I haven’t had much time to write lately as I’m inundated with grading and a host of other things. Basically I’ve been a nervous wreck waiting to find out about the job. I know, I know, it’s only been a week… After all, I just returned from Ohio on Friday 16th and the last candidate was interviewed on Monday the 19th, but nonetheless… The fun part of these things is that all my obsessional symptoms begin to come to the fore. In his case study on the Rat Man and elsewhere, Freud underlined the strong relationship between superstitious or magical thought and obsessional neurosis. For instance, the Rat Man would worry that thinking certain thoughts would lead to the death of his father, despite the fact that his father was already dead! I won’t trouble you with the sorts of connections playing about in my mind. They aren’t pretty.
At any rate, some of you might recall that one of my first posts here was about the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis. Indeed, it was the thoughts behind this post that motivated me to start this blog, on a whim one night, in the first place. My friend Melanie had been gushing about the whole blog phenomenon– in particular she had been lurking about on I Cite and Infinite Thought –so lest I lose my “hip factor” I decided, with bottle of wine in hand, to poke about one night while I was on vacation (it must have been Spring Break). I had participated for years on academic discussion lists– indeed I am even the moderator of a few such lists –but had never ventured forth into the daunting land of theory blogs. Was I hip enough to be a blogger, I wondered? Did I have what it takes to rant endlessly and in a self-absorbed fashion about the minor drama that is my life? Could I write freely and of my own accord, without having the instigation of other list members annoying the hell out of me with their particular thoughts and thus prompting me to respond? At any rate, as I poked about in my semi-drunken stupor, I came across a blog devoted to Deleuze and Guattari, and was enraged by the sort of standard claims you come across in these venues about psychoanalysis (this wasn’t, of course, on I Cite or Infinite Thought). When I tried to post my rejoinder, pointing out how heavily Deleuze and Guattari draw on Lacan and how Anti-Oedipus tends to except Lacan from the sorts of criticisms they level against folk like Melanie Klein and Freud, the computer froze and I lost the comment.
In that moment Larval Subjects was born. Basically I said screw it, quickly set up a blog with blogger, wrote a post on the death of god and then another on Deleuze, Guattari, and Lacan. Having gotten it out of my system, I didn’t give the blog another thought, yet to my great surprise someone posted: Orla. “Whoa, perhaps people actually read these things!” A few days later I got the courage to post on Jodi Dean’s I Cite with a link to something I’d written. She frontpaged me and then a few other blogs followed in kind, and voila! So I kept writing. It would be no exaggeration to say that Jodi Dean and Sujet-barre made me in more ways than one when they front paged me. The traffic that ensued and the comments that arose encouraged me to continue writing and to explore my ideas in ways that I never had before, pushing me to develop my own thoughts rather than simply engaging in commentary. While my style is still very citational, I nonetheless continue to develop thoughts of some sort, for good or ill. My interactions here have motivated me to submit far more papers and have made me more confident in my professional interactions. Blogging has been, for me, a life changing event. Such is the power of networks. At any rate, my rage about an offhand comment from an enthusiast of Deleuze and Guattari was the result of years of frustration borne out of my own interactions with Deleuzians on various online discussion lists and at conferences. As Deleuze and Guattari point out,
Let us remember once again one of Marx’s caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and the relations of production. The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends. (AO, 24)
Perhaps this is one of the quasi-transcendental sources of stupidity that I was lamenting in my recent post on learning: our tendency to think in terms of products and results, rather than processes of production. I always try to remind myself of this, that I do not know their field of individuation or from whence they have come, when I encounter someone who is responding to something in a particularly impassioned way, though I am seldom good at keeping this in mind. In a similar vein, if my irritation with the treatment of Lacan by American enthusiasts of Deleuze and Guattari is so impassioned, then this is due to years and years of hearing the same tired points trotted out again and again, when what is written there on the page in black and white says something completely different.
And, of course, there is my own sympathy towards psychoanalysis, having spent years in analysis myself, having struggled with Lacan’s own difficult and imposing theoretical edifice, and practicing as an analyst myself. Sometimes I cannot prevent myself from having dark and self-serving thoughts, smugly thinking of certain Deleuzians as academic dilettantes playing a game of letters, who have never sat before and been responsible to another genuinely suffering person and had to assume responsibility for the consequences of their own interventions. As Lacan remarks in his tenth seminar, L’angoisse, the analyst must learn, above all, how to use her own anxiety as a productive principle. And anxiety is certainly legion on the analyst’s end of things. It is my view that every thinker, every philosopher, should have a concrete practice so as to remind themselves of that little bit of the real, or so as to encounter a point of opacity and resistance within the otherwise “smooth” world of conceptual creation where we are all little gods. I know these are ugly thoughts and I try not to have them. Spinoza had his lenses to grind. Kant had his physics. Descartes had his mathematics. Leibniz all his inventions. And Lacan his patients. I do not like that I sometimes conceitedly think such things. Yet I get frustrated.
