. 12.
84
This is Leclaire’s set of examples, the descriptions slightly shortened. Serge Leclaire, “La réalité du
désir” in Écrits pour la psychanalyse 1 1954-1993 (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 149.
81
15
“reality of desire.” We encounter it when, in the course of analysis, certain ideas or
impressions no longer participate in the sphere of meaning, when a psychic content
falls out of the play of connections, associations and substitutions that constitute
meaningful discourse. Such elements insist in psychic life, they are stubborn, they do
not budge, (“on bute indéfiniment sur le même ensemble de ‘pures singularités’”), but
one can no longer say why: they cannot be exchanged for other signifiers or explained
or further analyzed. They are basic (molecular) terms. Though they have no relation
to one another they form a definite ensemble; as Leclaire writes, they are “soldered”
together precisely by their “absence of link.”85 They are nonsense but also pure sense,
meaningless and at the same time too meaningful; in Freudian terms: too charged with
energy to participate in the movement of representations, their intensity bends and
warps the functioning of other mental processes; in Lacanian terms: both radical lack
and surplus, objets a. Deleuze and Guattari enthusiastically approve “the rule of the
right to nonsense as well as to the absence of link,” repeating with Leclaire “you will
not have reached the ultimate and irreducible terms of the unconscious so long as you
find or restore a link between two elements.”86 This point deserves to be underlined:
although Anti-Oedipus can be read as a poetic elegy to the infinite plasticity of the
libido, it is in fact what Freud called points of fixation (not flow!) that are at the heart
of the desiring machines. Rather than sheer chaos or flux, what interests Deleuze and
Guattari are the rigid molecular elements that determine the ever-shifting network of
libidinal flows.
Deleuze and Guattari go on to ingeniously reinterpret Leclaire’s “pure being of
desire” in Spinozistic-Leibnizian terms, reading the ‘absence of link’ that defines
unconscious singularities in terms of the metaphysical concept of ‘real distinction’:
the ultimate desiring-elements are like the infinite attributes of God that are strictly
independent of one another yet participate in a common divine substance. “Likewise
for the partial objects and the body without organs: the body without organs is
substance itself, and the partial objects, the ultimate attributes or elements of
substance.”87 This is their ‘Spinozism of the unconscious’: the body without organs
refers to the One substance of which the partial objects (or “organs without bodies” to
cite Zizek) comprise its specific irreducible elements, and both stand opposed to the
‘organism’, i.e. the organization of desire according to the (oedipal) dialect of subject
and Other. Leclaire’s “pure being of desire” thus becomes “a pure dispersed and
anarchic multiplicity, without unity or totality, and whose elements are welded, pasted
together by the real distinction or the very absence of distinction.”88
Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysical re-interpretation of Leclaire entails one crucial
difference from him. Whereas Leclaire carefully qualified his “pure being of desire”
as a fiction, since one can never seize it directly but only through its effects on other
mental processes, Deleuze and Guattari insist that it is the real itself.89 For Leclaire
the “reality of desire,” the field of nonsensical pre-personal singularities, has the
status of a construction which serves to explain the gaps, fissures, and inconsistencies
in consciousness. “The Real is an entity which must be constructed afterwards so that
85
Ibid., p. 150.
A-O, p 314.
87
A-O, p 309fn.
88
A-O, p 324.
89
A-O, p 314.
86
16
we can account for the distortions of the symbolic structure.”90 What ultimately lies
behind these elements is the void, the lack of closure or inconsistency of the symbolic
order itself. Deleuze and Guattari insist instead on the primacy of the real, which is no
longer conceived as a gap or fissure but a “pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity.”
