Towards a Political Anthropology in the Work of Gilles Deleuze_ Psychoanalysis and Anglo-American Literature (2015)

TOWARDS A POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE WORK OF GILLES DELEUZE

FIGURES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 13

Editorial Board

PHILIPPE VAN HAUTE, (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)ANDREAS DE BLOCK, (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)JOS CORVELEYN, (Catholic University Leuven, Belgium)MONIQUE DAVID-MÉNARD, (Université Paris VII – Diderot, France)PAUL MOYAERT, (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)VLADIMIR SAFATLE, (University of São Paulo, Brazil)CHARLES SHEPHERDSON, (State University of New York at Albany, USA)

Advisory Board

TOMAS GEYSKENS, (Leuven, Belgium)ELISSA MARDER, (Emory University, Atlanta, USA)CELINE SURPRENANT, (University of Sussex, United Kingdom)JEAN FLORENCE, (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)PATRICK GUYOMARD, (Université Paris VII – Diderot, France)ELIZABETH ROTTENBERG, (De Paul University, Chicago, USA)JEFF BLOECHL, (Boston College, USA)PATRICK VANDERMEERSCH, (University of Groningen, the Netherlands)VERONICA VASTERLING, (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)HERMAN WESTERINK, (Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)WILFRIED VER EECKE, (Georgetown University, USA)RUDOLF BERNET, (Catholic University Leuven, Belgium)ARI HIRVONEN, (University of Helsinki, Finland)JOHAN VAN DER WALT, (University of Luxemburg, Luxemburg)STELLA SANDFORD, (Kingston University, London, United Kingdom)CLAUDIO OLIVEIRA, (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)PAOLA MARRATI, (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA)ERAN DORFMAN, (Tel Aviv University, Israel)MARCUS COELEN, (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany)RODRIGO DE LA FABIÁN, (University Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile, Chili)RICHARD BOOTHBY, (Loyola University, Maryland, USA)

TOWARDS A POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE WORK OF

GILLES DELEUZEPsychoanalysis and Anglo-American Literature

Rockwell F. Clancy

In loving memory of John “Mr. John” Makin, one of the best guys I’ve known.

May this suffice until “The Kampehout Diaries” matches in the literary genre what “Potverdekke!” is for music…

You’re missed.

© 2015 by Leuven University Press / Universitaire Pers Leuven / Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Minderbroedersstraat 4, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium)

All rights reserved. Except in those cases expressly determined by law, no part of this publication may be multiplied, saved in an automated datafile or made public in any way whatsoever without the express prior written consent of the publishers.

ISBN 9789462700116D/2015/1869/10NUR: 777

Cover illustration: YuQing Ying, “Barbie on Table”Cover design: Griet Van HauteLay-out: Friedemann BVBA

“The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude,

but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics

is a branch of fantastic literature.” Jorge Luis Borges

(“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Labyrinths.

New York: Penguin, 1979. 34.)

“In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.” Theodor Adorno

(Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. New York: Verso, 2002. 49.)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 11

Abbreviations 13

PrefaceFrom Psychoanalysis and Literature to Political Anthropology 15

IntroductionDeleuze, Politics, and the Problem of Human Nature 17

1. Politics and the Problem of Human Nature: Political Anthropology 172. Deleuze and the Problem of Human Nature: Philosophical Anthropology 23

Chapter OneThe Metaphysics of Psychoanalysis 33

Introduction: Psychoanalysis as Idealism and D.H. Lawrence 331. Philosophy and Literature in Lawrence 352. Psychoanalytic Reading in Freud, Bonaparte, and Lacan 373. A Note on “Pollyanalytics” and Problem of Critique 404. Praxis and Philosophical Anthropology in Marx and Engels 425. A Substance Theory of Mind and Theological Motivations in Descartes 446. Experiential Unity and Transcendental Subjectivity in Kant 477. Spirit as Ground and the Dialectical Method in Hegel 498. Marx versus Descartes, Kant, and Hegel 569. Lawrence’s Conception of the Unconscious 5910. Lawrence and the Psychoanalytic Tradition: Drive Theories and Individuation 6311. Familial Relations, according to Lawrence 6612. The Individual and Society, according to Lawrence 69Conclusion 74

Table of Contents

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Chapter TwoThe Metaphysics of Classic American Literature 77

Introduction: Language, Literature, and Lawrence 771. Classic American Literature and American Identity 782. Changing Identity by Changing the Blood 813. New Criticism and Reader Response: The Same Old Problem 854. Classic American Literature: Conditions Material and Ideal, Body and Mind 885. Spinoza and Lawrence: Parallelism and Classic American Literature 916. Individuals, Community, and Sympathy: Lawrence and Spinoza 947. Sympathy and Multitude: Anti-Democracy and Fascism 100Conclusion 102

Chapter ThreeReading Anti-Oedipus from behind with Lawrence 105

Introduction: From a Critique of Psychoanalysis… 1051. A Note on Metaphysics: The Organic Model 1062. The Specificity of Schizophrenic Experience 1093. A Materialist Conception of the Unconscious 1164. Syntheses of the Unconscious 1215. Connective Synthesis 1246. Disjunctive Synthesis 1297. Conjunctive Synthesis 1408. Social Machines 1489. Primitive Territorial Machine 15310. Barbarian Despotic Machine 16211. Civilized Capitalist Machine 169Conclusion 178

Chapter FourAnglo-American Literature as a Philosophical Concept 181

Introduction: …to the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature 1811. The Line of Flight: Exiting versus Leaving 1842. Anglo-American Literature: Individuals and Community 1883. Tricksters versus Traitors: Imitation versus Becoming 1924. Hume and the Exteriority of Relations 1965. Spinoza, Parallelism, and Affects 2006. Bodies, Events, and the Stoics 2047. Assemblages and the Political 207Conclusion 213

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Table of Contents

Chapter FiveThe Political Significance of Opinion, Philosophy, and Art 217

Introduction: Opinion as a Problem 2171. Elements of Opinion 2182. Development of Opinion in Relation to Chaos: Denial 2223. Political Significance of Opinion: Creating Consensus 2254. Elements of Philosophy and Art 2345. Relation of Philosophy and Art to Chaos: Uneasy Alliance 2416. Political Significance of Philosophy and Art: Inventing a People,

Making Brains 247Conclusion 254

Chapter SixCreating a People to Come 257

Introduction: Liberalism and its Failures 2571. Inclusive Particularism: The Political Significance of Philosophy and Art 2622. D.H. Lawrence, Christianity, and Fundamentalism 2633. The Meaning(s) of Revelation 2644. Christianity: Aristocratic and Popular 2655. Selves: Individual and Collective 2676. People and Power 2727. T.E. Lawrence, Arabs, and Exclusivism 2758. The Creation of Shame as an Affect 2759. The Political Significance of Literature 27910. Becoming (with but not like) Arab 28411. Walt Whitman, America, and Nationalism 28812. The Specificity of American Experience 28813. An Alliance with Nature as Fragmented Reality 29014. The Creation of Relations as Camaraderie 293Conclusion 297

ConclusionPolitical Anthropology, Liberalism, and Deleuze 301

Bibliography 309

Index 321

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Acknowledgements

The older I become the clearer it is how absolutely dependent I am on others. The relations I have form the very fabric of my life. There are many persons whose presence and help must thus be acknowledged, in the process of not only writing this book but also contributing to who I am. Although long lists of acknowledgements are admittedly obnoxious – and tend to either emphasize or deemphasize contributions depending on the frame of reference from which they are being assessed – I owe a great deal to many. Every three to four years of my adult life I have moved to a different place, establishing new relations while attempting to maintain the old. I have succeeded and failed in both.

First and foremost, I would like to thank Daniel Smith and Tomas Geyskens. What I think philosophy is and how it should be done have been determined by their examples. I must acknowledge the immense amount of guidance, assistance, and patience given to me by William McBride, Robert Marzec, and Philippe Van Haute. I am especially grateful to Professor Van Haute, not only for asking me to publish this book in his series but also because my understanding of and interest in psychoanalysis has profited tremendously from reading his books and articles.

The debt I owe to my family is unimaginable: my thanks to Maria, Rockwell, and Richard Clancy, as well as Kathryn Ryan. Noreen Byrne, Pam Nicolaï, Somaieh Emamjomeh, and Ann Chiu are the four women I have loved. I’m continually surprised to discover just what a mark they have left on me. I hold an abiding gratitude for all my friends from the Chicagoland area, especially John and Lee Hirsch, Dan and Sue Cates, Kevin and Jennifer Halloran, Geoff Chunowitz, Alex Mahler, Alex Finn, Kelly and Kathy Stevenson, and Ben Rooney.

I would like to thank all my professors from Purdue University, but especially Leonard Harris, Arkady Plotnitsky, Sandor Goodhart, Thomas Ryba, and Daniel Frank. My friends from Purdue and the (West) Lafayette area kept me (relatively) sane during my time there. My heartfelt thanks to Alberto Urquidez, Richard Severe, Brian Ruby, Justin Litaker, David Gauly, Christopher Penfield, Barry Blankman, Shane Greeno, Sophia and Bodhi Stone, and Becky Hunter.

I lived in Leuven, Belgium for three years. From there I would like to thank professors Rudolf Bernet, Roland Breeur, and Paul Moyaert, as well as all my friends from Belgium, especially Kelly VandenBosche, Thor Sandaker, Carel Peeters, Carl-Axel, Callan Ledsham, Nicholas Ryan, Anita Jans, Paul Walsh, and Drew Dalton.

Acknowledgements

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My interest in philosophy began as an undergraduate at Fordham University. The person most responsible for my pursuit of the examined life – a turn away from my initial trajectory towards one of corporate greed through the study of economics – is undoubtedly Avery Goldman. Only more than ten years later, having found myself in similar situations, can I fully appreciate the immense patience and skill he used in dealing with me as an obnoxious nineteen-year-old freshman. I owe a great deal to Michael Baur, Merold Westphal, and James Marsh as well.

I am grateful for the two persons with whom I was the closest during the final stages of writing this book: Nora “first tier” Trench Bowles and Bianca “only a child could have mistaken my shoes for theirs” Rubino. Finally, many thanks to my colleagues and the staff from the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute, especially Heinz Luegenbiehl, Pamela Mansutti, Roberto Dugnani, Shane Johnson, Roger Han, Silvia Li, Wendy Dai, and Aki Miao, as well as to all my friends in Shanghai, especially Jeff Juran and Ying YuQing.

In different ways, I love you all.

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Abbreviations

Works by DeleuzeB BergsonismD DialoguesDI Desert Islands and Other TextsDR Difference and RepetitionECC Essays Critical and ClinicalEPS Expressionism in Philosophy: SpinozaES Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human

NatureF FoucaultFBLS Francis Bacon: The Logic of SensationFLB The Fold: Leibniz and the BaroqueKCP Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the FacultiesLS The Logic of SenseM Masochism: Coldness and CrueltyN NegotiationsNP Nietzsche and PhilosophySPP Spinoza: Practical PhilosophyTRM Two Regimes of Madness

Works by Deleuze and GuattariAO Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia vol. IK Kafka: Towards a Minor LiteratureTP Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia vol. IIWP What is Philosophy?

Other worksA ApocalypseE ÉcritsFU Fantasia of the UnconsciousPU Psychoanalysis and the UnconsciousSCAL Studies in Classic American Literature

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Preface

From Psychoanalysis and Literature to Political Anthropology

The following book argues for the existence of a “political anthropology” in the work of Gilles Deleuze. I use this term to denote an understanding of political activity on the basis of philosophical anthropology – a conception of human nature. Deleuze’s political thought, I argue, is rooted in an account of human nature. However, this perspective is by no means an obvious one. Indeed, to anyone even vaguely acquainted with Deleuze’s work, this claim would appear counterintuitive if not misguided.

Deleuze’s thought is generally associated with a tradition known as “post-modernism,” the most salient characteristic of which is its critique of various notions such as truth, progress, and subjectivity, all of which belong to what Jean-François Lyotard refers to as “meta-narratives.” Using an account of hu-man nature to ground one’s political analyses is both modern and classical, placing Deleuze’s thought squarely within these traditions. Whereas “natures” have traditionally been conceived in terms of “essences” pegged to unchanging “forms,” Deleuze’s thought emphasizes time and “becomings.” Insofar as the locus of his political thought lies in his collaborative endeavors with Guattari – and their conception of “becoming-animal” there plays a considerable role – it would appear as though Deleuze’s political thought is explicitly disconnected from an understanding of human nature.1 My project is thus based on ap-proaching Deleuze’s thought from a particular perspective, in terms of specific themes.

I began by investigating two topics in Deleuze’s work: his critique of psychoanalysis and claim that Anglo-American literature is superior to its Franco-Germanic counterparts. These themes are interesting as their broader philosophical import is by no means straightforward. At first they appear as the idiosyncratic eccentricities of a strange French philosopher, an intellectual poster boy for the youth discontent of the 1960’s and 70’s.2 However, precisely these

1 In Deleuze and the Political, the major study to date exploring the political dimensions of Deleuze’s thought, Paul Patton claims Deleuze’s political thought takes shape in his works with Guattari, where “deterritorialization” is an overarching political norm (9).

2 Especially in English-language scholarship, the tendency exists to tie Deleuze to various thinkers and themes in a haphazard, rather unintelligent fashion. For an assessment along these lines, see François Cusset’s “Becoming Deleuzian: Deleuze aux États-Unis, l’inconnu et la boîte à outils,” as well as his longer French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and

Towards a Political Anthropology in the Work of Gilles Deleuze

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lines of inquiry led to a “political anthropology” in the thought of Deleuze – from psychoanalysis and literature to political anthropology. Deleuze’s critique of psychoanalysis and praise for Anglo-American literature bear on different conceptions of human nature and the respective understandings of political activity they support. Given the increasing polarization of views across the political spectrum, the major contemporary significance of Deleuze’s thought lies in the way he grounds his analyses of political thought on accounts of philosophical anthropology.

Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States.

17

Introduction

Deleuze, Politics, and the Problem of Human Nature

1. Politics and the Problem of Human Nature: Political Anthropology

We are in desperate need of political anthropology. Classical and modern political thought, including the related fields of ethics and law, has generally grounded its analyses of concepts belonging to these spheres – notions such as justice, rights, and duties – in terms of human nature, taking philosophical anthropology as a touchstone to understand notions belonging to the domain of politics.

To understand the nature of justice, for example, Plato appeals to an account of the soul via the polis in the Republic. Similarly, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says man is born for citizenship, that the function of man consists in this type of life. This activity or action of the soul implies a rational principle. He reiterates these same points in the Politics, claiming the state is a creation of nature prior to both the family and individual and that by nature man is a political animal.1 In early modern thought, Hobbes appeals to human existence in a state of nature to explain the basis of sovereignty in the social contract. Likewise, Spinoza claims that the positions he develops throughout the Political Treatise proceed “from the necessity of human nature” (308). With good reason, however, the mainstream of contemporary political thought has largely abandoned such an approach.

In these contexts, “human nature” has been conceived as inflexible and unchanging, an essence in terms of which the characteristic behaviors of individual persons and groups of people can be understood. Given the existence of competing and mutually exclusive accounts of philosophical anthropology, one can conclude such accounts result more from socially and historically contingent factors – such as cultural, ethnic, and religious orientations – than the convergence of these conceptions on any “matter-of-fact” regarding what it means to be human. Such accounts imply and support competing and mutually exclusive conceptions of the good life, which often result in or justify strife – if not terrible atrocities – between persons and groups of people. Given

1 Insofar as the polity is an outgrowth or reflection of human nature, on this understanding, the polis – versus the family – is the most sovereign and self-sufficient social unity, an out-growth or reflection of the highest part of human nature. See Hadley Arkes’ discussion of these points and their contemporary significance in First Things: An Inquiry into the First Principles of Morals and Justice 12.


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the increasingly globalized and pluralistic nature of the world, abandoning this strategy has itself been understood as a precondition for an analysis of notions belonging to the political domain, a line of thought associated with “liberalism.”

Slavoj Žižek describes its program as one where “politics should be purged of moral ideals” (Living 34). In this respect “liberalism conceives itself as a ‘politics of the lesser evil,’” where “its ambition is to bring about the ‘least worst society possible,’ thus preventing a greater evil, since it considers any attempt to directly impose a positive good as the ultimate source of all evil” (Žižek, Living 38). Evidence of this shift begins with Hobbes, an “effort to scale down the ends of politics, to remove from political life those questions about the highest moral ends which proved so enduringly contentious, and which were so often productive of civil war” (Arkes 15). In a different tradition but similar conceptual vein, Jacques Rancière asserts that Hobbes criticized the position of the ancients as being “utopic in its assertion that human beings are by nature cut out for the polity” (76); “one must refute the very idea of some kind of natural political aptitude in the human animal that would predestine them to any good other than simple survival” (77). In these respects, the thought of Hobbes and the liberal tradition it inaugurates departs sharply from Aristotle and the natural law tradition.

The merit of liberalism thus consists in neutrality with respect to these competing conceptions. “Its central idea is that government should be neutral toward the moral and religious views its citizens espouse. Since people disagree about the best way to live, government should not affirm in law any particular vision of the good life. Instead, it should provide a framework of rights that respect persons as free and independent selves, capable of choosing their own values and ends” (Sandel 4). This neutrality acts as a negative principle in which making robust claims with respect to human nature is itself bad, as the good consists in establishing a broad framework of negative rights that allow people to discover and pursue such accounts for themselves.2 Versus robust claims regarding the nature of morality, the good life, etc. – based on “thick” conceptions of personhood or human nature – liberalism sets aside such questions.3 However, this shift in perspective is itself problematic for at least two reasons. The first concerns the possibility of this approach – whether one

2 See Isaiah Berlin’s formulation and defense of negative rights and freedom in “Two Concepts of Freedom.”

3 John Rawls says, “accepting the political conception [of justice]” associated with liberalism “does not presuppose accepting any particular comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine” (“Priority of Right” 450).

19

Introduction

can ever fully divorce philosophical anthropology from political thought. The second concerns its desirability – whether this approach is itself beneficial.

With regard to the first, William Galston says “every contemporary liberal theory that begins by promising to do without a substantive theory of the good ends by betraying that promise” (143). Referring to “the characteristic error of anti-perfectionist liberalism,” Robert George unpacks this claim as follows: “[liberalism] falsely purports to justify a regime of law that is strictly neutral on the question of what makes for a morally valuable life…which itself presupposes no particular position on the question of what makes for a morally valuable life” (159). Hence, while Rawls claims to remain neutral with respect to such questions, attempting to bracket “comprehensive doctrines,” “justice as fairness” itself implies a specific conception of human nature, where human beings are rational and disinterested while at the same time being risk avert.4 All cooperate because collective wellbeing depends on this cooperation (Theory of Justice 15). Behind the veil of ignorance, no one knows the position they occupy in society, such that no one is prejudiced in the principles they choose (Theory of Justice 18).

At times, however, Rawls endorses a kind of moral formation indicative of the paternalism to which liberalism is supposed to be opposed.5 According to George, Rawls is thus committed to a conception of the person and the good: “The ‘persons’ in the original position choose liberal principles because they are ‘persons’ as a certain form of liberalism conceives them” (133). The neutrality at the heart of a liberal conception of justice thus implies a conception of human nature as rational, disinterested, and risk avert.6 Similarly, against those who champion only negative freedom and a liberal conception of right, Charles Taylor argues this emphasis is itself already informed by a broader conception of the good life – indicative of a conception of human nature.7 Hence, as much as one might like and try, it is difficult if not impossible to divorce an understanding and analysis of the political from human nature.

This gives rise to a second issue concerning the liberal tradition – the desirability of such an approach. A certain reflexive urge to understand human existence is itself characteristic of human nature. Contemplation and 4 “One feature of justice as fairness is to think of the parties in the initial situation as rational

and mutually disinterested” (Theory of Justice 13).5 He says that “certain initial bounds are placed upon what is good and what forms of character

are morally worthy, and so upon what kinds of persons men should be” (Theory of Justice 32).6 In this respect Rawls’ appeal to economic rationality is telling: “the concept of rationality

must be interpreted…in the narrow sense, standard in economic theory, of taking the most effective means to given ends” (Theory of Justice 14).

7 See, for example, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?”


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reflection on human nature is itself intimately linked to a uniquely human form of existence: contemplation and reflection on what being human consists in. It is precisely this tendency that leads Heidegger to approach the broader question of Being through being human, a being whose existence is itself an issue.8 As became increasingly clear to Heidegger, however, this activity is by no means exclusively individual but also concerns community.9 This perspective becomes much more explicit in his later works such as “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Question Concerning Technology.”

This urge stands at the heart of religious belief and practice, the liberal and fine arts, the social and even hard sciences. Attempts to divorce an understanding of political thought from philosophical anthropology thus stifle this inherently human urge to explore and stake out claims regarding what being human consists in. Heidegger’s own commitments to National Socialism might be understood from this perspective. His talk of the rootedness of a people, their world, earth, etc. and Nazi propaganda concerning race, blood, history, etc. all point in this direction, towards this urge within human beings to understand and establish themselves in a certain way. As is clear, far from idle speculation, this tendency results in real-life consequences. Its social-political manifestations are evident even today.

The rise of nationalist parties throughout Europe, religiosity in the form of evangelical Christianity and its political sway in the United States, and militant, fundamentalist forms of Islam are its contemporary manifestations. The emphasis on cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and inclusive universalism that dominated the late 80’s and 90’s has given rise to an intense backlash. The soft political philosophies associated with cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and inclusive universalism, expounded by the likes of Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida – ones of the “let’s wait and see” variety where people engage politically while recognizing these engagements as ultimately groundless or always in need of revision10 – have given rise to an intense backlash. One recognizes the counterpoint to these intellectual strands in the political work

8 “Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein’s Being, and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being – a relationship which is itself one of Being” (Being and Time 32).

9 This is already apparent in Being and Time when he writes, “Dasein has grown up both in and into a traditional way of interpreting itself… Its own past – and this always means the past of its ‘generation’ – is not something which follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes ahead of it” (41).

10 For example, by Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and by Derrida in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International.

21

Introduction

of Žižek and Alain Badiou, philosophy of religion, and the “new atheists.” The emphasis both Žižek and Badiou put on militant action and the

role of the party in their political thought are evidence of this backlash, the former’s discussions of political “decisions” and the latter’s talk of “fidelity” to an event.11 At a recent conference I overheard another participant discussing his involvement in the “Occupy” movement. He recounted the events of a night when he was arrested at a party. After describing his initial resistance and struggle with the police, he said something along the following lines: “I know that people become cops for different reasons, but at a certain point you just have to say, ‘Fuck them! I fucking hate all cops. They’re all evil!” In a vastly simplified manner, I suspect this mentality lies at the heart of Žižekian and Badiouian political thought, a breaking point at which one is finally fed up with attempting to understand and make oneself understood.

Although the use analytic philosophy makes of intuitions in conceptual analysis has always seemed bizarre to me – that which seems to push thought forward, not only in philosophy but also other disciplines, are ideas furthest from commonsense intuitions – the role these play in philosophy of religion seems especially problematic. Here the “commonsense” intuitions on which one relies in conceptual analyses clearly result from the particularity of one’s belief community or tradition.12 On the other end of the spectrum, public atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and A.C. Grayling seem as intolerant of religious belief and people as those they criticize.13 Biologist Kenneth Miller points towards this intolerance – putting evolutionary thought in the service of atheism – as one of the major reasons religious people reject evolutionary theory. This concerns less their ignorance or confusion regarding the science involved and more the way this militarized Darwinism-in-the-service-of-atheism threatens their worldviews, undermines the way they think about themselves and the ethical views these self-conceptions support (Miller 169 ff.).

11 See Badiou’s relatively accessible – albeit incomplete – account in Ethics 40-44. In that work Badiou explains his own “hostility to contemporary consensus on questions of democratic-liberal procedures, human rights, and our much-vaunted respect for cultural difference” (107). Describing the “political act,” Žižek says, “the unity and law of a civil society is imposed onto the people by an act of violence whose agent is not motivated by any moral considerations” (Living 32). This perspective fuels his endorsement of Leninism: “With Lenin…the point is that revolution ne s’autorise que d’elle-même: one should take responsibility for the revolutionary act” (Living 33).

12 For example, see Alvin Plantinga’s “Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism.”13 See, for example, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s

Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.


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These instances point towards not only the inability of divorcing political thought from philosophical anthropology but also the perils involved in attempting to do so. In the case of both individuals and community, a strong tendency exists to understand and stake out claims concerning the nature of existence. On both sides of the spectrum, in political, social, and religious matters, people have grown increasingly impatient, weary of bracketing or refraining from staking their claims with respect to differences between right and wrong, conceptions of the good life, and ultimate accounts regarding the nature of human existence. The intense, emotional nature of these current tendencies is only explicable as reactionary phenomena, reactions against the “let’s wait and see” mentality, the inclusive universalism characteristic of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and liberal ideals.

The tragedies of the 20th century consist not only in the mass murder facilitated by modern technology but also the relative inability to learn from and respond to these events in a proactive manner. Be it famine and war on the African continent or the rise of school and workplace killings in the United States, the tendency exists to refer to these events as “senseless,” as incidental and, therefore, disconnected from one another.14 This is a mistake.

At the beginning of the 21st century we stand in a similar position with respect to a number of fundamental human concerns as in the 19th century – nationalism in the political sphere, lack of or inefficient regulation of economic markets, simplistically reductionist understandings of psychopathology by psychiatry… These should be understood in a systematic manner, at the basis of which are the natures of the terms involved and their relations – individual persons, groups of people, and relations between the two. Far from claims of the type “People are fundamentally x – good, bad, selfish, evil, altruistic, etc.” an enquiry into human nature – an account of philosophical anthropology – should be in the service of and guided by broader cross- and inter-disciplinary concerns, ranging from the advisability of certain types of biological research and technological endeavors, the nature of psychopathology and end-of-life decision-making, to economic and healthcare policy. The thought of Gilles Deleuze points in this direction.

14 Regarding the systematic nature of problems on the African continent, see Teju Cole’s criticisms of the “Kony 2012” campaign in “The White Savior Industrial Complex.”

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Introduction

2. Deleuze and the Problem of Human Nature: Philosophical Anthropology

“I believe a worthwhile book,” Deleuze once said, “can be represented in three quick ways. A worthy book is written only if 1. you think that the books on the same or a related subject fall into a general error (polemical function of a book); 2. you think that something essential about the subject has been forgotten (inventive function); 3. you consider that you are capable of creating a new concept (creative function)… Henceforth, for each of my books, abandoning necessary modesty, I will ask myself 1. which error it claims to correct, 2. which oversight it wants to repair, and 3. what new concept it has created” (qtd. Dosse 112). Abandoning necessary modesty, I hope to have written a book on Deleuze that is worthwhile, according to these criteria – those of Deleuze himself.

Polemically, the error of most works on Deleuze lies in their poor understanding and even worse explication of his thought. In large part, scholarship on Deleuze suffers from the absence of close reading and critical commentary – explications of texts by Deleuze are rarely central features. More often than not, scholars refer to his concepts and ideas as though they were self-evident, parroting his terminology as if everybody already knew what Deleuze said.15 First and foremost then, I hope to have written a book that presents Deleuze’s thought in a clear fashion without sacrificing precision. Indeed, in the English-speaking world, the field of Deleuze studies awaits what H.S. Harris, John Findlay, and William Richardson were to Hegel and Heidegger scholarship, scholars capable of closely reading and carefully commenting on texts, tracing the background and wider milieu in which philosophical thought takes place.16 This leads to a second error regarding the way one approaches Deleuze’s thought, and concerns an oversight I would like to repair.

Reading an author is never simply an exercise in regurgitation. The approach one takes to a work – one’s expectations and motivations – itself determines the nature of the reading that results. This is nowhere more apparent than in the work of Deleuze himself. Regarding how to approach Deleuze’s thought, the broad consensus exists that Difference and Repetition is his magnum opus, that his earlier works in the history of philosophy lead up to

15 François Zourabichvili criticizes this presumed familiarity (5).16 In these respects, Daniel Smith is a remarkable exception, as well as Paola Marrati, Anne

Sauvagnargues, and François Zourabichvili within French-language scholarship on Deleuze. See, for example, Daniel Smith’s Essays on Deleuze and François Zourabichvili, Paola Marrati, and Anne Sauvagnargues’ La philosophie de Deleuze.


24

and culminate in Difference and Repetition, while later works, including those co-authored with Félix Guattari, are explications and further developments of explicit themes or nascent ideas already present there. This perspective is by no means groundless.17 However, Deleuze himself seems skeptical about the idea of a masterwork, a book that would be understood as an author’s definitive statement.18

Inventively, I claim works on Deleuze to date have overlooked the rather anomalous and transitory nature of Difference and Repetition. Although various concepts and themes appear there as the culmination of Deleuze’s intellectual development – for example, the notion of habit and its development in relation to both Hume and Bergson, the image of thought, the eternal return in Nietzsche, a doctrine of the faculties as a reconceptualization of Kantian thought – many others appear there for the first time only to quickly drop out again.19 Rather than a masterwork, it appears more as a loose amalgamation of his earlier books on figures and themes in the history of philosophy. One might understand Difference and Repetition as Deleuze’s feigned attempt to think on his own – to do philosophy rather than the history of philosophy. Here it would be an instrumental response to the stringent requirements of the French academy of his day, where one was required to produce an original work – to make some hitherto unexplored claim regarding the nature of accepted philosophical thought – for the sake of achieving a doctorate

17 In the Preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze himself declares the following: “All that I have done since is connected to this book, including what I wrote with Guattari” (DR xv). At the same time, however, the nature of this connection is specific: “the third chapter [on the “image of thought”]…serves to introduce subsequent books up to and including the research undertaken with Guattari where we invoked a vegetal model of thought: the rhizome in opposition to the tree” (DR xvii). He reiterates this same point elsewhere: “One might call this study of images of thought ‘noology’ and see it as the prolegomena to philosophy. It’s what Difference and Repetition is really about, the nature of the postulates of the image of thought” (N 149). See Patton’s commentary on this point, that Deleuze’s earlier criticisms of the image of thought condition his later political work with Guattari (Deleuze and the Political 132).

18 Regarding an understanding of Madness and Civilization as Foucault’s master work, Deleuze asks the following: “does Madness and Civilization already contain in principle everything else, for example the conceptions Foucault came to form of discourse, knowledge, and power?” He answers, “Certainly not. There’s something great writers often go through: they’re congratulated on a book, the book’s admired, but they aren’t themselves happy with it, because they know how far they still are from what they’re trying to do, what they’re seeking, of which they still have only an obscure idea” (N 104).

19 See Smith’s discussion of the appearance and disappearance of the concepts of “simulacrum” and “univocity” in Deleuze’s work in “The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism” and “The Doctrine of Univocity: Deleuze’s Ontology of Immanence,” respectively, both of which are included in Essays on Deleuze.

25

Introduction

and obtaining a better university position.20 Even if one treats this as a serious philosophical work rather than a professional requirement, however, it still appears as though Deleuze’s thought moves in a different direction after Difference and Repetition, especially in his collaborative endeavors with Guattari. The three most salient features of this transition concern Deleuze’s abandonment of a doctrine of the faculties, critique of psychoanalysis, and praise for Anglo-American literature. These three themes, I argue, go hand-in-hand.

In the third place then, creatively, drawing attention to the nature of this discontinuity between Difference and Repetition and the co-authored works with Guattari leads to a Deleuzian account of “political anthropology,” an understanding of the political based on philosophical anthropology. But what does this creativity consist in and how does it develop?

Many works on Deleuze claim to use or employ his thought in a creative manner, to be written in a Deleuzian spirit of creativity. By and large these are terrible, poorly written and difficult to understand. If these works are born out of creativity, if they result from a Deleuzian prescription to use his thought in a creative manner, one wonders if it wouldn’t be better to do the same old thing in a spirit of traditionalist conformity.21

Rather than any shortcoming in the thought of Deleuze, in English-language scholarship, I suspect this results from the vogue of French thought in the Anglo-American world, as well as the intentional obscurity characteristic of post, post-World War II French philosophy, often referred to as “post-structuralism” or “post-modernism.” Indeed, versus Deleuze’s published book-length manuscripts, one is struck by the clarity of his explanations in seminars, interviews, and shorter texts. The creative nature of Deleuze’s work did not itself result from letting his thoughts run wild, from a sloppy show of false erudition masquerading as the “employment” of someone else’s thought.22

Describing the manner in which one should approach an author with whom one engages, in a spirit of both admiration and critique, Deleuze writes the following: “You have to work your way back to those problems which an author of genius has posed, all the way back to that which he does not say in 20 Difference and Repetition takes precisely this form, Deleuze claiming philosophy has always

conceived of difference on the basis of identity. Instead he will think difference in-itself. Indeed, after his defense, Deleuze expressed his desire to leave Lyon and obtain a position in Paris (Dosse 178).

21 I am in full agreement with Zourabichvili’s claim that the dichotomy between exposition and use as it concerns Deleuze is a false one (4).

22 On this score see Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature as well as my review of that book.


26

what he says” (DI 139). Deleuzian creativity consists in this, the first step in the kind of creative reading Deleuze himself engaged. “A philosophic theory is a developed question, and nothing other. By itself, in itself, it consists not in resolving a problem, but in developing to its limit the necessary implications of a formulated question” (ES 119).

Given the vast body of work on Deleuze in existence today – both positive and negative, written out of a spirit of both admiration and with the aim of critique – it seems strange no one has yet attempted to rediscover the questions Deleuze himself asked, the nature of the problems animating his thought. I would argue that the answer to this question – the question to which Deleuze’s thought is an answer – is a conception of human nature, the question of what being human consists in. From Empiricism and Subjectivity – tellingly subtitled An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature – published in 1953, to Immanence: A Life written in 1995, Deleuze constantly and consistently returns to the question of what being human consists in – issues related to an account of philosophical anthropology.

However, the claim anything akin to a traditional account of human nature can be found in the work of Deleuze should seem strange. This seeming strangeness results from the way accounts of human nature have traditionally been conceived.

In the first place, this concerns a conception of “nature” and its relations to an account of philosophical anthropology. Natures have traditionally been understood in an essentialist manner, based on the model of an unchanging form – that which makes a thing what it is. An account of human nature in these terms then would refer to a fundamental distinction between the existence of human and other types of beings, a difference in kind rather than degree. The problem then consists in conceiving Deleuze’s conception of human nature in these terms.

Deleuze’s philosophical anthropology comes closer to Sartre’s, which emphasizes a specifically human mode of existence, although the basis of this specificity is not an unchanging form. Sartre’s emphasis is on the way human beings are, not as an account of essence, but rather, existence and the parameters this existence demarcates in the formation of an “essence.”23 Rather than human nature – where nature would be conceived on the model of an unchanging form – Sartre’s philosophical anthropology consists in 23 Given its specific conceptual history, the term “essence” here is probably inappropriate,

although Sartre never himself ceases to use it. Hence, his dictum that “If God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept” (Existentialism 35).

27

Introduction

the elucidation of a human condition, coordinates that form a framework in terms of which human existence plays out.24 This is precisely Deleuze’s interest in his first book-length monograph on Hume, conditions in terms of which human nature takes shape, the formation of subjectivity on the basis of the association of ideas. In this same manner, Deleuze’s philosophical anthropology emphasizes a different conception of “nature.”

Nature is not conceived as a well-organized whole on the basis of an unchanging form, but in terms of what Deleuze refers to as “becomings,” as a chaotic maelstrom where relations are constantly changing. Here the difference between human and other types of existence is conceived as one of degree rather than kind. Philosophical anthropology does not refer to a fundamental distinction between human and other types of beings. Indeed, this is precisely how Spinoza – Deleuze’s greatest philosophical inspiration – conceives the relation, emphasizing the continuity between human nature and nature in general.25 But the political consequences of these commitments only become clear from a certain perspective, only after Difference and Repetition and the Logic of Sense and at the beginning of his collaborations with Guattari, in terms of his critique of psychoanalysis and praise for Anglo-American literature.

If Difference and Repetition should indeed be understood as a doctrine of the faculties, as Deleuze himself declares and his commentators reiterate, then its orientation is that of the individual.26 Further, insofar as the Logic of Sense seems committed to the passive nature of events – focusing on how these come to be “embodied” in states of affairs – it implies a kind of immaterialism, an idealism. These commitments change in the transition to Anti-Oedipus, from an orientation on the individual to a more complex account of individuals, community, and their relations, which itself goes hand-in-hand with a shift towards materialism.27 In terms of their reformulation of fundamental

24 Describing the role of nothingness – the way nothingness acts as a condition of human existence – see Being and Nothingness.

25 “We do not here acknowledge any difference between mankind and other individual natural entities” (Theological 201). “[M]an…is part of nature, and…ought to be referred to the power of nature” (Political Treatise 292). On this point, Deleuze writes that man “thus loses in Spinozism all the privileges owed to a quality supposed proper to him, which belonged to him only from the viewpoint of imitative participation” in God (EPS 183).

26 See DR 143, as well as Joe Hughes’ Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition 73 ff. This perspective results in Hughes’ misguided claim that the activities of syntheses of the unconscious and social machines in Anti-Oedipus should be understood on the model of the activities of faculties (175-177).

27 Véronique Bergen explains this transition in terms of Deleuze’s abandonment of Carroll for Artaud after the Logic of Sense (34). Žižek judges this as the moment Deleuze’s thought falls off, when Guattari gets the better of him, abandoning psychoanalysis and an “event”-inspired


28

(metaphysical) psychoanalytic commitments, Deleuze and Guattari’s political thought goes beyond Žižek and Badiou’s simplistic and problematic application of Lacanian thought to the political sphere, at the root of which involves conceiving groups as individuals.28 The transition from Difference and Repetition and the Logic of Sense to Anti-Oedipus can be understood in terms of Guattari’s contribution to Deleuze’s thought, which consists in a critique of psychoanalysis and turn to Marx.

Guattari’s own background was in psychoanalysis and activism. As divergent as these two activities initially seem, in the case of Guattari they converge on a common objective. Versus various strands of Freudian and Lacanian thought where the therapeutic objective consists in making the sick individual healthy, the work in which Guattari was engaged with Jean Oury at La Borde emphasized group therapy. Just as in the case of political activism, the focus here is on relations between individuals and community, interpersonal organization. As a non-hierarchical, non-totalizing means of organizing and conceiving relations between individuals and community, Guattari develops the concept of “transversality” in this context.29 In terms of both psychoanalysis and Marxism, this leads to an account of human nature that provides the basis for the political philosophy Deleuze and Guattari develop in Anti-Oedipus.

Hence, although the locus of Deleuze’s political thought does indeed lie in his collaborative endeavors with Guattari, this is precisely because they are based on a particular conception of human nature. Since this develops with reference to a critique of psychoanalysis and the superiority of Anglo-American literature, only through a thorough exploration of these themes – their broader philosophical significance in Deleuze – does this account of philosophical anthropology and its political significance become clear, a Deleuzian political anthropology. It does not, however, appear on the basis of reading either Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari alone.

ethics (Organs 21). Although I agree with Žižek’s characterization of the transition, far from being a bad thing, this is precisely where Deleuze’s thought becomes relevant politically, through his critique of psychoanalysis and turn towards (Marxist) materialism.

28 Emblematic in this respect is the way Žižek sets up Living in the End Times, attempting to understand the crisis in capitalism – at the root of which is group behavior – in terms of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, meant to apply to the individual alone (xi-xii).

29 See François Dosse’ biographical accounts of Guattari’s work at La Borde, his involvement in political activism and group organization, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives.

29

Introduction

In large part, the poverty of Deleuze studies results from this tendency, focusing on works by Deleuze alone or those of his immediate contemporaries, remaining ignorant of the sources from which he received inspiration and the context in which his thought moves. Central to an understanding of Deleuze’s political thought, the transition from his earlier works to those co-authored with Guattari, and the significance of the critique of psychoanalysis and the superiority of Anglo-American literature to these, are the theoretical works of English writer D.H. Lawrence.

On almost every occasion Deleuze criticizes psychoanalysis or praises Anglo-American literature, he refers to Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, and Studies in Classic American Literature, respectively. Reading these works in conjunction with those by Deleuze, examining Lawrence’s commitments and tracing their metaphysical implications, reveals the extent to which they provide the theoretical foundation for Deleuze’s own thought. Lawrence’s critique of psychoanalysis and praise for classic American literature revolve around a conception of human nature; Deleuze’s critique of psychoanalysis and praise for Anglo-American literature can only thus be fully understood through Lawrence. Whereas psychoanalysis misunderstands what being human consists in, according to Lawrence, classic American literature provides an accurate depiction. Exploring these accounts and tracing Lawrence’s commitments brings to light the philosophical anthropology implicit in the work of Deleuze, as well as its political implications.

On the one hand, both psychoanalysis and Franco-Germanic literature suppose a conception of human nature where the mind is given priority over the body, individuals are conceived on the model of self-subsistent substances, community is conceived as a collection of substances, and the basis of relations between individuals and community are common goals and mutual aspirations – such that consensus represents the highest goal of political activity. On the other hand, central to schizoanalysis and “Anglo-American literature” is a philosophical anthropology where the mind is not given priority over the body, individuals are conceived as unique sets of relations – what Spinoza calls “bodies” – community is conceived as wider, further-reaching sets of relations than individuals, and the basis of relations between individuals and community is sympathy – such that the goal of political activity consists in the production of shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. Thus, versus the mainstream of contemporary political thought, Deleuze’s work can be understood as contributing to the project of a political anthropology. The fact this contribution takes shape in terms


30

of Lawrence’s thought on psychoanalysis and classic American literature is significant.

On these issues, Lawrence is conservative, bizarrely so when considered in relation to Deleuze. In terms of psychoanalysis, social and familial relations, Lawrence defends thoroughly traditional gender roles. Worse still, with respect to both psychoanalysis and classic American literature, his emphasis on the body and the importance of strong communal relations seems indicative of proto-national socialist sympathies. Indeed, through and through, Lawrence’s work is saturated by sexism and political conservatism. Rather than becoming embarrassed by or dismissing these tendencies in Lawrence, I argue the merit of Deleuze’s political anthropological project consists in taking these seriously, considering what is plausible in these thoroughly conservative, seemingly antiquated lines of thought.

Refraining from making strong claims regarding the nature of the good life, morality, etc. is indicative of an attempted neutrality in contemporary political thought. Tied to the liberal tradition, as an ideal this neutrality itself arises from and is based on an account of philosophical anthropology similar in nature to that criticized by Deleuze in psychoanalysis and Franco-Germanic literature. Insofar as increasing social and political polarity characterizes the contemporary situation, the account of human nature on which this ideal is based seems thoroughly misguided. When taken up by Deleuze, the merit of Lawrence’s thought consists in making sense of the strong contemporary backlash against neutrality with respect to claims regarding the nature of human existence. This is precisely because of the conservative lines of thought that permeate Lawrence’s accounts of psychoanalysis and classic American literature.

This is by no means an endorsement of either Lawrence’s conservatism or other rather wild accounts in his work. Rather, the point is to discover what is plausible or redeeming in these.30 Only by engaging in these lines of thought can one hope to combat them, understanding the allure of sexism, nationalism, and fundamentalism – forms of conservatism in terms of which the backlash against liberalism develops.

These should not be understood as aberrant movements, accidental deviations from the universal norm on which liberal thought is based. Insofar as these ideals are themselves rooted in a conception of human nature, this backlash should be understood in terms of philosophical anthropology. In

30 “[A]pplying my mind to politics,” Spinoza says about his own approach, “from the very condition of human nature… I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions” (Political Treatise 288).

31

Introduction

terms of their emphasis on the body and reconceptualization of individuality, community, and relations between the two, the thought of Lawrence and Deleuze makes sense of this tendency and these movements, pointing towards a political anthropology in terms of which they can be better understood and addressed.

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Chapter One

The Metaphysics of Psychoanalysis

Introduction: Psychoanalysis as Idealism and D.H. Lawrence

At various points throughout Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari refer pejoratively to psychoanalysis as a kind of idealism.1 Criticizing a conception of desire they associate with psychoanalysis, for example, Deleuze and Guattari write the following: “The three errors concerning desire are called lack, law, and signifier. It is one and the same error, an idealism that forms a pious conception of the unconscious” (AO 111 – emphasis added). Hence, despite their various and far-reaching criticisms of psychoanalysis, at bottom these have as their common root a fundamental philosophical error, namely, idealism. Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of psychoanalysis are more fundamental than the Oedipus complex, neurosis, castration, an understanding of desire in terms of lack, etc., taken piecemeal and by themselves.2 As components of psychoanalytic thought, these result from more basic metaphysical assumptions – assumptions regarding the nature of reality – of a specifically idealistic nature. Their “schizoanalytic” project consists in reformulating psychoanalytic thought in terms of materialism.3

On the basis of what Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus alone, however, it is not clear in what sense they understand psychoanalysis to be an idealism, what this conception of psychoanalysis has to do with a common, philosophical understanding of idealism, or why this should be a bad thing.4 Although various secondary works have addressed the relation(s) between psychoanalysis and the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, to the best of my

1 For example, see AO 24, 111, 118, and 308.2 Regarding attempts to reconcile the thought of Deleuze and Guattari with Lacan, which

I find misguided, see Philippe Mengue’s “Le concept de clinique dans l’esthéthique deleuzienne” and Daniel Smith’s “The Inverse Side of the Structure: Žižek on Deleuze on Lacan.” See Philippe Van Haute and Tomas Geyskens’ A Non-Oedipal Psychoanalysis?: A Clinical Anthropology of Hysteria in the Works of Freud and Lacan concerning Lacan’s move away from an understanding of desire in terms of castration and lack with his “formulas of sexuation.”

3 See, for example, AO 75.4 The present study follows Michael Baur’s concise yet comprehensive definition: “The

term idealism in its broadest sense denotes the philosophical position that ideas (mental or spiritual entities) are primary and lie at the very foundation of reality, knowledge, and morality, while non-ideal entities (such as physical or material things) are secondary and perhaps even illusory (“Idealism” 1078).


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knowledge, no author has taken up this issue specifically, their characterization of psychoanalysis as an idealism.5 Indeed, given the strange nature of this claim, it is not even clear how one would go about addressing – much less resolving – these queries. The present chapter takes up these questions.

A variety of bedfellows accompany Deleuze and Guattari in their critique of psychoanalysis, from literary authors and ethnologists to philosophers and psychoanalysts. Freud and Lacan themselves figure prominently throughout Anti-Oedipus, as well as Lévi-Strauss, Nietzsche, Marx, and Reich. Given the intellectual milieu in which Deleuze and Guattari’s critique moves, these engagements are understandable and their significance (relatively) straightforward. More often than Deleuze and Guattari discuss the work of either R.D. Laing or Lévi-Strauss, however, they refer to the English writer D.H. Lawrence.

How or why Lawrence should figure prominently in Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis – an author whose central literary themes seem to be of a thoroughly Oedipal nature, as notorious for his sexism as for his proto-national socialist proclivities – is not clear. This connection appears bizarre to anyone familiar with either Lawrence’s reputation in general or literary works specifically, providing understandable grounds for an outright dismissal of its significance.6 Only through an exploration of this connection, however, can one fully understand Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of psychoanalysis as an idealism, as well as schizoanalysis as a materialist reformulation of psychoanalytic thought. Lawrence’s engagements with psychoanalysis themselves imply deeper metaphysical commitments that animate his criticisms of and reformulations of psychoanalysis. According to Lawrence, psychoanalysis supposes a dualistic understanding of the relationship between mind and body, where the mind is given ontological as well as explanatory priority. Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of psychoanalysis as an idealism and its materialist alternative can be understood

5 See, for example, Monique David-Ménard’s Deleuze et la psychanalyse: L’altercation, Tomas Geyskens’ “Painting as Hysteria: Deleuze on Bacon”, Eugene Holland’s Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis, Christian Kerslake’s Deleuze and the Unconscious, Slavoj Žižek’s Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences and Deleuze and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Essays on Deleuze’s Debate with Psychoanalysis.

6 See Ian Buchanan’s Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus where he dismisses the importance of Lawrence’s thought for an understanding of Anti-Oedipus. He does the same in “Deleuze and His Sources,” Buchanan’s response to Anneleen Masschelein’s “Rip the Veil of the Old Vision Across, and Walk Through the Rent: Thinking Through Affect in D. H. Lawrence and Deleuze and Guattari.” This essay by Masschelein is one of the few texts to closely and carefully consider the relation between Lawrence and Deleuze and Guattari.

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in these terms, a trajectory within the history of philosophical thought that runs from mind-body dualism to idealism.

The ontological and explanatory priority given to the mind in Cartesian dualism leads to transcendental idealism in Kant, which results in the type of idealism characteristic of Hegelianism. Likewise, what begins as mind-body dualism in the work of Freud ends in the linguistic idealism of Lacan. As an alternative, Lawrence and Deleuze and Guattari emphasize an understanding of human existence in terms of material conditions. Instead of dualism, Lawrence’s alternative implies a materialism, a train of thought that can itself be discerned within the psychoanalytic tradition. Deleuze and Guattari formulate their own account in this same tradition, implying a Marxist materialism contra Hegelian idealism. Central to these lines of thought are familiar philosophical anthropological issues concerning personal identity and the unity of consciousness, the nature of individuality and relations between individuals and community.

Through an exploration of Lawrence’s work on psychoanalysis in conjunction with the history of philosophy, this chapter explores the intellectual background necessary to make sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of psychoanalysis as an idealism. To do so, I focus on Lawrence’s conception of the relationship between philosophy and literature, a problem regarding the possibility of critique and social change this relationship raises, and his conceptions of the unconscious, familial relations, and the individual’s relation to society. This explication takes place against the backdrop of the history of philosophy, which serves to clarify Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding and criticisms of psychoanalysis as a kind of idealism, as well as how this understanding and these criticisms bear on a broader, further-reaching critique of a conception of human nature – an account of philosophical anthropology.

1. Philosophy and Literature in Lawrence

Published in 1921, Lawrence’s first book on psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, was poorly received. Lawrence went on to write a second book, expanding and developing his criticisms of psychoanalysis, Fantasia of the Unconscious, published a year later in 1922. In its foreword, after admonishing critics and lay readers alike to simply stop reading the book – to just put it down because they will not understand it – Lawrence explains his own understanding of the theoretical work in which he is engaged.


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For Lawrence, the role of literature is primary to that of philosophy; literature and art are in some sense superior to philosophy: “This pseudophilosophy of mine – ‘pollyanalytics’…is deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and poems come unwatched out of one’s pen. And then the absolute need which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one’s experiences as a writer and as a man… These ‘pollyanalytics’ are inferences made afterwards, from the experience” (FU 57).

Although philosophy here plays a role, Lawrence says his theoretical and philosophical commitments derive from literature rather than the reverse, that literature and art are closer to and, therefore, more capable of grasping experience than philosophy. Theoretical reflection or philosophical doctrine – the “need which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general” – stands in a position twice removed from life, such that for philosophy to have bearing on life, it must first turn to art to cultivate insights. The perspective one takes towards art is itself indicative – or an outgrowth – of the metaphysical commitments to which one subscribes, the view one takes towards the nature of reality. Lawrence’s approach marks a sharp point of departure from the mainstream of the philosophical tradition.

Since its inception, the field of philosophical aesthetics has attempted to establish guidelines and criteria to judge the merits of artistic works. These have been employed as either theoretical measuring sticks to judge what does and does not count as art or as guidelines used by artists themselves in their creative endeavors.7 Such approaches demean creative, artistic expression at the expense of interpretive, philosophical understanding. In such a scheme, art is subordinate to philosophy. Nietzsche reacts against these rationalizing tendencies in The Birth of Tragedy, linking them to the death of tragedy in the works of Euripides. Lawrence is also reacting against these same tendencies, noting the fact that his theoretical (philosophical) reflections follow from his literary works (art) and not vice versa.

7 In book ten of the Republic, for example, Socrates condemns the poets, saying art is acceptable only if it serves political ends – a kind of socialist realism. The criteria he uses to reach this conclusion are the same as those employed by Lawrence in describing his own approach and touching on the relation between literature and philosophy: For Socrates art stands in a position twice removed from reality, producing copies of things which are themselves copies of forms. Similarly, in the work of Freud – as well as forms of literary criticism that take psychoanalysis as their touchstone – artistic works are understood and judged in terms of psychoanalytic meta-theory, forced into a predetermined theoretical constellation to which they have to answer.

37


The fact that Lawrence begins a book on psychoanalysis by describing the relationship between philosophy and art is significant: Deleuze’s own turn away from psychoanalysis and turn towards Anglo-American literature, after all, coincide. Central to the thought of both Lawrence and Deleuze is a relation between psychoanalysis and an understanding of the relationship between philosophy and art. Both react against the way psychoanalysis turns to literature to legitimate its own meta-psychological theories. Just as in the mainstream of the philosophical tradition, here art is subordinate to psychoanalysis, mere fodder for its interpretive exercises.8 This approach is indicative of metaphysical commitments that bear on an understanding of human nature, one where the mind is given priority in relation to the body.

2. Psychoanalytic Reading in Freud, Bonaparte, and Lacan

If psychoanalysis were simply a therapeutic practice with a set of (somewhat outlandish) theoretical axioms to explain its practice, then it seems unlikely that psychoanalysis would arouse the perennial interest and disgust it does. These reactions would be totally disproportionate to their cause. What psychoanalysis offers, rather, is a conception of human nature, an account of what it means to be human. What is unique – and at times especially interesting and disturbing – about psychoanalysis’ account is the centrality of madness, sexuality, irrationality, violence, etc., a far cry from either Plato or Aristotle’s account of human nature as gregarious, contemplative, etc.9 Psychoanalysis’ relationship to literature is best understood against this backdrop, turning to literature to legitimate its own meta-psychological theories. It might be said to do so in one of two ways, either literature confirms psychoanalytic theory, or psychoanalysis tells a plausible story about the meaning of literary works. Freud’s “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” is a perfect example of the first tendency at work.

Published in 1906, Freud’s theory of dreams as wish fulfillment was already becoming well known. However, the development of his theory of dreams goes hand-in-hand with the development of his theory of neurosis, central to which is an account of the ambivalence of the emotions, childhood sexuality,

8 Deleuze and Guattari constantly and consistently criticize psychoanalysis as merely an interpretive endeavor. See Freud’s description of psychoanalysis as an “interpretative art” in “The Question of Lay Analysis” 220. Regarding psychoanalysis as an interpretive endeavor, see “Psycho-Analysis” 238-239 as well.

9 See Philippe Van Haute and Tomas Geyskens’ Confusion of Tongues: The Primacy of Sexuality in Freud, Ferenczi, and Laplanche xi-xxii for a fuller elucidation of this account.


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repression – all forms of perceived unsavoriness belonging to psychoanalysis. The focal point of Freud’s interests in this essay are Jensen’s descriptions of Norbert Hanold’s delusions and dreams in Gradiva, specifically, that these descriptions confirm psychoanalytic theory. Based on Jensen’s characterization of Hanold, the descriptions of the latter’s delusions and dreams coincide with what a psychoanalytic practitioner would expect to find – a narcissistic patient attempting to re-establish relations with the external world through a love object that resembles himself (“Gradiva” 90). Hence, without any knowledge of psychoanalytic theory, but only an acute understanding of the human condition, Jensen confirms in a literary work what psychoanalysis discovers in clinical practice (“Gradiva” 44). Although this is by no means the only manner in which Freud engages with literature, it is a way of conceiving this relation that nevertheless dominates his thought.10 Whereas Freud’s interest in literary authors consists in their confirmations of psychoanalytic insights, Bonaparte’s are different.

Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962) was a princess, writer, and psychoanalyst – one of Freud’s early adherents and a close confidant. Her concern is with the ways the meaning of literary texts are determined by and should be understood in terms of the psychoanalytic biography of its author, consisting in well-known psychoanalytic themes such as ambivalent feelings towards one’s parents and repressed wishes. This is the approach Bonaparte takes in her reading of Edgar Allen Poe. She analyzes Poe’s texts in terms of his childhood and the relationship with his wife via his relationship with his mother.11 Once again, the controversy surrounding such readings consists in their emphasis on especially offensive psychoanalytic themes, those central to an understanding of human nature.12 Whereas Freud’s method of legitimating psychoanalytic meta-theory thus consists in pointing out similar discoveries by different methods, Bonaparte shows that without psychoanalytic insights literary criticism is deficient: Important meanings in texts are overlooked and undervalued without a psychoanalytic theory of human nature.

The importance of Lacan’s engagements with literature might be said to consist, primarily, in legitimating psychoanalytic practice on the basis of a structuralist interpretation of psychoanalytic accounts of human nature. This is especially evident in his “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” Following Shoshana Felman, it seems best to understand Lacan’s interest in the 10 See also, for example, “Psychopathic Stage Characters” 307-308 and “An Autobiographical

Study” 33 and 63-65.11 See “Selections from The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation.”12 See Shoshana Felman’s account in “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.”

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“Purloined Letter” as a metaphor for psychoanalytic practice, a story that explains Lacan’s unique contributions to psychoanalytic technique and the conception of philosophical anthropology it implies.13 There he says that the true subject of the “Purloined Letter” is the signifier, emphasizing the primacy of the symbolic order (E 21).

Versus Anna Freud and the ego psychologists, Lacan does not think the goal of psychoanalytic therapy is to strengthen the patient’s ego through identification with the analyst’s (Fink 3-5). This would entail a primacy of the imaginary register, an account of human existence where identity with oneself and others is possible and plays a primary role. Rather, according to Lacan, identity is determined by difference (E 6-7). The goal of analysis is not the identification of the patient’s desire with that of the analyst’s but to confront the patient’s “lack-in-being,” felt in the subject’s non-coincidence with itself and the cosmos, insufficiency in pleasure, lack of meaning, etc. (Fink 37). This therapeutic innovation is a result of Lacan’s structuralist understanding of human nature.14 Because of language, the imaginary register or function of identification cannot be primary.

In Lacanian meta-theory, ego identification would involve identification in desire, becoming like the other by desiring what the other desires as well as an object of the other’s desire (Four Concepts 243).15 Since human beings occupy the symbolic register, desire is always insufficient.16 Language creates a

13 On this see “On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytical Approaches” 147.

14 Structuralism’s fundamental insight might be stated as follows: Although language is dependent on human beings for its existence, language exists prior to individual persons. Insofar as meaning is a fundamental component of human existence, and language conditions meaning, human beings owe their existence to language. Emile Benveniste writes, for instance, that it “is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject” (729). Lacan says that language exists before any strictly human relations are established, before the subject (Four Concepts 20). I return to this more fully in chapter three.

15 One could argue this marks a difference between Freud and Lacan. Freud says, for example, that identification with the father precedes object cathexis of the mother (Ego and Id 31). Freud takes up the question of identification in terms of object relations at greater length in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. He discusses the relation between identification and desire in terms of “being” and “having,” writing that it is “difficult to give a clear metapsychological representation of the distinction” (106). Taking up Freud’s scheme, Lacan seems befuddled as to why this caused Freud so much trouble. See his discussion of these points in Four Concepts 256-257. I am grateful to Herman Westerink for a series of emails concerning these points.

16 This is a uniquely human form of desire similar to that introduced by Hegel in his master-slave dialectic, the desire for recognition (E 436). For this reason, Lacan thinks the human child depends on its mother’s love or her desire much more than biological satisfaction (E 463).


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gap between pleasure, the signified, and its articulation, the signifier, putting an irreducible distance between the articulation of desire and its fulfillment in pleasure.17 The order of the signifier, or symbolic register, excludes from the beginning any totalization of the subject, or a coincidence with itself in terms of what it wants.18 Since the meaning of desire always refers to something other than pleasure, by its very nature desire is lacking; it always leaves something to be desired (E 349). In “The Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” Lacan refers to this as the signifier that signifies an absence (E 17).19

Hence, identification in desire is impossible. Neither I nor the other can articulate what it is either of us wants. A pure and simple hole is the other’s answer to the question of what he or she wants (E 465). For this reason, a relation of simple identification is ultimately impossible. This “split subject” results from the body’s inscription in language. I can only strive after but never arrive at unity (Van Haute 26). Lacan’s use of literature is thus closer to Freud’s than Bonaparte’s. Lacan’s aim consists in legitimating his structural reformulation of psychoanalytic theory and technique, emphasizing the centrality of language and various functions (maternal/imaginary, paternal/symbolic) as opposed to bodies and actual people.

