THE PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD » Anti-Oedipus

Winnicott and Deleuze/Guattari: premise for a new project

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:46:42 +0000

I want to invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s double-sided interrogation: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” (Anti-Oedipus, F8, E3). Such an interrogation has fed its authors’ insistence on the primacy of a “machinic production” for human nature, a production for …

Affect-Time

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 11:09:18 +0000

This is the text of my presentation at the recent meeting of the ASCP at the University of Queensland, Brisbane. Keywords: subjectivity, time, affect, love Affect-Time I take my cue from Deleuze and Guattari’s conjunctive synthesis, “ah, so that’s what it is, that’s who I am!” (Anti-Oedipus, 16-22), the synthesis that grounds the subject in …

Reading

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:40:20 +0000

From Plato and through to Hegel, the distinction that has governed the analysis of desire is that of production versus acquisition, with desire invariably subsumed under the heading of the latter. At those rare moments when it did depart from this schema, psychoanalysis could conceive of desire as productive only in terms of an internal …

Anti- … … …

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:38:50 +0000

One of the most striking qualities of the Deleuze-Guattarian schema is its trinitarian structure: production, recording, and consumption; machine, body without organs, and subject; paranoid, miraculating, and celibate; connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive; and, finally, delirium, hallucination, and experience. The question that presents itself at this point is whether such a schema is but the latest …

Ich/I/moi

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:57:52 +0000

Back to the question of translation though this time the text is encumbered by a move from the German original. Freud’s Oedipal trinity is of the “es/it,” the “Ich/I,” and the “Uber-Ich/Over-I.” While his English translators introduced the “id,” “ego,” and “super ego,” their French cousins remained closer to the original with the “ça,” “moi,” …

Subjects-Laws

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 14:11:51 +0000

Let me draw a parallel, temporarily at least, between Lacan’s three registers (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real) and the tripartite structure Deleuze and Guattari identify as the basis for the emergence and understanding of a subject: hallucination, delirium, and intensity. The correspondences imaginary/hallucination, symbolic/delirium, and real/intensity identify the last of the couplets as …

Situational Subjects

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 01:14:19 +0000

Ultimately, the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject (be it an individual, a text, a practice, or an institution) is produced as the offshoot of a particular constellation of forces of attraction and repulsion, which is to say of a surround and a situation. It is hence aleatory since the constellation itself is an effect of the ongoing process …

Subjects-Insights

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 21:14:35 +0000

One of the main controversies in the history of the psychoanalytic movement has coalesced around the meaning and relevance of insight as a clinical category. A divide has often separated a more classic epistemic orientation from a concern for the analysand’s affective well being which, supposedly, may or may not have much to do with …

Subjects-3

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:35:16 +0000

While the subject does depend on the interaction between intensity (I experience), delirium (I think), and hallucination (I see), it is not the sum total of all three moments or modes; it is an offshoot and a side-effect rather than a unity precisely because it is constantly disrupted by its nature as a subject in …

Subjects-2

Fadi Abou-Rihan — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 02:51:25 +0000

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the psychoanalysis with which Deleuze and Guattari were most suffused, jouissance has come to hold pride of place amongst the categories and constructs. Jouissance is neither pleasure nor enjoyment (this is yet another one of those distinctions the translators seem to have completely missed); it is what goes beyond either of these …