Marc Goodman has been kind enough to track down some of Kerslake’s articles (here and here).I have not yet read any of his work, but it sounds very interesting. He also has a book forthcoming with Continuum, entitled Deleuze and the Unconscious, focusing on Deleuze’s relationship to psychoanalysis. I confess that I’m a little leery of his focus on Jung, but I do think that the relationship of Deleuze to psychoanalysis is far more nuanced than has often been suggested in American scholarship. There’s a vast research project waiting to be done on Deleuze’s positive engagement with Freud, Lacan, and Klein.
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February 11, 2007 at 11:41 pm
I’m curious, as a psychoanalysis and Lacanian, how do you deal with the scientistic crowd and many of the mistakes perpetuated by psychoanalysis (i.e. with regard to autism, blaming the mother for being a ‘hysteric’)? I don’t mean this as an attack, I’m just curious.
February 12, 2007 at 12:11 am
This isn’t really recognizable to me as a psychoanalytic position or one that could be articulated from within the psychoanalytic clinic. On the one hand, the position of the analyst is rather passive in the clinic. An analyst listens and does not explain. It is the analysand that does the work. When the analysts does intervene, it is to underline something in the analysand’s speech (by repeating a word or phrase for instance or saying “hmmm?”), by asking an open-ended question, or by offering an interpretation or construction that is designed to be enigmatic like the speech of an oracle, allowing for maximal play in how the analysand receives it. While an analysand might blame their parents for such and such a thing, this certainly wouldn’t be something done by a genuine psychoanalyst.
On the other hand, it is curious thing about development that almost everyone seems to blame their parents for something. In my recent post on Zizek and fantasy, you might have noted that I discussed that one of the aims of traversing the fantasy consists in overcoming the belief that someone else has stolen our jouissance. What you describe here is an instance of the absence of jouissance being referred to the parent or mother.
So many theoretical orientations are “external” in the precise sense that they take a theoretical model and apply it to the outside of what it is that they are describing. This is an example of the university discourse, where it’s a question of categorizing everything in terms of a pre-existent model. In my view, psychoanalysis and Lacanianism in particular is unique in just how respectful it is of the analysand’s discourse and how it works with that discourse in its own terms. For instance, terms like “hysteric” wouldn’t come from the mouth of a Lacanian in the psychoanalytic session, nor would terms like jouissance, objet a, transference, symptom, neurosis, etc. The first principle of analysis is the immanence of the analysand’s discourse and the ideal would be to not introduce anything that can’t be found within that discourse. Perhaps the scientistic crowd confuses material in case studies drawn from the analysand’s speech with impositions of analysts?
February 12, 2007 at 12:46 am
Well what I’m thinking of with regards to autism is actually the work done by psychoanalysts with autistic children, where they attempted to get them to deal with their trauma. I apologize for not being able to remember the name of the particular analyst, but his work influenced many psychologists in the 50’s when Freudian themes were still common and it caused many children to be separated from their parents.
I guess I’m thinking of some things that SEK has written on Freud and Lacan, but I’m not sure. Thanks for the response, you do make it sound attractive.
February 12, 2007 at 12:57 am
It doesn’t seem self-evident to me that things such as autism can’t be psychological, so it would make sense for a therapist to investigate it through talk therapy if the autistic person is high functioning. As for trauma, only a patient can tell you what is traumatic. There’s no a priori where trauma as concerned. At any rate, I don’t know why psychoanalysis would be singled out for abuse. Somewhere I have an article tucked away about a young woman institutionalized a few decades ago for something innocuous like masturbating. She spent her entire life in the institution and was treated in a stellar fashion with shock therapy, a lobotomy, and daily chemical cocktails that kept her in a constant comatose state. I’m not sure why psychoanalysis gets singled out with respect to the history of the human sciences. The history of psychiatry and neurologically based therapeutic approaches is littered with stories like this where doctors regularly choose “what’s best” (the subject gets no voice) and irreversible procedures are prescribed. These sorts of things continue to this day.
February 12, 2007 at 1:14 am
APS: are you thinking of Bruno Bettelheim? Although at one time a very popular and influential author, his actual history is a bit complex and contentious (not trying to enter into the dispute over Bettleheim’s credentials, on which I have no position, although I do find his theories problematic…) In any event, not really the same thing as the sort of psychoanalytic framework outlined here (not that I know much substantively about either framework, only enough to say this… ;-P)
February 12, 2007 at 1:25 am
That would be him.