In these respects, psychoanalytic reading devalues literature by giving primacy to theory over art, turning to literature for the sake of legitimating meta-theory. Lawrence and Deleuze’s critiques of psychoanalysis are intimately linked to issues of philosophical anthropology, which are in turn connected to the relation between philosophy and literature. Lawrence’s account of the relation between philosophy and art further highlights and supports this claim.

3. A Note on “Pollyanalytics” and Problem of Critique

Versus psychoanalytic readings that turn to literature for the sake of legitimating psychoanalytic meta-theory, a reading of literature such as the one Lawrence proposes consists in engaging with literature for the sake of cultivating novel insights regarding the nature of existence. On Lawrence’s account, his theoretical work – his “pollyanalytics” – is the result of his novels, poems, and experiences. Writing is closer to life than theoretical work,

17 See Four Concepts 154 where desire is described as a remainder of demand, which results from its articulation in signifiers.

18 See Philippe Van Haute’s Against Adaptation: Lacan’s “Subversion of the Subject” A Close Reading 32-33.

19 Elsewhere he identifies this signifier with the phallus and la chose or das Ding.

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i.e., philosophy. Consequently, the theoretical work will succeed or fail to the extent it is capable of drawing conclusions from the novels, poems, and experiences. The theoretical work is general, whereas the novels, poems, and experiences are particular, and the generality of the theoretical work should always answer to – or base its general metal attitudes on – the particularity of the novels, poems, and experiences. But Lawrence seems to suddenly renege, moving in a direction opposite that of his original commitments.

He says literature and art themselves suppose and are based on philosophy, a certain metaphysics: “even art is utterly dependent on philosophy: or if you prefer it, on a metaphysic… Men live and see according to some gradually developing and gradually withering vision. This vision exists also as a dynamic idea or metaphysic – exists first as such. Then it is unfolded into life and art” (FU 57). Despite initial appearances to the contrary, however, Lawrence is not here reneging on his previous position regarding the primacy of art to philosophy, suddenly re-privileging theoretical or philosophical insights at the expense of artistic and literary ones.

Rather, Lawrence is adding further nuance to his account of the relationship between philosophy and art. He says that all art begins with some type of philosophy, metaphysics, or – construed as broadly as possible – a guiding conception of reality. This metaphysics governs one’s life and actions – including literary creation – and this conception of reality unfolds in these activities, although no one need be explicitly aware of it. The problem, says Lawrence, is that the conception of reality with which people are working is sadly degenerate and, as a result of this degeneracy, so too is art. In Lawrence’s pollyanalytical project, and Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic project by analogy, both philosophy and art should play a critical, prescriptive role. They have the capacity to change the ways people think, perceive, and feel.20 However, Lawrence’s account of the relationship between philosophy and literature here raises a problem, one that opens onto and further establishes its connection to philosophical anthropology.

This problem concerns the implicit commitment to the position that by changing the way one thinks about reality in general (metaphysics) one changes the way one experiences and depicts reality (literature), thereby changing the way one lives (life), and so on and so forth, and vice versa. Conceived in these

20 More specifically, together these comprise what Deleuze refers to as “modes of existence.” In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the political, I argue, is modeled on the creative activities of philosophy and art.


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terms, the solution to the problem of life’s restoration via philosophy and literature becomes a catch-22 in which one thinks, experiences, depicts, and lives differently by thinking, experiencing, depicting, and living differently. If both philosophy and literature are degenerate, then it would be impossible to work oneself out of this vicious circle. The form of this problem opens onto a broader one concerning the possibility of critique and social change, thinking and acting differently: If the ways one thinks about oneself and the world are determined by the parameters of the social order in which one is raised and exists, then it seems impossible to think and act beyond these confines. One must turn to philosophical anthropological commitments to resolve these problems.

These problems themselves result from regarding the relation between mind and body dualistically, where psychical processes play a dominant and determining role. On this account, a change in thought comes before and precipitates a change in action: The body is determined by the mind, such that by thinking differently one experiences differently, and only then does one depict and live differently. However, neither Lawrence nor Deleuze and Guattari conceive of these problems and their solutions in these terms.21 They subscribe to different metaphysical suppositions concerning the relation between the mind and body. To understand not only their criticisms of these positions but also their positive alternatives, it is necessary to examine the philosophical traditions in which these commitments are grounded.

4. Praxis and Philosophical Anthropology in Marx and Engels

As the wellspring of critical theory, Marx and Engels’ thought deals with questions concerning the possibility and means by which critique and social change occur. For them these questions are intrinsically connected to an account of philosophical anthropology, highlighting a predominately materialist conception of human nature.22 One can locate the most salient characteristics of this account in the German Ideology, against the backdrop

21 The analogue in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought is the question of how desire comes to desire its own repression. I return to this in chapter three.

22 This is one where the body, material conditions, and physical processes play a larger, more determinative role than the mind, ideal conditions, and psychical processes. Of course, my reading here runs exactly opposite to that of Althusser’s highly influential account in Reading Capital. However, this is not to disregard the change in Marx’s attitude concerning human nature from his earlier to later works. See William McBride’s The Philosophy of Marx 84-88 on this.

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of their criticisms of Hegel and the young Hegelians, based on the role labor plays as a physical activity determinative of human existence.23

The young Hegelians share with Hegel a predilection to think of human nature in terms of intellectual activity. Their emphasis on religious matters evidences this trend: The ability to create gods is a uniquely human capacity that results from the intellectual activity of projection. Marx challenges this predilection and its resulting emphasis, evident in, for example, his criticisms of their theological orientation (Manuscripts 55). Whereas Hegel and the young Hegelians focus on ideal (thoughts and ideas) conditions of human existence, Marx and Engels’ emphasis via Feuerbach is on material conditions of human existence.24 Marx’s turn to political economy can be understood in this light, a concern with concrete conditions as a heuristic for understanding collective, productive behavior and its potential for reform, rather than with the individual and intellectual activity of a theological nature (McBride 15 and 39). Marx and Engels’ commitments bearing on philosophical anthropology concern this point.

They explain the difference between humans and other types of beings on the basis of material rather than ideal conditions: “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization” (German Ideology 114). This difference is the ability to create and manage material means of subsistence: “By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life” (German Ideology 114). Whereas animals have to rely on the given conditions of their environments to survive, human beings have the capacity to manage their environments as well as themselves. “This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part” (German Ideology 114). Not only do human beings have the ability to build shelters, plant crops, etc., but also the capacity to exercise in order to better build shelters, learn in order to plant better crops, etc. “As individuals

23 This characterization places Feuerbach with the young Hegelians based on the former’s account of the relationship between human beings and God(s). Although Feuerbach is a materialist and Marx credits him on this point – see The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 54 – Marx is nonetheless critical of the type of materialism he espouses. For instance, see Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach in “Theses on Feuerbach” 107.

24 This is not to say, however, that Marx is committed to a strict materialism or the determinism it implies. See McBride 15 on this point.


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express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production” (German Ideology 114). Hence, insofar as human beings are considered from a material perspective – capable of creating and managing material means of subsistence – it can be said that what sets them apart from animals is the ability to create and manage themselves.

Marx refers to this uniquely human capacity as praxis (sensuous human activity). Under more specific social and historical conditions, however, labor is a species of this genus – the process by which raw materials are imbued with value.25 Insofar as the material world becomes valuable as a result of labor, and labor is considered a species of the genus praxis, labor creates not only material value but also ideal meaning.

To more fully appreciate the significance of this account – laying the groundwork in terms of which to understand its import to Deleuze and Guattari – it is necessary to turn to the thought of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. These three thinkers form the core of a tradition that begins with dualism and results in the idealism against which the thought of Marx and Engels, Lawrence, and Deleuze and Guattari are working. Contrasting Descartes, Kant, and Hegel with Marx and Engels allows for a better understanding of the non-dualistic, materialist commitments in the work of Lawrence and Deleuze and Guattari. Not only do these commitments facilitate an answer to the question concerning the possibility and means of critique and social change but also the role philosophy and art play towards this end.

5. A Substance Theory of Mind and Theological Motivations in Descartes

Central to the role philosophy and art play in the possibility of critique and social change are familiar philosophical anthropological issues of personal identity and the unity of consciousness – how and why one thinks of oneself as an individual. Exploring this account in Descartes reveals the theological motivations guiding his thought, helping to make sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s frequent characterizations and criticisms of psychoanalysis as theological in nature.

25 Engels generally refers to labor as the activity directed towards the production of exchange- rather than use-value. See McBride 88 on this.

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Descartes accounts for the unity of consciousness with a substance theory of mind. Consciousness is a unity because the mind is a unity.26 This discovery is based on the certainty of Descartes’s own thought – that whenever he is thinking Descartes can be certain that he exists in some way. Descartes’s justification for asserting the existence of mind on the basis of thinking is the result of a metaphysical supposition regarding the relationship between substance and attribute, actor and activity, based on an assumed ontological hierarchy.

According to Descartes, substances are more real than attributes, and actors are more real than activities: Neither could thoughts exist as attributes without being attributes of a substance, nor could the activity of thinking exist without the existence of an actor to perform it. 27 Accounting for the unity of consciousness is an easy step from here.

Consciousness is comprised by thoughts and the activity of thinking, and thoughts and the activity of thinking belong to and emanate from the mind. Since the mind is a substance, it exists independently, in and through itself alone. Insofar as thoughts and the activity of thinking belong to the mind, they belong to and originate from one and the same mind. This account is motivated, however, by concerns of a specifically theological nature rather than disinterested philosophical inquiry alone.

Written as a letter to the Sorbonne’s theology faculty, the Preface to the Meditations is explicit in this respect: Descartes’s objective is to offer definitive proofs for God’s existence and the soul’s potential immortality. Insofar as the basis of Descartes’s account is a substance theory of mind, he has an easier time proving the possibility of the soul’s immortality than, for example, Aquinas.28

26 “Is it not one and the same ‘I’ who is now doubting almost everything… The fact that it is I who am doubting and understanding and willing is so evident that I see no way of making it any clearer” (Meditations 19).

27 For his discussion of this point with respect to formal reality see, for example, Meditations 117. Further, God possesses more reality than substances, attributes, and modes. For this reason, Deleuze says the scholastic and Thomistic legacy of analogy is present everywhere in Descartes (EPS 163). On Descartes’s account – strictly speaking and in an absolute sense – neither the mind nor the body are substances since neither exist independently of other things – in and through themselves alone. It seems inconceivable that thoughts should be free-floating properties that do not belong to some substance. See George Dicker’s Descartes: An Analytical and Historical Introduction 54 on this point. In response to Hobbes, Descartes writes the following on this: “it is certain that a thought cannot exist without a thing that is thinking; and in general no act or accident can exist without a substance for it to belong” (Meditations 124).

28 Aquinas’ epistemology relies on the senses more than Descartes’s. Except in the case of beatific vision, the intellect always needs a material image from which to abstract a form. Hence, whereas the mind is (potentially) independent of the body in a Cartesian scheme, Thomism depends on material conditions to explain not only the individuality-particularity


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One of substance’s defining characteristics is its independence, that that it can be conceived independently of other entities (Dicker 54).29 As a finite substance, however, in Descartes’s account, mind is always already dependent on an infinite substance: Mind can only ever be conceived in relation to God.30 Although this is perhaps not surprising – after all, Descartes is happy to invoke divine concurrence throughout his analyses as a metaphysical supposition for explanatory purposes – the fact that one’s experience of being human is never independent of one’s experience of the divine secures Descartes’s position in a line of thought that runs throughout the early church fathers, Hegel, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis – a line of thought Deleuze finds objectionable.

Augustine’s claim, for example, that our hearts are restless until they rest in thee is an experience of lack characteristic of human existence, tied to the divine as the subsequent fulfillment of this lack. Hegel associates absolute knowledge with a kind of divine knowledge, one that supposes an understanding of the whole to understand parts, which takes place in a discursive, historical fashion.

of substances, but also the experiential basis of knowledge. However, this means that Aquinas has a harder time giving an account of how souls subsist independently of their bodies. Specifically, it is much more difficult for him to describe how disembodied souls either experience pleasure (reward) or pain (damnation) in an afterlife; at the very least it complicates his account. For a further discussion of these problems, see, for example, John Wippel’s “Thomas Aquinas on the Separated Soul’s Natural Knowledge.” At the same time, however, Aquinas’ less dualistic conception of the soul-body relationship has a positive side from a theological perspective: It makes the doctrine of bodily resurrection seem more plausible.

29 Modes can only be conceived of in terms of the entities (substances) of which they are modes. They cannot be conceived independently of substance.

30 This becomes clear in light of meditation three. Rebutting charges that the attribute of infinity belonging to the idea of God is merely a negation of his own finitude, the root of the problem lies in the following: “there is more reality in an infinite substance than a finite one, and hence that my perception of the infinite, that is God, is in some way prior to my perception of the finite, that is myself. For how could I understand that I doubted or desired – that is, lacked something – and that I was not wholly perfect, unless there were in me some idea of a more perfect being which enabled me to recognize my own defects by comparison?” (Meditations 31). See his discussion of this in Principles of Philosophy 210 as well. This line of thought is itself the result of the Protestant theological milieu in which Descartes was working, influenced by the likes of Issaac Beekman and Willem Teellinck. See Herman Westerink’s The Heart of Man’s Destiny: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Early Reformation Thought for an excellent discussion of this point. Insofar as thinking is conceived in a discursive fashion (an activity that moves from premises to conclusions, resulting in more knowledge from less, durational in nature or taking time to achieve, etc.), then this activity – and the substance of which it is supposed to be an essential attribute – is inconceivable apart from God. For example, “understanding, willing, doubting, etc. are forms by which I recognize the substance which is called mind” (Mediations 157).

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Similarly, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, human existence is characterized by a lack brought on by one’s inscription in language.31 The same line of reasoning and descriptions of this type are even more evident in Levinas’ thought, where he refers to Descartes specifically.32 Hence, although Descartes is certainly not unique in these respects, insofar as his work sets the stage for much of early modern as well as contemporary thought, noting exactly how and where his dualistic account of mind bears the marks of a vestigial theology is important.

A connection exists between dualistic accounts of the relation between mind and body and a theological worldview, a connection Deleuze and Guattari find in Hegelian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis, in terms of their related methodologies and accounts of desire. Insofar as Hegelian philosophy is, in large part, a response to Kantian commitments, to better understand this connection, it is necessary to examine how Kant accounts for the unity of consciousness. Further, examining this account lays the groundwork to understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean by both “syntheses” and “paralogism of the unconscious.”33

6. Experiential Unity and Transcendental Subjectivity in Kant

Kant’s concern with the unity of consciousness stems from Hume’s criticisms of substance theories of mind. According to Hume, one never discovers the self as a mind substance, such that the unity of consciousness cannot be pegged to that of a substance. Kant follows Hume in his criticisms of such an account, but is well aware – as seemed to be Hume – that explaining the unity of consciousness without a substance theory of mind poses acute difficulties.34

Experience presents itself in a unified fashion, and there must be a reason for this unity. Based on the particular conception of experience with which Kant works, he identifies “transcendental subjectivity” as this condition. Versus imagistic accounts of experience – where experience is comprised of something like images or pictures – Kant’s conception of experience is thoroughly propositional – where experience is always of something, that things

31 I return to Hegel shortly, more fully describing the relation between Hegelian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

32 See, for instance, Emmanuel Levinas’ Otherwise than Being 25 and Ethics and Infinity 91. Although this line of thought is especially evident in Levinas’ phenomenology, it is also at work in Husserl’s later thought. See, for example, Richard Kearney’s The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion for an explanation along these lines.

33 I return to this at length in chapter three.34 See, for instance A Treatise of Human Nature 635-636. I return to a fuller elucidation of

Deleuze’s engagements with Hume’s thought in chapter four.


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appear in a certain way. Experience must thus be the result of judgments; judgments condition the possibility of experience.35

The activity of judgment consists in the process of applying concepts to intuitions, the activity of synthesis.36 Since experience supposes concepts, contra empiricist accounts, these concepts cannot be derived from experience.37 Rather, they are a priori. Concepts make experience possible in the first place.38 According to Kant, however, the activity of synthesis itself requires and presupposes more basic conditions, “pre-categorical conditions” of possible experience.39 These are a subject of judgment and an object of experience, what Kant refers to as “transcendental subjectivity” or “apperception,” and the “object x.” Experiential unity results from synthetic judgments, but judgments suppose the transcendental subject and object x as their co-constituting ground. The object x is an organizational focal point for the way the transcendental subject brings concepts to bear on intuitions in judgments (Gardner 157-160). Kant’s clearest description of transcendental subjectivity is in terms of an “I think” capable of accompanying any and all experience. This subject is by no means anything substantial but merely an empty representation that accompanies experience.40 Although the transcendental subject should not be conceived in substantial terms, thought has an inevitable tendency to do so.

This tendency results in an illusion of reason, mistaking a logical function for a substantial entity, what Kant calls “paralogisms” – particular types of illusions regarding the nature of the self. The different transcendental illusions

35 See Anthony Saville’s Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 34-37.36 This is determinate rather than reflective judgment. My only concern here is with determinate

judgment. I return to Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the “syntheses of the unconscious,” which should be understood along these lines, in chapter three.

37 On an empiricist account, concepts result from abstraction: Experience is ordered in a law-like manner and cognition abstracts concepts from this experience. But if Kant’s characterization of experience as propositional is correct, the problem for empiricists lies in explaining experience’s law-like manner in the first place, how experience is possible if the mind is tabula rasa and concepts only result from experience by abstraction.

38 Whereas Kant begins with the average person’s experience of medium-sized sensible things, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari’s transcendental philosophy begins with the schizophrenic’s experience. I return to this in chapter three.

39 See Sebastian Gardner’s Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason 145.40 “At the ground of this [transcendental] doctrine [of the soul],” Kant writes, “we can place

nothing but the simple and in content for itself wholly empty representation I, of which one cannot even say that it is a concept, but a mere consciousness that accompanies every concept. Through this I, or He, or It (the thing), which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of thoughts = x, which is recognized only through the thoughts that are its predicates, and about which, in abstraction, we can never have even the least concepts” (Critique of Pure Reason 414).

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share a common error, ascribing existence to that which exceeds the bounds of (possible) experience, employing transcendent criteria to immanent experience.41

Transcendental subjectivity is the activity of thought in general, the thought of an “I know not what” that brings unity to experience by virtue of the fact that experience occurs within one and the same consciousness. The transcendental subject likewise supposes the object x as an object or event in general, in terms of which experience is organized. Although these two conditions are equiprimordial – co-constituting grounds of any and all possible experience – Kant allows the duality between them to subsist. The philosophy of Hegel takes shape in terms of the relation between transcendental subjectivity and the object x as conditions of possible experience. His notion of Spirit and the import of the dialectical method develop at the crux of this subsistent duality in Kant.

7. Spirit as Ground and the Dialectical Method in HegelThe thought of Hegel is best understood in terms of its relation to his philosophical predecessors: He takes up and pushes further a number of objectives introduced by Fichte and Schelling whose work relies, in turn, on Kant. Within this philosophical lineage, two issues are of particular interest: Hegel’s notion of Spirit and his dialectical method. Examining each in turn – and the relation between them – reveals the connection between theological tendencies in Hegel’s thought and his social and political commitments. Deleuze and Guattari find these same strands at work in psychoanalysis, and through their elucidation a connection can be established between Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy.

According to Hegel, Kant is wrong to leave the distinction between transcendental subjectivity and the object x intact. Since transcendental subjectivity supposes the object x and vice versa, as mutually supporting and co-determining conditions of any and all possible experience, the difference between the two should ultimately be resolved. Spirit is the ground into which Hegel resolves this distinction, which is a quasi-divine form of socially and historically conditioned collective self-consciousness. For this reason, his analysis takes the form of an account of the way Spirit comes to be manifest both socially and historically, as the self-conscious realization of itself as the

41 Immanent criteria then are the opposite of transcendent ones. They appeal only to what is given in (possible) experience.


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ground of both subjectivity and objectivity. Hegel’s dialectical method informs his conception of Spirit. This method is ultimately a solution to problems of historical and cultural relativism.

Traditionally conceived, knowledge is of that which is unchanging, episteme. According to Aristotle, for instance, having episteme consists in understanding a thing’s cause or explanation.42 The cause or explanation of a thing is its form: Forms explain the regular characteristics and characteristic activities of things, and forms are themselves unchanging. The 18th and 19th centuries experienced an influx of information regarding peoples from all over the world, an awareness that, historically and geographically, beliefs and practices regarding, for example, religion and politics differ significantly. This presents problems to philosophical accounts of knowledge.

Empirical facts regarding the wide variance of people’s behaviors, religions, etc. call into doubt the existence of unchanging forms. If forms existed and were unchanging, then one would expect the characteristics and characteristic activities of people to be relatively invariant, but this is precisely not the case.43 If unchanging forms do not exist, then it seems as though knowledge would be impossible.

The picture of philosophy and history with which Hegel works is full of struggle and strife. Precisely because of its initially chaotic appearance, Hegel’s philosophy is an attempt to make sense of this mess. His philosophical endeavor can thus be considered a theodicy (Findlay 330). Whereas traditional theodicy attempts to justify God’s goodness on the basis of a story regarding the divine, as a critical post-Kantian philosopher, this route is closed to Hegel. He needs immanent criteria to justify history’s cruel march. Hegel’s contribution is the unique way he carries out this task, resolving apparent contradictions and showing how and why things and concepts that at first appear different from one another are ultimately the same, justifying history’s violent character in the process. In this respect then, the goal of Hegel’s dialectical method is an explanation of difference in terms of identity.44

He does so on the basis of two movements. The dialectical method shows that things and concepts that at first appear to be different are based on a more originary, logically prior unity and can be understood in terms of a higher,

42 See, for example, Posterior Analytics 1.2, 71b8-12.43 With regard to this problem in Hegel’s thought, Alexandre Kojève writes the following:

“Knowledge is related to Time – that is, to change. But since Time is now without limits, change never stops. Hence, there is no eternal or definitive Knowledge: there is no episteme, there is only doxa” (108-109).

44 This is precisely the way Deleuze frames Hegel’s thought in Difference and Repetition.

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temporally posterior unity (Kojève 87). Although these two movements are separated for heuristic purposes, Hegel’s genius lies in collapsing them: According to the criteria of the method itself, these two movements must be resolved, forming a more originary-higher unified-explanatory movement. Hegel collapses arche onto telos, forming one focal point used for the sake of essentialist explanation (Kojève 194).45

Although human behaviors and political organizations change and are changing in and with time, if an unmovable Archimedean point could be established in terms of which to understand and explain these, then philosophical understanding and explanation become certain in terms of this point. Necessity becomes a feature of each and every one of history’s movements if the point (arche-telos) towards which all these movements are tending is itself necessary.46 When difference is understood and explained in these terms – as the reason for, as both ground and end, historical violence – then violence ceases to be meaningless. Violence takes on meaning in terms of the philosophical understanding and explanation carried out in light of this point. On this basis, an initial connection can be established between Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy, a methodological connection.

In Hegelian philosophy, one can only fully understand the meaning or truth of parts on the basis of the whole, just as in Lacanian psychoanalysis the whole only receives its structure and, in turn, individual signifiers their meaning on the basis of a privileged signifier that signifies lack, what Lacan variously refers to as the phallus, das Ding, etc. Further, to account for his transition from individual forms of consciousness to a social world, Hegel invokes the notion of desire, which is described as an attempt to utilize external objects for one’s own ends, consumption being the simplest, most animal-like form. Desire then is the mechanism by which an individual relates to a community, at the very least because the individual relies on a community to fulfill his or her instinctive, biological needs (Kojève 6-9). Hence, a second point of continuity

45 This move is a response to the advent of historical consciousness and its concomitant epistemological problem, and should be understood in terms of Hegel’s theodical predilections. Once again, Kojève succinctly describes the conundrum as follows: “One must say that events in the World, as well as the World itself, are contingent: hence there is no absolute Knowledge relating to them. But if, per impossible, God’s designs and His creative will were known, there could be a true Science of the World” (109).

46 In Aristotle: The Desire to Understand 44 and 51, Jonathan Lear describes this same line of reasoning at work in Aristotle’s understanding of the relation between the physical sciences and metaphysics, calling it “hypothetical necessity.” In fact, Lear goes so far as to invoke Hegel’s description of the relationship between history and philosophy in the preface to the Philosophy of Right to introduce this notion in Aristotle’s thought (23).


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between the thought of Hegel and Lacan becomes apparent with regard to their respective conceptions of desire.

Lacan’s account of desire is modeled on Hegel’s in two ways. First, in both cases desire plays a decisive role in the individual’s relation to a community. Second, a central feature of their accounts is the non- or a-biological nature of desire, the fact that – versus either need or demand in Lacan, or consumption in Hegel – the aim of a uniquely human desire (desire of desire) is not the fulfillment of biological needs. In fact, desire of this type can have a consequence exactly the opposite of the organism’s survival, as is evident in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.47

The highest, most human form of desire is the desire to be desired, which supposes one’s recognition as a person. This initiates a life and death struggle wherein one participant refuses to fight to the death and agrees to become the other’s slave, the slave working to support the master. However, the slave takes on a position of superiority to the master since the slave’s labor supports both.48 The resolution of this dialectic only occurs when both the master and slave partake in labor, supporting themselves as well as the state for which they labor. The state takes the place of another person, recognizing everybody equally under the law.49 This is what Hegel understands by “freedom,” Spirit’s central characteristic as a form of consciousness: the I that is the we and the we that is the I.50 From this perspective, it becomes clear why and how Hegel considers

47 See, for example, Kojève 45 and 248 regarding suicide for a further discussion of these points. For this reason, it is not surprising that Lacan associates desire’s movement with “the insistence of the signifier,” which he also associates with the death drive.

48 On this point, Kojève says the following: “History stops at the moment when the difference, the opposition between Master and Slave disappears: at the moment when the master will cease to be Master, because he will no longer have a Slave; and the Slave will cease to be a Slave because he no longer has a Master (although the Slave will not become Master in turn, since he will have no Slave)” (43-44). As is well known, Kojève’s reading of the Phenomenology takes the master-slave dialectic as its focal point. For this reason, his reading is obviously open to criticism. However, I am in agreement with a view proposed by Paul Moyaert: Even if Kojève’s reading is off, he manages to accomplish what few scholars of Hegel do; Kojève makes Hegel interesting. Furthermore, it is in terms of Kojève’s reading of Hegel, which significantly influenced the French intellectual milieu, that Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms take shape and can be understood.

49 For a discussion of the way in which this takes place in terms of the dialectic – where the slave as the particular and the master as the universal give rise to the citizen as individual – see Kojève 59-60 and 234 ff.

50 Findlay gives a nice description of this same point regarding the active and passive powers that constitute objects in Hegel’s interpretation of Kant’s third analogy in the Logic (219). This point should be understood in light of his later lectures on the philosophy of history, specifically, the development of Spirit throughout history, its three basic stages – Oriental, Classical, and German – and their classification in terms of freedom – for one, some, all. See Hegel’s The Philosophy of History on this.

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Spirit the arche (origin-ground) of individual consciousness and philosophical explanation. However, he also thinks that Spirit can be considered the telos (goal-outcome) of individual consciousness and philosophical explanation.

Since each form of consciousness coming before that of Spirit needs additional philosophical suppositions to support its claims, the dialectic moves in accordance with a search for these postulates. It stops with the discovery of Spirit, however, because Spirit is a complex enough form of consciousness to require no further suppositions. This conclusion is related to Hegel’s end-of-history thesis, the claim that history came to an end with the advent of the 19th century Prussian state.51

Only when everybody works together to imbue raw nature with meaning does one become conscious of the fact that one’s proper orientation within the world results in self-consciousness. The conditions for the possibility of such a realization, says Hegel, are of a specifically social-political nature.52 Just as a search for an account of consciousness adequate to experience drives the dialectic to Spirit – as the necessary and sufficient condition of preceding accounts (arche) – so too does the search for a social-political milieu adequate to Spirit drive the dialectic to constitutional monarchy as the final cause directing earlier forms of social-political organization in which Spirit cannot be realized (telos).

In relation to the dialectical method as a solution to the problem of relativism, it is absolutely necessary that Hegel reach a point at the end of the dialectic that is neither contingent nor changing but necessary and immutable. If Spirit reciprocally supposes and conditions the 19th century Prussian political milieu and is the necessary outcome of earlier forms of consciousness and social-political milieus, then earlier forms of consciousness

51 Regarding an understanding of Spirit in these terms, he writes that “The ethical substance is actual substance, absolute Spirit realized in the plurality of existent consciousnesses; this spirit is the community… as conscious ethical essence… It is Spirit which is for itself in that it preserves itself in its reflection in individuals; and it is implicitly Spirit, or substance, in that it preserves them within itself ” (Phenomenology 267). This is not an empirical claim, one that would concern the end of movement or lived temporal duration. I claim neither that history came to an end with the advent of the 19th century Prussian state, nor that Hegel thought history came to an end – empirically speaking – with the advent of the 19th century Prussian state. Rather, this position is metaphysical in nature: Hegel invokes it as a metaphysical supposition for the sake of establishing a fixed point in terms of which to undertake his essentialist analysis of history.

52 On this score, Hegel writes that “As actual substance, it [Spirit] is a nation, as actual consciousness, it is the citizens of that nation. This consciousness has its essence in simple Spirit, and the certainty of itself in the actuality of this Spirit, in the nation as a whole; it has its truth, therefore, not in something that is not actual [transcendent or extra-sensory], but in a Spirit that exists and prevails” (Phenomenology 267).


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and social-political milieus can themselves be conceived as necessary in relation to this fixed point.53 In Hegel this process is intimately related to theological commitments.

Spirit is a quasi-divine entity, such that its process of unfolding in history and being realized in historical world consciousness is tantamount to the working out of God’s plan in history, as well as the conscious realization of this plan as divine.54 The 19th century Prussian political organization and Christendom are, for example, concrete instantiations of Spirit as the necessary outcome of history’s movement. Foregone political arrangements and religious systems can only be understood in terms of these fixed points, which retroactively give previous political arrangements and religious systems a sense and meaning. In this respect then, a profoundly Aristotelian line of reasoning animates Hegel’s philosophy.

As was mentioned previously, for Aristotle episteme consists in understanding a thing’s cause, explaining the characteristics and characteristic activities things evidence with reference to the expression of an essence through the development of form. The development of a thing’s form ultimately results from God, what Aristotle refers to as the “unmoved mover.” The unmoved mover initiates the movement in and through which the development of a

53 Succinctly describing the nature of this movement, Kojève writes the following: “Generally speaking: the historical movement arises from the Future and passes through the Past in order to realize itself in the Present or as temporal Present” (136).

54 Nicely capturing the relation between the two movements of the dialectic, Kojève describes the process in terms of Christian scripture, terminology borrowed from the Gospel of John: “Indeed, on the one hand the (eternal) Concept situated in Time – i.e., the Word – rises up through its meaning to the entity revealed by this meaning; and on the other hand, this entity descends through the meaning toward the Word, which it thus creates as Word out of its phonetic, sound-giving, changing reality. Without the Word, Eternity would not be represented in Time, and consequently it would not be accessible to Man. And without Eternity, the Word would have no meaning and would not raise Man above Time and change; there would be no truth for Man” (106-107). Although noting the Christian origin, Kojève says that Hegel is Platonic on this point (106). However, it seems as though this position is best characterized as neo-Platonic in nature. It should be pointed out that various “non-metaphysical” readings and interpretations of Hegel exist, ones that sift through his thought for insights regarding, for example, political and epistemological thought while leaving aside or throwing out many of Hegel’s more robust metaphysical commitments. See, for example, Christopher Yeomans’ Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency and Kenneth Westphal’s Hegel’s Epistemology. These readings are uninteresting to me as Deleuze clearly does not subscribe to such interpretations, and I do not think that Hegel’s broader thought can be divorced from his metaphysical commitments, nor that one’s views regarding, for example, either politics or epistemology can be divorced from metaphysics, from fundamental commitments regarding the nature of reality.

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thing’s form occurs as a final cause.55 Since material things are composed of not only form but also matter, they are also not entirely actual but – in a sense – only potential. The unmoved mover is entirely actual and, hence, completely immaterial. The development of form is the movement from potentiality to actuality, and in this way the development of form is an attempt to imitate the entirely actual existence of the unmoved mover. As an object of love that each and every thing attempts to imitate, the unmoved mover is the final cause towards which the development of form and the expression of essence is tending.56 Hegel is explicit in this analogy.

Knowledge of the absolute idea achieved in Hegel’s encyclopedic philosophy is tantamount to the thought of the unmoved mover, the final, self-sufficient, and totally immaterial cause directing history to its zenith, the focal point in terms of which all other forms must be understood (Logic 324).57 The end of history is the telos towards which the dialectic is working, the specific historical and social point at which Spirit comes into existence. Unlike Aristotle, however, Hegel need not appeal to transcendent criteria – a transcendent entity, the unmoved mover – to explain this movement.58 His commitment to an end-of-history thesis obviates this necessity. As opposed to appealing to the mystical activities of an unknown God, Hegel need only look out his window to discover the activity directing history – the reason, as a final causal, history has unfolded as such.59

55 See especially Metaphysics Lambda 1069a18-1076a4.56 Regarding a reading of this type, see Aryeh Kosman’s “Divine Being and Divine Thinking

in Metaphysics Lambda.” He says the divine mode of being one finds in lambda is the principle of a more general mode of being – the being of substance – one finds in the central books of the Metaphysics, “as the formal explanatory principle of being in general” (165). It serves as the link between an understanding of substance-being and general ontology – an understanding of being as such (174). For similar approaches, see Michael Frede’s “The Unity of General and Special Metaphysics: Aristotle’s Conception of Metaphysics”, as well as Günther Patzig’s “Theology and Ontology in Aristotle’s Metaphysics.”

57 For further commentary on this point, see John Grier Hibben’s Hegel’s Logic: An Essay in Interpretation 145-146, as well as Findlay 48. When Hegel takes up the question of the family, for example, he explains and justifies its place in a broader public order, that of the state (Philosophy of Right 122).

58 See Kojève 162 on this.59 In a profoundly Hegelian vein, Lacan says the stages of psychical life are organized around

castration. He writes that the “fear of castration is like a thread that perforates all the states of development. It orients the relations that are anterior to its actual appearance – weaning, toilet training, etc. It crystallizes each of these moments in a dialectic that has as its centre a bad encounter” (Four Concepts 64). See Four Concepts 180 where he describes the objet petit a as the lost object around which the drives circle as an eternally lacking object.


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8. Marx versus Descartes, Kant, and Hegel

Marx and Engels deal with many of the same themes as Descartes, Kant, and Hegel.60 However, they place greater emphasis on material rather than ideal conditions in their understandings of human existence. This is also the case with Lawrence and Deleuze and Guattari. Given the generally esoteric nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s expositions, however, to clearly understand their commitments with respect to philosophical anthropology, here Marx’s account acts as a touchstone to understand the way it tacitly inform Lawrence’s work, on the basis of which Deleuze and Guattari’s own account can be understood. The present section deals with the way Marx’s materialist analysis in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 can be understood as providing different grounds for the unity of consciousness in Descartes, the pre-categorical subject-object nature of experience in Kant, and the reason for social change in Hegel.

Descartes’s account of the unity of consciousness – in terms of his substance theory of mind and psychical activity – is anathema to Marx. Marx does not deny the role the intellect plays in human affairs, but merely explains ways of thinking and intellectual activity on the basis of actions and physical activity, and not vice versa. Praxis receives ontological and explanatory priority in Marx. Precisely this perspective causes him to deny consciousness’ unity. Marx’s account of alienation can be understood in theses terms, as claiming consciousness is not one.

As was mentioned above, insofar as the material world becomes valuable as a result of labor, and labor is considered a species of the genus praxis, labor creates not only material value but also ideal meaning.61 Marx highlights the fact that not only does labor imbue raw material with meaning through the creation of artifacts that establish a world according to human needs as ends, but the created artifacts and the world they constitute also reciprocally determine and give meaning to human beings that create them. Given a capitalist mode of production – where the goal is the production of capital and labor’s division is a mechanism to more efficiently extract surplus value from labor for this end – a process of misidentification occurs, what Marx

60 These are, after all, of perennial philosophical concern, themes concerning the nature of human existence.

61 Describing the relationship between praxis as labor, the production of commodities, and the production of the worker in terms of praxis, Marx writes the following: “Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity” (Manuscripts 57).

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refers to as “alienation.”62 The role this activity plays in the production of a human world is not only unclear to workers but also materially non-existent. Workers do not share in the spoils of the commodities they produce.

Hence, this activity cannot be understood as a uniquely human capacity by which people create themselves. A rift is thus established, a discontinuity between the way people create themselves (existence) and the way they think of themselves (essence). For this reason, the source of one’s being seems to be different from – or alien to – one’s self.63 This discontinuity is no less real because of its contingent character. Usurping one’s productive activities for the sake of extra-sensuous objectives – the production of capital in which workers will not share – the world is drained of practical, sensuous goals – the transformation of one’s environment and self for the sake of survival – by which objects and subjects receive meaning. Marx’s further difference from both Kant and Hegel might be understood on the basis of these commitments.

Kant introduces the notion of transcendental subjectivity to account for the unity of consciousness in terms other than substance. Unlike Kant, the conditions of experience Marx identifies are material in nature. For this reason, he can explain the subject-object nature of experience described by Kant in terms of praxis. Rather than the pre-categorical conjugate transcendental subjectivity-object x, Marx accounts for both the subject and object in terms of the productive laborer (as subject) and produced commodity (as object). One and the same physical activity is responsible for the production of both subject and object. The fact that experience evidences a subject-object form can be explained with reference to the concrete conditions according to which labor is organized (Marx, Manuscripts 58).64 Kant’s philosophy – with its emphasis

62 “This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer” (Manuscripts 57).

63 “In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labor appears as loss of reality for the workers” (Manuscripts 57-58).

64 This conception of an undifferentiated, neither subjective nor objective productive power lies at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the unconscious and desire in Anti-Oedipus. With respect to these notions, generally scholars either dodge the issue com-pletely – Eugene Holland’s entry on “Desire” in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts is emblematic in this respect: “The aim of this essay is not to explain what desire means, but to show how the concept gets constructed and how it works” (53) – or get it wrong, explaining desire in polymorphous, early Freudian terms – basically, an account of desire in which its objects and aims are variable. For an excellent description of Freud’s account, see Van Haute and Geyskens, Confusion 107 ff. Although a conception of this type is by no means totally di-vorced from Deleuze and Guattari’s view, it does not fully capture what they mean by desire. I return to this in chapter three.


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on the subject-object ground as the most basic condition of judgment and, therefore, experience – is, thus, a sort of ideology. It results from and attempts to justify as foundational a type of experience oriented in and conditioned by a particular social-historical milieu.65 Kant takes this experience for granted, never considering the possibility that social and historical factors condition it. Although this possibility stands at the forefront of Hegel’s thought, just as with Kant, Marx accounts for the transition between social and historical milieus in a different manner.

According to Hegel, the end of history is the telos towards which the dialectic is working, a specific political milieu embodying Spirit that pulls thoughts and ideas forward as a final cause – the reason for social and political change. Although neither Marx nor Engels think that history had or has come to an end, they are nonetheless teleological thinkers: The highest (final) form of social and political life is not a constitutional monarchical state in which a newly-minted bourgeois class has increasing say in government, but a system in which private property no longer exists – or plays a much smaller role – so that workers own and control the means of production (McBride 17). For Marx and Engels, this is the logical outcome of a number of contradictions that plague capitalism (McBride 93). Socialism and then communism result from the resolution of these contradictions.66 Hence, whereas Hegel works with a very specific telos, a specific social-political organization towards which history is tending, explaining the cause and nature of social and political change, Marx and Engels are more ambiguous and do not appeal to a determinate telos (the end of history) to explain how or why revolutionary changes in self-consciousness and social-political organization are – or are still capable of – taking place. Rather, their theory of labor provides this explanation.

65 An argument for an analogous case – an analysis of the way Descartes’s philosophy is an ideology that results from an increasingly wealthy but politically stifled bourgeois class – can be found in Antonio Negri’s The Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology, and the Bourgeois Project. In chapter three I orient my reading of Anti-Oedipus from a similar perspective, noting that its experiential reference is specific to schizophrenia.

66 However, Marx and Engels’ descriptions of socialist and communist societies are few and far between, and, on the basis of these descriptions, it is difficult to arrive at their precise characteristics (McBride 117). The closest they come is a number of negative descriptions that they describe in terms of, for example, the annulment of private property and the abolition of the present state of things. See especially Manuscripts 68 and 70 and German Ideology 126.

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Understood in terms of the uniquely human activity by which human beings transform themselves and their environments for the sake of subsistence, any social-political organization in which praxis – as labor – is utilized and directed against these ends seems doomed to fail; it is riddled with contradictions. Capitalism works in accordance with just such a logic, which precipitates change. This conclusion is important to the investigation at hand for two reasons. First, the cause of social and political change (and upheaval) lies in material rather than ideal conditions. On this account, the ultimate reason for change lies in neither new ideas nor different ways of thinking but concrete material conditions.

Second, this perspective results from more fundamental metaphysical issues regarding the relation between mind and body. In Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, the mind and psychical processes are given ontological as well as explanatory priority: The mind is more real than the body and – for this reason – psychical processes explain physical ones. At bottom, such a dualism is ultimately an idealism. This is not the case in the thought of Marx and Engels. Lawrence orients his own critique of psychoanalysis in precisely these terms.

9. Lawrence’s Conception of the Unconscious

Lawrence’s criticisms of psychoanalysis can be understood in terms of his commitments regarding the relationship between mind and body, which are components of a broader philosophical anthropology that runs throughout his work. These come to the foreground in his conception of the unconscious. For Lawrence, the term “unconscious” denotes a much broader range of phenomena than in traditional psychoanalytic parlance. Neither “the content” of the unconscious with which he is primarily concerned result from repression67 nor does Lawrence think there is anything uniquely psychical

67 Although Lawrence understands this to be a psychoanalytic commitment, it is by no means something for which Freud argues. In fact, Freud claims precisely the opposite: “Everything that is repressed must remain unconscious, but at the very outset let us state that the repressed does not comprise the whole of the unconscious” (“Unconscious” 109). At other points, however, Freud claims that the repressed is a prototype of the unconscious. For instance, see Ego and Id 15.


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about the unconscious.68 Describing his own project, Lawrence says that we “have actually to go back to our own unconscious. But not to the unconscious which is the inverted reflection of our ideal consciousness” (PU 13).

On Lawrence’s account, the psychical content of consciousness is the result of unconscious physical processes, but these processes are neither analogous to nor representative of the content to which they give rise.69 Rather, Lawrence is interested in what he calls the “true unconscious.” “It is not a shadow cast from the mind [a representation]. It is the spontaneous life-motive in every organism… where life begins the unconscious also begins… like a unit of force” (PU 13).

Unlike a psychical, representative account of the unconscious – where the unconscious is something specifically mental that simply mirrors or represents conscious content in an inverted fashion – Lawrence conceives of the unconscious as a physical reality, likening it to “a unit of force.” Consciousness develops in relation to this unconscious, physical reality, from the development of the coordination of a number of somatic processes.70 Since these processes come before consciousness, Lawrence says they should be considered unconscious. Hence, everything traditional psychoanalytic theory considers preconscious is – in Lawrence’s scheme – unconscious, as well as phenomena that might be called “a-conscious,” insofar as they are not typically related to discussions concerning the nature or make-up of

68 Regarding the content of the unconscious, Freud writes that “of many of these latent states we have to assert that the only point in which they differ from states which are conscious is just in the lack of consciousness of them” (“Unconscious” 112). These “latent states” are like images, and the distinction between conscious and unconscious states is explained in terms of the amount of “consciousness,” mental energy, or libido attached or cathected to these images. On this same score, Freud writes that psychoanalysis “regarded everything mental as being in the first instance unconscious; the further quality of ‘consciousness’ might also be present, or again it might be absent” (“Autobiographical Study” 31). Here the content of the unconscious are the same as those of consciousness, except that the former are lacking in consciousness. Although Freud is quick to point out – especially in earlier works such as Interpretation of Dreams – that processes that govern the unconscious are different from those that govern consciousness, his model of the unconscious is essentially that of a mirror, where images in the unconscious are just distorted representations of those in consciousness.

69 He says “that the unconscious contains nothing ideal, nothing in the least conceptual, and hence nothing in the least personal, since personality, like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective self ” (PU 30).

70 “The primal consciousness [unconscious] in man,” he says, “is premental, and has nothing to do with cognition. It is the same as in the animals… The mind is but the last flower, the cul de sac… life and action take rise actually at the great centers of dynamic consciousness” (FU 74).

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consciousness.71 In this manner, a number of sociological and political factors enter Lawrence’s analysis. Before being able to examine the implications of this broadened horizon, however, it is necessary to turn to Lawrence’s account of these somatic processes and their development.

According to Lawrence, the body should be conceived as a cross, with a horizontal as well as a vertical axis, which divides the body into quadrants, or what he calls “centers.”72 Lawrence gives each of these centers a specific name, saying that they are responsible for the operations of each of the major organs located therein.73 These centers are as follows: first, the lower front, “the solar plexus which controls the assimilatory function in digestion” (FU 76); second, the lower back, the lumbar ganglion;74 third, the upper front, the thoracic plexus; fourth, the lower back, the thoracic ganglion.75 Lawrence associates each of the five senses with one or more of these centers (FU 93-104).

When these centers develop properly and are coordinated with one another, the lower centers of the body are responsible for the passions or emotions, while the upper centers are responsible for knowledge. Although this account is admittedly wild, rather than dismissing it wholesale, one should look towards its plausibility: Philosophically, this consists in an explanation of

71 On this score, Lawrence writes that the unconscious “is that active spontaneity… bringing both mind and body forth from itself… the unconscious brings forth not only consciousness, but tissue and organs also” (PU 42).

72 “These four centers control the four greatest organs. And they give rise to the whole basis of human consciousness… The horizontal division of the diaphragm divides man forever into his individual duality, the duality of the upper and lower man, the two great bodies of upper and lower consciousness and function. This is the horizontal line. The vertical division between the voluntary and the sympathetic systems, the line of division between the spinal system and the great plexus-system of the front of the human body, forms the second distinction into duality” (PU 43-44).

73 He says, “it is the solar plexus, with the lumbar ganglion, which controls the great dynamic system, the functioning of the liver and the kidneys. Any excess in the sympathetic dynamism tends to accelerate the action of the liver, to cause fever and constipation. Any collapse of the sympathetic dynamism causes anaemia. The sudden stimulating of the voluntary center may cause diarrhoea, and so on…. Nevertheless, the whole of the great organs of the lower body are controlled from the two lower centers, and these organs work well or ill according as there is a true dynamic psychic activity at the two primary centers of consciousness… Any excess in the sympathetic mode from the upper centers tends to burn the lungs with oxygen, weaken them with stress, and cause consumption” (FU 96-97).

74 It is “from the lumbar ganglion that the dynamic vibrations are emitted which thrill from the stomach and bowels, and promote the excremental function of digestion” (FU 76).

75 On “the upper plane, the lungs and heart are controlled from the cardiac plane and the thoracic ganglion” (FU 97).


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mental activity and the intellect on the basis of the body; psychologically, it consists in a theory of the drives that can be oriented within the psychoanalytic tradition. Before or without this coordination and proper development, the activities that result from the various centers might be conceived as drives. This account thus points towards a theory of the drives in Lawrence. Its import consists in an emphasis on material conditions in an understanding of human existence. Lawrence’s account of the unconscious then is a somatically grounded theory of the drives

As was mentioned above, Lawrence thinks that contemporary philosophy and literature – both of which depend on experience and life – are sadly degenerate. This degeneracy is a result of the mis-development and mis-coordination of these drives. Lawrence highlights the fact that both experience and life concern other people; they are extra-individual in nature, as are the drives. The drives can only be understood and develop properly in relation to other people.76 In this respect, the thought of Lawrence anticipates that of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, specifically, their mutual criticisms of Freud regarding sexuality.77 For Lawrence, the development of sexuality is never autonomous but always depends on other human beings. Hence, to right the degeneracy of modern life, Lawrence returns to a theory of the drives, understanding them individually and in interaction with one another.78 In this account, however, Lawrence’s commitments are themselves informed by and can be oriented within the psychoanalytic tradition.

76 The “whole circuit” of the drives, he says, “is established between two individuals…neither is a free thing unto-itself…the very fact of established polarity between the two maintains that correspondence between the individual entity and the external universe which” consists in “all growth and development” (PU 28).

77 “Laplanche reproaches Freud because Freud understands the development of sexuality as a process that occurs autonomously, independently of other human beings. Freud conceives of sexuality as an autocentric or ipsocentric process that develops from the inside out” (Van Haute and Geyskens, Confusion 108).

78 He says that the “whole of modern life is a shrieking failure. It is our own fault. The actual evolution of the individual psyche is a result of the interaction between the individual and the outer universe… every man and woman grow and develop as a result of the polarized flux between the spontaneous self and some other self or selves. It is the circuit of vital flux between itself and another being or beings which brings about the development and evolution of every individual psyche and physique” (PU 46).

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10. Lawrence and the Psychoanalytic Tradition: Drive Theories and Individuation

Unlike the drive theories of either Adler or Jung – but similar to those of Freud – Lawrence’s theory of the drives is dualistic in nature.79 He conceives of the drives as falling into two distinct categories. Whereas both Adler and Jung reduce the functioning of the drives to a single undifferentiated energy – aggression or “Will to power” and libido, respectively – Lawrence and Freud maintain a duality. In Freud’s early work, this distinction is between ego instincts that aim at the preservation of the individual and sexual instincts that aim at the preservation of the species. In his later work, this distinction is between eros, which brings together the components of individual organisms and groups of individuals, and thanatos, which tears apart individual organisms and groups of individuals. Freud’s theory of the drives thus undergoes a shift. This shift concerns not only the lines along which he makes the distinction between the drives, but also the way he conceives of drives in general.80

In his 1915 “The Unconscious,” Freud’s account is close to Lawrence’s, where Freud conceives of the drives somatically, in terms of the body.81 Bodily drives give rise to their correlates in mental life. In his later work though Freud breaks with this understanding. He says the problem with this account concerns the difficulty involved in identifying all the bodily processes to which mental processes would correspond.82 Were it not for this indeterminacy one would be justified in focusing attention on these bodily processes.83 Further, 79 “Instincts” is the English translation of the German “Trieben” in the Standard Edition

of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, but by most accounts is more appropriately rendered “drives.”

80 For his own succinct account of this transition, see, for instance, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 52-53 and “Psycho-Analysis” 265.

81 He says that by “the source of an instinct is meant that somatic process in an organ or part of the body from which there results a stimulus represented in mental life by an instinct” (“Unconscious” 76).

82 The “conscious processes [in mental life that he earlier recognizes as correlates of processes in the body] do not form unbroken sequences which are complete in themselves; there would thus be no alternative left to assuming that there are physical or somatic processes which are concomitant with the psychical ones and which we should necessarily have to recognize as more complete than the psychical sequences, since some of them would have conscious processes parallel to them but others would not” (Outline 29).

83 “If so, it of course becomes plausible to lay stress in psychology on these somatic processes, to see in them the true essence of what is psychical and to look for some other assessment of conscious processes” (Outline 29). Succumbing to philosophical prejudice, Freud says that the “majority of philosophers, however, as well as many other people, dispute this and declare that the idea of something psychical being unconscious is self-contradictory” (Outline 29). According to Deleuze, this is precisely the approach Spinoza takes. On the basis of Spinoza’s mind-body parallelism, Deleuze elucidates a methodology one could employ (SPP 17-19).


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after his introduction of the death drive, Freud characterizes the drives as inherently conservative in nature.84 However, this characterization obfuscates the nature of the drives: Aside from Freud’s rather tenuous interpretation of spotty evidence, following an evolutionary perspective, one might assume the drives are expansive and adaptive in nature.85 Despite this shift in perspective by Freud, Lawrence’s dualistic account can nevertheless be oriented within the psychoanalytic tradition.

The lesser know Hungarian psychoanalyst Imre Hermann (1889-1984) subscribes to a theory of the drives similar in nature to that of Lawrence. Like both Freud and Lawrence, Hermann’s theory of the drives is dualistic in nature. The distinction he makes is between an instinct to “cling” and an instinct to “search.”86 For Lawrence, the corresponding categories are the sympathetic drives – or those to be with others, which result in the desire for and identification with others – and the voluntary drives – or those to be by oneself, which result in a desire to be alone and individual.

Lawrence associates each set of drives with specific persons appropriate to them; these drives only develop properly when they are in the right types of relationships with the right types of persons.87 Unsurprisingly, Lawrence associates the drives and their development with members of the family, specifically, the mother and father. Consciousness, says Lawrence, is the product of the development of unconscious (a-conscious), somatic (a-psychical) processes, which only reach their proper fulfillment in relation to

84 Instincts are described “as tendencies inherent in living substance towards restoring an earlier state of things: that is to say, they would be… of a conservative nature” (Ego and Id 183). Regarding his further characterization of the retroactive nature of the drives, which aim at returning the organism to an inorganic state rather than self-preservation, see Beyond Pleasure Principle 36-39, 57, and 59 as well.

85 Regarding the nature of the instincts according to Darwin, see, for example, On the Origin of Species 156 ff.

86 For an especially lucid account of Hermann’s psychoanalytic drive theory and its relation to attachment theory, see Van Haute and Geyskens’ From Death Instinct to Attachment Theory: The Primacy of the Child in Freud, Klein, and Hermann.

87 Again, Lawrence is striking in his anticipations of Laplanche: “Development… must be both individual and extra-individual… That is, in the first place there must be the other individual. There must be a polarized connection with the other individual – or even other individuals… It may be that one circuit of spontaneous consciousness may never be fully established. This means, for a child, a certain deficiency in development, a psychic inadequacy. So we are again face to face with the basic problem of human conduct. No human being can develop save through the polarized connection with other beings. This circuit of polarized unison precedes all mind and all knowing” (PU 44).

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other persons. He says this goal consists in the development of individuality.88 Here Lawrence’s understanding of the end – or goal – of mental life is strikingly similar to Jung’s.

According to Jung, life consists in the process of the individual adapting to external circumstances, integrating elements from the shadow and collective unconscious into the persona, in relation to a specific social milieu. Jung calls this adaptive process “individuation.”89 Failure to adapt or individuate, says Jung, ultimately results in schizophrenia (Jung 40-44).90 Lawrence’s account here closely tallies with Jung’s.91 Although Lawrence’s theory of the drives is dualistic, whereas Jung’s is monistic, Lawrence’s account of the end or goal of the mind is much closer to that of Jung than Freud. For Freud, the end or goal of life is essentially the reduction of tension, whether it takes place under the sway of the pleasure principle or death drive as its quintessential manifestation, the Nirvana principle.92

88 “For the end, the goal, is the perfecting of each single individuality, unique in itself – which cannot take place without a perfected harmony between the beloved, a harmony which depends on the at-last-clarified singleness of each being, a singleness equilibrized, polarized in one by the counter-posing singleness of the other” (PU, 22).

89 “I use the term ‘individuation’ to denote the process by which a person becomes a psychological ‘individual,’ that is, a separate, indivisible unity or ‘whole’” (Jung 418). He further writes that the goal of life “consists essentially in the constant adaptation of the primordial patterns of ideas that were given a priori. These need certain modifications, because, in their original form, they are suited to an archaic mode of life but not to the demands of a specifically differentiated environment” (Jung 382-383).

90 Versus Freud, for Jung schizophrenia rather than neurosis is the general model of psychopathology. See Eric Alliez’s discussion of this in “Deleuze avec Masoch” 228. I return to this at length in chapter three.

91 Perhaps this is not entirely surprising as it was David Eder who first introduced Lawrence to psychoanalysis. One of Freud’s earliest English translators, Eder sided with Jung after his split from Freud. See John Turner’s “David Eder: Between Freud and Jung” on this. Lawrence even describes development in terms of individuality: “The goal of life is the coming to perfection of each single individual. This cannot take place without the tremendous interchange of love from all the four great poles of the first, basic field of consciousness… To stress any one mode, any one interchange, is to hinder all, and to cause corruption in the end,” which would be the analogue of schizophrenia in the case of Jung (PU 41).

92 Freud writes, “it is an established fact that…feelings of pleasure-unpleasure – govern the passage of events in the id with despotic force. The id obeys the inexorable pleasure principle. But not the id alone. It seems that the activity of the other psychical agencies too is able only to modify the pleasure principle but not to nullify it… The consideration that the pleasure principle demands a reduction, at bottom the extinction perhaps, of the tensions of instinctual needs (that is, Nirvana) leads to the still unassessed relations between the pleasure principle and the two primal forces, Eros and the death instinct” (Outline 85). See his similar characterization in Beyond Pleasure Principle 56.


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Further, Lawrence comes close to recognizing something similar to Jungian archetypes.93 In his very last work, Apocalypse, Lawrence refers to Jung and his conception of the archetypes explicitly, putting it to use for his own purposes.94 For both Jung and Lawrence, the process of individuation or psychical development concerns the integration of these archetypes.

Once again, this process never only concerns the individual but also a community, a group of individuals in relation to which the bodily drives develop and, in turn, psychical development occurs. Thus, versus a line of philosophical thought running from Descartes through Hegel that gives privilege to ideal over material conditions, and psychical rather than physical processes in an understanding of human nature – which has its psychoanalytic analogue in the move from Freud to Lacan – Lawrence’s account implies a thoroughgoing materialism. As a recasting of psychoanalysis in conjunction with Marx along materialist lines, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic project must be understood in terms of these commitments. As with Marx, for Lawrence this materialist perspective opens onto and informs concrete political concerns. Modern social ills, claims Lawrence, can be explained in terms of the family. Since the family is the first social unity to which the individual is related – in terms of which the development of the drives takes place – he explains wider social relations with reference to familial ones.

11. Familial Relations, according to Lawrence

Lawrence identifies two major drives, to be with others and by oneself, associating each of these with respective parts of the body, the stomach and back, and persons, the mother and father. These drives only develop properly, and proper psychical development only thus occurs, when they are in the right types of relationships with the right types of persons.95

93 Describing this overlap in terms of symbols, Lawrence says “the intense potency of symbols is part at least memory… all the great symbols and myths which dominate the world when our history first begins, are very much the same in every country and every people” (FU 55).

94 Describing the conscious apprehension of these collective, unconscious archetypes, Lawrence writes that when “a boy of eight sees a horse, he doesn’t see the correct biological object we intend him to see. He sees a big living presence of no particular shape with hair dangling from its neck and four legs… His unconsciousness is filled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, a two-eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence looming imminent” (FU 125-126). Jung places particular emphasis on the significance of the horse in his own account of the archetypes. See Jung 187-188 on this. Lawrence clearly has the case of little Hans in mind here.

95 Lawrence writes the following: “just as a child in the womb grows as a result of the parental blood-stream which nourishes the vital quick of the foetus, so does every man and woman

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Lawrence begins his account with the solar plexus, which is responsible for our first feelings of sympathy, the drive to be with others. The navel marks and reminds us that we used to be a part of another human being, our mother.96 In vitro, our umbilical cords sustain and nourish us through gestation, after which point we become our own beings. The navel serves as a reminder of this.97 This explains, thinks Lawrence, why the solar plexus should be considered the first sympathetic center, as the point at which we were first joined to another human being and from which we seek to rejoin others.98 On the other hand, the lumbar ganglion is the first center of individuality, or the source of the drive to be by oneself. Again, Lawrence gives a physical explanation for this point, that the back is hard and muscular.99 For this reason, it allows one to stand upright, independent of others. Lawrence associates this center with the father.

Whereas the mother is responsible for the sympathetic activity associated with the solar plexus, the father is responsible for the child’s individualistic or voluntary activity. Just as the mother awakens the sympathetic drive in the child, the father is a strong, independent figure the child emulates, developing the voluntary drive.100 If these two tendencies are not balanced, then the child suffers.101 The father should be stern with the child, says Lawrence, allowing

grow and develop as a result of the polarized flux between the spontaneous self and some other self or selves” (PU 46).

96 “Surely our own subjective wisdom tells us, what science can verify, that it [the source of our sympathetic yearning] lies beneath the navel of the folded foetus” (PU 19).

97 “There at the navel, the first rupture has taken place, the first break in continuity. There is the scar of dehiscence, scar at once of our pain and splendor of individuality” (PU 20).