It is this additional turn of the screw, from the gap in the symbolic to the positive
‘inorganization’ of the real, that Leclaire misses. For Leclaire, on the other hand, the
fault of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is its abstraction of the real from any symbolic
and imaginary mediation, which renders it totally opaque. Whereas Anti-Oedipus
presents the real as ground and the imaginary and symbolic as superstructures, in
Lacan the objet a “belongs in a fourfold structure that includes the signifier, which is
dual (S1 and S2), and the subject (crossed-out S).”91
One can wonder whether the positions of Leclaire and Deleuze and Guattari are really
so far apart. For as the authors of Anti-Oedipus specify, “The movement of
deterritorialization can never be grasped in itself, one can only grasp its indices in
relation to the territorial representations.”92 To say that we can access only the
‘indices’ of deterritorialization but never the pure flux itself, is tantamount to arguing
that the real is always at least minimally fictionalized: the drive is always-already
entangled in desire.93 This would seem to confirm Leclaire’s criticism, and to a certain
degree Deleuze and Guattari could agree that it makes no sense to radically separate
the objet a from the circuits of the imaginary and symbolic—or in their terms, to
isolate movements of deterritorialization and lines of flight from the molar
representations in which they both are embedded and exceed. Despite this broad
agreement, however, the key question of the starting point remains. Should one begin
with the schizophrenic production of the real, and derive the genesis of the symbolic
from its turbulent internal dynamics; or should one begin with the symbolic structure
and endeavor to show how it necessarily generates a troubling symptomal point, an
intrinsic stumbling block?
The problem of genesis in Zizek
The major aim of Zizek’s philosophical project can be summed up as thinking
together Lacanian psychoanalysis with the German Idealist problem of the
constitution of subjectivity and reality. In this endeavor, Lacan’s theory of psychosis
plays a pivotal role. It is the extreme fractures of the psyche that reveal the most
primordial processes at work in the genesis of self and world: philosophy is here put
90
Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 162.
“Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back…” (op. cit.), p. 224.
92
A-O, p. 316.
93
This is the essence of Jacques Rancière’s critique of Deleuzian aesthetics: however Dionysian in
intention, Deleuze always ends up re-inscribing pre-personal forces and singularities in stable
Apollonian forms. Central to Rancière’s strategy is showing how Deleuze time and again relies on a
classic allegorical interpretation of artworks in order to ‘represent’ their more radical antirepresentative nature; thus Bartleby becomes a hero in a story about redemption, and not a pure
‘formula’; the end of the movement-image in Hitchcock’s cinema is allegorized by the photographer’s
motor paralysis in Rear Window; and so on. See “Existe-t-il une esthétique deleuzienne?,” in Gilles
Deleuze: une vie philosophique ed. Éric Alliez (Paris: Institut Synthélabo, 1998); “Deleuze accomplit
le destin de l’esthétique,” Magazine littéraire no. 406 (February 2002); La Chair des mots (Paris:
Galilée, 1998), last chapter on Deleuze and Bartleby; and, La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil,
2001), chapter on Deleuze and cinema.
91
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to the test of madness.94 In Zizek’s more recent work, the elaboration of this problem
has proceeded primarily via a reinterpretation of F.W.J. Schelling, focusing on his
idea of Divine creation as a kind of therapeutic escape from madness. Schelling is not
only read through the lens of Lacan, but Zizek advances a novel Schellingian
hypothesis regarding the category of the real.
In The Fragile Absolute, Zizek identifies what he calls a “fundamental oscillation” in
Lacan’s oeuvre: “what comes first, the signifier or some deadlock in the real?” It is
worth quoting the passage in full, as it provides a succinct summary of Zizek’s
position.
Sometimes, Lacan presents the traumatic colonization of the live body by the
parasitic symbol sic Order as the primordial fact: it is the intervention of
the Symbolic that derails, throws out of joint, the natural organism in its
balanced circuit, transforming natural instincts into a monstrous drive that
can never be fully satisfied, since it is condemned to an eternal ‘undead’
returning to its path, persisting forever in an obscene immortality. At other
times, in a more speculative-mythical mode, he is searching for some kind of
natural excess or imbalance, a malfunctioning, monstrous derailment, and
then he conceives the symbolic Order as a secondary in(ter)vention destined
to ‘gentrify’ this monstrous excess, to resolve its deadlock. One is tempted to
claim that it is here, between these two versions, that the line runs which
separates materialism from idealism: the primacy of the symbolic Order is
clearly idealist; it is ultimately a new version of Divine intervention in the
natural order; while the second version—the emergence of the symbolic
Order as the answer to some monstrous excess in the Real—is the only
proper materialist solution.95
For the remainder of this essay I shall offer a few comments on this provocative
thesis.