At any rate, in order to keep myself sane as I wait and as I grade, I’ve been distracting myself by rereading Anti-Oedipus. I thought, perhaps, with some distance in time between the heady days of heated polemical debates about Lacan in the various forums devoted to Deleuze and Guattari, I could approach the collaberative works with fresh eyes and less irritation. And indeed, I am finding the work to be productive and enjoyable in a number of ways. Yet still I wonder how the translation process has effected the reception of Deleuze and Guattari and tended to produce sterile debates between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis in ways that aren’t reflective of what the text directly says. Thus, for instance, in a footnote we find the translators making the following remark:
Institutional analysis is the more political tendency of institutional psychotherapy, begun in the late 1950s as an attempt to collectively deal with what psychoanalysis so hypocritcally avoided, namely the psychoses. La Borde Clinic, established in 1955 by Jean Oury of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, served as the locus for discussions on institutional psychotherapy, and Jacques Lacan’s seminars served as the instutitional basis for these discussions ‘in the beginning.’ Felix Guattari joined the clinic in 1956, as a militant interested in the notions of desire under discussion– a topic rarely dealt with by militants at the time. Preferring the term ‘institutional analysis’ over ‘institutional psychotherapy,’ Guattari sought to push the movement in a more political direction, toward what he later described as a political analysis of desire. In any case this injection of a psychoanalytical discourse (Lacan’s version) into a custodial instutition led to a collectivization of the analytical concepts. Transference came to be seen as institutional, and fantasies were seen to be collective: desire was a problem of groups and for groups. See Jacques Donzelot’s excellent article on Anti-Oedipus, “Une anti-sociologie” in Esprit, December 1972, and Gilles Deleuze’s detailed discussions of Guattari’s notions of groups and desire, “Trois problemes de groupe” in Felix Guattari, Psychanalyse et transversalite (Paris: Maspero, 1972). (Translators’ note.) (AO, 30)
The amount of commentary in this passage is simply bizarre. First, what is hypocritical here in psychoanalysis? Lacan’s doctoral thesis was on psychosis and he there did groundbreaking work in the analysis of the relationship between “cultural factors” and the phenomenon of psychosis. Second, Lacan devoted two entire years of his seminar to the study of the psychoses– first in 1995 and later in the twenty-third seminar, on the Sinthome. Third, one will find articles on psychosis in the Ecrits. And most importantly, fourth, Lacan was among the first to advocate the development of techniques– markedly different from those employed in working with neurotics –for working with psychotics. It seems that interest in psychosis was widespread within the Lacanian psychoanalytic community. Moreover, these discussions are just lively and vital today among Lacanians.
Things become more bizarre when we note the square quotes around “in the beginning”, when the translators speak of La Borde Clinic’s relationship to Lacan, as if the translators need to find some point of contention between Lacan and the engaged practitioners of La Borde. How are we to square this with the fact that Guattari was a member of Lacan’s school for his entire life? Wouldn’t Guattari have renounced his membership if there were some fundamental theoretical break here? Further, it would be rather odd for Deleuze and Guattari to present Lacan with a copy of Anti-Oedipus upon its publication were there not some theoretical sympathy between them. Moreover, it simply isn’t true that Lacan ignored the instutitional dimension of transference with regard to psychoanalytic groups. Anyone who has read the founding documents of Lacan’s various schools and pronouncements on the training of analysts in Television knows that these issues of group and institutional transference are front and center. Indeed, it could be said that Lacan’s central question where psychoanalytic organizations is concerned was that of how to form a group that isn’t premised on belief in the big Other and the primacy of either the master or university discourse.
Finally, how are we to square the apparently hostile attitude towards Lacan expressed in this footnote with passages from Anti-Oedipus such as the following:
Lacan’s admirable theory of desire appears to us to have two poles: one related to “the object small a” as a desiring-machine, which defines desire in terms of a real production, thus going beyond both any idea of need an any idea of fantasy; and the other related to the “great Other” as a signifier, which reintroduces a certain notion of lack. In Serge Leclaire’s article “La realite du desire” (Ch. 4, reference note 26), the oscillation between these two poles can be seen quite clearly. (AO, 27)
Why would they describe Lacan’s theory as admirable if they were thoroughly rejecting it. A little later, Deleuze and Guattari will say “There is no doubt that at this point in history the neurotic, the pervert, and the psychotic cannot be adequately defined in terms of drives, for drives are simply the desiring-machines themselves. They must be defined in terms of modern territorialities” (AO, 35). Confronted with this passage, it is difficult for the reader well acquainted with Lacan not to recall this passage from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, given eight years before the publication of Anti-Oedipus:
Let me say that if there is anything resembling a drive it is a montage
…
The montage of the drive is a montage which, first, is presented as having neither head nor tail– in the sense in which one speaks of montage in a surrealist collage. If we bring together the paradoxes that we just defined at the level of Drang, at that of the object, at that of the aim of the drive, I think that the resulting image would show the working of a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap, a peacock’s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful. (169)
Deleuze and Guattari describe the functioning of desiring-machines as decentered with regard to the subject, just as we see in this passage, where drive is described as having no head (drive is “acephalous”). But more fundamentally, it is impossible to miss the strong parallel between the connective nature of drive– dynamo-gas-tap-peakcock feather-woman –and the connective nature of desiring-machines. Finally, just as desiring-machines function by interrupting a flow– for instance, the mouth interrupting a flow of milk –drive or objet a results from a cut.