98 On this score, he further writes that the “powerful, active psychic center in a new child is the great solar plexus of the sympathetic system. From this center the child is drawn to the mother again, crying, to heal the new wound, to re-establish the old oneness. This center directs the little mouth which, blind and anticipatory, seeks the breast… From the great first-mind of the abdomen it moves direct, with an anterior knowledge almost like magnetic propulsion, as if the little mouth were drawn or propelled to the maternal breast by vital magnetism, whose center of directive control lies in the solar plexus” (PU 21).

99 He writes that “It is the great difference between the soft, recipient front of the body and the wall of the back. The front of the body is the live end of the magnet. The back is the closed opposition” (PU 44).

100 “It needs as well the presence of men, the vibration from the present body of the man… from the great voluntary center in the man pass unknowable communications and untellable nourishment of the stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see… And these rays, these vibrations, are not like the mother-vibrations… the true male instinct is to avoid physical contact with a baby” (FU 73).

101 He writes that “any lack of this vital circuit, this vital interchange between father and child, man and child, means an inevitable impoverishment to the infant” (FU 73).


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it to be independent.102 Hence, this development can be understood in terms of somatic drives, first yearning for and identifying with the mother, next seeking independence and emulating the father.103 However, this is only half the story; the rest takes place in the upper two centers.

From the lumbar ganglion, the child turns outward again, sympathetically. This time, however, the sympathetic activity is governed by the upper part of the body, the thoracic plexus. At this stage, its activity is no longer purely emotive but evidences the first signs of intellect. Rather than a drive, it might be described as attention, attention first to the mother and then its surroundings, immersing itself in the data of sense consciousness. This first activity is supplemented by that of the thoracic ganglion, which is the correlate in the upper part of the body of the lumbar ganglion, responsible for individuation and voluntary activity.104 As a result of this center, the child need not remain immersed in the data of external consciousness but can return to a place of individuality to contemplate this data.

Only at this point, says Lawrence, at the end of the development and coordination of certain drives, emotions, and knowledge – always in relation to other human beings – does consciousness proper occur. This development is not a one-time process but ongoing, where these processes are understood as various superimposed layers. However, according to Lawrence, this process has gone terribly awry in modern life.105 Consciousness fails to develop the way it should. Degeneracy in philosophy and literature, life and experience, are symptomatic of and further contribute to this failure.

102 “The business of the father, in all this incipient child-development, is to stand outside as a final authority and make the necessary adjustments… the father by instinct supplies the roughness, the sternness which stiffens in the child the centers of resistance and independence, right from the very earliest days” (FU 87). For this reason, Lawrence says that the father should “establish a rule over them, a proud, harsh, manly rule. Make them know that at every moment they are in the shadow of a proud, strong, adult authority” (FU 123).

103 Although Lawrence associates the sympathetic and voluntary drives with the mother and father, respectively, there is no reason these should be gender specific.

104 But, says Lawrence, if “this activity alone worked, then the self would utterly depart from its own integrity; it would pass out and merge… living beings are kept integral by the activity of the great negative pole” (PU 38). “From the thoracic ganglion also the unconscious goes forth in its quest… But what does it go to seek?” Lawrence answers “objective knowledge” (PU 38).

105 “The whole of life is one long, blind effort at an established polarity with the outer universe, human and non-human; and the whole of modern life is a shrieking failure” (PU 46).

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12. The Individual and Society, according to Lawrence

The problem, says Lawrence, is of a two-fold nature. In the first place, contemporary education places too much emphasis on the development of knowledge in the upper centers to the neglect of the passions in the lower self.106 In the second place, to compensate, the drives associated with the lower centers seek illicit satisfaction, perpetuating this cycle. Lawrence places his hope in social reform. Social reform can address both these issues and, thereby, solve the problem to which they give rise. Again, this is in stark contrast to the mainstream of psychoanalytic thought.

According to Freud, for example, perennial unhappiness and discontent plague modern human existence, and these cannot be assuaged via social reform. If one takes Civilization and its Discontents to be Freud’s last and definitive statement on this score, then the reason for the difference between his conclusion and Lawrence’s is two-fold. First, by the time of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud makes the death drive responsible for a generalized human aggressiveness that threatens any and all social order. The Christianly imperative to “love thy neighbor as thyself ” is an ideal enacted for the sake of counteracting these aggressive tendencies in human nature and protecting civilization (Civilization 143). At the same time, however, this ideal stifles the drives Freud associates with eros, including the sexual instincts. This same tendency lies at the basis of civilized sexual morality, which results in widespread unhappiness. Versus Freud, no analogue to the death drive exists in Lawrence’s thought. For this reason, the dominance of the Christianly ideal is a contingent fact rather than a necessary condition. The development of modern civilization is conditioned by neither the suppression of a generalized human aggressiveness that results from the death drive nor – for this reason – does it depend on the Christianly ideal. Through a better understanding of the drives and their social development, thinks Lawrence, civilization can do without this ideal.

Second, Lawrence’s understanding of the end or goal of the mind is very different from Freud’s. Whereas Freud conceives of happiness in terms of a 106 “To impose any ideals upon a child as it grows is almost criminal. It results in impoverishment

and distortion and subsequent deficiency… a dislocation or collapse of the great voluntary centers, a derangement of the will. It is in us an insistence upon the one life-mode only, the spiritual mode. It is a suppression of the great lower centers, and a living a sort of half-life, almost entirely from the upper centers. Thence, since we live terribly and exhaustively from the upper centers… The powerful lower centers are no longer fully active, particularly the great lumbar ganglion, which is the clue to our sensual passionate pride and independence, this ganglion is atrophied by suppression” (FU 90-91). On this score, see FU 102 as well.


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reduction in tension via the expulsion of energy, for Lawrence the end towards which the principle operations of the mind are working is not pleasure but individuation – in the Jungian sense, a process of integration. Before being able to understand why this process goes awry, one should understand its ideal development within a broader social perspective, how full integration with the world and individuation would occur.

Although the development of the lower centers begins with the father and mother, these are only starting points. Ideally, one’s sympathies broaden to include not only one’s mother but also other people. Further, the ways one sympathizes with other people should not be the same as with the mother.107 Assuming the behavior of the father has been appropriate, one will have become an individual who no longer needs the support of the maternal tit, who develops relationships with others that are different from the early familial ones.

This is never really the case for Freud, either de facto or de jure. Familial relations serve as the model for all other types of relations, in terms not only of the types of objects one loves but also the ways one loves them.108 Although the influences of familial relations include racial and national traditions, just as with contributions one receives to the super ego from authority figures, Freud always conceives of these as substitutes for parental figures.109 On the other hand, according to Lawrence, one’s sympathies include other men and women with whom one is engaged in collective, constructive projects

107 As development occurs, says Lawrence, “new relationships are formed, the old ones retire from their prominence. Now mother and father inevitably give way before masters and mistresses, brothers and sisters yield to friends… A whole new field of passional relationship. And the old bonds relaxing, the old love retreating” (FU 140). Lawrence further expands on this point in FU 170-171.

108 “The parental influence,” says Freud, “includes in its operation not only the personalities of the actual parents but also the family, racial and national traditions handed on through them… In the same way, the super-ego, in the course of an individual’s development, receives contributions from later successors and substitutes of his parents, such as teachers and models in public life of admired social ideals” (Outline 16).

109 On this score and as the first object, Freud says the breast “is later completed into the person of the child’s mother, who not only nourishes it but also looks after it and thus arouses in it a number of other physical sensations, pleasurable and unpleasurable. By her care of the child’s body she becomes its first seducer. In these two relations lies the root of a mother’s importance, unique, without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and strongest love-object and as the prototype of all later love-relations – for both sexes” (Outline 70). For Deleuze and Guattari it is absolutely essential that one recognize the immediate import of social, political and economic relations. Although familial relations always mediate these extra-familial relations, this is the result of the social-political-economic milieu in which we find ourselves. I return to this in chapter three.

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that leave one emotionally and intellectually fulfilled.110 The problem is that contemporary life lacks projects in which one can direct and develop the activities of one’s bodily centers, properly developing these activities through constructive interactions with other human beings, becoming individuals in the Jungian sense.

Lawrence’s criticisms have the following in mind: First, the increasing specialization in manual labor, relegating people’s affective activities to the performance of menial tasks that play no visible role in larger productive enterprises. For this reason, people are “alienated” – in Marx’s sense of the term – separated from the productive capacity (praxis) to change their environments and themselves in the process, which constitutes a uniquely human existence.111 Second, the rise of white-collar work, confining people’s intellectual activities to the performance of operations as tedious and insignificant as their manual counterparts. Failing to find fulfillment in these projects, people regress to earlier stages in intellectual and affective development, and the drives revert to the objects with which they were originally associated. Of foremost concern to Lawrence is the impact this dynamic has on relations between men and women.

On Lawrence’s account, women naturally love whereas men are naturally loved.112 However, these roles have switched: “The male is the sensitive, sympathetic nature, the woman the active, effective, authoritative. So that the male acts as the passive, or recipient pole of attraction, the female as the active, positive, exertive pole, in human relations. Which is a reversal of the old flow. The woman is now the initiator, man the responder. They seem to play each other’s parts” (FU 132). According to Lawrence, both parties are dissatisfied with this arrangement, but still yearn to love and to be loved, but not each

110 He says that at this point the “heart craves for new activity. For new collective activity. That is, for a new polarized connection with other beings… Is this new craving for polarized communion with others, this craving for a new unison, is it sexual, like the original craving…? Not at all. The whole polarity is different… A new, passionate polarity springs up between men who are bent on the same activity… Is this new polarity, this new circuit of passion between comrades and co-workers, is this also sexual? It is a vivid circuit of polarized passion. Is it hence sex? It is not… What is the dynamic contact? – a unison in spirit, in understanding, and a pure commingling in one great work. A mingling of the individual passion into one great purpose… When man loses his deep sense of purposive, creative activity, he feels lost, and is lost. When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair. When he makes woman, or the woman and child the great center of life and of life-significance, he falls into the beginnings of despair” (FU 142-143).

111 See my above discussion of Marx.112 “In love, it is the woman naturally who loves, the man who is loved. In love, woman is the

positive, man the negative. It is woman who asks, in love, and man who answers” (FU 133).


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other. Since men no longer have grand constructive projects in which to engage, says Lawrence, neither their intellectual nor affective capacities have appropriate outlets, and, as a result, men become more like boys who yearn for sympathetic outlets modeled on those they experienced during childhood in their relationships with their mothers.

Obviously, on Lawrence’s account, these men are poor models of paternity, and future generations of boys fail to properly activate the voluntary or individual activity that results from the lumbar ganglion. Since men become more like boys, women can no longer love these men. They will, nonetheless, crave an outlet for the activities of their sympathetic centers. Since their husbands are incapable of fulfilling this role, says Lawrence, women direct their sympathetic activities at the only other persons close at hand, their sons.113

According to Lawrence, women attempt to treat their sons like men, arousing not only their passional activity but also their intellect. Freud himself considers a similar account in his early work in connection with the seduction theory.114 Whereas for Freud this awakening results from an actual assault of a sexual nature, for Lawrence it results from an intellectual assault.115 According to Lawrence, the inadvertent, premature awakening of sexual awareness in

113 He says that at “the very age dangereuse, when a woman should be accomplishing her own fulfillment into maturity and rich quiescence, she turns rabidly to seek a new lover… a new sort of lover, one who will ‘understand’ her. And as often as not she turns to her son… Seeking, seeking the fulfillment in the deep passional self; diseased with self-consciousness and sex in the head, foiled by the very loving weakness of the husband who has not the courage to withdraw into his own stillness and singleness, and put the wife under the spell of his fulfilled decision; the unhappy woman beats about for her insatiable satisfaction, seeking whom she may devour. And usually, she turns to her child. Here she provokes what she wants. Here, in her own son who belongs to her, she seems to find the last perfect response for which she is craving. He is a medium to her, she provokes from him her own answer. So she throws herself into a last great love for her son, a final and fatal devotion, that which would have been the richness and strength of her husband and is poison to her boy” (FU 156-157).

114 In “The Aetiology of Hysteria” Freud writes, for example, “Where there had been a relation between two children I was sometimes able to prove that the boy – who, here too, played the party of the aggressor – had previously been seduced by an adult of the female sex, and that afterwards, under the pressure of his prematurely awakened libido and compelled by his memory, he tried to repeat with the little girl exactly the same practices that he had learned from the adult woman” (208). See Three Essays 223 as well.

115 “In this way,” he writes, “personal sex is prematurely evoked, and real complexes are set up. But these derive not from the spontaneous unconscious. They are in a way dictated from the deliberate, mental consciousness, even if involuntarily. Again they are a result of mental subjectivity, self-consciousness – so different from the primal subjectivity of the unconscious” (PU 31).

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childhood results from an arousal of the child’s upper, intellectual centers.116 The consequences are two-fold.

First, if one attempts to reason with a child – emblematic of treating a child like a grownup – that has not yet developed the activities of the lower centers on which this reason is based, then not only will the child not understand, but any type of reasoning that does take place will also be poorly developed.117 Second, insofar as the mother attempts to arouse the child’s lower, sympathetic centers, she further stunts the child’s development. She attempts to draw the child close, making it love her through the activation of its passional centers.118

The mother expects the child to reason like an adult before developing the drives for independence that result, initially, from the activation of the lumbar ganglion. In this way, the mother confuses the child. The child becomes absolutely dependent on the mother, falling in love with her, “a relation as of two adults, either of two pure lovers, or of two love-appearing people who are really trying to bully one another” (FU 151). Given this dereliction, the child’s development is severely stunted. It never develops the drives associated with independence and, therefore, thought.119 The child’s own way of loving never develops further than this unthinking devotional love for the

116 Although it is the “aim to establish a purely spiritual dynamic relation on the upper plane only, yet, because of the inevitable polarity of the human psychic system, we shall arouse at the same time a dynamic sensual activity on the lower plane, the deeper sensual plane… once we arouse the dynamic relation in the upper, higher plane of love, we inevitably evoke a dynamic consciousness on the lower, deeper plane of sensual love” (FU 153-154). For this reason, Lawrence cannot be considered a strict materialist. I return to Lawrence’s implicit conception of the relationship between mind and body and its relation to Spinozistic parallelism by explaining his conception of classic American literature in chapter two.

117 Lawrence writes that instead “of leaving the child with its own limited but deep and incomprehensible feelings, the parent, hopelessly involved in the sympathetic mode of selfless love, and spiritual love-will, stimulates the child into a consciousness which does not belong to it, on the one plane, and robs it of its own spontaneous consciousness and freedom on the other plane. And this is the fatality. Long before puberty, by an exaggeration and an intensity of spiritual love from the parents, the second centers of sympathy are artificially aroused into response. And there is an irreparable disaster” (FU 151).

118 This, says Lawrence, is the “peril of our particular form of idealism. It is the idealism of love and of the spirit: the idealism of yearning, outgoing love, of pure sympathetic communion and ‘understanding’” (FU 150).

119 Lawrence says that instead “of seeing as a child should see, through a glass, darkly, the child now opens premature eyes of sympathetic cognition. Instead of knowing in part, as it should know, it begins, at a fearfully small age, to know in full. The cervical plexuses and the cervical ganglia, which should only begin to awake after adolescence, these centers of the higher dynamic sympathy and cognition, are both artificially stimulated, by the adult personal love-emotion and love-will into response, in a quite young child, sometimes even in an infant. This is a holy obscenity” (FU 151-152).


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mother.120 It is thereby incapable of joining in sympathetic relations with others, for the sake of collective, constructive projects.121 Once the child grows up, his wife will be as disappointed in him as his mother was in his father, and the whole cycle will repeat itself. According to Lawrence, this is the true root of the Oedipus complex.122

Conclusion

An analysis of Lawrence’s criticisms of psychoanalysis – against the backdrop of the history of philosophy and psychoanalytic tradition – provides a groundwork to better understand the thought of Deleuze and Guattari. In his reflections on psychoanalysis, Lawrence says literature and poetry should be given priority over philosophy. His quasi-philosophical reflections follow from his literary works rather than the reverse. In a similar manner, according to Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is a creative, practical enterprise. Their interest in literature is of a philosophical nature, what literature can teach philosophy about life. This view breaks with the mainstream of the philosophical tradition, which privileges philosophy over art.

This same tendency exists in the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, which becomes apparent by examining the ways Freud, Bonaparte, and Lacan conceive of literature. This examination also establishes a foundation to better understand psychoanalytic commitments, especially those of Lacan. One of Deleuze and Guattari’s central criticisms of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus can be understood along these lines: Psychoanalysis fails to adequately take cognizance of the experience of its patients. Just as Lawrence recognizes the centrality of his literary works, life, and experience in the creation of his “pollyanalytics” – stressing an appropriate understanding of the relationship

120 “The hour of sex strikes. But there is your child, bound, helpless. You have already aroused in it the dynamic response to your own insatiable love-will. You have already established between your child and yourself the dynamic relation in the further plane of consciousness… You have done what it is vicious for any parent to do: you have established between your child and yourself the bond of adult love: the love of man for man, woman for woman, or man for woman” (FU 153).

121 This, says Lawrence, “is fatal. It is a sort of incest. It is a dynamic spiritual incest, more dangerous than sensual incest, because it is more intangible and less instinctively repugnant” (FU 153).

122 To anticipate Deleuze and Guattari’s account, it is not that psychoanalysis invents the Oedipus complex. Psychoanalysis does, in fact, discover it. Psychoanalysis discovers Oedipus everywhere it looks. However, for both Lawrence and Deleuze and Guattari this discovery does not means that the Oedipus complex is inherent. Rather, it is the result of social and historical conditions.

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between these two – Deleuze and Guattari hold a similar view concerning the relationship between life and theory.

According to Lawrence, not only life and experience but also philosophy and literature are sadly degenerate. This degeneracy results from – while at the same time further reinforcing – the degeneracy of philosophy and literature. This opens onto a broader question concerning the possibility of critique and social change, the possibility and means by which existing social orders can be criticized to arrive at alternatives. The apparent circularity involved in Lawrence’s answer to this problem results from a particular understanding of philosophical anthropology, specifically, that the mind and psychical processes have ontological and explanatory priority over the body and physical processes. Marx addresses the possibility of critique and social change, while at the same time offering a novel perspective on philosophical anthropology.

For Marx and Engels, the human animal’s capacity to transform its environment and itself in the process – through sensuous activity or praxis – distinguishes it from other animals. Versus Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, who give ontological and explanatory priority to the mind and psychical processes in their accounts of human existence, for Marx and Engels praxis determines a specifically human mode of existence. This background provides a basis to understand the philosophical implications of Lawrence’s critique of psychoanalysis.

According to Lawrence, there is nothing specifically psychical about the unconscious. Rather, any and everything not specifically conscious is uncon-scious. Consciousness results from the proper development and coordination of bodily drives. Despite his criticisms of psychoanalysis, Lawrence’s claims can themselves be oriented within the psychoanalytic tradition. His commit-ments come close to those of Hermann, Jung, and Laplanche. Lawrence’s conception of the unconscious is a dualistic, somatically grounded theory of the drives: The drive to be with others and the drive to be by oneself are rooted in the stomach and back. The development and coordination of these drives is not an autonomous process that takes place within the individual alone. Rather, it always depends on others, first and foremost one’s parents. Un-like Freud, however, Lawrence’s account of this development extends beyond the family. If the development and coordination of the drives take place in a proper manner, then these relations should neither resemble nor be modeled on those of the family. But at present, claims Lawrence, this is rarely the case.

Rather, contemporary society is plagued by neurosis, which results from the Oedipus complex. On this point then, Lawrence is in agreement with Freud when he identifies the Oedipus complex as the nuclear complex of


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psychopathology. But for Lawrence this fact is contingently rather than necessarily true. The Oedipus complex is a result of social and historical conditions rather than being constitutive of human nature. Chief among these conditions, thinks Lawrence, is the absence of grand, constructive projects in which people can engage, properly developing somatic drives that, in turn, foster the development of mental life.

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Chapter Two

The Metaphysics of Classic American Literature

Introduction: Language, Literature, and Lawrence

One comes across the following while reading through Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty, his second book-length study dealing with literary figures: “[F]or Masoch as for Sade, language assumes its full value in acting directly on the senses” (17 – emphasis added ).1 As with Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of psychoanalysis as a kind of idealism, however, on the basis of what Deleuze writes in Coldness and Cruelty alone, it is by no means clear what he means by language “acting directly on the senses” or why language’s fullest value consists in this rather than, for example, conveying information, entertaining, etc.2 Regarding language and literature, Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari make similarly obscure claims.3 As with their criticisms of psychoanalysis, I argue these claims concerning both language and literature can only be fully understood in terms of Lawrence’s theoretical work, his account of classic American literature. The present chapter explores the way Lawrence’s accounts of language and literature influence Deleuze’s.

Implicit to Lawrence’s account of classic American literature is a quasi-materialist, -parallelist understanding of the relationship between mind and body – one where the mind is given neither ontological nor explanatory priority over the body – eluded to in his account of literature “changing the blood” of a people. As with the claim psychoanalysis supposes a dualistic understanding of the relationship between mind and body that results in a kind of idealism introduced in the chapter one, however, this is by no means obvious on the basis of what either Lawrence or Deleuze write alone. For that reason, it is necessary to examine the traditions of philosophy and literary criticism in which this re-conceptualization occurs, noting exactly where they stake their claims. Here Spinoza’s doctrine of mind-body parallelism plays a central role.

1 Published in 1962, his first book-length study devoted to a literary figure is Proust and Signs.2 For similar bewilderment at these claims by Deleuze, see Ronald Bogue’s Deleuze on

Literature 195.3 For example, that “minor literature” consists in creating a people to come, and that literature

consists in “experimentation” rather than interpretation. See AO 106, 133, and 370-371 and D 36 and 41, respectively.


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This first shift in perspective results in a second commitment, one regarding the nature of and relations between individuals and communities. Whereas a dualistic-idealistic perspective results in an understanding of individuals as substances, communities as collections of substances, and the relations between them in terms of goal-directed activity, a materialist-parallelist perspective consists in an understanding of individuals as “modes” (aggregates of thoughts, perceptions, and feelings), communities as larger, further reaching modes, and the relations between them in terms of sympathy (shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings).

Through an exploration of Lawrence’s account of classic American literature, the present chapter explores the role Lawrence says it plays in the development of the identity of the American people, the way it does so, the relationship between mind and body implied by this account, and its consequences for an understanding of the nature of – and relation between – individuals and community. This exploration serves to better understand broader claims Deleuze makes regarding language and literature – for example, what it means for language to act “directly on the senses” and that literature creates a people and consists in “experimentation” – the way commitments of this type constitute his conception of Anglo-American literature, and how it differs from Franco-Germanic literature – specifically, how this understanding bears on a further-reaching re-conceptualization of human nature.

1. Classic American Literature and American Identity

In Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence examines the works of Ed-gar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, among others, elucidating the relationship between the literature of these authors and the American ethos and the role that classic American litera-ture plays in the formation of a uniquely American identity.4 Contra his con-temporaries, Lawrence finds value in classic American literature. He thinks it

4 The literary critic Norman Holland also thinks literature plays a role in the formation of identity. He writes that “identity recreates itself, or, to put it another way, style – in the sense of personal style – creates itself. That is, all of us, as we read, use the literary work to symbolize and finally to replicate ourselves. We work out through the text our own characteristic patterns or desire and adaptation. We interact with the work, making it part of our own psychic economy and making ourselves part of the literary work – as we interpret it. For, always, this principle prevails: identity recreates itself ” (124). Versus Holland, Lawrence (and Deleuze) places less emphasis on the role of the psyche (mind) and interpretation in his account of the way literature contributes to identity formation.

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performs an essential service to – and shows an important tendency in – the development of the identity of the American people.

After acknowledging the shortcomings of American literature in his time (the first quarter of the twentieth century) Lawrence lauds classic American literature: “There is a ‘different’ feeling in the old American classics. It is the shifting over from the old psyche to something new, a displacement.” Characterizing the nature of this displacement, he writes that “displacement hurts. This hurts. So we try to tie it up, like a cut finger… It is a cut too. Cutting away the old emotions and consciousness” (SCAL 7-8). In classic American literature, something is being destroyed, namely, “old emotions and consciousness” – how people feel, perceive, and think about themselves and others. This is the first movement in a two-part process of what Lawrence refers to as “sloughing” and rebuilding.5 However, determining the nature of these old emotions and consciousness is difficult. Lawrence mistrusts the early American writers; he calls them liars: “The old American artists were hopeless liars… The artist usually sets out – or used to – to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it” (SCAL 8). If one takes them at their word, then the stories of classic American writers contain moral messages. Lawrence disputes this claim. More specifically, he doubts that the morals intended by the authors are the same as those contained in the stories. Deleuze employs a similar hermeneutics of skepticism in his own work.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, he describes the critical philosopher as a kind of genealogist.6 On Lawrence’s account, the literary critic performs a similar function, determining true morals in literature, uncovering the types of forces and wills that determine their authors – the modes of existence their writing implies. Putting this method into practice, Lawrence asks why people came to

5 This process can be understood in terms of the dualistic drive theory Lawrence develops in Fantasia of the Unconscious, shedding light on what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “decoding-coding,” which leads to/is part of the process of “deterritorialization-reterritorialization” in Anti-Oedipus, as well as being central to their account of the creative natures of philosophy and art in What is Philosophy?

6 The philosopher uncovers the types of wills and forces that animate phenomena, the modes of existence implied by statements, thoughts, and feelings: “Any given concept, feeling or belief will be treated as symptoms of a will that wills something. What does the one that says this, that thinks or feels that, will? It is a matter of showing that he could not say, think or feel this particular thing if he did not have a particular will, particular forces, a particular way of being” (NP 78).


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America: Which forces seized these authors and what modes of existence do their writings imply?

The general reply, says Lawrence, is religious freedom: Europeans immigrated to America to practice their religions freely. Lawrence, however, doubts this claim.7 If Europeans did not come to America to practice their religions freely, then why did they come? “They came largely to get away – that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That’s why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been” (SCAL 9). According to Lawrence, the early Europeans immigrated to America to escape themselves, more specifically, to escape European forms of identity based on social, political, and religious organization, which determined the thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of these people.8

According to Lawrence, however, this is an unreal expectation.9 A positive movement must also be operative, one of establishing a new identity to replace the old. The problem with the American people, says Lawrence, is that they undertake a purely negative movement without a corresponding positive one.10 Classic American literature accomplishes both, supplementing this negative movement with a positive one. It destroys the old European identity

7 “He [the early American] didn’t come in search of freedom of worship. England had,” claims Lawrence, “more freedom of worship in the year 1700 than America had” (SCAL 9).

8 Describing the social and theological paradigm from which the early Americans were escaping, Lawrence writes the following: “What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea? Oh, it was in a black spirit. A black revulsion from Europe, from the old authority of Europe, from kings and bishops and popes. And more. When you look into it, more. They were black, masterful men, they wanted something else. No kings, no bishops maybe. Even no God Almighty. But also, no more of this new ‘humanity’ which followed the Renaissance. None of this new liberty which was so pretty in Europe. Something grimmer, by no means free and easy” (SCAL 11). Lawrence claims the early Americans fled Europe to escape hierarchical social orders, both religious and secular, as a revolt against these paradigms. This entire mentality, says Lawrence, is summarized in their motto, “Henceforth be masterless” (SCAL 9).

9 “[V]ery well, but it isn’t freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not” (SCAL 9-10)

10 This is, once again, a parallel in Lawrence’s thought to that of Deleuze and Guattari. This second movement should be understood as one of “recoding,” which results in – or is part of the process of – “reterritorialization.” According to Deleuze and Guattari, these two movements are part of the same process and, therefore, always go hand-in-hand. The issue at the heart of this problematic is, basically, that of a “break-down” (negative without positive) versus a “breakthrough” (negative and positive), which Deleuze examines at length in “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature” and Deleuze and Guattari touch on in What is Philosophy?

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and establishes a new American one.11 The work of Edgar Allen Poe represents this purely negative movement: Poe’s work is the clearest manifestation of the negative movement, what Lawrence calls “sloughing” the skin of the old European identity.12 Without a second, positive movement, say Lawrence, the process is not really art.

Why does Poe’s work succeed in accomplishing this first movement but not the second? Regarding this point, Lawrence writes the following: “[The work of Poe] is an almost chemical analysis of the soul and consciousness. Whereas in true art there is always the double rhythm of creating and destroying” (SCAL 70). Hence, Poe’s work is an analysis of the soul and consciousness, constitutive of this purely negative movement. But for precisely this reason – Poe’s exclusive emphasis on the soul and consciousness – his work is only capable of carrying out a negative movement.

2. Changing Identity by Changing the Blood

Classic American literature enacts a two-part process of “sloughing” and re-building, shedding the skin of the old European identity and developing the identity of a new America and a new American people. Classic American literature thus has the capacity to create a people, establishing new ways of thinking, perceiving, and feeling. The short stories of Edgar Allen Poe emphasize the first movement. Alone, however, they are insufficient. According to Lawrence, the poetry of Walt Whitman represents the highest accomplishment of the second movement. This claim is based on Lawrence’s broader commitments regarding the ethical function of art, as well as the implicit metaphysical commitments regarding the relationship between mind and body on which it is based.

11 “As we have said, the rhythm of American art-activity is dual. (1) A disintegrating and sloughing of the old consciousness. (2) The forming of a new consciousness underneath” (SCAL 70).

12 “Poe has only one, the disintegrative vibration. This makes him almost more of a scientist than an artist. He is absolutely concerned with the disintegration-process of his own psyche… Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe’s ‘morbid’ tales need have been written. They need to be written because old things need to die and disintegrate, because the old white [European] psyche has to be gradually broken down before anything else can come to pass… But Poe is rather a scientist than an artist. He is reducing his own self as a scientist reduces salt in a crucible” (SCAL 70).


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“The essential function of art”, says Lawrence, “is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic.” Although what Lawrence means here by “a passionate, implicit morality” is less than clear, his defining this morality in contradistinction to one that would be didactic is instructive: Art is not prescriptive. It neither tells people what they should do, how to live, nor does it inform them as to the nature of a number of traditionally recognized ethical themes such as, for example, the nature of the good and duty. What Lawrence means by “morality” in this context can be understood in terms of what Deleuze call “ethics.” In both cases, their emphasis is on the body rather than the mind.13

The central problem with which Deleuze is interested in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy is why people live so poorly: how they are separated from their powers of acting and what might be done about it. However, far from a prescriptive ethics in which formulas are offered for determining ethical behavior, the focus of Deleuze’s inquiry is descriptive, outlining why people are miserable – in terms of Spinoza’s philosophy, the dominance of sad passions, mistaking effects for causes, etc. – and what they might do about it. If an implicit ethical preoccupation runs throughout Deleuze’s work, then it is certainly an attempt to answer these questions. Time and again, in relation to these questions, he returns to Spinoza’s proclamation “we do not even know what a body can do” (NP 36, EPS 255, and SPP 17-18).

As I showed in chapter one, these are precisely the concerns Lawrence raises in his work regarding psychoanalysis: He turns to a theory of bodily drives and examines their (mis-) development for the sake of answering these questions. Published only a year later, it should come as no surprise that his book on classic American literature takes up analogous problems in a similar vein. When Lawrence says that art is moral, “a passionate, implicit morality,” this claim should be understood in terms of what Deleuze calls ethics, rather

13 In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze draws a distinction between what he refers to as “morality” and “ethics.” Whereas morality is conceived as the dominance of the passions by consciousness – the subordination of bodily passions to intellectual consciousness – the aim of ethics is to discover unknown powers of the body and the mind (18-19). Deleuze refers to this as “a typology of immanent modes of existence” (23). His conception of ethics as “a typology of immanent modes of existence” consists, in the first place, in a categorization of different ways of living. In Todd May’s Deleuze: An Introduction Deleuze’s thought is explained in terms of the difference between the metaphysical implications of the following ethical questions: How should one live? How should one act? How might one live? In this sense, ethics is closely related to the activity of the philosopher and literary critic as genealogists, which consists in uncovering and classifying the types of wills and forces that determine people’s thoughts, perceptions, and feelings – the mode of existence these imply – as I showed in my previous discussion.

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than a list of prescriptions or regulative principles that guide one’s conduct.14 On Lawrence’s account, art is moral to the extent that it has the potential to bring about a change in the self, a change in one’s identity.

As with Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, Lawrence’s emphasis here is on the body rather than the mind. He says that art “changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake” (SCAL 180). Hence, whereas Lawrence associates the negative movement of classic American literature with the destruction of old forms of consciousness, its positive movement consists in changing the blood and, thus, establishing a new identity. For this reason, he claims the work of Whitman marks classic American literature’s high point: “Now Whitman was a great moralist… He was a great changer of the blood in the veins of men. Surely it is especially true of American art, that it is all essentially moral. Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Melville: it is the moral issue which engages them… Sensuously, passionately, they all attack the old morality. But they know nothing better, mentally. Therefore they give tight mental allegiance to a morality which all their passion goes to destroy” (SCAL 180). Although American writers besides Whitman are concerned with and critical of the way people live, according to Lawrence, they are incapable of arriving at anything better.

The contours of this problem are the same as those regarding the problem of critique mentioned in chapter one: Lawrence says these authors attempt to change the way people think of themselves and others – changing their identities – by changing the way people think. Like Poe, they emphasize the mind and psychical processes at the expense of the body and physical processes. These authors thus betray their project, affirming the idealism at the heart of the old European identity they attempt to overcome.

According to Lawrence, Whitman is the first and only classic American writer to succeed where his predecessors fail, breaking with an understanding of the relationship between mind and body in terms of a dualism that results in idealism.15 Whitman is an important author to both Lawrence and Deleuze for this reason, since he does not conceive of the mind (soul) as superior to the body. His understanding of the relationship between mind and body allows

14 Both conceptions of ethics are similar to what Foucault deals with in his later work – via Pierre Hadot – as a set of practices that form the self, “technologies of the self.” See especially, “The Subject and Power,” “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” and “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom.” See Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault as well.

15 “Whitman was the first to break the mental allegiance. He was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something ‘superior’ and ‘above’ the flesh… ‘There!’ he said to the soul. ‘Stay there!’ Stay there. Stay in the flesh. Stay in the limbs and lips and in the belly. Stay in the breast and womb. Stay there, Oh, Soul, where you belong” (SCAL 180).


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Whitman to carry out the positive movement of establishing a new American identity, a process Lawrence describes in terms of freedom.

According to Lawrence, freedom consists in and results from not only the negative movement of escape but also a positive movement of determination.16 But given this characterization, it is unclear how the process Lawrence describes fundamentally differs from the movement of freedom in Hegel’s dialectic, a movement that consists in understanding, accepting, and embracing a given social order – moving from particularity to universality to individuality.

According to Lawrence, freedom does not consist in “doing what one likes” but first accepting the fact one is determined, as a precondition for establishing a positive identity.17 In this respect, Lawrence’s account of freedom is indeed close to Hegel’s. However, whereas Hegel gives ontological and explanatory priority to ideal conditions in this process – different ways of thinking, new ideas, etc. – for Lawrence, as for Marx – and Deleuze and Guattari – material conditions are given both ontological and explanatory priority in this process.

Here Lawrence evokes an account of the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious in terms similar to those of his theory of the drives from Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious: He claims that consciousness is the result of the coordinated interaction of a series of unconscious (preconscious, a-conscious) physical processes. The conscious, choosing self (subject) is the result of unconscious, somatic drives. Moreover, Lawrence refers to these drives with the term “IT.”18 In English translations of

16 “Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when there are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is always a rattling of chains, always was” (SCAL 12).

17 In a similar vein, Spinoza claims that human beings can only be free by frankly recognizing that – and examining the ways in which – they are determined, and this recognition is the first step in the process of becoming free. See Spinoza’s Ethics III Pref. as well as SPP 70. Henceforth, all references to Spinoza are to his Ethics unless otherwise noted.

18 Lawrence says that “Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes… Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done… That’s why the Pilgrim Father’s came to America, then; and that’s why we come. Driven by IT. We cannot see that invisible winds carry us, as they carry swarms of locusts, that invisible magnetism brings us as it brings the migrating birds to their unforeknown goal. But it is so. We are not the marvelous choosers and deciders we think we are. It chooses for us, and decides for us… But if we are living people, in touch with the source, IT drives us and decides us. We are free only so long as we obey. When we run counter, and think we will do as we like, we just flee around like Orestes pursued by the Eumenides” (SCAL 13).

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psychoanalytic works written in German, the term “Id” is the English reserved for the German “Es” – the term Freud uses to denote the seat of the drives. In German, “Es” is simply the third-person pronoun “it.” Given Lawrence’s knowledge of German, one can assume he here uses “IT” instead of “Id” to translate the German “Es.” What Lawrence calls “IT” can be understood in terms of not only psychoanalytic drive theory but also Marx’s philosophical anthropology: a pre-subjective/-objective raw productive capacity. In this respect, Lawrence’s account of classic American literature connects to the problem of critique discussed in chapter one.

In Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence says the only way to correct a variety of social ills that plague modern life is by returning to an examination of the drives, examining how they develop ideally – and what has gone wrong – for the sake of correcting these ills. In Studies in Classic American Literature, he frames this problem in a similar manner.19 Hence, taking together these two points, Lawrence’s claim here is that the first step in this process is recognizing and accepting the fact we are only conscious, free, choosing subjects because of the coordinated interaction of a series of determined, somatic processes. In this way, Lawrence thinks literature serves a social function: Classic American literature consciously destroys the old European identity and unconsciously – through the blood – establishes a new American identity.

But what does Lawrence mean when he says literature changes one’s blood, that Whitman succeeds in establishing a new American identity by changing the blood of the American people? To make sense of this claim, one would have to understand literature’s specifically political function. Understanding the way literature is political goes a long way in understanding how and why Lawrence says it changes the blood.

3. New Criticism and Reader Response: The Same Old Problem

For Lawrence, the primary function of classic American literature consists in bringing about a change in identity – changing the way people think, perceive, and feel, thus changing the ways they live. At its apex, says Lawrence, classic American literature accomplishes this by changing the blood of the American people.20 As with his criticisms and positive reformulation of psychoanalytic

19 “Nowadays,” he writes, “society is evil. It finds subtle ways of torture, to destroy the life-quick, to get at the life-quick in a man. Every possible form… society is evil, evil, and love is evil. And evil breeds evil, more and more” (SCAL 87).

20 As I show in later chapters, Deleuze’s understanding of literature is closely analogous to Lawrence’s and – as is already evident from what he writes in Coldness and Cruelty with


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commitments, to make sense of Lawrence’s account regarding literature, it is necessary to orient this within the tradition of literary criticism. In at least two respects Lawrence’s conception of literature departs sharply from the mainstream of the tradition of contemporary criticism. Turning to an account within this tradition similar to that of Lawrence and Deleuze helps to clarify these differences.

Written in 1980, Tompkins’ “The Reader in History: The Changing Shape of Literary Response” is a reaction against the then growing movement within literary criticism away from new criticism and towards reader response approaches. In that article, Tompkins criticizes reader response approaches, noting that, despite their novelty with respect to new criticism, the former shares with the latter two misguided premises (201). First, both conceive of literary works as relatively autonomous, self-standing entities that exist for the sake of themselves alone. Second, literature conveys meaning, and the role of the critic is to discover these meanings. Tompkins goes on to outline various conceptions of art and literature throughout history, showing that these commitments are relatively recent and by no means universally shared. Before examining Tompkins’ article, it would be good to briefly outline the most salient features of the approaches she criticizes, those of new criticism and reader response approaches.

Generally traced to the work of John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), new criticism is an approach to literary texts that attempts to bring a scientific legitimacy to the study of literature. It assumes literary texts convey universal, invariant meanings, and – through the dissection of literary texts – critics can discover these meanings. The locus of meaning in this case is objective. It resides in the text and is conveyed by the form of the text, which includes elements such as language, voice, and syntax. From a reader response perspective, the locus of meaning is subjective. It resides in the reading subject. For this reason, literary texts do not convey universal, invariant meanings. Rather, since the locus of meaning resides in the reader, the meaning of texts changes depending on a variety of subjective factors such as, for example, the reader’s disposition.21

According to Tompkins, these accounts are based on the abovementioned, misguided premises. However, she thinks these commitments are based on the even more fundamental supposition that literary and artistic works are

respect to language assuming “its full value in acting directly on the senses” – equally strange.21 On this last point see Wolfgang Iser’s “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach”

54. For a nice overview of reader response approaches, see Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart’s Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts and Contexts.

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a-political, that literature and art exist apart from politics.22 This predilection is evident, says Tompkins, in the emphasis reader response approaches place on the individual reader.23 Even after rightly acknowledging the role the reader plays in the constitution of a work’s meaning, this approach confines itself to the effects the literary text produces on the individual reader.24 In this manner, reader response approaches exclude the possibility of investigating the effects literature and art produce on a community – the political role they could be said to play – and, for this reason, are not that much different from those of new criticism.25

But, says Tompkins, approaches such as these – based on the premise that literary and artistic works are a-political – are in the historical minority. By and large, art and literature have been conceived in terms of their social functions. For this reason, literary and artistic works have been conceived as neither relatively autonomous, self-standing entities that exist for the sake of themselves alone, nor as vehicles to convey meaning – such that the role of the critic would be to uncover these meanings.26 According to Tompkins, literary and artistic works should be regarded as existing to produce results, and the critic should analyze and guide the artist concerning these anticipated results.

These two claims are based on a more fundamental assumption regarding the nature of language. Tompkins writes that a “literary work is not so much an object…as a unit of force whose power is exerted upon the world in a

22 “The belief that literature is above politics and does not act directly to bring about results has determined the way contemporary reader-centered critics define their task” (Tompkins 210).

23 “Whereas in the Renaissance, literature’s effects are often conceived in socio-political terms…modern reader-critics understand effects as entirely a matter of individual response” (Tompkins 210).

24 She says that “whatever their moral benefits are said to be, the consequences of reading are normally confined to the self considered in isolation” (210).

25 Tony Bennett’s “Texts in History: The Determinations of their Readings and their Texts” is a nice example of an attempt to escape this tendency, investigating the social and political conditions of reading – the affects literature produces on communities, and the political role they could be said to play. See especially 66-68.

26 Describing such a conception in Greek thought, Tompkins writes the following: “The integration of art and politics in Greek thought affected the status accorded to literary texts, a status which, in turn, reflects ancient attitudes toward the power and function of language” (204). Tompkins describes the role of the critic in a Greek paradigm; her description comes close to both Lawrence’s of the critic – as one who uncovers the true “moral message” of literary works – and Deleuze’s of the philosopher – as symptomatologist that analyzes forces that seize phenomena. Regarding the role of the critic, Tompkins writes that he “faces toward the future and writes in order to help poets produce new works; insofar as he looks back it is only to provide rhetorical models for works yet to be written. The text as an object of study or contemplation has no importance in this critical perspective, for literature is thought of as existing primarily in order to produce results and not as an end in itself ” (204).


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particular direction” (204). If literary works are themselves “units of force,” then so too is language, as a constitutive element of literary works.27 Here there is not a clear or definitive demarcation between words and things. Language is not the result of a spiritual faculty – the rational soul – unique to human beings.28 Words have the power to affect bodies, just as bodies have the power to affect words.29

With this framework in place, one is now in a better position to make sense of Lawrence’s claim that – in its positive movement – classic American literature brings about the formation of a new identity by changing the blood. Lawrence conceives of language in a manner similar to that of Tompkins’ characterization. An account such as this implies a certain understanding of the importance of material over ideal conditions to human existence, which implies an understanding of the relationship between mind and body.

4. Classic American Literature: Conditions Material and Ideal, Body and Mind

As I showed in chapter one, Lawrence is critical of psychoanalysis because of the philosophical anthropology it implies, more specifically, that psychoanalysis conceives of the relationship between mind and body dualistically. As is now becoming clear, for Lawrence, psychoanalysis’ foil is classic American literature – Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis and praise for Anglo-American literature are related in precisely this way. Lawrence claims the work of Whitman represents classic American literature’s apex since

27 In chapter three I return to Deleuze and Guattari’s account in Anti-Oedipus of the emergence of language as a mnemotechnics involving a relationship between the eye, voice, and body.

28 For example, regarding the way Descartes conceives of an innate language capacity as the point of demarcation between animals and humans and, therefore, the basis of a philosophical anthropology, see Discourse on the Method 140-141. For an interesting account of this issue and its relation to consciousness in the work of Descartes and Hobbes, see George Macdonald Ross’ “Hobbes and Descartes on the Relation Between Language and Consciousness.”

29 Foucault conceives of language in precisely these terms when he writes the following: “Literature…leads language back from grammar to the naked power of speech, and there it encounters the untamed, imperious being of words” (Order 300). The fact that Foucault refers to Antonin Artaud’s work in The Order of Things as emblematic of this tendency is suggestive and establishes a connection between the conception of language mentioned here and that of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari. See Artaud’s “The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto” regarding a “naked language of the theater” (245). Such an understanding might be said to privilege pragmatics, insofar as language is conceived in terms of what it can do – in terms of its power. On this point in the thought of Deleuze, see Bogue 98.

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Whitman’s work is the highest accomplishment in establishing an American identity. Whitman succeeds in establishing a new American identity by changing the blood, effecting a change in the blood of the American people.

This claim can be understood in terms of the relative importance it attaches to material over ideal conditions in an understanding of human existence: Literature changes the blood and body rather than the intellect and mind. Lawrence conceives of the relationship between mind and body in two ways, both of which shed light on Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s commitments regarding language and literature, as well as their philosophical anthropological commitments regarding the relationship between mind and body.

The first is a relatively straightforward materialism where the most basic constituents of reality are physical in nature. In this scheme, language and literature exert a force that changes the blood as a component of the material body. This would be in line with Lawrence’s criticisms of psychoanalysis described in chapter one, his claim that Whitman succeeds in establishing the new identity of an American people by changing their blood, and similarities between Tompkins’ account of literature and the relationship between words and things on which it is based. Words are conceived as packets of material stuff – quanta of force that interact with themselves and other bodies, causing changes in both. There are good reasons to believe both Lawrence and Deleuze have something like this in mind.

The quotation with which this chapter begins – regarding the way language reaches its highest function when acting directly on the senses – seems to support this position. In this way, language would be more than merely a material substratum to convey ideas worked on by the mind and its psychical processes of interpretation to wrest meaning. Although it would certainly serve this purpose, language would reach its highest function when acting directly on the senses.30

Precisely this conception of language stands at the heart of Artaud’s account of theater, which he refers to as a “theater of cruelty.” His account is a reaction against a conception of theater in representative terms, where spectators would be shown things to think about, which correspond to a text. Here the text would be like the mind of the theater and everything else its body.

30 In the work of Francis Bacon, Deleuze describes the “Figure” with reference to a similar distinction: “The Figure is the sensible form related to a sensation; it acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form is addressed to the head and acts though the intermediary of the brain, which is closer to the bone” (FBLS 31).


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The conception of theater Artaud envisions breaks with this understanding.31 He conceives of a theater that would act directly on the senses rather than one where sensibility is mediated by the mind. Central to this account is a conception of language: “We must now consider the purely material aspect of this language. That is, of all the ways and means it has of acting on sensibility,” a conception of language along materialist lines, similar to that described in Lawrence’s account of classic American literature (Artaud 243).

Along similar lines, describing the nature of material signs in Proust’s work, Deleuze writes that they “are true signs that immediately give us an extraordinary joy, signs that are fulfilled, affirmative, and joyous” (PS 13), such that to “refer a sign to the object that emits it, to attribute to the object the benefit of the sign, is first of all the natural direction of perception and representation” (PS 29). Although Deleuze ultimately argues against the latter claim – that signs should be referred in an uncomplicated manner to the objects that emit them – his claim that objects emit signs speaks volumes about the metaphysical underpinnings on which he thinks Proust’s work rests.

Further characterizing this framework, Deleuze writes that neither “things nor mind exist, there are only bodies: astral bodies, vegetal bodies. The biologists would be right if they knew that bodies in themselves are already a language. The linguists would be right if they knew that language is always the language of bodies… It will come as no surprise that the hysteric makes his body speak. He rediscovers a primary language, the true language of symbols and hieroglyphs” (PS 92-93). According to Deleuze, all things are thus composed of bodies. The fact he here refers to the hysteric as one who rediscovers a true, primary language is striking. As I showed in the previous chapter, Freud’s move away from a physiological perspective and the cathartic method he initially develops while working with hysterics, and towards a psychological perspective and the development of psychoanalytic technique proper, marks the introduction into his thought of a dualism, an emphasis on the mind at the expense of the body.

31 Describing his alternative, Artaud says that “instead of relying on texts that are regarded as definitive and as sacred we must first of all put an end to the subjugation of the theater to the text, and rediscover the notion of a kind of unique language halfway between gesture and thought… what theater can still wrest from speech is its potential for expansion beyond words, for development in space, for a dissociative and vibratory effect on our sensibilities” (Artaud 242).

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However, it is precisely because one finds such a strikingly similar conception of language and materialist commitments in Artaud’s work – as well as in Deleuze’s conception of material signs in the work of Proust – that a wholesale ascription of this account to Deleuze seems unwise.32 After all, in the Logic of Sense Deleuze goes to great lengths to distinguish between three conceptions of language and the metaphysical commitments on which they depend: height, which he associates with an idealist conception of language and Plato; depth, which he associates with a materialist conception of language, the Pre-Socratics, Nietzsche, and Artaud; surface, which he associates with a conception of language that falls between these two, the Stoics, and Lewis Carroll.

Furthermore, in his own account of Anglo-American literature, not only does Deleuze make reference to his earlier work on the Stoics, praising their conception of language and the relationship between words and things it implies (D 47-50), but also especially lauds the work of Spinoza (D 44-47). The greatness of Spinoza, says Deleuze, consists in his emphasis on the mind and the body. Spinoza opts for neither dualism nor idealism (mind but not body), nor materialism (body but not mind), but parallelism (both mind and body).33 Given the profound influence of Spinoza on Deleuze, it is necessary to turn to Spinoza, examining his commitments regarding the nature of substance and its relationship to modes, which will serve as a springboard to discuss Spinoza’s account of parallelism.

5. Spinoza and Lawrence: Parallelism and Classic American Literature

Spinoza argues that if substance is self-subsistent, then only one type of thing can truly be called substance. In this respect, Spinoza pushes the thought of Descartes to its limit. By Descartes’s admission, neither minds nor bodies 32 Bogue characterizes this account as a “minor use of language,” one where sound is

“deterritorialized.” He seems to mean by this something like sounds being detached from the objects they are normally meant to designate, such that the sense of these sounds becomes neutralized, becoming merely sonic vibrations (104). In this way, one would no longer be able to distinguish between words and things. However, this seems to be only one “minor use” of language, a schizophrenic use Deleuze associates in the Logic of Sense and Essays Critical and Clinical with the work of Artaud. On the significance of Artaud to Deleuze concerning this schizophrenic language, see Anne Tomiche’s “L’Artaud de Deleuze: du schizo au mômo” 167.

33 I return to these themes in greater length and detail in chapter four, which is a close reading of Deleuze’s essay “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature.”


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are truly self-subsistent; rather, both depend on God. Only God is truly a substance.34 For this reason, according to Spinoza, only one substance exists, which he identifies with God.35

Thus, thoughts that appear to originate in the mind of an individual subject are impersonal alterations – what Spinoza calls “modes” – of an all-encompassing substance, God (IP25C). The difference between minds and bodies – entities whose essential characteristics are thought and extension, respectively – is one of perspective: Mind entities and mental states are modes conceived under what Spinoza calls the “attribute of thought,” whereas bodily entities and physical states are modes conceived under the “attribute of extension” (IIP21S).

In this way then, affects of the mind and psychical processes correspond to/have their parallels in affects of the body and physical processes, just as affects of the body and physical processes correspond to/have their parallels in affects of the mind and psychical processes.36 Unlike reductionist tendencies on either side of the philosophical spectrum, Spinoza neither attempts to explain psychical processes exclusively on the basis of physical processes (materialism) nor attempts to explain physical processes exclusively on the basis of psychical processes (idealism) (SPP 18). A consequence of this view – the one to which Deleuze clearly gives priority in his explanation of Anglo-American literature – is that, versus mind-body dualism, in mind-body parallelism neither the mind nor the body has ontological or explanatory priority. The body is as real as the mind, and changes in the body explain changes in the mind. In terms of the ethical and political consequences of this perspective, the treatment of one’s body is as important as the cultivation of one’s intellect.

Related to these commitments is the way this shift in metaphysical suppositions determines an understanding of aesthetics. More specifically, mind-body parallelism has important consequences for Lawrence’s conception of literature and the associated activities of reading and criticism – as well as Deleuze’s by extension. First and foremost, the value of literature and the activities of the author, reader, and critic alike cannot be understood on the basis of the mind and psychical processes alone. A search for meaning in literary texts via interpretation is only one way of engaging literature, implying

34 See chapter one where I refer to Descartes’s claim in the Principles that when he speaks of substance with respect to man and God he does so in an equivocal fashion.

35 Spinoza writes that “except for God no substance can be or be conceived” (IP14C3).36 Spinoza writes that “the thinking substance and the extended substance are one and the same

substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute, now that. So also a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways” (IIP7S ).

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that priority is not given to ideal over material conditions in an understanding of human existence. To better understand this alternative, it is necessary to turn again to Lawrence’s account of classic American literature, this time attempting to understand it from the perspective of mind-body parallelism.

According to Spinoza, for every physical state and process there exists a corresponding mental state and process, and vice versa. Hence, mental states and processes have the potential to change – in a non-causal fashion – physical states and processes, and vice versa. On such an account, as opposed to regarding literary texts exclusively as bearers of meaning that affect metal states, one can also regard literary texts and the words of which they are composed as sources of action that affect physical states – what Tompkins refers to as “units of force.” This casts Lawrence’s account of classic American literature differently, especially his claims regarding the work of Poe and Whitman.

From this perspective, Whitman is the first American author to break with traditional mind-body dualism and is important to Lawrence and Deleuze for precisely this reason. Whitman no longer conceives of the mind as superior to the body, nor does he think the body is superior to the mind. Whitman might be said to subscribe to a doctrine of mind-body parallelism, which allows his writing to carry out the positive movement within classic American literature, building a new American identity by changing the blood of the American people. From this perspective though, the way Whitman manages to accomplish this task is different from that described above – where words would act directly on the body, on the blood. This shift in perspective entails a different understanding of Poe’s work as well.

The negative movement within American literature carried out by the likes of Poe would be a psychical process that changes the mind, a “disintegration-process of” the old European form of consciousness. Given a doctrine of mind-body parallelism, this psychical process has a corresponding physical process – the movement undertaken by the early Americans when they escape from Europe, sailing away in their ships and coming to America. Hence, Poe’s work and coming to America would be part of the same negative movement that constitutes one aspect of classic American literature. Both are part of one and the same process considered under the attributes of thought and extension, respectively.

Whitman’s poetry works in the same manner. His writing changes people’s blood by changing their minds. Whereas the work of Poe results from the negative movement of people to American, the work of Whitman brings about the positive movement of a change in the blood of the American people.


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A Spinozistic reading of Lawrence thereby conceives of literature in its capacity to change the way people live – their modes of existences as collections of thoughts, perceptions, and feelings – in terms not only of psychical but also physical processes.37 Its emphasis is on the way words and bodies have the potential to give rise to psychical and physical processes and states, rather than on reading and criticism as interpretive endeavors that seek meaning. A shift in identity occurs as a result of this sloughing and rebuilding, one where psychical processes and affects of the mind have their parallels in physical processes and affects of the body, so that changes in the former automatically imply changes in the latter.

Classic American writers before Whitman, says Lawrence, were unable to create the kinds of literature capable of enacting this change. These authors rallied against the old European identity but were incapable of arriving at anything better “mentally,” in terms of their thoughts. They came to or were born in America, hunted with native Americans, travelled broadly, and joined whaling ships. Although these authors freed themselves from the fixities of European modes of existence and their concomitant identity-morality – in terms of the ways they lived – they were incapable of writing in such a way as to initiate psychical processes whose corresponding physical processes would give rise to these modes of existence and types of lives in other people. For this reason then, these authors were still tied to the old European identity, says Lawrence. Whitman correctly identified the mind-body relationship and was capable of bringing about this transformation, in terms not only of the themes about which he wrote but also the ways he wrote about them.38

Although this change in perspective concerns primarily the kinds of relations that exist between mind and body, it is not limited to these. Such an account has broader, further-reaching implications for other aspects of philosophical anthropology, specifically, the nature of individuality and community, as well as the kinds of relations that exist between them.

6. Individuals, Community, and Sympathy: Lawrence and Spinoza

The priority in importance given to ideal over material conditions in an understanding of human existence is never itself an isolated commitment. Rather, it implies broader, further-reaching motivations and consequences,

37 On the significance of this point to practical concerns, see SPP 90.38 With respect to the work of Whitman, Deleuze refers to the latter as “style.” In chapter six

I return to themes in Whitman’s work in an analysis of Deleuze’s “Whitman,” included in Essays Critical and Clinical.

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which are of a social, political, and theological nature. It should come as no surprise then that this shift in perspective regarding the relationship between mind and body in the thought of Spinoza, Lawrence, and Deleuze entails an altered perspective regarding conceptions of and relationships between other philosophical anthropological claims, specifically, those concerning individuals and community. In Lawrence’s work, however, this is by no means obvious on the basis of what he writes alone. Rather, one must understand these implied commitments through the lens of Spinoza and Hegel.

A shift in perspective regarding the relationship between mind and body implies a different way of being with others, a different way of conceiving the natures of and relations between individuals and community. In his account of classic American literature, Lawrence models these on his conception of the open, indeterminate “road,” one without a goal. He says that the “great home of the soul is the open road. Not heaven, nor paradise. Not ‘above.’ Not even ‘within.’ The soul is… a wayfarer down the open road. Not by meditating. Not by fasting. Not by exploring heaven after heaven, inwardly, in the manner of the great mystics. Not by exaltation. Not by ecstasy. Not by any of these ways does the soul come into her own… Only through the journey down the open road. Exposed to full contact. On two slow feet. Meeting whatever comes down the open road. In company with those that drift in the same measure along the same way. Towards no goal” (SCAL 181).

These descriptions by Lawrence of the soul’s adventures down the open road should, in the first place, be understood in contradistinction to the goal-directed activity that relates individuals and community in Hegel’s thought. For Hegel, the actualization of one’s individuality consists in a dialectical process whereby the particular recognizes as its ground the universal. Concretely, this process consists in a person’s recognition of as ground – and proper orientation within – a wider social milieu. The social milieu to which Hegel refers is specific, the political order of the 19th century Prussian state – Kojève later associates this with Western liberal democracy. This account then presents two distinct but related conceptions of goal: first, individuality as the outcome of one’s proper orientation within a wider social milieu; second, the coming to fruition of a particular political order as the realization of history’s march. In both cases, these act as teloi towards which the development of a person and that of a community are tending.

Moreover, these two developments are part of one and the same movement towards the realization of Spirit in the world: A person’s development towards individuality supposes and is conditioned by this development of the community in terms of recognition, just as this development of the


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community supposes and is conditioned by a person’s development towards individuality as the end of history.39 Hence, when Lawrence describes the mode of existence of the open, indeterminate road, one without a goal – this way of being with others – he implicitly rejects an understanding of the relationship between individuals and community along Hegelian lines.

Deleuze and Guattari are critical of both Lacan and Habermas for similar reasons, because they conceive relations between individuals and community in terms of goal-directed activities. In this respect, a line of continuity runs from the thought of Aristotle to Hegel, through Lacan and up to Habermas, one where relations between individuals and community would be a result of the natural outgrowth of a potential in individuals that finds its ends in a particular relation with a community, variously explained in terms of the development of form and Spirit (Aristotle and Hegel), a proper understanding of desire (Lacan), or the inherent telos speech-acts have towards truth (Habermas).40 All of these imply a tacit commitment to a kind of thought based on the theological notion of final causality. Spinoza is, of course, highly critical of this thought.41 However, a positive conception of the relationship between individuals and community follows from this, what Lawrence calls “sympathy,” which can be understood in terms of Spinoza.

Tentatively, one could say sympathy consists in shared thought, perceptions, and feelings between individuals and community. It is a prerequisite to dialogue, agreement, and orientation towards mutual goals and interests through which community arrives at consensus.42 Philosophy and art cultivate sympathy by creating new ways of thinking, perceiving, and feeling.

