Fetish
It is in terms of this tension that Deleuze and Guattari will understand the fetish, not as an object, a commodity, or a body part; but as the movement, event, and relationship that reverse the connective synthesis and fix the machine as fatefully miraculated, as, in other words, owing its existence to some body without organs without which it cannot survive.
Oedipus is a telling example of such a fetish. Indeed, many a post-Freudian reading has further complicated our understanding of the tumultuous relationship between father and son: André Green for instance reminds us that Laius was not simply the innocent victim of patricide but the plotter of his own son’s murder as well. In this context, much remains to be said of Jocasta’s collusion with her husband’s plot and of the ideological silence that surrounds that collusion to this day.
Still, the structure and logic of the myth persist to the point where it has become virtually impossible to experience the familial, either phenomenally or ideologically, without its Sophoclean recordings. However, and should art or history be our guide and inspiration, then let us not overlook the episode that Herodotus tells of Hippocrates who refused to abide by the prophecy’s warning that he not father a son or if he already has one to disown him. Pisistratus, his offspring, would go on to conquer Athens and serve as its ruler. Neither father nor son in this case was any the poorer for disregarding the codes of the deities and the directives of their prophets (Histories, Book One #59-64).
To put it bluntly, the logic of the fetish here is the intolerant and singular logic of the “without me, you are noting” that one party fosters and with which another colludes. Author and reader, teacher and student, analyst and analysand, parent and child, ruler and ruled; these are some of the structural couplets that breathe in the stagnant air of resentment without which, and in an ironically doubled and nested move, the corresponding institutions of Literature, Pedagogy, Psychoanalysis, Family, and State would not exist.
“Without me, you are nothing” is the logic of quasi-causes, of boundaries and restrictions, of confinements and regulations, through which the leak is construed as a threat and the crossing is supposedly a crossing into illegitimacy, chaos, fragmentation, and disintegration. But it is precisely the impermeable boundary itself that divides, consolidates, and reifies the functions of dictator, father, and super ego. Often enough, the crossing is not into chaos but into a more liveable and freer sanity. Instead of health or truth, it is territoriality and power that are the fundamental concerns of the institution and its fetish.
Ostensibly, this “without me, you are nothing” is but a thin veil for a deep and desperate projection: “without you, I am nothing.” To admit that much is to renounce the fallacy of the hierarchy that allows me to identify myself as your superior (in health, truth, or wealth); it is to renounce my investment in my phantasy of my superiority over you, which is to say, it is to recognize my aggression toward you as someone I wish to subordinate. Freud’s elaborations on the mechanisms of projection and paranoia in his study on Schreber still hold true, as long as one inscribes them within the circuit of the conditional relations of the inter-subjective.
Relations
My incursion into this bit of intellectual and institutional history helps me situate Anti-Oedipus not only within the psychoanalytic context but also within that of one of the most pressing concerns that have marked the twentieth century. Deleuze and Guattari were by no means impermeable to the pressures and pleasures to take sides in the experience versus abstraction debate: Einstein/Heisenberg, Freud/Lacan. One might even extend the scenario to the artistic domain and add, for instance, Picasso/Kandinsky to the list of couplets.
However, Deleuze and Guattari opted for the third possibility, the one that neither physics nor psychoanalysis had acknowledged. I am referring here to that possibility one finds in Nietzsche’s, or at least in Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s, works. Indeed, Deleuze had already argued that Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism did not consist in the privileging of experience at the expense of abstraction since Plato himself never did dismiss experience in the first place. What the Greek philosopher had actually done was to prioritise amongst the various experiences in order to distinguish between the good copies of the ideal and universal Forms from their bad and cheap imitations.
For those of you who might be a bit uncomfortable with my characterization of Lacan as a Platonist, you might want to keep in mind the practices of selection and valuation that the schemas of the Platonic Form and the Lacanian Symbolic discharge through the couplets good copy/cheap imitation and full speech/empty speech respectively.