Further on Deleuze and Guattari will go on to remark that,
…every machine has a sort of code built into it, stored up inside it. This code is inseparable not only from the way in which it is recorded and transmitted to each of the different regions of the body, but also from the way in which the relations of each of the regions with all the others are recorded… All sorts of functional questions thus arise: What flow to break? Where to interrupt it? How and by what means? What place should be left for other producers or anti-producers (the place of one’s little brother, for instance)?… The data, the bits of information recorded, and their transmission form a grid of disjunctions of a type that differs from the previous connections. We owe to Jacques Lacan the discovery of this fertile domain of a code of the unconscious, incorporating the entire chain– or several chains –of meaning: a discovery thus totally transforming analysis. (The basic text in this connection is La lettre volee [The Purloined Letter].) But how very strange this domain seems, simply because of its multiplicity– a multiplicity so complex that we can scarcely speak of one chain or even of one code of desire. The chains are called ‘signifying chains’ because they are made up of signs, but these signs are not themselves signifying. The code resembles not so much a language as a jargon, an open-ended, polyvocal formation. (AO, 38)
Lacan himself will go on to emphasize exactly these points beginning around the time of the twentieth seminar, Encore, where he formulates concepts such as “linguistricks” and “linguisteries”, to distinguish the way in which the psychoanalytic relationship to language differs from that of linguistics. Indeed, just as Deleuze and Guattari formulate a trenchant critique of linguistics in “Postulates of Linguistics” in A Thousand Plateaus, Lacan will develop his own critique of the primacy of the code in linguistics from Encore on. This critique begins quite early in Lacan’s work– during the 50s –when he dispenses with the term “code” in the graph of desire in the Ecrits “Subversion of the Subject, where in seminars 4-6 where he developed the graph of desire he had referred to the code of language. That is, Lacan became increasingly skeptical of the idea of a code. This culminated, at the end of the six seminar, Desire and Its Interpretation, with the declaration that the Other does not exist or that there is no “code”. What is striking here is how enthusiastically Deleuze and Guattari, alleged to be sworn enemies of Lacan, speak of his work… Indeed, with regard to a vital aspect of their own conception of desire.
Passages such as this can be found all over the place in Anti-Oedipus, begging the question of whether or not there hasn’t been a missed encounter between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis. This would be as true of secondary scholarship on Deleuze and Guattari as it is of Zizek’s atrocious reading of Deleuze in Organs Without Bodies. As Aleatorist reminds us with regard to a passage in Difference and Repetition,
There is a crucial experience of difference and a corresponding experiment: every time we find ourselves confronted or bound by a limitation or an opposition, we should ask what such a situation presupposes. It presupposes a swarm of differences, a pluralism of free, wild or untamed differences; a properly differential and original space and time; all of which persist alongside the simplifications of limitation and opposition. A more profound real element must be dfined in order for oppositions of forces or limitations of forms to be drawn, one which is determined as an abstract and potential multiplicity. Oppositions are roughly cut from a delicate milieu of overlapping perspectives, of communicating distances, divergences and disparities, of heterogenous potentials and intensities. Nor is it primarily a question of dissolving tensions in the identical, but rather of distributing the disparities in a multiplicity. Limitations correspond to a simple first-order power– in a space with a single dimension and a single directin, where, as in Leibniz’s example of boats borne on a current, there may be collisions, but these collisions necessarily serve to limit and to equalise, but not to neutralise or to oppose. As for opposition, it represents in turn the second-order power, where it is as though things were spread out upon a flat surface, polarised in a single plane, and the synthesis itself took place only in a false depth– that is, in a fictitious third dimension added to the others which does no more than double the plane. In any case, what is missing is the original, intensive depth which is the matrix of the entire space and the first affirmation of difference: here, that which only afterwards appears as linear limitation and flat opposition lives and simmers in the form of free differences. Everywhere, couples and polarities presuppose bundles and networks, organised oppositions presuppose radiations in all directions. (DR, 50-51)
It is ironic that Lacanian psychoanalysis has so consistently been treated according to the logic of identity and opposition by the defenders of Deleuze and Guattari. What is needed is a far more differential and nuanced analysis of these relations, that avoid the molarities that have hitherto so dominated contemporary discussions of theory. Wasn’t Lacan himself the first to declare psychoanalysis anti-Oedipal when he announces that the Other does not exist, that there is no metalanguage, that there is no universe of discourse, that there is no Other of the Other, and finally when, in seminar 17, he declares that the Oedipus is Freud’s symptom, and in seminar 23, The Sinthome, that the name-of-the-father is only one way of tying the borromean knots or the orders of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real?
My apologies, I realize this post is of little interest to those not deeply invested in Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari. I suppose that I’m letting off a bit of steam.
February 27, 2007 at 9:37 am
I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to look at Guattari’s recently-translated “Anti-Oedipus Papers”… It contains a diary entry in which Guattari describes being summoned to Lacan’s office to explain the nature of his collaboration with Deleuze. So Guattari lays it out to Lacan by telling him that objet petit a is a desiring-machine, and Lacan nods approvingly.
However, I do think there is an issue with the status of sexuality in pyschoanalysis and the role of immanent critique in Deleuze. For example, Deleuze develops a clinical account of literature in which the author is working on a pre-subjective problem. Now this notion of “problem” is a technical term for Deleuze and he views problems as pre-subjective and therefore non-sexual. This seems completely at odds with how sexuality functions in psychoanalysis – although it makes sense when people like Christian Kerslake develop Deleuze’s relationship with psychoanalysis with reference to Jung.
