DGPI
Deleuze and Guattari: A Psychoanalytic Itinerary
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy
London and New York: Continuum Publishing, 2008
(xii + 155 pages + index)
ISBN-10: HB: 1-8470-6371-3
ISBN-13: HB: 978-1-8470-6371-7
Publication dates:
UK: November 2008
Canada & USA: January 2009
From the back cover:
This is a highly original reassessment of Deleuze and Guattari’s much-discussed Anti-Oedipus project, without doubt one of the most influential works of philosophy of the 20th century… Firmly grounded in continental philosophy and psychoanalytic practice, this book extends the anti-oedipal view on the unconscious in a wholly new direction.
The Preface:
Most commentators have situated Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus along two principal hermeneutic axes, the one historico-political, as an ethic grounded in the events of May 1968, and the other textual, as a Nietzschean reordering of Marx and Freud, ostensibly uncomfortable to both Marxists and Freudians. Very few indeed have seen fit to locate the text, and positively so, within a specifically psychoanalytic tradition. After all, the advocates of schizoanalysis consider the text a Medusa into whose face psychoanalysis cannot but stare and subsequently suffer the most abominable of deaths. And, to believe the few within the clinical circles that have actually bothered to read it, one would think Anti-Oedipus is, at best, a well-intentioned but thoroughly misguided flash in the pan. Both of these responses suffer from (1) a reading strategy that treats psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis as opposing paradigms caught up in a dispute over the so-called truth of the unconscious, and hence (2) an exclusive focus on the ways in which either paradigm can trap, conquer and/or discredit the other. While I do not wish to underestimate the critical legacy with which Anti-Oedipus has been rightly credited, I want to insist on a no less significant but much less manifest productive, psychoanalytic legacy that needs to be unravelled. To ignore that legacy is to wrest the text from its theoretical and practical matrix and reify its authors’ richly ambivalent position.
My plan in the following pages is to reorganize the various components of the debate and show how, in underscoring the truly productive core of desire, Deleuze and Guattari remain fully committed to Freud’s most singular discovery of an unconscious that is procedural and dynamic. I will show how Anti-Oedipus is not only a harsh and most insightful critique of the assimilationist vein in psychoanalysis, but that it is also, and more profoundly, a practice where the science of the unconscious is made to obey the laws it attributes to its object. The outcome here is nothing short of the ‘becoming-unconscious’ of psychoanalysis, a becoming that signals neither the repression nor the death of the practice but the transformation of its principles and procedures into those of its object. Psychoanalysis is no longer the subject that speaks of the unconscious; it is subject to it. Ostensibly, Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-oedipal project is ‘anti-’ insofar as it ushers in a much needed moment of reflexivity where psychoanalytic theory and practice meet, where the theory is practiced on itself, where the theory finds itself on the couch it has produced. I want to track this anti-oedipal reflexivity alongside Nietzsche, Winnicott, Freud, Feynman, Bardi, Sophocles and Cixous. Along the way, I will unsettle the psychoanalytic axiom that pins identity onto a sexuality that is presumably always already tragic. I will rediscover a productive desire that belongs neither to subject nor to object but to the verb in its unfolding, to the verb as a gerund. I will conclude with a reformulation of the analytic process as an agile and resilient traversal, without design or resolution, in conflict and surprise.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Nietzsche: by way of an introduction
2. Winnicott: the psychoanalytic family
3. Anti-Oedipus: reading, listening, analysing
4. Process Notes: productions and syntheses
5. Sophocles: under the sign of Nemesis
6. Cixous: the unseen seen
7. Désirand: the transitional subject
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Images
The following are links to images referenced in Chapter Six (Cixous: the unseen seen):