It is in order to more fully elaborate the materialist solution that Zizek turns to
Schelling. More precisely, it is the ‘middle’ Schelling of the Ages of the World that
allows Zizek to theorize the genesis of the symbolic order from out of a deadlock or
impasse in the real, rather than the real being immanently determined as the stumbling
block of the symbolic. These great speculative writings, at times reminiscent of the
psychotic world system of Dr. Schreber, present an esoteric mythological narrative
about the creation of the universe. Put very briefly: Before creation proper “there is
the chaotic-psychotic universe of blind drives, their rotary motion, their
undifferentiated pulsating”96 (it is this abyssal universe that Deleuze and Guattari
94
In a recent essay Zizek accuses Heidegger of failing this test: Lacan is not a Heideggerian insofar as
the latter cannot think psychosis. See “Why Lacan is not a Heideggerian,” Lacanian Ink no. 32 (Fall
2008).
95
Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, or why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? (Verso: London,
2000), p. 91-92. Zizek has more recently posed “the key materialist question” thusly: “if the Real has
not subsistence of its own, if it is inherent to the Symbolic, how, then, are we to think the emergenceexplosion of the Symbolic out of the presymbolic X? Is the only alternative to naïve realism a kind of
“methodological idealism’ according to which ‘the limits of our language are the limits of the world’,
so that what is beyond the Symbolic is strictly unthinkable?” The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT,
2006), p. 390; emphasis in original.
96
Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, p. 13.
18
endeavor to describe in modern machinic terms). God’s inaugural act consists in a
desperate escape from this suffocating, closed domain into the light of creation.
What is described here is the passage from “the pre-symbolic chaos of the Real to the
universe of logos,”97 or, put otherwise, from “‘closed’ rotary motion to open progress,
from drive to desire.”98 The greatness of Schelling’s philosophy is to the think the real
as itself unbalanced, unhinged, ‘out-of-joint’—an insight which Schelling himself
does not consistently maintain, but obscures in his turn to pre-modern sexual
mythology and dreams of a final reconciliation.99 This idea is what some of Lacan’s
most interesting interpreters refer to as the “barred real.”100 Though to my knowledge
the term was never employed by Lacan himself, in one of his last seminars Lacan
does remark that “nature is not so natural as all that”: “[I]n conformity with what
Edgar Morin says in a recent book where he interrogates the nature of nature, it is
completely clear that nature is not so natural as all that, and it’s even in this which
consists that rottenness that is generally referred to as culture.”101 This passing
reference to Edgar Morin’s La nature de la nature is instructive. Morin characterizes
nature as “more Shakespearian than Newtonian,” a complex system where chaos,
waste, disorder, and cataclysm cannot be dissociated from order, law, and
organization.102 The crux of Morin’s argument is that the human being constitutes a
hyperbolic exacerbation of the universe’s complexity, a violent opening up or disordering of the natural world, what he calls “hypercomplexification.” Contrary to an
all too simplistic idea of Darwinian adaptation, Morin defends imagination, delirium,
and insanity as belonging to mankind’s essential being. It is by virtue of humanity’s
successful dis-adaptation, its seemingly useless and even self-destructive aptitudes,
that it is capable of all the accomplishments of rationality and technical civilization:
homo sapiens is at the same time and inextricably homo demens.103 Zizek’s Schelling
affirms this evolutionary paradigm: “[T]he features we refer to in order to emphasize
man’s unique status—the constitutive imbalance, the ‘out-of-joint’, on account of
which man is an ‘unnatural’ creature, ‘nature sick unto death’—must somehow be at
work in nature itself, although—as Schelling would have put it—in another, lower
power (in the mathematical sense of the term).”104
In his reply to Daniel Smith, however, Zizek changes tack and defends the primacy of
the symbolic: the real “has no ontological consistency in itself, but can only be
discerned retroactively, from its effects, as their absent Cause”105—a definition
familiar from The Sublime Object of Ideology, and consonant with Deleuze and
Guattari’s thesis that deterritorialization is discernible only through its effects on
territorial representations. But if this is the case, then strictly speaking it makes no
97
Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder, p. 7.
Ibid., p. 13.
99
Ibid., pp. 72-73.
100
“The Real that will have been barred by the Symbolic was always already barred in itself.” Lorenzo
Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge: MIT, 2007), p.
217. See also Adrian Johnston, Zizek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity
(Evanston: Northwestern, 2008), p. 92.
101
Lacan, Seminar XXIV L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre 1976-77 (unpublished),
Session of May 17, 1977.
102
Edgar Morin, La méthode 1. La Nature de la Nature (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 368.
103
Edgar Morin, Le paradigme perdu: la nature humaine (Paris: Seuil, 1973); see especially pp. 123126.
