In a very nice response to my post on Schizoanalysis and Psychoanalysis, Ian writes,
Point taken, I hope my response was not taken too strongly, perhaps my wording of it was poor. I agree with you that portraying lack as simply a production of the analyst is inadequate and the remarks on fascism in Anti-Oedipus would seem to suggest that Deleuze and Guattari would agree. But I can’t help but wonder, and this is a personal thought, that the absence of any real mechanical discussion concerning the production of castrated subjects is not a low-point on the part of Deleuze and Guattari, but is rather their resistance towards any kind of metapsychology. No doubt they play some favor towards a kind of transcendental field, but, at least in Anti-Oedipus, I’m not as convinced that this transcendental field exists apart from the social field in any defined sense; the transcendental field (say, the body-without-organs) does not transcend the social field created from it. I would be very skeptical towards the idea that Deleuze and Guattari are after some kind of reinvigorated Plato or Kant.
That said, and possibly this is in part due to personal bias, I don’t see it as any fault of Deleuze and Guattari that this metapsychology is not accounted for; I think it rather a strength. Much of Guattari’s “clinical” work is based around stripping from analysis any kind of metapsychology that would give instruction as to the manner within which affirmative desires are coded into repressive desires, instead being concerned with how to provided an arena for the expressions of desire as political action. I would guess (and this is always dangerous) that Deleuze and Guattari would hastily resist any kind of metapsychology of this process or interaction between analysand and analyst, as if to finally diagnose the real problem. Thus my question, do you think the metapsychology or ‘transcendental analysis’ you are looking for can contain the intersection between Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan that you wrote about, or might it, rather, “cross out” the ‘avec’ between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis? Could this transcendental analysis of the creation of castrated subjects in fact be a recoding attempting to produce a universal trajectory for a process that has formally the same outcome, but might always takes place in highly “individualized,” contextualized means?
Despite this all, I think you’re on to something and my personal biases towards the aims of the book shouldn’t detract from admitting its shortcomings. Even suggesting that castration could be intimately contextual still sidesteps the question of the mechanics of that production. Very interested in your thoughts.
I suppose, for the sake of clarity, I should explain just what I mean by the transcendental, just so it’s clear that we’re talk about the same thing. The great enemy of Deleuze’s thought, of course, was the transcendent. In his earliest work, this can be seen in his critique of anything resembling Platonic form or unchanging essences, but also of his critique of the self-identical subject as in the case of Descartes’ cogito. Deleuze’s thought begins from the position that, on the one hand, all being is becoming and therefore is the result of a production or a process of individuation. In Difference and Repetition he will perpetually emphasize that individuation is not the individual insofar as individuation is the differential process by which the individual is produced. Likewise, he will staunchly oppose any position that begins from an unchanging identity whether in the form of the subject or God, as well as any position that posits invariant and ahistorical forms. Deleuze is, above all, a process philosopher.
However, the transcendental is not the transcendent. Rather, the transcendental, following Kant, refers to a set of conditions thoroughly immanent to being. While it is certainly the case that Kant is one of Deleuze’s philosophical enemies, there is nonetheless a deep Kantian inspiration or influence in Deleuze’s thought. However, Deleuze radicalizes or transforms the Kantian position in three ways: First, where Kant’s transcendental merely conditions the field of sensibility, imposing a priori (and invariant) forms on the matter of sensation, Deleuze’s transcendental conditions are genetic conditions. As Deleuze will emphasizes endlessly, the virtual or transcendental, unlike Kant’s transcendental, does not resemble the actual, but instead as a set of genetic potentials that produces something entirely new in the course of being actualized. Deleuze will take Kant and many other transcendental philosophers to task for “tracing the transcendental from the empirical”, which amounts to both a circular argument (the conditions are supposed to account for the conditioned, yet we arrive at the condition by tracing them from the conditioned), and to arriving at the transcendental based on its resemblance to the actual or the condition. 
Thus we get a strange sort of operation where we begin with the actualized object of experience, trace its abstract form from this object, and then treat this abstract form as an a priori, invariant, ahistorical necessity, effectively covering over any process of production, becoming, or genesis and treating philosophy as an apologetics for the status quo. Only a genetic account of the relation between the transcendental and the field of material being can, according to Deleuze, break out of this vicious circle. In this connection, the transcendental will share no resemblance to individuated entities.
Second, where Kant locks the transcendental or condition in a transcendental subject (the ultimate form of identity), Deleuze instead theorizes the existence of a transcendental field where, as you rightly point out, subjects are actualized, individuated, or produced, rather than presiding over actualization emerging from subject’s as in the case of Kant. The transcendental field is something anterior to the subject and far more extensive than the domain of the subject. If, as Meillassoux argues in After Finitude, correlationism is intrinsically tied to a subject of some sort such that the world would not exist were there not a subject, Deleuze’s transcendental fields would exist regardless of whether there were any humans or living entities. Finally third, and in a closely related vein, Deleuze’s transcendental genetic conditions (the virtual) are not a product of mind, but rather belong to being or existence itself (I develop this thesis in greater detail in my forthcoming article “Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism: Notes Towards a Transcendental Materialism” in Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant: A Strange Encounter with Continuum, edited by Edward Willat and Matt Lee). You can find a more thorough development of Deleuze’s transcendental field and the difference between the transcendent and the transcendental in my book Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, Northwestern University Press.
An excellent example of the necessity of the transcendental and the transcendental field can be found in Deleuze’s essay on Masoch and Sade, Coldness and Cruelty. There, Deleuze, like Lacan (Lacan actually praises this book as the finest study of sadism and masochism yet to be written in seminar 13 or 14), rigorously argues against the thesis that the sadist and the masochist are complementary, such that the perfect partner for any masochist is the sadist and the perfect partner for any sadist is a masochist. Deleuze skillfully demonstrates that sadism and masochism are completely different assemblages and have entirely different geneses through which they are actualized. However, here’s the key point: So long as we remain at the level of actualized entities– at the level of what Deleuze had referred to as “species, parts, and qualities” in Difference and Repetition –this is impossible to see or understand. When we look at the sadist and masochist we will note that the one likes giving pain and the other likes receiving it (empiricist positivism), and will therefore conclude that the structure of the two is complementary. Based on their spatialized resemblances to one another– that they both appear to belong to the common species “human” –we will assume they belong to the same relational network, embody the same singularities, and embody the same differential relations. It is only when we reach the dimension of the virtual or transcendental field, the dimension of singularities (potentials) and their differential relations, that we can begin to discern that these two forms of life and desire are entirely different assemblages with very different organizations that are in no way complementary.