In any case, and to return to Deleuze’s Nietzsche, a reversal of Platonism is effected only when the distinction good copy/bad copy and the system of reference upon which it is based (the Form) have been dismantled. For Nietzsche, the antithesis of the duality true world (Form) and apparent world (copy) is ostensibly the duality world and nothing (The Will to Power #567).
Consequently, “coming to know means ‘to place oneself in a conditional relation to something’; to feel oneself conditioned by something and oneself to condition it—it is therefore under all circumstances establishing, denoting, and making-conscious of conditions (not forthcoming entities, things, what is ‘in-itself’)” (#555). For Nietzsche, the world we know is a world of conditional relations and not of objects. Stripped of such relations, it ceases to exist. Translated into Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, these relations are not to be understood in causal terms; rather, they are to be subsumed under the heading of machinic production and its corollaries.
Had Heisenberg read Nietzsche? I do not know. However, and notwithstanding his will to abstraction, the physicist recognized that the thing-in-itself, the electron, could not be represented and was hence experientially unknowable in itself. Feynman’s diagram is again the schema of an event, of a conditional relation of repulsion between two electrons. We do know that Freud had in fact read Nietzsche and that he had developed a conditional relation of envy and resentment toward the philosopher who, as he somewhere put it, had intuited the conclusions that he had had to spend an entire lifetime observing clinically. We also know that Lacan’s conditional relation to the German philosopher was one of admiration: he had read and eulogized his texts as an adolescent and then, after he had completed his medical studies, had been exposed to them once again via Georges Bataille, both at Acephale and the Collège de sociologie.
It is rather unfortunate but perhaps not too surprising that envy, resentment, and admiration obscured one of Nietzsche’s most fundamental insights: what is to be analysed is not the unconscious as a thing in itself but the relations and the events which constitute it, and that such an analysis must itself figure among these relations and hence be the object of its own analysis. Of course, both Freud and Lacan, each in his own particular way, made extensive clinical use of such relations and events, especially in their transferential echoes. Invariably however, that use was motivated by an epistemophilic drive whose principal aim was the “truth” of the analysand’s unconscious; the interpretation (Freud) or dialectisation (Lacan) of the transference is relevant only insofar as it makes explicit the analysand’s psyche in its wishes, histories, patterns, and frustrations.
Even within those other clinical quarters where the reciprocal relational nature of the analytic encounter had been underscored—the so-called “two person” psychologies of Fairbairn, Klein, and Winnicott for instance—the (sufficiently analysed) analyst’s share, his or her counter-transference, has been invariably filed under the rubric of the analysand’s projective identifications, reverberations, or deficits and hence, yet again, pertaining to the supposed truth of the latter’s unconscious. While indeed highly useful, such clinical strategies remain bound to the understanding of the unconscious as a discreet and knowable object merely influenced by its relations to other equally discreet objects.
Consider, however, the dynamics of mourning and melancholia as they were first elaborated by Freud and subsequently deployed by Klein as the launch pad for her theorizing the ubiquity of ambivalence. What have remained under-investigated are much less the mourner’s responses to the experience of object loss and what these responses betray of his or her psychological structures and strategies, but rather the qualitative transformations in the relations the mourner has had to the supposedly lost object. At the level of the unconscious, neither objects nor relations ever die; they only get transformed. What is experienced is hence not so much the loss of the object but the abrupt reshaping of one’s relationship to it.
Consequently, mourning and melancholia are amongst the vicissitudes of one’s relationship to other relations and not to objects. Such vicissitudes never occur in a vacuum; they are invariably predicated upon—which is to say produced, recorded, and consumed by—the current, as well as the long history of, relations of so-called loss the mourner has witnessed, learned, and been shaped by. The logic of the connective synthesis is as relevant here as it is in the context of the desiring machines and it is no coincidence that Deleuze and Guattari will speak of the body without organs as the unproductive, un-consumable, and imageless “full body of death” (8). The desiring machines do not cease to exist; with the emergence of the body without organs the flow of the connective synthesis is halted momentarily but only to be further reconfigured and organized.