104
Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 1996), p. 220; emphasis added.
105
Zizek, “Notes on a Debate ‘From Within the People’,” Criticism vol. 46 no. 4 (Fall 2004), p. 661.
98
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sense to speculate about a “natural excess or imbalance” which the “secondary
intervention” of the symbolic order would then serve to stabilize.
The main difference between the Schellingian Zizek and Deleuze and Guattari
concerns the object of primary repression. For Zizek it is not the primal pulsional
chaos that forms the core of repression, but rather a special ‘originary’ signifier
which, in sinking into unconsciousness, simultaneously pushes back the drives and
inaugurates the symbolic order.106 For Deleuze and Guattari primary repression bears
instead on the desiring machines themselves, as the moment of their breakdown, antiproduction. In a more Nietzschean vein, Deleuze and Guattari posit a conflict between
drives: the body without organs repulses the partial objects and thereby forms the first
paranoiac machine which then serves as the basis for symbolic inscription. Despite
these differences, both theories are versions of what Deleuze calls in The Logic of
Sense “dynamic genesis,” which moves from the clamorous depths to the production
of surfaces; i.e. from drive to desire, from real to symbolic.107 Here I think Eugene
Holland is right to compare, while not identifying, the body without organs to the
unary trait since both serve the function of introducing signification to the psyche. 108
Where does Lacan stand with respect to this? Is there, in fact, a “fundamental
oscillation” in his work? I am convinced that, for the most part, Lacan ascribes to an
ontological dualism in which body and signifier, or the pre-symbolic real and the
order of language, are radically distinct. This position has three main sources. First, it
can be seen as an inheritance of Alexandre Kojève, who in his lectures on Hegel
categorically rejected the master’s philosophy of nature, ascribing it to the unfortunate
influence of Schelling (!): “All of this, in my opinion, is an error on Hegel’s part …
the real (metaphysical) and ‘phenomenal’ Dialectic of Nature exists only in Hegel’s
(Schellingian) imagination.”109 This idea was then echoed by Bataille and Queneau
(the editor of Kojève’s lectures),110 and later taken up by Sartre in his debates with the
French Communist Party, where he defended the autonomy of historical dialectics
against its (Stalinist) ‘naturalization’.111 Lacan’s innovation was to make use of the
theological notion of creatio ex nihilo to attack what he viewed as the theological
underpinnings of a certain teleological evolutionism: the symbolic order is absolutely
novel, and the “dialectic of desire” its instantiates cannot be derived from any pre-
106
Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder, p. 33.
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 186.
108
Eugene Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (London:
Routledge, 1999), p. 30.
109
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel transl. James H. Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell,
1969), p. 217.
110
See Georges Bataille and Raymond Queneau, “The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian
Dialectic,” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 transl. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and
Donald M. Leslie (Minneapolis: University Minnesota, 1985).
111
The debate that took place on December 7, 1961 at La Maison de la Mutualité in Paris between
Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Hyppolite, on one side, and Roger Garaudy, Jean-Pierre Vigier and Jean
Orcel on the other still makes for interesting reading. The transcripts were published under the title
Marxisme et existentialisme: controverse sur la dialectique (Paris: Plon, 1962). In his later Marxist
philosophy, Sartre remains faithful to the ontological dualism of his first great work Being and
Nothingness. One should also mention Merleau-Ponty’s intervention in this debate, a plea against
scientism and mechanism in Marxist thought: “Marxism and Philosophy,” Sense and Non-Sense, transl.
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Chicago: Northwestern, 1964).