February 27, 2007 at 2:12 pm
You might want to consult footnote 17 on page 316 of Difference and Repetition on this issue. Deleuze had already developed the “problematic” conception of unconscious desire in terms of Lacan in this early work. My take is that when Deleuze and Guattari critique the “sexual”, they’re referring to desire at the level of the imaginary, where the mirror image is taken as the sexual object, i.e., genital sexuality. At the level of the unconscious, desire is organized around the signifier and objet a, desire is no longer “sexual” in the sense that it’s not genital, but connective. Lacan makes a similar point with regard to his claim that “there is no sexual relationship.” In part, what this means is that we don’t relate to another as the object of our desire, but to objet a, the barred Other, or phallus. I think you’re flying a bit fast and loose with your remarks about “psychoanalysis and sexuality”. It was already psychoanalysis that had discovered this non-sexualized strata of desire in drive in Freud’s Three Essays on Infantile Sexuality. Deleuze also has a great little essay in an appendix to The Logic of Sense entitled “Tournier and a World Without Others” that addresses these issues in psychoanalytic terms. I confess that I don’t at all like the relations Kerslake seems to be drawing to Jung, but I haven’t read his work so perhaps it will prove worthwhile. I tend to associate Jung with a wrong turn in psychoanalysis, where Jung attempted to gentrify the unconscious and its desiring-production by returning it to a nice universe of representation vis a vis the symbolism of the collective unconscious. That is, rather than recognizing the productive nature of the signifier in producing its own sense and relations, the unconscious is instead shackled to a sort of symbolic dictionary. This, in effect, abdicates the position of the analyst and returns analysis to the discourse of the university and the master, where the “analyst” is once again the one who is in charge of all signifiance.
February 27, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Thanks for these references.
I was thinking about the relationship between sexuality and epistemology. In Deleuze, we can experiment in order to investigate our pre-subjective problem. However, sexuality is a special case because it raises paradoxes such as the following: why are most adults not peodophiles? Is it just because they know it’s wrong? There has to be more to it than that. Is it, then, because they have already evaluated (and rejected) children as sexual objects? That doesn’t seem quite right either. Doesn’t psychoanalysis provide us with a third way here? This seems to be what Zizek is getting at when he writes:
“How… do we pass from the state in which ‘the meaning of everything is sexual’, in which sexuality functions as the universal signified, to the surface of the neutral-desexualized literal sense? The desexualization of the signified occurs when the very element that (failed to) co-ordinate(d) the universal sexual meaning (i.e. the phallus) is reduced to a signifier. The phallus is the ‘organ of desexualization’ precisely in its capacity of a signifier without signified: it is the operator of the evacuation of sexual meaning.” (Metastases of Enjoyment, p. 128, 2005 edition)
Doesn’t this mean that the de-sexualized arena of meanings will always be haunted by the obscene underbelly of sexuality? Or am I totally misreading Zizek here? Or is Zizek misreading the phallus?
February 27, 2007 at 5:48 pm
I was thinking about the relationship between sexuality and epistemology. In Deleuze, we can experiment in order to investigate our pre-subjective problem. However, sexuality is a special case because it raises paradoxes such as the following: why are most adults not peodophiles? Is it just because they know it’s wrong? There has to be more to it than that. Is it, then, because they have already evaluated (and rejected) children as sexual objects?
Yet isn’t this exactly what psychoanalysis explores? When Freud declares that infants are “polymorphously perverse”, his whole point is that we must give some account of why the nearly infinite forms of adult desire take the form they take. Indeed, each and every time an analyst begins a new case they are exploring an absolutely singular form of desire unique to that individual. Thus, rather than saying “Deleuze invites us to explore our pre-subjective problem” (incidentally you’ll find I’ve written a vast amount on Deleuze’s conception of problems here), I would say that Deleuze is thinking very much in the vein of psychoanalysis here. Put a bit differently, I think you’re setting up a false opposition between Deleuze and psychoanalysis. This is clear from a careful reading of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. For instance, take a close look at the second chapter on repetition in Difference and Repetition where Deleuze works heavily with Melanie Klein, Freud, and Lacan. Or look at the later chapters of The Logic of Sense where Deleuze gives a developmental account of desire with Klein as his major point of reference.
Doesn’t this mean that the de-sexualized arena of meanings will always be haunted by the obscene underbelly of sexuality? Or am I totally misreading Zizek here? Or is Zizek misreading the phallus?
I don’t have much to say about Zizek in this connection. What I was trying, perhaps poorly, to say in the original response was that I see the term “sexuality” as confusing issues in this discussion as it sets up a binary between the sexual and the non-sexual that doesn’t really exist for Deleuze and Guattari. What I take D&G to be criticizing is that perspective on sexuality that takes the actualized adult body focused on reproduction as the model of sexuality and desire. What psychoanalysis reveals, in contrast, is the vast domain of “pre-subjective” jouissance that does not aim at reproduction or the other body as the object of its jouissance, but which circulates about partial objects or the various objet a’s. In this regard, it is “non-sexual” from a particular dominant perspective on sexuality. The aim here, rather, is a singular form of jouissance that need not pass through another actualized body at all. Deleuze and Guattari make precisely this point with regard to desiring-machines when they speak of the satisfaction or jouissance that accompanies the functioning of desiring-machines as a by-product. Deleuze also explores this domain of pre-subjective enjoyment in heavily Lacanian terms in his essay “Tournier and the World Without Others”, where he explores the structure of perversion and the shift from desire fixated on the body of the Other to acephalous drive satisfaction. I just don’t see the opposition that your remarks seem to suggest.