Describing this notion in terms of Whitman’s contributions to the formation of the American ethos, Lawrence says that the “soul is not to pile up defences round herself… She is to go down the open road, as the road opens, into the unknown, keeping company with those whose soul draws them near to her, accomplishing nothing save the journey…the soul in her subtle sympathies accomplishing herself by the way” (SCAL 182 – emphasis

39 See my previous discussions of these points in “Spirit as Ground and the Dialectical Method in Hegel” in chapter one.

40 With regard to Habermas, see especially Theory of Communicative Action vol. 1 Reason and the Rationalization of Society as well as On the Pragmatics of Communication.

41 See, for instance, IV Pref., as well as the way this constitutes a fundamental rejection of a theological worldview in SPP 20 and 60.

42 This supposition lies as the heart of Spinoza’s claim – as well as one of a similar nature in Hobbes’ Leviathan 120 – that “we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it” (IIIP9S).

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added). The soul should not be conceived as having a specific place proper to it. Lawrence’s emphasis here is on random encounters and chance events, remaining fluid and being exposed to life.

One can thus understand Lawrence’s conception of sympathy in terms of Spinoza’s claim that a thing’s perfection consists in its capacity to affect and be affected. This capacity is central to the formation of what Lawrence calls the “soul” – a condition for the way the self develops with others, joining forces to itself in the production of novel combinations.43 Lawrence’s conception of sympathy and its relation to an American mode of existence supposes experimentation, experimentation with new modes of existence, ways of affecting one’s body and mind, and being affected by other bodies and minds in turn.44 In this manner, one achieves the fullest-potentiality for affection, and life becomes active and affirmative.45 For Lawrence and, as I show in following chapters, Deleuze and Guattari, this has concrete social and political ramifications.

Describing these in terms of the literary works of James Fenimore Cooper, Lawrence writes the following: “What did Cooper dream beyond democracy?… [H]e dreamed the nucleus of a new society. That is, he dreamed a new human relationship. A stark, stripped human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. Deeper than property, deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than love” (SCAL 59-60). First and foremost, Lawrence describes this mode of existence as one “beyond democracy.” The relationships on which it is based are deeper than sex, property, fatherhood, marriage, and love, and he says they are specifically masculine in nature. This mode of existence should be understood in terms of Lawrence’s criticisms of psychoanalysis.

43 On this score he writes the following: “Meeting all the other wayfarers along the road. And how? How meet them, and how pass? With sympathy, says Whitman. Sympathy. He does not say love. He says sympathy. Feeling with. Feel with them as they feel with themselves. Catching the vibration of their soul and flesh as we pass” (SCAL 181). For his further characterization of this relation, see SCAL 183-184.

44 See SPP, 40 and 125 regarding experimentation in Spinoza’s thought. On Deleuze’s reading, random encounters and chance events are necessary in the move from knowledge of the first to knowledge of the second kind. It is only through being affected favorably by another body that one seeks to inquire what it is about that other body that agrees with one’s own (their commonality) that causes and allows one to discover the common notions. See SPP 54-58 and TRM 192 as well.

45 According to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, a thing’s perfection consists in its capacity for affection (SPP 97-104) and the Ethics can be considered “an ethnology” of man and animal insofar as it “considers their capacity for being affected” (SPP 27). See also SPP 124-127 and EPS 95-96 and 217.


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According to Lawrence, the ideal ends towards which both physical and psychical life are developing are powerful, creative collectives in which men engage in grand constructive projects. He refers to the emotional source of these projects as a “religious impulse,” and says all other relations are ultimately in its service, including sex, family, etc. However, contemporary life lacks these grand constructive projects. Men do not have creative, constructive projects in which to engage, devoting their time and energy to their wives and families instead. For this reason, says Lawrence, women are incapable of loving these girlish men. Women turn to their sons for love instead, which disrupts the physical and psychical developments of their sons and results in the Oedipus complex.46

Hence, although Lawrence still conceives of the development of both individuals and community in terms of an ideal telos, because of his Spinozistic predilections with respect to the relationship between body and mind, this telos is not longer conceived as a final cause that pulls this development forward, as is the case in Hegel. Rather, physical and psychical processes – related in a parallel fashion – push this development forward.47 Central to this development on both Spinoza and Lawrence’s account is the notion of sympathy, which Lawrence describes at various points with the term “vibrations.”48 Lawrence’s implicit account of individuals, community, and relations between them as ones of sympathy has a Spinozistic character, which should be understood in contradistinction to Descartes’s account of mind as substance.

46 See my previous discussions of these points in chapter one.47 Describing the difference between ancient and early modern political thought in these

terms, Deleuze writes that the “law of nature is no longer referred to a final perfection but to an initial desire, to the strongest ‘appetite’; detached from the order of ends, it is deduced from appetite as its efficient cause” (EPS 259).

48 He says that every “continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like” (SCAL 12). Lawrence’s use of the word “sympathy” in his work on psychoanalysis to denote what I described in chapter one as a drive to be with others is, obviously, different from his use of the term here. Points of convergence exist between Lawrence’s description here and Deleuze and Guattari’s claim in What is Philosophy? that “thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth” (WP 85). Regarding relations between family members, for instance, he writes that a “family, if you like, is a group of wireless stations, all adjusted to the same, or very much the same vibration. All the time they quiver with the interchange, there is one long endless flow of vitalistic communication between members of one family, a long, strange rapport, a sort of life-unison. It is a ripple of life through many bodies as through one body” (FU 72). But these vibrations are by no means either personal or even specifically human: “It is the rushing thither and the rushing thence of vibrations expelled by death from the body of life, and returned back again to life” (FU 184).

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What appear as thoughts originating in the mind of an individual mind substance, on Descartes’s account, are, by Spinoza’s interpretation, impersonal alterations or modes of one all-encompassing substance.49 For this reason, Spinoza cannot say that individuality consists in being a unique mind substance, as does Descartes. Rather, individuality consists in a unique set of relations, “distinguished from one another by reason of motion and rest, speed and slowness, and not by reason of substance” (IIL1). Individuals are modifications of one and the same substance expressed under different attributes. Concretely, this means individuals are best understood as unique aggregates of thoughts, perceptions, and feelings.50 As opposed to collections of individual substances, communities are larger, further-reaching aggregates of modes and alterations of a single, all-encompassing substance than are individuals – collections of sets of relations that mutually reinforce and strengthen each other.51 In a sense then, one’s body is a community as is the Milky Way galaxy.

Rather than conceiving relations between individuals and community in terms of goal-directed activity, relations between individuals and community consist in “sympathy.” “From this we understand how it can happen that we love or hate some things without any cause known to us, but only (as they say) from sympathy or antipathy” (IIIP15S). For this reason, “each of us strives, so far as he can, that everyone should love what he loves, and hate what he hates… wants the others to live according to his temperament… that from the same property of human nature from which it follows that men are compassionate, it also follows that the same men are envious and ambitious” (IIIP31).

Relations of sympathy that constitute and bind both individuals and community, and individuals to community, result from a common human disposition, one that gives rise to both compassion and envy and ambition in human relations.52 As with an understanding of individuals on this account, these relations are contingent in nature, determined by chance encounters with

49 “The being of substance does not pertain to the essence of man, or substance does not constitute the form of man” (IIP10), but rather, “the essence of man is constituted by certain modifications of God’s attributes” (IIP10C).

50 Deleuze refers to these as “unique chances,” packets of thoughts, perceptions, and feelings determined by chance encounters with the environment they inhabit and other individuals with whom they interact. See D 30 on this.

51 Spinoza thus writes that “if we precede in this way to infinity, we shall easily conceive that the whole of nature is one individual, whose parts, that is, all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change to the whole individual” (IIL7S).

52 I return to this point at the end of the chapter, noting its relation to anti-democratic, fascistic tendencies that run throughout the thought of Spinoza and Lawrence. I return to these issues at length in chapter six.


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the environment and other individuals. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri invoke precisely this understanding of community with their conception of “multitude.” However, the way they describe this concept is much different from Spinoza.

7. Sympathy and Multitude: Anti-Democracy and Fascism

Hardt and Negri employ the notion of multitude to denote something like a group of persons capable of acting in a radically democratic fashion for the sake of productively changing the world.53 Although this account roughly corresponds to the above description with respect to Spinoza’s thought in the Ethics, what Spinoza means to invoke with his notion of the multitude is less than clear.54

Negri first deals with this notion extensively in The Savage Anomaly. There he rightly says that the term “multitude” “appears principally in the Political Treatise, Spinoza’s most mature work, but it is a concept that lives throughout the maturation of his philosophy” (8). Negri’s descriptions of this notion are overwhelmingly positive.55 However, his interpretation is suspect as it flies in the face of Spinoza’s characterizations of the term in the Political Treatise.56 Spinoza describes the multitude as being directed by one mind (301), and he says that – in establishing an aristocratic government – sole will and power should be given to a supreme council “so that it may be as independent as possible, and in no danger from the multitude” (348). He describes the

53 “The other head of the imperial eagle,” they write, “is the plural multitude of productive, creative subjectivities of globalization that have learned to sail on this enormous sea. They are in perpetual motion and they form constellations of singularities and events that impose continual global reconfigurations on the system” (Empire 60).

54 Deleuze writes the following in his Preface to Negri’s The Savage Anomaly: “Bodies (and souls) are forces. As such they are not only defined by their chance encounters and collisions (state of crisis). They are defined by relationships between an infinite number of parts that compose each body and that already characterize it as a ‘multitude’” (TRM 192). Although what he writes seems to endorse this conflation, given that Deleuze never himself describes this as multitude in his own work on Spinoza, as well as the fact that “multitude” is written in scare quotes, one can assume he had misgivings regarding Negri’s characterizations.

55 Negri further characterizes this notion as a “new quality of the subject,” which “opens up to the sense of multiplicity of subjects and to the constructive powers that emanates from their dignity, understood as totality” (8). For a similar characterization, see Savage Anomaly 21.

56 For example, Spinoza writes that “Inasmuch as men are led, as we have said, more by passion than reason, it follows, that a multitude comes together, and wishes to be guided, as it were, by one mind, not at the suggestion of reason, but of some common passion – that is, common hope, or fear, or the desire of avenging some common hurt” (316 – emphasis added).

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multitude as something closer to a group of mass-minded plebs fueled by emotion rather than as a collection of “productive, creative subjectivities” that join together with “constructive powers that emanates from their dignity.” In his characterizations of this notion, Negri relies more on Spinoza’s account in the Ethics than the Political Treatise (Savage Anomaly 135-136).

This matters as a strong anti-democratic sentiment runs throughout the work of both Spinoza and Lawrence. In Spinoza, this sentiment is best described as aristocratic in nature, evident in his characterizations and misgivings of what Hardt and Negri unequivocally laud as the “multitude.” Spinoza’s characterization of human nature is by no means a bright one. In Lawrence this is even more apparent.57 The sentiment that runs throughout Lawrence’s thought is best characterized as a proto-fascism, evident in the emphasis he places on themes such as the body, blood, and land of a people. By contemporary standards, Lawrence’s thought is both thoroughly sexist and racist.

Both Spinoza and Lawrence greatly influence Deleuze.58 One might thus wonder what Deleuze makes of these anti-democratic, aristocratic, and proto-fascistic strains in Spinoza and Lawrence, or even the role these play in Deleuze’s own thought. Rather than chalking up these engagements to cherry picking, a general contrariety, or misguided academic silliness on Deleuze’s part, I prefer instead to assume he finds something redeeming in these tendencies. The question then becomes what precisely this is: What is it about these anti-democratic, aristocratic, and proto-fascistic strains with which Deleuze feels compelled to engage? As with Spinoza’s claim that what is good in sympathy follows from the same disposition that gives rise to what is bad in antipathy, so too for Deleuze does anti-democracy, aristocracy, and fascism follow from a common human disposition, a claim that can be understood from the perspective of philosophical anthropology.59

57 “Democracy in America,” he writes, “was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was always a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else… Men murdered themselves into this democracy” (SCAL 59).

58 In “To Have Done with Judgment,” a short essay written near the end of his life, touching on a variety of themes central to Deleuze’s thought, he writes the following: “Breaking with the Judeo-Christian tradition, it was Spinoza who carried out the critique [of judgment], and he had four great disciples to take it up and push it further: Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud” (ECC 12).

59 I return to this in chapter six.


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Conclusion

Lawrence says that classic American literature establishes the identity of the American people through a two-part process of sloughing and rebuilding, destroying the old European consciousness and establishing a new American one. The work of Poe especially accomplishes this first movement, whereas the work of Whitman represents the highest development of the second. In this account, Lawrence’s conception of the literary critic is close to Deleuze’s of the philosopher as a genealogical typologist. This is important because Lawrence does not think early settlers came to America to practice religious freedom but simply to get away from the old European forms of social and political organization. However, for Lawrence this movement of escape is purely negative, which results in a false freedom.

For the sake of achieving true freedom and establishing a new identity, the American people must also undertake a positive movement. Lawrence says classic American literature accomplishes its positive movement of establishing a new American identity by changing the blood of the American people. For Lawrence – and Deleuze by extension – this claim signals a commitment to the importance of material over ideal conditions in an understanding of human life. Just as understanding Lawrence’s criticisms and re-conceptualization of psychoanalytic notions within the tradition of psychoanalysis gives a clearer picture of his commitments, so too does understanding his conception of classic American literature through the tradition of literary criticism.

Despite its turn to the reader as the locus of meaning, reader response approaches still conceive of literary works in an a-political manner. This supports an understanding of literary works as relatively self-subsistent entities existing for the sake of themselves alone and critics as interpreters of meaning. Although these understandings are prevalent among contemporary criticism, throughout history they represent the minority view. Rather than quasi-spiritual entities that bear meaning, words are conceived as things that act directly on bodies. Thus, literary works are themselves units of force, thoroughly embedded and working in the social milieus in which they arise and operate. The critic categorizes relations between words and things, different types of forces.

Whereas Lawrence thus criticizes psychoanalysis for its implicit dualistic commitments, he lauds classic American literature because it gives neither ontological nor explanatory priority to the mind. There are two ways this alternative can be conceived, both of which are important to Deleuze. The first is a straightforward materialism, where any and all things are conceived in

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material terms. The second is a parallelism, one where neither mind nor body has either ontological or explanatory priority. It becomes clear that a shift in perspective with respect to the relationship between mind and body results in a second with respect to the nature of – and relations between – individuals and community.

Whereas the dualistic-idealistic perspective results in an understanding of individuals as substances, community as a collection of substances, and the relations between the two in terms of goal-directed activity, a materialist-parallelist perspective consists in an understanding of individuals as modes of substance – aggregates of thoughts, perceptions, and feelings – community as a larger, further-reaching mode of substance, and relations between the two in terms of sympathy, shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. Hardt and Negri’s use of the term “multitude” designates a community of this type in Spinoza.

However, whereas their conception and use of the term is overwhelm-ingly positive, Spinoza’s is anything but, which highlights anti-democratic tendencies running throughout his thought. These are even more pronounced in Lawrence, which are proto-fascist as well as profoundly sexist and racist. Given the influences of both Spinoza and Lawrence on Deleuze, this leads one to consider the significance of these lines of thought to Deleuze. Rather than writing them off, these lines of thought are of profound importance to Deleuze’s broader political commitments.

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Chapter Three

Reading Anti-Oedipus from behind with Lawrence

Introduction: From a Critique of Psychoanalysis…

If Deleuze and Guattari’s engagements with psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus simply had as their aim a criticism of psychoanalysis, then there is good reason to doubt the importance of this book. Although the work of Freud and psychoanalysis sets the stage for and provides a broad framework in terms of which psychological theory and practice develop, many of its guiding suppositions remain speculative and dubious.1 Psychoanalysis represents a small, somewhat marginal position within contemporary psychology. This is especially true in the United States where psychoanalysis has always been less popular than in Europe and South America. Today drug therapy in conjunction with different strands of cognitivism and behavioral therapy is far more influential than psychoanalysis. Hence, the importance of Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of a position that has always been somewhat marginal and whose influence is today negligible is open to doubt.

As was mentioned previously, if psychoanalysis were simply a therapeutic practice with a set of somewhat outlandish axioms to explain its practice, then it seems unlikely psychoanalysis would arouse the perennial interest and disgust it does. Rather, what psychoanalysis offers is a conception of human nature. Deleuze and Guattari’s engagements with psychoanalysis should be understood from this perspective.2

The criticisms and positive positions Deleuze and Guattari develop in Anti-Oedipus aim not merely at psychoanalysis as such. Rather, following Lawrence, their target is a much broader and more influential conception of human nature implied by psychoanalysis. This account privileges ideal over material conditions in an understanding of human existence, conceives individuals on the model of substance, community as a collection of substances, and relations between the two in terms of goal-directed activity, animated by mutual aims

1 For instance, the extent to which Freudian theory itself relies on a discounted form of Lamarckian evolution, as well as whether one can establish a fundamental discontinuity between human and animal life on the basis of psychopathology.

2 Insofar as these engagements are themselves related to Deleuze’s claim that Anglo-American literature is superior to its Franco-Germanic counterparts, Deleuze’s praise for Anglo-American literature can be understood from this perspective. I return to this connection in the next chapter.


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and shared interests. Given the centrality of these suppositions to Western philosophical accounts of human nature, Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms in Anti-Oedipus bear less on the radical aspects of psychoanalysis – such as madness, sexuality, irrationality, and violence – and more on the traditional, thoroughly conservative commitments it implies.

In the first place, this concerns two competing conceptions of the unconscious, “an idealism that forms a pious conception of the unconscious” (AO 111). For this reason, the groundwork developed in chapters one and two guides the present analysis, using Lawrence’s understanding of the unconscious, familial relations, and relations between individuals and community as touchstones in a reading of Anti-Oedipus, showing how Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms, re-conceptualizations, and commitments closely tally with those of Lawrence.3 Furthermore, for Deleuze and Guattari, as for Lawrence, these have a political dimension. What they find objectionable in these commitments are their implicit affinities with features belonging to the philosophies of Aristotle and Hegel via Lacan. Hence, in this chapter I chart the metaphysical suppositions that animate Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus.

1. A Note on Metaphysics: The Organic Model

To understand the positive positions Deleuze and Guattari develop in Anti-Oedipus, one must first understand the implicit metaphysical assumptions against which they are working, as well as the framework in which they stake their claims. In the first place, these can be understood in terms of their criticisms of the “organic model,” what they refer to as the “organism,” and their development of an alternative, what they call the “body without organs.” The major characteristics of these positions are already familiar.

According to the organic paradigm, the most basic constituents of reality are substances, unities whose behavior is determined by a form, in turn determined by a telos acting as a final cause, prescribing the development of not only individual substances but also the relationships that exist between them. For example, the form “human being” prescribes the organs and proper

3 Deleuze and Guattari are explicit in their debt to Lawrence (AO 115). On some points, Lawrence’s account and Deleuze and Guattari’s diverge sharply. For example, unlike Lawrence, Deleuze and Guattari reject the notion of a natural telos towards which human life is tending, and they claim that broader social and political relations are contemporary with familial relations – familial relations are themselves types of social and political relations. See my discussion of these points in Lawrence in the previous chapters.

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functions of these organs in relation to each other, to realize a functioning human being as well as a properly functioning community.4 Likewise, the form “democracy” prescribes the constituent units of democracy – for example, elections and juridical equality – and the proper functions of these constituents in relation to each other.5

This paradigm supposes a micro-macroscopic conception of reality, one where larger macrocosms are composed of smaller microcosms. Deleuze and Guattari credit Bergson with recognizing and criticizing this position.6 Microcosms fulfill their ends by engaging in relations with other microcosms, constituting the macrocosm in the process. In turn, the macrocosm conditions the development of individual microcosms and the relations that exist between them. Both are conceived as closed systems engaged in a movement similar to that described by Plotinus as emanation from and back to the One. Hegel conceives of relations between individuals and community in precisely this manner.7 For Deleuze and Guattari then this organic model implies

4 According to both Plato and Aristotle, for example, human beings are naturally gregarious creatures. For this reason, without a faculty of speech, human beings would not enter into political communities.

5 Describing this paradigm in their criticisms of both mechanistic and vitalistic models, Deleuze and Guattari write the following: “From machines, mechanism abstracts a structural unity,” a unity that functions as a form, “in terms of which it explains the functioning of the organism. Vitalism invokes an individual and specific unity of the living,” conceiving of this unity as a substance, “which every machine presupposes insofar as it is subordinate to organic continuance,” functioning as a telos determining the substance through its form (AO 284).

6 “With his general conception of microcosm-macrocosm relationships,” they write, “Bergson brought about a discreet revolution… Likening the living to a microcosm is an ancient platitude. But if the living organism was thought to be similar to the world, this was attributed to the fact that it was or tended to be an isolated system, naturally closed, the comparison between microcosm and macrocosm was thus a comparison between two closed figures, one of which expressed the other and was inscribed within the other” (AO 95-96).

7 Insofar as the macrocosm is itself thought to be a closed system, the trajectory of each substance “hits the wall” of a closed macrocosm conceived as its telos, and then “bounces back” again to determine the form of a substance. On this point, see my discussion of Kojève 106-107 in “Spirit as Ground and the Dialectical Method in Hegel” in chapter one. On this basis, Hegel retrospectively determines the relative ends and forms of all world-historical constituents, such that they accord with the absolute end of world history and Spirit. Regarding Bergson’s criticisms of micro-macroscopic relations understood in terms of Hegelian “finalism” see B 104-106. Deleuze takes up these same themes in his work on Proust. See PS 112-113 regarding the way micro-macrocosmic relations of whole and parts constitute a “great Organism,” where the meaning of the part “must be discovered in the whole to which it belongs”(PS 146). The claim is that Hegel discovers what was given from the beginning, what was there all along, and – for this reason – the Hegelian dialectic is a false movement. Regarding the whole never being given see B 131-132 and B 112 and the dialectic being a false movement B 44.


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commitments of a political nature.8 Thought is itself conceived in terms of the state, and they describe the state in organic terms, where it defines thought’s “goals and paths, conduits, channels, organs, an entire organon. There is thus an image of thought covering all of thought” (TP 374).9

This marks a point of continuity between Deleuze’s earlier work and his later collaborative endeavors with Guattari. Deleuze’s criticisms of the image of thought in Proust and Signs, Nietzsche and Philosophy, and Difference and Repetition take on a political dimension in his work with Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of the organic model and the alternative they propose are thus thoroughly political in nature.10 In Anti-Oedipus, they couch their criticisms and begin to develop an alternative in the work of Samuel Butler.11 Following Butler, Deleuze and Guattari reject both vitalism and mechanism, as these share the same paradigmatic organic model, where one accounts for the unity of both living beings and machines in terms of their functions, in terms of their ends.12 Deleuze and Guattari reject an understanding of whole-part relations in terms of goal-directed activity, a substance metaphysics where the basic constituents of reality would be independent, self-subsistent entities understood in terms of final causality.

Their alternative can thus be understood in largely Spinozistic terms. Here individuals are conceived as modes or “unique chances,” packets of

8 Describing the connection between the political state and conceptions of thought, they write the following: “The State as the model…for thought has a long history: logos, the philosopher king, the transcendence of the Idea, the interiority of the concept, the republic of minds, the court of reason, the functionaries of thought, man as legislator and subject. The State’s pretension to be a world order, and to root man” (TP 24).

9 See TP 24 on this as well.10 Deleuze himself says that politics comes into play with Anti-Oedipus, see TRM 66, although

Paolo Marrati argues that even before the beginning of his collaborations with Guattari, Deleuze’s thought is political, and it is in terms of his criticisms of opinion that the political import of his philosophy should be understood (206). Marrati establishes this connection via Plato. Just as Plato’s criticisms of opinion are political in nature – implying and resulting in a criticism of the status quo – so too are Deleuze’s criticisms of opinion political in nature (215). Both Alexandre Lefebvre and Philippe Mengue follow a similar approach in their readings of Deleuze on opinion, likening Deleuze to Plato via their mutual criticisms of opinion. See The Image of the Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza 60 and 267, and “The Problem of the Birth of Philosophy in Greece in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze” 178. I return to this in chapter five, linking Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of this organic model in Anti-Oedipus to their criticisms of opinion in What is Philosophy?

11 “[Butler] shatters the vitalist argument,” they write, “by calling in question the specific or personal unity of the organism, and the mechanist argument even more decisively, by calling into question the structural unity of the machine” (AO 284).

12 Given these criticisms, those that describe Deleuze’s philosophy as “vitalistic” in nature – on the basis of his engagements with Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson – seem misguided.

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thoughts, perceptions, and feelings determined by chance encounters with the environment they inhabit and other individuals with whom they interact. Community is understood as a larger, further-reaching aggregate of modes or alterations than individuals, and relations between individuals and community are conceived in terms of shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings, what I describe as “sympathy.” Taken together, these stand at the heart of a worldview Deleuze and Guattari develop, one based on what they call the “body without organs” as an alternative to the organic model.13 Deleuze begins developing this alternative even prior to his collaborations with Guattari.14

Whereas Deleuze criticizes thinkers within the mainstream of the tradition in his earlier work – seeking out alternatives in the likes of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Artaud – only with the help of Guattari and beginning with Anti-Oedipus does he become capable of accounting for the seeming plausibility of this dominant tradition and its organic model – why it is so convincing. Deleuze and Guattari’s task in Anti-Oedipus is thus two-fold: Not only do they describe this alternative – a worldview based on the model of the body without organs – but Deleuze and Guattari also show – on the basis of this alternative – why the organic model is so convincing, why it represents the mainstream of the philosophical tradition.

2. The Specificity of Schizophrenic Experience

Given the broad influence and seeming plausibility of the organic model, one might wonder why Deleuze and Guattari opt for the model of the body without organs rather than the organism. An answer to this question concerns the specificity of the experience on which Deleuze and Guattari base their analyses.

The philosophical methodology Deleuze and Guattari employ in Anti-Oedipus is transcendental in nature, beginning with experience and deducing

13 See TRM 20-22 for his clearest, most succinct account of the body without organs.14 This is nowhere more apparent than in Deleuze’s book on Proust, to which he returned

multiple times throughout his life. For example, versus the logos of philosophy – conceived as a huge animal or organism – Deleuze says the pathos with which Proust works belongs to the “vegetal realm” (PS 174-175), a claim that clearly anticipates the notion of the rhizome Deleuze and Guattari develop in Thousand Plateaus. In addition, versus a philosophical image of thought where truth acts as the natural telos of thought, assuring agreement between minds – philosophy as the expression of a universal mind – Deleuze claims Proust establishes an image of thought against philosophy’s, one where impressions force one to think. See PS 94-95 on this.


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conditions for the possibility of this experience. Their methodology consists in what Deleuze earlier refers to as “transcendental empiricism,” discovering conditions of real rather than possible experience, where the conditions deduced are no wider than those of the experience they condition.15 The major difference between Deleuze and Guattari and figures traditionally associated with transcendental philosophy – for example, Kant, the German idealists, and Husserl – is the nature of the experience with which they begin.

Transcendental philosophy generally begins with a kind of commonsense experience, an experience of medium-sized sensible things such as, for example, writing paraphernalia and dining utensils, “insignificant facts such as Recognition, everyday banality” (DR 135). As with Kant, the central feature of this experience is its pre-categorical, subject-object nature: Any and all experience has the form of an object for a subject, of an object being recognized by a subject.16 In this way, transcendental philosophy locates conditions of possible experience in a knowing subject. Since Deleuze and Guattari begin with a different type of experience, they reach different conclusions.

The type of experience with which they begin is that of schizophrenia, the experience of the schizophrenic.17 This shift alters the trajectory of Deleuze and Guattari’s subsequent analyses. Whereas commonsense experience consists in the subject-object form, their interest is in the fact schizophrenia does not evidence this form. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari say schizophrenia consists 15 See TRM 309 where the ambition of Anti-Oedipus is described as Kantian in spirit. See DR

56-57 and 143-144, as well as B 30 where Deleuze refers to Bergson’s method as a “superior empiricism” that goes towards concrete conditions of experience.

16 For example, Descartes’s description of the transformation of wax when held over a flame in the Meditations, Sartre’s analysis of the inkwell as being-in-itself in Being and Nothingness, and Heidegger’s description of the bowl as constituted by nothing in “The Thing.” Although Husserl’s concern is always with more abstract entities, such as those belonging to mathematics and the self, in all cases, these are more or less conceived in terms of objects for which medium-sized sensible things always provide the experiential model. As I show momentarily, taking medium-sized sensible things as an experiential touchstone marks the transition from Pre-Socratic to Aristotelian philosophy. See John Elof Boodin’s “The Discovery of Form” on this. I am grateful to Patricia Curd for drawing this point to my attention.

17 Since “how is stupidity (not error) possible”? is “the object of a properly transcendental question” (DR 151), so too is “how is schizophrenia possible?” What are thought’s structures such that schizophrenia is a possibility? In fact, Deleuze claims that everything new and interesting in psychoanalysis comes from psychosis. See N 15 on this point. Deleuze says that “schizophrenia is not only a human fact but also a possibility for thought” (DR 148), that stupidity, malevolence, and madness “are structures of thought as such” (DR 151). See Holland, Anti-Oedipus 2 regarding psychosis as Deleuze and Guattari’s point of departure.

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in an experience of production, an apprehension of nature as a process of pure production (AO 2-3). This is an experience of a chaotic maelstrom, where things are coming into and going out of existence, in which the schizophrenic is involved.18 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze says the world of difference is a chaotic one without identity (57), such that line of continuity can be drawn between schizophrenic experience and the worldview it implies, and what might be broadly construed as a Pre-Socratic worldview.

Whereas the organic model takes as its touchstone an experience of medium-sized sensible things as the basic constituents of reality – artifacts such as tables and chairs and livings beings – resulting in a metaphysics involving substance, form, and teleology, Pre-Socratic worldviews focus on very large and small non-sensible things as the basic constituents of reality – atoms and vortexes, elements and forces.19 The medium-sized sensible things the organic model takes as primary are explained as amalgamations of material stuff coming together and falling apart, depending on the operative forces.20 In the metaphysics Deleuze and Guattari develop in their transcendental analysis of schizophrenic experience, the analogue would be as follows:

partial objects, flows, detachments from signifying chains :: material stuff de-, re-, coding, and de-, re-, territorialization21 :: forces

18 In this respect, the schizophrenic experience on which Deleuze and Guattari base their analyses in Anti-Oedipus seems to be the same as what they refer to as “a too-sudden destratification” in Thousand Plateaus (503) and chaos in What is Philosophy? (118).

19 With regard to the very small, in fragments 195 and 216, Heraclitus says all things are in motion at all times but that this escapes our perception. See Jonathan Barnes’ Early Greek Philosophy 206 concerning Democritus’ account of atoms as well. See G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield’s The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts 2nd ed. 307 regarding love and strife as forces in Empedocles, as well as Aristotle’s criticisms of Empedocles’ use of chance to account for development. See Patricia Curd’s The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought 154 for a discussion of hot and cold as basic, genuine entities for Anaxagoras.

20 Paradigmatic in this respect is Empedocles’ account of the development of the parts of animals in fragments 375 and 376. See Kirk, Raven, Schofield 302-312. In fragment 555, Leucippus and Democritus are said to subscribe to the position that “what exists differs only by contact, rhythm, and turning.” See Barnes 207 for a discussion of the way that, according to Democritus, forms are separated from the whole by a “whirl,” and Curd 162 for a discussion of Empedocles’ position that all mortal things arise from the mixture of roots. This position leads Aristotle to criticize the Pre-Socratics for not distinguishing between generation and alternation, that mixing does not result in real coming-to-be or passing away (Curd 214), that generation is simply alteration (Barnes 207).

21 I return to in-depth explanations of all these notions.


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Taking the schizophrenic at her word, Deleuze and Guattari search out conditions for the possibility of her experience. Since this experience and the worldview it implies are radically different from the dominant organic model, so too must be its conditions. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari do not locate conditions of possible experience in an independent, self-subsistent, knowing subject – a conception of subjectivity based on the philosophical notion of substance.22 In this respect though, Deleuze and Guattari are by no means unique. In large measure, they owe a debt to Lacan.

Lacan’s doctoral dissertation is a symptomatology, distinguishing dementia from psychosis (Psychose paranoïaque 13). Taking Binswanger’s phenomeno-logical psychology (Daseinsanalyse) as his point of departure, Lacan explores psychopathology in terms of its broader relation to personality (la différence nosologique), asking to what pathological experiences and behaviors are re-sponses. He says psychosis is not simply a physico-chemical deficiency but concerns conceptual structures, the development of personality in relation to a social milieu, the comportment of a subject (Psychose paranoïaque 346-347). Understanding Lacan’s mature work from this initial trajectory, his approach can be understood as asking what conditions of normal experience psychotics lack, such that their symptoms are supplemental responses.23 The answer La-can gives is “the name of the father,” a function according to which language, the “symbolic order,” is organized.24 The name of the father consists in a lack in the signifying chain that makes possible the meaning of each and every other signifier in terms of their difference from one another, as well as the dif-ference between words and things.

For Lacan, it is a signifier that signifies an absence.25 Without the name of the father – without this lack – meaning formation is impossible. The schizo-phrenic can distinguish neither words from words nor words from things. In schizophrenia, language is powerless to create distance from reality, from the

22 See Claire Colebrook’s Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed 69 regarding the manner in which transcendental philosophies are generally founded on a subject.

23 See TRM 24, where psychoanalysis is described as asking the question of what the schizophrenic is missing.

24 Regarding Lacan’s description of insanity as misrecognition – misrecognition regarding one’s nature as a fundamental lack – see E 135 and 140. Concerning his claim that a breakdown in the name of the father causes psychosis, see E 479 and 481. See Van Haute 230-231 for a discussion of this point as well.

25 See E 17, as well as AO 110 for a synopsis in terms of an illegitimate understanding and employment of the disjunctive synthesis. I return to this shortly.

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body.26 The schizophrenic is foreclosed from the symbolic register and the realm of meaning, and her delusions are attempts to make up for this loss in the register of the real and realm of perceptions (TRM, 24). Although schizophrenia is also Deleuze and Guattari’s point of departure, the direction they travel is different. Lacan begins with schizophrenic experience, but his touchstone is commonsense experience, and in this way his thought implies the organic model.27

The name of the father plays a similar role in Lacan as does the notion of the whole in Hegel. Whereas for Hegel individual parts must be understood in terms of the whole, for Lacan a missing part structures the whole. The name of the father is an absence that allows for the possibility of relations of difference, thereby structuring language and establishing meaning, structuring experience.28 In this respect then, Lacan approaches schizophrenia in terms of the questions: What happened to the schizophrenic? What happened to the conditions for the possibility of her experience such that this experience fails to tally with the organic model? Lacan’s answer is an absence of lack.

Deleuze and Guattari give a different account since they ask a different question. Rather than asking what happened to or is wrong with the schiz-ophrenic, Deleuze and Guattari take schizophrenia as their touchstone. As opposed to assuming something above and beyond schizophrenic experience – transcendent to this experience against which schizophrenia could be as-sessed and judged – their critique is immanent.29 The immanent nature of this critique should be understood in Kantian terms.

Kant’s critical methodology consists in invoking only what is necessary to explain experience, conditions immanent rather than transcendent to experience. To account for the experience of objects, for example, one need not posit the existence of mind-independent objects. Rather, one can simply assume a certain givenness (the manifold of intuitions) and its organization in judgments (the categories), in terms of an object (the object x) and for a

26 See Van Haute 230 on this, as well as Van Haute and Geyskens, From Death Instinct 57 regarding the same point in the work of Melanie Klein.

27 At the same time, however, in Des noms-du-père 18, Lacan mentions as a historical fact – and seems to tacitly endorse – neurosis as the touchstone of analytic experience.

28 Deleuze and Guattari characterize and criticize this Lacanian perspective in the following terms: “[A]n Oedipal ‘organization’ is imposed on the psychotic, though for the sole purpose of assigning the lack of this organization in the psychotic” (AO 123).

29 For example, see AO 57 regarding their criticisms of Freud’s reduction of Schreber’s delirium to neurotic categories of familial constellations.


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subject (transcendental apperception).30 At the basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought in Anti-Oedipus lies a similar approach.

Rather than using commonsense experience as their touchstone and asking what happened to the schizophrenic, Deleuze and Guattari use schizophrenic experience as their touchstone and ask what happened to the normal person, why most people’s experience is not schizophrenic. As with Kant, Deleuze and Guattari’s answer concerns the assumption in existence of more than is given in experience, the common root of transcendental illusions. They distinguish between two different ways experience can be understood and organized, either legitimately or illegitimately.31 Invoking Kantian terminology, Deleuze and Guattari refer to the latter as “paralogisms.” Whereas for Kant paralogisms

30 These do not appear in Kant’s critical philosophy as transcendent notions – for example, a substantial subject based on the philosophical notion of substance – but as regulative ideas or logical functions, “to confer on” the concepts of the understanding “a maximum of systematic unity and extension” (KCP 19). They act as “a focus or horizon within perception” providing for “a maximum of systematic unity” (DR 169). Just as intuitions are blind without concepts, so too is the understanding disordered without reason. The understanding and its concepts need the postulates of reason to function properly, although they are not given as objects of possible experience. See Kant 590 ff. regarding the role the postulates of reason play in the organization of theoretical knowledge, Saville 84-86 for a discussion of the way reason directs understanding in its operations, and NP 82-94 regarding Deleuze’s criticisms of Kant versus Nietzsche with respect to the notion of critique. See DR 168 where Kant’s account of ideas is described in similar terms. It is no mere accident, however, that reason falls into such errors. “Kant exposes the speculative illusions of Reason,” writes Deleuze, “the false problems into which it leads us concerning the soul, the world and God. Kant substitutes, for the traditional concept of error (error as product in the mind of an external determinism), that of false problems and internal illusions” (KCP 25). Hence, transcendental illusions are internal to reason. They arise inevitably from the nature of reason itself.

31 The way Deleuze and Guattari employ the term “repression” throughout Anti-Oedipus should be understood in terms of “organization” or “determination,” which has the potential to but need not necessarily result in oppression. This terminological point is crucial as it allows for an understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s central claim in Anti-Oedipus that “the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly and, that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: ‘Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’ How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: ‘More taxes! Less bread!’? As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for” (AO 29). In other words, how and why does desire desire its own repression.

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concern the interaction of understanding and reason, for Deleuze and Guattari these paralogisms concern the nature of the unconscious, what they call “paralogisms of the unconscious.” As in Kant, these paralogisms are determined internally rather than externally. They result from the unconscious itself. Insofar as Deleuze and Guattari use the terms unconscious and desire interchangeably, one can thus say that the paralogisms result from desire: The paralogisms consist in a certain configuration of desire. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this configuration when they say desire desires its own repression.

Desire’s repression does not consist in keeping persons from doing what they want.32 The political significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of desire should not be understood in terms of a free-loving paradigm where life would be better if people simply “let it all hang out.” Rather, the novelty of the position they develop consists in the fact persons could do exactly what they want and be all the worse as a result. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari’s position concerning desire is close to Foucault’s concerning power.33

Since Deleuze and Guattari use the terms desire and unconscious interchangeably, to understand this it is necessary to turn to their account of the unconscious, “the specific nature of the libidinal investments in the economic and political spheres…to show how, in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression” (AO 105). Desire desiring its own repression consists in an understanding and employment of the syntheses of the unconscious, which gives rise to and supports a conception of experience and worldview they associate with the organic model.34

32 For a reading along these lines, see Judith Butler’s misguided characterization in Subjects of Desire, as well as Patton, Deleuze and the Political 106 where he seems to characterize Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy as one that consists in freeing schizophrenic desire.

33 Conceiving power as something negative, says Foucault, results from a juridical notion of sovereignty. He characterizes this position as one where the state would be understood in terms of the rights of the individual, where the fundamental manifestation of power would be the law. To understand power relations, says Foucault, one must not begin with primitive terms but the relations themselves, insofar as the relations determine the terms on which they come to bear. Hence, “instead of asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or what powers of theirs they have surrendered, allowing themselves to be subjectified [se laisser assujettir], one would need to inquire how relations of subjectivation manufacture subjects” (Essential Foucault 294). See Foucault’s similar description in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison 194, regarding the way power is positive rather than negative, producing reality itself, “a ‘new micro-physics’ of power” (139).

34 “Desiring-machines” they write, “make us an organism” (AO 8).


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3. A Materialist Conception of the Unconscious

Deleuze and Guattari make the rather esoteric claim that – on the basis of its conception of the unconscious – psychoanalysis constitutes a kind of idealism. This should be understood in terms of Lawrence’s critique of psychoanalysis, oriented in terms of the history of philosophy. Lawrence thinks Freudian psychoanalysis supposes a dualistic conception of the relationship between mind and body ultimately resulting in a kind of idealism. The trajectory of this path can be discerned from Descartes through Kant to Hegel, which is also apparent in a line of thought that connects Freud to Lacan through Lévi-Strauss, one that results in the linguistic idealism characteristic of Lacan.

Lawrence’s re-conceptualization of psychoanalysis can itself be understood in terms of a variety of competing commitments within the psychoanalytic tradition. Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis should be understood in these same terms. Hence, Anti-Oedipus concerns less a wholesale rejection of psychoanalysis and more a critique of central Freudian and Lacanian suppositions, ones of a metaphysical nature.35 In the first place, this concerns two competing conceptions of the unconscious.

Freud has a largely psychic, representative account of the unconscious, modeled on and determined by the mechanisms of primary or psychic repression, based on neurosis as its starting point and touchstone.36 In other words, Freud conceives of the unconscious as something specifically mental that simply mirrors or represents conscious content in an inverted fashion, understood in terms of biological processes of actively giving up thoughts and behaviors that are adaptively disadvantageous, which results in pathology if not sufficiently carried out.37 In this way then, a Freudian conception of the unconscious invokes the organic model, conceiving of psychic processes in an essentialist manner on the basis of naturally occurring teloi. Although Deleuze and Guattari do not doubt this is how the unconscious appears to psychoanalysis, they argue for a different account.

Theirs is a largely somatic, creative conception of the unconscious, modeled on and determined by mechanisms of secondary or social repression,

35 See Four Concepts 72 concerning Lacan’s frank admission of an ontology.36 Regarding neurosis as psychoanalysis’ starting point and touchstone, see TRM 24 and

N 15. See “Aetiology of Hysteria” 278 where Freud says neurosis acts as the touchstone of psychoanalysis.

37 Regarding repression as a natural biological process, see Van Haute and Geyskens, Confusion 107 and 128.

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based on schizophrenia as a starting point and touchstone.38 In these respects then, their conception is strikingly similar to Lawrence’s. On this view, the unconscious is anything not specifically conscious, including pre-, non-, or a-conscious phenomena. There is nothing specifically psychical or mental about the unconscious. Equating the unconscious with desire, Deleuze and Guattari write that structures “do not exist in the mind, but in the real; there is nothing mental about desire” (AO 97). Here Deleuze and Guattari clearly have Lacan in mind when they refer to “the real” – versus the registers of the imaginary and symbolic. Elsewhere, they say that delirium is “at work in reality, we saw only reality all around us, taking the imaginary and the symbolic to be illusory categories” (N 144).39 Their frequent claims that the unconscious and desire are productive rather than representative should be understood on this basis.

In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, desire has an idiosyncratic meaning, having little to do with need, wish, demand, etc. Although these are all ways desire is experienced, it is neither identical with nor can it be reduced to them.40 Rather, it is closer to what Spinoza means by conatus and Nietzsche by will, and in all cases concerns a conception of power.41 However, this is not a power one desires, strives for, wills, or possesses. This would be to understand power in terms of representation. Deleuze goes to great lengths to distinguish Nietzsche’s philosophy of power from both Hobbes and Schopenhauer’s, comparing and contrasting – but ultimately criticizing – the latter.42 Rather, for Deleuze via

38 Deleuze and Guattari endorse Reich’s position that one can identify a turn for the worse in Freud’s work when psychic repression is given precedence over social repression, when Freud “accepts the idea of a primary anxiety that supposedly touches off psychic repression” (AO 117). See AO 118-119 for a further discussion of the primacy of social repression, as well as its relation to psychic repression. I return to these points shortly. Regarding schizophrenia as a starting point, Deleuze and Guattari write that the “relationships of neurosis, psychosis, and also perversion depend on the situation of each one with regard to the process, and on the manner in which each one represents a mode of interruption of the process… Each of these forms has schizo-phrenia as a foundation; schizophrenia as a process is the only universal” (AO 136).

39 I return to the significance of this claim with respect to Lacan below.40 “To a certain degree,” they write, “the traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very

outset: from the very first step that the Platonic logic of desire forces us to take, making us choose between production and acquisition. From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack” (AO 25).

41 Hence, in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze equates desire, conatus, and power. See 58-62 and 97-104 on this.

42 According to Deleuze, both Hobbes and Schopenhauer conceive of power in terms of “representation.” At bottom, says Deleuze, both Hobbes and Schopenhauer conceive of power as an object, as a thing. Since one can possess things, it is assumed one could also possess power, that power is something after which one could strive. For this reason then, power could be represented. One could have an idea of power and then strive after it in


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Nietzsche, power is something everyone always already possesses. Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power concerns less the desire to possess or achieve power than techniques for feeling the power one already possesses.43

For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari equate desiring-production with social-production; they equate desire with labor.44 Hence, rather than basing their conception of desire on the model of need, wish, demand, etc. – central to which are psychical operations that entail giving priority to the mind over body – Deleuze and Guattari base their conception of desire on power, power each and every individual always already possesses, about which there is nothing specifically psychical.45 Desire is something one does, part of each and every action one takes.

In this respect then, Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the unconscious-desire is best understood in terms of Marx and Engels’ conception of praxis, an undifferentiated, neither subjective nor objective, productive force through which human beings transform themselves while transforming their environments.46 In fact, so as not to mistake what Deleuze and Guattari mean by desire with need, wish, demand, etc., every time they refer to “desire” one might replace it with “labor,” understood here as a species of the genus praxis.

Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the unconscious-desire can thus be understood as what people do, the physical processes by which people shape themselves while shaping their environments – rather than as the inverse,

reality. For Nietzsche – and Deleuze by extension – power is productive in nature, a creative force (NP 57-59). According to Deleuze, one should not conceive of power as an object one might or might not possess – as a thing after which one strives. Central to this conception of power are psychical processes of ideation and mentalization. Hence, although Deleuze and Guattari credit Kant with formulating a productive conception of desire, they criticize this conception for being mental. “The reality of the object,” they write, “insofar as it is produced by desire, is thus a psychic reality” (AO 25). With respect to psychoanalysis, this results in the following: “The whole of desiring-production is crushed, subjected to the requirements of representation” (AO 54). It involves a conception of human nature and desire where psychical processes are given ontological and explanatory priority.

43 With regard to Kafka’s work, Deleuze and Guattari write the following: “One would be quite wrong to understand desire here as a desire for power… Kafka’s idea has nothing to do with this. There isn’t a desire for power; it is power itself that is desire. Not a desire-lack, but a desire as a plentitude, exercise, and functioning” (K 56).

44 “The truth of the matter is that social production [labor] is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions…libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production” (AO 29).

45 Regarding the way representation constitutes psychoanalysis’ idealism, see N 17 as well.46 “The objective being of desire,” they write, “is the Real in and of itself. There is no particular

form of existence that can be labeled ‘psychic reality.’ As Marx notes, what exists in fact is not lack, but passion, as a ‘natural and sensuous object’” (AO 26-27).

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mirror image of consciousness (representation), or a mental state that consists in need, want, wish, etc.47 Similarly, for Marx and Engels, praxis separates human beings from animals and – for this reason – stands at the center of a materialist philosophical anthropology discernible in their thought.48 However, this separation is constituted by a difference in degree rather than kind.49

Non-human animals might also be said to transform themselves through processes of transforming their environments, and it seems as though one could establish ranks and categories to determine more and less “human animals” on this basis. This discontinuity between categories such as man and animal, culture and nature also plays a central role in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the unconscious. They make clear not only that there is nothing specifically psychical about the unconscious – in fact, they say the opposite, that it belongs to physics – but also that “the body without organs” and “intensities” are themselves a part of the unconscious and physical in nature.50 They are constitutive of this undifferentiated process of production. On this basis, one is in a position to understand the central role that secondary or social repression plays in Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the unconscious.

Whereas for Freud primary or psychic repression determines the nature of psychical organization that, in turn, determines the nature of social organization, for Deleuze and Guattari secondary or social repression determines the nature of social organization that, in turn, determines the 47 See Holland, Anti-Oedipus 13 regarding desire as power and power as labor in connection

with the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, Buchanan, Anti-Oedipus 48 for a discussion of desire as something one does, as well as Negri, Savage Anomaly 10 where the conception of power – puissance (potentia) versus pouvoir (potestas) – Negri develops in the thought of Spinoza is described as the productive activity of labor. He returns to this in Spinoza: une hérésie de l’immanence et de la démocratie 7.

48 See my previous discussion of these point in “Praxis and Philosophical Anthropology in Marx and Engels” in chapter one.

49 Taking up this line of thought, Deleuze and Guattari write that “the unconscious is an orphan, and produces itself within the identity of nature and man” (AO 49). This continuity between human and animal life stands at the center of Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, where differences between human and animal life are said to originate from an initially undifferentiated élan vital (B 95), such that all degrees of difference exist in a single nature (B 93). However, his later claim that stupidity (“betise”) characterizes human thought and life uniquely – that animals are protected from stupidity – calls the characterization of this continuity into doubt. See DR 150 on this.

50 “The unconscious,” they write, “is Rousseauistic, being man-nature,” an undifferentiated process of production that involves the transformation of subjects as much as of objects, of culture as much as of nature (AO 112). “[I]n reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics; the body without organs and its intensities are not metaphors, but matter itself ” (AO 283).


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nature of psychical organization.51 The things people think, feel, and believe are the result of wider social milieus or mode of existence in which they arise and to which they belong. Since Deleuze conceives of individuals as collections of unique sets of relations between thoughts, perceptions, and feelings, secondary or social repression determines individuals as specific sets of relations via social organization. However, just as there is nothing specifically psychical about desire, neither is there anything specifically human or organic about this process. It concerns and involves non-human nature and artifacts as much as human beings and living creatures.52

Deleuze and Guattari conceive of the unconscious-desire as a vast reservoir of productive power that concerns and involves human nature as much as nature proper, living things as much as inorganic stuff. At bottom they develop and argue for the view that the world one inhabits and the way it is perceived results from the organization of this power. In this respect then, the unconscious-desire is the most basic constituent of the transcendental philosophy Deleuze and Guattari develop in Anti-Oedipus.53 The originality of their project consists in the fact that Deleuze and Guattari use schizophrenic rather than commonsense experience as their touchstone.

Taking schizophrenic experience as their touchstone, Deleuze and Guattari describe the unconscious-desire in somatic, productive terms.54 Central to its

51 See AO 118-119, as well as Holland, Anti-Oedipus, 10 regarding social repression as determinative of psychical repression. Here one should keep in mind the claim Deleuze makes regarding ethics, symptomatology, and the role of the philosopher – which I discussed in chapter two: The philosopher uncovers the types of wills and forces that animate phenomena, the modes of existence implied by statements, thoughts, and feelings (NP 78).

52 See AO 285 for their discussion of Butler’s claims that human beings constitute the reproductive organs of vapor-engines just as vapor-engines constitute the reproductive organs of human beings, N 178 regarding Deleuze’s conception of a non-organic life taking place through silicon rather than the organic life of carbon, and D 52 concerning the role the stirrup plays in the assemblage to which it belongs, transforming the medieval world.

53 Hence, their conception of desire is close to what Deleuze earlier associates in Bergson’s thought with a singular duration comprised of an infinite number of fluxes (B 82) – calling it a new monism (B 74) – and later refers to as a “transcendental field” – a stream of pre-reflective, impersonal consciousness Deleuze associates with life in general (TRM 384). After writing Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari say their notion of assemblages is meant to replace that of desiring-machines from Anti-Oedipus. As opposed to characterizing this relation as one of replacement, however, it seems more accurate to say their notion of assemblages more clearly brings out what is already at stake in desire. One should understand Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire retrospectively through that of assemblages. Hence, when they say that assemblages are “hodgepodges” and “Hodgepodges are combinations of interpenetrating bodies,” one should understand the nature of desire in terms of interpenetrating bodies (TRM 177).

54 Summarizing this contribution, they write that the “schizoanalytic argument is simple: desire is a machine, a synthesis of machines, a machine arrangement – desiring-machines.

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productive nature are what they refer to as the “syntheses of the unconscious,” the principles by which this productive power is organized. Deleuze and Guattari identify three syntheses of the unconscious: the connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive syntheses of the unconscious. Both the world one inhabits and the way it is perceived result from this organization, result from these syntheses.

4. Syntheses of the Unconscious

In Kant, “synthesis” refers broadly to the way concepts are brought to bear on intuitions, in term of which experience is organized. Working together, the faculties of imagination and understanding carry out the syntheses of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. In Deleuze and Guattari, this term has a loosely analogous sense. Whereas for Kant the activity of synthesis results from intellectual faculties of cognition, for Deleuze and Guattari they result from the productive forces of the unconscious-desire. The syntheses of the unconscious not only organize experience but also create reality.55

According to Deleuze and Guattari, there is nothing specifically psychical about the unconscious-desire. Rather, this refers to what people do.56 The syntheses of the unconscious describe the principles according to which reality is produced. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions of the syntheses are among the most difficult to sort out and comprehend in Anti-Oedipus. In large part, this results from a subtle yet important distinction. They describe the syntheses of the unconscious in two distinct yet related ways: in terms of how the syntheses are employed – how they produce reality – and how they are understood – how they are understood as producing reality. The way one understands the syntheses to produce reality makes a difference to the ways they are employed or produce reality, and vice versa. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the syntheses of the unconscious can be understood and employed in either a legitimate or illegitimate fashion. The latter gives rise

The order of desire is the order of production; all production is at once desiring-production and social production. We therefore reproach psychoanalysis for having stifled this order of production, for having shunted it into representation” (AO 296).

55 “[O]bjects, persons and symbols depend for their distribution and very constitution” on “desire as libido” (DI 195).

56 “If desire produces,” they write, “its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire” (AO 26).


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to what they refer to as “paralogisms of the unconscious,” mis-understandings and -employments of the syntheses.

Like their use of the term “syntheses,” Deleuze and Guattari’s use of “paralogisms” has a sense roughly analogous to that of Kant. Paralogisms occur when one mistakes a logical function for a substantial entity, thereby mistaking the nature of the self, conceiving of the self in substantial terms, the self as substance.57 For Deleuze and Guattari, although the paralogisms result from the unconscious-desire, this development is socially and historically conditioned: Misunderstandings concerning the nature of the syntheses of the unconscious give rise to their illegitimate employment, which leads to further misunderstandings. Unlike Kant, the purview of their discussion is not experience in general but the realm of psychoanalytic meta-theory and therapeutic practice.

Hence, their criticisms are directed against psychoanalytic suppositions specifically, the fact that psychoanalysis supposes more in existence than is given in experience, misconstruing the nature of the syntheses in the process, which in turn leads to their illegitimate employment.58 A mistaken understanding and employment of the syntheses supposes and reinforces notions belonging to the organic model.

In the first place, this concerns the way psychoanalysis attempts to understand schizophrenic experience in terms of commonsense experience, assuming commonsense experience as its touchstone and then asking what happened to the schizophrenic. Given the specificity of the patients, case studies, and clinical work on which Freudian meta-theory and therapeutic practice are based, however, neurosis provides the model for commonsense experience, insofar as neuroses are themselves understood as caricaturish exaggerations of general human dispositions, pathological variants of common human tendencies and characteristics.59 More precisely then, psychoanalysis assumes neurotic experience as its touchstone. Taking schizophrenic experience as their point of reference, Deleuze and Guattari show where psychoanalytic

57 See my previous discussion of these point in “Experiential Unity and Transcendental Subjectivity in Kant” in chapter one.

58 Here their use of the terms “legitimate” and “illegitimate” should not be understood as “good” and “bad,” as designating a good (“legitimate”) versus a bad (“illegitimate”) metaphysics. Rather, an employment of the syntheses is illegitimate from the perspective of experience, when one supposes more in reality than is given in experience.

59 The Belgian psychoanalyst Jacques Schotte (1928-2007) refers to this as a “pathoanalytic” perspective on psychopathology. See Van Haute and Geyskens, Non-Oedipal Psychoanalysis for an excellent discussion and development of this position with respect to hysteria. In many ways, a perspective such as this characterizes Deleuze and Guattari approach to schizophrenia in Anti-Oedipus.

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theory and practice go astray. Time and again, they criticize psychoanalysis for attempting to understand schizophrenia in terms of neurosis, for forcing schizophrenia into categories belonging to neurosis. On this point, Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis tallies with Lawrence’s.

At bottom these concern the Oedipus complex. Their mutual criticisms are directed against the way psychoanalysis understands pathology specifically, and human nature in general, in terms of the conceptual architecture involving familiar psychoanalytic notions such as childhood, family members, and familial relations. Following Lawrence, Deleuze and Guattari criticize psychoanalysis because of the primacy it gives to these elements and the way this leads to misconceptions regarding the natures of individuality, community, and relations between the two.

As with Lawrence, in the background of Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses in Anti-Oedipus is the claim psychoanalysis supposes a metaphysics. Psychoanalytic notions imply and are conditioned by the notions of substance, form, and teleology. As in Kant, these are not themselves given in experience but are nonetheless used to structure and make sense of experience (ideas in the Kantian sense). Each notion implies the others, such that substance, form, and teleology go hand-in-hand.60 For this reason, an illegitimate understanding and employment of one of the syntheses of the unconscious is never distinct from an illegitimate understanding and employment of the other two. Experience is different depending on whether one does or does not suppose these notions.

In brief, the syntheses of the unconscious are understood and employed illegitimately when one supposes the notions substance, form, and teleology.61 First, supposing substance leads to an illegitimate understanding of the connective synthesis, which in turn results in supposing the existence of what Deleuze and Guattari call “full persons,” the central importance of parents to psychoanalysis. Next, supposing the notion of form leads to an illegitimate understanding of the disjunctive synthesis, which in turn results in supposing the existence of particular types of familial relations, the relation between children and parents as described by psychoanalysis. Finally, supposing teleology leads to an illegitimate understanding of the conjunctive synthesis, which in turn results in supposing particular types of relations between families and society, familial relations and their dynamics as archetypes of

60 For example, in its most robust sense, the notion of form refers to the expression of essence, implying an end that guides this expression – a telos that determines a thing’s characteristics and its characteristic relations.

61 Since the purview of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion is psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic notions, my own explanation takes this same perspective.


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or models for any and all broader social relations. To make sense of how the syntheses would be understood and employed in a legitimate fashion, it is necessary to more closely examine each of these in turn.

5. Connective Synthesis

Describing the nature of the connective synthesis, Deleuze and Guattari write that desire “constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented” (AO 5). To understand what they mean here, one should keep in mind the following: Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire as creative and productive, the relation of their worldview to a broadly Pre-Socratic one, and the relation between the body without organs and Spinozistic substance – where individual things are conceived as modes and modifications of one substance expressed under different attributes.

Rather than substances as enformed matter, for Deleuze and Guattari the basic constituents of reality are partial objects, flows, and detachments from signifying chains, analogous to matter in Pre-Socratic schemes and modes in Spinoza.62 Just as Spinoza makes attributes responsible for the organization of modes and modifications of substance, and the Pre-Socratics conceive of forces as bringing together and tearing apart amalgamations of material stuff, so too do Deleuze and Guattari think the syntheses of the unconscious organize partial objects, flows, and detachments from signifying chains.

The first step in this organization is bringing together various partial objects and flows, connecting them. They distinguish two ways this process can occur and be understood. “The opposition here,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “is between two uses of the connective synthesis: a global and specific use, and a partial and non-specific use” (AO 70). They align these two uses with an illegitimate and legitimate understanding, respectively. The former involves the assumption of substance, such that reality’s basic constituents would be enformed matters. Partial objects and flows would then be understood as belonging to or coming from substances (AO 71). The latter involves the recognition that, at bottom, reality consists in partial objects, flows, and detachments from signifying chains, “by nature fragmentary and fragmented,” brought together in various ways. To determine the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari consider partial objects, flows, and detachments from signifying chains basic constituents of reality, however, requires understanding the sense in which partial objects would belong to or come from substances. 62 They say that “the body without organs is substance itself, and the partial objects, the

ultimate attributes or elements of substance” (AO 309).