If beginning with the actualized entities leads to this impasse, then this is because, as Deleuze had carefully argued in chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition (and elsewhere), difference erases or veils itself in the process of being actualized, such that we’re left with species, parts, and qualities (the end results of the process of indi-different/ciation), rather than the process of individuation or differentiation through which these elements are formed. Another way of putting this would be to say that we fall into spatialized difference or multiplicities, where everything resembles everything else. Deleuze consistently charges Kant (as well as a number of the phenomenologists), with tracing the transcendental from the empirical and then finding resemblances where there are none. Only the virtual, he argues, can save us from this fate. What is revealed in his study of Sacher-Masoch and Sade is that the two occupy entirely different topological spaces. This is part, I think, of what interests Deleuze in Francis Bacon in texts like The Logic of Sensation. It could be said that Bacon attempts to directly paint the virtual field of forces and singularities rather than the empirical objects among which we dwell.
With this caveats in mind, I would argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s Deleuze’s three synthesis– the syntheses of connection, disjunction, and conjunction –constitute the beginnings of a transcendental analysis. Indeed, these syntheses Kant’s three syntheses of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition in the “A” edition of the Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason, however, beginning from difference rather than identity. Moreover, where Kant’s syntheses pertain to operations of the mind, Deleuze and Guattari’s three syntheses belong to being as such. It is on the ground of these distinctions that Deleuze and Guattari are able to unfold their critique in the five paralogisms, for each of these paralogisms pertains to an illicit tracing of the transcendental from the empirical, where fully actualized objects are projected back into the machinic unconscious as forms. Deleuze and Guattari, by contrast, will show how desiring-machines only operate on partial objects, not fully formed persons, thereby undercutting a number of claims from orthodox psychoanalysis. In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari enact their own “return to Freud”, though one which certainly transforms Freud. As Freud had argued, the unconscious knows no negation, contradiction, opposition, or objects, but instead only knows connections and productions. This was the surprising result he had already attained in his early unpublished Project essay, where the functioning of the primary process becomes unmoored from any sort of representational realism or instinctual and natural relation to sexuality. Yet somehow all of this falls apart with the introduction of the Oedipus where, instead of relating to partial objects and flows, the primary attachment becomes an attachment to fully formed objects (the father, mother, brother, sister, etc.). Nonetheless, Deleuze and Guattari do not give much in the way of an analysis of just how these paralogisms are possible from the standpoint of active and affirmative desire. Here we would need to look to Nietzsche and Philosophy, as well as, I believe, the work of Lacan. We can thus think of the relationship between schizoanalysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis as being like two sides of a severed egg. The latter explores the domain of the actual and all of its illusions, coupled with their genesis and strategies for escaping these sad passions premised on an installed lack and castration (for Lacan it was always a question of moving beyond these things as I argue in my post on the Borromean knots), whereas Deleuze and Guattari explore the productive realm of the unconscious and its desiring-machines perpetually manufacturing the real.
Larval Subjects . 
December 8, 2008 at 5:38 pm
[…] 8, 2008 There’s some absolutely terrific discussion about schizoanalysis taking place on Sinthome’s blog, Larval Subjects, at the moment. And […]
December 9, 2008 at 4:40 am
I’m rather taken aback by the citation and the response, much thanks. Your reply is certainly a well-constructed, highly commendable portrayal of Deleuze’s distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent; it’s admittedly one I still need to chew on for a bit longer.
I quite like the image of ‘schizoanalysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis…being like two sides of a severed egg.’ Further, I take these two sides, though divided, as being portrayed as complementary. You write: ‘The latter explores the domain of the actual and all of its illusions, coupled with their genesis and strategies for escaping these sad passions premised on an installed lack and castration (for Lacan it was always a question of moving beyond these things as I argue in my post on the Borromean knots), whereas Deleuze and Guattari explore the productive realm of the unconscious and its desiring-machines perpetually manufacturing the real.’ I am not aiming here, as my knowledge of this material is more limited, to discount your attempt to reconcile the two, but I have two questions that arise.
First, and Deleuze was known to change his mind, Deleuze remarks in Dialogues II (forgive the long quotation):
‘Psychoanalysis increasingly concerns itself with the ‘thought’ function and – not without reason – allies itself with linguistics. These are the new apparatuses of power in thought itself, and Marx, Freud and Saussure make up a strange, three-headed Represser, a dominant major language. To interpret, to transform, to utter are the new forms of ‘correct’ ideas. … Linguistics triumphed at the same time as information was being developed as power, and was imposing its image of language and of thought, consistent with the transmission of ‘order-words’ and the organization of redundancies. There is not really much point in wondering whether philosophy is dead, when many other disciplines are assuming its function. We have no right to lay claim to madness, since madness itself passes through psychoanalysis and linguistics reunited, since it is imbued with correct ideas, with a strong culture or a history without becoming, since it has its clowns, its professors and its little chiefs.’ (14)
Lacan is not mentioned specifically here, but two figures of fundamental importance to him are: Freud (of course) and Saussure. Lacan, no doubt, wrote to the effect that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language,’ a remark that Derrida, in his, in my opinion, sorely misunderstood critique of Lacan takes Lacan to task for. I will return to Derrida in a moment, first Deleuze in this specific concern. Deleuze cites two thinkers of whom Lacan relies heavily on, arguably not critically enough, as helping to constitute a ‘dominant major language,’ and, given all of the work in Dialogues II and A Thousand Plateaus on Majoritarian and Minoritarian becomings, could it be argued that Deleuze implicates Lacan as being complicit or even actively participant in this major language, if not with a sly hostility? Could Anti-Oedipus, which, to use Deleuze’s word, stammers through Freud and Lacan, as well as Saussurian linguistics, be aimed not at compliment with Lacan but rather as an attempt from one half of the egg (Deleuze and Guattari) to smash or shatter the other (Lacan)?
This brings me to my second question, which concerns another thinker for whom Deleuze rarely directly addresses, but for whom has he has a well-noted contempt: Hegel. Deleuze goes as far to remark in Dialogues II, ‘For my part, I could not see any way of extracting myself. I could not stand Descartes, the dualisms and the Cogito, or Hegel, the triad and the operation of the negation. But I liked writers who seemed to be part of the history of philosophy, but who escaped from it in one respect, or altogether: Lucretius, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson’ (14-5). While any of Lacan’s references to other philosophers should never be taken totally at face-value, I have always been, and this is just an impression, overwhelmed by what seemed to be the highly Hegelian nature of Lacan’s writings. Whether referenced outright or in the background, Hegel always seems to be there. I have to wonder if Derrida’s critique of Lacan, as with others that he confronts, differs to a larger engagement with Hegel, the latter of whom Derrida devoted a significant amount of ink to confronting. While Deleuze does not confront Hegel so frontally or outwardly, his hostility is noteworthy and unmistakable. Could Deleuze’s distaste for Hegel be the (or one of) the dividing line between he and Lacan? Maybe separate them irreconcilably? Admittedly, curiously Deleuze speaks with condemnation of Hegel but had always very kind words for Sartre, the latter of whom has deeply Hegelian strains and to whom Lacan also had a great debt.