Sinthome,
Fair enough. Have you talked with SEK about these sorts of things?
February 12, 2007 at 1:29 am
Anthony, no I haven’t… Though if he’s evoking figures such as this to delegitimate psychoanalysis, I’m not sure what else is to be said. I don’t see how any discussion of these issues can proceed without careful attention to what actually takes place in the psychoanalytic clinic.
February 12, 2007 at 3:14 am
I’ve never actually seen Scott mention Bettelheim – not an influential figure, to my knowledge (which is admittedly scant), in literary studies (other than perhaps in studies of children’s literature, on which he wrote). And, of course, Bettelheim operated in a clinical context – that’s part of the reason for both the credibility he was given at the time (as he claimed clinical results and experience to back his theories) and for the intense reaction against him after his suicide…
But he wasn’t operating in anything that seems even vaguely to resemble the theoretical or clinical context you’ve sketched here. The catchall way in which the term “psychoanalysis” operates from a “lay” perspective means that the phrase casts a much wider net than it might within the profession, and thus captures all sorts of traditions that have nothing much substantive to do with one another…
February 12, 2007 at 3:46 am
No SEK didn’t mention Bettelheim, but he’s written much on Freud at his blog.
“The catchall way in which the term “psychoanalysis” operates from a “lay” perspective means that the phrase casts a much wider net than it might within the profession, and thus captures all sorts of traditions that have nothing much substantive to do with one another.”
That is fair. I only brought up Bettelheim because he was talked about on a BBC documentary in relation to psychoanlaysis and autism.
February 12, 2007 at 5:06 am
I think N.P. makes a great point in reference to how psychoanalysis functions as a “catchall” phrase. Something similar seems to occur with discussions of “Christianity”, where it’s not always clear what’s being referred to.
I’ve never looked at Bettelheim or even heard of him until this discussion. He may have had cases that suggested the conclusions he arrived at. To me it sounds as if he crosses the line when he generalizes those findings, just as the whole “dissociative disorder” crowd did something similar. That is, it seems to me that in psychoanalysis things should work from case to theory, not theory to case. Or to put it a bit more broadly, each case should be both a challenge to all previous psychoanalytic theory and a renewal of that theory. Psychoanalysts, of course, do not always live up to this. Freud, for instance, generalized the oedipus. Later Lacan showed how the oedipus was Freud’s symptom.
There will be some invariants in psychoanalytic practice: intersubjectivity, jouissance, the thesis that there is always some symptom, etc. However, how these things are structured can come in nearly infinite flavors and for this reason you can only discover structuration by listening to the person there in the other chair. If you read any of the most recent psychoanalytic literature written by practicing analysts– I’m talking folk like Miller, Soler, Nobus, Fink, Svolos, etc., not cultural theorists like Zizek –you’ll see a lot of talk about the “new symptoms”. This talk of new symptoms is referring to shifts that have taken place in social organization that have been accompanied by shifts in how intersubjective relations are structured. No one is quite sure what to make of the new symptoms. We only know that we’re encountering them in our clinics. I suppose the point that I’m trying to make is that there isn’t any catch-all explanation for symptoms in analysis. Bettelheim might have indeed treated cases of autism where the analysand’s speech suggested a fantasy structure in which it was “the mother’s fault”. Another case of autism could have an entirely different structure.
Unlike medical symptoms that are signs (green snot means bronchitis), you can’t diagnose from symptoms in psychoanalysis. All you can do is trace the filiaments of the symptom in the analysand’s associations and see where they lead. On the analyst’s end, of course, this is anxiety provoking which is why it’s so important to go through analysis if you’re going to practice. You don’t get to occupy the position of all knowing master and you can’t predict where things will go. You have to listen.
