April 7, 2008
(Via Continental Philosophy) A number of texts on Deleuze and by Deleuze/Deleuze-Guattari are now available online through Fark Yaralari’s blog. Of special interest to me is Christian Kerslake’s Deleuze and the Unconscious. There are so few books delving deeply and in an informed way into Deleuze’s relationship to psychoanalysis that it is nice to see someone doing such work. I am, however, perplexed to see that Kerslakefocuses so much on Jung. On the one hand, this move seems retrograde as Jung, with his collective unconscious and focus on expressivist “interpretive keys” is something of the Plato of psychoanalysis. From one end of his work to the other, Deleuze devoted his thought to overcoming the overdetermination and subordination of matter to form. This is precisely the aim of his intricate analysis of processes of individuation in the last two chapters of Difference and Repetition. Whether we’re speaking of Platonic Ideas, Kantian categories, Hegelian notions, or Jungian archetypes, the force of this critique of form remains the same. However, perhaps this is just a mistaken understanding of Jung and my view will change after reading Kerslake’s book.
On the other hand, it seems to me that Freud and Lacan, under a highly original reading, occupy a far more central place in Deleuze’s philosophical project. Indeed, Deleuze’s critique of Freud’s Oedipus in Anti-Oedipus can actually be read as a way of bearing fidelity to Freud and what he had discovered in his early work about the mechanisms of the early work. As Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly remark in Anti-Oedipus, Freud is the Martin Luther and Adam Smith of psychiatry. Luther deterritorialized religion from the church, but reterritorialized it on scripture. Smith deterritorialized value from pre-existent needs, showing how it is humans that produce value, but reterritorialized it on private property. Freud deterritorializes desire from pre-existent needs and lack, showing how it produces its object, only to reterritorialize it on the Oedipus. Would not Jung reterritorialize the unconscious on culturally invariant archetypes? Or is this a completely spurious reading of Jung?
April 8, 2008 at 3:04 am
Not to be pedantic but it is Kerslake.
I found the book very interesting and helpful. He’s quite explicitly ignoring the Capitalism and Schizophrenia books, not because he thinks they are bad, but because people have already covered that ground sufficiently well. The stuff on Jung, if I remember correctly, tended to read him as bit more “deterritorialized” than the standard reading. That is the archetypes didn’t play that big of a part, if I remember correctly, but rather the structure of culture and the formation of time were more intimately processual and intertwined than a structuralist account allows. I’m not sure if the mainline Jungian reading is spurious, but Kerslake was pretty convincing that Deleuze worked with Jung’s concepts, but I suppose it is up to debate whether or not his Jung is the Jung of Jungians.
Well worth a read, but that pdf is terrible. I wish Continuum was publishing this stuff in paperback or that libraries would buy it.
May 16, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Thanks for your interest in the book, Levi; I’m very glad you found it interesting Anthony. The argument for the influence of Jung on Deleuze is made in chapters 1-3 (you can miss out the section on Leibniz at the end of ch. 1).
About Jung as the Plato of psychoanalysis. There’s a lot of truth in that. One of the key ways of understanding Deleuze’s concept of repetition is to see it in opposition to reminiscence (the distinction is from Kierkegaard). Jung definitely tells us a lot about the perspective of reminiscence; but Deleuze’s appropriation of his ideas shows that they can also be interpreted within the rubric of ‘difference and repetition’. So it’s complicated.
The other reason for returning to Jung is that quite a lot is at stake in the Freud/Jung discussion around 1906-12. As well as being a good path into some of the main theoretical problems of psychoanalysis, this debate is helpful background for understanding what is at stake for the early Deleuze. The argument is that Deleuze’s thought first emerges in the context of non-Freudian traditions of thought about the unconscious. I argue for a bifurcation in the theory of the unconscious at the turn of the twentieth century. Janet, Bergson and Jung have a totally different understanding of the concept of the unconscious to Freud’s psychoanalysis. Deleuze’s early thought emerges from the former lineage, although he is also influenced by various ideas from Malinowski and Eliade amongst others. The field of ideas about the unconscious in the first half of the twentieth century was much wider and more varied than it is now often taken to be. For Deleuze, from the beginning, Freud’s theory of the unconscious was one amongst several other competing ones. In the 1961 Masoch article he outlines a number of reasons for preferring Jungianism to Freudianism. This context needs to be taken into account to understand the development of Deleuze’s ideas. He also approached the issues of the unconscious/desire/sexuality, etc as a philosopher rather than a clinician, which further complicates his position re psychoanalysis.
About Freud as deterritorialising desire from need (analogously to Luther and Adam Smith) Yes, Eugene Holland makes a convincing case for reading Anti-Oedipus on this basis in his Introduction to Schizoanalysis. However, Deleuze (on his own or with Guattari) nowhere affirms Freud’s theory of drives, and the question of the relationship between ‘need’, ‘desire’, ‘drive’, even ‘demand’ are all live ones for him. The aim of ch 2 of the book is to put in question the orthodox view of the distinction between need/biological instinct and psychosexual drive.
The book lacks a discussion of Anti-Oedipus; instead it’s focussed on Deleuze’s original lines of thought, with the claim that these original lines reassert themselves in his late work (esp. A Thousand Plateaus).
I’m trying to make good this lack by getting to grips with Guattari’s thought. Anti-Oedipus is founded on Deleuze’s appropriation of Guattari’s concepts. We were fortunate enough to have a conference on Guattari here at Middlesex a few weeks ago, with very informative and stimulating papers by Jean-Claude Polack, Barbara Glowczewski, and Peter Pal Pelbart (all of whom worked with Guattari) amongst others. There is a link to a revised version of my conference paper here:
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/crmep/STAFF/ChristianKerslake.htm
It attempts to make some sense of Guattari’s early ideas about desire and desiring ‘machines’. Almost of all of his early essays (including the key text, ‘Machine and Structure’) are unavailable in English translation, which has put obstacles in the way of the evaluation of the concept of the desiring machine.
May 16, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Many thanks for this, Christian. I think you’re right on the mark with Freud’s conception of the drives, although I do think there’s much more tension on this issue in Freud. The debate between Freud and Jung hadn’t occurred to me… Are you referring specifically to the debate over psychosis?
May 17, 2008 at 9:26 am
Psychosis is one of the main flashpoints, but Jung also makes some cogent criticisms of Freud’s concepts of sexuality and drive, as well as his theory of symbolism. Do you know John Kerr’s excellent book A Most Dangerous Method? - this gives a detailed account of the Freud-Jung relationship. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t want to overplay the importance of Jungianism as such - the aim is really to situate the development of Deleuze’s thought within an alternative lineage of ideas about the unconscious - the ‘other tradition’ of Janet-Bergson-Jung. Jung’s ideas about archetypes develop immanently from his reading about Bergson. Deleuze’s early work on the unconscious emerges in this context.
June 10, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Jung does not believe in archetypes as invariant cultural forms. in this he differs entirely from Plato. Jung’s epistemology stems from the unknowable and creative unconscious as the foundation of all knowledge. Hence we can assert nothing absolutely,all knowledge is provisional. This is his ONLY god-term. It follows, and Jung acknowledges frequently, that all theorising, including that of archetypes is pragmatic only and must give way before the greater reality of unconscious being. In detail, Jung described archetypes as the creative shaping energy behind powerfully, culturally repeated imagery. Actual images and symbols are ALWAYS culturally and historically inflected. Moreover, archetypes have roots in the body and instinct; they are the way the body manifests itself as psyche. See my book, Jung as a Writer (Routledge, 2005)or email me.