I need to devote much more rereading and consideration to the role of the ‘transcendent’ in Deleuze’s thought, with a great thanks to your response, as I’m unfit at the moment to make a more refined judgment as this time. Again, much thanks.
Interested in your thoughts,
Ian M.
New School for Social Research
December 9, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Hi Ian,
I can’t respond at length as I’m in the midst of end of the semester grading and am suffering from a rather nasty cold; but perhaps I can provide a few signposts as to how I’m thinking about this. First, I think that Guattari and Deleuze and Guattari are right on the mark with their critique of the primacy of Saussurean linguistics in [Lacanian] psychoanalysis and their broadening of the field of semiotics. Following Deleuze’s account of individuation, I take it that any encounter between thinkers or any attempt to read thinkers together necessarily implies a transformation of both thinkers involved. For example, it’s clear that Deleuze’s Spinoza gets “bergsonized” and “nietzscheanized” and that Bergson and Nietzsche get “spinozized” in the course of the encounter Deleuze orchestrates between these thinkers. Deleuze, of course, becomes something other as well. Consequently, the issue isn’t one of assimilating Deleuze to Lacan or Lacan to Deleuze, but rather of determining those moments in Lacan’s thought where the schizo and anti-Oedipal emerges– and there are many –and pushing them as far as they can go.
Part of the strategy here lies in targeting psychoanalytically inflected versions of contemporary political theory and resurrecting what I think was a missed opportunity in Deleuze and Guattari’s own political thought. On the one hand, in my view psychoanalytical inflected versions of contemporary political theory have taken the Gramscian turn, focusing too much on cultural artifacts to the detriment of other dimensions of the political field such as economy, material resources, flows of communication, etc. Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the unconscious and their material semiotics opens out beyond this narrow enclosure, allowing for a much broader field of inquiry, thereby critiquing some of the limitations of Lacanian approaches while also retaining a place for these modes of analysis. On the other hand, their forays into ethnography and history rescue the Oedipus from the narrow confines of the private subject and private family, showing how the Oedipus opens on to a broader social and political field, and also showing how other alternatives are possible. This undercuts a common Lacanian tendency to Platonize the various Lacanian structures, turning them into invariant and ahistorical iron structures, instead treating them as assemblages that both have to be built and that can be dis-assembled.
Second, based on my own reading of Lacan, it is difficult for me to see his as a defender or caretaker of major language as articulated in “The Postulates of Linguistics” and Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. In Seminar 20: Encore Lacan contrasts the relationship of psychoanalysis to language in terms of “lalangue” and “linguistricks”, as opposed to “language”. Thus, where linguistics, as Deleuze and Guattari argue in “The Postulates of Linguistics”, idealizes language into a dominant or majoritarian language against which all departures are seen as deviations from the ideal code, Lacan is interested in precisely those moments where language breaks down and takes a line of flight (hence Lacan’s fascination with Joyce later on). Far from shackling the subject to majoritarian language, Lacan is instead interested in those moments where the language of the analysand breaks through this majoritarian language creating a line of flight. While this is entirely a matter of speculation, Anti-Oedipus was published in 1972, the same year Lacan gave his twentieth seminar. It’s highly possible these issues were being discussed about the EFP with Guattari participating in these discussions.
While it is certainly true that Zizek Hegelianizes Lacan, it is very difficult for me to see Lacan himself as Hegelian. It is true that Lacan was deeply influenced by Kojeve’s reading of Hegel with respect to his early work on the imaginary, the mirror stage, and the formation of the ego. Yet, in “Subversion of the Subject”, Lacan describes the unconscious as the ruin of any sort of Hegelian project. He situates Hegel in terms of the discourse of the master in Seminar 17, arguing that psychoanalysis is that discourse entirely opposed to the master (admittedly he calls Hegel the most sublime of hysterics in this seminar as well). Moreover, from seminar 6 on, Lacan systematically demolishes any notion of totality or a whole, both of which are key terms for Hegel. Ultimately I think Deleuze is attacking any philosophy that attributes an ontological privilege to lack or negativity as happens in the case of Hegel. However, while Deleuze rejects any account that would treat lack or negativity as ontologically primordial as Hegel does in the opening moment of the Logic, Deleuze does not reject the notion of lack as an emergent effect or other differential processes. Lacan, in his response to Hyppolite will argue much the same thing, pointing out that affirmation is primary and that lack only emerges subsequent to a primary affirmation. Indeed, Lacan will argue that there is no lack in the unconscious, only differential relations. In this connection, it’s also worthwhile to note that while Lacan does persistently argue that the unconscious is structured like a language, he is also careful to emphasize that the unconscious is not a language. To say that the unconscious is structured like a language is to say that it is differential in nature. Were the unconscious a language we would have no way of explaining conversion symptoms or those symptoms where the body embodies some signifying formation without itself being a signifier (for example, the woman Freud mentions in “The Unconscious” who complained about having “twisted eyes” and problems with her vision).
December 9, 2008 at 5:22 pm
So as I read your historiography, Lacan began a project of breaking away from Hegel, and could only partially complete it. You seem to see Deleuze (and Guattari) as completing, or at least furthering Lacan’s own attempt to free himself from Hegel.
Is this fair?
December 9, 2008 at 6:03 pm
No, I don’t think that would be a fair assessment of what I’m doing or what I think of Lacan. One of the issues here would be to avoid Oedipalizing either/or alternatives attached to particular masters where we’re forced to choose between certain figures and thoughts like Lacan or Deleuze and Guattari or Badiou or Spinoza, etc. At least, I never think in these sorts of terms, and wouldn’t be interested in such a project discussing “how x broke away from Hegel” as I don’t think breaking with Hegel is a real or important issue. In my view, Lacan provides important tools for understanding attachment to Oedipus that simply can’t be found in Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari do a very good job developing tools for both showing how the Oedipus is based on a series of paralogisms and for breaking with the Oedipus, but they never really answer their key question as to just why we will our own oppression. Lacan spent his entire career denouncing the Oedipus and devising techniques to help his analysand’s along in moving to a post-Oedipal subject position, and provides tools capable of explaining how these attachments to the paranoid and Oedipal pole of subjectivity emerge. Part of this is by virtue of Lacan’s work in the clinic. In this regard, Lacan is able to complete a lot of work that is incomplete in Deleuze and Guattari. Likewise, Deleuze and Guattari provide a lot of tools that simply can’t be found in Lacan with respect to their much richer discussions of history, their naturalist ontology in texts such as What is Philosophy? and A Thousand Plateaus, and Deleuze’s independent works such as Difference and Repetition, etc.