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Their use of “partial objects” is inspired by psychoanalytic thought. These refer to objects through which various instincts achieve their aims, understood apart from the persons to which they belong. For Freud, the novelty of this discovery consists in the fact the sexual drive is independent of its object.63 The mother’s breast is an object through which the hunger of a child satisfies itself, for example, through which the ego instincts of self-preservation achieve their aims.64 This is important because the human animal is not born with a ready-made set of instincts. Rather, in terms of both the individual and species – onto- and phylo-genically – the nature of and relations between the instincts change. According to Freud, the sexual instincts are originally spread throughout the body – the entire body is an erogenous zone (Three Essays 150) – tied to those of self-preservation, what he calls “anaclisis.”65 A process of development occurs during which certain instincts dominate while others fall to the background, changing their aims and objects in the process.66 The child moves through developmental stages, oral and anal, satisfying its sexual instincts on different objects depending on the stage.67

Once the child reaches the stage of genital sexuality, instincts of sexuality and self-preservation are ideally distinct, taking different aims and objects. In addition, various partial and polymorphous drives now coalesce, taking as their object the other, full person.68 At this stage then, the instincts discover what has been there all along, another person to which the partial objects belong, through which the instincts satisfy themselves. This stage is especially important as it necessitates developing relations with others.69 Initially, the 63 “Freud calls these drives partial first because they do not arise from the body in its totality,

and furthermore, because they function relatively independently of each other” (Van Haute and Geyskens, From Death Instinct 55). See Three Essays 166 where the discovery of partial drives and objects originates in perversions.

64 For this reason, the breast is the prototype of every object loved. See Three Essays 222 on this.65 See Three Essays 182 on this, as well as “Autobiographical Study” 35.66 Freud says an effluence of sexual drives present themselves in early childhood, a childhood

sexuality that succumbs to repression during latency, before reawakening in puberty (Three Essays 200). During this phase, the sexual instincts mix with those of self-preservation and vice versa.

67 The Oedipal stage is preceded by an oral-cannibalistic stage, one where “sexual activity is not yet distinguished from the ingestion of food” and a sadistic-anal phase dominated by the activity-passivity distinction. Here the muscle system is the locus of mastery and sexual excitation in activity, and the intestinal canal the source of sexual excitation in passivity (Van Haute and Geyskens, From Death Instinct 76).

68 “A normal sexual life,” Freud writes, “is only assured by an exact convergence of the affectionate current and the sexual current both being directed towards the sexual object and the sexual aim” (Three Essays 207).

69 “With the arrival of puberty, changes set in which are destined to give infantile sexual life its final, normal shape. The sexual instinct has hitherto been predominantly auto-erotic; it now finds a sexual object” (Three Essays 207).


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sexual instincts are autoerotic, and at puberty they take an external object. Given the thoroughly hetero-normative social and cultural values to which Freud subscribes, the development of genital sexuality entails finding a mate and creating a family, propagating the human species.70 This constitutes the form of a healthy, mature sexuality. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s own engagements with the notion of partial objects focus on the work of child psychologist Melanie Klein (AO 44-45).

Klein was an innovator in the field of infant and child psychology. If Freud is psychoanalysis’ father, then Klein is certainly its mother. According to Klein, parents are not initially the primary constituents of a child’s metal life. Since children are not yet aware of their parents as full persons, familial relations cannot be the primary organizational matrices according to which the mental life of the child is ordered. Parents only become terms for the child during a later stage of development, after two earlier states that Klein refers to as the “paranoid-schizoid” and “depressive” positions. Rather than mothers and fathers – what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “full persons” – the primary constituents of a child’s mental life are partial objects, parts of the parents’ bodies and other objects in the child’s perceptual and affective fields. Klein’s account of the role of the mother’s breast during this developmental process is, perhaps, the most well known.

While the child occupies the paranoid-schizoid position, it perceives neither the mother nor the mother’s breast. Rather, the child perceives either a good or a bad breast, depending on whether the breast is dispensing milk or pulling away. Hence, the significance of the breast and mother consists in the connection of a “partial object” (the breast) and a “flow” (of milk). The child attempts to integrate the good while warding off the bad, a process analogous to what Freud describes as the constitution of a primordial pleasure ego.71 During the next phase in development, the child realizes one and the same breast both nourished and disappointed it all along. The good breast is also the bad breast. The child now constitutes the mother as a total person from which this full object is taken.

According to an illegitimate understanding of the connective synthesis, say Deleuze and Guattari, Klein assigns partial objects to full persons.72 Although

70 “The sexual instinct is now subordinated to the reproductive function; it becomes, so to say, altruistic” (Three Essays 207).

71 See Van Haute and Geyskens, From Death Instinct 65 regarding the way incorporation is a precursor to identification in this scheme.

72 “Partial objects now seem to be taken from people,” write Deleuze and Guattari on this point, “rather than from the nonpersonal flows that pass from one person to another” (AO 71).

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Klein discovers that parents and familial relations are not primary, she betrays the novelty of this insight, ultimately giving primacy in this roundabout way to the role of parents and familial relations. Two important points should be mentioned in connection with these accounts. First, failure to move through and out of these stages – achieving universal developmental benchmarks along the way – results in psychopathology. Second, features of Freud and Klein’s accounts resemble those of the movement of the Hegelian dialectic.

With respect to the first, a certain ambiguity marks Freud’s work regarding the possibility of a healthy, mature sexuality. Although this is posited as an ideal, it is by no means clear that anyone ever actually achieves it – that a healthy, mature sexuality free of psychopathology is possible. One can discern in Freud’s work two competing and mutually exclusive perspectives on psychopathology, one in which psychopathology is merely an accidental feature of human existence, which is avoidable both in principle and fact, and another in which psychopathology lies at the very heart of human existence, which no one ever completely avoids.73

In this respect, the existence and realization of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “full persons” – persons corresponding to the integration of partial objects through which instincts satisfy their aims – is merely an ideal. It is an “idea of psychoanalytic reason,” one that grounds and guides psychoanalysis. For the sake of meta-theory and therapeutic practice, psychoanalysis assumes the existence of a developmental stage characterized by a coalesce of the drives. This ideal acts as an explanatory touchstone in terms of which psychoanalysis makes sense of earlier stages and aberrant states of these drives and object relations. Psychoanalysis falls into errors – paralogisms – when it assumes the existence of this merely ideal state in reality, when it posits more in existence than is given in experience. This stage has implicit ethical and political significances, functioning as a majority standard, “a model of identity and normality in relation to which deviations can subsequently be detected”

73 Following Schotte, much of Van Haute and Geyskens’ work focuses on the nature of these perspectives and their broader philosophical anthropological significance. See Van Haute and Geyskens, From Death Instinct xx, where they claim that if psychopathology is understood strictly from the perspective of trauma, then this opens the way to normal psychical development and a normative conception of normality, as well as Van Haute and Geyskens, Confusion 128, regarding organic repression as a natural process that entails a difference in degree rather than kind between normality and pathology. Van Haute explores this line of thought in Lacan’s work. See Van Haute 32, where the impossibility of a totalization of the drives entails the impossibility of a healthy, mature, adult sexuality in relation to the genital other, and Van Haute 155 for the way Lacan’s conception of object a undermines such a totalization.


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(Marrati 208).74 With this perspective in mind, one is in a position to understand the way features of this account resemble ones in Hegel’s thought.

Hegel’s conception of Spirit can be understood in terms of Kant’s postulates of reason. Hegel collapses self, world, and God, forming an explanatory arche-telos for the sake of carrying out an essentialist analysis of history.75 Later stages in history and historical development are understood as ends that pull social and political development forward.76 In this way, the end of history and 19th century Prussian state function in an analogous manner in Hegel as a pathology-free, mature sexuality in psychoanalysis. In both cases, these act as ends towards which processes of individual and communal development are tending and in terms of which they are understood, implying an understanding of reality in terms of the organic model.77 However, if one jettisons the notions of substance, form, and teleology, then there is no reason to suppose these partial objects come from or eventually constitute full persons modeled on the notion of substance.78 Neither is there a necessity nor an inherent order to the way partial objects and flows are thought of and brought together.79

The question now becomes – and the onus falls on Deleuze and Guattari to explain – why and how people so commonly and prevalently think of collections of partial objects and flows as substances determined by forms, determined in turn by teloi. Their answer concerns a second synthesis of the unconscious, what they call the “disjunctive synthesis,” which records relations that exist between partial object and flows.

74 On this point, Marrati further writes that it “makes discrimination possible, or even calls it forth” (208). I return to this shortly and in chapter five.

75 For an explanation of Hegel’s thought along these lines, see Michael Baur’s “From Kant’s Highest Good to Hegel’s Absolute Knowing.” Similarly, in a profoundly Hegelian reading of Kant based on the Critique of Judgment, Deleuze writes that the “accomplishment of freedom and of the good Sovereign in the sensible world thus implies an original synthetic activity of man: History is this accomplishment, and thus it must not be confused with a simple development of nature. The idea of last end implies a final relation of nature and man; but this relation is made possible only by natural finality” (KCP 74).

76 On these points, see my earlier discussions of Hegel’s thought in chapters one and two.77 Regarding this point, Deleuze and Guattari write that they do not “believe in a primordial

totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date” (AO 42).78 Deleuze and Guattari write the following: “There is no sort of evolution of drives that would

cause these drives and their objects to progress in the direction of an integrated whole, any more than there is an original totality from which they can be derived” (AO 44). See AO 324 for their further discussion of this point.

79 “It is clear that such a totality-unity,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “is posited only in terms of a certain mode of absence, as that which partial objects and subjects of desire ‘lack’” (AO 72).

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6. Disjunctive Synthesis

“Recording” refers to the relation between the way partial objects and flows are organized – the relations into which they enter or ways they are connected – and the way they appear, and vice versa. In the first place, recording can be understood in terms of meaning – in terms of the formation of meaning, how and why things have the meanings they do.80 Here the importance of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “detachments from signifying chains” comes to the forefront.

The meanings of things are neither inherent and invariable nor determined by forms and ends towards which they are naturally tending. Rather, their meanings are extrinsic, resulting from the variable relations into which they enter, which are determined by – and determine in turn – their conjunction with detachments from signifying chains. The significance of this claim is related to and can be understood in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s engagements with structuralism, more specifically, its psychoanalytic variants. The target of their criticism is a Lacanian perspective in which the formation of meaning depends on relations determined by lack. This lack acts as a telos that determines forms of relations, in turn determining their meanings.81

When psychoanalysis becomes structural, say Deleuze and Guattari, everything is interpreted in terms of parental figures and Oedipal, familial relations.82 For this reason, despite the deference they show to Lacan throughout Anti-Oedipus – criticizing his students rather than Lacan himself – Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of psychoanalysis most primarily concern its Lacanian variants.83 Their main criticism concerns the way a structuralist interpretation of psychoanalysis results in an understanding of desire in terms of lack, what Deleuze and Guattari associate with a theologically-inspired “insufficiency in being” (AO 111). Related to this is the way such an interpretation results in a kind of linguistic idealism, where the concrete, material conditions of human existence are ignored, demeaning the importance of clinical experience, the

80 See Buchanan, Anti-Oedipus 94 regarding the way codification concerns the attribution of meanings.

81 Once again, the previously discussed affinity between Hegel and Lacan should be kept in mind here.

82 Deleuze and Guattari find this introduction especially odious: “Structural interpretation makes Oedipus into a kind of universal Catholic symbol,” they write, “beyond all the imaginary modalities. It makes Oedipus into a referential axis not only for the pre-oedipal phases, but also for the para-oedipal varieties, and the exo-oedipal phenomena” (AO 52).

83 For instance, see AO 73, 308, and 360.


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specificity of the patient’s experience.84 Since their criticisms directly concern the formation and nature of meaning, it is necessary to examine Lacan’s commitments on these points in greater depth.

Lacanian psychoanalysis works with three registers, in terms of which mental life takes place and its functions can be understood. For Lacan – as with Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of Lacan – the imaginary and symbolic are the most important. These are responsible for relations of identity and difference, which condition language and give rise to a meaningful human world and can be understood as developmental stages constitutive of subjectivity, community, and relations between the two.85 Lacan associates the imaginary with what he calls the “mirror stage,” a developmental phase in the child’s life that lasts from its sixth until eighteenth month. This is also a structuralist function that explains personal identity, one that Lacan attributes to the mother (E 75-81). Through its identification with those around it, the child develops a personal identity. The third register, that of the real, concerns anything falling outside the registers of the imaginary and symbolic, anything that cannot be conceived and described in terms of language and meaning. One cannot know or say anything positive about the real by its very nature.86 In this way, Lacan gives priority and primacy to language and

84 They write that the “function of Oedipus as dogma, or as the ‘nuclear complex,’ is inseparable from a forcing by which the psychoanalyst as theoretician elevates himself to the conception of a generalized Oedipus” (AO 51). Regarding the way Lacanian psychoanalysis is a kind of linguistic idealism, see my discussions in chapter one.

85 See E 6-7 regarding the way identity and imaginary relations are determined in difference or by symbolic relations. The other acts as an interjected ego ideal that gives the ego a fixed vantage point aside from language, which brings to the ego a (false) unity, one of imaginary identification. See Fink 18 on this. Initially, however, Lacan conceives of the mirror stage and imaginary relations as ones that supplement the fundamental prematurity of human birth (Van Haute 90). Mentioning the imaginary and symbolic registers while referring to their functions, Deleuze and Guattari write the following: “Everything takes place as if Oedipus of itself had two poles: one pole characterized by imaginary figures that lend themselves to a process of identification, and a second pole characterized by symbolic functions that lend themselves to a process of differentiation” (AO 82).

86 See Van Haute 292 regarding the imaginary, symbolic, and real. The real is the dumb reality of brute existence, which Lacan seems to conceive in much the same way Sartre does the in-itself. Both fall outside the realm of language and meaning. Before, outside, and without signification, reality has a dumb, de trop quality, and since the subject of the unconscious is not bodily, says Lacan, “every biologizing interpretation of the Freudian doctrine of the drive must be rejected” (Van Haute 27). Since the body makes no positive contribution to the formation of meaning (Van Haute 287) and “no subjectivity” exists “outside of language,” “the status of the subject must be reconsidered in terms of its dependence on language” (Van Haute 285). Lacan thus claims that the Freudian unconscious should be considered as “the sum of the effects of speech on a subject” (Four Concepts 126).

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meaning, and from this perspective his work can be considered a linguistic idealism.87

However, Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions regarding differences be-tween these registers with respect to psychoanalysis concern not only Lacan. Rather, they seem to have in mind the difference between traditional Freudian psychoanalysis on the one hand and its structural Lacanian variants on the other.88 Whereas the emphasis in traditional Freudian psychoanalysis is on real persons and biology, the emphasis in structural Lacanian psychoanalysis is on functions and language.

Given a structural interpretation, biology and real persons become increasingly insignificant.89 Rather than allowing the specificity of individual persons and relations to determine an understanding of the nature of broader social structures, an account of the nature of broader social structures determines an understanding of the nature of individual persons and relations.90 A structural interpretation of psychoanalysis thus demeans the importance of clinical experience, the specificity of the patient’s experience. Just as the coupling of linguistics with anthropology reduces the importance of field-work in favor of speculation concerning the shared cultural structures of all civilizations, so too does the introduction of linguistics into psychoanalysis obviate demands on the analyst to attend closely to the personal experiences of individual patients.91 The figure of the mother functions as a structure, a mere

87 See Van Haute and Geyskens, Confusion 106 regarding a characterization of the French psychoanalytic tradition as one that refuses biological considerations. They say this move can be understood in terms of a tradition of French philosophy that stretches back to Descartes. Van Haute characterizes Lacan’s thought in precisely these terms, identifying an ontological dualism concerning language and the subject versus the body. Van Haute makes the excellent point that Lacan follows in a French tradition that includes Kojève and Sartre. For Kojève this distinction concerns labor and history versus nature, and for Sartre the in-itself versus the for-itself (Van Haute 286).

88 Highlighting the significance of this distinction, they write the following: “Our preceding criticism of Oedipus therefore risks being judged totally superficial and petty, as if applied solely to an imaginary Oedipus and aimed at the role of parental figures, without at all penetrating the structure and its order of symbolic positions and functions” (AO 52).

89 Deleuze and Guattari write that “the distinction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic permits the emergence of an Oedipal structure as a system of positions and functions that do not conform to the variable figure of those who come to occupy them in a given social or pathological formation” (AO 52).

90 See E 34 regarding the way the signifier constitutes man rather than man constituting the signifier, as well as Lévi-Strauss’ Structural Anthropology 353 concerning the way human beings make themselves through complex bodies of rules. In Tristes Tropiques, he says the customs of communities act as structures (178).

91 “The Interpretation of Utterances,” included in Two Regimes of Madness, analyzes classic case studies along schizoanalytic lines.


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function in a structural Oedipal configuration, one that results in personal identity through identification with another,92 although this identification is itself always fleeting and compromised.

Structuralists such as Lévi-Strauss and Lacan take Saussure’s work on linguistics as their starting point. Saussure’s innovation consists in attributing the production of meaning to a to non-coincidence, the difference between both words and words and words and things.93 This cleavage then is understood in terms of lack, a lack that conditions the production of meaning.94

Lacan places this lack at the heart of human existence.95 Human subjectivity is in some sense always split or fractured, never fully coinciding with itself (Four Concepts 107). The subject can only ever strive after but never arrive at unity. The symbolic excludes from the beginning any totalization of the subject or a coincidence in terms of what it wants (Van Haute 32-33).96 The symbolic is the domain of both language and social life (Noms-du-père 28), introducing differentiation into imaginary identification, fracturing an image of oneself as a complete subject, through symbolic signifiers and laws that govern linguistic relations – metaphor (resemblance) and metonymy (contiguity).97 After imaginary identification in the mirror stage, the next step in psychic development is symbolic differentiation, which results from the subject’s entry into language and occurs because of the father function – “the name of the father.”98

The name of the father now occupies the same position in mental life as that previously occupied by the image of the mother. The father prohibits the

92 See Tristes Tropiques 100 regarding persons as functions.93 Saussure writes that “in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether

we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither idea nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system” (653).

94 This is what Lévi-Strauss refers to it as the “floating signifier.” See his Introduction to Marcel Mauss 63.

95 Structuralism supposes language is unique to human beings, that language is a uniquely human capacity. For example, Lacan says that symbols introduce something new into animal life, a new human reality into animal reality (Noms-du-père 56). For this reason, an understanding of language is central to an account of philosophical anthropology, for distinguishing and explaining what it means to be human.

96 Further, see Van Haute 26 regarding the way the split subject results from its inscription in language.

97 For a discussion of these principles, see E 412-439.98 Although distinguished for explanatory purposes, these two registers are never wholly

separate or independent from one another. The task of Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” is explaining how these two domains are related. Not only are human beings actually born into language but also always identify with someone or something.

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mother as an object of the child’s desire.99 A tension is thereby established between an object of identification and a law that frustrates this identification. No matter how deep the renunciation, this image always and inevitably plays a role by affecting signifiers within the signifying chain.100 As the ultimate object of desire, all signifiers have a greater or lesser resemblance to this image – governed by the principle of metaphor – and they all occupy positions closer to or further from it – governed by the principle of metonymy.

These resemblances and positions order the signifying chain of language, and desire traces its path on the basis of this lost image. The name of the father prohibits imaginary identification, thus establishing a tension that maintains the movement of desire.101 It introduces lack into desire so that one never stops wanting, “a transcendent stock that distributes lack to all the elements of the chain, something in common for a common absence” (AO 208). The whole of mental life receives meaning and is ordered on the basis of this lack.102 The interaction between imaginary identification and symbolic differentiation results in the lack lying at the basis of language and conditioning both the production of meaning and mental life.103

Keeping in mind the organic model, one can thus say that through this interaction an end is established that is constantly frustrated, which acts as a reference for differentiating normality from pathology. One is forced to choose between either continuing to identify with the mother and becoming pathological or heeding the voice of the father, entering the symbolic order, and dealing with the lack-in-being this choice entails, “an oscillation between

99 Understood through a structuralist lens, the primordial law against incest should be understood as one that institutes the imposition of culture on nature (E 229). The Oedipus complex is thus a myth that takes different forms in different societies but that “will always have to do with the institution of a law that forbids total fulfillment” (Van Haute 194). Lacan thus describes the primal father as introducing the law against incest as a satisfaction “sans frein” (Noms-du-père 87). See Van Haute and Geyskens, Confusion 134-135 regarding the Oedipus complex as a symbolic narrative as well.

100 See AO 73, where Deleuze and Guattari seem to offer a reading of Lacan in these terms.101 See E 34 regarding desire’s inability to satisfy itself except by finding an object that’s been

fundamentally lost, as well as Van Haute 124 and 279-280 concerning this lost encounter with the first other. Deleuze and Guattari describe this process as “the extraction of a transcendent complete object from the signifying chain, which serves as a despotic signifier on which the entire chain thereafter seems to depend, assigning an element of lack to each position of desire, fusing desire to a law” (AO 110).

102 Hence, the phallus is not simply another partial object but one that gives meaning to them all. See Van Haute 210 on this.

103 In the Lacanian scheme, even knowledge then is motivated by a lack in pleasure or dissatisfaction, rather than an overflowing of life – as in Aristotle (Fink 155). See Fink 23 regarding the nature of desire as structurally unsatisfiable.


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two poles: the neurotic identification, and the internalization that is said to be normative” (AO 80).

According to Lacan, schizophrenia is a response to a lack of meaning by the individual. The schizophrenic is “foreclosed” from the symbolic register, and her delusions are attempts to make up for this loss in the register of the real. Although both Freud and Lacan are of the view that psychoanalysis can do relatively little to treat schizophrenia, this perspective nonetheless informs much of Lacan’s thought regarding psychopathology. Hysteria and obsessional neurosis – the two major neuroses, according to Lacan – are conceived as lapses in meaning, attempts by the individual to come to terms with the questions “Am I a man or a woman?” “Am I dead or alive?” In both cases, the problem is understood – say Deleuze and Guattari of Lacan – in terms of a failure of differentiation, foreclosure from the symbolic order that would allow the individual to understand and come to terms with sexual and existential difference.104

Psychopathology would thus result from a failure by the disjunctive synthesis to properly distinguish between different things, to assign one and only one meaning to each and every thing. As both full persons and structural functions, mothers and fathers must be understood in an exclusive and restrictive sense, as being either one thing or another, as being responsible for either one function or another. Since the syntheses of the unconscious can neither function independently of nor be understood apart from one another, to better understand the disjunctive synthesis, it is again necessary to turn to an examination of the connective synthesis.

For both Freud and Klein, the breast is a partial object. As a partial object – before the coalescence of the drives and the constitution of the mother as a full person – the breast has a nutritive function for the child. Its meaning is

104 Deleuze and Guattari describe this as follows: “Commit incest and you’ll be a zombie and a hermaphrodite. In this sense, indeed, the three major neuroses that are termed familial seem to correspond to Oedipal lapses in the differentiating function… the familial triangulation represents the minimum condition under which an ‘ego’ takes on the co-ordinates that differentiate it at one and the same time with regard to generation, sex, and vital state” (AO 75). Following the path of healthy development, the individual should enter the symbolic order and lack would become central to the notion of desire. Contra the ego psychologists, the goal of analysis is not that the patient identify with the analyst’s desire but that the patient confront her own lack-in-being. See Fink 37 on this, as well as my previous discussions in chapter one. “Resignation to Oedipus,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “to castration: for girls, renunciation of their desire for the penis; for boys, renunciation of male protest – in short, ‘assumption of one’s sex.’ This something in common, the great Phallus, the Lack… it is like the One in negative theology, it introduces lack into desire and causes exclusive series to emanate, to which it attributes a goal, an origin, and a path of resignation” (AO 59-60).

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determined by its function, in terms of its relation to other partial objects and flows. The breast emits a flow of milk that nourishes the child, and the child derives satisfaction from the autoerotic activity of thumb sucking because it mimics feeding. From an economic point of view, however, such activity is superfluous. Freud considers activities in which the organism achieves no discernible advantage to its survival dangerous.105

One cannot make sense of such an activity on the basis of the child’s survival. If all goes well developmentally, however, the child gives up and moves away from autoeroticism and towards genital sexuality, developing relations with other people. This stage then acts as an end in terms of which earlier developmental states can be understood, a wider context in terms of which partial objects and full persons are oriented and thus become meaningful.

The breast receives the meaning it does – is recorded in a certain way – because of its relation to a flow, a partial object through which the drive of self-preservation satisfies itself in relation to a flow of milk. As a full person, the significance of the mother is determined in the same way, by the relations between partial objects and flows that constitute her.106 The significance of the relation between mother and child is not itself basic but determined by relations between partial objects and flows. From this perspective, however, the novelty of Deleuze and Guattari’s commitments are unclear, the way their account diverges from Freud’s concerning the variability of the relation between the aims and objects of drives.107 Central to this discovery, for Freud, is an understanding of normal as well as abnormal psychical development. On this score, the position of Deleuze and Guattari diverges from that of psychoanalysis.

One can discern in Deleuze and Guattari’s work two competing perspec-tives on psychoanalysis, especially evident in their treatment of Freud. This concerns the distinction between an earlier, physiologically-inclined Freud who thinks in terms of the body and material causes – evident in the cathartic method – and a later, psychologically-inclined Freud who thinks in terms of the mind and immaterial causes – evident in the psychoanalytic method proper and becoming especially pronounced with the introduction of the

105 See, for example, the tellingly titled section “Dangers of Fore-Pleasure” in Three Essays 211-212.

106 Thus, following Freud and psychoanalytic drive theory, Deleuze and Guattari are squarely opposed to the primacy of personal relations emphasized by attachment theorists. On this see Van Haute and Geyskens, From Death Instinct.

107 See TRM 80-81 where desire is explained along polymorphous, Freudian lines.


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death drive.108 Although this distinction can be understood in terms of the relation between mind and body and the relative importance given to material over ideal conditions in an understanding of human existence109, it can also be understood in terms of a developmental model regarding psychopathology that comes to increasingly dominate Freud’s work, appearing hand-in-hand with the introduction of the Oedipus complex as the nuclear complex of psychopathology.110

No longer are psychopathologies understood as caricaturish exaggerations of common human dispositions. Rather, sickness arises when the individual fails to achieve universal developmental benchmarks. In this way, the idea or postulate of a mature, adult sexuality free of psychopathology comes to the forefront. For Deleuze and Guattari, this concerns the way full persons receive meaning based on relations between partial objects and flows, determined by an ultimate end of psychosocial development. One only achieves this ideal by sufficiently overcoming earlier developmental stages as an end towards which this development is tending and in terms of which it can be understood. This shift introduces a universalism into psychoanalytic thought with respect to the importance of familial relations.

Psychoanalysis takes familial relations as its point of departure and reference (AO 120). The primacy of familial relations as a theoretical touchstone can be explained by the fact that these are supposedly the first a child knows, “thought to be lived first by the child as a microcosm, then projected into the adult and social development” (AO 174). They serve as the archetypes for relations

108 For a different, more nuanced, and perhaps better-informed perspective on the relation between mind and body in Freud, see Antoine Vergote’s “Husserl et Freud sur le corps psychique de l’action.” Vergote develops the notion of a “libidinal” or “psychic” body in Freud’s work. This category would complicate an understanding of Freud in terms of a simple positivism or mind-body dualism. On the relation between mind and body in Freud, see Jonathan Lear’s Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis. Although Lear’s work on Aristotle is excellent, the problem with his understanding of psychoanalysis seems to be his incapacity to disengage from Aristotle, reading Freud as though he were a sagely humanist. I am grateful to Herman Westerink for these references.

109 See my discussions of this distinction in chapter one.110 For example, “Every new arrival on this planet,” Freud writes, “is faced by the task of

mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis. With the progress of psycho-analytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex has become more and more clearly evident; its recognition has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis from its opponents” (Three Essays 226). Significantly, this dogmatic and ominous warning does not appear in earlier editions of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality but was added in 1920. Regarding Freud’s understanding of the Oedipus complex as the nuclear complex of psychopathology, see “Autobiographical Study” 55 as well.

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that a child has throughout its life. Furthermore, childhood and the types of familial relations established therein have an impact on persons throughout the rest of their lives. Phenomena such as trauma, guilt, the Oedipus complex, and castration anxiety produce their formative, lasting effects during this stage and in the context of these relations.111

Such relations and their effects serve as the foundation for cultural phenomena such as social organization, religious practices, and the arts.112 In this sense, familial relations are understood as having an inherent and invariable significance, based on the significance of family members. The meaning of family members is determined by the functions they serve in the development of the child’s psychical life. Central to this development is the resolution of the Oedipus complex, giving up one’s mother as an object of desire via the internalization of the father’s cruel voice threatening castration, which conditions the internalization of social norms and values.

Hence, illegitimately understanding and employing the first connective synthesis results in supposing that partial objects and flows come from and belong to full persons, as characteristics or attributes of substances. These full persons have an invariable meaning conditioned by the role they play in the development of the child’s psychical life – the way form is determined by telos. The mother is desire’s primary and archetypical object, and the father acts as the agent of this desire’s repression. By maintaining that flows and partial objects come from full persons – or tend towards the constitution of full persons – psychoanalysis can ascribe to these persons – either actually or as structural functions – a preeminent place in the constitution and development of mental life.113 Full objects and persons are then coded according to a process of exclusive, restrictive inscription. As functions, they determine the course of mental development, either healthy or pathological.

According to psychoanalysis, the identity of the subject is determined on the basis of these relations; the identity of the child is determined by its development in terms of Oedipal relations. Being a child consists in taking

111 Regarding the importance of childhood when dealing with repression, see Freud’s account in “Lay Analysis” 205.

112 On this score, Deleuze and Guattari write that “castration and oedipalization beget a basic illusion that makes us believe that real desiring-production is answerable to higher formations that integrate it, subject to transcendent laws, and make it serve a higher social and cultural production” (AO 74).

113 “The desiring-experience is treated,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “as if it were intrinsically related to the parents, and as if the family were its supreme law. Partial objects are subjected to the notorious law of totality-unity acting as ‘lacking.’ The disjunctions are subjected to the alternative of the undifferentiated or exclusion” (AO 120).


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the mother as an object of desire and then giving up this object in accordance with the father’s cruel voice. The child is only capable of occupying one of these developmental stages at a time – either it clings to the mother as an object of desire or internalizes the voice of the father – and, for this reason, full objects and persons are understood and recorded as either one thing or another. Familial relations thus determine what and how people are.114

According to Deleuze and Guattari, however, this exclusive disjunction is a false dichotomy psychoanalysis pushes on patients. “The psychoanalyst,” thus, “became the carrier of Oedipus” (AO 56). Patients are forced into what Deleuze and Guattari call a “double bind,” resulting from an exclusive and restrictive understanding and employment of the disjunctive synthesis of recording; “the only choice it permits is between the exclusive symbolic differentiations and the undifferentiated Imaginary, correlatively determined by Oedipus… the double-bind is not the schizophrenic process” (AO 110). The patient misunderstands the nature of her desire. She conceives of herself as a lack directed at a lost object, seeking to orient herself in a certain manner towards this lack – undergoing psychoanalysis. However, this represents only one way the disjunctive synthesis of recording can be understood and employed.

According to a legitimate, inclusive understanding and employment of the disjunctive synthesis of recording, partial objects and flows can always appear as one thing and another, and another, and another: “The train is not necessarily daddy, nor is the train station necessarily mommy” (AO 46). Deleuze and Guattari attribute this discovery to the emphasis they place on schizophrenia, taking schizophrenic experience as the touchstone of their transcendental analyses.115 They deduce different conditions for the possibility of experience from those of common sense and neurosis. Schizophrenia consists in an experience in which partial objects and flows always appear as one thing and another, and another, and another.

114 “When Oedipus slips into the disjunctive syntheses of desiring-recording,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “it imposes the ideal of a certain restrictive or exclusive use on them that becomes identical with the form of triangulation: being daddy, mommy, or child. This is the reign of the ‘either/or’ in the differentiating function of the prohibition of incest: here is where mommy begins, there daddy, and there you are – stay in your place” (AO 75).

115 They write that “schizophrenia teaches us a singular extra-Oedipal lesson, and reveals to us an unknown force of the disjunctive synthesis, an immanent use that would no longer be exclusive or restrictive, but fully affirmative, non-restrictive, inclusive. A disjunction that remains disjunctive, and that still affirms the disjointed terms, that affirms them throughout their entire distance, without restricting one by the other or excluding the other from the one, is perhaps the greatest paradox. ‘Either…or…or,’ instead of ‘either/or’” (AO 76).

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The importance of schizophrenic experience consists in the fact it does not suppose the notions substance, form, and teleology to make sense of experience. It thus shows a legitimate use of the syntheses of the unconscious – how they are understood and employed in an immanent fashion without reference to these notions and a concomitant sense of transcendence (AO 319). Starting with schizophrenic experience results in a legitimate, non-restrictive understanding and employment of the disjunctive synthesis of recording.116 Partial objects and flows are conceived in-themselves rather than as belonging to full objects and persons; parts are conceived in themselves rather than as parts of wholes.117

Just as with an illegitimate understanding and employment, a legitimate understanding and employment of this synthesis conditions the structures and meanings of wider social relations. Whereas the structures and meanings of wider social relations appear intrinsic and invariable with an illegitimate understanding and employment of the disjunctive synthesis of recording – based on its assignment of intrinsic and invariable meanings to full objects and persons – given a legitimate understanding and employment of the disjunctive synthesis of recording, the structures and meanings of wider social relations appear extrinsic and variable, determined by the variable relations into which partial objects and flows enter. “Detachments from signifying chains” then refer to the nature of variable and extrinsic relations between partial objects and flows.118

Different types of partial objects and flows can and do enter into the same relations. They are not specific to the types of partial objects and flows related. Hence, these relations are themselves “detachable” from the amalgamations of partial objects and flows out of which they arise and to which they give meaning.119

116 They write that “if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts. It is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately” (AO 42). For Deleuze and Guattari, this schizophrenic experience is the same as that of the child: “From his very earliest infancy, the child has a wide-ranging life of desire – a whole set of nonfamilial relations with the objects and machines of desire – that is not related to the parents” (AO 48).

117 In his engagements with the work of Walt Whitman in Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze describes fragments and their organization in an “open” or “fragmented” whole along similar lines. I return to the political significance of this account in chapter six.

118 Deleuze describes Spinoza’s account of “essences” along similar lines, which he also refers to as “true codes.” See EPS 292-293 and 312 ff.

119 Describing this scheme and challenging the primacy psychoanalysis places on parental figures and familial relations in terms of it, Deleuze and Guattari say, “our ‘object choice’ itself refers to conjunctions of flows of life and of society that this body and this person intercept,


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Since this perspective does not suppose substance, form, and teleology, any pre-determined and invariable coding of partial objects and flows on the basis of and in relation to totalities is out of the question.120 Assuming these syntheses are understood and employed in a legitimate manner, the connections and relations between partial objects and flows appear, are coded, and recorded as ever changing, continuously establishing fresh connections within this maelstrom of partial objects and flows.121

Just as an illegitimate understanding and employment of the first synthesis conditions an illegitimate understanding and employment of the second, and vice versa, so too does an illegitimate understanding and employment of the third synthesis condition an illegitimate understanding and employment of the first two, and vice versa.

7. Conjunctive Synthesis

The synthesis of conjunction concerns the nature of subjectivity and the constitution of groups – the way subjectivity identifies with a particular group in terms of its origin and destiny, as well as the way groups develop in terms of this identification. In very general terms, the goal of the conjunctive synthesis consists in determining one’s origins – processes that form the subject, connections – leading to an understanding of what one is – the meaning of the

receive, and transmit, always within a biological, social, and historical field where we are equally immersed or with which we communicate” (AO 293). Although parental figures and familial relations are important to one’s development and the subject’s formation, according to Deleuze and Guattari, they function as partial objects that condition variable relations occurring in the context of broader social ones, rather than as full persons that condition invariable familial relations on which broader social ones are based: “The family is by nature eccentric, decentered” (AO 97).

120 They write the following with respect to this worldview and its connection to literature: “Maurice Blanchot has found a way to pose the problem in the most rigorous terms, at the level of the literary machine: how to produce, how to think about fragments whose sole relationship is sheer difference – fragments that are related to one another only in that each of them is different – without having recourse either to any sort or original totality (not even one that has been lost), or to a subsequent totality that may not yet have come about? It is only the category of multiplicity, used as a substantive and going beyond both the One and the many, beyond the predicative relation of the One and the many, that can account for desiring-production: desiring-production is pure multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity” (AO 42). I return to their notion of multiplicity and its relation to Anglo-American literature in the next chapter.

121 Deleuze and Guattari write that “the father and the mother exist only as fragments, and are never organized into a figure or a structure able both to represent the unconscious, and to represent in it the various agents of the collectivity; rather, they always shatter into fragments that come into contact with these agents” (AO 97).

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subject, recording – and the conjunctive synthesis brings together the other two. An understanding and employment of this synthesis already supposes and conditions either a legitimate or illegitimate understanding and employment of the other two.

According to a “biunivocal and segregative” understanding and employ-ment of the conjunctive synthesis, the characteristics and characteristic relations of full objects and persons are determined by the social ends towards which they are tending. This constitutes the final element of the organic model in its relation to the syntheses of the unconscious, “when…a living organism appears as a single subject; when the connections become global and specific, the disjunctions exclusive, and the conjunctions biunivocal” (AO 287). Taken together, one supposes the existence of full objects and persons (substance-connective synthesis) whose relations are intrinsic and invariable (form-disjunctive synthesis), which are determined by the ends towards which they are tending (teleology-conjunctive synthesis).122

Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses concerning an illegitimate understanding and employment of the conjunctive synthesis consist in subjectivity’s identification with a particular extra-familial group in terms of its initial membership in a family, as well as the role extra-familial groups play in the development of the dynamics of family relations. Their discussions of these points take place in terms of psychoanalysis and capitalism. They claim psychoanalysis works in tandem with capitalism, effecting an obfuscation regarding the nature of desire and, therefore, human existence.123 122 Regarding this process, Deleuze and Guattari write that desiring-machines are “organic,

technical, or social machines…the same machines under determinate conditions” (AO 287). By “determinate conditions” they mean “forms into which the machines enter as so many stable forms, unifying, structuring…the selective pressures that group the parts retain some of them and exclude others, organizing the crowd” (AO 287-288). Desiring machines are thus conceived as organic because of an illegitimate understanding and employment of the syntheses, which are themselves conditioned by notions belonging to the organic model. They mention the notion of teleology specifically: They are “the same machines, but not at all…the same use of the syntheses… Only what is not produced in the same way it functions has a meaning, and also a purpose, and intention” (AO 288 – emphasis added). Hence, only when one understands and employs the syntheses of the unconscious in an illegitimate fashion does desire appear as lack that organizes experience in a teleological fashion: “The desiring-machines on the contrary represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is made with them, what they make in themselves” (AO 288). I return to the way social machines employ the syntheses of the unconscious in an illegitimate fashion, giving rise to the Oedipus complex, shortly.

123 This results, however, from an illegitimate employment and understanding of the syntheses, and for this reason the nature of familial relations – the role they play in the development of extra-familial relations and the role extra-familial relations play in the development of the dynamics of familial relations – are by no means immutable. On this score, Deleuze and Guattari write that these “private persons are formally delimited in the locus of restricted


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Since psychoanalysis takes as its starting point familial relations, Deleuze and Guattari say it operates with a false arche that determines a mistaken telos – the configurations and dynamics of familial relations restrict the destinations to which one can aim in later life.124 Familial relations act as models for future social relations, and the Oedipus complex plays a central role in this development. The emphasis psychoanalysis puts on the dynamics of familial relations consists in a distinction between familial and extra-familial relations. In some sense the two are understood as mutually exclusive, as biunivocal.125 If the child continues to cling to or identify with its mother, then the child neither begins a family of its own nor develops its own identity. Its development is stunted. The existence of society depends on the healthy development of individuals. As a therapeutic technique, say Deleuze and Guattari, psychoanalysis supposes it plays a central role in this process.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to uncover memories, thoughts, and feelings that have become unconscious as a result of repression, which influence the ways people behave, usually in the form of pathological symptoms understood as the outcome of this process. These memories, thoughts, and feelings are usually in the order of infantile wishes and desires. If these can be remembered and, thereby, added onto or integrated into a coherent matrix with the rest of a patient’s mental life, then the pathological symptoms cease. Since repression occurs in early childhood, familial relations are the context for these infantile wishes or desires and the touchstone for investigating them as their point of origin. Through free association, dream analysis, transference, and other psychoanalytic techniques, one rediscovers these repressed wishes or desires. The realization these are the sources of the pathology is part of the cure: “biunivocalization…so that is what this means” (AO 101).

family as father, mother, child. But instead of being a strategy that, through the actions of alliances and filiations, opens onto the entire social field, is coextensive with it, and countersects its co-ordinates, it would appear that the family is now merely a simple tactic around which the social field recluses, to which it applies its anonymous requirements of reproduction, and that it counteracts with all its dimensions… The familial determinations become the application of the social axiomatic” (AO 264). I return to the role of the social axiomatic in my discussions of the capital machine.

124 See Holland, Anti-Oedipus 40 regarding the role familial relations play in the restriction of options.

125 Describing the “overcoming” of the Oedipus complex, for example, Freud writes that at “the same time as these plainly incestuous phantasies are overcome and repudiated, one of the most significant, but also one of the most painful, psychical achievements of the pubertal period is completed: detachment from parental authority, a process that alone makes possible the opposition, which is so important for the progress of civilization, between the new generation and the old” (Three Essays 227).

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According to Deleuze and Guattari, however, this is a false dichotomy in the service of extra-familial authority. They say this dichotomy – where one either enters the realm of the social and internalizes external authority or fails to do so and becomes sick as a result – is itself determined by and in the service of extra-familial authority.126 Yet again, quasi-Aristotelian, Hegelian commitments are implicit to an employment and understanding of the conjunctive synthesis in this manner.

The development of individuals conditions the development of society, just as the development of society conditions the development of individuals. The two reciprocally determine and mutually reinforce one another.127 Even before discovering or positing the importance of familial relations, psychoanalysis uses as its point of reference broader social relations in terms of which individuals are oriented, relations towards which individuals are supposedly developing or tending.128 This “biunivocal use, illegitimate from the point of view of the unconscious itself, has what appears to be two moments; first, a moment that is racist, nationalistic, religious, etc., and that, by means of a segregation, constitutes an aggregate of departure that is always presupposed by Oedipus, even if in a totally implicit fashion” (AO 110-111). Deleuze and Guattari here mention one’s belonging to, or alignment with, a race, nation, or religion – social coordinates in terms of which the subject’s identity is formed.129 Herein lies the segregative characteristic of an illegitimate understanding and employment of this synthesis.

126 “Oedipus says to us,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “either you will internalize the differential functions that rule over the exclusive disjunctions, and thereby ‘resolve’ Oedipus, or you will fall into the neurotic night of imaginary identifications. And everybody knows what psychoanalysis means by resolving Oedipus: internalizing it so as to better rediscover it on the outside, in social authority, where it will be made to proliferate and be passed on to the children” (AO 79).

127 See Group Psychology 80, where Freud makes an analogy between the integration of individuals into groups and his account of the development of the instincts towards genital sexuality in Three Essays 207. On this point, Deleuze and Guattari say Oedipus “presupposes in itself a certain kind of libidinal investment of the social field, of the production and the formation of this field… that depend on the determinations of the subjugated group as an aggregate of departure and on their libidinal investment (from the age of thirteen I’ve worked hard, rising on the social ladder, getting promotions, being a part of the exploiters)” (AO 103).

128 “Only in appearance,” however, “is Oedipus a beginning… In reality,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “it is a completely ideological beginning, for the sake of ideology. Oedipus is always and solely an aggregate of destination fabricated to meet the requirements of an aggregate of departure constituted by a social formation” (AO 101).

129 Regarding a segregative, biunivocal use of the conjunctive synthesis – and the way notions such as race and nation determine familial relations – see Buchanan, Anti-Oedipus 86.


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Groups are themselves determined in opposition to other groups, how groups differ from one another. Individuals belonging to different groups then also differ from one another in terms of their characteristics and characteristic relations.130 Given the wider social milieu in which the family exists, the latter takes on special form and meaning.131 These characteristics and characteristic relations are determined in individuals by the family through a process Deleuze and Guattari call “retention.” Through retention, the family determines which characteristics and characteristic relations individuals have.132 This process takes place with reference to broader, extra-familial relations onto which familial ones open, the different ends towards which individuals are tending, an end that concerns one’s membership in a particular group.133

Familial relations are important because of the role they play in the individual’s integration into a wider community. The first step in this process is “a familial moment that constitutes the aggregate of destination by means of an application,” where “the third paralogism…fixes the precondition for Oedipus by establishing a set of biunivocal relations between the determinations of the social field and the familial determinations” (AO 111). The biunivocal nature of the conjunctive synthesis thus concerns the developmental discontinuity between familial and extra-familial relations and distinctions between various extra-familial groups with which the individual identifies.134 Persons and people appear as the operative factor in the formation of subjectivity. On this basis, one seeks out one’s origin in a group for the sake of aligning oneself with this group. According to a biunivocal, segregative understanding and employment of the conjunctive synthesis, fostering normal, healthy relations with one’s family while ultimately giving 130 I return to a characterization of the development of individuals and groups along these lines

in chapter five, in my discussion of the political import of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of opinion.

131 Deleuze and Guattari say, “we know in point of fact that the actual factors are there from childhood, and that they determine the libidinal investments in terms of breaks and connections that they introduce into the family” (AO 99).

132 “Retention is the primary function of the family: it is a matter of learning what elements of desiring-production the family is going to reject, what it is going to retain, what it is going to direct along the dead-end roads leading to its own undifferentiated (the miasma), and what on the contrary it is going to lead down the paths of a contagious and reproducible differentiation” (AO 125).

133 “Oedipus informs us: if you don’t follow the lines of differentiation daddy-mommy-me, and the exclusive alternatives that delineate them, you will fall into the black night of the undifferentiated,” belonging to no group and, hence, being no one (AO 78).

134 See Holland, Anti-Oedipus 84 regarding the division between familial and extra-familial relations, and Holland, Anti-Oedipus 39 and 41 concerning the nature of a segregative use of the third synthesis.

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up these familial ties is a precondition for the development of the individual as well as society.135

For Deleuze and Guattari, this is all a mystification, describing only one way the conjunctive synthesis can be understood and employed.136 Since this description and the way the syntheses of the unconscious are illegitimately understood and employed suppose broadly Aristotelian, Hegelian commitments, a legitimate understanding and employment of the third synthesis of the unconscious can be understood along Spinozistic lines. As Deleuze and Guattari describe it in their discussion of a legitimate understanding and employment of the conjunctive synthesis, the nature and origin of subjectivity can be understood in terms of Spinoza’s account of individuality.

According to a legitimate understanding of the conjunctive synthesis, subjectivity results from the conjunction of partial objects and flows with detachments from signifying chains, as unique sets of relations, tantamount to Spinozistic individuality.137 For Deleuze and Guattari, what appears as a subject as substance is, in fact, residue alongside the productive machines, on and in their interactions with the body without organs.138 In this way, the body without organs is similar to Spinozistic substance, which Deleuze and Guattari take as their model rather than the organism.139 The subject is

135 “The fact that the father is first in relation to the child,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “can only be understood analytically in terms of another primacy, that of social investments… if it appears that Oedipus is an effect, this is because it forms an aggregate of destination (the family become microcosm)” (AO 179). Further, they say that the “primacy of the social field as the terminus of the investment of desire defines the cycle, and the states through which the subject passes… to evolve solely within the movement of progression or regression” (AO 276).

136 They say “the problem is not resolved until we do away with both the problem and the solution. It is not the purpose of schizoanalysis to resolve Oedipus, it does not intend to resolve it better than Oedipal psychoanalysis does. Its aim is to de-oedipalize the unconscious in order to reach the real problems” (AO 81).

137 “The subject itself is not at the center,” they write, “which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered, defined by the states through which it passes” (AO 20).

138 “It is a strange subject, however, with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs” (AO 16). Regarding the schizophrenic identity as one organized on the organless body, as a proper name or unique set of relations, see TRM 26.

139 Related to an understanding of individuals and community conceived as unique sets of relations – in which the relations between them are ones of sympathy or “vibrations” – they write that “schizoanalysis would come to nothing if it didn’t add to its positive tasks the constant destructive task of disintegrating the normal ego. Lawrence, Miller, and then Laing were able to demonstrate this in a profound way: it is certain that neither men nor women are clearly defined personalities, but rather vibrations, flows, schizzes, and ‘knots.’ The ego refers to personological co-ordinates from which it results, persons in turn refer to familial


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neither a substance nor a locus of agency, one with a fixed identity.140 Not only subjectivity but also community is conceived along broadly Spinozistic lines, unique sets of relations, chance occurrences that result from the interaction of partial objects and flows.141 Both individuals and community are the result of productive processes of connecting, coding, and conjuncting, according to the syntheses of the unconscious.142 However, when and where this takes place – in relation to which flows and partial objects – is undetermined.143

Unlike in Kantian philosophy where the subject is basic – where transcendental subjectivity is pre-categorical and conditions the synthesis of experience – for Deleuze and Guattari the subject is thoroughly residual, parasitic on the syntheses of the unconscious as forces that bring together partial objects and flows. The subject is the result of the syntheses rather than the syntheses being the result of the subject.144 This subject only appears alongside the syntheses of the unconscious, alongside the syntheses’ operations on partial objects and flows – what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “desiring-machines.”145 Understood legitimately, the conjunction of partial objects

co-ordinates… The task of schizoanalysis is that of tirelessly taking apart egos and their presuppositions; liberating the prepersonal singularities they enclose and repress; mobilizing the flows they would be capable of transmitting, receiving, or intercepting; establishing always further and more sharply the schizzes and the breaks well below conditions of identity; and assembling the desiring-machines that countersect everyone and group everyone with others” (AO 362). See my discussions of these points in chapter two.

140 Rather, in “the third synthesis,” they write, “the conjunctive synthesis of consumption…the body without organs” is “in fact an egg, crisscrossed with axes, banded with zones, localized with areas and fields, measured off by gradients, traversed by potentials, marked by thresholds… Phenomena of individuation and sexualisation are produced within these fields” (AO 84-85).

141 Deleuze and Guattari write that “in reality, it is a question of encounters or conjunctions, of derivatives and resultants between decoded flows” (AO 267).

142 They write that “our choices in matters of love are at the crossroads of ‘vibrations,’ which is to say that they express connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions of flows that cross through a society, entering and leaving it, linking it up with other societies, ancient or contemporary, remote or vanished, dead or yet to be born” (AO 352).

143 See, further, AO 289 and 309 regarding the chance nature of these occurrences. This maelstrom of partial objects and flows can also be conceived in terms of Pre-Socratic thought, a primordial soup out of which subjects and objects arise through the interactions of different matters, because of different forces.

144 Deleuze reiterates this same point in a later discussion of Foucault: “The subject’s always something derivative. It comes into being and vanishes in the fabric of what one says, what one sees” (N 108). See Buchanan, Anti-Oedipus 52 regarding the syntheses as formative of the subject.

145 Deleuze and Guattari explain this in terms of desire: “Desire is not in the subject, but the machine in desire – with the residual subject off to the side, alongside the machine, around the entire periphery, a parasite of machines” (AO 285). This same conceptual framework is evident when Deleuze describes the relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights as one of interpenetrating intensities (N 116), as well as his description of

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and flows with signifying chains constitutes this residual subjectivity. This recognition is itself part of the process of coupling partial objects, flows, and detachments from signifying chains.

In its most basic form, the conjunctive synthesis is a genealogical principle that consists in the recognition “I am…” Understood and employed in a legitimate fashion, this recognition brings together partial objects and flows (connection), giving them meaning based on their relations to one another (recording).146 Because of the recognition occurring in the third synthesis, partial objects and flows come to be coupled – partial objects and flows become coded on the basis of these relations. Before this recognition, partial objects and flows are not yet coded and, for this reason, indistinguishable from one another. They have no meaning. The subject, full objects, and persons that arise in the third synthesis function as points of orientation, tying together partial objects and flows, establishing relations as detachments from signifying chains between them.

A legitimate understanding of the conjunctive synthesis thus recognizes that subjects result from partial objects and flows. Although the subject is a result of the syntheses of the unconscious, the formation of subjectivity itself reveals the syntheses of the unconscious as the source of subjectivity and experience. The subject, full objects, and persons lie at the point of convergence between partial objects and flows. Detachments from signifying chains refer to relations that exist between the conjunctions of these two elements. Since no telos establishing a path of normal development exists, neither does a hard and fast developmental distinction between the familial and extra-familial. Deleuze and Guattari discuss this in terms of a fourth psychoanalytic paralogism, that of the “afterwards.”

In the first place, this concerns a conception of the libido and the primacy of familial relations.147 A biunivocal understanding and employment of the conjunctive synthesis results in an understanding of familial and extra-familial relations as mutually exclusive, where the dynamics of familial

the body and the web of the spider forming one and the same machine, where the slightest “vibration” causes the spider to spring (PS 158). Elsewhere Deleuze refers to individuals as “proper names,” unique sets of relations (TRM 158). See AO 351 where they refer to Lawrence’s account of sexuality as a matter of flows, where people consist in vibrations. See Buchanan, Anti-Oedipus 95 concerning subjects and community being formed in one and the same way, as amalgamations of syntheses.

146 “The unities found are never in persons,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “but rather, in series which determine the connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions of organs” (AO 142).

147 “By joining sexuality to the familial complex,” they write, “by making Oedipus into criterion of sexuality in analysis…Freud himself posited the whole of social and metaphysical relations as an afterwards or a beyond that desire was incapable of investing immediately” (AO 58).


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relations determine those of broader social relations – the child must first abandon its earliest objects of desire and identification for the sake of broader social relations. Psychoanalysis thus supposes desire has an initially familial quality. Insofar as desire’s object is specifically sexual in nature, libido must be desexualized before investing the social field, the process of sublimation. But if one abandons an understanding and employment of the conjunctive synthesis in a biunivocal manner, then the mutually exclusive nature of familial and extra-familial relations disappears. Deleuze and Guattari claim familial and extra-familial relations are in some sense contemporaneous.148 As opposed to developmental stages through which a person passes, they are conceived as different layers constituting one and the same organizational matrix belonging to desire.149 The nature of familial relations thus determines those of extra-familial relations, but no less than extra-familial relations determine familial ones. For this reason – to understand social relations and the role these play in an understanding and employment of the syntheses of the unconscious – it is necessary to turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s accounts of extra-familial relations.

8. Social Machines

According to Deleuze and Guattari, the unconscious should be conceived as a vast reservoir of productive material power. The body without organs and desiring and social machines arise out of and work within this maelstrom. All of these elements are part of the unconscious, part of desire. Versus such a conception, in large part psychoanalysis conceives of desire psychically and in terms of lack. This results from the specificity of the experience with which psychoanalysis begins, taking neurotic experience as its touchstone, supposing and reinforcing an organic worldview that results in an illegitimate understanding and employment of the syntheses.

148 On this point, Deleuze and Guattari write the following: “active desiring-production, in its very process, invests from the beginning a constellation of somatic, social, and metaphysical relations that do not follow after Oedipal psychological relations” (AO 129).

149 They says that the “small child lives with his family around the clock; but within the bosom of this family, and from the very first days of his life, he immediately begins having an amazing non familial experience that psychoanalysis has completely failed to take into account” (AO 47). Further, Deleuze and Guattari write “it is evident that the individual in the family, however young, directly invests a social, historical, economic, and political field” (AO 166).

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Beginning with schizophrenic experience, Deleuze and Guattari arrive at different conclusions, one of which is the non-primacy of familial relations.150 Following Lawrence, they do not think social relations are modeled on familial ones. Versus psychoanalytic theory, Deleuze and Guattari maintain the primacy of social over familial relations. Familial relations are types of social relations – species of the genus rather than models or outgrowths. In turn, this commitment grounds the relative importance they give to social over psychic repression. The importance of familial relations consists in the types of social relations they establish, the way they form individuals with reference to broader social relations.151

Schizophrenic experience reveals that familial relations are not primary. Schizophrenic experience falls outside the mainstream, and this is because the syntheses of the unconscious do not work for the schizophrenic the way they do for everyone else.152 Deleuze and Guattari do not begin with the question, “What happened to the schizophrenic?” but rather, “What happened to everybody else? Why do the majority understand and employ the syntheses of the unconscious in an illegitimate fashion, thereby misunderstanding the nature of desire, subjectivity, groups, and relations between individuals and groups?” As discussed above, their answer concerns the organic model and metaphysical suppositions that condition it.

The syntheses of the unconscious are understood and employed paralogistically when one supposes the notions substance, form, and teleology. However, this is only part of Deleuze and Guattari’s answer. After all, the syntheses are neither personal nor psychical, and the subject results from the syntheses of the unconscious rather than the syntheses resulting from the subject. Insofar as these are elements of desire, there is nothing specifically psychical about these operations. The unconscious is impersonal and material. For this reason, an explanation concerning how and why one understands and employs the syntheses of the unconscious in an illegitimate fashion must refer to impersonal, material conditions. This is precisely Deleuze and Guattari’s approach. Their explanation concerns social repression.

Whereas Freud and psychoanalysis take psychic repression to be a natural process that provides the basis for civilization’s further social repression,

150 They say their goal is to “discover beneath the familial reduction the nature of the social investments of the unconscious… this is the whole task of schizoanalysis” (AO 271).

151 Deleuze and Guattari write that “it is not a question of knowing whether or not the familial determinations or indeterminations play a role. It is obvious that they do” (AO 91).

152 “The schizo has his own system of co-ordinates,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “for situating himself at his disposal, because, first of all, he has at his disposal his very own recording code, which does not coincide with the social code” (AO 15).


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Deleuze and Guattari say that social repression is primary. Social repression provides an initial basis for the further psychic repression of a subject. A subject capable of psychic repression is itself the result of social repression.153 Although psychoanalysis solidifies and reinforces a mode of existence belonging to the organic worldview, psychoanalysis is not itself a sufficient condition of this mode of existence.154

Psychoanalysis neither invents the Oedipus complex nor does it manufacture the emphasis psychoanalysis places on the role of parental figures and familial relations in an understanding of relations between individuals and community; psychoanalysis discovers these.155 The psychic repression psychoanalysis and oedipalization inculcate is itself part of social repression.156 According to Deleuze and Guattari, social repression results from the representations established by social machines, the mechanism by which the syntheses of the unconscious are employed in an illegitimate manner.157 Social machines organize people in certain ways for specific ends. They arise out of and organize the undifferentiated productive powers of desire and the unconscious, and the goal of this organization is recording.

This is necessary because, in its pure state, desire is productive in a disorganized and haphazard fashion. Desire is evident in this form in schizophrenia, as an overflowing in production whose frenetic activity never

153 “What we mean,” they write, “is that Oedipus is born of an application or a reduction to personalized images, which presupposes a social investment” (AO 278).

154 “Oedipus is never a cause: it depends on a previous social investment of a certain type, capable of falling back on (se rabattre sur) family determination” (AO 178). Deleuze and Guattari are unequivocal on this point: “Once again,” they write, “psychoanalysis does not invent Oedipus; it merely provides the latter a last territoriality, the couch, and a last Law, the analyst as despot and money collector” (AO 269).

155 See further AO 121 and 269, N 17, and Holland, Anti-Oedipus 24, 39, and 52 for a discussion of this point.

156 The term “repression” is equivocal. For the sake of the present analysis – in accordance with what Deleuze and Guattari seem to have in mind – it can be used synonymously with “determination” or “organization.” Hence, repression is not the same as – nor should it be confused with – “oppression,” where one is kept from doing what one is capable. Although there are elements of oppression in Deleuze and Guattari’s account of repression, this is neither the whole nor most important part of their story. On the contrary, determination or organization has the capacity to enhance one’s powers of acting. I am grateful to Justin Litaker’s having pointed this out to me.

157 On this point, they write the following: “Each type of social machine produces a particular kind of representation” (AO 262). “The social machine is literally a machine…flows are set apart, elements are detached from a chain, and portions of the tasks to be performed are distributed. Coding the flows implies all these operations” (AO 141). Further, see AO 177, where Deleuze and Guattari say the social conditions of Oedipus are inseparable from the paralogisms of the unconscious.