107
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existing need or natural development.112 Strictly speaking, the symbolic order has no
pre-history. Nothing precedes it, or rather whatever primal Stoff was there can only be
thought from within the coordinates of the already given horizon of language. Second,
this dualism is derived from the specific situation of psychoanalytic therapy, as a
practice based on speech. It is this fundamental fact that Lacan wished to recall
analysts to in his “return to Freud”: psychoanalysis is a “talking cure” in which,
contrary to hypnosis or behavioral therapies and close to the ancient aspirations of
philosophy, something true is revealed about the subject. Language, and more
specifically how language works in the cure, is therefore the paramount concern of
psychoanalytic theory. The standard criticism that Lacanian theory is a linguistic
idealism which ignores bodily drives and affects is in my mind specious. Of course
there are drives and affects—the point is that, in the course of analysis, what matters
is not these forces as such but how they are spoken about, symbolized. The ground
and medium of analysis is not any Erlebnis or immediate affective experience but
speech;113 in particular that strange quasi-automatic speech freed from rules of
propriety, morality and common sense, and without any goal (even a therapeutic one)
beyond its own aleatory movement—what Freud called free association. In this sense,
the great antipode of Freud’s talking cure is Wilhelm’s Reich’s orgasmic
vegetotherapy which aims to directly manipulate bodily forces via massage, trance,
and mystical technologies. Lacan’s theorization of the creative power of the symbol
should be understood first and foremost as an attempt to explain the efficiency of the
talking cure. Third, and perhaps most interesting, Lacan’s thesis of the primacy of the
symbolic is based on his understanding of the relationship between psychoanalysis
and modern science. The essence of Lacan’s critique of phenomenology is that it
fetishizes immediate experience at the expense of missing the broader symbolic
network—Freud’s “other scene”—that secretly determines the very character of this
experience, how it ‘immediately’ appears; though consciousness has no direct
awareness of this order, and cannot if it is to function properly, it is nonetheless
responsible for one’s most intimate feelings, thoughts, and so on. For all his talk of
surmounting the natural attitude and the prejudices of everyday life, the
phenomenologist proceeds in a naïve way, thinking that perception grants access to
things as they are in themselves. But as any scientist knows, reality is hardly
accessible through perception: the real can only be expressed by abstract
mathematical formulae which have no intuitive fulfillment whatsoever.114 Just as,
contra Husserl, the mathematical idealization of nature cannot be founded on the
intuitive evidence of the life-world (this is the sense in which modern science is
‘creationist’), so the symbolic order cannot be derived from phenomenological
experience however raw or savage. The most profound effect of modern science on
the human condition is its radical decentering of the universe with respect to sensuous
experience—reality becomes thoroughly non-anthropocentric, divorced from human
112
See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 213-14.
113
See Lacan, Seminar IX L’Identification (unpublished), session of 13 December 1961.
114
As Lacan argues against Merleau-Ponty: “Why not confirm that the theory of perception no longer
elucidates the structure of reality to which physical science makes us accede? … Everything shows us
that it is by refusing the perceived intuitions of weight and impetus that the Galilean dynamics annexed
the heavens to the earth, as the heavy cost, though, of introducing what we nowadays feel in the
experience of the cosmonaut: a body that can open and close itself weighing nothing and bearing on
nothing.” “Merleau-Ponty: In Memoriam,” Merleau-Ponty and Psychology, ed. Keith Hoeller transl.
Wilfried Ver Eecke and Dirk de Schutter (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 74; translation
modified.
21
perception—, and Lacan argues that the Freudian split subject is the proper heir of
that decentering.
One of the clearest statements of Lacan’s position can be found in Seminar XVII:
“Our first rule is never to seek the origins of language, if only because they are
demonstrated well enough through their effects. The further we push back their
effects, the more these origins emerge. The effects of language are retroactive,
precisely in that it is as language develops that it manifests what it is qua want-tobe.”115 To paraphrase Heidegger, ‘the origin of language is language as origin’. Here it
is possible to mark a major difference between Freud and Lacan. Whereas Freud
analyzed the symbolic logic of dreams, neurotic symptoms, and other unconscious
formations, it was Lacan who argued that human beings are inherently prone to
psychopathology because we are speaking beings: it is language—the autonomy of
the self-relating symbolic order with respect to the natural world—that transforms
animal instincts into unruly drives and insatiable desires. (This is illustrated by the
‘graph of desire’ elaborated in Seminar V and the important écrit “Subversion of the
Subject”: the starting point of the graph is a raw instinctual need which is then
retroactively transcoded by the discourse of the Other and transformed into a demand;
one is always already inside language, and the very idea of a ‘starting point’ can only
be presented mythically). The crucial seminar on this topic is the unpublished
Seminar IX L’Identification (1961-62). Anticipating Deleuze’s major study, there
Lacan links together difference, as introduced by the unary trait, the most primitive
symbolic element, and repetition, the peculiar insistence of human drives which break
with the natural cycle of need and satisfaction. Ultimately, what repeats is difference
as such, the rupture instituted by the autonomous order of language with pre-symbolic
nature.116
However, in that same seminar Lacan also explicitly situates the subject between two
poles, the “idealizing effects of the signifying function” and a “vital immanence”
which he warns should not be confused with the “drive” (presumably because the
drive cannot be understood outside the ‘idealizing effects’ of the signifier).117 In what
consists this second pole? To what extent can ‘vital immanence’ be determined on its
own? Against his own predominantly dualistic perspective, Lacan occasionally
appears to endorse a kind of biological pre-history of the transcendental subject, as if
desire’s dialectic were preceded and prepared by structures found in nature. Such is
the conclusion one could draw from his argument that, for example, the symbolic law
operates on the naturally occurring division between pleasure and enjoyment
(jouissance), as “what binds incoherent life together”;118 or his emphasis on “man’s
prematurity at birth” as the evolutionary underpinning of his theory of subjectivity;119
or his assertion that the lack and negativity proper to language find a natural ‘fit’ in
the openings and rims of bodily orifices; or his references to the specific
115
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis 19691970, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), p. 155.