As for the issue of Hegel, he’s neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned. In my view, philosophers shouldn’t be read so much as responding to other philosophers– though that occurs as well –but as responding to historical conditions and situations. My remarks about Hegel were simply responding Ian’s observations about Hegel and Lacan.
Philosophical thought, I think, should be viewed in ecological terms. Rather than looking at philosophies as positions competing to give accurate accounts of a self-same being or world, instead, following Deleuze, we should understand philosophies as individuations emerging in response to a specific set of problems (where problems are understood to belong to being, not minds), in much the same way that we look at organisms as a response to a particular set of problems in an ecosphere. No one would think, I hope, to ask whether a snake, tiger, or mouse is more “right”. Rather, snakes, tigers, and mice are specific individuations in response to problems posed with respect to a particular milieu. We can talk, after the fashion of Deleuze and Guattari’s animal-becomings, what advantages it might give us to become a rat as in the case of Willard, or to become a horse, as in the case of Little Hans. Likewise, we can talk of what advantages we might gain through viewing the world through Saint Thomas’ lens on this particular issue, Augustine’s on that, Spinoza’s on that, Lucretius’ on that, and Lacan’s on that. We can even talk of a “becoming-Hegel” on certain issues (I’m rather fond of Hegel’s account of essence or relation in the second part of the Science of Logic). Here philosopher’s aren’t approached as total systems that we judge or evaluate in terms of whether they’re accurate or inaccurate, but rather we approach the proper name of a philosopher as a set of conceptual inventions that can be deterritorialized and placed in new settings, generating new possibilities and problems, in exactly the same way that the human mouth is deterritorialized from the affect of eating when it begins to speak. Rather than asking whether a particular philosophy or concept is right or wrong (a phallic, representational approach that desires mastery and a view from nowhere), one instead asks “what can I do with it and what can it do with me?”
December 9, 2008 at 6:44 pm
One of the issues here would be to avoid Oedipalizing either/or alternatives attached to particular masters …
Dr Sinthome I think blawgers provide a very nice illustration of the repetition compulsion which you were having all these metapsych. musings on, but unlike you I see that relentless malevolent affect as a creative opportunity; it seems to throw you into bouts of frustration.
No one would think, I hope, to ask whether a snake, tiger, or mouse is more “right”.
Certainly so, dr. Sinthome, but the pressing question is why do humans keep putting things in those terms?
December 9, 2008 at 7:19 pm
I certainly find it frustrating, though I also find it to be, as you suggest, to be a creative opportunity… Or, at least, it generally works as a creative opportunity for me in the long run, even as I find it unpleasant in the moment. I will confess that dogmatic attachment to proper names or master-figures drives me into fits as somehow the proper-name becomes a normative principle against which everything being said is to be measured, rather than attending to the issue or phenomena itself being discussed. Consequently, sterile debates emerge as to whether or not something is properly “Badiouian” or “Lacanian” or “Deleuzian” (choose your fetish object), as if that were at all interesting or important. This, I think, is a form of the Oedipus, where the issue becomes one of constantly policing boundaries– “if Deleuze said Hegel is bad, bad, bad, then one must never speak of Hegel!” –and of alienating oneself in the master-figure. Perhaps I experience this fetishistic attachment to proper names that we find in the world of continental theory as being so disgusting because of my own vexed relationship to my proper name. Anyhow, I wrote about creative function of blogging and irritation a couple years back here:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2006/09/22/in-praise-of-irritation/
December 9, 2008 at 11:03 pm
because of my own vexed relationship to my proper name.
Levi Bryant you mean? Sounds perfectly alright to me. And since in Serbian you say ”levi” for ”left”, even has a socialist flavor to it.
The Continental philosophy is an industry like any other, and it works with fashion labels (I wrote a parody once together with the Impostume,
GLAMOURAMA – http://theimpostume.blogspot.com/search?q=lacan+fashion
and I just remembered how my Lacanalyst
was frustrated with the fact he couldn;t
sell that anywhere in Yugoslavia,
though he kept explaining it to friends.
One especially annoyed friend once lashed
out at him, ”In any village people would
say HE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT HE’S SAYING to
describe a lunatic instead of your irreparable hole in the SYmbolic Order”
which I thought was a good illustration of
the way Lacanalysis suffers under the burden
of its own labels – an odd phenomenon,
but very much operative
December 9, 2008 at 11:16 pm
LS: “Deleuze and Guattari do a very good job developing tools for both showing how the Oedipus is based on a series of paralogisms and for breaking with the Oedipus, but they never really answer their key question as to just why we will our own oppression.”
Kvond: Perhaps that is because they do not privilege the subject as a site of “willing” in the way that you would like them to. That is, they do not frame the question as you frame it? Philosophy is often the occasion of re-framing the question, getting others to ask the same question as you find important. If you don’t feel that D&G answered the question well, perhaps they had a different kind of question.
Is a reterritorialization a “willing your own opposition”?
LS: “I will confess that dogmatic attachment to proper names or master-figures drives me into fits as somehow the proper-name becomes a normative principle against which everything being said is to be measured, rather than attending to the issue or phenomena itself being discussed. Consequently, sterile debates emerge as to whether or not something is properly “Badiouian” or “Lacanian” or “Deleuzian” (choose your fetish object), as if that were at all interesting or important. This, I think, is a form of the Oedipus, where the issue becomes one of constantly policing boundaries–”
Kvond: I don’t know if this is directed to me at all, but if in any way it is, I would say that you have a limited notion of the kinds of positions I hold. I am not a Deleuzian in any sense, nor even a Spinozist. I do though find that sometimes when you are attributing positions to other thinkers, that is describing what it is that they hold, you often switch from a neutral voice which is simply descriptive, to a wistful voice which attributes aspects which you WISH were there. You seem to vary between saying that Deleuze and Guattari are some kind of Lacanian (radicalized or whatever), and wishing that they had been more Lacanian then they were. Whether trying to parse out each of these voices are “policing” boundaries, or just trying to be clear, is I suppose a larger question.
I do find it interesting that you seem to have come up with a hypothetical sentence: ““if Deleuze said Hegel is bad, bad, bad, then one must never speak of Hegel!”as someone had said this, or even implied it.
December 10, 2008 at 12:44 am
Dejan,
I have a rather unusual relationship to my name. I actually didn’t know what my name was until I was 9 or 10 years old and found out by mistake through a teacher. Prior to even being born I was referred to by family as “Levi” and therefore assumed that my name was “Levi”. Around the age of 9 or 10, I discovered that the name on my birth certificate was actually “Paul”, which is also, not incidentally, my father’s name. For a number of years after this I went by the name “Paul”, with only my family referring to me as “Levi”. However, in graduate school I found that I was having difficulty writing. For my master’s degree I had written a four hundred page manuscript that would eventually become Difference and Givenness. My director said that it was of dissertation quality and that I should set it aside, writing something else for my master’s degree (I ended up writing on Derrida, Peirce, and Husserl on signs, developing a semiotic or relational ontology). At any rate, the dissertation manuscript sat on a shelf gathering dust for a couple of years. For some reason I just couldn’t bring myself to edit it or even look at it. It was also around this time that I decided to enter analysis, wishing to discover if there was something to the actual practice that I had been reading about. At this point I decided to start going by the name “Levi” once again– which must have looked quite strange to my friends and professors: “Oh, by the way, I’d like you to call me ‘Levi'” now”. It seems that this shift in names unfroze whatever was going on and my problems writing disappeared.