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ceases – rather than a lack that yearns for a lost object.158 Characterizing desire along these lines, Deleuze and Guattari write that if “desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society… It is therefore of vital importance for a society to repress desire” (AO 116). This is not, however, because desire wants a different social order or revolution. Rather, desire “is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants” (AO 116). Desire is revolutionary in nature because it “lacks nothing, because it is defined as the natural and sensuous objective being” (AO 311). Desire is not a psychical activity that consists in a fundamental lack but an overflowing of physical power that wants for nothing (AO 296). Insofar as sundry philosophical theories dealing with the nature of communal organization have supposed relations between individuals and communities are determined by goal-directed activity – people receiving from others goods and services they are incapable of providing for themselves, in exchange for providing goods and services to others159 – based on a conception of desire as lack, desire is revolutionary in nature because it wants for nothing, cannot be oriented or coded socially.160

Although society depends on the productive powers of desire, cohesive social organization is untenable on the basis of the haphazard and disorganized nature of desire. In its pure state, it introduces chaos into the social order – a chaos on the basis of which neither individuals nor community can subsist. Different forms of coding thus act in the service this objective. Religion, for example, acts as an antidote to chaos – a shield against which people protect themselves from chaos. Employing parables, myths, and theologies gives people a framework to make sense of the world in which they live, bringing a familiarity and regularity to experience that it otherwise lacks. According to religious scholar Mircea Eliade, neither individuals nor groups can subsist in chaos, and religion plays a central role in the process of warding off chaos (34). The appearance of the sacred – a “hierophany” – “makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes

158 See AO 6-7 for their discussion of Henri Michaux’s description of the schizophrenic table, and Lévi-Strauss’ characterization of bricolage as a process of schizophrenic production. Buchanan says that, for Deleuze and Guattari, desiring production exists everywhere but is only visible in its pure state in schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus 43).

159 For instance, this is precisely how Plato describes the genealogy of communal life in the Republic, as well as Hobbes in the Leviathan.

160 Social machines repress “the part of this production that does not enter into social production or reproduction. It is what would introduce disorder and revolution into the socius, the noncoded flows of desire” (AO 173). In this form – and from the perspective of society – desire is threatening and must be coded.


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the order of the world” (30). Similarly, the sociologist Peter Berger associates the loss of one’s orientation in experience – “anomy” – with the individual’s becoming worldless, similar in nature to schizophrenia (21). Thus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, social machines code flows and thereby excise chaos. Decoded flows escape coding and, therefore, appear strange and unfamiliar, reintroducing chaos into human experience.161 The position Deleuze and Guattari develop then does not imply that coding is bad, where people would be free if only they could cultivate decoded flows.162

Although recording concerns the disjunctive synthesis specifically, again, none of the syntheses ever work on their own or independently of one another. In each case, the recording operation of the second synthesis implies what Deleuze and Guattari call a “surface” on which the relations between flows are recorded, what they call the “socius” or “full body.” Their notion of the full body must once again be understood with reference to the model of the body without organs.

As opposed to assuming an organic model in which intrinsic and invariable forms determine substances in terms of ends, amalgamations of partial objects and flows are related in different fashions by extrinsic and variable detachments from signifying chains. Each “machine” has a full body on which the relations between flows are recorded – the “body of the earth,” the “body of the despot,” and the “body of capital.” The nature of these bodies determines the ways the flows are coded – “coding” on the body of the earth, “overcoding” on the body of the despot, and “decoding and axiomatizing” on the body of capital – although these bodies never merely act or appear as surfaces of recording.163

The surfaces of recording “fall back” on forces of production, thereby determining the nature of these extrinsic and variable relations, making the surfaces of recording/full bodies on which relations are recorded appear as the

161 They associate the decoding of flows with a chaos in which human life cannot subsist: “the body without organs is the deterritorialized socius, the wilderness where the decoded flows run free, the end of the world, the apocalypse” (AO 176). This is the reason that Deleuze and Guattari reject Marcel Mauss’ exchangist conception of social order, saying instead the primary task of the socius is coding, which it does in the first place by inscribing bodies. See AO 185-186 on this.

162 Again, see Butler’s account. One can discern this line of thought in Paul Patton’s work on the political implications of Deleuze’s thought. See Patton, Deleuze and the Political 136, where he describes Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of deterritorialization as a juridical norm.

163 “This socius,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “may be the body of the earth, that of the tyrant, or capital. This is the body that Marx is referring to when he says that it is not the product of labor, but rather appears as its natural or divine presupposition… constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed…which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi-cause” (AO 10).

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productive causes of these relations. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this process as “representation.” Representation is responsible for both psychic and social repression and is comprised of two layers, one “in depth” and the other “on the surface.” Its in-depth layer is comprised of three elements – the repressed representative, repressing representation, and displaced represented (AO 184); its on-the-surface layer involves a conception and account of language, which comprises the second part of the way relations between flows are recorded.

Social machines then are the second part of Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to the question of what happened to the schizophrenic. Social machines are their impersonal, material answer to the question of how and why the organic worldview becomes dominant. The basic tenets of the organic model arise from these socio-historic formations, where the syntheses of the unconscious come to be employed in an illegitimate fashion. Each machine gives rise to and articulates a specific configuration and understanding of the relation between the syntheses, which gives prominence to one of the three, through whose employment one comes to assume the basic elements of the organic worldview.

The savage territorial machine misemploys the first connective synthesis, giving rise to substance and unity in the form of parents – the creation of full persons. The barbarian despotic machine misemploys the second disjunctive synthesis, giving rise to form and organization through the figure of the despot. The civilized capitalist machine misemploys the third conjunctive synthesis, giving rise to the notion of teleology in the form of an infinite debt – desire as lack.164 In this way, psychoanalysis takes up all the elements of the social machines and incorporates them (AO 304). Having this framework in place allows for an examination of the specific elements and operations of the different social machines.

9. Primitive Territorial Machine

To varying degrees, it is supposed that biology determines familial relations. Sons and daughters are persons who fathers and mothers sire and birth, such that marriage rules establishing prohibitions concerning sexual relations between them are based on biology. This is evident in the emphasis placed on the universality of the incest taboo. Something akin to a form would thus

164 They say that “the savage territorial machine operated on the basis of connections of production, and that the barbarian despotic machine was based on disjunctions of inscription derived from the eminent unity. But the capitalist machine, the civilized machine, will first establish itself on the conjunction” (AO 224). See AO 262 as well, where they further discuss this point.


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determine the kinds of relations into which persons do and do not enter, and characteristics of persons and the characteristic relations into which they do and do not enter follow from their natures. Broader social relations then would simply be the natural outgrowth of familial ones, and rules governing relations between family members and society at large would result from the natures of the members themselves.

Implicit to this scheme is the supposition that relations are internal to their terms. Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective is exactly the opposite.165 Persons are themselves the result of prohibitions, and from this perspective relations would be external to their terms. Relations determine the nature of the terms and, in this respect, Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective is thoroughly structuralist.166 This is their first step in explaining the socially and historically conditioned nature of the Oedipus complex.

With respect to the first synthesis, this concerns an understanding of the self in substantial terms – individuals as relatively autonomous self-subsistent entities – a metaphysical supposition conditioned by the primitive territorial machine. The territorial machine employs the connective synthesis in an illegitimate manner and produces full persons in the process, establishing relations between the flows and partial objects of desire in terms of territorial representation, supporting a conception of family members as full persons. This is the process through which social repression takes place, organizing and determining the productive powers of desire. Flows are coded in and through territorial representation.

Central to territorial representation is the full body in reference to which coding takes place, in term of which flows are organized and on which these relations are recorded. The territorial machine inscribes or records relations between the flows of desire on the body of the earth; the earth serves as the full body in territorial representation. However, the full body never appears merely as a recording surface but falls back on the productive forces of desire, making it appear as though the earth is productive.167 This claim can be understood in terms of primitive myths and a perennial understanding of the earth as a productive source of life. In the savage socius, the body of the earth and that of the individual are coextensive – human beings are part of

165 “The personal material of transgression,” they write, “does not exist prior to the prohibition, any more than does the form of persons” (AO 71).

166 See Structural Anthropology 50 where Lévi-Strauss claims kinship is not based on nature and/or blood ties, as well as Tristes Tropiques 314, where he says social relations are not modeled on familial ones; the chief is not a father.

167 “The earth is the primitive, savage unity of desire and production” (AO 140).

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the earth and the earth is part of human beings. Eliade explains the perennial importance of the tera mater as a religious symbol in these terms (138-141). According to Deleuze and Guattari, however, as a recording surface, the full body reciprocally determines the nature of both organization and recording.168 Hence, although the connective synthesis is central to the territorial machine, the syntheses never function on their own or independently of each other. With this perspective in mind, one can understand their claim that, in territorial representation, recording takes place through inscription, by marking the body.

Connections between partial objects and flows are recorded by inscribing the human body, just as one would the body of the earth, for example, to distinguish burial sites, trade routes, and other significant locales.169 Inscription designates and prescribes relations between things, giving them a familiarity they otherwise lack. For example, “I’ve been here before – I carved my initials in this tree,” or, “He’s one of us. I can tell from his tattoo.” The on-the-surface layer of representation consists in this, which implies a conception of language. Here one-to-one correspondences are established between connections and the recording surface. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this operation as “coding.”170

Coding takes place through a relationship between three different parts of the human body – the hand, voice, and eye – and they claim the relation between these elements gives rise to language. The account of language that Deleuze and Guattari associate with territorial representation is thus thoroughly material in nature. Language rests on and arises out of sonorous, corporeal interactions between parts of the body. The hand records relations by inscribing them directly on the flesh, while the eye sees the pain this inscription evokes. Like Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari associate this inscription with the movement of culture, a mnemotechnics that creates a

168 “If the full body falls back on the productive connections and inscribes them in a network,” they write, “it must attribute them to itself as though it were their cause… It is not content to inscribe all things, it must act as if it produced them. It is necessary that the connections reappear in a form compatible with the inscribed disjunctions, even if they react in turn on the form of these disjunctions” (AO 154).

169 “The essence of” inscribing the “socius…resides in these operations: tattooing, excising, incising, carving, scarifying, mutilating, encircling, and initiating… following the require-ments of a socius” (AO 144).

170 Regarding this system of inscription or non-signifying signs – as below or before meaning – see Colebrook, Guide for the Perplexed 115-116. In the next section, I show how Deleuze and Guattari explain the transition from an account of language in these terms to one where meaning proper arises.


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memory for human beings.171 Hence, like Nietzsche, their emphasis is on the importance of material over ideal conditions in an understanding of human existence.

The psychical faculty of memory is itself the result of a physical process of inscription. In the primitive socius then, the voice is semi-independent of graphism, initially independent of writing. Witnessing the pain of inscription, the eye bridges the gap between writing and the voice, establishing a relation between these relatively autonomous components. Deleuze and Guattari’s account here is close to Foucault’s in The Order of Things; the title of this work in French, Les mots et les choses, makes the connection explicit.

There Foucault writes that “language exists first of all, in its raw and primitive being, in the simple, material form of writing, a stigma upon things, a mark imprinted across the world which is a part of its most ineffaceable forms” (42). For the ancients, language was a thing “inscribed in the fabric of the world” (43). Words and things become separated from one another, says Foucault – as representation for the classical age and as signification for us – and the eye and ear become separated from each other as well (43). Foucault’s early work concerns identifying discursive formation, their transitions, and the ways they condition knowledge. Only later does his attention turn to the reasons for these transitions, which are transitions in non-discursive formations. Deleuze and Guattari seem to be considering something similar. The analogue could be stated as follows: on-the-surface representation : in-depth representation :: discursive formations : non-discursive formations.172 Connected to this line of investigation, both turn their attention to literature.

Foucault claims that, beginning in the 19th century, literature achieves an autonomous existence, beginning with Hölderlin and continuing through Mallarmé and Artaud (Order 43-44). Literature shows “language in its brute being” (Order 119). Words appear as things. Deleuze’s engagements with literature seem at least in part concerned with the same dynamic – an in-depth, schizophrenic use of language that he also identifies in the work of Artaud.173 As opposed to a scheme where writing would be a second-best representation of speaking, writing is primary and speech only ever secondary 171 On this score, they write that “cruelty is the movement of culture that is realized in bodies

and inscribed on them, belabouring them. That is what cruelty means. This culture is not the movement of ideology” (AO 145).

172 Similarly, see F 10, where Deleuze describes the “diagonal movement” as a relation between discursive relations and non-discursive milieus.

173 See F 130-131, where Deleuze points towards the being of language in literature as a clue to what comes after man and god. I am grateful to Christopher Penfield for many fine conversations regarding the relation between the thought of Deleuze and Foucault.

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– the voice is a response to the action of the hand. The affinities with Derrida’s early work here are obvious.

For Derrida, however, writing is only ever the result of lack – a lack in the subject’s presence to itself – that he variously refers to as “supplement,” “trace,” “différance,” etc. In this way then, Derrida subscribes to a similar conceptual framework as Lacan, one where meaning is based on that which is missing.174 Hence, Derrida’s supplement, trace, différance, etc. functions in the same way as Lacan’s name of the father. Both take as their point of orientation a critique of Hegel’s use of totality – understanding a part in terms of the whole – but, in the end, the positions they develop come to the same thing – understanding the whole in terms of a missing part. Deleuze and Guattari find both positions equally odious.

Insofar as language is itself an organizational mechanism, the conception of language belonging to this on-the-surface layer of territorial representation relates to an in-depth layer that concerns the organization of productive forces. The latter is comprised of three elements, the repressed representative, repressing representation, and displaced represented of desire. Territorial representation’s in-depth layer organizes forces of material production through the dynamics of these elements, resulting in the constitution of full persons. Deleuze and Guattari say the “intensive germinal flux” plays the role of repressed representative, relations of alliance act as the repressing representation of desire, and (homosexual) incest is the displaced represented of desire. Examining each of these and the relations between them sheds light on how their interactions constitute full persons and contribute to establishing the Oedipus complex.

Once again, in its pure form, desire is a disorganized force of material production; cohesive social organization is untenable on the basis of desire in its intensive state.175 Deleuze and Guattari refer to the raw productive energy with which the territorial machine works as the “intensive germinal flux,” discussing the productive nature of this energy in terms of “filiation.” They characterize the forces of the germinal flux as intensive rather than extensive. This is significant to their analyses of the ways filial relations concerning whom one can and cannot marry determine productive forces in territorial

174 “If there are structures,” Derrida writes, “they are possible only on the basis of the fundamental structure which permits totality to open and overflow itself such that it takes on meaning by anticipating a telos which here must be understood in its most indeterminate form” (Writing and Difference 31).

175 For this reason, in what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “pure nomadism,” all production takes place outside the camp, in a kind of proto-socius. See AO 148 for their discussion of this point.


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representation, as well as the way this process gives rise to full persons out of the maelstrom of partial objects and flows that constitute desire.

Whereas filiation is normally understood in terms of relations of human sexual reproduction, in Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the territorial machine there is nothing specifically human about this productive energy. Rather, it refers to forces of material production in general, including those of nature.176 For this reason, the intensive germinal flux occupies the position of desire’s repressed representative in territorial representation.177 As the repressed representative of desire, the intensive germinal flux comes to be extended – repressed, organized, or determined – by relations of alliance.178 For the sake of cohesive social organization, the intensive germinal flux must be organized or repressed. Relations of alliance give form to the frenetic productive activity of the intensive germinal flux, and they thus act as the repressing representation of desire.179 Relations of alliance play the role of repressing representation in territorial representation, organizing the intensive germinal flux – relations of alliance extend or organize filial relations of production.

In territorial representation, relations of alliance take the form of rules of prohibition and exclusion, concerning what one does and does not receive.180 Versus structural anthropological interpretations, Deleuze and Guattari claim neither is it “possible simply to deduce alliance from filiation, the alliances from the filiative lines,” nor are filial relations based on invariant social structures (AO 146).181 Rather, they are strategic in nature.182 Filial relations 176 They write the following: “we know the nature of this intensive filiation, this inclusive

disjunction where everything divides, but into itself, and where the same being is everywhere, on every side, at every level, differing only in intensity” (AO 154).

177 “The intensive germinal flow is the representative of desire; it is against this flow that the repression is directed” (AO 162).

178 “For the flows to be codable,” they write, “their energy must allow itself to be quantified and qualified… Now this is possible only in the system in extension that renders persons discernible” (AO 163).

179 “We call this second instance – the repressing representation itself – alliance, since the filiations become extended only in terms of lateral alliances” (AO 164).

180 Deleuze and Guattari write that “alliance is the form in which the socius appropriates connections of labor in the disjunctive order of its inscriptions” (AO 188).

181 Concerning the invariance of social structures, Lévi-Strauss writes the following regarding tribal organization: “And yet these units, whose identity, number, and distribution are constantly varying, remain linked by relationships whose content is equally variable but whose formal character is maintained through the vicissitudes in their history” (Structural Anthropology 22).

182 “A kinship system is not a structure but a practice, a praxis, a method, and even a strategy” (AO 147). They serve political ends, such that a “kinship system only appears closed to the extent that it is severed from the political and economic references that keep it open” (AO 148).

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work in the service of broader extra-familial relations, political relations of alliance.183 Alliance relations thus organize the disorganized, haphazard filial relations of the intensive germinal flux by making them extensive, extending and organizing filial relations.184 At bottom, this organization concerns who does which type of work for what (AO 144).

In terms of the first synthesis, marriage laws establish connections between men and women, although these concern less the joining of men and women as full persons than connecting raw materials and productive capacities, establishing connections between land, foodstuffs, and specialized skills.185 For this reason, filial relations can be understood as being in the service of alliance or political relations.186 The nature of persons is determined by rules that establish licit and illicit relations between partial object and flows – which ones are brought together and kept apart – in turn determining the nature of the persons occupying roles within these relations.187 Primitive territorial representation creates persons by establishing rules regarding whom one can and cannot marry, which concern the organization of production, organizing productive material forces.188 Central to this organization are procedures of

183 “Primitive families constitute a praxis, a politics, a strategy…formally, they are the driving elements of social reproduction; they have nothing to do with an expressive microcosm” (AO 166).

184 They say that “alliance imposes on the productive connections the extensive form of a pairing of persons” (AO 155)

185 Once again, this can be understood in terms of Foucault. Regarding the nature of governmentality, he says the following: “in La Perrière’s text, you will notice that the definition of government in no way refers to territory: one governs things. But what does this mean? I think this is not a matter of opposing things to men but, rather, of showing that what government has to do with is not territory but, rather, a sort of complex composed of men and things. The things, in this sense, with which government is to be concerned are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrications with those things that are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, and so on; men in their relation to those other things that are customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking, and so on; and finally men in their relation to those still other things that might be accidents and misfortunes such as famines, epidemics, death, and so on” (Essential Foucault 235). Thus, although Foucault doubts that governmentality concerns territory, what he goes on to describe is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari characterize as a territory. Hence, the things with which governmentality is concerned seem to be the same in nature as what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as desire.

186 “The method of the primitive territorial machine,” they write, “is in this sense the collective investment of the organs” (AO 142).

187 “The respective position of the mother or father as kin or affine, the patrilineal or matrilineal character of the filiation, and the patrilineal or matrilineal character of marriage, are active elements of the repression, and not objects at which the repression is directed” (AO 159)

188 On this, Deleuze and Guattari write that “alliance imposes on the productive connections the extensive form of a pairing of persons…but inversely reacts on inscription by determining an exclusive and restrictive use of these same disjunctions” (AO 155).


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exclusion and restriction, represented by the incest taboo. One moves from intensive states to discernible persons through the process of naming relations – and thus establishing persons – that do not exist prior to the prohibitions that constitute these relations (AO 160).

Homosexual incest acts as the displaced represented in territorial representation, that against which relations of alliance as the repressing representation are directed. Although a universal prohibition on incest provides the basis for marriage rules, homosexual incest is a limit case – totally superfluous and unproductive from the perspective of political relations. In the service of alliance relations, in territorial representation filial relations appear to be directed against this possibility – protecting society from homosexual incest. Desire supposedly tends towards incest, and filial relations in the service of alliance relations protect society from incest. Filial relations in the service alliance relations thus appear to be directed against incest as an unproductive activity that would threaten the social order. According to Deleuze and Guattari, however, this dynamic is mere show. Relations of alliance only appear to be directed against incest. For this reason, they refer to incest as the “displaced represented of desire,” a red herring that mystifies and draws attention away from the actual dynamics of desire and social organization.189 This mystification goes hand-in-hand with a fourth paralogism of the unconscious, what Deleuze and Guattari call “displacement.”

Here one would conclude from a law of prohibition that the object prohibited is something one desires. According to Deleuze and Guattari, exactly the opposite is the case.190 Things only appear once desire is organized, once desire is repressed.191 As a determination in or organization of desire, restriction creates objects in the first place. The object does not itself exist

189 “By placing the distorted mirror of incest before desire (that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?), desire is shamed, stupefied, it is placed in a situation without exit, it is easily persuaded to deny ‘itself ’ in the name of the more important interests of civilization (what if everyone did the same, what if everyone married his mother or kept his sister for himself? There would no longer be any differentiation, any exchanges possible)” (AO 120).

190 What “really takes place,” they write, “is that the law prohibits something that is perfectly fictitious in the order of desire or of the ‘instincts,’ so as to persuade its subjects that they had the intention corresponding to this fiction. This is indeed the only way the law has of getting a grip on intention, of making the unconscious guilty. In short, we are not witness here to a system of two terms where we could conclude from the formal prohibition what is really prohibited” (AO 114-115).

191 “If desire is repressed,” they write, “this is not because it is desire for the mother and for the death of the father; on the contrary, desire becomes that only because it is repressed” (AO 116).

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before the restriction.192 With the fourth paralogism then, “a strange sort of reasoning leads one to conclude that, since it is forbidden, that very thing was desired. In reality, global persons – even the very form of persons – do not exist prior to the prohibitions that weigh on them and constitute them…desire receives its first complete objects and is forbidden them at one and the same time” (AO 70). For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari say incest is a factual impossibility.193 As opposed to incest as an unproductive activity, filial relations in the service alliance relations are directed against desire as a haphazard and disorganized force of productive activity.

The problem for social cohesion and stability is not a lack in production but disorganized overproduction, and the goal of social organization is not the instatement of incentives or aims to spur on production but one of organizing the inherently disorganized and haphazard forces of material desire.194 For example, regarding Aztec civilization, the historian J.M. Roberts writes that careful “and tight control kept population where it was needed; removal or marriage outside the local community were not allowed. All produce was state property” (487). Incest is not repressed but desiring-production, that which does not enter into social production or reproduction (AO 173). From a social perspective, however, territorial representation has a major drawback, which concerns the earth as the full body or surface of recording.

Once relations are recorded on the earth, one might say they are “written in stone.” Relations inscribed on the body of the earth become relatively invariant. Coding then considerably constricts the capacity of a social order to alter relations between partial objects and flows for political ends. Take, for instance, the case of gangs. Nothing intrinsic to gang members disposes them to act in a certain way, to enter into specific relations. Gang designations denote the intersection of specific constellations of connections between various flows – drugs, money, clothing, cars, music, etc. Rather than terms determining or being internal to relations, relations determine or are external

192 Deleuze and Guattari write that “it is through a restriction, a blockage, and a reduction that the libido is made to repress its flows in order to contain them in the narrow cells of the type ‘couple,’ ‘family,’ ‘person,’ ‘objects’” (AO 293).

193 “The possibility of incest would require both persons and names – son, sister, mother, brother, father. Now in the incestuous act we can have persons at our disposal, but they lose their names inasmuch as these names are inseparable from the prohibition that proscribes them as partners; or else the names subsist, and designate nothing more than prepersonal intensive states that could just as well ‘extend’ to other persons, as when one calls his legitimate wife ‘mama,’ or one’s sister his wife” (AO 161).

194 See Holland, Anti-Oedipus for a reading of Anti-Oedipus in terms of Bataille’s notion of the generalized economy, where the problem of social order would not be one of lack but organizing excess.


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to their terms. At times the constellations of these connections are recorded directly on the body as tattoos, brands, piercings, etc., denoting relations of gang membership. Corporeal testaments to the relations that constitute oneself, inscriptions of this type are relatively invariant and so too are the relations of which these signs are the record. Only with great difficulty do members succeed in extracting themselves from gang life after initiation. Furthermore, recording in this manner precludes the possibility of meaning in the Saussurian-structuralist sense.

Marks inscribed on the body of the earth refer only to the relations of which they are the records. Coding establishes one-to-one correspondences between relations and their records on the body of the earth. On a Saussurian-structuralist account of language, however, meaning results from differences between various signified and signifying elements. Amalgamations that arise at the intersection of partial objects and flows in territorial representation then lack meaning. The one-to-one correspondences characteristic of coding in territorial representation preclude the possibility of meaning. A second social machine superimposed on the first – the barbarian despotic machine – conditions the possibility of meaning in the above-described sense.

10. Barbarian Despotic Machine

The despotic machine is the second form of social organization Deleuze and Guattari discuss. Whereas territorial representation records on the body of the earth, despotic representation records on the body of the despot. The body of the despot functions as the full body in despotic representation. As a result, whereas territorial representation codes – establishing one-to-one correspondences between relations and their records – despotic representation consists in an operation Deleuze and Guattari call “overcoding.” This machine misemploys the disjunctive synthesis, giving rise to the notion of form in relation to the despot. Since the second synthesis directly concerns the nature of recording, the account of language Deleuze and Guattari associate with despotic representation lies closer to a common conception of language and meaning formation, giving rise to a conception of language and meaning formation central to Lacan (AO 207).

For Lacan, meaning formation depends on the difference between signifying elements and what they signify, rather than the correspondence between words and things. This difference is understood in terms of a lack that results from the name of the father – a dominant signifier that signifies nothing but on which the entire process of meaning formation nonetheless depends.

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This signifier conditions the possibility of meaning in general, disrupting and breaking one-to-one correspondences between signifiers and signifieds, distributing lack throughout the signifying chain (AO 208). Meaning is thus “irreducible,” which is to say one never reaches a point of termination, a point where one would not have to refer to other signifiers to understand the term under consideration. This commitment unites Lacan and Derrida.195 Since this dominant signifier conditions the entire process of meaning production in general, but itself signifies nothing, it is more appropriately understood as a “function” or “law.”196 One can begin to understand Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the despotic social machine on the basis of this scheme.

According to Lacan, these structures and functions are inherent to language and human existence, insofar as human existence is itself inscribed in language – human beings are language-competent creatures. For Deleuze and Guattari, these structures and functions are incidental to human existence, and Lacanian thought is itself firmly rooted in despotic representation.197 An understanding of language in these terms is socially conditioned, resulting from overcoding and despotic representation. As a condition for the possibility of meaning, recording in general and coding specifically can be understood in terms of overcoding. As with coding in territorial representation, the nature of overcoding in despotic representation is determined by the full body on which recording takes place. The despotic machine records on the body of the despot. To understand this point though, it is necessary to turn to a religious distinction. Examining the difference between “transcendent creator” gods and “immanent regulatory” gods within religious traditions sheds light on Deleuze and Guattari’s commitments here.

195 Derrida discusses the irreducibility of meaning in terms of a chain of differential references, “writing as the disappearance of natural presence” (Of Grammatology 159). An understanding of this same type is at work in his discussion of Husserl. Criticizing Levinas’ reading, Derrida describes Husserl’s “idea in the Kantian sense” as a horizon that can never itself become an object – or an intuition that will remain forever empty – opening “the work of objectification to infinity” (Writing and Difference 150). Nevertheless, Derrida’s reading makes of “ideas in the Kantian sense” a border or horizon – a non- or missing object – that structures the whole of experience. Regarding the relationship between Lacan and Derrida in these terms, see my previous discussion as well.

196 “It is the nature of the law,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “to signify without designating anything. The law does not designate anything or anybody” (AO 214).

197 “Lacan accompanies the signifier back to its source,” they write, “to its veritable origin, the despotic age, and erects an infernal machine that welds desire to the Law, because, everything considered – so Lacan thinks – this is indeed the form in which the signifier is in agreement with the unconscious, and the form in which it produces effects of the signified in the unconscious… that famous metaphors and metonymy – all of that constitutes the overcoding and the deterritorialized despotic machine” (AO 209).


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Transcendent creator gods are understood as creating the world but then leaving the scene, entrusting its care to immanent regulatory gods responsible for various quotidian functions. The latter live in the world among people and are more closely associated with animistic and totemic religions. Regulatory gods are spirits within things and animals with which people identify their lineages. Characterizing this scheme, Berger says that “The entire universe is pervaded by the same sacred forces, from mana in its original prepersonal form to the later animistic and mythological personifications” (61). In a similar vein, Eliade writes that, “following Hume, De Brosses maintained that it was an error to believe that mankind had first possessed a pure idea of God, which later denigrated; on the contrary, ‘since the human mind rises by degrees from the lower to the higher,’ the first form of religion could only have been crude, that is, ‘fetishism,’ a term that De Brosses used in the vague sense of the cult of animals, plants, and inanimate objects” (228). Moving from conceptions of religion based on animism and totemism to those based on transcendent gods, Berger describes a similar process, calling it a “disenchantment of the world,” especially prominent in the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism (111).198 People’s relationships with creator gods are understood as being mediated by relationships they have with lesser gods – through natural phenomena in animistic religions and ancestors conceived as animals in totemic religions – that are in turn mediated by tribal chieftains and medicine men.199 These relations are both filiative and political, providing the basis for both lineage and political alliance.

However, the recording surface falls back on creative forces of production, making it appear as though the full body that provides a surface of recording is itself responsible for production.200 For this reason, in primitive religions and territorial representation, the earth, its natural processes, and animals appear

198 Further, regarding kinship relations between the Lakota and buffalo, elk, and birds, see John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux 27. Regarding the role a common tendency to think of trees and rivers as inhabited or animated by souls – since they display self-movement and change as opposed to rocks that do not – in the thought of Thales, see Kirk, Schofield, and Raven 96-98.

199 Describing the role played by tribal chieftains and medicine men in territorial representation – their part in the way the territorial machine wards off the possibility of any one individual or group of individuals becoming too powerful and thus giving rise to the possibility of decoded flows – Deleuze and Guattari write the following: “The segmentary territorial machine makes use of scission to exorcise fusion, and impedes the concentration of power by maintaining the organs of chieftainry in a relationship of impotence with the group: as though the savages themselves sensed the rise of the imperial Barbarian, who will come nonetheless from without and will overcode all their codes” (AO 152-153).

200 See Kirk, Schofield, and Raven 16 concerning Hesiod’s description of the Titans as born from the sky and earth, Ouranos and Gaia.

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as being productive of existence. Primitive myths and totemic structures are records of these relations, the ways productive material forces are organized. Insofar as one associates primitive religion with territorial representation, people are mediately related to creator gods through natural processes and animals associated with the earth. For Eliade, this concerns the establishment of micro-macrocosmic correspondences – homologies between human existence and the universe, through which human beings relate to the cosmos.201 This changes in despotic representation.

As opposed to a tribal chieftain or medicine man who mediates relations between people and immanent regulatory gods – which in turn mediate relations between people and transcendent creator gods – in the despotic machine, an all-powerful ruler associated with a state installs himself at the intersection of the mediation of these relations. For example, when Amenhotep IV came to power in 1379 BC, he tried replacing traditional Egyptian religion with a monotheistic cult to the sun God Aton (Roberts 84). The despot thus establishes a relation of direct filiation and new alliance with the creator god, establishing direct lineage with the creator god versus mediated filiation through totemic systems, as well as a new relation of unmediated political alliance with the more powerful creator god.202 A myth concerning the despot’s direct filiation with the creator god legitimates his rule and justifies an ultimate understanding of things in terms of their relations to the despot.203 In this vein, Berger writes that “religion has been the historically most widespread and effective instrumentality of legitimation” (32); the best way to legitimate a given social order is to hide its constructed nature (Berger 33). Given the despot’s relations of direct filiation and new alliance, everything is now understood as relying for its existence on and serving the ends of the despot.204 Meaning now depends on the place a thing occupies in relation to this despot, owing its existence to while serving the ends of the despot.205

201 See Eliade 168-169 on this, as well as Neihardt 155 regarding micro-macroscopic relations of these kinds, specifically, his claim that everything tries to be round/take the shape of a circle in accordance with nature.

202 “What is produced on the body of the despot,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “is a connective synthesis of the old alliances with the new, and a disjunctive synthesis that entails an overflowing of the old filiations into the direct filiation, gathering all the subjects into the new machine” (AO 198).

203 On this point, Deleuze and Guattari write the following: “It is therefore inevitable that alliance be mythically represented as supervening at a certain moment in the filiative lines” (AO 155).

204 “He is the sole quasi cause, the source and fountainhead and estuary” (AO 194).205 “As for the subaggregates themselves,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “the primitive territorial

machines, they are the concrete itself, the concrete base and beginning, but their segments here enter into relationships…that ensures their integration into the higher unity” (AO 199).


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Describing this process in terms of the rise of monarchy, for example, Roberts writes the following: “Under the Carolingians, the practice began of ‘vassals’ of the king doing him homage; that is to say, they acknowledged with distinctive ceremonies, often public, their special responsibilities of service to him. He was their lord; they were his men. The old loyalties of the blood-brotherhood of the warrior-companions of the barbarian chief began to blend with notions of commendation in a new moral ideal of loyalty, faithfulness and reciprocal obligations… A chain of obligation and personal service might stretch in theory from the king down through his great men and their retainers to the lowest of the free” (419). The same dynamic took place in Islam, where social ties began being conceived in terms of umma – the brotherhood of believers – rather than blood (Roberts 328).

In these cases, one moves from an emphasis on the materiality of human existence in social and political ties to an idealized, abstract criterion, which Deleuze and Guattari describe as “a cerebral ideality that is added to, superimposed on the material evolution of societies, a regulating idea or principle of reflection (terror) that organizes the parts and the flows into a whole” (AO 219). No longer do people relate to each other and the earth through relations with immanent gods that establish relations of mediated filiation and alliance.206 Under despotism, relations established in territorial representation continue to operate, and although they are still recorded on the body of the earth, they are also now related to the despot – recorded on the body of the despot.207 Everything is recorded twice, once on the body of the earth and again on the body of the despot.208 In this way, relations

206 “The immanent unity of the earth as the immobile motor,” they write, “gives way to a transcendent unity of an altogether different nature – the unity of the State; the full body is no longer that of the earth, it is the full body of the Despot, the Unengendered, which now takes charge of the fertility of the soil as well as the rain from the sky and the general appropriation of the productive forces” (AO 146). The despot “installs himself at the limit, at the horizon, in the desert, the subject of a deterritorialized knowledge that links him directly to God and connects him to the people” (AO 194).

207 “The wheels of the territorial lineage machine subsist,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “but are no longer anything more than the working parts of the State machine. The objects, the organs, the persons, and the groups retain at least a part of their intrinsic coding, but these coded flows of the former regime find themselves overcoded by the transcendent unity” (AO 196).

208 “For what is at stake in the overcoding effected by incest is the following: that all the organs of all the subjects, all the eyes, all the mouths, all the penises, all the vaginas, all the ears, and all the anuses become attached to the full body of the despot… Royal incest is inseparable from the intense multiplication of organs and their inscription on the new full body” (AO 210). The transition Deleuze and Guattari describe from territorial to despotic representation can, once again, be understood in terms of Foucault. Regarding what might be considered the relationship between territorial elements and their integration into a state, Foucault writes the following: “The state is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks

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between partial objects and flows become double coded, what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “overcoded.”209 As in the territorial machine, with despotic representation, this relation gives rise to a corresponding conception of language. The processes of recording in general and coding specifically can be understood as the production of meaning in terms of overcoding.

In territorial representation, inscription is primary – a proto-writing. The hand inscribes the flesh, the voice screams out in pain, and the eye mediates this relation, bringing together the two. Unlike the materialist conception of language territorial representation conditions, however, the despotic machine gives rise to an immaterial, spiritualized conception of language. This concep-tion is also based on a relation between the hand, voice, and eye. Whereas the hand, voice, and eye are relatively autonomous in territorial representation, in despotic representation they all come together in the figure of the despot.210

With despotic representation, the voice of the despot commands, and these commandments are written down. The relationship between the voice and hand thus changes. As opposed to what Deleuze and Guattari call a “system of cruelty” belonging to the territorial machine – where inscription takes place on the body directly – the despot now employs a “system of judgment” that consists in written laws. Writing is now aligned with and becomes subordinate to the voice. The voice dictates, the hand writes, and the eye reads, and – in this way – the voice now takes priority over writing (AO 206). The despot thus establishes a system of bureaucratic state laws in which everything relates to him through this form of writing – through this new relation between the hand, voice, and eye. From the perspective of the social order, despotic representation assuages a difficulty inherent to territorial representation while at the same time introducing a new problem.

that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology, and so forth” (Essential Foucault 309). The organization of productive filial relations through alliance relations in territorial representation can be understood as the analogue of what Foucault calls “a whole series of power networks.” In both cases, the state would be superstructural, insofar as the existence of hierarchical power relations established by the state themselves rely on forms of network repression. Deleuze brings this same framework to bear on his own reading of Foucault. See F 35 where Deleuze says that in primitive societies networks of alliance cannot be reduced to hierarchical structures.

209 “The despotic signifier has the effect of overcoding the territorial chain” (AO 209). See Holland, Anti-Oedipus 3 regarding meaning being defined by a supreme authority, as well as Eliade 165 concerning the way the meaning of the world depends on its being created by God.

210 Deleuze and Guattari write that “the vocal, the graphic, and the visual…converge toward the eminent unity of the despot… the flattening of the graphy into the voice has made a transcendent object jump outside the chain – a mute voice on which the whole chain now seems to depend, and in relation to which it becomes linearized” (AO 205).


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Territorial representation records on the body of the earth, which results in the relative invariance of filial relations – hampering the formation of novel alliance relations, stifling novel forms of social and political organization. Although relations are still recorded on the body of the earth, in despotic representation they are also recorded on the body of the despot. They thereby receive new meaning in terms of their relation to the despot. Unlike territorial representation where recording takes place through inscription on the flesh, recording on the body of the despot consists in a spiritualized writing aligned with the voice – the promulgation of social and political codes through state bureaucracy. Relations are thus malleable in despotic representation in a way they are not in territorial representation.

Since the meaning of all relations ultimately depend on their relation to the despot in despotic representation, to a large extent, the whim of the despot determines the meaning of these relations. Their meanings change depending on their relation to the despot, how they serve the despot. Since these relations are recorded on the body of the despot – the promulgation of social and political codes through state bureaucracy – the possibility exists of their being revised. The spiritualized writing characteristic of despotic representation is revisable in a way the material inscription characteristic of territorial representation is not. The despot disrupts one-to-one correspondences between relations and their records on the body of the earth. Inscriptions on the body of the earth refer to not only the relations of which they are the records but also the despot.

This process introduces ambiguity into the correspondences between relations and their records, synonymous with the slippage between the signifier and signified that conditions meaning on a structuralist-Saussurian account of language. Deleuze and Guattari say that with despotic representation a mute voice speaks from up high (AO 205). Here the despot has the same function as the name of the father in Lacan. Overcoding results in a slippage between the signifier (codes) and the signified (relations), central to the formation of meaning. As with territorial representation, however, from the perspective of social order, despotic representation gives rise to a problem.

Overcoding gives rise to the possibility of decoded flows.211 The double recording that takes place in overcoding gives rise to ambiguity in the nature of relations. Decoded flows escape coding and, therefore, appear strange and unfamiliar, reintroducing chaos into human experience. The job of social machines is to code flows and, thereby, excise chaos, and the problem with overcoding is that it results in decoded flows. Decoded flows are the fear of

211 “Writing – the first deterritorialized flow…it flows from the despotic signifier” (AO 206).

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the socius, threatening to the existence of any and all social order. According to Deleuze and Guattari, however, there is one social machine that actively cultivates and depends for its very existence on decoded flows.

11. Civilized Capitalist Machine

The last form of social organization with which Deleuze and Guattari deal in Anti-Oedipus is the capitalist machine.212 Just as schizophrenia occupies a privileged place in Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses of the syntheses of the unconscious, so too does the capitalist machine play a special role in their analyses of social machines. In a sense, the capitalist social formation acts as a starting point and touchstone for Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses of the other social machines; their analyses are retrospective and could only have taken place from the perspective of capitalism.213

Only in capitalism do the elements of social machines and mechanisms of coding become apparent, at what might be described as their point of breakdown.214 Insofar as each of the social machines operates on the basis of and further conditions an illegitimate understanding and employment of a synthesis of the unconscious, however, unlike schizophrenic experience, capitalism does not display a legitimate understanding and employment of the syntheses. Capitalism itself operates on the basis of and further reinforces an understanding of reality in terms of the organic notion of teleology.

Since capitalism depends on and actively cultivates the decoding of flows, only in capitalism does it become apparent that the basic constituents of reality are not substances organized by forms determined by ends, but partial objects, flows, and detachments from signifying chains organized by the syntheses of the unconscious (AO 320 and 374). Capitalism evidences the contingent, variable nature of the organization of desire, as well as pointing towards desire in its pure state, as a haphazard process of erratic production. In this way, capitalism is a limit case, a worst-case scenario where the mechanisms of representation that condition coding break down.215

212 It seems as though their conception of the “nomadic war machine,” which Deleuze and Guat-tari discuss in Thousand Plateaus, would be a fourth form of non-state social organization.

213 They say that “any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed” (N 171).

214 “Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding,” they write, “that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field” (AO 33).

215 On this score, they write that “in a very precise sense it is true that precapitalist social machines are inherent in desire: they code it, they code the flows of desire. To code desire


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Whereas despotic representation records on the body of the despot, the capitalist machine records on the body of capital. The body of capital functions as the surface of recording in the capitalist machine. While despotic representation overcodes – relating relations recorded on the body of the earth to the despot through a spiritualized, bureaucratic writing – capitalist coding results from an operation Deleuze and Guattari call “axiomatization.” They emphasize the capitalist machine’s misemployment of the third conjunctive synthesis, giving rise to the notion of teleology. Since the third synthesis concerns the nature and formation of subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari relate the notion of teleology with a Lacanian conception of desire.216 This results from the highly abstract nature of the capitalist machine.

Capitalism is the most ideal and least material of the social machines, both in terms of its process of recording and the surface on which recording takes place.217 These constitute its highly abstract nature. With the capitalist machine, an axiomatic takes the place of representation. In broad terms, an axiomatic can be understood as a set of fundamental assumptions or principles regarding the nature of reality, which reciprocally determine the appearance and meaning of reality. Depending on the set of axioms with which one begins, however, the appearance and meaning of reality changes profoundly. One might think, for example, of the difference that exists between pictures of the cosmos based on Euclidean geometry and a conception of space as flat, and those based on Riemannian geometry and a conception of space as curved. A tendency in this direction is already apparent in the transition from territorial to despotic representation.

On the one hand, territorial representation codes by recording on the material body of the earth – inscribing in the flesh – and the despotic machine overcodes by re-recording these relations on the body of the despot, subsuming these relations through a spiritualized writing aligned with the

– and the fear, the anguish of decoded flows – is the business of the socius. As we shall see, capitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract qualities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flow of desire, but under social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit” (AO 139-140).

216 See AO 110 and 208 regarding the socially conditioned nature of lack.217 Regarding its difference from axiomatization as the capitalist form of recording, Deleuze and

Guattari say, “the characteristic object of codes is…to establish necessarily indirect relations among these qualified and therefore incommensurable codes… a code is not, and can never be, economic: on the contrary, it expresses the apparent objective movement according to which the economic forces or connections are attributed to an extraeconomic instance as though they emanated from it, an instance that serves as a support and an agent of inscription” (AO 247).

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voice. While territorial representation wards off the possibility of decoded flows and chaos, recording in a material fashion, it also hampers the possibility of novel relations of social and political alliance. On the other hand, although despotic representation facilitates the possibility of novel relations of social and political alliance, recording in a less material fashion, it also facilitates the possibility of decoded flows and chaos.

The nature of this development is from the concrete to the abstract, from the concretely material to the abstractly ideal, giving rise to ambiguity in meaning and, in turn, decoded flows – relations that escape representation and coding. The capitalist machine moves even further in this direction, depending on decoded flows to function. As with the other social machines, the relation between its procedure of recording and the surface on which recording takes place determines the nature of the capitalist machine. The highly abstract nature of axiomatization then depends on the body of capital as the most ideal and least material of the recording surfaces. To understand Deleuze and Guattari’s commitments here, it is necessary to turn to Marx’s account of the general formula for capital, more specifically, an understanding of the role that money plays in the formula and its relation to coding.

In pre-capitalist economies, says Marx, use-value governs relations of production and exchange, fulfilling concrete needs with commodities produced and obtained in exchange. Here money acts as a common measure, an intermediary in the exchange of different commodities. Marx describes this relation with the formula C-M-C. One begins and ends with a commodity, and the impetus for production and exchange is use-value, the needs these commodities fulfill. On both sides of this formula, the commodities thereby involve and refer to concrete needs. Although the type of commodities brought into exchange and the needs that these fulfill are variable, they always refer to concrete conditions of human existence.

As a cobbler, for example, I need not worry about my feet becoming cold but am certainly concerned about my food source. This concern moves me to establish arrangements with local farmers, ones in which I repair their shoes in exchange for grain, vegetables, etc. In this way, use-value determines the meaning and appearance of commodities, the unique ends they serve in the fulfillment of concrete needs. The value of money is thus parasitic on use-value. Insofar as coding concerns the appearance and meaning of things, concrete needs determine codes.218 The relations involved here always appear 218 On this point, Deleuze and Guattari write the following: “Hence the code relation is

not only indirect, qualitative, and limited; because of these very characteristics, it is also extraeconomic, and by virtue of this fact engineers the couplings between qualified flows. Consequently it implies a system of collective appraisal and evaluation, and a set of organs


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in a certain way and have a specific meaning in terms of these concrete ends, conditioning the coding of flows.219 The meaning and value of money is determined by the meaning and value of commodities, which is determined, in turn, by the way these fulfill basic human needs. In capitalism this changes.

Exchange-value governs relations of production and exchange in capitalism. The goal of both production and exchange is the production of capital through the extraction of surplus value, the production of money through the production and exchange of commodities.220 In capitalist exchange, commodities act as intermediaries in monetary relations. One begins and ends with money, and the impetus for production and exchange is the production of money. Once capitalism determines relations of production and exchange, commodities appear and are understood in terms of capital. No longer does concrete use-value determine the meaning and appearance of things – the unique ends they serve in the fulfillment of basic needs.

For instance, foodstuffs, shelters, and tools are understood less as things to be used to sustain human life – to fulfill basic biological needs – and more as things to be produced and exchanged for the sake of profit. The meaning of all things is now determined by capital, in terms of their appearance as things to be produced and exchanged for the sake of capital. Marx expresses this in the general formula for capital, M-C-M.221 The value of commodities is determined abstractly, by their exchange value, the amount of money one can obtain through their exchange. Unlike basic needs that have specific, concrete points of termination as their goal, the goal of capital is general, abstract, and interminable in nature (AO 248). It never ends. With this framework in place, one is now in a position to understand the way capitalism conditions an illegitimate employment of the third synthesis and necessitates axiomatization.

In the first place, say Deleuze and Guattari, the rise of capitalism depends on the coalesce of work and money – the conjunction of labor and capital.

of perception…as a condition of existence and survival of the society in question – thus the collective investment of organs that causes men to be directly coded, and the appraising eye as we have analyzed it in the primitive system” (AO 248).

219 See AO 254 regarding the disappearance of enjoyment as an end in the process of consumption.

220 See Marx’s Capital vol. I. 254. For this reason, Marx says that capitalism’s “ultimate product is money” (Capital 247).

221 On this score, Deleuze and Guattari write that “money as a general equivalent represents an abstract quality that is indifferent to the qualified nature of flows” (AO 248). This is the first of four reasons they give “for defining capitalism by a social axiomatic that stands opposed to codes in every respect” (AO 248). See Buchanan, Anti-Oedipus 113 regarding the way money is free of all codes and thus undermines fixed meanings. See Holland, Anti-Oedipus 2 concerning the way capitalism undermines fixed meanings and Holland, Anti-Oedipus 66-67 regarding the way axiomatization depends on subverting meanings.

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Capitalism is only possible once people have been uprooted and displaced from their areas of origin – their direct relations to the earth and concrete needs – and large amounts of material surplus become available – the appearance of money as a force or power of production. The conjunction of abstract labor and capital thus constitutes the most basic characteristic of capitalism. This relation itself depends on the cultivation of decoded flows, an understanding of both labor and capital as general powers of production, apart from the concrete circumstances in which they work. The rise of the state in the despotic machine cultivates decoded flows. Since the records initially inscribed on the earth are now understood in terms of the despot, no longer does the earth appear as productive. The despot appears responsible for these relations.

The productive power of the despot is explained in terms of his direct filiation with a creator god, a single personal entity. Insofar as an understanding of god in these terms provides the basis for an understanding of being human – one where human beings are simply limited gods222 – the productive power attributed to the despot through a creator god provides the model for abstract labor. In this way, material powers of production become disconnected from the earth.223 No longer does the earth appear productive. Rather, labor appears as productive, as an abstract power belonging, first, to the despot specifically and, then, human beings in general. This relation further changes in capitalism.

As opposed to labor appearing as a force of material production, in capitalism capital itself appears to be productive. In the pre-capitalist formula C-M-C, money acts as a mere equivalence between commodities, which are themselves objectified forms of labor, synonymous with what Deleuze and Guattari mean by desire. In the capitalist formula M-C-M, however, money now appears as productive of commodities. Money can be understood as the cause of commodities in two senses: Capital appears as both an efficient and final cause, an efficient cause insofar as it is a necessary condition for the production of commodities and a final cause insofar as commodities are themselves produced for the sake of capital. As with the other surfaces of recording then, capital falls back on forces of material production, making

222 On this point, referring to the work of Foucault, Deleuze says that in “the classic period…man is formed in the image of God and his finitude is merely a limitation of infinity” (N 90). See N 117 where he discusses this as well.

223 Deleuze and Guattari thus say that the question of god is “born of an abstraction, it assumes the link to be already broken between man and nature, man and the world, so that man must be produced as man by something exterior to nature and to man,” i.e., by god (AO 107).


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it appear as though capital is itself productive of these relations.224 With the capitalist machine this takes on special significance; only from the perspective of capitalism does this really become apparent.

The apparent productivity of the body of the earth and despot in territorial and despotic representation must be understood in terms of proto-capitalist social formations, forms of social organization that anticipate and ward off capitalism. Most importantly, this concerns the manner in which capitalism actively cultivates decoded flows, as well as the danger this tendency poses to any and all forms of social organization. Recording on the bodies of the earth and despot are concrete operations that limit the potential for decoded flows, warding off the introduction of chaos into the social order, which capitalism actively cultivates.

In capitalism, no longer is desire conceived as a positive force of material production, but capital appears as having a magical filiative character. As the most fundamentally characteristic power of human existence – the capacity to transform oneself through the transformation of one’s environment – praxis, as labor, now appears as something to be bargained away, to be traded off. Although labor is conceived as an asset, it is only ever an asset in terms of one’s ability to trade it for capital. In capitalism, the ultimate goal of both production and exchange is capital for the sake of capital. For this reason then, desire as a productive force can only be conceived in negative terms, as a second best. The whole of human existence is thereby devalued in terms of this goal.225

Capital thus becomes “concrete” by appropriating production, by enticing people into trading sensuous human activity for an immaterial idea. Insofar as labor ceases to be tied to the earth and determined by concrete needs, it constitutes a decoded flow, one that only becomes qualified in terms of

224 On this score, Deleuze and Guattari write that “the capitalist machine begins when capital ceases to be a capital of alliance to become a filiative capital. Capital becomes filiative when money begets money, or value a surplus value… It is solely under these conditions that capital becomes the full body, the new socius or the quasi cause that appropriates all the productive forces” (AO 227).

225 “It is at the level of flows,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “the monetary flow included, and not at the level of ideology, that the integration of desire is achieved” (AO 239). This point thus touches on Deleuze and Guattari’s second reason for differentiating between the operations of coding and axiomatization: “Secondly, the fact remains that money as an unlimited abstract quality cannot be divorced from a becoming-concrete without which it would not become capital and would not appropriate production… it is a direct relation between decoded flows whose respective qualities have no existence prior to the differential relation itself. The quality of the flows results solely from their conjunction as decoded flows… it expresses the capitalist transformation of the surplus value of code into a surplus value of flux” (AO 249).

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capital. Capital is thus a “surplus value of code” – a universal equivalence without any inherent meaning – and labor is a “surplus value of flux” – a collection of relations without any inherent meaning. When the two coalesce, exploitation results, turning capital into labor.226

An employment of the conjunctive synthesis – the conjunction of abstract labor with capital by the capitalist machine – thus gives rise to a gaping lack at the heart of human existence, supposing and reinforcing the organic notion of teleology. As a genealogical principle, this operation concerns the origin and destiny of human existence, determining a conception of human existence in terms of lack.227 Given that people have been uprooted and displaced from their direct relations of material production with the earth, they have no choice but to work for money, to exchange their labor for capital. For Marx this constitutes alienation, and Deleuze and Guattari are concerned with the way this relation determines a conception of desire and, in turn, human existence.

Here social and mental alienation are part of one and the same process, conditioned by psychic repression in the service of social repression (AO 320). Because of its abstract and interminable nature, capitalism places a gaping lack at the center of human existence. Roberts describes this situation as follows: “Perhaps there now looms up the spectre that modernization’s success may have communicated to mankind goals which are materially and psychologically unachievable, limitlessly expanding and unsatisfiable in principle as they are” (1187). No longer is human reality oriented in terms of terminable needs, which in turn determine the meaning of commodities and things as the basis for coding. Rather, the meaning of needs is now determined by capitalism.

Needs only appear and have meaning in terms of lack. With the capitalist machine, an activity that exists for itself alone – that has neither meaning nor purpose beyond itself – structures the whole of reality, giving meaning to all other things and activities in relation to this goal.228 This is how the

226 The preceding is an attempt to make sense of the following rather esoteric remarks by Deleuze and Guattari: “It is from the fluxion of the decoded flows, from their conjunctions, that the filiative form of capital, x+dx, results. The differential relation expresses the fundamental capitalist phenomenon of the transformation of the surplus value of code into a surplus value of flux” (AO 228).

227 “The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy,” they write, “involves deliberately organizing wants and needs (manque) amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied” (AO 28).

228 “This welding of desire to lack,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “is precisely what gives desire collective and personal ends, goals or intentions – instead of desire taken in the real order of production, which behaves as a molecular phenomenon devoid of any goal or intention” (AO 342).


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capitalist form of social organization deals with the productive, inherently threatening nature of desire, “to introduce lack where there is always too much, by effecting the absorption of overabundant resources… that ensures the integration of groups and individuals into the system” (AO 235-236). Here similarities with the organic model are obvious.

Capitalism structures reality in a manner analogous to the thought of the unmoved mover in Aristotle, the unfolding of Spirit towards the end of history in Hegel, and the name of the father in Lacan. Capitalism thus operates on the basis of, and further reinforces, the organic notion of teleology. Whereas strict necessity governs the structures that result from these focal points in both Aristotle and Hegel – the nature of form and historical development respectively – this is not the case for either Lacan or capitalism. The name of the father conditions meaning formation by introducing ambiguity into representation, disrupting one-to-one correspondences between relations and their records. Relations between signifieds and signifiers are neither necessary nor inherent.229

It is precisely the extrinsic and contingent nature of these relations that gives rise to meaning. Insofar as the production of capital is an activity that exists for itself alone – referring only to itself – it functions as a signifier falling outside the signifying chain, a signifier signifying nothing.230 Capitalism thus introduces profound ambiguity into representation, conditioning the possibility of decoded flows as relations that escape representation. Things only appear and have meaning in relation to this very general, highly abstract end. They might do so in a number of ways, and, for this reason, the appearance and meaning of things is variable, always open to revision.231 This is the reason Deleuze says capitalism itself engenders revolutionary situations and experiments (TRM 379).

However, Deleuze and Guattari are quick to point out that capitalism’s movement “of decoding or deterritorializing flows on the one hand” is followed by the “violent and artificial reterritorialization” of flows that constitutes axiomatization “on the other. The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value from them,

229 This is the fourth reason Deleuze and Guattari give for distinguishing the process of coding from axiomatizing. Capitalism does not have to write in bodies. In fact, it is better that people do not have memories and are stupid, so that capitalism can add, remove, or change axioms.

230 They describe it as a “transcendent object that is more and more spiritualized…this describes the evolution of infinite debt – through Catholicism, then the Reformation” (AO 268).

231 This concerns the interminable nature of decoding and axiomatizing, which is the third reason Deleuze and Guattari give for opposing coding to axiomatizing. Capitalism can always add, remove, or changes axioms.

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the more its ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value” (AO 34-35).232 While the cultivation of decoded flows brings forth the threat of chaos, it also determines relations as variable and open to revision, which ultimately serves the end of the production of capital.233 Axiomatization should be understood as the process by which these relations are determined in terms of this end, creating wants for goods and services no one needs (AO 236).

No longer are the appearance and meaning of things tied to and determined by concrete conditions of human existence – “If I fix ‘x’ number of shoes, then I’ll be able to eat for ‘y’ number of days,” C-M-C – but the abstract goal of accumulation and the equivalence of all things in terms of their yield in capital – “If I fix ‘x’ number of shoes and harvest ‘y’ pounds of crops then I’ll accumulate ‘z’ amount of capital,” M-C-M. For this reason, the possibility of decoded flows increases exponentially.234

As opposed to conceiving of things and activities as having inherent and invariable characteristics and characteristic relations – determined by something akin to an essence being expressed in a form – as is the case with both coding in territorial and overcoding in despotic representation, in capitalism the appearance and meaning of things and activities are determined by an axiomatic.235 In this respect then, capitalism has an unparalleled capacity to absorb alternative cultures, strands of thought, movements, groups, etc. – but always with the goal of producing capital.236

Naomi Klein discusses this phenomenon at length in No Logo. For example, “while it may be true that real gains have emerged from this process [of integration],” she writes, “it is also true that Denis Rodman wears dresses and supports Gay Day less because of political progress than financial expediency” (115). Spurred on by financial gain, brands incorporate

232 See AO 378 regarding the way new axioms can always be added, and Holland, Anti-Oedipus 12 regarding the double nature of de- and re-coding.

233 “The true axiomatic,” they write, “takes the place of the old codings and organizes all the decoded flows, including the flows of scientific and technical code, for the benefit of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends” (AO 233).

234 “Doubtless, to begin with money and to finish with money,” they write, “is an operation that cannot be expressed in terms of a code” (AO 176).

235 Deleuze and Guattari say that capitalism “axiomatizes with one hand what it decodes with the other… The flows are decoded and axiomatized by capitalism at the same time” (AO 246).

236 On this score, they write the following: “You say you want an axiom for wage earners, for the working class and the unions? Well then, let’s see what we can do – and thereafter profit will flow alongside wages… An axiom will be found even for the language of dolphins” (AO 238).


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diversity. Klein points to this tendency by Nike and Tommy Hilfiger with regard to African American style specifically (112). In a particularly poignant jab at the left, she says that when “the free-trade debate was lost, the left retreated even further into itself, choosing ever more minute disputes over which to go to the wall… In this new globalized context, the victories of identity politics have amounted to a rearranging of the furniture while the house burned down. Yes, there are more multi-ethnic sitcoms and even more black executives – but whatever cultural enlightenment has followed has not prevented the population from the underclass from exploding or homelessness from reaching crisis levels in many North American urban centers” (123). She links these tendencies with globalization, describing what Hardt and Negri refer to as “Empire.” “The conduct of the individual multinationals,” Klein writes, “is simply a by-product of a broader global economic system that has steadily been removing almost all barriers and conditions to trade, investing and outsourcing” (422).237

Conclusion

Deleuze and Guattari’s engagements with psychoanalysis concern less psychoanalysis as such and more its philosophical underpinnings – the metaphysics it implies and conception of human nature these support. Their work should thus be understood in terms of Lawrence’s engagements with psychoanalysis: Deleuze and Guattari’s engagements aim less at a wholesale rejection of psychoanalysis and more a reformulation of the metaphysical commitments that guide the mainstream of this tradition. Taking Lawrence’s criticisms of psychoanalysis and conception of classic American literature as touchstones, these commitments concern the relationship between mind and body, the nature of individuality, community, and relations between the two.