Things get even more complicated. The history of how analysis is practiced itself has an impact on the unconscious. Everyone is familiar with the standard Freudian interpretations, and as a result they don’t work any longer. Moreover, transference tends to be structured in terms of how the analysand conceives analysis. For instance, someone who heavily studies Lacan will tend to have Lacaniany symptoms and dreams, just as someone heavily into Jung will have dreams and symptoms that the Jungian would just gush over. This functions as a kind of defense or ruse at the level of the unconscious. That is, by anticipating the likely interpretation and presenting symptoms accordingly, the unconscious thereby defends its specific mode of jouissance. This is why the analyst must himself always be analyzing his own interventions and how they signify, always striving to be elsewhere than where the transference positions him. All of this is to say that symptoms and transference are perpetually shifting sands that have their own singular logic like a Deleuzian multiplicity, sensitive to the life history of the analysand, social shifts, the transference unfolding in the analytic setting itself (which is always two-way), and any number of other factors.
February 12, 2007 at 8:08 am
I have nothing really to add, but I felt since you gave me so much time I should express my appreciation. I only had four hours of sleep and that sentence was a doozy! Still not sure if it says what my mind think it says, but can’t wake up enough to verify. Anyway, I think you’ve convinced me that psychoanalysis is a living discourse, which I don’t think I had realized prior to reading this.
February 12, 2007 at 8:20 pm
I too was sceptical about Kerslake’s use of Jung; however, he develops some very interesting ideas about Jung and perversion.
February 13, 2007 at 4:22 am
My nose itches. (I blame my mother!)
February 13, 2007 at 4:30 am
Seriously though, we ought to have this conversation at some point, as I’ve increasingly become convinced of the utility of psychoanalysis for literary studies, but am still fairly adamant (fairly adamant?) about its place in the culture at large.
N.P., I’ve never mentioned Bettelheim, but I could’ve, as he’s one of the most frequent targets of anti-psychoanalytic critics. The thing is, that’s largely why I haven’t mentioned him. I’ve been taught — rightly or wrongly — to attack the strong cases, not the weak ones, as a demolition of the latter only proves that, well, outliers exist. (Which, as you know, isn’t what I want to prove.)
Anyhow, perhaps at some point in the future you two, Joe, Anthony and I could do a reading group of some sort. Pair some pro- and anti-psychoanalytic texts which we think are particularly strong and/or convincing and hash this out. I’ve been reading some, shall we say, interesting translations of Lacan’s seminars of late, and would love to bat some ideas around. (By “interesting,” I only mean some of the mimeographed translations which circulated in the late ’70s and early ’80s, before any official ones came out. This is for my “history of theory in ’70s and ’80s paper,” by the by, which all of you are welcome to read and tear to shreds when I finish.)
February 13, 2007 at 6:34 am
Yes – but you didn’t succumb to the temptation to use him as your sample case – which is a good thing :-) I was doing consulting work with several psychoanalytically-oriented facilities in the period after his suicide, and had professional relationships with people who had worked under him, and the ripples from the allegations that flew around in the wake of his death were a complex thing to watch… Even without all of this, though, he wouldn’t, I think, be a particularly strong or interesting theoretical target…
February 14, 2007 at 5:25 am
Scott, not a bad suggestion, but only after things slow down a bit. What’s the Lacan you’ve been reading?
February 14, 2007 at 6:13 pm
I’ve been reading some early, personal translations of the material collected in Four Fundamental Concepts, as a way of seeing what Lacan would’ve looked like before being widely available in translation. I thought there might be some telling differences, but actually, I’m not finding many. One thing I have noticed, however, annotative apparatus on these early translations is rather more impressive than what’s currently available. What that means for me is, well, that he was understood more easily, if not differently, by that first wave of literary critics. That’s really neither here nor there, though, as it says more about the polemics of the time than the thought itself.
But yes, when thing calm down, I’d love to a reading group of some kind.
February 16, 2007 at 11:08 pm
[…] Eric Kaufman has been teasing us for a while now, in various settings, with the fact that he has been working on a piece on the […]
June 20, 2007 at 8:15 pm
The Deleuze and the Unconscious book is out now, I have a copy but I haven’t had time to read it all yet.
More interesting to me than his Jungian line with Deleuze is the argument/debate with Hallward that Kerslake’s other main themes pursue, with regard to Kant.