December 10, 2008 at 1:09 am
Kvond,
I find this remark quite strange:
I’m not sure what I might have written that gave you the impression that my questions revolve around the subject. On the one hand, the category of the subject is not a major theoretical reference for me, nor one that I refer to or work with often. For example, you might note that I’ve been repeatedly poking thinkers like Badiou and Zizek who both valorize the category of the subject, arguing that the condition of politics is not the subject but rather the formation of collective-assemblages. On the other hand, if you’re picking up on my references to the Lacanian subject, the Lacanian subject is not a seat of willing. The idea of the subject as an entity that wills would be, for Lacan, an illusion produced by the imaginary and the formation of the ego. The Lacanian subject refers not to this sort of agency and willing, but to the subject of the unconscious, produced as an effect as in the case of Deleuze and Guattari’s third synthesis of conjunction. It is not a seat or foundation, substance, transparency, or unified identity– it is, after all, split –but is that which constantly deterritorializes the signifying chain.
The question “why do we will our own oppression” comes directly from Anti-Oedipus and is not of my own invention:
My thesis is that Deleuze and Guattari have posed the right question, but have not provided a sufficient answer to this question. Our previous discussions about Spinoza, lack, and sickness incline me to suspect that you probably have difficulty understanding this question as you continuously conflated the level of the ontological (that being or substance contains no lack) with the level of modes, where modes indeed experience themselves as lacking, understand the universe in terms of purposes or teleological causes rather than efficient causes, understand beings as being more or less perfect, etc. That is, you seemed to see these ways of viewing the world as simple errors rather than as transcendental illusions produced as a result of how these particular types of modes are constituted:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-metaphysics/#SouRatPsy
In evoking Kant, I am not suggesting that Deleuze and Guattari adopt Kant’s transcendental idealism. However, Deleuze does develop a robust account of transcendental illusion following Kant in Difference and Repetition and they develop their own set of paralogisms– five in all –in Anti-Oedipus. So long as these are treated as mere errors, rather than transcendental illusions, nothing can be understood. What is required by the lights of their own ontology– which understands all beings as the result of a process of genesis within being and being as strictly immanent to itself –is a genesis of these illusions themselves. So long as this move is not made, so long as we treat certain ways of thinking as mere errors (and Deleuze carefully critiques the notion of error in chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition) we fall back into the model of transcendence as we are opposing a world to a subject as transcendent to that subject.
December 10, 2008 at 4:09 pm
LS: “Our previous discussions about Spinoza, lack, and sickness incline me to suspect that you probably have difficulty understanding this question as you continuously conflated the level of the ontological (that being or substance contains no lack) with the level of modes, where modes indeed experience themselves as lacking, understand the universe in terms of purposes or teleological causes rather than efficient causes, understand beings as being more or less perfect, etc. That is, you seemed to see these ways of viewing the world as simple errors rather than as transcendental illusions produced as a result of how these particular types of modes are constituted”
Kvond: I don’t know what “conflating the level of the ontological…with the level of the modes” is when it comes to a PRAXIS of freedom. Any Spinozist prescription for freedom allows for a constructive path forward or out. That is, we literally build our freedom mode by mode, though combination, despite (and through) the illusions of lack. Freedom is ever immanent to ANY circumstance. Any analysis of “transcendental illusions” falls to real world, real body constructions that begin here, begin now, with this body, and this mind, these thoughts. What makes the errors “simple” (as degrees of Joy and Sadness) is what makes the path to freedom relatively simple.
Now those that declare the path to be extremely complex tend to be those that favor a mediator between a person (or class) and their freedom. One NEEDS an analyst to mediate between themselves and LANGUAGE, to help position them. Or, one needs a philosophy professor…This desire to assert a THEORETICAL mediation to freedom I always find suspect, and interestingly not uncommon in people in institutions which organize themselves around mediating freedoms. These people tend to theorize how important theorizers of one sort or another are, and perhaps this is not a surprise. In fact though, where you find such theorization of “priest” (this is the role that the analyst plays, as often does the professor), here is where you find also the “transcendental illusion” operating. Where “I (or one of my office) must stand between you and freedom” is said, it is there that the illusion of lack (for instance something like “a person must experience a castration in order to enter language”) expresses itself.
Indeed there is an importance, and a degree of freedom in studying “types” of illusions, and the way that illusions organize people (all forms of organization are forms of oppression AND freedom, the question being only one of degree), but the constitutive path of freedom begins HERE, in the body and in the way that the body can assemble with other bodies, that is, at the REAL ontological level, in fullness. The “types” of illusions can be identified genealogically, as inheritances of capacities, but the path forward is STILL one of combination. Arguments that Lack is Real therefore we must have a lack-officer can mediate the way are little more Sin-Priest-God structures redressed. These are effective structures, as they have a long history, but I prefer to see them as power distributions which favor those that argue for them, rather that primarily schemas for freedom. If you ever want to find where “transcendence” lurks, look for the mediator, it is almost always there.
LS: “In evoking Kant, I am not suggesting that Deleuze and Guattari adopt Kant’s transcendental idealism. However, Deleuze does develop a robust account of transcendental illusion following Kant in Difference and Repetition and they develop their own set of paralogisms– five in all –in Anti-Oedipus. So long as these are treated as mere errors, rather than transcendental illusions, nothing can be understood. What is required by the lights of their own ontology– which understands all beings as the result of a process of genesis within being and being as strictly immanent to itself –is a genesis of these illusions themselves. So long as this move is not made, so long as we treat certain ways of thinking as mere errors (and Deleuze carefully critiques the notion of error in chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition) we fall back into the model of transcendence as we are opposing a world to a subject as transcendent to that subject.”
Kvond: This portion I do not really follow, at least in terms of your supposed critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to THE question, because you seem to be stating all the ways that they DO answer the question in ways that you like. Is it that Deleuze is not quite Kantian enough? Is it that he does not find the Real/Imaginary/Symbolic (a nice Hegelian three) as powerful enough “transcendental illusions”, such that mediation unto them becomes a requirement for freedom? I am unclear just what is deficit in Deleuze and Guattari for you?
