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Mourning

Why no longer?

April 3, 2008
Deleuze, Guattari, History, Mourning, Repetition

(This review is forthcoming in the fall issue of Symposium)

        In his most recent book, Jay Lampert leads us back to one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most complex philosophical expositions of time and repetition without fuss or fanfare. He weaves for us an account of history that is both rich and concise. In a wonderfully honest and generous paragraph near the end of the penultimate chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Lampert asks: “How is someone trained in philosophy supposed to know how to name even one genuine event of ‘today,’ let alone analyse one convincingly as part of his book? What qualifies someone like me to diagnose it in an interesting way, so as to avoid making amateurish or pop-postmodern pronouncements? … Does any case study, short of one that inaugurates an entirely new world-historical Regime of Signs, show what a historical event is qua event, or show in general how the now captures the ‘why?,’ or how the ‘why?’ captures the now?” (154). Lampert’s poetic modesty does not preclude scholarly rigour; it reinforces it. Witness not only his illuminating digressions on Hume, Hegel, Bergson, and Derrida but, and much more encouragingly, his sense of responsibility to detail: 4 arguments for intratemporality, 13 for the pure past, and 2 for the dark precursors of the future; 4 major genealogies of the syntheses of time, 4 similarities and 6 differences with Derrida on dates, and 7 confrontations with Hegel on that selfsame topic; 13 layers to Alice’s obsession with size, 12 features to discuss in relation to the question of why an event occurs when it does, 5 senses of “falling back into history,” and 4 elements to the theory of consistency.

        Lampert unpacks a most subtle and challenging set of questions that have preoccupied, if not defined, the long tradition of western philosophy. From Plato to Hegel, the rehabilitation of multiplicity, of difference, and indeed of chaos under the rubric of the One has had to confront the question of repetition and time, time after time, only to relegate it quite often to the status of a seduction. Contra those who have understood repetition as the reproduction in time of an origin or a preceding state of affairs, Deleuze elaborates a repetition “for its own sake” (« une répétition pour elle-même »), a repetition that accounts for that which does not return, for that which is a becoming without origin or destiny. This is a repetition that does not operate in time; it produces time. This is the repetition Lampert deploys to elucidate not one grand “Philosophy of History” but—count them—nine forms of past, of present, and of future, nine forms of succession and simultaneity, and, finally, nine “movements of the name of history.” Lampert braids his concepts, crosses them, stacks them, aligns them, serially, co-extensively, but always deftly and rigorously, in order to argue that “the succession of befores and afters is a triple by-product of there being three simultaneous simultaneities. What takes the place of the classical concept of history is nothing other than these multiple forms of co-existence with their multiple subordinate forms of serial distribution. Once it is proved that an event’s present status and its past status are independent yet simultaneous, it will follow that the succession-effects of the names of history run simultaneously, and that the past is a real place on the body” (9).

        Here, the typical questions of a philosophy of history, of a universal history, (“How come?” “Why now? “What next?”) are all questions of contingency. I believe that these questions very quickly extend into the broader concerns around memory, desire, and life. Indeed, repetition does not belong exclusively on the stage of world historical events with their progressions, interruptions, and recapitulations; repetition also pertains to the passage from one affect to the next, from one performance to the next, and from one observation to the next. A philosophy of history that takes the syntheses of time for a point of departure, a philosophy of history as thought by Deleuze and Guattari and subsequently pursued and elaborated by Lampert is hence a philosophy of psychology, of art, and of science as well. This is why Lampert’s text is neither an introduction to one aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought nor is it an exhaustive account of that aspect. It is rather a plateau, as Deleuze and Guattari deployed the practice in the second volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a plateau that revisits and repeats, which is to say rearticulates, the as of yet unarticulated—or perhaps that which is beyond articulation—becoming.

        I would like to take a moment and consider not Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History but Lampert’s History of Philosophy. I am convinced that Lampert is qualified to “diagnose” (and this is his term), and has indeed diagnosed, the genuine philosophical event “Deleuze-Guattari.” This is why I would like to invite him to deploy his philosophy of history as a measure and an understanding of his history of the philosophy of history, of his history of philosophy tout court, with all of its attendant simultaneities and serialities. If the past never actually dies, if, as Lampert affirms, “an event’s present status and its past status are independent yet simultaneous … [and] the past is a real place on the body” (9), what then is the status of Deleuze and Guattari’s own past on their philosophical body? What, for instance, is the status of their long standing investments in psychoanalysis, intellectually, as with Deleuze from his Presentation of Sacher Masoch to Difference and Repetition, to both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and clinically, as with Guattari the Lacanian-trained psychoanalyst, member of the Ecole freudienne, and institutional psychotherapist at the La Borde clinic? I pose this question of the so-called “past” because I am not sure how to reinterpret Lampert’s deployment of the double dating of any event—that the first time it appears is when it appears for the second time—without Freud’s nachträglichkeit or Lacan’s après coups. I am also not sure how to re-assess the discussion in Difference and Repetition without Deleuze’s treatment of Freud’s elaborations on the pleasure principle and its beyond as a founding mechanism of repetition. I am even less sure how to understand the syntheses of desiring production in Anti-Oedipus as the “motor of history” without reference to the laws of the dynamic unconscious (condensation and displacement) and their structuralist renderings (metaphor and metonymy)?

        Deleuze and Guattari’s psychoanalytic past is nowhere to be seen in Lampert’s account. It has become “imperceptible.” Is it excess baggage or last year’s fashion? Is it a passing phase which, once “diagnosed,” is easily overcome? Has it been castrated and/or repressed? Has it been excised, sublated, or deteritorialised beyond recognition? Is it no longer? Lampert, via Deleuze and Guattari, and as far as I can observe, never poses the question of endings, of how the “why?” not only captures the “now” but can perhaps sometimes suffocate it and render it “no longer.”

Relations

November 16, 2007
Anti-Oedipus, BwO, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Klein, Lacan, Mourning, Nietzsche, Schizoanalysis

        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.

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