The debate followed the publication of Kerslake’s provocative essay “The Vertigo of Philosophy: Deleuze and the Problem of Immanence” in Radical Philosophy 113 (May/June 2002). The debate ensued in vol. 114 (July/August 2002) and continued in Kerslake’s 2004 article, “Deleuze, Kant, and the Question of Metacritique” (The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 17, 2004) and in Hallward’s book Out of this World; Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, (Verso, 2006). This dispute concerns (at least to a large degree) the position of Deleuze’s philosophy with respect to the Copernican Revolution of Kant, and in particular with respect to the demands of a method of ‘legitimation,’ to put it simply/crudely. In other words, whether Deleuze is essentially a disciple of the German Idealist tradition, in which case his philosophy contains a necessarily ‘metacritical’ dimension capable of demonstrating an a priori relationship between thought and being, and thereby substantiating his (so-called) “metaphysical” claims, or whether he belongs rather in the milieu of a pre-critical (& ‘vulgar’) metaphysics attributed to Spinoza and extended (by Hallward) to Bergson’s intellectual intuition of Duration. And while I am undoubtedly more sympathetic to the former position (that of Kerslake), at the same time it seems to me that the debate is perhaps poorly framed as an either/or, since this risks overlooking the subtlety and ambivalence of the Deleuze-Kant relation. the notion of ‘transcendental empiricism’ would be at stake in this debate, and thus entails a nuanced reading of Diff&Rep, among other claims.
In any event, coupled with the problems brought forth in Toscano’s recent study on individuation, I think these represent the two most interesting strains of work currently being undertaken in Deleuzian philosophy.
In fact, bringing Toscano and Kerslake’s arguements to bear upon one another would be very interesting. Toscano makes some gestures to wanting to ‘overcome’ the notion of the transcendental’ in Deleuze, and yet his work is ultimately quite ambivalent on this point in my eyes, as he turns back on this claim when defending deleuze against badiou. many of his ‘this part of deleuze and not that’ arguments flip-flop like this. I plan in the next year to publish a thorough review of this work somewhere which would unfold these ambivalences and evaluate them in light of his defense of ‘anomalous individuation’ (i.e. individuation without a principle guiding it). if and when this comes to pass, i’ll drop a link to it here, as i’ve enjoyed many of the discussions on this blog for some time, and look forward as well to the forthcoming manuscript you’re preparing, which i saw the outline of some time ago on a friend’s blog (nick).
regarding the intersection of kerslake and toscano’s claims, the problem would probably hinge on the (either principled or non-principled) concept of ‘metacritique’ and its position with respect to the individuation of thought itself. seeing as how they undoubtedly know each other (both teaching in england last i heard), i wonder if this would even be confrontation possible in a conference setting. anyway, these are just vague ramblings for now, but if anyone wanted to discuss the above mentioned essays by Kerslake, or toscano’s book, i’d be quite interested in hearing the response. my email is in the comments, please keep me in the loop if possible.
best,
kieran
sketchyproposal@yahoo.com
June 20, 2007 at 8:25 pm
p.s. sorry if that post seemed not very ‘apropos’, but since the conversation began with kerslake and quickly left to go somewhere else, I figured it was still the best place to post the ideas.
cheers
June 20, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Kieran, I’m somewhat ashamed to confess that the focus on Jung, coupled with the ridiculously high price of Continuum books is nearly enough to prevent me from looking into Kerslake’s work at all. I understand that Deleuze and Guattari draw on Jung surrounding the issue of schizophrenia and psychosis, distinguishing between the way Freud approaches the analysis of various figures that appear in formations of the unconscious (sorcerers, animals, etc) and how Jung approaches this analysis. However, it seems to me that this reference is made in passing of a broader argument, and that a focus on Jung opens the door for all sorts of (I think) undesirable things such as the collective unconscious, archetypes, etc.
Moreover, it seems fairly clear from their discussion of the three passive syntheses (connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive) that Deleuze and Guattari are drawing on the early Freud of the Entwurf, prior to the formulation of the Oedipus complex, and using the unconscious processes Freud there discovered as a way of critiquing subsequent developments in psychoanalysis vis a vis the illegitimate reduction of desiring-production to Oedipal formations. Connective synthesis would then be the relations formed through libido, disjunctive synthesis would be the trace left in the unconscious that can then function as material for subsequent unconscious formations, and conjunctive synthesis would be the remainder of jouissance produced as a result of these operations. Given that connective syntheses can be forged with anything, and that we can get syntheses of connective syntheses and disjunctive syntheses producing an unlimited number of formations as dreams attest, Deleuze and Guattari can then rightly ask why classical psychoanalysis perpetually reterritorializes desire back on the family structure in its interpretation and practice, rather than tracing the immanent formations of the unconscious as the early, pre-Oedipus, Freud had done.