Where Spinoza might tell a broken-hearted lover or political activist, “Your sadness comes from the poor idea that this external thing is making you weak, and the affective affinities you have imaginarily built…”, you want to say something like, “you are caught up in a transcendental illusion which is so huge, powerful and hidden, unless you go to an expert of some kind who knows about this condition there is no way out”.
The “simple error” really isn’t that simple at all. It is a change in the vector of power. It is simple because it begins right there at the very personal nexus between thought and body, the way that your own thoughts relate to your own body. But it is not simple in all that it pulls within its gravity, the entire matrix of affective affinities and imaginary relations which help make of the constitutive body of which you are an expressive part. A change in the “simple error” radiates out with great consequence (and resistance).
As to “falling back” into a transcendent subject, if we hold the wrong notion of “error”, honestly the transcendent subject occurs primarily where there is mediation between a person and some theorized transcendental real to which that person has no access. Honestly, any linguistic sense of Self, and its counterparts in theory, is parasitic upon the affective identities of power that the body experiences, and which ground any of those meanings. This affective pool, if you will, is ever a reserve of freedom, in a trans-personal ways. Only when “error” is seen in non-ontological terms, that is, not in terms of constitutive affect and real power change, but in terms of a “mistake” does the transcendental subject arise.
In such cases, it is the presence of a mediator (a priest of some kind) who signals this condition.
December 10, 2008 at 4:26 pm
LS,
I wonder if you had ever considered the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in answer to the “transcendental illusion” question?
[For those unfamiliar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu ]
December 10, 2008 at 4:45 pm
“I will confess that dogmatic attachment to proper names or master-figures drives me into fits as somehow the proper-name becomes a normative principle against which everything being said is to be measured, rather than attending to the issue or phenomena itself being discussed. Consequently, sterile debates emerge as to whether or not something is properly “Badiouian” or “Lacanian” or “Deleuzian” (choose your fetish object), as if that were at all interesting or important. This, I think, is a form of the Oedipus, where the issue becomes one of constantly policing boundaries– “if Deleuze said Hegel is bad, bad, bad, then one must never speak of Hegel!” –and of alienating oneself in the master-figure.”
I couldn’t agree more. And I have to wonder if this relegating oneself under some master and protecting the ‘sanctity’ of their name, is, if not with some biblical analogue, one of the many things responsible for stifling creative output. I find the ‘camp mentality’ rather frighting and I should think any of the people we’ve been discussing here would urge us to read authors precisely because we’re told we shouldn’t.
That said, I disagree that Hegel isn’t of much importance here. Deleuze mentions somewhere in the early parts of Dialogues II that his education was consumed with studying Husserl, Hegel and Heidegger, and I have to wonder if one of the major (implicit) arguments and defining factors between the post-WWII teachers (like Althusser and Lacan) and their students (Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, among others) is an argument over the Hegelian legacy, whether in dialectics, becoming, negativity, lack, etc. Lacan and Althusser change their minds, perhaps, and, to me, Derrida is the one, coming from Heidegger, who takes this question most seriously. Where Deleuze and Foucault wanted to design new philosophies that were anti-Hegelian, Derrida made much ado of Hegel. I asked that question partly because I can’t help but wonder if Hegel, at least in the background, is always at issue.
With that, given how much Lacan changes his mind, throughout his seminars in particular, should we have some anxiety about talking singularly about Lacan? Can we say that Lacan matches up with Deleuze and Guattari entirely, or that Lacan matches with them only in certain phases of his lecturing career?
December 10, 2008 at 5:19 pm
I’m not sure what you’re on about with all this talk of mediators… Perhaps you’re responding to someone else? I can’t see that I’ve anywhere called for the sort of mediators you’re describing. One of the major motives behind my critiques of masculine sexuality (hierarchical social systems organized around a leader) and my forays into networks (non-centralized social systems that are self-organizing) is the critique of precisely these sorts of mediators. Lacanian psychoanalysis is interesting in part because its practice is designed to dethrone the analyst from this position, both striving not to enter the position of the master and working to undercut the analysand’s demand for a master. The analysand or patient enters analysis treating the analyst as a subject supposed to know, i.e., as a subject that possesses knowledge. Over the course of analysis this idea is overturned and the analysand discovers that it is only the unconscious that has knowledge. Of course, this is not the only way people can overcome their belief that the big Other exists. As I argued in my post on Joyce and the Borromean knots, Joyce freed himself from this belief without analysis. It seems to me that you approach Lacan with a set of preconceptions and anticipations about his position that cloud your ability to see what he is arguing. Likewise, my interest in Marx over the years here derives from how he examined models of social organization that weren’t organized around a central sovereign, but which emerge immanently from their own self-organization positing their own goals and aims. I would think that my positions here would be obvious given what I’ve written on networks and masculine sexuality, but perhaps not.
At any rate, in Kant a transcendental illusion isan illusion that arises from within reason itself and which is unavoidable. Unlike an error where there is a lack of adequation between a statement and the world (e.g., “Good morning Theatetus” when the person you’re addressing is Thrasymachus), these are illusions generated by the structure of thought. In this regard, transcendental illusions can be compared to optical illusions:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.sightsavers.org/images/f_1826optical-illusion-1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.sightsavers.org/Who%2520We%2520Are/Interactive/Optical%2520Illusions/United%2520Kingdom1837.html&usg=__JDFl6ZHm3TuOr5g2smDrQZzW1Bo=&h=405&w=398&sz=25&hl=en&start=79&um=1&tbnid=7nXtfHhYTFA2AM:&tbnh=124&tbnw=122&prev=/images%3Fq%3Doptical%2Billusions%26start%3D63%26ndsp%3D21%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1B2GGFB_enUS224%26sa%3DN
These optical illusions aren’t simple errors that arise from a failure to make true or adequate claims about the world (Spinoza’s 6th axiom in part 1 of the Ethics), but are instead inevitable illusions that arise from how our perceptual apparatus is put together. Even when you know that the three horizontals in the link above are the same length, you are unable to avoid perceiving the first horizontal as the shortest, the second as longer, and the third as the longest. Of course, for Spinoza this would be an instance of the first kind of knowledge and this wouldn’t come as a surprise. Something similar is at work with transcendental illusions in Kant, where it isn’t simply that a person has made an erroneous claim about the nature of the world, but that the way in which reason is structured leads to a set of inevitable illusions in thought. In Difference and Repetition, as well as Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze argues that the concept of error should be replaced by that of transcendental illusion. A few passages:
And
And most importantly,