February 27, 2007 at 7:16 pm
If there is a difference between Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari (and there are many), then it is perhaps that the former sees the Oedipus as something that must be worked through, as a phantasy to be traversed, while the latter often seem to suggest that we can immediately proceed to deterritorialization.
But, isn’t this an ESSENTIAL difference? Or let me put it differently: if you were to envisage Deleuzian psychoanalysis, how would you proceed?
February 27, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Fair enough, I defer to your greater knowledge of Lacan and Deleuze. And your comments have helped me understand the relationship between desire and drive in Lacan – as this is something that I have been struggling with recently.
However, I still accept Kerslake’s (and Zizek’s) point that there are two different notions of immanence in the Deleuze of Difference and Repetition and the Deleuze and Guattari of What Is Philosophy? After all, in WIP, they say that immanence must be affirmed as a “pre-philosophical presupposition”. Kerslake points out that this really just comes down to whether we are “that sort of person”. I want to account for this shift – and it seems to me that how we do account for this shift is going to affect how we view the relationship between Deleuze and psychoanalysis.
February 27, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Dejan, this sounds right, although I go back and forth. D&G are, after all, developing a critique of Oedipus, thus suggesting that there is something to be gone through or overcome, similar to traversing the fantasy. Nonetheless, I’ve argued in a similar vein in the past, suggesting that D&G seem to think that we can proceed directly, and not recognize the way in which desire gets bound up in the Oedipus.
February 27, 2007 at 8:30 pm
though it might sound crass to some readers i shall name the example of anal sex. Hocquenghem,a disciple of Deleuze, critiqued Lacan’s Oedipus ferociously saying that it is possible to obtain DIRECT pleasure (thus: without traversing the fantasy) from anal sex. This has been a part of his larger Foucaltian critique of power, etc. But this has not been my experience. Anal sexuality seems to have a certain ”virtual” quality to it which I think comes from the fact that orgasm cannot be obtained directly – all accounts of the male G spot notwithstanding. As a result, it is dissatisfying, and I think also leads to a neverending, compulsive search for more anal sex. I completely agree with Focualt is dead that sexuality is the problematic arena here which needs more theorizing. And dr. Sinthome, I am enormously interested in your opinions here…
February 28, 2007 at 6:14 am
Dejan, I’m not sure what to say in response to Hocquenghem. It seems to me that he misses the point. After all, for psychoanalysis jouissance is precisely that which falls outside the signifier. The real question, I think, would be that of how certain activities come to be charged or loci of drives for a particular subject. Or rather, why does the subject find his jouissance in precisely this way? Not only does this criticism strike me as based on a facile understanding of Lacan, but it even seems to indicate a rather facile understanding of Foucault.
February 28, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Hocquenghem was basically complaining that the world of Oedipal sexuality cancels out a free interconnection of organs,relationships of immediate pleasure. He called the Phallus a despotic signifier, which in capitalism plays the same role as money: a fetish. It feeds on libidinal energy quite like capital sucks up labor power. Our society is so phallocratic that every act of pleasure without ejaculation is seen as failure. Etc. He frowned at the way every sexual act has a meaning (”why does the subjet find his jouissance in precisely this way”). In this society, the anus is privatized and so the anal homosexual desire only has the right to appear as sublimation – the control of the anus is the prerequisite for establishing control over private property. As Deleuze and Guattari used to say, ”only the mind is capable of shitting” i.e. only sublimation can situate the anal.
He thus proposed a collective libidinal reinvestment into the desiring anus as a way of weakening the power of the Phallic master signifier and of the Oedipus complex. The anus would be something like ”a body without organs”, a vessel allowing for a free, direct and uninterruped flow of desire.
Because in this he wants to foreclose Oedipus, he reminded me of this Deleuzian idea of ”immediately proceeding to deterritorialization”. (and I think he’s also saying let’s diss language, because of that oppressive binary in the Phallic law)
One of Hocquenghem’s arguments to that end was male non-ejaculatory orgasm, which despite all my experiments in life I have never even come close to experiencing, and a number of similar, rather science fiction – sounding ideas like the ”liberatory power of homosexual social bonding” (e.g. cruising in pubs, where desire flows uninterrupted)
Well this dissing of language and Oedipus sounds suspicious to me precisely in the field of sexuality, of which I have here stated one illustrative example.
February 28, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Dejan, thanks for relating the argument. It seems to me that the “dissing of Oedipus” is one of the forms of Oedipus par excellence. As for the despotic nature of the phallus, isn’t this already one of Lacan’s own arguments early on? Throughout the seminar he 1) criticizes the idea of developmental stages culminating in “normal” genital sexuality, 2) criticizes the notion of “oblativity” as an obsessional fantasy, and 3) underlines the manner in which the drives are partial drives that do not culminate in a single unified object or telos.