In close second to the Freud of Entwurf, would then come Melanie Klein of the part objects, and Lacan of objet a and symbolic chains (the significantly modify Lacan’s concept of symbolic chains, substituting the notion of “jargon” for “codes”, but nonetheless speak of Lacan’s innovation positively, and in a number of places in Anti-Oedipus and Guattari’s Chaosmosis, they explicitly say objet a and desiring-machines are one and the same thing). Given this it just strikes me as odd for Kerslake to place so much emphasis on Jung… A figure who is so often the darling of new age obscurantists and mystics. Do you feel he does a good job with this analysis?
June 20, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Finally, I can think of few things more unproductive in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring-production” than Jung’s archetypes. The move just strikes me as very odd. I suppose I’ll have to read the text eventually as I’m gearing up to write a book on intersections between Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari. I think generally this relationship has been very poorly articulated and understood, mostly due to a lack of familiarity with Lacan’s later teachings. Hopefully such a text would go some of the way to taking the wind out of the sails of critiques like those we find in Zizek, and of introducing more ecological, economic, and historical modes of analysis into Lacanian thought. Nonetheless, I have an almost visceral reaction to the focus on Jung.
I look forward to seeing your critique. In my view, the key figure in understanding Deleuze’s transcendentalism is not Kant, but rather the obscure figure Solomon Maimon who levels as strong critique against Kant, while synthesizing the thought of Kant, Hume, Spinoza, and Leibniz so as to produce an immanent metaphysic. Sound familiar?
June 20, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Levi-
thanks for your reply. yeah the kerslake book is way overpriced. I borrowed it from a foreign library and then copied it on a faculty photocopy account, bound it, and now have a 2 dollar version rather than a hundred+ dollar version :)
anyway, I share your concerns about Jungian theory, and in general am much more interested in the other side of kerslake, as i mentioned. if you want the shorthand version of what kerslake’s jung is, just look online for his article (i think its in angelaki) “Rebirth through incest”…i found a copy online before…or just send me an email and i’ll forward it to you.
I look forward to your work on lacan and d&g, it’s a topic that (properly done this time) is long overdue for consideration, which your writings on this blog have already made ample headway towards. enough flattery though.
yes, I certainly am familiar with Maimon. I’ve read numerous pieces by D. Smith on the topic, and poured over the references in DR ch.4, but remain crippled by a lack of German language since almost nothing by him is translated. but if i understand your redirection, I think we’re still in agreement about the general trajectory of Deleuze-studies, i.e. in a “post-Kantian” line that would extend from maimon, perhaps through schelling, and into Lautman, Simondon, and all the other people from france in the 20th century deleuze pulls out of his hat that no one’s heard of…but it’s post-kantian in essence, by virtue of the transcendental character of intensive individuation and the differential character of the syntheses he first calls “Ideas”…right?
if so, it seems to me that the questions i proposed to you would be no less fitting, no? since the problems of metacritique are no less foreign to maimon’s internal differential Ideas than to simondon’s pre-individuality…hence Kerslake and Toscano should box. but I think the work can be done without them, if we read their work carefully and use it as a focus for locating the position of “principles” in Deleuze’s transcendental register. would you agree about the pertinence of such a problem?
a suggested beginning then, to give weight to my suggestion.
an investigation of Deleuze’s notion of (principled or not?) “sufficient reason” (related, i think to this problem of metacritique and the language of “adequatio” that Badiou and Hallward pick on repeatedly) could (this is one place among many) begin with a careful assessment of Deleuze’s usage of the transcendental/empirical distinction, in order to determine the precise meaning of the phrase “intensity is a transcendental principle”. The following quote could certainly constitute a place to begin this investigation, as it both situates intensity prior to empirical principles, while at the same time locating in its individuating power the matrix which supplies a determinate empirical domain with the principle of its distribution: “Intensive quantity is a transcendental principle, not a scientific concept. ..an empirical principle is the instance which governs a particular domain. Every domain is a qualified and extended partial system, governed in such a manner that the difference of intensity which creates it tends to be cancelled within it (law of nature). But the domains are distributive and cannot be added: there is no more an extensity in general than there is an energy in general within extensity. On the other hand, there is an intensive space with no other qualification, and within this space a pure energy. The transcendental principle does not govern any domain but gives the domain to be governed to a given empirical principle; it accounts for the subjection of a domain to a principle. The domain is created by difference of intensity, and given by this difference to an empirical principle according to which and in which the difference itself is cancelled. It is the transcendental principle which maintains itself in itself, beyond the reach of the empirical principle. Moreover, while the laws of nature govern the surface of the world, the eternal return ceaselessly rumbles in this other dimension of the transcendental or the volcanic spatium” (DR 241/310-11). As the close of this passage makes clear, the problem of sufficiency is inseparable from that of the eternal return as the vehicle of determination as such. and what is more (post)Kantian than Deleuze’s use of the term “pure form of determination/empty form of time” ??