See also SEMINAR X… Catherine Malabou recalls this passage to argue against Lacan’s idealism…
116
See the session of… SEMINAR IX references…
117
Lacan, Seminar IX L’Identification (unpublished), session of 20 December 1961.
118
“But it is not the Law itself that bars the subject’s access to jouissance—it simply makes a barred
subject out of an almost natural barrier. For it is pleasure that sets limits to jouissance, pleasure as
what binds incoherent life together…” Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of
Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Écrits, op. cit., p. 696.
119
Lacan, “Presentation on Psychic Causality,” Écrits, p. 152; emphasis in original.
22
characteristics of the human phallus in comparison with penises throughout the
animal kingdom—as Jared Diamond notes, the function of relative enormity of the
human penis still remains a mystery for evolutionary biologists;120 or his speculations
on the homology between his topological figures of subjectivity, like the torus, and
embryological structures (the blastosphere); or his musings on the infinite pain
pervading nature…121
As is well known, the position of Deleuze and Guattari is that of monism or
immanence. Sometimes Lacan’s stance is called, in opposition to Deleuzian
immanence, a ‘transcendence within immanence’, in reference to the logic of
extimacy: at the heart of immanence there is an inaccessible foreign kernel that
120
Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 62-64.
In Seminar XVII Lacan comments on a passage from the Gospel of Matthew, “Consider the lilies of
the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin” (6:28). To this image of a carefree nature,
typically interpreted as hymn to God’s joyful creation and an exhortation to the ‘simple life’, Lacan
opposes his own wild speculation. Might it not be the case that the plant suffers from an infinite pain?
That far from exhibiting a graceful and harmonious balance, nature is suffused with a terrifying
masochistic jouissance? (Seminar XVII, p. 77) Marx and Engels had already ridiculed the pastoral
vision of Matthew: “Yes, consider the lilies of the field, how they are eaten by goats, transplanted by
‘man’ into his buttonhole, how they are crushed beneath the immodest embraces of the dairymaid and
the donkey-driver!” (The German Ideology in Collected Works Volume 5 1845-1847, New York:
International Publishers, 1976, p. 472) But Lacan goes further. Beyond deriding an idealist and
conciliatory conception of nature, his suggestion of a pained plant is reminiscent of a Diderot or
Whitehead-style panpsychism where all of nature is alive and teeming with enjoyment. “From the
elephant down to the flea […] from the flea down to the sensitive and living molecule which is the
origin of all, there is not one speck in the whole of nature that does not feel pain or pleasure.”
(D’Alembert’s Dream in Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream transl. Leonard Tancock,
London: Penguin, 1966, p. 182) Indeed, Lacan’s darker intimations in Seminar XVII fall squarely in
the purview of the romantic Naturphilosophie of Schelling or the putrefying, self-destructive nature of
Sade.
Lest we think that this passage is a mere hapax, it is instructive to note that Lacan repeats the
same point in the following seminar: “[The pleasure principle] can only have one meaning, not too
much enjoyment. Because the stuff of every enjoyment is close to suffering, that is even how we
recognize its finery. If the plant was not manifestly suffering, we would not know that it was alive.”
(Seminar XVIII D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, unpublished, session of March 17, 1971)
A few years later Lacan reformulates his (Schellingian-Sadeian) hypothesis in a more scientific
manner. Again he raises the question of whether nature ‘enjoys’, this time in relation to the pioneering
studies of bacterial conjugation conducted by François Jacob and Elie Wollman. Can one speak of
enjoyment at the level of the sexual life of bacteria (e.g. the infection of bacteria by the bacteriophage)?