February 28, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Hocquenghem was basically complaining that the world of Oedipal sexuality cancels out a free interconnection of organs,relationships of immediate pleasure. He called the Phallus a despotic signifier, which in capitalism plays the same role as money: a fetish. It feeds on libidinal energy quite like capital sucks up labor power. Our society is so phallocratic that every act of pleasure without ejaculation is seen as failure. Etc. He frowned at the way every sexual act has a meaning (”why does the subjet find his jouissance in precisely this way”). In this society, the anus is privatized and so the anal homosexual desire only has the right to appear as sublimation – the control of the anus is the prerequisite for establishing control over private property. As Deleuze and Guattari used to say, ”only the mind is capable of shitting” i.e. only sublimation can situate the anal.
Dejan, perhaps you could say more about this. Such a claim is disconcerting as it has been long recognized that there is a strong relationship between how capitalism functions– which is, “non-ejaculatory” –and the anal drive. This, for instance, would be one way of reading Weber’s thesis on protestantism and capitalism. Is Hocquenhem really suggesting that this is something subversive to capitalism? From a psychoanalytic point of view, does the category of “liberatory sexuality” make sense, or are there just various structures of desire that deal with the real in various ways?
February 28, 2007 at 3:55 pm
yes i will do that just a second because my hocquenghem is in serbian and i have to translate
February 28, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Hocquenghem writes in ”Homosexual desire”:
for Freud, the anal stadium is the stadium of personality formation.The anus has no social function of desire, because all its functions are excrementalized: that is to say, private to the highest possible degree. The grand act of capitalist decoding is followed by personality construction; money, in order to flow, is related to the anus, in that the anus is the most private part of the individual. The consitution of the private, individual personality is anal; the consitution of the public personality is ”phallic”. (…) The anus does not exist in the social relation, seeing as to the fact that it characterizes the individual and enables the distinction between the individual and the social. So Schreber is seriously handicapped by the fact that he cannot shit alone: you don’t shit in company. (…) All libidinal energy is redirected from the anus so that the social field can be organized in accordance with sublimation and the private personality: ”The entire Oedipus complex is anal”. Your shit is yours and yours alone: what you do with it is only your problem. The asshole plays amongst the organs the same role narcissism plays in relation to the constitution of the individual: it is the source of energy which feeds a society’s sexual system and the repression of desire that this system enforces.
And having established that he indeed proceeds to subversion via the anus:
Desires aimed at the anus, in a close bond with the homosexual desire,comprise what we shall term the ”group” modus of interrelation, as opposed to the usual social modus. Anus undergoes the process of privatization; but introducing the anus into the public sphere, i.e. its desiring groupalisation, would cause the demise of both the sublimating phallic hierarchy and the twofold connection between the individual and society.
(…)
It is possible that when the anus returns to its desiring function, the interlocking of organs will unfold irrespective of any rule or law, the group will be able to attain pleasure through an immediate relationship …(continued )
February 28, 2007 at 4:39 pm
…public-private, individual-social will collapse. In some institutions of the homosexual ghetto (sauna) we already find the indications of this primordial sexual Communism.
(I forgot to add he also describes the anal desire, Deleuze and Guattari style, as sphincterous, ring-shaped, allowing for a multitude of attachment points, without a hierarchy, etc…)
I have discussed these ideas with Steven Shaviro relating to Samuel Delaney’s book MADMAN (which also discusses a form of sexual Communism) and Makavejev’s film WR MYSTERIES OF ORGA(NI)SM, here are the links:
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=557
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=526
February 28, 2007 at 4:56 pm
The consitution of the private, individual personality is anal; the consitution of the public personality is ”phallic”. (…) The anus does not exist in the social relation, seeing as to the fact that it characterizes the individual and enables the distinction between the individual and the social.
The first claim here is correct in Freudian terms, while the second is not. Anality perhaps presides over the constitution of the private in the sense that it is here that the individual begins to take control of their body by withholding or giving the feces, thereby founding a distinction between outside and inside and a mastery of self that will later be reflected in other activities. However, I don’t see how one leaps from this to the thesis that this isn’t social. This dialectic, at least as described by Freud, is thoroughly social in the sense that the feces are conceived by the infant according to the model of the gift as something to be given or withheld in relation to the other. Lacan, for instance, argues that drive is here related to demand, where the demand of the Other is either thwarted or obeyed. Consequently, to claim that anality is non-social is to ignore the dialectical dimension of its structure. There is, after all, a marked difference between how an infant relates to its feces and how a young child does so. What accounts for this change? He evokes Foucault, so let’s take a look at some concrete micropractices rather than speaking in these abstractions: What concrete micropractices surround the body of the infant that transform its relation to its body, world, and self?
February 28, 2007 at 5:48 pm
I have to do more translating later to give you his micro-account, if any is available, but it appears to me that in refusing to consider, overlooking or overtly dismissing the dialectic you describe, Hocquenghem like many Deleuzians I encountered wants to say it is the oppressive language-virus which brings all misery upon us, we don’t have to accept it, we can just tap directly into the Affect, and not only that, but this has transformative powers socially. And from this all manner of science fiction follows: compulsive sex in the sauna as ”sexual Communism”, queer performances as a way to resolve the repressive, ”heteronormative” gender binary, and finally, what seems to me like some post-human, alien form of being-in-the-becoming straight out of Bjork’s video clips and David Cronenberg movies. All the while Deleuzians seem to me to be expecting some evolution to take place where new organs will develop, either by tapping into our bodies’ secret orifices, or by a fusion with technology.