What I have suggested is that you have approached these issues based on the notion of error and Spinoza’s 6th axiom defining truth, and not based on what Deleuze refers to as these “richer determinations”, where certain forms of illusion are generated inevitably through thought itself. Talk of lack, I have argued, is not a simple theoretical error that fails to properly represent the relationship between a proposition and the world, but is rather a transcendental illusion generated within those subjects that experience themselves as lacking. Likewise, Deleuze and Guattari are more than happy to concede that Oedipus exists. The question is rather one of how subjects come to experience themselves in Oedipal terms when desiring-machines constantly explode the boundaries of anything like an Oedipal triangle. When Deleuze and Guattari discuss the five paralogisms of psychoanalysis in chapter 2 of Anti-Oedipus, they are also making a reference to Kant and the notion of transcendental illusions, as it was Kant who first introduced the notion of paralogisms as one of the three types of transcendental illusion. Hence it would be worthwhile to know a thing or two about Kant to understand what they are there up to. My point is that despite moving in the right direction, Deleuze and Guattari’s five paralogisms still do not answer the question of how people come to desire their own servitude. In my view, Deleuze and Guattari too often speak as if it is somehow analysts and institutions that are imposing this sad desire on subjects. And indeed I would agree that there is a form of clinical practice that does reterritorialize all of the lines of flight that emerge in the clinical setting back on lack, castration, and the Oedipus. I do not, however, believe all forms of clinical practice can be characterized in these terms. You hear this theory that it is theorists that shackle subjects in this way echoed everywhere in the secondary literature on Deleuze and Guattari, and indeed, even in your comments where you talk about mediators such as psychoanalysts and philosophy professors wishing to enslave others so that they might have a place of mastery over them. What this account leaves unanswered is how particular sorts of modes become susceptible to this sort of operation in the first place. That is, if, at the level of desiring-machines, desiring-machines are purely affirmative and connective in the way Deleuze and Guattari describe, it is difficult to see how they could ever become susceptible to these sad sort of passions. Deleuze and Guattari fail, in my view, to provide such an account. In this connection, you speak of all the ways in which we are able to find freedom. I don’t disagree with any of this, but at the moment that is not the issue I am attending to. That is, you’re speaking like the mathematical prodigy that skips all the steps in a deduction and goes directly to the answer, without first seeking to understand the nature and structure of the problem. It as is if you’re immediately jumping to part five of the Ethics, while I’m tarrying a bit at book 3, working through the ways in which the functioning of our emotions generate certain forms of bondage. I am attending to the nature of the problem and setting aside the answers and solutions for the moment. In part this is because the nature of the solutions will be dictated by the nature of the problem.
Yes, I have read a good deal of Bourdieu and written about him often here. If you look at the right-hand column of this blog you will find a search function as well as a tag cloud that will allow you to determine what has and has not been discussed here. As for mediators, much of the political thought on this blog has been devoted to arguing against precisely the sort of thing you were railing against in this post (i.e., the need for priests). For example, I am very troubled by those forms of Marxism that see the necessity of a party elite to both awaken the proletariat and guide them. Of course, it would be unreasonable for me to expect you to have read two + years worth of blog entries so as to be aware of this. Although perhaps it would not be unreasonable to expect you to understand that you’re entering a discussion midstream.
December 10, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Hi Ian,
You’re right about Hegel, of course. I guess my point is that I see a lot of sterile debates arising from this way of reading. Everything gets focused on how one philosopher is responding to another philosopher as if that were the thing that is of crucial importance, rather than examining how texts are trying to act on their world and circumstances.
I am certainly not making the claim that Deleuze and Guattari match up with Lacan in all respects. The sort of reading I’m proposing also involves a transformation of Lacan in a number of respects. Guattari became a member of La Borde and Lacan’s EFP at a relatively late date (1962), when Lacan had moved into the final phase of his teaching focused on the real. Lurking behind my reading are two things in particular: First, I think that part of the conflict among Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan in the English speaking world has to do with the slow publication of Lacan’s own work. Anti-Oedipus was translated in 1983, Difference and Repetition in 1994, and A Thousand Plateaus in 1987. In short, we had the key texts of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari at a relatively early date.
By contrast, prior to 1980, we only had a partial translation of the Ecrits and translations of Seminar 1, 2, 3, and 11. In my view, Seminar 11 was almost unreadable without access to Lacan’s other seminars. It wasn’t until recently that Lacan’s unpublished seminars became widely available or that we had any access to his later seminars. This was true in French as well. All of this, I think, gave rise to a highly distorted picture of Lacan that often focused on the mirror stage and the imaginary to the detriment of everything else.
To make matters worse, in my view there was a great deal of ignorance concerning the complexity of psychoanalytic movements in the English speaking world. English speaking readers read Anti-Oedipus and uncritically treated the signifier “psychoanalysis” as being a monolith with a univocal content or signified behind the term. As such, it became easy to see Lacan as one of the prime targets of their critique, despite the fact that deep familiarity with Lacan’s teaching, theory, and practice would have revealed that Lacan is immune to a number of these charges and railed against a number of the things that Deleuze and Guattari railed against. Had there been more awareness of the internal politics of the many psychoanalytic orientations, Anti-Oedipus would have been read very differently, in my view, as a polemic against what Lacan called “ego-psychology”, not a polemic against Lacan. But again, this is not to suggest that Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari are convergent on all points.
December 11, 2008 at 12:49 am
LS: “As for mediators, much of the political thought on this blog has been devoted to arguing against precisely the sort of thing you were railing against in this post (i.e., the need for priests). Of course, it would be unreasonable for me to expect you to have read two + years worth of blog entries so as to be aware of this. Although perhaps it would not be unreasonable to expect you to understand that you’re entering a discussion midstream.”
Kvond: Of course I realize I am coming in midstream on your discussion with others and yourself. But in catching my stroke in these shifting waters one cannot help but note where EXPLICIT contradiction shows itself. For instance you declare yourself as against mediators, but then profess what seems to be a rather mediating “pegagogic fantasy” in which you imagine your students to be in Plato’s Cave, a place from which you imagine yourself to free them, so to speak. This is fundamentally the role of a priest (and I mean no offense). As you wrote to me in your comments on your rationalism,
“As for the pedagogical fantasy I outline, in the course of my teaching I’ve come to believe there’s a sort or maieutic that students must go through before reaching more complex things such as metaphor, rhetorical strategies, and all the rest (although in my critical thinking courses I actually begin with the analysis of rhetoric and common informal fallacies). In my view the reigning doxa of our time is relativism, such that no truths exist or are possible. Insofar as this is a doxa (Plato’s cave), the more radical gesture is to first treat of valid arguments and the possibility that truth exists, and then move in to the rhetorical dimension where all of this is problematized. If you begin with the problematized position you end up being an apologist for a “whatever goes” ideology that prevents students from ever encountering the split in their being and from confronting alternatives to their own belief systems.”