i’m interested to hear what you have to say about all this…
all the best,
June 20, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Kieran, I agree that the question between Deleuze as a speculative metaphysician and Deleuze as engaged in metacritique shouldn’t be posed as an either/or alternative. I also agree that he’s a post-Kantian thinker. In my book (not to shamelessly plug myself), I actually pose a question very similar to this, asking in what sense Deleuze remains within the orbit of critical philosophy. That is, we can easily see the Kantian responding to Deleuze, asking “what entitles you to these claims? Aren’t these the claims of the dogmatic and speculative metaphysician?”
In that chapter I focus on Deleuze’s reading of Kant’s fractured cogito in chapter 1 of Difference and Repetition, in the context of his initial discussion of the eternal return. There I try to show how Deleuze turns Kant inside out, positing not mind as the condition or ground of experience, but rather an impersonal time as the genetic condition out of which both subjects and objects are generated. As Deleuze puts it, the subject does not experience itself thinking or as the agent of thought, but rather receives its thoughts. Consequently, Deleuze passes through critical philosophy to a metaphysics that appears speculative but that has found a ground deeper than that of mind. If this argument holds up, the metacritical question of the relationship between thought and being need not even be posed, as there is no hardline distinction between thought and being. The thinker is a product of thought that already pertains to being itself, such that there isn’t a hardline distinction between subject and object. Instead of transcendental conditions imposed by mind as the “form of experience”, we instead get a transcendental field out of which both subjects and objects emerge. As the Nietzsche book indicates, the critical question then becomes one of the genesis of various values and subjectivities within the transcendental field. Like Whitehead, Deleuze effectively reverses the critical project, asking not how the world and objects are precipitated out of the subject, but rather how a subject is precipitated out of this transcendental field. I realize all of this is very gestural.
I’m very much looking forward to your review. When it comes to secondary sources on Deleuze and other thinkers, I don’t tend to be a very careful reader. My habit is to read these texts in terms of whether or not they illuminate a particular aspect of the thinker I’m trying to understand, rather than as positions taken as a debate. As such, I seldom follow these sorts of debates (though I should). It sounds like the sort of work you’re doing will clarify a number of things for me.
Best,
Levi
June 20, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Dear Levi,
as I’ve said, I very much look forward to reading your manuscript. the outline you posted in a comment on the accursed share blog, as well as these thoughts you’re now sharing, are incisive and timely.
and yet, my impatience gets the better of me, and so i wonder if you might develop one or two points here.
it is clear that the problem you’re calling “critique” as the adequation of thought to being is the same one kerslake raises in the Immanence essay, and hence you’re not far apart on this question. incidentally, it is this very problem that splits Kerslake from hallward and badiou, since the problem hinges (and here I’m not interested in ‘debates about secondary sources’ so much as a genuine problem i myself have had in my understanding of deleuze for some time now) on the way thought and being enter into relation or assume a co-constitution. You have suggested that “the metacritical question of the relationship between thought and being need not even be posed, as there is no hardline distinction between thought and being.” my interest is in hearing more about how this problem can be overcome…you have dropped some interesting suggestions, and I (as the blog-fish) am biting.