Because the natural organ, the anus, to my knowledge and experience, cannot perform the function Hocquengheim sees in it. Without being inscribed in the symbolic, thus outside of language, it is completely virtual. (And what is this ”male non-ejaculatory orgasm”?)
BTW I am relating this to those postings we shared on the Apocalypse.
February 28, 2007 at 5:51 pm
…in that I associate anal sex with that nostalgia for the Real
February 28, 2007 at 5:53 pm
My position is that Deleuze and Guattari are themselves far more nuanced than the position you describe here. Nonetheless, my experience has been the same here, where it is suggested 1) that language is the source of all wickedness and we can proceed directly to affect, and 2) there’s nothing about concrete conditions that produce this discontent, but rather it results from those nasty analysts and theorists. Bluntly, I think this is idiotic and reflective of a very poor reading of the texts themselves. My strategy has thus been to show how something quite different and far more interesting is argued.
February 28, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Note to all my gay friends who are reading (and I said this before): don’t be lulled by Hocquenghem into BAREBACKING because it;s still the no1 cause of hiv infection in the West.
My position is that Deleuze and Guattari are themselves far more nuanced than the position you describe here.
Well I read some of your account of that, but do give me links to the concrete postings it saves time. (I myself am grappling with the problematique)
I will translate more Hocquenghem tomorrow, looking for those Foucaltian points.
February 28, 2007 at 11:34 pm
[…] that his disciples have misappropriated his work by Oedipalizing everything. As I have pointed out before, this is a sentiment echoed by Lacan himself. Not only does later Lacan refer to Oedipus as […]
March 1, 2007 at 12:01 am
more quotations from Homosexual Desire by Hocquenghem:
Homosexual desire is not some second rate consequence of the Oedipus complex: it is the functioning of the mechanism of desire plugged into the anus. Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the mistakes of various authors, such as Deveraux, who see homosexuality as a product of Oedipal repression. We shall see
later, when we get to the issue of masochism, why certain manifestations of desire are attributed with this ”second-handedness”.
”If it is true that there exists Oedipal or filial homosexuality, we must observe it only as a second-handed reaction to group homosexuality, which is never Oedipal.”
(Devereux: Considirations ethno-psychoanalytiques sur la notion de parenté, in: L’homme, july 1965.)
Thus homosexual desire only exists in a group, yet it is at the same time banished from society. This is where the need comes from to remove the anal, or rather to transform it into anality. Freud writes:
”The history of the first prohibition which the child encounters, the prohibition to experience pleasure from anal activity and its product, is decisive for the child’s entire development. The little being must sense on this occasion that the environment is hostile to his instinctual impetus and learn to carry out his first ”repression” in order to get pleasure. From here onwards ‘the anal’ will be the symbol of all that is rejected, separated from life.”
In his Introductory lectures Freud explains that we have to give up on anal excitation, because ”everything related to those functions is unclean and must be kept secret. The child must give up on such sources of pleasure, in the name of social normativity.”
Homosexual desire turns into homosexuality and falls into the trap of the Oedipus complex, because the ”group anal” is a danger for the Oedipal ”social”. The myth of Oedipus enables us to understand the need for differentiating between homosexual desire, primary homosexuality, which reveals the absence of differentiated desire, and perverse Oedipal homosexuality, where energy is invested in the strenghtening of the Law. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari: ”Everything begins in the mind of Lai, that old group homosexual, that pervert who throws desire into a trap.” Oedipal homosexuality is formed in the father’s head, and guarantees that group energy will end up integrated into the Oedipal social structure.
March 1, 2007 at 12:40 am
And this is Hocquenghem’s cooperation with Foucault, where unfortunately I do not have access to MUSE, but maybe you do:
While here a Hocquenghem-influenced author discusses anal intercourse and power between men:
http://sexualities.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/4/4/413
But dr Sinthome, even from a casual glance it’s easy to see that to critique the Western-burgeois ”homosexual” (by the usual strategy of queer theory – identity is performance, etc) and based on Deleuze Guattari and Foucault, these people are proposing a homosexual desire ”unburdened” by the binaries of language and the Oedipus complex.
I think this desire doesn’t exist; it’s pure imaginary. But somehow I feel that capitalism would be quite well-served by the idea of such a desire, in a reversal of Hocquenghem’s thesis:
the uninterrupted, free circulation of the anus engaged in a sauna orgy lends itself much more easily to SHOPPING than the (according to Hocquenghem) normative and oppressive Phallic law.
March 1, 2007 at 12:50 am
I guess my point would be that I don’t take these to be accurate or faithful appropriations of Deleuze, Guattari, or Foucault. You’re having a discussion of Hocquenghem, but I’m discussing Deleuze and Guattari. I haven’t read his book, yet if your presentation is accurate, I find it unrecognizable within the framework of D&G.