On the one hand, the philosophies of Aristotle and Hegel are representative of the organic model, employing the notions of substance, form, and teleology. When brought to bear on philosophical anthropology, this model provides for an understanding of individuals as substances, community as a collection of substances, and relations between them in terms of goal-directed activity.

237 See Holland, Anti-Oedipus 121 concerning the way biunivocal relations firmly established in earlier syntheses are dissolved and become variable in capitalism. Similarly, see Karen Armstrong’s The Battle for God 63-64, 73, and 105-106 regarding the way modernization forces societies to integrate previously marginalized groups for the sake of utilizing all its resources. She discusses the case of Jews and America specifically.

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On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari take their conception of the body without organs from the Pre-Socratics and Spinoza. Here individuals are conceived as modes or unique chances – determined by chance encounters with the environment they inhabit and other individuals with whom they interact – community is understood as further-reaching aggregates of modes than individuals, and relations between them are conceived in terms of shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings – sympathy. This difference results from the specificity of the experience with which Deleuze and Guattari begin, that of schizophrenia. Since schizophrenic experience is radically different from commonsense experience, so too must be its conditions of possibility.

Deleuze and Guattari thus criticize what they call psychoanalysis’ “representative account of the unconscious.” As with Lawrence’s critique of psychoanalysis, their criticisms bear on a conception of the unconscious along idealist lines, where the unconscious would be simply a mirror double of consciousness; its defining characteristic would be psychical activity – representing the contents of consciousness in a different fashion. Deleuze and Guattari instead conceive of the unconscious along materialist lines. They equate the unconscious with desire, both of which they claim are productive of reality. Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptions of the unconscious and desire should thus be understood in terms of Marx and Engels’ conception of praxis. They explain this in terms of syntheses of the unconscious, showing how an illegitimate understanding and employment of the syntheses ultimately result in a misunderstanding of the nature of both desire and reality.

The connective synthesis concerns the ways relations between partial objects and flows are conceived and can be explained in terms of Freudian drive theory. The disjunctive synthesis determines the ways relations between partial objects and flows are recorded, in terms of the way things appear and are understood. The conjunctive synthesis is a genealogical principle regarding the nature of subjectivity and the constitution of groups. Although an illegitimate understanding and employment of the syntheses depend on the organic notions of substance, form, and teleology – all of which are taken up and promulgated by psychoanalytic thought in the Oedipus complex – Deleuze and Guattari insist that psychoanalysis discovers, rather than invents, the Oedipus complex.

Parental figures, familial relations, and their significance to social relations are elements comprising the Oedipus complex, although these elements do not themselves originate with psychoanalysis. Rather, each results from a specific social machine – from one of the forms of social organization Deleuze


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and Guattari discuss in Anti-Oedipus – on the basis of one of the syntheses of the unconscious.

On the basis of the connective synthesis, the primitive territorial machine gives rise to an understanding of full persons in the form of familial figures that conditions the notion of substance. The territorial machine organizes the productive capacities of desire through filial guidelines, determining whom one can and cannot marry, which are ultimately in the service of political relations of alliance. On the basis of the disjunctive synthesis, the despotic machine introduces a form of spiritualized bureaucratic writing aligned with the voice. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this operation as “overcoding.” In this way the despotic machine conditions an understanding of the notion of form, where their ultimate relation to the despot determines the characteristics and characteristic relations of things. Although the aim of social machines in general is to code flows – to organize the erratic and haphazard forces of pure production – according to Deleuze and Guattari, there is one socius that operates on the basis of decoded flows.

The civilized capitalist machine purposefully and actively cultivates the decoding of flows. Capitalism not only evidences the contingent, variable nature of the organization of productive capacities, but also points towards desire in its pure state, as a haphazard process of erratic production. Given that relations are recorded on the body of capital, no longer are the meanings of and relations between things understood as inherent, in terms of the concrete needs they fulfill. For this reason, capitalism operates on the basis of an axiomatic, where the natures of and relations between things are highly variable, being determined by and for the sake of the production of capital. This goal conditions an understanding of teleology in a specifically Lacanian sense, an understanding of desire in psychical terms determined by a fundamental lack lying at the heart of human existence.

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Chapter Four

Anglo-American Literature as a Philosophical Concept

Introduction: …to the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari align what they call an “Oedipal form of literature” with psychoanalysis and capitalism. This form of literature not only reinforces the processes of psychoanalysis and capitalism but also in some sense precedes them. This Oedipal form of literature comes before, conditions, and is itself more central to capitalism than psychoanalysis.1 Time and again, Deleuze and Guattari reiterate the fact psychoanalysis does not invent but discovers the Oedipus complex. It is composed of elements that arise with the social machines through an illegitimate employment of the syntheses of the unconscious, giving rise to the notions of substance, form, and teleology, which condition paralogisms of the unconscious.2 At bottom then, the defining characteristic of this Oedipal form of literature is an illegitimate understanding and employment of the syntheses of the unconscious and these notions.

At the same time that Deleuze and Guattari align this Oedipal form of literature with psychoanalysis and capitalism, however, they also introduce an alternative. For each author associated with this literature, there is a writer who works against this tendency. In fact, for Deleuze and Guattari, only the works of writers who establish themselves in contradistinction to this Oedipalizing tendency deserve the title literature.3 Although they never develop this theme at length in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari make remarks that point in a definite direction, referring to “Anglo-American literature.”4 They connect the

1 “It is correct to measure established literature against an Oedipal psychoanalysis,” they write, “for this literature deploys a form of superego proper to it, even more noxious than the nonwritten superego. Oedipus is in fact literary before being psychoanalytic… The Oedipal form of literature is its commodity form” (AO 134).

2 See chapter three where I develop this at length.3 “There will always be a Breton against Artaud, a Goethe against Lenz, a Schiller against

Hölderlin… The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form of content” (AO 134 – emphasis added).

4 Regarding the tradition and authors that constitute this anti-Oedipal trajectory, they note the following: “Strange Anglo-American literature: from Thomas Hardy, from D.H. Lawrence to Malcolm Lowry, from Henry Miller to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier” (AO 132).


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experience of American existence with that of schizophrenia, on which their critique of psychoanalysis is based.5

Since the target of Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms in Anti-Oedipus is less psychoanalysis as such and more the metaphysical underpinnings it implies and the conception of human nature these support, it seems as though their praise for anti-Oedipal literature – what they associate with Anglo-American literature – should be understood in the same manner. Rather than a body of work from authors of a particular tradition or geography, as a philosophical concept, “Anglo-American literature” refers to metaphysical commitments and a conception of human nature. Just as an Oedipal form of literature coincides with psychoanalysis and an illegitimate understanding and employment of the syntheses of the unconscious, Anglo-American literature should be understood as coinciding with a non-Oedipal form of psychoanalysis (schizoanalysis), based on a legitimate understanding and employment of the syntheses. Since this Oedipal form of literature coincides with an illegitimate understanding and employment of the syntheses, Anglo-American literature would set in motion processes through which the syntheses would be understood and employed in a legitimate manner. Again, although Deleuze and Guattari never develop this line of thought at length in Anti-Oedipus, it seems as though one can locate it elsewhere.

Included in Dialogues, one is immediately struck by a seeming discontinuity while reading through Deleuze’s “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature.” Although he begins by expounding the merits of Anglo-American literature and its authors in contrast to their Franco-Germanic counterparts (D 27-38), Deleuze quickly moves on to discuss issues and themes that are in no way straightforwardly related to literature (D 38-56). On only a few occasions – and very briefly – does he actually give examples from what might be called Anglo-American literature; he refers to Kafka as an “Anglo-American” writer. One can thus venture that, for Deleuze, “Anglo-American” and “Franco-Germanic” literature signal more than simply bodies of work from authors of particular traditions and that differences between the two go beyond topical, stylistic, or aesthetic considerations. Rather, as philosophical concepts, Anglo-American and Franco-Germanic literature denote different understandings of human nature, different accounts of philosophical anthropology in terms of the relation between mind and body, the natures of individuals and community, and relations between the two. In turn, these concepts support different accounts of political activity.

5 “The schizophrenic voyage is the only kind there is. (Later this will be the American meaning of frontiers” (AO 224).

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This becomes clear when understood through Lawrence’s account of classic American literature. As a philosophical concept, Deleuze’s understanding of Anglo-American literature is based on Lawrence’s conception of classic American literature, in terms of its relation to the development of the identity of a people. This connection becomes apparent by closely examining claims Deleuze makes concerning Anglo-American literature and then tracing the metaphysical roots of these claims in the thought of Hume, Spinoza, and the Stoics – all of whom Deleuze associates with Anglo-American literature. These concern the exteriority of relations, mind-body parallelism, and the priority of events, respectively. Together these constitute Deleuze’s notion of the assemblage. This is his positive alternative to a world-view based on the organic model, which he associates with Franco-Germanic literature in “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature.”

Further, Deleuze and Guattari themselves refer to the assemblage when characterizing the transition from Anti-Oedipus to Thousand Plateaus, saying their conception of the assemblage replaces that of desire.6 This notion itself gives rise to a problem specific to the Anglo-American milieu, which has its solution in a corresponding conception of the political. Rather than employing exhaustive examples from Anglo-American literature, Deleuze’s account takes as its touchstone the metaphysical commitments of Lawrence’s conception of classic American literature. Taken together these stand at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage. Insofar as their notion of the assemblage is central to that of Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept – which is itself based on Lawrence’s account of classic American literature – both Anglo-American literature and Lawrence are much more central to the thought of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari than has been recognized to date.7

To support these claims, the present chapter is a close reading of Deleuze’s “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature.” By explaining the elements that belong to it, I show that Anglo-American literature constitutes a philosophical concept that implies a philosophical anthropology. In addition, I note points of continuity between Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze’s development of Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept in this essay, and its relation to Lawrence’s account of classic American literature. Through this reading, it becomes clear the extent to which Deleuze’s concept of Anglo-American literature is indebted 6 See my discussion of this point in chapter three.7 Or an outright dismissal of the importance of Lawrence’s thought to Deleuze’s such as that of

Buchanan. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly refer to the roles British and American literature play in approaching multiplicities, which comprise assemblages (TRM 306).


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to Lawrence’s account of classic American literature – the extent to which it provides the theoretical foundation for Deleuze’s own thought.

1. The Line of Flight: Exiting versus Leaving

Just as Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses in Anti-Oedipus are based on schizophrenic experience, so too is Deleuze’s concept of Anglo-American literature. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari continually emphasize the extent to which schizophrenia is a universal process, on the basis of which different psychopathologies can be understood in terms of where and how this process stops.8 Insofar as they claim schizophrenia can be understood as a stationary journey, it seems as though they conceive this process as one of change in general rather than local motion specifically. Further, Deleuze and Guattari claim that – as a process – schizophrenia need not necessarily result in a breakdown but can also result in a breakthrough (AO 130-131). Their focus shifts in Thousand Plateaus.

Deleuze and Guattari cease discussing schizophrenia. However, the conceptual role that schizophrenia plays as a universal process in Anti-Oedipus is not completely abandoned in Thousand Plateaus. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari’s introduction of the notion of the “line of flight” can be understood as taking its conceptual place. At bottom, this consists in a Heraclitean model of the universe, an understanding of reality as thoroughly relational and in constant flux, where the nature of things is determined by where and how this process ceases. Deleuze begins “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature” with precisely this point, with his notion of the line of flight.

He mentions authors such as D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jack Kerouac among others (D 27). According to Deleuze, the merit of these authors and Anglo-American literature is the way they escape or take flight without resorting to either transcendence or escapism, both of which are said to be the downfall of French literature. This essay thus begins by discussing two different ways to conceive of “taking flight,” which concern different conceptions of change and identity through change.9

8 For example, they write that “there is no difference in nature between neuroses and psychoses. For in any case desiring-production is the cause, the ultimate cause of both the psychotic subversions that shatter Oedipus or overwhelm it, and of the neurotic reverberations that constitute it” (AO 127).

9 “To flee is not exactly to travel, or even to move,” Deleuze writes, “because flights can happen on the spot, in motionless travel” (D 28).

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The first concerns a conception of flight in terms of exiting – the way the French and French literature, claims Deleuze, conceive of flight. This French conception depends on a notion of transcendence. Both French writers and their characters flee but to another world, a world beyond this one – via art, mysticism, or irresponsibility.10 Implied by this conception of flight is a notion of identity.11 This claim can be understood in terms of the organic model criticized in Anti-Oedipus, in terms of the way Franco-Germanic literature works with an illegitimate understanding and employment of the syntheses of the unconscious. The French conception of flight supposes an account of identity, which is itself pegged on the notion of substance – a person or group of persons as ego substances that travel.12 Deleuze goes on to explain Franco-Germanic in these terms.

He writes that the “French are all too human, too historical, too concerned with the future and the past. They spend their time in in-depth analysis. They do not know how to become, they think in terms of historical past and future” (D 28). Deleuze thus relates French literature and its conception of flight as exiting to a notion of history and in-depth analysis. Taking the second first, Deleuze is here referring to not only the literature of France but also its enthusiasm for structuralism – both its anthropological and psychoanalytic variants.13 Structuralism’s emphasis is on interpretation, a search for meaning based on relations between signifiers and signifieds, according to which both individuals and communities are imbued with meaning.14 Conceiving his criticisms of Franco-Germanic literature in terms of the organic model, Deleuze’s reference here to structuralism thus concerns the notion of form.

10 “The line of flight is a deterritorialization,” Deleuze writes, although the “French do not understand this very well. Obviously, they flee like everyone else, but they think that fleeing means making an exit from the world, mysticism or art, or else that it is something rather sloppy because we avoid commitments and responsibilities. But to flee is not to renounce action: nothing is more active than a flight. It is the opposite of the imaginary. It is also to put to flight – not necessarily others, but to put something to flight, to put a system to flight as one bursts a tube” (D 27).

11 On this point, he writes the following: “there are travels in the style of the French – too his-torical, cultural and organized – where they are content to transport their own egos” (D 28).

12 See “A Substance Theory of Mind and Theological Motivations in Descartes” in chapter one for an explanation of this point.

13 “Look at structuralism: it is a system of points and positions, which operates by cuts which are supposedly significant instead of proceeding by thrusts and crackings” (D 28).

14 In terms of the connection between Franco-Germanic literature, structuralism, and psychoanalysis in terms of meaning, see TRM 97, as well as “Psychoanalytic Reading in Freud, Bonaparte, and Lacan” in chapter one and “Disjunctive Synthesis” in chapter three.


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Particular locales, traditions, and political systems function as structures or forms, giving meaning and stability (identity) to egos conceived as substances. Further, these locales, traditions, and political systems also act as points of departure in a French conception of flight as exiting, which Deleuze associates with a notion of history.15 Structures are conceived as forms that give meaning and stability to persons and groups of persons. Subsequent locales, traditions, and political structures in which persons or groups of persons would be oriented in the future are also assumed, as points of destination or ends towards which persons or groups of persons are tending. These points of destinations themselves act back on and give meaning to those of departure.16

French literature thus conceives of its characters as full persons with fixed identities, which assumes an illegitimate employment of the disjunctive synthesis in an exclusive, restrictive manner. This literature consists in establishing a series of recurring themes and motifs, on the basis of which not only the individuality of characters is established, but also the solidarity of a nation state that relies on this literature to establish its identity. Insofar as Deleuze here claims the French think in terms of trees (D 29-30) – and Deleuze and Guattari later associate this arborescent model of thought with a state and its literature (TP 11 and 24-25) – it is clear that, even in this essay, Deleuze associates Franco-Germanic literature with the formation and functioning of a state.17

15 He says that structures “are linked to conditions of homogeneity” (D 39). In Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari criticize Chomsky for similar reasons, for his attempts to carve out constants in language (TP 93). Relating this linguistic perspective to a metaphysical one, they write the following: “But this [thinking of matter-flow in terms of form-matter] cannot be done without a distortion that consists in uprooting variables from the state of continuous variation, in order to extract from them fixed points and constant relations” (TP 408-409). This distortion is the same as that performed on language by linguists and philosophers of language, such that, for Deleuze and Guattari, an implicit analogy exists between metaphysical and linguistic models.

16 This is how Deleuze describes the nature and function of artistic signs in the first edition of Proust and Signs, in terms of a Hegelian perspective, where the regaining of time consists in an acting back on and giving meaning to time lost. See Stéphane Chaudier’s “Proust aux éclats” 86-87 regarding the way that Deleuze’s reading of Proust in terms of the creation of signs in the second, 1976 edition marks a definite – if nowhere explicitly stated – break from his reading of Proust in terms of the interpretation of signs in the first, 1964 edition.

17 Further, regarding the relationship between a German state literature of this type and Freudian psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari ask the following: “For what does it mean to say that Freud discovered Oedipus in his own self-analysis? Was it in his self-analysis, or rather in his Goethian classical culture?” (AO 55). As an undergraduate studying German in Berlin one summer, my language teacher told me I must read Faust, that this was the only way to truly grasp the German psyche, and that almost every German politician still quotes Goethe in political speeches. The formation of individual and communal identity in terms of literature such as this seems to be what Deleuze has in mind.

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The national identities of these characters act as points of destination, determined by a segregative, biunivocal employment of the conjunctive synthesis. Hence, through individual memories and communal traditions – as well as future projects – the French conception of flight itself supposes the organic notions of substance, form, and teleology. Based on these organic notions – which result in a perversion of the syntheses – a literary conception of this type leads people to seek orientation within community along racial, ethnic, and national lines – in terms of a State and its literature.18 Deleuze begins elucidating an alternative to this perspective in terms of a different conception of flight.

In his initial characterization, he points out that a line of flight is not the same as “fleeing”; it can also be conceived in terms of “leaving.” Central to this distinction is the absence of notions belonging to the organic worldview. The line of flight is “demonic,” says Deleuze, which he sets in contradistinction to “gods.” Here he describes the role of gods in terms analogous to the despotic function: Gods themselves have fixed identities that fix identity in turn.19 One might then say their function is analogous to overcoding – assigning meaning to things and activities in terms of their relation to the despot.

Although the line of flight could be conceived as a movement between locales, traditions, political structures, etc. – à la littérature francaise – everything changes without structures conceptually resembling those belonging to the organic model on which to peg a conception of personal identity.20 That which takes flight need not be a person or group of persons; Deleuze claims one can also put a system to flight. Insofar as he associates the line of flight with deterritorialization, “putting to flight” would be similar to “deter-ritorialization,” which consists in operations of decoding.21 Hence, central to this conceptual schema is a rejection of the organic model, which Deleuze as-sociates with French literature.

18 “The French beginning again is a tabula rasa,” says Deleuze, “the search for a primary cer-tainty as a point of origin, always the point of anchor… The French think in terms of trees too much: the tree of knowledge, points of arborescence, the alpha and omega, the roots and the pinnacles” (D 29-30). See my discussions of these points in chapter three as well.

19 Regarding the role these play in an account of identity related to the line of flight, Deleuze writes that there “is something demonical or demonic in a line of flight. Demons are different from gods, because gods have fixed attributes, properties and functions, territories and codes: they have to do with rails, boundaries, and surveys” (D 30).

20 Again, on this point, see “A Substance Theory of Mind and Theological Motivations in Descartes” in chapter one.

21 Again, see chapter three where I develop this at length.


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“Anglo-American literature” is thus based on the model of the body without organs. As a philosophical concept, this entails that the syntheses of the unconscious are understood and employed in a legitimate manner, working in terms of partial and nonspecific connections, inclusive and unrestrictive disjunctions, and nomadic, polyvocal conjunctions. This becomes apparent in Anglo-American literature’s notion of characters. Rather than fixed identities, according to Deleuze, these characters are based on unique, chance events – conjunctions of partial objects and flows with detachments from signifying chains.

2. Anglo-American Literature: Individuals and Community

Deterritorialization is the process of undoing identities that occurs through the decoding of partial objects and flows, similar in nature to what Lawrence refers to as “sloughing” – classic American literature’s negative movement resulting in the breakdown of the old European psyche. Regarding the process of deterritorialization and its relation to Anglo-American literature in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari say that everything “becomes mixed and confused, and it is here that the breakthrough…occurs” (AO 132). Stable structures that allow for distinctions between subjects and subjects, subjects and community, thus vanish – identities become undone. Everything blends together, what they refer to as entering “zones of indiscernibility.” Characters become locales, traditions, political structures, but just as much as locales, traditions, and political structures become characters.22 Just as with Lawrence’s account of sloughing, however, the undoing of identities through deterritorialization is not the whole story.

As a possibility, first and foremost deterritorialization assumes the basic constituents of reality are not substances determined by fixed and invariable

22 In Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari refer to this same process in what they call “involution.” “There is a material proliferation,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “that goes hand in hand with a dissolution of form (involution) but is at the same time accompanied by a continuous development of [another type of ] form” (TP 270). In this movement, one sees the “rejection of reference points, a dissolution of constant form in favor of differences in dynamics” (TP 104). Bogue describes this process as one where language, speech, and other non-linguistic elements are brought to a point of varying continuously (142), losing their fixed identities (143). Marrati describes this process in similar terms when she says that “any becoming is a movement of de-identification” (211). See chapter two for a discussion of this point in the work of Lawrence with respect to classic American literature, as well as its connection to Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of deterritorialization in chapter three. See Marrati 213 on this point as well.

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forms, themselves determined by final ends, but partial objects and flows organized in terms of detachments from signifying chains by the syntheses of the unconscious. In other words, one assumes the model of the body without organs rather than the model of the organism.

Anglo-American literature does not then account for individuation in substantial terms, in terms of personal subjects on the model of substance. It fully embraces individualism, says Deleuze, but relies on a notion of individuation without subjectivity, conceiving of characters as unique chances, collections of variable sensations that arise through chance encounters on the basis of experimentation. He refers to these as “traitors.”23 Individuals then are never exclusively or primarily persons but result from chance encounters in various social, historical, and geographical milieus – closer in nature to thunderstorms.24 Deleuze further notes that the respect shown for these individuals does not hinge on a socio-political account of recognition, which has its basis in subjectivity.25 This claim should be understood in terms of a tacit criticism of Hegel’s account of recognition, one that bears on the relation between individuals and community when conceived in non-substantial terms.

According to Hegel, the motor of world history lies in the uniquely human desire for recognition. This desire initiates the master-slave dialectic and the development of history and culture. In this scheme, the development of individuals and community would be part of one and the same process, reciprocally conditioning and mutually reinforcing each other, where relations between individuals and community would consist in goal-directed activity based on mutual aims and shared interests. Hegel ultimately explains this process in teleological terms, where the 19th century Prussian state, at the end of history, acts as a final cause pulling this process along.

23 “The traitor is the essential character of the novel, the hero. A traitor to the world of dominant significations, and to the established order… the experimenter is a traitor” (D 31).

24 On this score, it seems as though Deleuze takes inspiration from Miller in developing a philosophical account of individuality. For instance, Miller says that one has to be wiped out as a human being to become an individual (Tropic of Capricorn 28).

25 Describing this conception of individuality in the work of Thomas Hardy, Deleuze writes that “his characters are not people or subjects, they are collections of intensive sensations, each is such a collection, a packet, a bloc of variable sensations. There is a strange respect for the individual, an extraordinary respect: not because he would seize upon himself as a person and be recognized as a person, in the French way, but on the contrary because he saw himself and saw others as so many ‘unique chances’ – the unique chance from which one combination or another had been drawn. Individuation without a subject” (D 30 – emphasis added).


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Deleuze’s criticism here concerns not only the teleological nature of this process but also the role Hegel gives to this process in the mediation of relations between individuals and community. In the first place, rather than explaining the nature and development of individuals and community in terms of a process determined by a final cause towards which they are both tending, Deleuze makes chance encounters and experimentation the basis for this development and these relations.26 Rather than history being pulled forward by and towards an ideal end, social change is something pushed forward by random encounters and chance events.27 In the second place, for Deleuze, the difference between individuals and community is one of degree rather than kind. Both individuals and community are bodies conceived along broadly Spinozistic lines – unique sets of relations.28 Bodies are described as forces defined by their chance encounters and collisions (TRM 192); Deleuze says that Anglo-American writers conceive of individuals as haecceities rather than subjects (TRM 351).

Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the schizophrenic voyage as a universal process in Anti-Oedipus seems already to anticipate the line of flight as Deleuze describes it in connection with Anglo-American literature – as well as their conception of the “line of flight” in a Thousand Plateaus.29 As Deleuze mentions at the beginning of this essay, a line of flight or deterritorialization concerns not only the local motion of persons and groups but also a more broadly conceived notion of change that concerns systems – “putting a system to flight.” This claim sheds light on the relations between individuals and community implied by Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept.

As with Lawrence’s conception of classic American literature, Anglo-American literature effects not only a negative process of de-identification or deterritorialization through the decoding of partial objects and flows but also a positive process of re-identification through the conjunction of partial objects and flows. In the process of decoding, partial objects and flows become

26 On this point, Deleuze takes inspiration from the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom he constantly associates Anglo-American literature. Fitzgerald says, for example, that one has never had – nor will ever have – a “smooth identity,” emphasizing the extent to which one’s identity is the result of random, chance encounters and haphazard circumstances, in terms of the persons, places, and events with which one comes into contact (Crack-Up 210).

27 Again, see chapters one and two where I develop these two positions at length.28 “In short, if we are Spinozists, we will not define a thing by its function, nor as a substance

or a subject… A body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity” (SPP 127)

29 I return to this point with respect to the specificity of American social and political relations below. Deleuze and Guattari’s later claim that certain authors “have written the novel of Spinozism” can be understood in terms of this perspective (WP 67).

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detached – or de-conjuncted – from the detachments from signifying chains to which they are joined. Through chance encounters, partial objects and flows are then joined to different detachments from signifying chains. Since detachments from signifying chains denote the extrinsic and variable relations into which partial objects and flows enter, this is simply to say that relations between partial objects and flows change – such that they appear in new and different ways.30

Especially interesting here is the fact Anglo-American literature enacts a decoding just as in capitalism, and in Anglo-American literature something akin to a reterritorialization occurs. This seems to be what Deleuze and Guattari mean in Anti-Oedipus when they describe Anglo-American literature as a breakthrough at the limits of capitalism, which always risks turning into a breakdown, seeming to imply the two are closely related in terms of the ways they function (AO 132).31 Insofar as capitalism and Anglo-American literature function on the basis of similar operations, capitalism cultivates conditions of its own downfall in Anglo-American literature, just as Anglo-American literature cultivates conditions of its own downfall in capitalism.32 The question then arises of how to distinguish the processes belonging to Anglo-American literature from those of capitalism – how Anglo-American literature provides a counterpoint to an Oedipal literature Deleuze associates with capitalism – given the similarities of these processes.

In the first place, capitalism reterritorializes according to an axiomatic, where meaning is determined in terms of the production of capital. This is not the case with Anglo-American literature, where the conjunction of partial objects and flows with detachments from signifying chains takes place in a chance, haphazard fashion. Taken together, Deleuze refers to the processes of deterritorialization and conjunction in Anglo-American literature as “becomings.”33 Central to the difference between processes belonging to Anglo-American literature and those of capitalism is Deleuze’s claim that

30 Again, see chapter three where I develop this at length, especially “Disjunctive Synthesis.”31 From this perspective, one can better understand Žižek’s claim that Deleuze is “the ideologist

of late capitalism” (Organs 18). Further, with regard to the way desire constitutes social production and relations of production – such that affects and drives are parts of the infrastructure – Deleuze and Guattari write that “they are part of it, they are present there in every way while creating within the economic forms their own repression, as well as the means for breaking this repression” (AO 63).

32 At the end of this chapter, I describe the way Anglo-American literature establishes relations between affects and drives through its cultivation of sympathy.

33 “There are animal-becomings in literature,” he writes, “which do not consist in imitating the animal, in ‘playing’ the animal… It is rather an encounter between two reigns, a short-circuit, the picking-up of a code where each is deterritorialized” (D 33).


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becomings do not consist in imitation.34 The distinction he draws between the writer as trickster and writer as traitor sheds further light on this claim.

3. Tricksters versus Traitors: Imitation versus Becoming

Central to the distinction between the trickster and the traitor is that between “plagiarism” and “creative theft,” a difference Deleuze goes on to explain in terms of imitation and becoming. This claim implies not only that authors portray imitations and becomings in their works, but also that they enact these in the world, causing either imitations or becomings to take place. Although the trickster enacts something new, she does so on the basis of fixed properties or preexisting identities. With respect to the trickster’s future, Deleuze says her conception of flight consists in leaving, a conception of change that rests on exchanging one fixed identity for another, one ready-made form for another.35 The trickster writes by appropriating fixed forms of an existing order, simply capitulating what has come before – albeit in a different manner.36 To understand the way Anglo-American authors enact becomings in the world, it is necessary to understand an earlier characterization Deleuze and Guattari make regarding the revolutionary potential of art and science.

Towards the end of Anti-Oedipus, they write that “art and science have a revolutionary potential…this potential appears all the more as one is less and less concerned with what art and science mean…art and science cause increasingly decoded and deterritorialized flows to circulate in the socius…to the point where the scientist and the artist may be determined to rejoin an objective revolutionary situation” (AO 379). Insofar as one associates “increasingly decoded and deterritorialized flows” with becomings, in the first place then, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize not only the extent to which artists and scientists enact becomings in the world but also the fact that these becomings carry a revolutionary potential. Further, they say art and science 34 “This is not a matter of imitation” (D 33).35 Deleuze writes that the “trickster claims to take possession of fixed properties, or to conquer

a territory, or even to introduce a new order. The trickster has plenty of future but no becoming whatsoever” (D 31).

36 The distinction between becoming and imitation lies at the basis of two conceptions of the political in the work of Deleuze and Guattari: one based on the creative activities of philosophy and art that consists in the production of genuinely new ways of being or modes of existence and another based on opinion that consists in the production of agreement or consensus concerning existing possibilities. This difference constitutes the nature of the trickster’s plagiarism, the way she enacts imitation, the French procedure. I return to this at the end of the chapter, as well as in chapters five and six.

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are all the more effective – all the more revolutionary – the less artists and scientists take this as their goal, the less they concern themselves with the meaning of art and science from the perspective of society – in terms of their capacity to enact becomings that carry a revolutionary potential.

Returning to “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” Deleuze claims writers bring about deterritorializations with the subject matter about which they write.37 Thus, writing about an animal makes that animal something different from an animal – a cat to pet, cow to milk, horse to ride. This constitutes decoding – disconnecting partial objects and flows from detachments from signifying chains – which effects deterritorialization.38 In this process, however, the writer also changes, becoming something other than a writer. Just as an animal becomes something different from an animal in the process of being written about, so too does the writer become something different from a writer in the process of writing about an animal. Here Deleuze’s thought takes inspiration from Blanchot’s.39 But a question thus arises concerning what exactly the writer ceases to be – or becomes – in the process of writing.

Touching on this question – regarding why one would write – Deleuze asks the following: “What other reason is there to write than to be traitor to one’s own reign, traitor to one’s sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority? And to be traitor to writing” (D 33). Again, Deleuze considers not only the characters portrayed in Anglo-American literature traitors but also Anglo-American writers themselves. As a traitor, the writer can be understood in a fashion analogous to Anglo-American characters, which concerns a rejection of the organic model. In terms of authors, this would consist in an understanding of the writer as a substance determined by a form, in turn determined by an end.40 Again, however, a question arises concerning what end the writer serves, which would determine her form.

On the one hand, writing might be conceived as serving a social function, to legitimate a given social or political order. How well writers serve this end would determine the form of both writers and writing. However, this is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari criticize in an Oedipal-form of literature, 37 In terms of literature as an “affective deterritorialization,” see the work of William Spanos.38 “It is only when a flux is deterritorialized,” he writes, “that it succeeds in making its

conjunction with other fluxes, which deterritorialize it in their turn, and vice versa” (D 37).39 Regarding the relation between writers and writing, Blanchot says, “we do not write

according to what we are; we are according to what we write” (89).40 See Benoît Auclerc’s discussion of Deleuze’s “third-person singular” as an alternative to

thinking about writing in terms of a personal substance in “Deleuze à l’épreuve du tropisme” (97).


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a writing that works on the basis of – and further reinforces – an illegitimate understanding and employment of the syntheses of the unconscious.41 On the other hand, one might conceive the task of writing as a traitor to consist in criticizing a given social order, a criticism of capitalism. Once again, however, Deleuze and Guattari reject precisely this understanding at the end of Anti-Oedipus, saying writing is all the more revolutionary – all the more capable of bring about social change – the less it takes this as its goal. Given capitalism’s ability to make all things appear in terms of and serve the ends of the production of capital, writing and writers are particularly susceptible to this subversion, where writing becomes a commodity form. Anytime writing takes social criticism as its goal, it opens itself to this subversion.42

This is not to say, however, that the goal of writing consists in writing alone, that this constitutes its majesty.43 The aim of writing consists in freeing life. Anglo-American literature provides a source for conceiving “persons, societies, and reigns” differently.44 Deleuze returns to this characterization of writing and literature throughout his work, that they free life or establish a “more-than-personal life.”45 Once again, he takes inspiration for this claim from

41 In Thousand Plateaus, they associate this with a “state form” of literature (3-25). I return to this below and in chapter six.

42 In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari’s position is similar to that of Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno in Aesthetic Theory. See the last section, “Movements and Migrations,” of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism 326 ff. for an important discussion of this kind of subversion.

43 Deleuze and Guattari make this same point regarding philosophy in What is Philosophy? I return to this in chapter five.

44 “Writing carries out the conjunction, the transmutation of fluxes, through which life escapes from the resentment of persons, societies, and reigns… Writing, the means to a more than personal life” (D 38).

45 For this reason, he claims that Masoch and Sade are “pornologists” rather than “pornographers” (M 16-18). According to Bogue, for Deleuze, Masoch and Sade are pornologists because their work goes from a personal realm of phantasy to a universal realm of myth (Bogue 18). Although this characterization is not entirely incorrect, insofar as Deleuze and Guattari are highly critical of the role myth plays in psychoanalysis, if one stops there, then one fails to fully capture the novelty of this distinction – especially Deleuze’s claim that language reaches its highest function in the work of Masoch and Sade when it acts directly on the senses. As pornologists, Masoch and Sade establish entire worlds through the creations of affects, which concern novel relations between subjects, percepts, and affects. The impersonality of the sadistic enterprise in Philosophy in the Bedroom is not simply a matter of obtaining personal enjoyment in individual acts but the creation of an impersonal sadistic universe through the education of others. See Philosophy in the Bedroom in Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings 191. See Geyskens for a characterization along roughly these lines, as wells as my discussion of this in chapter two. I return to this in chapter five.

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various Anglo-American authors,46 and his position comes close to Blanchot’s (28), especially when Deleuze says the impersonal third person substitutes for the personal I in writing. In their reading of Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari claim the impersonal nature of animal essences written about in his short stories provides Kafka with a way out of the stories and into the novels (K 35). Furthermore, when Deleuze describes the nature of signs in Proust, he seems to have something similar in mind.47

Of central importance in all these cases is the extent to which Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari conceive of writers and writing as harnessing impersonal material forces for the sake of transformation – in other words, what they refer to in Anti-Oedipus as “desire.” Insofar as conceiving desire in terms of lack supports a conception of relations between individuals and community in terms of goal-directed activity – based on shared interests and mutual aims – the problem Deleuze addresses concerns less determining the proper end or purpose of writers and writing than with conceiving reality in terms of ends or purposes in the first place – in terms of the organic model.

Deleuze goes on to further explain these commitments in terms of the relationship between Anglo-American literature and the thought of Hume, Spinoza, and the Stoics – in terms of metaphysical commitments. Once again, for this reason, as opposed to understanding Deleuze’s engagements with Anglo-American literature in terms of topical, stylistic, or aesthetic issues – concerning a body of work from authors of a particular tradition and geography, one of a coincidental nature48 – it seems more appropriate to consider Deleuze’s engagements with Anglo-American literature from a philosophical perspective, in other words, Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept. The metaphysical commitments Deleuze associates with Anglo-American literature culminate in his notion of the assemblage. In terms of the transition from Anti-Oedipus to Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari say their notion of assemblage is meant to replace that of desire. Understanding the metaphysical commitments of the philosophers with whom Deleuze associates Anglo-American literature is thus necessary to understand the nature of this transition and his notion of assemblage.

46 For instance, Miller describes a type of desire so great it becomes a reality, saying it is impersonal and inhuman (Tropic of Capricorn 336). He characterizes this desire as one of wanting more than life can offer (Sexus 40). Fitzgerald describes the trajectory of his own work in terms of an increasing impersonality (Crack-Up 321), in terms of the growth of a large personality (Crack-Up 203).

47 Deleuze writes that “the series of our loves transcends our experience, links up with other experiences, accedes to a transubjective reality” (PS 71).

48 See Lecercle for his characterization of Deleuze’s interest in Anglo-American literature as coincidental in nature.


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4. Hume and the Exteriority of Relations

The first philosopher with whom Deleuze associates Anglo-American literature is Hume. He begins with the rather abrupt query, “Why write, why have written about empiricism, and about Hume in particular?” Deleuze answers that “empiricism is like the English novel. It is a case of philosophizing as a novelist, of being a novelist in philosophy” (D 41). Understanding what Deleuze means by “philosophizing as a novelist” is thus necessary to understand the significance of Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept. If philosophizing like a novelist consists in empiricism in general – and the philosophy of Hume in particular – then to make sense of this claim, one must understand the nature of empiricism and the philosophy of Hume from Deleuze’s perspective. This concerns what Deleuze refers to as the “exteriority of relations,” which he begins to discuss in terms of its methodological implications.

Before giving his own positive account of empiricism, Deleuze criticizes traditional characterizations in the history of philosophy: empiricism would consist in an account of knowledge where understanding has its basis in the sensible, where the intelligible comes from the senses (D 41). Insofar as such accounts begin with first principles, says Deleuze, they have a stifling effect, that things do not come “alive” until one reaches second, third, and fourth principles – at which point postulates cease being principles. Empiricism is methodologically interesting for this reason.49 The empiricist discovery consists in the way it conceives relations, conceiving relations as “external to their terms” (D 41).50

Deleuze goes on to give two examples, contrasting the empiricist position with those of rationalism-idealism and Platonism-Aristotelianism: “‘Peter is smaller than Paul,’ ‘The glass is on the table’: relation is neither internal to one of the terms which would consequently be subject” (D 41). Here Deleuze means that neither does empiricism conceive of relations of ideas in terms of rationalism-idealism – where relations would be internal to a subject and

49 Inquiring into the reason for this – how they made this methodological breakthrough – Deleuze asks the following: “In this respect what is it that the empiricists found not in their heads,” as first principles, “but in the world, which is like a vital discovery, a certainty of life which, if one really adheres to it, changes one’s way of life?” (D 41). He answers that empiricism begins in the middle, with relations: “Relations are in the middle, and exist as such. This exteriority of relations is not a principle, it is a vital protest against principles” (D 41).

50 See TRM 365 for his further discussion of the way relations are external to their terms, as well as my previous characterization in chapter three of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions of detachments from signifying chains in terms of the externality of relations.

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then imposed on the world as an object51 – “nor to two together,” in terms of Platonism-Aristotelianism, where relations would be internal to both terms as particular embodiments or instances of universal forms (D 41). The significance of empiricism thus consists in not only its philosophical methodology but also its metaphysical commitments. Even more precisely, the point Deleuze makes here is that philosophical methodology informs metaphysical commitments, just as metaphysical commitments inform philosophical methodology.

Characterizing the significance of empiricism in his own thought – in terms almost diametrically opposed to those of the structuralist tradition – Deleuze says that the nature of empiricism is to start with states of things and then derive concepts from them (TRM 304).52 His criticisms of psychoanalytic readings of literature are based on a similar methodological point, where psychoanalysis is criticized because it turns to literature simply to justify or legitimate its own positions.53 Deleuze’s earlier work on Hume provides for a better understanding of the significance of this point.

Published in 1953, Empiricism and Subjectivity is Deleuze’s first book-length monograph, in which he investigates the philosophy of Hume. At a time when Hegel, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis dominated the French academic landscape, where the central philosophical questions concerned the ways a subject causes a world to come into existence – in other words, how a subject forms the given – Deleuze asked another question: How is a subject formed by the given? This question orients his reading of Hume, and the answer Deleuze gives to this question is the association of ideas. As relations, the association of ideas constitutes a subject on the basis of experience. As opposed to beginning with a conception of subjectivity based on substance and then explaining how it constitutes the given, Deleuze begins with the

51 See TRM 384, where he says that transcendental empiricism does away with distinguishing anything belonging to a subject and object, as well as my explanation of the subject-object nature of experience in Kantian idealism in “Experiential Unity and Transcendental Subjectivity in Kant” in chapter one.

52 Characterizing structuralism and its methodology, Lévi-Strauss says, for example, that the “term ‘social structure’ has nothing to do with empirical reality but with models which are built up after it” (Structural Anthropology 279). One can better understand Deleuze’s position here with reference to Lawrence’s claim that literature is closer to life than philosophy and that Lawrence’s philosophy (“pollyanalytics”) is a result of literature rather than the reverse (FU 57).

53 Freud’s characterization of the close relation between the psychiatrist and poet is of this type (“Gradiva” 44), such that in Deleuze’s reflections on the work of Masoch, he says that all “too often the writer is still considered as one more case added to clinical psychology” (DI 133). Miller uses these psychoanalytic engagements with literature to ridicule psychoanalysis (Sexus 324-339). See my discussion of these issues in chapters one and three.


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given and then explains how the given constitutes the subject.54 He returns to this in “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” discussing it in terms of a distinction between the verbal form “is” and the conjunctive “and.”

Describing the significance of the verbal form is, Deleuze writes that “the history of philosophy, is encumbered with the problem of being, IS. They discuss the judgment of attribution (the sky is blue) and the judgment of existence (God is), which presupposes the other. But it is always the verb to be and the question of the principle” (D 42). Philosophy always begins with an existing being, turning to the question of the nature of relations on this basis. Insofar as the mainstream of the tradition has always conceived of substance as the most basic constituent of reality, one can here equate Deleuze’s reference to the verbal form is with the philosophical notion of substance. He then describes a different perspective, one based on empiricist insights: “if relations are external and irreducible to their terms, then the difference cannot be between the sensible and the intelligible, between experience and thought, between sensations and ideas, but only between two sorts of ideas, or two sorts of experiences, that of terms and that of relations” (D 41-42). Because of empiricism’s recognition that relations are external and irreducible to their terms, the most important philosophical distinction becomes that between terms and relations.

Deleuze attributes precisely this feature of empiricism to Anglo-American literature.55 In this respect then, Anglo-American literature begins with relations rather than terms. The category of relation takes primacy over that of terms – or substance. On this basis, Anglo-American literature considers the nature of these relations, the way they constitute terms, rather than the way terms constitute relations.56 This is empiricism’s contribution to Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept.57

54 “Subjectivity is determined as an effect; it is in fact an impression of reflection. The mind, having been affected by the principles [the association of ideas], turns now into a subject” (ES 26). Fitzgerald conceives the identity of his characters in similar terms. For instance, see The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western 11, where he describes Monroe Stahr not having an identity until getting back to the hotel room and being given a letter with his name on it.

55 “It is only the English and the Americans,” he writes, “who have freed conjunctions and reflected upon relations” (D 42).

56 “The conjunctive AND is the basis for all such relations, versus the substantial IS. The AND is not even a specific relation or conjunction, it is that which subtends all relations, the path of all relations, which makes relations shoot outside their terms and outside the set of their terms, and outside everything which could be determined as Being, One, or Whole” (D 43).

57 “Thinking with AND, instead of thinking for IS,” Deleuze writes, “empiricism has never had another secret” (D 43). He describes the filmmaker Godard’s work in similar terms – in terms of its use of “the conjunctive and” instead of the “verbal form is” (N 44).

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In terms of the transition from Anti-Oedipus to Thousand Plateaus, this is a first characteristic of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblages, their thoroughly relational nature. Assemblages are composed of multiplicities, which are themselves relational, taking the place of substance in traditional metaphysics (Smith and Protevi). Whereas their emphasis in Anti-Oedipus is on the relational nature of desire, in Thousand Plateaus it is on the relational nature of assemblages. However, this perspective is itself multifaceted, concerning not only metaphysical commitments but also philosophical methodology, as well as relations between the two.

Anglo-American literature implies a methodology based on experimen-tation rather than interpretation, one that begins with relations rather than principles.58 This is what it means to philosophize like a novelist, experimenting with relations rather than interpreting with principles. Insofar as experimentation constitutes a methodological component of Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept, to develop it Deleuze clearly pulls from his criticisms of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus.59 This highlights the extent to which Deleuze’s critique of psychoanalysis and praise for Anglo-American literature go hand-in-hand.

In the first place, experimentation can be understood as a difference in perspective, looking at things differently. This is precisely Deleuze and Guattari’s approach in Anti-Oedipus, where they take schizophrenia as their starting point and touchstone in a critique of psychoanalysis. Insofar as they base their analyses on schizophrenic experience, Deleuze and Guattari arrive at different conclusions than the mainstream of the psychoanalytic tradition. In the second place, insofar as the importance of interpretation is itself based on a primacy given to psychical over physical processes, experimentation can be understood as a semi-materialist methodology. In this regard, experimentation takes into account the central importance of material conditions to human existence, as well as the role these play in addressing the problem of critique and social change raised in chapter one. Precisely this issue lies at the heart of Deleuze’s discussion of the relation between Anglo-American literature and Spinoza, as well as a second major characteristic of assemblages.

58 Deleuze writes that empiricists “are not theoreticians, they are experimenters: they never interpret, they have no principles” (D 41).

59 See TRM 80 where Deleuze describes psychoanalysis as an art of interpretation.


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5. Spinoza, Parallelism, and Affects

The second philosopher with whom Deleuze associates Anglo-American literature is Spinoza. Regarding the manner in which he links the thought of Spinoza to Anglo-American literature, Deleuze writes, “let us take him by the middle and not by the first principle (a single substance for all the attributes)” (D 45). As with his reading of Hume, Deleuze thus begins by contesting a widely received understanding of Spinoza’s thought, one that begins with the notion of a single all-encompassing substance.60 Deleuze’s primary concern here is with the Spinozistic doctrine of parallelism, a conception of the relation between mind and body.61 However, a methodological question immediately presents itself.

Deleuze wonders how and why Spinoza has such an original feeling for the conjunction and. Whereas others overlook this novel perspective, it is central for Spinoza. Invoking the empiricist method he locates in the thought of Hume, the answer Deleuze gives is experimentation. Experimentation allows Spinoza to discover this novel relation between mind and body. As in his discussion of Hume, here Deleuze’s conception of experimentation should be understood in two related ways, one metaphysical and the other methodological.

In the first place and fairly straightforwardly, this concerns thinking about things differently. Rather than beginning with substance (the verbal form is) – conceiving mind and body as substances and then considering relations between the two on this basis – Deleuze recommends conceiving Spinoza’s thought differently, beginning with relations (the conjunctive and). Starting with parallelism, Deleuze thus elucidates a different perspective in the thought of Spinoza. Once again, his analysis here can be understood in terms of a criticism and rejection of the organic model, while at the same time praising and elucidating a model of the body without organs in the thought of Spinoza.

From the perspective of parallelism, neither the mind nor body is privileged. Neither is the mind more real than the body, nor is the body more real than the mind; neither does the mind control the body, nor does the body control the mind. Rather, each and every affect in the body has a corresponding affect in the mind, and vice versa. At the same time, beginning

60 However, this is not to say that Spinoza’s notion of a single all-encompassing substance is unimportant to Deleuze. See chapter three where I describe the model of the body without organs in terms of Spinozistic substance.

61 “The soul AND the body; no one has ever had such an original feeling for the conjunction ‘and’” (D 45).

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with relations and parallelism results in conceiving mind and body in terms different from those of substance and the verbal form is. Neither do they exist in and through themselves alone, nor can they be distinguished on the basis of forms, determined by ends. According to Deleuze, they should be understood as unique sets of relations.

Mind and body are conceived as modes or affects of a single all-encom-passing substance considered under different attributes, thought and exten-sion respectively. Insofar as every mode is composed of and composes less-er and greater modes, the nature of reality is relational all the way down.62 These inter-determining, unique sets of relations are what Spinoza refers to as “bodies.”63 This commitment thus constitutes a fundamental rejection of substance as the most basic constituent of reality.

Further, relations between affects are conceived as ones of chance encounters. One cannot conceive these relations in terms of either formal or final causality. These encounters constitute affects that either increase or decrease the ability of a mode to act, determining different modes of existence.64 Since these relations are never final but always variable – one always becomes more or less powerful depending on one’s encounters – affects constitute what Deleuze refers to as “becomings.”65 These commitments thus constitute the metaphysical components of Deleuze’s conception of experimentation in the thought of Spinoza. One is now in a position to approach its methodological component – how and why Spinoza discovers this novel perspective where others overlook it.

As has often been pointed out, the Ethics is itself written from the perspective of knowledge of the second kind.66 The metaphysics it elucidates – including the notions of parallelism and an all-encompassing substance,

62 Describing Spinoza’s thought, Deleuze says that each “individual, body and soul, possesses an infinity of parts which belong to him in a more or less complex relationship. Each individual is also himself composed of individuals of a lower order and enters into the composition of individuals of a higher order. All individuals are in Nature as though on a plane of consistence whose whole figure they form, a plane which is variable at each moment” (D 45).

63 “Bodies are not defined by their genus or species,” Deleuze writes, “by their organs and functions, but by what they can do, by the affects of which they are capable – in passion as well as in action. You have not defined an animal until you have listed its affects” (D 45).

64 Deleuze goes on to say that modes “affect each other in so far as the relationship which constitutes each one forms a degree of power, a capacity to be affected. Everything is simply an encounter in the universe, a good or a bad encounter” (D 45).

65 “Affects are becomings,” Deleuze writes, “sometimes they weaken us in so far as they diminish our power to act and decompose our relationships (sadness), sometimes they make us stronger in so far as they increase our power and make us enter into a more vast or superior individual (joy)” (D 45).

66 See EPS 296 for a characterization of the Ethics in these terms.


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its critique of teleology, etc. – is only possible on the basis of knowledge of the common notions. To reach knowledge of the second kind, one must first become powerful enough and experience enough joy to unite the idea of oneself to that of something else, thereby discovering the common notions and organizing one’s thoughts, actions, and encounters in such a way as to escape the passions.67 As Deleuze notes, however, this is difficult and appears almost impossible.68 Here one is confronted with the methodological component of Deleuze’s conception of experimentation, not only how one discovers this metaphysics but also the role it plays in addressing the paradoxical problem of critique and social change raised previously.

As in Deleuze’s reading of Hume, the metaphysical component of experimentation informs the methodological one. Especially important here is the notion of parallelism, as it emphasizes the role of the body in experimentation. According to a doctrine of parallelism, each and every affect in the body has a corresponding affect in the mind – conceived as unique sets of relations based on chance encounters. These encounters either increase or decrease the ability of a mode to act, determining different modes of existence. Deleuze’s emphasis here is on the role the body plays in this process, discovering that of which the body is capable so as to simultaneously discover that of which the mind is also capable, which he says goes beyond an understanding of the mind in terms of consciousness.69

Although the goal of this process is ultimately a difference in psychical perspective – the ability to consider things differently – this is only itself pos-sible on the basis of physical processes, that which happens to the body. Ex-perimentation consists in considering things differently on the basis of experi-mentation with one’s body, discovering that of which one’s body is capable.70 67 See my description of this process in chapter two.68 He writes that we “live in a world which is generally disagreeable, where not only people

but the established powers have a stake in transmitting sad affects to us. Sadness, sad affects, are all those which reduce our power to act… It is not easy to be a free man…organize encounters, increase the power to act, to be moved by joy, to multiply the affects which express or encompass a maximum of affirmation” (D 46).

69 “Just as you do not know what a body is capable of,” Deleuze writes, “just as there are many things in the body that you do not know, so there are in the soul many things which go beyond your consciousness. This is the question: what is a body capable of? What affects are you capable of? Experiment” (D 46).

70 Again, Deleuze takes inspiration for this position from not only Spinoza but also Anglo-American writers: Miller describes the way the body cannot be separated from the soul, this being especially so in sex (Sexus 221). Insofar as Deleuze and Guattari directly associate their conception of desire in Anti-Oedipus with libido, which they say is thoroughly sexual – versus Jung’s characterization of libido as a general mental energy – this constitutes another point of continuity between Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of psychoanalysis and conception of desire in Anti-Oedipus – Deleuze’s development of Anglo-American literature

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Through this method, one discovers a metaphysics based on the model of the body without organs rather than that of the organism, as well as resolving the paradoxical problem of critique and social change raised in chapter one. Only on the basis of this semi-materialist methodology is a difference in both meta-physical and political perspective possible, where one simultaneously arrives at different psychical conclusions because of different physical processes.71

Deleuze refers to none other than Lawrence and his reading of Whitman to summarize this perspective. Instead of the organic model’s conception of the relationship between mind and body in substantial, dualistic terms, through Anglo-American literature and its constitutive conception of experimentation one discovers these as affects conceived in terms of parallelism.72 Furthermore, relations between individuals and community are here described in terms of vibrations, in the same manner as in Anti-Oedipus.

Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept thus implies metaphysical and methodological commitments, as well as an account of the way these are related. In constructing this concept, Deleuze borrows from Hume a commitment to the externality of relations, as well as the related methodological conception of experimentation. From Spinoza, he begins with parallelism and arrives at a conception of individuals and community as modes or affects determined by chance encounters. This supplements the conception of experimentation with which he begins in Hume’s thought, emphasizing the importance of material conditions to an understanding of human existence.

Hence, in the transition from Anti-Oedipus to Thousand Plateaus, the second major characteristic Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept contributes to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage is its material nature, as well as the importance of material conditions to philosophical and political methodology. Whereas their emphasis in Anti-Oedipus is on the material nature of desire, in Thousand Plateaus it is on the material nature of assemblages. The third major characteristic concerns a distinction between substances and events, which Deleuze here locates in Stoic thought.

as a philosophical concept and Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the assemblage in Thousand Plateaus.

71 “To make the body a power which is not reducible to the organism,” Deleuze writes, “to make thought a power which is not reducible to consciousness” (D 46).

72 “What Lawrence says about Whitman’s continuous life is well suited to Spinoza: the Soul and the Body, the soul is neither above nor inside, it is ‘with,’ it is on the road, exposed to all contacts, encounters, in the company of those who follow the same way, ‘feel with them, seize the vibration of their soul and their body as they pass,’ the opposite of a morality of salvation, teaching the soul to live its life, not to save it” (D 46-47).


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6. Bodies, Events, and the Stoics

The last set of philosophers with whom Deleuze associates Anglo-American literature in this essay is the Stoics. In this reading, Deleuze adds further nuance to his conception of Anglo-American literature, focusing on the material nature of reality in Stoic thought, as well as their conception of the event in contradistinction to that of substance. As with Hume, Deleuze begins with the abrupt query, “Why write about them?” His answer concerns bodies and their relations: “A darker and more agitated world has never been set out,” Deleuze writes, “bodies…but qualities are also bodies, breaths and souls are bodies, actions and passions themselves are bodies. Everything is a compound of bodies – bodies interpenetrate, force each other, poison each other, insinuate themselves into each other, withdraw, reinforce or destroy each other, as fire penetrates iron and makes it red, as the carnivore devours its prey, as the lover enters the beloved” (D 47).

Deleuze’s emphasis here is on a Stoic conception of reality in terms of the way bodies interpenetrate and determine each other. Insofar as Stoic metaphysics closely tallies with that of the Pre-Socratics, it is unsurprising the description Deleuze gives of their worldview is one where the emphasis is on bodies and material conditions.73 However, as in his readings of Hume and Spinoza, Deleuze’s position here regarding the Stoics is one developed earlier, in relation to the notions of freedom and sense.

Published in 1969, The Logic of Sense is a transitional work for Deleuze, written around the time of Difference and Repetition but before the beginning of his collaborations with Guattari. Deleuze still praises psychoanalysis and the likes of Freud, Klein, and Lacan in this work. However, insofar as he develops Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept in contradistinction to psychoanalytic thought and the organic model – and associates Stoic thought with Anglo-American literature – as early as The Logic of Sense he can thus be understood as developing a conceptual framework in tension with psychoanalysis.

The focus of this book is on a number of paradoxes and seemingly irresolvable difficulties that arise in logic and linguistics if one fails to take into account what Deleuze refers to as the important Stoic category of “sense”

73 Deleuze’s characterization of the Stoic worldview here implies Democritus’ claim that “what exists differs only by contact, rhythm, and turning” (Barnes 207). Regarding the claim that Stoic thought is based on an atomistic, Pre-Socratic metaphysics, see David Cooper’s description in Ethics: The Classic Readings 47. See my discussion in chapter three of the relation between Pre-Socratic metaphysical commitments and those of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus.

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(LS 16-26). Starting from insights in the work of Lewis Carroll, Deleuze puts forward an account of sense inspired by Stoic metaphysics. He shows that linguists and logicians are unable to either resolve or account for these paradoxes because they have overlooked Stoic insights. In the first place, these concern the nature of and relations between corporeal and incorporeal stuff. The starting point for this discovery in Stoic thought, says Deleuze, is an attempt to account for both causality and freedom (LS 7-13). The Stoics do so in terms of sense, which Deleuze refers to as the “event” in “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature.”

Describing the event in terms of bodies and their relations, Deleuze writes the following: “from all these bodily struggles, there arises a sort of incorporeal vapor, which no longer consists in qualities, in actions or in passions, in causes acting upon one another, but in results of these actions and passions, in effects which result from all these causes together. They are pure, impassive, incorporeal events, on the surface of things, pure infinitives of which it cannot even be said that they ARE, participating rather in an extra-being which surrounds that which is: ‘to redden,’ ‘to turn green,’ ‘to cut,’ ‘to die,’ ‘to love’” (D 47). Insofar as Stoic thought is itself based on Pre-Socratic metaphysics, again, it is unsurprising that the description Deleuze gives of the Stoic worldview resembles that of the Pre-Socratics. The major difference between the two – and the difficulty with this analogy – is the fact that Deleuze describes the Stoic event in immaterial terms. Events arise from material bodies as “a sort of incorporeal vapor” and then act back on the bodies from which they arise.74 Although Deleuze here describes events in immaterial terms, these should not be understood as spiritual entities conceived in dualistic terms.75

Deleuze’s concern is with the way the Stoics reconceive the nature and relation between things and events, similar to the way Hume reconceives the nature of terms and relations. Here one could say the Stoics give priority to relations rather than terms. Deleuze says they discover how things can be conceived on the basis of events rather than events on the basis of things. For this reason, events might also be understood as unique sets of relations, bodies in the Spinozistic sense; it seems as though Deleuze’s understanding of the Stoics is influenced by Spinoza’s conception of the common notions and their 74 He says that the “event is always produced by bodies which collide, lacerate each other or

interpenetrate, the flesh and the sword. But this effect itself is not of the order of bodies, an impassive, incorporeal, impenetrable battle, which towers over its accomplishment and dominates its effectuation” (D 48).

75 The “Stoics’ strength lay in making a line of separation pass – no longer between the sensible and the intelligible, or between the soul and the body” – in other words, a dualist distinction – “but where no one had seen it before – between physical depths and metaphysical surface. Between things and events” (D 47).


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relation to knowledge of the third kind.76 Thus, the significance of the Stoic event to Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept concerns less its immaterial than relational nature.77

Here relations are conceived as external to their terms and things as consequent on events.78 Insofar as becomings are always open to and determined in relation to other becomings, relations and events provide counterpoints to the simplistic formal determinism of the organic model. It is impossible to determine beforehand the nature of either relations or events, the things to which they give rise.79 One must experiment.

Hence, in the transition from Anti-Oedipus to Thousand Plateaus, the third major characteristic Anglo-American literature contributes to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage is the event, understanding things on the basis of events rather than events on the basis of things. Just as their project in Anti-Oedipus consists in not only a critique of psychoanalysis and the organic model but also a positive alternative in schizoanalysis and the body without organs, so too is Deleuze’s task here positive in nature. His readings of Hume on the exteriority of relations, Spinoza on parallelism, and the Stoics on the event culminate in his notion of assemblages. This notion itself gives rise to a problem specific to the Anglo-American milieu, one regarding relations between individuals and community, a political problem specific to

76 He writes that “Thyestes’ terrible feast, incest and devouring, sicknesses which are nurtured in our thighs, so many bodies which grow in our own. Who is to say which compound is good or bad, since all is good from the viewpoint of the two parties which encounter one another and interpenetrate” (D 47). A cool, disinterested perspective on incest and devouring one’s children is thus possible if only one considers these as relations of composition and decomposition.