to begin, if the subject is a passive (or larval) subject of being’s emission of thought, and this allows us to discover “a deeper ground than mind”, what interests me is how, if mind is not the condition or ground of experience, “but rather an impersonal time as the genetic condition out of which both subjects and objects are generated”, we can call time a ground? it makes perfect sense to me that you would look to the eternal return, as this turns the ground into an intensive ungrounding, unstained by the form of the subject or the identical object which is selects-away or ‘erases’ them in the play of difference. but the curious thing to me would be how this “impersonal time” can be thought alongside the account of the pre-individual field. if larval subjects are the patients of forced movements produced by the field, and are divided by the pure form of time (through which Ideas enter and leave), the question becomes how to bring a “pure form of time” into the account of the pre-individual field…it’s the problem i’m presently battling in my thesis too. furthermore (as you know, having read and commented on Toscano elsewhere in your blog)it’s the basis of Toscano’s reply to Badiou. According to toscano (certain of his pages anyway), we must reject the notion of a formal account of time as being part of Deleuze’s “structuralist” phase, and say with simondon that time is but one of the aspects of being produced by individuation. this rejection of a coexisting totality and the formal sufficiency of the virtual purportedly strip deleuze’s work of the “sufficiency of the virtual” and it’s “principled” account of individuation. i raise toscano not because I’m piggy-backing on his work, which i’ve only read very recently after trying to work these things out for myself for some time now, but because the upshot of this reading has a decisive effect on the relation between thought and being. as he writes regarding simondon, “thought always comes second” and the individuation of thought must be conceived in its ontogenetic relation to the unprincipled ‘anomalous’ individuation or disparation that precedes it. that’s all fine and good, but so long as he continues to speak again and again of the “sufficient reasons” of beings, thought, etc, the problem of critique seems to return again and again. perhaps its a conservative tendency, but the charge of “speculative metaphysics” doesn’t seem to me so easily ushered away. your suggestion seems to straddle both sides, since the subject “receives its thoughts” (implying thought as secondary to individuation) and yet you’ve also said that thought and being have no hardline distinction. I would expect then that a certain relation between this reception and the pure form of time that fractures the I would be the way to go on this, but i’m putting words in your mouth now…how do you see this as working?
is the “impersonal time” formal? if not, how can it supply the basis for a co-determination of being and thought?
i apologize if your hint was that you wanted me to wait for your manuscript. i assure you i will not take these replies as being some form of substitution, but rather as friendly thought-arrows tossed back and forth between fellow admirers of Deleuze.
all the best,
kieran
June 21, 2007 at 12:20 am
Kieran, I’ll have to think on this more. The strategy that I’m proposing is to undercut the assumptions of critical philosophy, the premise that warrants such a form of critical reflection, at their root. Critical philosophy, following the philosophy of representation effected by Locke and Descartes, presumes that subject and world are independent of one another. The subject is said to represent the world, but because the subject does not have direct access to the world, it is unable to determine whether or not its representations are adequate to the world. Hume draws out the skeptical implications of this, and Kant comes back suggesting the alternative possibility that it is not mind that conforms to objects, but objects that conform to mind. Given the structuring agency of mind and the limitation to phenomenal experience, we can thus avoid skeptical conclusions so long as we restrict ourselves to the phenomenal and do not try to claim knowledge of being in itself. Critical philosophy thus begins with the decision to reflect on the operations of mind (this trend is already operative in Hume) so as to determine both the limits of experience and the way in which mind gives form to or constitutes its objects. I know you’re aware of all this, I’m just repeating it for whoever might be reading and to situate my own thought process.
Now what I’ve tried to argue (and the success of this argument is certainly up for debate) is that Deleuze’s strategy is first to call into question whether or not the sort of reflection called for by transcendental idealism is possible. Kant assumes that the subject entertains a sort of privileged or transparent relationship to the contents of mind which it does not entertain to objects in themselves. Focusing on a particular moment in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason Deleuze contests this. As Deleuze writes,
Contrary to both Hallward and Toscano (pre-critical metaphysics vs post-Kantian metaphysics), Deleuze asks us to instead focus on a precise moment in Kant. In referring to a fractured Cogito for a dissolved self, Deleuze is, of course, referring to the distinction between empirical and transcendental apperception, and Kant’s analysis of the paralogisms in the first Critique, where it is shown that the move from “I think” to “I am” is illegitimate, requiring a mediating third term: time.