As I responded at the time, I would never see students (or anyone else) as locked within a Cave from which I meant to free them with my supra-cave knowledge (even if I am “freeing” them to their own possibilities). I think that this is one of the most interesting consequences of a Spinozist approach to thinking. Even the most apparently self-imprisoning organizations are already organizations of freedom by degree. There is no strict categorical difference between those in a Cave, and those who can go outside a Cave. In my opinion, part of respecting the discourse of others is how one frames that discourse. It strikes me that at least in respect to your “being-splitting” fantasy of pedagogy, you place yourself as a kind of mediator between your student’s current state, and the state they may be able to achieve, through your mediation. This does not mean of course that the theorizer of the mediatation is malevolent. In fact they can be benificent. But what is more important is how knowledge is positioned and liberation is conceived plays a large part on the paths taken.
I have of course to patch together themes as I read your posts, and where there are apparent contraditions form ideas as to explain them. Perhaps your thought has tensions in it: your over-arching theoretical work in the service of non-mediation and your experiences of being a mediating Lacanian clinician and analysand may pull in two directions. Or perhaps what you mean by mediation and what I mean are different things. The Cave Allegory though is a primary example of the role of the intercessor.
LS: “What I have suggested is that you have approached these issues based on the notion of error and Spinoza’s 6th axiom defining truth, and not based on what Deleuze refers to as these “richer determinations”, where certain forms of illusion are generated inevitably through thought itself. Talk of lack, I have argued, is not a simple theoretical error that fails to properly represent the relationship between a proposition and the world, but is rather a transcendental illusion generated within those subjects that experience themselves as lacking.”
Kvond: The 6th axiom you appeal to, “A true idea must agree with that which is the idea” has to be read within Spinoza’s parallel postulate and his epistemology, if one is going to make analytical sense of it. The idea of anything in the mind is of the body as it exists, and nothing else. That is its object. All our ideational moves are material moves, therefore. There are no “transcendental illusions” which become objects of our analysis. Spinoza reads our thoughts to be the thoughts of God/Substance:
“…the human mind is part of the infinite intellect of God. Therefore when we say that the human mind perceives this or that, we are saying nothing but that God, not insofar as he is infinite, in insofar as he is explained through the nature of the human mind, has this or that idea” (2p11c).
The human mind/body experiences lack, but the path out from such an experience is seeing that such thinking is only part of a larger thinking expression. This very seeing has a “stronger affect” which overpowers weaker ones. There is no mediating knowledge (or intersubjective relationship) which allows us to overcome “transcendental illusions”. The process is one of witness and experience; one simply sees the sense of it, like when an explanation of a phenomena suddenly shows how it works, what Spinoza called “seeing with the eyes of the mind”, thus drawing on the original meaning of “theory”, theorein.
Your treatment of your “transcendental illusions” which are born of thought violates Spinoza’s fundamental Naturalism, that is his primary objection to treating things in the human world as a “kingdom within a kingdom”. You are free to do so of course, but not within a Spinozist framework. Spinoza set himself solidly against the Cartesian split between the “human world” and the natural world, and Kant finds himself on the Cartesian side.
As Della Rocca articulates in his new book on Spinoza,
“Spinoza’s problem with Cartesian and other accounts of the affects is that such a views introduce an objectionable bifurcation between human beings and the rest of reality. Here we have non-human nature which operates according to one set of laws and here we have another part of reality – human beings – which operates according to a different set of laws…” (Spinoza 2008, 5)
Now the status of the very non-Spinozist “transcedental illusions” is an interesting one. I can’t tell if you take these necessary illusions of thought as a priori or a posteriori. If a priori then indeed we have entered the Kantian realm of the scheme/content distinction, wherein the philosopher acts as priest or mediator to truth. That is, in order to have access to the proper content, one has to consult the mediator who has access to the scheme that determines the truth. As Rorty has made clear following Davidson’s critique of Kant, this scheme/content dualism is a nesting ground for political power structures. And it is for this very scheme-mastering reason that Nietzsche found the philosopher’s work so much a Will to Power that had to be acknowledged.
Now if such “transcendental illusions” are a posteriori, or simply historically contingent, really it would seem that the proper non-elitist, non-mediating approach to them would be ethnographic, and part of a praxis of empowerment. A description of said illusions, and a practice toward their dispel through the display of OTHER ways of thinking about things would be the suitable way to counter them.
To return to a more Spinozist approach, the illusions of lack are countered by stronger affects, that is the power of seeing the world in more constitutive ways…at least that is the way that I see it, not by undergoing a process of subjected mediation. If the Sun appears 200 ft away one encounters the power of thinking of it roughly 93,000,000 miles away. This does not mean that it ceases to appear 200 ft away, but one is able to act outside of this experience. The same goes for the illusion that this woman you love makes you sad when she ignores you. Yes, you may have that affective experience, but a deeper understanding of causes and affects will allow you to experience your relations differently. (One need not consult someone who understands that human beings have all been subject to castration when entering language and therefore are (un)naturally subjected to a kind of perpetual crisis of desire in relation to an ineffable object.)
Key to this is understanding that the resources of power and freedom way within the affective capacities of a person, as NATURAL, as connected to all the rest of nature, and not seeing human beings as “a kingdom within a kingdom”. This is the reason why one turns to “ontology” when one wants to answer modal questions. There are no humans-only (or language holders only) laws.
I think that these are not just theoretical issues, but also issue of power distribution. It is in the great history of the priest that the human-world (however it is articulated or defined) is distinguished from, and CUT OFF FROM the natural world. The priest (however well-meaning) is the one who attempts to reconnect these two in whatever ritualized way, mediating them. Anytime you find these two cut off from each other, look for the priest. The notion that the subject is cut off from the Real by its entrance into language is the myth of the Fall all over again.
December 22, 2008 at 3:30 pm
[…] on Deleuze and Kant, respectively, Larval Subjects explains the profound difference between the transcendent and the […]
March 16, 2009 at 6:51 pm
After reading the lengthy discussion in which the two or more philosophers are discussed, i felt the need to most my comment. However I’m no expert on the subject, so correct me if i’m wrong in my thoughts. But I believe that Ian is right on the subject of Hegel. When browsing sights such as this so many sterile debates arise, and I personally believe that it is not how a philosopher reacts to another philosopher it is how their texts effect the society and the greater population, which is something that personally i find more interesting… Wouldn’t you agree?
February 18, 2013 at 2:01 am
Reblogged this on deleuzianexcursus and commented:
Repeat after me:
“However, the transcendental is not the transcendent. Rather, the transcendental, following Kant, refers to a set of conditions thoroughly immanent to being. ”
I seem to have a knack for reading to understand, but I fail to let that understanding cohere into an articulatable (sp?) knowledge or deeper understanding. Ultimately, it seems that writing out the construction of the argument is the best way to retain it in order to, um, regurgitate, for lack of a better word… anyway- this is a nice extension of an ongoing conversation with a friend of mine, as we both begin to exhibit the wounds acquired from reading Difference and Repetition.