March 1, 2007 at 12:54 am
I know for a fact that he cooperated closely with Foucault. I didn’t yet find if he was dialoguing with D&G in the same way, but he quotes abundantly from them.
March 1, 2007 at 12:55 am
I didn’t make a presentation BTW, I literally transcribed the text from his book.
March 1, 2007 at 1:00 am
..where the idea is not to interrupt your discussion of Deleuze and Guattari, rather that I find the implications of collapsing language and Oedipus quite SCARY to tell you the truth so I would like to know where they come from, and why.
March 1, 2007 at 1:09 am
Sure, but is abundant quotation sufficient to establish a valid interpretation? Suppose he has a rather superficial interpretation of psychoanalysis– as your quotations seem to indicate –and that he’s largely unfamiliar with the work of Lacan. What would his experience be like in reading a text like Anti-Oedipus? Chances are he would gloss over those passages where things such as what I’ve quoted here are mentioned or he wouldn’t even notice them, as he’d lack the theoretical frame to digest them. You’ve drawn me into a discussion of Hocquenghem, which is fine, but your suggestion seems to be something like there’s guilt by association. “Hocquennghem says x, therefore D&G are guilty of x.” I’m not particularly interested in Hocquenghem’s thesis as you’ve described it because 1) it strikes me as based on a pretty facile appropriation of psychoanalysis, and 2) it just strikes me as mistaken for a number of the reasons you’re outlined. My engagement with D&G is around a specific set of issues that I think are unrelated to what you’re discussing. I wasn’t meaning to imply that you were misrepresenting his work, just that I haven’t myself read it. As for your remark in your most recent post:
..where the idea is not to interrupt your discussion of Deleuze and Guattari, rather that I find the implications of collapsing language and Oedipus quite SCARY to tell you the truth so I would like to know where they come from, and why.
I’d like to know where they come from as well (depending on what you mean by “collapsing Oedipus”). I like solid and rigorous critique that’s capable of noting that there are a lot of very sad passions out there, explaining why that is so, and proposing some way of responding to these forms of resentment and so on. A number of appropriations of D&G seem completely incapable of engaging in that sort of critical work and are thus dead on arrival. I’ve never quite understood why such appropriations are so readily embraced.
March 1, 2007 at 9:27 am
but your suggestion seems to be something like there’s guilt by association. “Hocquennghem says x, therefore D&G are guilty of x.”
dr sinthome though I AM irritated by the incessant complaints against analysis coming from places as diverse as hocquenghem and cognitive-behavioral therapy (which to my mind also sees eeeevil in language), so part of my mission is to propagandistically counter such accusations, in what can surely be seen as my heroic defense of Lacan from being relegated to obscure French-Argentinian catacombs, my intent was not to formulate things negatively but instead to capitalize on your positive claim that D & G are NOT guilty by association i.e. that their original teachings have been distorted by the disciplies. To that end I have asked you to direct me to those postings where I can find a concrete working-through of the subject; because dr. Sinthome, it is not always easy to navigate through your prolific output.
I’d like to know where they come from as well (depending on what you mean by “collapsing Oedipus”).
By collapsing Oedipus I mean that Hocquenghem basically wanted to abolish the very concept because to him it seems that the Phallic law is oppressive, it creates guilt in the homosexual and perpetuates (Faucaltianly understood) capitalism’s biopower. He juxtaposes Oedipal desire with homosexual desire which (at least to my limited insight) resembles D&G notions like flow, flux, virus; he speaks about the need to deterritorialize gay desire in this respect.
This is what relates the whole Hocquenghem discussion to your early statement about the relation between Lacan and D&G.
I like solid and rigorous critique t
such a solid and rigorous critique i cannot deliver without your explanations. if i could i would not be writing here, i would already be critiquing away.
March 4, 2007 at 1:14 am
[…] over at Larval Subject has been posting a series of reflections on the relationship between Lacan and Deleuze & Guattari – revisiting what were […]
February 24, 2009 at 2:27 am
I am so pleased to have discovered this… I have been wondering what in fact a Deleuzian psycho-application might consist in. To my mind, one of the barriers to such an enterprise is the tendency taken to date towards institutionalization/professionalization in the various psycho-professions.
What interests me relates to blogging – it is interesting what is happening in this world of social diary-ing. About 50% of bloggers say they blog as a form of self therapy. In this image there is no professional, no analyst. Yet certain analytic effects nevertheless accrue.
Lawrence Lessig (2008) has a very interesting little idea in his book ‘Remix’. “A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B…”
To my mind, Lacan tried to grasp at something beyond the private and personal analytic territory with the ‘passe’. This differentiates the Lacanian field from many of the other psychotherapies. Blogs touch on this beyond of the personal and private of traditional psychoanalysis.
March 28, 2009 at 10:16 am
Personally, I’ve always identified the absolute deterritorialization described by D & G in the “three novellas” chapter of A Thousand Plateaus as being analagous to a near if not total encounter with the real. The quote from James cited in this chapter rings true for me–
“She ended up knowing so much that she could no longer interpret anything. There were no longer shadows to help her see clearly, only glare.”
— that combined with D & G’s warning in the How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs? ( “It can be terrifying and lead to your death.”) seems to suggest a close relation.
Later on, on the same page, there’s the quote: “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit”
Which certainly evokes petit objet a.