Archive for the BwO Category

From One Imaginary to Another

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Lacan, MetaTherapeutics, Speaking Desire on 7 November 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        At this point, I want to underscore the quality of a Lacanian imaginary in the reader’s relationship to the text, not as analyst but as object for an attempt at a so-called analytic reading.

        Indeed, and at one level at least, we have both a duplication and a reversal of the analytic process. One approaches a text expecting it to provide knowledge much like one approaches an analyst as the subject supposed to know. As the reader reads, the text effects the analytic move of thwarting interpretation and unsettling those demands imposed upon it under the register of the textual imaginary: unity, structure, and meaning. As a body without organs, the text repels its reader’s organisation of words and concepts and forces her or him into a confrontation with and the accountability for the basic tenets of readership.

        I would like to suggest that the awareness of a similar reversal as it takes place in the clinical setting is critical: it is not only the analysand who approaches the analyst as subject supposed to know, it is the analyst as well who has already, qua analyst, approached the analysand as the subject in whose depths lies a set of truths that have yet to be consciously known. Lacanians pride themselves on the fact that what distinguishes them from the rest of their analytic counterparts is their refusal to be entrapped in the imaginary logic of the counter-transference. Their wager is that such a refusal affords them a better focus on the analysand’s symbolic underpinnings; in the process, their wager blinds them to the reality of the presence of at least two often equally thwarted imaginary registers in the room.

Anti-

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Connective Synthesis, Disjunctive Synthesis, Productions, Schizoanalysis on 5 November 2007 by Fadi Abou-Rihan

        In this context, we witness near the closing of the chapter’s first section what might seem like a moment of dialectical abstraction: “desiring-machines make us an organism; but at the heart of this production, within the very production of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all” (8).

        Deleuze and Guattari seem to be telling us if not the truth of production then at least the truth of its vicissitudes. Supposedly, the linear series of production, recording, and consumption congeals enough to produce its own antithesis: the non-productive dis-organisation that is the body without organs. To some, this may sound distastefully, perhaps even shockingly, Hegelian. Hardly, since the production of the body without organs does not carry with it any evidence of finality; it is qualitatively eruptive and unpredictable. As we shall soon see, and in the face of the borderline’s rigid either/or, one encounters the disjunctive synthesis “either… or… or…” of the schizophrenic.

        While there is much in it that tells us what it does, there is nothing in Anti-Oedipus, so far at least, that explains what a body without organs, or a desiring machine for that matter, is. Instead, we are told what this body without organs is not: it is not a projection; it has nothing to do with the body or with an image of the body; it is not a metaphor; and it has no productive quality whatsoever (8). If Anti-Oedipus is a theory of the body without organs, it records and hence produces that which it theorizes; it is also the process by which it becomes what it theorizes. It not only theorizes the impossibility of imaging, producing a copy, whether good or bad, of the body without organs, it is itself a body without organs and as such, it is unavailable for copying. Any attempt at reproducing in its totality a theoretical image of this body is bound to be unproductive, or productive of another extension of the same organ-less body, or of another body altogether.

        Furthermore, if one accepts this schema of the connective synthesis then, and in one of its registers at least, Anti-Oedipus is to psychoanalysis what the anti-production of the body without organs is to the desiring machines. The “Anti-“ in the text’s title is a reference to its relationship as a product of, and not simply a reaction to or a rejection of, the rigid over-organization of the machines of psychoanalysis as they constitute a clinical practice and a theoretical enterprise. The “Anti-“ is hence one of neither repudiation nor substitution; its effects are momentary and the final word has not been and, thankfully, never can be spoken; the machines will invariably regroup and desire will circulate once again.