Do bacteria too suffer an inconceivable masochistic pain? Here Lacan focuses not on what he now calls
the “religious mousse,” the fiery stuff of enjoyment, but the actual regulatory structures at work in
living beings. In the case of E. coli K12 (the main subject of Jacob and Wollman’s experiments) the
difference between donor (male) and recipient (female) bacteria is determined by a single sex factor F:
the presence or absence of this genetic factor determines the sexual character of the bacteria strain. The
relation between the different strains, Lacan notes following Jacob and Wollman, is asymmetrical: the
F- type is incapable of mutating to the F+ type, except via contact with donor bacteria; conversely, in
conjugating with recipient bacteria the F+ type does not mutate to the F- type. The transfer of genetic
material is strictly one-way: there is no sexual ‘relation’ or reciprocity, no balanced interchange. Now
what interests Lacan is the highly suggestive analogy (or “strange isomorphism” as he puts it) between
biological and symbolic structures, the (real) fact that bacterial sexuality is dictated by a single sex
factor, and the (symbolic) determination of human sexuality by the presence or absence (+/-) of the
phallus. At both levels, what we find is not two positive or substantial (sexual) identities, but rather a
disjunction turning on the presence or absence of a single element: in other words, a non-rapport.
Lacan’s comments on Jacob and Wollman are found in Seminar XXI Les non-dupes errent
(unpublished), session of April 23, 1974, and D’un Autre à l’autre Le séminaire livre XVI, ed. JacquesAlain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991), pp. 221-222. Lacan claims to have read Jacob and Wollman’s study
in the original English: Sexuality and the Genetics of Bacteria (New York: Academic Press, 1961).
121
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transcends immanence and prevents it from closing up on itself.122 Evoking the specter
of such claustrophobic self-enclosure, Leclaire once remarked about Anti-Oedipus
that “The book puts your more perceptive readers in the situation of a single and
unique perspective that leaves them feeling absorbed, digested, bound, even negated
by the admirable workings of your so-called machine! […] It seems to put the reader
in the situation of feeling cornered, by the simple fact of speaking and asking a
question.”123 This is the perfect Lacanian rejoinder to Anti-Oedipus: Deleuze and
Guattari’s supposedly open and liberated (anti-)system effectively plunges us into the
worst hell, a suffocating maternal prison. However, I maintain that Deleuze’s
immanence is not really opposed to Lacan’s transcendence-in-immanence. In fact, as I
previously argued, it is precisely the aim of Anti-Oedipus to think the genesis of
transcendence from out of immanence, representation from production, Oedipus from
the blind whirr of partial objects and desiring machines. Transcendence is not simply
opposed to but a necessary part and product of immanence (though this is sometimes
not acknowledged by Deleuzians, and sometimes not by Deleuze and Guattari either).
What is barred by this approach is the classic Lacanian idea that the symbolic
intervenes ‘from out of nowhere’—don’t inquire about its origins!—into a
undifferentiated and, in essence, unthinkable real, similar to the Sartrean model of the
for-itself negating the inert in-itself. This is what Zizek calls Lacan’s idealism. Now,
one should not overlook the great advantages to this scheme, which effectively
preempts the idea of a natural adaptation between the subject and the real. Yet this
dualism might not be the only or best way to save Lacan’s insights into the
successfully dis-adapted character of the human psyche. For the main targets of
Lacan’s creationism, Stalinist nature dialectics and teleological evolutionism à la
Teilhard de Chardin, are no longer really threats or interesting opponents, and the
refrain of the ‘absolute novelty’ of the symbolic is an increasingly weak riposte in the
face of contemporary evolutionary theory (like Stephen Jay Gould’s Nietzschean
notion of ‘exaptation’).124 Insofar as Zizek asserts in his most recent work the primacy
of the real, he moves into a theoretical space occupied by, among others, Deleuze and
Guattari. Here a genuine dialogue with Anti-Oedipus is possible.
122
See Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: MIT, 2006), pp. 165-166.
“Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back…” in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, transl. Michael
Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 221. Originally published in La Quinzaine Litteraire no.
143 (June 16-30, 1972), pp. 15-19.
124
One of the great strengths of Zizek’s work is his confrontation of Lacanian theory with work in the
natural and cognitive sciences.
123
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