Deleuze’s point, under my reading, is that the subject maintains no special, immediate, and transparent relation to its thoughts. The spontaneity of thought is always beyond us, such that we instead only receive our thoughts like witnessing events taking place. Yet this undermines the basic assumptions of transcendental inquiry (and phenomenology as well), opening the possibility that it is not an I that thinks, but being that thinks. Here I think Deleuze is following Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil as well as Freud:
There is no thinker behind the thought, rather “it thinks” (in The Logic of Sense Deleuze draw special attention to grammatical forms like “it rains”, “es regnet”, “il pleut”, etc., where we refer to an impersonal taking place of the event). Freud is similar to Nietzsche. In his famous unpublished Entwurf the processes described as “unconscious” are not carried out by a particular agent or agency (spontaneity), rather they are non-linear, decentered processes without any agent presiding over them (hence Deleuze’s focus on passive synthesis). I still haven’t fully figured out Deleuze’s idea of an empty form of time or his thesis that the form of change does not itself change, however, I do think that it’s important to distinguish between the impersonal and the empty form of time. Under my reading, the impersonal and the pre-individual are one and the same. Impersonal does not designate “empty”, but rather “not belonging to a person or subject”. As such, it refers to the prepersonal transcendental field populated by singularities and their relations. I base this reading on Deleuze’s analysis of time in chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition, where the cone of memory is not undifferentiated or empty, but contains a variety of different levels in more or less contracted and dilated states.
All of this is why I place so much emphasis on Maimon, as, on the one hand, Deleuze draws his analysis of the differentials, Ideas as multiplicities, and the undetermined, the determinable, and the ideal of complete determination from his work, but Maimon also attempts to undermine the distinction between concepts and intuitions, spontaneity and receptivity, understanding and sensibility, and to give the Ideas pride of place, showing that it is being that thinks, not a subject (here echoes of Spinoza).
I appreciate your thought arrows on these issues and am not entirely convinced by my own arguments. The book was originally written as my dissertation under the supervision of Andrew Cutrofello. Cutrofello reads everything through the lense of Kant’s critical project– though he tried to break out at one point through a deconstructive reading of Kant via Hume and psychoanalysis in the under-appreciated book Imagining Otherwise –so I was trying to work through the requirements of critical thought he was throwing at me. My strategy was not so much to show how Deleuze is a critical thinker– clearly Deleuze’s account of individuation and focus on the pre-personal is at odds with the way transcendental idealism centers things on the transcendental subject –but rather to sidestep the issue altogether by trying to “deconstruct” the assumptions upon which critical philosophy is based. I thus tried to show how Deleuze passes through critical philosophy– “the specific moment in Kant” –to a position where the distinction between critical and dogmatic philosophy becomes undecidable (by virtue of the constraints placed on self-experience as a result of being split by the form of time). Thus, where in Kant and those following him we get a focus on the primacy of epistemological questions, in Deleuze we get invention and conceptual experimentation (we also get a focus on pedagogy and learning as opposed to knowing). Certainly I’d like stronger arguments for Deleuze’s ontology, better able to respond to critical and phenomenological objections.
October 18, 2008 at 6:42 am
Reading Kerslake on Deleuze is like to find missing pieces of the puzzle. To get his articles online is great happiness.
I think, in this century, we will discuss more Jungian themes and we will need to focus on the relationship between Jung and Freud. To read Jung’s latest book (Memories, Dreams and Thoughts)would be a good start.
May 10, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Hello there,
I just came upon this blog accidentally by looking for connections between Jung and Deleuze. I am currently working on a thesis about the possible relationship between Jung and Deleuze in order to enrich Deleuze’s approach to cinema. My starting point is the video Vicarious by Tool, a band influenced by Jung and, so it seems to me, Deleuze as well. The combination Jung and Deleuze came to me rather intuitively about a year a half ago, and not much later I stumbled upon Kerslake’s work.
There indeed seems to be something incommensurable between Jung and Deleuze, but somehow, on a more instinctive level perhaps, there seem to be intriguing (rhizomatic?) connections to be made between the two as well.
I don’t know if this post will be read, since the latest response was in October last year, but if someone reads this, I would love to hear your opinion and/or ideas, or perhaps someone knows interesting articles or links that I can delve into? I’d be much obliged.
Sincerely,
Niels Tubbing
July 28, 2013 at 5:02 am
Actually Deleuze said in A Thousand Plateaus that Jung, after all, is “more profound” than Freud. (Jung est quand même plus profond que Freud). (MP, 294). Although he chose to study Lacan and Freud, probably because they are more interesting to discuss with. Deleuze is clear (you can hear him many times during his “cours”) when he says that psychoanalysis is a shame for our time. (Excuse my English)