77 Regarding a characterization of the broader trajectory of his own thought, Deleuze says, “I’ve tried in all my books to discover the nature of events; it’s a philosophical concept, the only one capable of ousting the verb ‘to be’ and attributes” (N 141). Hence, Deleuze’s concern with events bears less on their immaterial than relational nature – starting with relations rather than terms, events rather than things. Reflecting on his engagements with Leibniz, Deleuze emphasizes this point: “I have, it’s true, spent a lot of time writing about this notion of event: you see, I don’t believe in things” (N 160).

78 Summarizing the Stoic contribution to Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept, Deleuze thus describes the event as a “new way of getting rid of the IS: the attribute is no longer a quality related to the subject by the indicative ‘is,’… Verbs in the infinitive are limitless becomings. The verb to be has the characteristic – like an original taint – of referring to an I…which overcodes it and puts it in the first person of the indicative. But infinitive-becomings have no subject: they refer only to an ‘it’ or the event (it is raining)…states of things which are compounds or collectives, assemblages, even at the peak of their singularity” (D 47-48).

79 Later Deleuze says that the “event creates a new existence, it produces a new subjectivity” (TRM 234).

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Anglo-American literature that has its solution in a corresponding conception of the political.

7. Assemblages and the Political

Deleuze and Guattari note that their concept of assemblages in Thousand Plateaus is meant to replace that of desire in Anti-Oedipus, and Deleuze’s description of Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept culminates in precisely this notion. In “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” as elsewhere, Deleuze describes the assemblage in terms of its difference from notions belonging to the organic worldview. He begins to explain this concept by making reference to a structuralist understanding as representative of the organic worldview.

Words or signifiers condition ideas and concepts, which in turn condition the experience of a uniquely human existence.80 On a structuralist model, words, ideas, concepts, and signifiers are considered the basic constituents of human existence. Deleuze disputes this, saying instead that assemblages are the basic constituents of reality.81 Words, ideas, concepts, and signifiers result from assem-blages. Insofar as the former are conceived as relatively self-subsistent, immate-rial entities modeled on the notion of substance, assemblages should be under-stood as reciprocally determining and interpenetrating material entities. Thus, there is nothing specifically personal about these entities, such that Deleuze’s account of assemblages does not rely on the notion of a personal subject.

Even if a structuralist paradigm is committed to the view that language is impersonal – coming before and conditioning individual human existences82 – it nonetheless relies on a notion of personal subjectivity to embody specific material instantiations of language, the subject of enunciation. However, not even specific material instantiations of language, says Deleuze, should be understood on the basis of a subject as substance. The voice, writing, gestures, etc. – material vehicles in and through which language enters and reinforces itself in the world – are themselves conditioned by wider sets of material relations, assemblages and what Deleuze here refers to as “populations,

80 See chapters one and three where I explain this claim at length.81 “The minimum real unit is not the word,” he writes, “the idea, the concept or the signifier,

but the assemblage” (D 38).82 Deleuze’s earlier, positive comments regarding the role structuralism plays in producing

a conception of the “nomad subject” should probably be understood in terms of the impersonality of these structures. On this see DI 190.


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multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events.”83 These assemblages themselves give rise to individuals. Conceived in terms of “populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events” – all of which constitute components of assemblages – individuals are understood as proper names that denote unique sets of relations, bodies in the Spinozistic sense.84

Deleuze then immediately raises a problem in connection with this account, one that is political in nature. This problem concerns how individuals and community manage to function when conceived along these lines – the question of relations between individuals and community in non-organic terms. Deleuze writes that structures “are linked to conditions of homogeneity, but assemblages are not” (D 39). His reference to the homogeneity of structures should, again, be understood in terms of structuralism, its relation to the organic model, and a corresponding conception of the political.

In this scheme, structures serve the same roles as forms, giving stability and meaning to individual egos conceived as substances. Traditions and political systems act as points of departure and destination, in terms of which individuals are oriented and integrated into community. This understanding assumes an illegitimate employment of the syntheses based on notions belonging to the organic model. Conceived in terms of the model of the organism, individuals, community, and relations between the two are understood in a top-down fashion.

The organic model’s conception of the political consists in the production of agreement or consensus, where relations between individuals and community are based on goal-directed activity, determined by mutual interests and shared aspirations. Here the integration of individuals into community is simply the natural consequence of the expression of form. Orientation and integration within a community is thus conceived as a natural process, one that occurs because of the types of creatures human beings are.

If one jettisons these notions, however, then the question of how individuals relate to community comes to the forefront. If relations between individuals and community are no longer the result of a natural process, then it is

83 He says that it “is always an assemblage which produces utterances. Utterances do not have as their cause a subject which would act as a subject of enunciation… The utterance is the product of an assemblage – which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events” (D 38). In connection to this, see chapter three for my discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s account in Anti-Oedipus regarding the way the social machines organize the productive powers of desire on the basis of an illegitimate employment of the syntheses of the unconscious.

84 “The proper name does not designate a subject,” Deleuze write, “but something which happens, at least between two terms which are not subjects, but agents, elements… makes one multiplicity pass into another” (D 38-39).

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unclear how they can be brought together.85 For Jacques Rancière, this is the problematic unique to politics, precisely that agreement cannot be conceived as a natural process.86 Anglo-American literature touches on this problem.

Although Deleuze’s interest in Anglo-American literature goes beyond that of a simple fascination with works from authors of a particular tradition and geography, one finds considerations in this body of work that justify Deleuze’s construction of a philosophical concept on its basis. In the first place, this concerns Anglo-American works themselves. Anglo-American writers neither conceive of nor write about their characters in terms of a primary identity, in terms of the notion of substance. Rather, they portray these characters as chance encounters, individuals as unique sets of relations, as Spinozistic bodies. In the second place, Deleuze’s construction of a philosophical concept on the basis of Anglo-American literature concerns the broader social and historical context in which this literature is written. This is particularly true of American literature.87

The United States of America is a country of immigrants, populated with people from all over the world. These people come from different, diverging, and often conflicting backgrounds and traditions, with different conceptions of how to live and what constitutes the good life. Fitzgerald describes Americans, for example, as a people without roots, without history (Crack-Up 109). Relations between individuals and community are thus potentially fraught with strife. The integration of individuals into community is by no means a process that appears as either easy or natural. Deleuze’s claim that society is defined by its lines of flight implies this problematic (N 160), and Anglo-American literature addresses this process with its notion of assemblages.88

85 Deleuze writes that the “difficult part is making all the elements of non-homogeneous sets converge, making them function together” (D 39).

86 Rancière writes that the “foundation of politics is not in fact more a matter of convention than of nature: it is the lack of foundation, the sheer contingency of any social order. Politics exists simply because no social order is based on nature, no divine law regulates human society” (Rancière 16). “This means that politics doesn’t always happen – it actually happens very little or rarely” (Rancière 17). I return to this in chapters five and six.

87 Hence, although Deleuze conflates English and American literature in this essay – in his construction of Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept – at the end of his life, he returns to this issue, distinguishing between English and American literature and their precise social functions. See ECC 77 regarding his distinction between Dickens and Melville.

88 Addressing this same issue, Miller says America is a sick, cancerous growth (Tropic of Capricorn 213). Although this claim is easily misconstrued, he does not mean it in a pejorative sense. Rather, Miller’s characterization is a matter of fact, pointing towards the political problem of conceiving relations between individuals and community in non-organic terms. Time and again, Fitzgerald touches on precisely this issue, describing individuals and their relations to community in terms of this problematic. In The Love of the Last Tycoon – a work to which Deleuze frequently refers – Fitzgerald says that writers are not people but a whole bunch of


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Deleuze says he conceives of assemblages in terms of sympathy, symbiosis, or co-functioning rather than identity.89 Sympathy consists in shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. Both individuals and community are modes that interpenetrate and reciprocally determine one another. Here individuals, community, and relations between the two are conceived in a bottom-up fashion, in terms of relations, affects, and events. There is no way to tell beforehand the nature of the relations to which assemblages will give rise.90 Deleuze thus proposes a conception of the political based on ethics in the Spinozistic sense, which consists in experimentation as discussed above.91 He describes this in terms of a way of writing, beginning to elucidate a conception of Anglo-American writing in contradistinction to Franco-Germanic writing.

According to Deleuze, French and German literature consist in national-istic projects, those of establishing the identity of a people through a specific type of literature, which arises from and can be identified with that people.92 Not only do Franco-Germanic authors give voice to the spirit of a people in their writing, but they also establish the identity of a people through this process. Authors thus speak for and in the place of others, and criteria of identification are central to this process such that the author is close to a people and its identity.93 All of this assumes notions belonging to the organic

people trying to be one (12) and that, as a movie producer, the character Monroe Stahr acts as a point of unity for the individual writers (58). Further, Fitzgerald characterizes Americans as three or four different people in one, although they change very quickly (116). In Tender is the Night, Nicole is described as a whole lot of simple people in one (293-294).

89 Structures “are linked to conditions of homogeneity, but,” as Deleuze goes on to say, “assemblages are not. The assemblage is co-functioning, it is ‘sympathy,’ symbiosis” (D 39).

90 Describing this with reference to the exteriority of relations, Marrati says, “what happens does not depend on fixed essences or properties” (212).

91 In Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe a similar material process in different terms, as a “generalized chromaticism.” “This is what we are getting at,” they write, “a generalized chromaticism. Placing elements of any nature in continuous variation is an operation that will perhaps give rise to new distinctions, but takes none as final and has none in advance” (97).

92 In Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write that it “is odd how Goethe and Hegel hated this new kind of writing,” one they associate with Kleist and is similar in nature to Anglo-American literature. “Because for them the plan(e) must indissolubly be a harmonious development of Form and a regulated formation of the Subject, personage, or character (the sentimental education, the interior and substantial solidity of the character, the harmony or analogy of forms and continuity of development, the cult of the State, etc.)” (268).

93 “Neither identification nor distance,” he writes, describing Anglo-American literature in contradistinction to Franco-Germanic literature, “neither proximity nor remoteness, for, in all these cases, one is led to speak for, in the place of” (D 39). See Mengue, “Birth of Philosophy” regarding the difference between Deleuze’s conception of fabulation as constituting a people to come and that of, for example, political aestheticism in the work of Heidegger. I return to the notion of fabulation in chapter five.

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model, where the spirit of a people resembles something like a form. The job of the author is to articulate this form, such that the author is understood in a teleological fashion, in terms of the role he or she plays in a given social milieu. Having abandoned these notions, Deleuze proposes something different.

One must “speak with, write with. With the world, with a part of the world, with people. Not a talk at all, but a conspiracy, a collision of love or hatred. There is no judgment in sympathy, but agreements of convenience between bodies of all kinds” (D 39). Instead of conceiving writing in terms of criteria of identification – speaking for or in the place of others – Anglo-American authors speak with others, write with the world. Insofar as speech has always been given a certain priority over writing as a vehicle for communicating thoughts, the fact that Deleuze here refuses to equate speech with Anglo-American writing – “Not a talk at all” – is significant. Writing consists in more than the material process of conveying ideas, not merely an intermediary process through which immaterial ideas are transmitted from mind to mind, a third-best to the activities of speech and pure thought.94

Writing is understood as a material force, where its political value consists in establishing relations of sympathy, what Deleuze here refers to as “agreements of convenience between bodies of all kinds.”95 Writing with someone, writing with the world, consists in establishing sympathy, cultivating shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. This is not simply because reading a book written about puppies, for instance, makes one think about puppies at the moment someone else is reading the same book.96 Rather, both writing and reading are material processes that affect the body and other bodies, physical processes that act directly on the senses,

94 Again, one can locate at least a nascent form of this position in Anti-Oedipus. There Deleuze and Guattari write that “it has been a long time since Engels demonstrated…how an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate, flows that split asunder the catholic and despotic signifier of his work… That is what style is…the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what it causes to move, to flow, and to explode – desire. For literature is like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression” (133 – emphasis added).

95 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes a similar process, one he refers to as “individuation.” “The act of individuation consists…in integrating the elements of the disparateness into a state of coupling which insures its internal resonance” (246).

96 Central to this distinction is Lawrence’s between allegory and myth and the difference between the ways they employ symbols (A 48-49). In Lawrence’s scheme, allegories are the equivalent of reading a book or looking at a picture about which one then thinks something, a thoroughly psychical process. He says that allegories can be explained and explained away, whereas myths utilize symbols in a manner that affects us deeply, as physical processes (A 142).


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unmediated by either mental ideas or psychical processes.97 This account of reading and writing points towards the metaphysical positions Deleuze and Guattari develop in Thousand Plateaus98 and is evident in What is Philosophy? when they claim the writer’s materials are words and syntax, which pass into sensations (167).99

In the diverse American social milieu of immigrants, where neither the orientation nor integration of individuals into a wider community appears as a process that is either easy or natural, the political import of Anglo-American literature consists in establishing relations of sympathy, acting directly on the senses through a writing that cultivates shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings.100 Insofar as this position consists in a material ontology, it is not surprising that Deleuze’s conception of writing in its political function comes close to that of the Pre-Socratics, similar in nature to the conception of

97 Deleuze takes this same position in his reading of Proust. There he says that, as material impressions, signs initially reach us through the senses (PS 96). Material signs are described as forcing one to think, but the nature of these encounters is contingent (PS 97). Deleuze reiterates this same position in Difference and Repetition, saying that an encounter forces one to think, but that this encounter “can only be sensed” as a sign (139-140). Foucault also conceives of literature as acting directly on the senses and the body. Literature consists in “the action, in disorder, noise, and pain, of power on lives, and the discourse that comes of it” (Essential Foucault 293). See Bogue 21 regarding his discussion of a language capable of acting directly on the senses, which he goes on to characterize as a “minor use of language,” one where sound is “deterritorialized” – by which he seems to mean something like detached from designated objects, such that they become simply sonic vibrations – where words and things can no longer be differentiated (104). Although this is certainly a minor use of language – and the one in which I am interested – it is only one minor use of language, that of the schizophrenic.

98 In Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysics, movement takes the place of form. A thing’s shape, characteristics, characteristic relations, etc. – all of which are explained by the notion of form in classic metaphysics – are explained with reference to movement. In this respect, the metaphysical commitments on which their thought is based can be understood as thoroughly ancient (Pre-Socratic) or modern. In Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari characterize assemblages and multiplicities as matters in motion, as “matter-movement, this matter-energy, this matter-flow, that matter in variation… It is a destratified, deterritorialized matter” (407). I greatly appreciate Trevor Perri bringing this to my attention in his explanation of the relation between the notions of multiplicity in the thought of Deleuze and Guattari and Bergson. See my previous characterization of this position with respect to the thought of Spinoza in chapter two. I return to this in chapters five and six.

99 Deleuze and Guattari further write that artists “are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects. They not only create them in their work, they give them to us and make us become with them, they draw us into the compound,” into an assemblage (WP 175). On this same point, Deleuze claims that writers “generate real bodies” (N 134). I return to this claim in chapter five, explaining its relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the relations between philosophy, art, and the brain in What is Philosophy?

100 Fitzgerald refers to this process as “a shifting about of atoms to form the essential molecule of a new people” (Tender is the Night 83).

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apprenticeship Deleuze develops in his engagements with Proust.101 Criteria of great writing are not based on identification – how well a writer

captures the spirit of a people or succeeds in establishing an identity with which a people can relate, based on the assumption that writing consists in speaking for and in the place of others. Rather, Deleuze uses the criterion of whether writing “works.” The political significance of writing, reading, and art consists in the creative process of experimentation, determining what does and does not work between people, for the sake of establishing new ways of being or novel modes of existence.102

Conclusion

Although Deleuze and Guattari do not develop their claims in Anti-Oedipus that a commodity form of Oedipal literature conditions psychoanalysis and that a non-Oedipal form of literature exists that works against this tendency, these can be understood in terms of the distinction Deleuze makes between Franco-Germanic and Anglo-American literature in “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature.” His praise for Anglo-American literature concerns the metaphysical commitments it implies and conception of human nature it supports, developing Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept.

On the one hand, Deleuze’s criticisms of structuralism and interpretation in connection with Franco-Germanic literature aim at not only psychoanalysis but also notions belonging to the organic worldview and the way they condition and are conditioned by an illegitimate employment of the syntheses. On the other hand, Deleuze associates Anglo-American literature with the model of the body without organs and a legitimate understanding of the syntheses of the unconscious, which gives rise to a different understanding of individuals, community, and relations between them. He discusses this concept with reference to the philosophies of Hume, Spinoza, and the Stoics.101 Regarding the way an atomist conception of teaching consist in rearranging material stuff,

Democritus says, “nature and teaching are similar, for teaching changes a man’s shape and nature acts by changing shape” (Barnes 232). For these same reasons, according to Bogue, the creation of a people in Deleuze’s conception of theater begins with language, including speech, gesture, etc. (144).

102 Blanchot describes this as “inspiration…the gift of existence to someone who does not yet exist,” where the poet is equally formed in the process of writing (227). Miller describes it in terms of writing and sex, both of which establish new types of relations with life (Sexus 243). Fitzgerald relates a similar understanding of relations between individuals in Tender is the Night. Regarding the relation between Nicole and Abe, he says, unlike lovers, they possessed no past, and, unlike man and wife, they possessed no future (81).


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In terms of both its methodological and metaphysical implications, Hume’s account of the exteriority of relations informs the philosophical methodology and metaphysical commitments belonging to Anglo-American literature as a philosophical concept. The empiricist discovery consists in conceiving relations as external to their terms: Anglo-American literature begins with relations rather than terms, considering the nature of these relations and the way they constitute terms – rather than the way terms constitute relations. As opposed to a methodological approach based on interpretation that begins with principles, Anglo-American literature thus implies a methodology based on experimentation. Insofar as interpretation itself supposes the primacy given to psychical over physical processes, in contradistinction to interpretation, experimentation can be understood as a materialist methodology. Deleuze takes up this issue in his discussion of the relation between Anglo-American literature and the thought of Spinoza.

Deleuze’s primary concern is with Spinoza’s metaphysical doctrine of parallelism – an understanding of the relation between mind and body. However, this opens onto an equally important methodological question regarding how Spinoza discovered this novel perspective. The answer Deleuze gives is experimentation and the role of the body in this process – discovering what the body can do so as to simultaneously discover what the mind can do.

Insofar as Stoic metaphysics closely tallies with that of the Pre-Socratics, it is unsurprising that bodies and relations take precedence in Deleuze’s description of the Stoic worldview. Deleuze discusses this priority in terms of his conception of the event or becomings – becomings are always open to and determined in relation to other becomings. Deleuze’s engagement with the Stoics ultimately concerns how things can be understood on the basis of events rather than events being understood on the basis of things. Taken together, Deleuze’s reading of these philosophers – in association with Anglo-American literature – culminates in his concept of the assemblage.

This notion itself gives rise to a problem specific to the Anglo-American milieu, one regarding relations between individuals and community: In the United States, the integration of individuals into community is by no means a process that appears as either easy or natural, and Anglo-American literature addresses this problem with its conception of writing. Its political value consists in establishing relations of sympathy. Writing with someone, writing with the world, results in establishing sympathy, cultivating shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. Here Deleuze thus champions a conception of the political based on experimentation. The political significance of writing,

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reading, and art concerns a creative process of determining what does and does work between people, to establish new ways of being or novel modes of existence.

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Chapter Five

The Political Significance of Opinion, Philosophy, and Art

Introduction: Opinion as a Problem

Increasing attention has been paid to Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the creative nature of philosophy, art, and science, as well as the political import of this creativity. However, in What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari oppose these disciplines to what they call “opinion.” Opinion is the object against which the creative forces of philosophy and art struggle (WP 204). For this reason, understanding what they mean by opinion and its negative significance is paramount for understanding the creative nature and positive significance of philosophy and art, as well as the political implications of this significance. For Deleuze and Guattari, this difference is by no means minor but has practical consequences evident, for example, in their claim that “the misfortune of people comes from opinion” (WP 206). Hence, any and all attempts to live better must confront opinion’s reign. However, their notion of opinion has gone largely unexplored in the secondary literature, and the first task in the present chapter is to rectify this deficiency.1

What Deleuze and Guattari mean by opinion is far from a commonsense understanding of the term, and, for this reason, neither what they mean by opinion nor its political implications are entirely clear. This gives rise to misunderstandings and misrepresentations of not only opinion and its political significance but also Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the creative natures of philosophy and art and the political import of this creativity. In the second place then, this explication is an attempt to address and correct these readings.1 Although no other work deals with Deleuze and Guattari’s account of opinion singularly

or exhaustively, Claire Colebrook, Paolo Marrati, Philippe Mengue, and Paul Patton all touch on this notion in their own work. However, the ways they handle this account seem misguided, ranging from recapitulations only loosely based on anything either Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari write, such as those of Colebrook, to explications regarding the political implications and consequences of this notion open to contention, such as those of Marrati, Mengue, and Patton. See Colebrook’s Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed as well as her Gilles Deleuze, Lefebvre’s The Image of the Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza, Marrati’s “Against the Doxa: Politics of Immanence and Becoming Minoritarian,” Mengue’s “The Problem of the Birth of Philosophy in Greece in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze,” as well as his Deleuze et la question de la démocratie and Paul Patton’s “Deleuze and Democracy” and “Order, Exteriority, and Flat Multiplicities in the Social.” I return to these throughout the course of my own exegesis.


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The following examines Deleuze and Guattari’s account of opinion in terms of three points. First, the elements that comprise it – opinion is committed to metaphysical suppositions (regarding the nature of reality) that support conceptions of subjectivity, objectivity, inter-subjective community, and relations between individuals and community – an entire philosophical anthropology or conception of human nature. According to Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy and art are based on fundamentally different suppositions that, therefore, support different accounts of these notions and a different philosophical anthropology. Second, opinion’s development as a response to chaos – opinion’s relation to chaos is one of denial, denying variances in correspondences between particular perceptions and affections that constitute opinions. The nature of this relation marks one of the main differences between opinion and philosophy and art: Philosophy and art’s relation to chaos is one of (uneasy) alliance. Third, the way this development leads to a conception of politics as consensus – assuming all are capable of recognizing the same universal opinions and naturally tend towards agreement regarding these opinions through discussion, opinion’s conception of politics as one of consensus is based on fixed correspondences between perceptions and affections all are capable of recognizing. This recognition constitutes membership in a global community, what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “universal liberal opinion as consensus” (WP 146). On the other hand, conceived in terms of the creative activities of philosophy and art, their conception of the political consists in “inventing a people who are missing,” conditioning genuinely new ways of thinking, perceiving, and feeling (ECC 4). Through an examination of the elements that constitute philosophy and art, the relation Deleuze and Guattari claim exists between these elements and the brain, and their relation to chaos, I argue the invention of a people who are missing consists in establishing novel modes of existence, different ways of thinking, perceiving, and feeling.

1. Elements of Opinion

Given the wide-ranging nature of the objects of Deleuze’s criticisms throughout his work – from phenomenology, the dialectic, and the image of thought, to psychoanalysis and capitalism – the fact that in his last collaborative endeavor with Guattari their criticism falls on the somewhat banal notion of opinion is at first surprising.2 The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines opinion as, 2 See chapter three regarding Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of Hegel via psychoanalysis,

as well as chapter four concerning their relation to Franco-Germanic literature. As I

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first, “a view, judgment, or appraisal formed in the mind about a particular matter,” next, “belief stronger than impression and less strong than positive knowledge,” and lastly, “a generally held view.” What in this definition makes opinion a worthy adversary of philosophy and art, or warrants Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that opinion is the cause of people’s misfortune is unclear.

Deleuze’s discussion of opinion in Difference and Repetition bears some resemblance to the above definition. There he describes the thinker as someone who manages not to know what everybody else does, who has neither common sense nor good sense, which together constitute what Deleuze refers to as “opinion” (DR 130). At least on this point then his understanding of opinion comes close to the above definition of opinion as “a generally held view.” When one looks closer though, paying attention to what Deleuze means by “common sense” and “good sense,” the picture is more complicated.

He says that common sense is a norm of identity with respect to a pure self and unspecified object – here Deleuze means something like transcendental subjectivity and the “object x” as pre-categorical conditions of experience and that good sense concerns the distribution of this form with respect to empirical selves and objects – in other words, everybody has it.3 For this reason then, Deleuze’s account of opinion is obviously different from – and more precise than – a commonsense understanding of the term. One might nevertheless argue that such an understanding has a philosophical basis, one that results from broader commitments regarding the nature of reality. Opinion as “belief stronger than impression and less strong than positive knowledge” seems to correspond to a Platonic account of opinion, where opinion would be a deficiency in knowledge, an inadequate or untrue apprehension of form. Insofar as a commonsense understanding of opinion is based on this view, a line of continuity connects Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of opinion through Plato to a commonsense understanding of the term.4

noted before, a line of continuity runs throughout these criticisms, which concerns the metaphysical commitments on which they are based and conception of human nature they support.

3 Regarding “good sense” as the “best distributed thing in the world,” see Descartes’s Discourse on Method 111. For an excellent account of the co-determining roles that transcendental subjectivity and the “object x” play as pre-categorical conditions of possible experience, see Gardner 145-160. See my discussion of this point in “Experiential Unity and Transcendental Subjectivity in Kant” in chapter one. Regarding good sense as the distribution of the form of common sense, Deleuze’s account of opinion in Difference and Repetition comes close to Deleuze and Guattari’s in What is Philosophy? In both cases the form of opinion is universal. I return to this below.

4 See Plato’s discussion of the relationship between philosophy and art in, for example, the Philebus 59a. Paolo Marrati bases her explication of Deleuze’s thought on this understanding. She argues that even before the beginning of his collaborations with Guattari Deleuze’s


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As is already clear, however, Deleuze’s notion of opinion is different from a Platonic account. Likening Deleuze to Plato even for explanatory ends seems misguided as Deleuze’s philosophy – from beginning to end – is thoroughly anti-Platonic in nature. In “Plato, the Greeks,” for example, Deleuze associates opinion with Platonic philosophy specifically and philosophies of transcendence in general (ECC 136-137).5 Attention to Deleuze and Guattari’s account of opinion in What is Philosophy? in conjunction with “Plato, the Greeks” makes it clear that portraying Deleuze’s thought as a Platonism – insofar as both Deleuze and Plato are opposed to opinion – is thoroughly misguided. This results from their fundamentally different metaphysical suppositions and commitments. To understand these, it is necessary to turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s account of opinion in What is Philosophy?, examining the elements that comprise opinion and the relations that exist between them.

Deleuze and Guattari’s clearest articulation of opinion comes in the form of a functional definition; they define opinion by explaining how it works: “what opinion proposes is a particular relationship between an external perception as state of a subject and an internal affection as passage from one state to another (exo- and endoreference)” (WP 144). This definition’s brevity belies its complexity. For this reason, it should be worked through slowly, examined piece-by-piece.

The above quotation highlights two important features of opinion. First, opinion is a type of relationship. Second, this relationship is between three elements: an external perception as a state (exoreference), an internal affection as a passage (endoreference), and a subject for whom the perception is an external state and the affection an internal passage. Since opinion is a type of relation, it assumes the existence of these elements, such that they can enter into a relation with each other. Hence, versus philosophy and art – both of which might be said to begin with relations, which explains, in part, the creative nature of these endeavors – opinion begins with terms rather than

thought is political, and the political import of his philosophy at this stage should be understood in terms of his criticisms of opinion (206). Marrati establishes this connection via Plato. Just as Plato’s criticisms of opinion are political in nature – implying and resulting in a criticism of the status quo – so too are Deleuze’s criticisms of opinion political in nature (Marrati 215). Both Alexandre Lefebvre and Philippe Mengue follow a similar approach in their readings of Deleuze on opinion, likening Deleuze to Plato via their mutual criticisms of opinion. See Lefebvre 60 and 267, as well as Mengue, “Birth of Philosophy” 178.

5 Neither Marrati, Lefebvre, nor Mengue refer to this text in their respective readings of Deleuze on opinion. Marrati refers almost exclusively to Deleuze’s account in Difference and Repetition, which is different from Deleuze and Guattari’s in What is Philosophy? Since her aim is to elucidate pre-Guattarian stands of political thought in Deleuze’s work, this is understandable, although her account is necessarily incomplete for this reason.

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relations.6 In this way, opinion is implicitly committed to a certain conception of reality, and the first aspects of its implied philosophical anthropology become apparent.

This conception of reality includes an account of subjectivity and its characteristics, a subject that perceives an external world and feels its own internal changes. Perceptions and affections act as points of reference by which the subject orients itself in an external world and an inter-subjective community. This orientation takes place in the following manner: “We pick out a quality supposedly common to several objects that we perceive, and an affection supposedly common to several subjects who experience it and who, along with us grasp that quality” (WP 144).

Hence, Deleuze and Guattari add two more elements to their account of opinion: not only a subject, its perceptions, and affections, but also objects of perceptions from which qualities are extracted that give rise to specific feelings, and other subjects for whom correspondences between qualities belonging to objects and feelings within a subject are also the case. In this way then, perceptions refer to external states of affairs (those of an objective world) and affections refer to internal states of affection (those of an inter-subjective community). Opinion consists in establishing a correspondence between the two.7

Taken together, the above elements comprise what might be called a “metaphysics of opinion,” a view concerning the nature of reality, the kinds of things that exist, and the relations that exist between these things. On this basis, one supposes that specific qualities within perceptions precede and precipitate specific affections within subjects. The correspondence between these perceptions and feelings is determined with reference to an inter-subjective community that, in turn, takes as its reference an objective

6 See chapters three and four for a fuller explanation of the way that philosophy begins with relations rather than terms and events rather than things. I return to this point below, as it bears on elements that comprise philosophy and art.

7 “Opinion is the rule of the correspondence of one to the other; it is a function or a proposition whose arguments are perceptions and affections” (WP 144). Hence, although Claire Colebrook is correct to say that opinion supposes a common world, it seems incorrect to say that in opinion one passes directly from affects to concepts (Deleuze 24). And it is clear that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of opinion is different from and more precise than her other characterizations of opinion as 1. a state in which one passes from sensations to generalities (Guide for the Perplexed 106), 2. the re-presentation of a word that is recognized and results in a general laziness in thought (Deleuze 16), or 3. simply that opinion takes the form “I don’t like this; therefore this is bad” (Deleuze 115). Patton’s description is more precise and closer to my own. See Patton’s “Order, Exteriority, and Flat Multiplicities in the Social” 22 on this.


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world. Although these suppositions are general enough to be ascribed to a number of philosophers and philosophies, as was mentioned above, Deleuze associates these with Plato specifically and philosophies of transcendence in general. For this reason, one can say that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, opinion supposes an unchanging standard against which individual opinions are judged for the sake of orthodoxy, which functions analogously to – but in the absence of – a Platonic form.8

2. Development of Opinion in Relation to Chaos: Denial

According to Deleuze and Guattari, opinion arises in response to chaos. It appears as a type of protection against chaos.9 “We constantly lose our ideas. That is why we want to hang onto our fixed opinions so much” (WP 201). Chaos is the reason we lose our ideas; alone chaos is a terrible thing.10 However, as with their use of the term “opinion,” Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term “chaos” is specific, and to understand opinion’s development – and why thought is conceived in terms of opinion – it is essential to understand what they mean by chaos.

With respect to this notion, Deleuze and Guattari write the following: “Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void which is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance” (WP 118). Given this vertiginous definition, one can certainly appreciate Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that chaos is something from which to be protected. As with their account of opinion, their conception of chaos should be worked through slowly, piece-by-piece.

Contrary to the way the term is commonly understood, Deleuze and Guattari say chaos should not be understood in terms of disorder or disorganization. It is not an arrangement lacking order or organization. Here one must be cognizant of the terms in which order and organization

8 I return to this point more fully in terms of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “generic subject” below.

9 However, opinion only appears as a protection against chaos, only “claims to protect us from chaos” (WP 203). Philosophy and art provide a true protection against chaos. I return to the reason for this in chapter six.

10 See my discussion of this point in chapter three, with respect to the way that – in its pure, schizophrenic state – desire is a disorganized and haphazard force of production threatening cohesive social organization.

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have traditionally been understood. Both invoke a conception of form associated with the organic model.11 Understood in terms of this concept’s earliest appearance in the history of philosophical thought, Plato (and maybe Socrates) makes form the cornerstone of his intellectual edifice: a thing’s form is the answer to the question what is it? Plato is responsible for the creation of the Idea as a philosophical concept (ECC 136). The Aristotelian innovation consists in placing form in matter. In both cases, however, a thing’s form – versus various Pre-Socratic accounts, most of which involve the relationship between basic elements of matter and sundry forces12 – explains the regular characteristics and activities a thing evidences. These characteristics and activities account, in turn, for expectations regarding the kinds of relations into which things do and do not enter.

In this way, order and organization are parasitic on a conception of form, and, insofar as this concept lies at the heart of one’s worldview and functions as a way of conceiving one’s experience, disorder and disorganization are nonexistent. Everything is what it is by virtue of the fact that it shares in (Plato) or embodies (Aristotle) a particular form. Not only the order and organization of individual things but also the whole of experience would be a result of form. The merit of form metaphysics is its intense practicality, the fact one can anticipate organization and order in experience in the first place, providing a ground for expectations in terms of which to adjust behavior. Given the difficulties involved in obtaining and coordinating information, a certain practical interest informs the tendency to understand this information as invariant. Expecting this organization to be forthcoming and unchanging is profoundly comforting, allowing one to do more and think less. Hence, immutability is form’s most important characteristic, which leads to an understanding of disorder as merely an epistemological state that results from being ignorant of or misunderstanding (mistaking, misapplying) the form at work. However, such an account is clearly indicative of an understanding of thought in terms of what Deleuze refers to as “recognition,” a conception of thought in which error is conceived as a misapplication of this type and as thought’s primary enemy.13

For this reason, rather than defining chaos by disorder or disorganization – mistaking, misapplying, or being ignorant of the particular form at work – Deleuze and Guattari understand chaos in terms of its an-order or an- 11 See earlier chapters regarding the organic model.12 See my further discussion of this point in chapter three.13 See DR 148-149 on this point, as well as Patton “Order, Exteriority” 23. I return to the

significance of recognition to opinion below.


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organization, insofar as the forms on which order or organization depend are not immutable but changing. The regular characteristics things evidence – as well as the characteristic relations into which they enter – are not the result of immutable forms expressing themselves in matter. The significance of speed to their definition of chaos can be understood in terms of this explanation.

Chaos is the speed by which the percepts and affects – on the basis of which one reasons to the existence of form – appear and vanish. But “vanish” should not here be understood in terms of “disappear” but “change.” Chaos is an-ordered or an-organized insofar as the persistent invariance of characteristics and relations one expects to find in experience are not always forthcoming.14 Since the immutability of forms cannot provide a basis for establishing – once and for all – objective constants in the characteristics of and relations between things, at least subjective rules can be established for the sake of methodologically joining percepts to affects, associating ideas as a shield from chaos.15

Opinion is a way of thinking that attempts to establish more or less fixed coordinates within chaos, establishing correspondences between perceptions and affections. Ideas are the subjective side of this process, as they relate to qualities belonging to subjective perceptions. There is also an objective side to this process, which concerns the relationship between subjective principles and objective states of affairs, since “there would not be a little order in ideas if there was not also a little order in things or states of affairs, like an objective antichaos” (WP 202). In addition to subjective principles, thought must also pose objective standards, such that the employment of subjective rules has an objective basis.

Understood in terms of the earlier analysis, this is the objective world for which perceptions act as exoreferences. In opinion, qualities of particular objects cause particular sensations, and the recurrence of these sensations is proof that the subjective principles posited to organize experience are ones that do in fact mirror – or get a grip on – the world.16 These three elements

14 Regarding Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of substance metaphysics and the way things are conceived as en-formed matter – as well as their alternative in which things are simply matter in motion – see, for instance, their discussion of the “machinic phylum” in TP 409-410, as well as my discussions of these points in earlier chapters.

15 They write the following: “We ask only that our ideas are linked together according to a minimum of constant rules. All that the association of ideas has ever meant is providing us with these protective rules – resemblance, contiguity, causality – which enables us to put some order into ideas” (WP 201). Their mention here of “association of ideas” as “resemblance, contiguity, causality” is – of course – a tacit reference to Hume. I return to this in chapter six.

16 On this point, Deleuze and Guattari write the following: “at the meeting point of things and

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are “all that we ask for in order to make an opinion for ourselves, like a sort of ‘umbrella’, which protects us from chaos” (WP 202). However, if opinions work as an umbrella that protects against chaos, then they must do so in a particular way, one that differs from the way philosophy and art do. Whereas the latter actively align themselves with chaos in order to create, opinion’s relation to chaos is one of denial, and it is in terms of this relation that opinion’s political significance can be understood.

3. Political Significance of Opinion: Creating Consensus

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari associate opinion with a conception of the political as consensus – universal agreement regarding correspondences between qualities in perceptions and affections. Under the sway of opinion, the goal of politics is to produce consensus.17 For this reason, the relationship opinion has to chaos is one of denial – denying variance in the correspondence between particular perceptions and affections. Here community and communication play a large role in the development of opinion and the production of consensus.

Opinion never concerns only individual subjects but also community and relations between individuals and community. This constitutes the second major aspect of its implicit philosophical anthropology. In opinion, an individual “identifies himself with a generic subject experiencing a common affection (the society of those who detest cheese – competing as such with those who love it, usually on the basis of another quality)” (WP 145). The generic subject is a paragon for the inter-subjective community of which it is the representative, determined by the ways it is affected by perceptions. Different types of generic subjects and inter-subjective communities are here defined in contradistinction to other types of generic subjects and inter-subjective communities, based on the types of correspondences they recognize between qualities in perceptions and affections.

In this way, the generic subject is an unchanging standard against which individual opinions are judged, functioning analogously to – but in the absence of – a form. Opinion then operates as follows: Depending on the

thought, the sensation must recur…as proof or evidence of their agreement with our bodily organs that do not perceive the present without imposing on it a conformity with the past” (WP 202).

17 On this they write the following: “Nor does philosophy find any final refuge in communi-cation, which only works under the sway of opinions in order to create ‘consensus’ and not concepts” (WP 6).


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ways an individual is affected by particular perceptions, it identifies with a generic subject, which determines, in turn, the inter-subjective community to which it belongs, defined in contradistinction to another generic subject and inter-subjective community – for example, homelessness à compassion à for the welfare state à democrat versus republican. According to Deleuze and Guattari, however, this is only the first step in a two-part process through which opinion triumphs.

The second step takes place “when the quality chosen ceases to be the condition of a group’s constitution but is now only the image or ‘badge’ of a constituted group that itself determines the perceptive and affective model, the quality and affection, that each must acquire” (WP 146). The same process is at work in this second step as the first but in the reverse order. The generic subject and inter-subjective community with which an individual identifies now act as a rule for determining a correspondence between particular perceptions and affections, how an individual feels in response to particular perceptions. Here opinion operates as follows: Defined in contradistinction to another generic subject and inter-subjective community that establish different correspondences between perceptions and affections, the subject identifies with a particular generic subject, which determines the ways the subject is affected by a particular perception – for example, republican versus democrat à against the welfare state à callous à homelessness. Consensus then is the process of coordinating persons through the production of opinion in this second way.

Deleuze and Guattari say this process takes place through “discussion,” a particular type of communication.18 Discussion bears on the ways particular qualities belonging to perceptions correspond to affections belonging to generic subjects. Opinions are never discrete but parts of continuous, interpenetrating webs that define different generic subjects and the communities of which they are the representatives.19

An opinion characteristic of a generic “democrat” subject concerns not only a certain correspondence between, for example, the isolation of a quality belonging to perception (homelessness) and the corresponding affection it evokes (compassion), but also other opinions that bear on perceptions and affections regarding things like, for example, taxes, education, and foreign policy. The role that insult plays in discussion bears on opinions’ continuous,

18 See Mengue, Deleuze et démocratie 102-103 for an excellent discussion of the way contemporary public opinion is produced.

19 Thus, as Colebrook and Patton rightly point out, neither philosophical concepts nor the planes on which they are created ever exist in isolation from each other, nor should they be considered as such. See Colebrook, Deleuze 17 and Patton, “Order, Exteriority” 23 on this.

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interpenetrating characteristic. A certain opinion is isolated and attacked for the sake of condemning the generic subject to which it belongs, as well as the community of which this generic subject is the representative.20 This is the role insult plays and why “all opinion is already political… why so many discussions can be expressed in this way; ‘as a man, I consider all women to be unfaithful’; ‘as a woman, I think men are liars’” (WP 145).21

If there is one philosopher whose understanding of philosophy consists primarily in discussion then it is certainly Plato. However, Deleuze and Guattari do not single out Plato in What is Philosophy? as an “opinion monger” – for lack of a better term – as they do Habermas and Rorty.22 Contra their characterizations throughout, however, neither Habermas nor Rorty conceive of philosophy in terms of discussion but primarily characterize political activity as consisting in discussion.

Rather than thinking simply that Deleuze and Guattari mistake the nature of Habermas and Rorty’s respective projects, these claims highlight Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the deeply interrelated nature of philosophy and political activity. What they find objectionable in consensus as universal liberal opinion are the ends debate and discussion serve, the role communication plays in the attenuation of opinions as described above. As insult, both debate and discussion contribute to the universalization of opinions, the solidification of correspondences between qualities in perceptions and affections.23 The resulting opinions, claim Deleuze and Guattari, belong to a particular generic subject, that of the capitalist. The building of consensus through the attenuation of opinions is part of a process that facilitates the

20 ‘‘‘Discussion’, therefore, bears on the choice of the abstract perceptual quality and on the power of the generic subject affected… opinion is an abstract thought, and insult plays an effective role in this abstraction because opinion expresses the general functions of particular states” (WP 145). For example, “If seeing homelessness (perception) makes you feel okay (affection), then I disagree with you (opinion). I am a democrat (generic subject) and believe something different from you (different community) and cannot, therefore, subscribe to any of the other beliefs you hold (web of opinions).”

21 According to Deleuze and Guattari then, neither debate nor discussion is a violence that forces thought to think, as Mengue claims (Deleuze et démocratie 53-54), but kinds of communication by which opinions are attenuated and, in turn, ways of perceiving and feeling become impoverished.

22 They write that “opinions are essentially the object of a struggle or an exchange. This is the Western democratic, popular conception of philosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive dinner conversations at Mr. Rorty’s” (WP 144). Although Deleuze and Guattari never mention Habermas by name in What is Philosophy?, when asked if their criticisms of opinion, discussion, and consensus were directed against Habermas, Deleuze and Guattari respond by saying their criticisms are directed against not only Habermas (TRM 378).

23 See WP 12 for their discussion of the role Hegel and the post-Kantians play in the establishment of universals.


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spread of global capitalism.24 Here opinion’s relation to “recognition” plays a central role, in terms of the way communication results in a conception of politics as consensus, as well as the relation of consensus to capitalism.

For the sake of the present analysis, this notion’s most important characteristic is its affinity with truth, supposing that thought naturally tends towards truth.25 Truth would be the result of the natural, harmonious exercise of thought’s various faculties. Insofar as opinion is modeled on recognition, opinion’s elements – perceptions, affections, and inter-subjective communities – function in an analogous fashion. Contemplation, reflection, and communication are conceived as faculties that function together to produce opinion. Contemplation isolates qualities within perceptions while reflection identifies affections corresponding to these qualities in a generic subject. Through communication a generic subject and the inter-subjective community of which it is the representative are determined in contradistinction to another generic subject and inter-subjective group.26 Communication here attenuates opinions. This process acts as the criterion by which the truth-values of opinions are established.

Considered as faculties, the harmonious exercise of contemplation, reflection, and communication results in truth.27 In opinion, a proposition’s truth-value is decided with reference to a group. Individual opinions are true if they conform to those of a community, if the opinions of an individual are the same as those of the generic subject with which one identifies and

24 See N 152 regarding consensus as an idea that guides opinion, its relation to the state and a single world market.

25 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that recognition “may be defined by the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object,” which he associates with “the image of thought” – a conception of the way thought works (DR 133). See DR 139 on this as well.

26 “Opinion is a thought that is closely molded on the form of recognition,” they write, “recognition of a quality in perception (contemplation), recognition of a group in affection (reflection), and recognition of a rival in the possibility of other groups and other qualities (communication)” (WP 145-146). For a further discussion of the way both individuals and groups determine themselves in contradistinction to other individuals and groups, see my discussion in chapter three with respect to an illegitimate understanding and employment of the third synthesis of the unconscious in Anti-Oedipus. I return to this in chapter six.

27 For the sake of this analogy, the following passage in Difference and Repetition is relevant: “An object is recognized, however, when one faculty locates it as identical to that of another, or rather when all the faculties together relate their given and relate themselves to a form of identity in the object. Recognition thus relies upon a subjective principle of collaboration of the faculties for ‘everybody’ – in other words, a common sense as a concordia facultatum; while simultaneously, for the philosopher, the form of identity in objects relies upon a ground in the unity of a thinking subject, of which all the other faculties must be modalities” (DR 133).

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the community to which one belongs.28 As was mentioned above, opinion supposes an unchanging standard against which individual opinions are judged for the sake of orthodoxy. In this manner then, the generic subject functions analogously to – but in the absence of – a form, for the sake of establishing orthodoxy.29 According to Deleuze and Guattari, discussion signals a step away from and beyond a conception of thought they characterize in terms of the sage and sagely wisdom towards philosophy (WP 3).

No longer is thought conceived as the possession of an esoteric wisdom by the sage but as a struggle or dispute between multiple claimants through discussion for a wisdom nobody ever fully possesses. In this respect then, Mengue correctly points out that Deleuze and Guattari consider discussion a necessary condition of the birth of philosophy (“Birth of Philosophy” 178). However, his failure to consider the nuance and qualification Deleuze gives to this characterization in “Plato, the Greeks” results in the misrepresentation of Deleuze’s thought as a quasi-Platonism. There Deleuze says philosophy employs the concept of form to mediate between and resolve conflicting views and opinions that arise in discussion, thereby establishing a right opinion – truth as orthodoxy (ECC 136). Form then functions in a similar manner to the generic subject in opinion, and the Greek emphasis on discussion brings with it a corresponding emphasis on transcendence.30 Deleuze says the goal of philosophy is always to battle against transcendence and, for this reason, philosophy seems to go wrong from the very beginning.31

28 Opinion “gives to the recognition of truth an extension and criteria that are naturally those of an ‘orthodoxy’: a true opinion will be the one that coincides with that of the group to which one belongs by expressing it” (WP 146).

29 “This is clear in certain competitions: you must express your opinion, but you ‘win’ (you have spoken the truth) if you say the same as the majority of those participating in the competition” (WP 146).

30 “The poisoned gift of Platonism,” Deleuze writes, “is to have introduced transcendence into philosophy” (ECC 137). Further, in Proust and Signs, Deleuze systematically opposes themes in ancient Greek philosophy to those in Proust, impugning the relationship between conversation and friendship in philosophy (29 and 108). See my discussions of the importance of Proust to Deleuze in preceding chapters. I return to the significance of Proust in What is Philosophy? below.

31 “Every reaction against Platonism is a restoration of immanence in its full extension and in its purity, which forbids the return of any transcendence” (ECC 137). Deleuze and Guattari make a similar claim regarding psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus, where they write “there is no contradiction in the fact that it started on the right track, and that it went wrong from the start” (173). I am grateful to Daniel Smith for bringing this continuity to my attention. Although Deleuze and Guattari claim psychoanalysis goes wrong from the start, if one closely examines their own engagements, criticisms, and reformulations of psychoanalytic theory – where Deleuze and Guattari stake their own claims with respect to the psychoanalytic tradition – then this is less than obviously true. See my discussions of these points in chapter three.


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Opinion denies the singular and unique nature of the relation between qualities in perceptions and their affective correspondences within subjects, universalizing the opinions of a particular individual or group.32 In this way, the particular opinions of an individual or group are understood as universal and necessary rather than as unique and contingent. True opinions are those that match this standard, and opinion becomes the standard by way of majority.33 The majority opinion is ascribed to a generic subject representative of a group, and since individuals relate to communities by identifying with a generic subject, the group to which an individual belongs determines the opinions of individuals.34

Individuals belonging to the same community experience the same affects in response to the same qualities in perceptions, not because like-minded individuals come together to form communities but because communities form like-minded individuals.35 But the community with which Deleuze and Guattari are interested is specific: “The philosophy of communication,” they write, “is exhausted in the search for a universal liberal opinion as consensus, in which we find again the cynical perceptions and affections of the capitalist himself ” (WP 146).36 The point they seem to be making here is that – as a community – capitalism overwhelmingly determines contemporary opinion, more specifically, liberal ideals regarding the value of, for example, consensus,

32 “Contemplation, reflection and communication are not disciplines but machines for constituting Universals in every discipline” (WP 6).

33 “The essence of opinion,” they write, “is will to majority and already speaks in the name of a majority” (WP 146).

34 Marrati’s reading – in which the majority functions as the standard measure of orthodoxy (207-209) – is the same as my own. For a different understanding of the role of the majority in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought see, for example, Patton’s “Deleuze and Democracy,” where the majority is described as “the analytic fact of nobody” (407) and is based on Patton’s reading of Thousand Plateaus (106).

35 See DR 158, where opinion is characterized as having the same perceptions and affections of the group to which one belongs, as well as PS 83, where belonging to a society consists in having the ideas and values that society emits.

36 In his defense of the compatibility of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and Western liberalism, Patton thoroughly misrepresents the sense of these lines. He introduces them by writing “all to often reflect ‘the cynical perceptions and affections…’” making the relation between a “philosophy of communication,” “the search for a universal liberal opinion as consensus,” and “the cynical perceptions and affections of the capitalist himself ” appear much weaker than Deleuze and Guattari themselves seem to think, thereby obscuring the trajectory of their thought (“Deleuze and Democracy” 411 – emphasis added). Patton does the same when calling their critical remarks regarding a conception of philosophy “as providing pleasant or aggressive dinner conversations at Mr. Rorty’s” (WP 144) “ironic” (“Deleuze and Democracy” 412). There does not seem to be any sense in which Deleuze and Guattari’s comments on this point could be called ironic.

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universal human rights, and “free” markets.37 Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of these liberal ideals bear on the role they play in the spread and legitimation of global capitalism. This tendency is captured perfectly in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.38 The capitalist is the generic subject with which individuals identify and through which they belong to the global capitalist community.39 Deleuze and Guattari claim that an understanding of politics as “the search for universal liberal opinion as consensus” is guided by capitalism, ultimately determined by and in the service of capitalism (WP 146).40

Rather than becoming embarrassed by an interpretation in which Deleuze and Guattari seem to be critical of these ideals and arguing against such an interpretation, as does Patton, it seems more interesting to consider what Deleuze and Guattari find wrong with the philosophical suppositions on which liberal ideals are based. At bottom, their criticisms bear on philosophical anthropology.41 In this way then, the issue is not so much that “democracy has been completely skirted,” as Mengue claims (“Birth of Philosophy” 180). Rather, the aim of Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of liberal ideals are the metaphysical suppositions on which these are based, as well as the role they play in the justification of global capitalism.

This liberal tradition has its roots in the thought of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the American founding fathers, and emphasizes universal,

37 In this regard, Deleuze and Guattari write the following: “Human rights are axioms. They can coexist on the market with many other axioms, notably those concerning the security of property… What social democracy has not given the order to fire when the poor come out of their territories or ghetto? Rights save neither men nor a philosophy that is reterritorialized on the democratic State. Human rights will not make us bless capitalism. A great deal of innocence or cunning is needed by a philosophy of communication that claims to restore the society of friends, or even of wise men, by forming a universal opinion as ‘consensus’ able to moralize nations, States, and the market. Human rights say nothing about the immanent modes of existence of the people provided with rights” (WP 107). Here they are clearly referring to the position Habermas develops in his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.

38 On the relationship between democracy and political liberalism, see Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man 42-43.

39 Hence, Colebrook’s claim that opinion results in a reduction of diversity, supposes all are the same and capable of acting in one global market (Deleuze 16), and insofar as liberal ideals are themselves based on capitalism, they are in the service of powers that be (Mengue, Deleuze et démocratie 103-104).

40 For this reason, Mengue’s claim that their criticisms of opinion are indicative of their misgivings regarding liberal ideals seems correct (Deleuze et démocratie 43).

41 I return to this point further in chapter six.


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largely negative rights that secure competition in a market – for example, the right to own property.42 Hardt and Negri also credit the American founding fathers, saying that American constitutionalism introduces a unique form of sovereignty that lies at the basis of “Empire,” the term they use to denote to a non-state, network form of power characteristic of global capitalism.43

Previous and more traditional forms of sovereignty, which arise with the development of nation states in Europe, have their basis in transcendent forms of power – for example, God, church, king, and feudal lords – in which citizens eventually come to share. Hegel’s project, both metaphysically and politically, can be understood as explaining how this sovereignty comes into – and can be legitimized within – world history (Hardt and Negri 81-88). An American form of sovereignty, on the other hand, begins with the people and then constitutes transcendent powers on this basis – for example, local, state, and federal governments, and corporations.44 The import of this innovation consists in making people responsible for the oppression to which they are subjected, explaining how, why, and in which ways people concretely contribute to their own repression, in terms of sensuous human activity – desire desiring its own repression when understood as praxis. Here one can thus establish a link between Deleuze and Guattari’s account in Anti-Oedipus of how and why desire desires its own repression and the political significance of their criticisms of consensus and opinion in What is Philosophy?45

Deleuze’s critique of human rights should be understood in these terms; his criticisms of the collusion of the democratic state with capitalism can be understood from this perspective.46 Insofar as these rights are conceived as

42 “In its economic manifestation,” writes Fukuyama, “liberalism is the recognition of the right of free economic activity and economic activity based on private property and markets… the legitimacy of private property and enterprise” (44). See Fukuyama 153-161 for a discussion of the roots of this tradition.

43 “Later we will critique this notion of network power contained in the U.S. Constitution,” they write, “but here we want simply to highlight its originality. Against the modern European conceptions of sovereignty, which consigned political power to a transcendent realm and thus estranged and alienated the sources of power from society, here the concept of sovereignty refers to a power entirely within society. Politics is not opposed to but integrates and completes society” (164).

44 See my discussion in chapter four regarding the differences between a top-down versus bottom-up conception of the relation between individuals and community implied by Franco-Germanic versus Anglo-American literature, in terms of goal-directed activity versus sympathy.

45 I return to this in chapter six.46 “A concern for human rights,” Deleuze says, “shouldn’t lead us to extol the ‘joys’ of the

liberal capitalism of which they’re an integral part. There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery” (N 172-173).

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universal, basic goods whose protection results in further goods, programs of “democratization,” state building, and the opening of new markets seem justified.47 Deleuze addresses these same tendencies in remarks concerning the value of consensus and its relation to philosophical thought in the context of global capitalism.48 For these reasons, Mengue’s claim that – since it lacks transcendent values and is without foundations – Deleuze and Guattari should embrace democracy as a truly immanent politics seems to miss their point (Deleuze et démocratie 47).49

An understanding of opinion makes clear that Deleuze and Guattari think contemporary forms of liberal democracy not only suppose transcendent values but are also thoroughly foundational. They involve discussion and – in terms of the role it plays – discussion involves reference to transcendence, reference to a generic subject that functions in an analogous manner to a transcendent form, mediating and resolving conflicts in opinions, thereby causing their attenuation. Here the political sphere is understood as a market where citizens possess beliefs, ideas, points of views, etc. that are then traded and traded away. The political consists in a surreptitious activity, attempting to obtain a maximum while imparting a minimum: The liberal democratic ideal of consensus consists in people obtaining as much possible while giving as little as possible. In this way, the foundations of liberal ideals are those of a generic capitalist subject, and an understanding of politics as consensus consists in a relation to chaos as one of fundamental, foundational denial.

47 Naomi Klein’s analyses are instructive on these points. Regarding democratization in the context of globalization, she says it is usually couched in terms of “the euphoric marketing rhetoric of the global village” (xvii). Describing the relation between globalization and corporations in terms similar to those of Hardt and Negri, she writes that the “conduct of the individual multinationals is simply a by-product of a broader global economic system that has steadily been removing almost all barriers and conditions to trade, investing and outsourcing” (422).

48 He writes that “consensus is an idea that guides opinion…often directed against the USSR… One can’t think about the state except in relation to the higher level of the single world market… People talk about the future of Europe, and the need to harmonize banking, insurance, internal markets, companies, police forces: consensus, consensus, consensus” (N 152-153).

49 Patton is in agreement with Mengue when he writes that “As it is a politics without foundation in which even the most fundamental convictions expressed in its laws and institutions are open to change, democracy is a politics of pure immanence” (“Deleuze and Democracy” 401).


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4. Elements of Philosophy and Art

Just as opinion is committed to metaphysical suppositions that support a philosophical anthropology, so too are philosophy and art comprised by elements that imply a conception of human nature. However, overlap exists between the two. Opinion employs elements belonging to philosophy and art. For example, the coordination between subjective rules (thought) and an objective order (things) takes place by means of sensations, where art consists in the creation of sensations (WP 211). Opinion thus operates by means of elements constitutive of philosophy and art. The difference between the two can, in the first place, be understood in terms of the priority opinion gives to terms over relations.

Although opinion consists in a type of relation, this relation supposes the preexistence of terms that enter into relations. Whereas opinion begins with terms, philosophy and art begin with relations. In part, this explains the creative nature of these endeavors and the fact that, although philosophy and art are capable of explaining the elements and relations on the basis of which opinion functions, opinion is incapable of explaining the elements and relations on the basis of which philosophy and art function. Opinion consists in intrinsic and invariable relations between fixed terms, while extrinsic and variable relations that condition fluid elements comprise philosophy and art.50

Although Deleuze and Guattari go to great lengths to distinguish philosophy from art, this distinction primarily concerns the elements with which these disciplines work (WP 65-66).51 Deleuze is much looser with this difference in works written before and after What is Philosophy? At times concepts are described as inseparable from percepts and affects; they reciprocally condition and mutually reinforce each other (TRM 238 and 325). At other points, relations described between philosophy, art, and science verge on equivalence rather than interaction (N 67 and 123). Both philosophy and art are described as creative endeavors that work with elements resembling each other.52

50 See chapters three and four on this point. I return to a fuller explication below.51 Further, the “object of philosophy,” they write, “is to create concepts that are always new…

arts, and philosophies are all equally creative, although only philosophy creates concepts in the strict sense” (WP 5).

52 Regarding the interactions between elements belonging to philosophy and art, Deleuze and Guattari discuss philosophy more than art. For this reason, in my discussion of the interaction between elements belonging to philosophy and art, I focus largely on philosophy – it being understood that the same holds for the interaction between elements belonging to art.

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Whereas philosophy creates concepts, in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari describe art as creating sensations – percepts and affects (TRM 296). This claim can be understood on the basis of remarks Deleuze makes regarding concepts, percepts, and affects in his 1989 “Letter to Reda Bensmaïa, on Spinoza.” Philosophy creates concepts, percepts, and affects that condition new ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling.53 Although Deleuze and Guattari associate the creation of percepts and affects with art specifically, they describe the activity of philosophy in similar terms.54 Both the artist and philosopher add new varieties to the world through the creations of concepts, percepts, and affects. Time and again, Deleuze and Guattari stress the impersonality of these endeavors.

Neither does the creation of concepts consist in merely causing a subject to think differently, nor does the creation of percepts and affects consist in merely displaying an object differently. Philosophy and art do not involve reference, such that the creative activities of philosophy and do not refer to subjects and objects.55 Unlike in opinion, in philosophy and art concepts, percepts, and affects are neither indexed on nor act as points of correspondence between a preexisting objective world and an intersubjective community. Rather, they bring about both worlds and inter-subjective communities, as novel modes of existence, in their relations through problems. In philosophy and art, concepts, percepts, and affects relate to each other through problems.56 The nature of these problems and relations depend on and reciprocally determine other elements belonging to philosophy and art, what Deleuze and Guattari call “conceptual personae” and “aesthetic figures,” respectively, as well as the planes on which the creation of concepts, percepts, and affects occur. Philosophy creates on a “plane of immanence,” whereas art does so on a “plane of composition” (WP 65-66).

53 There he writes that style “in philosophy strains toward three different poles: concepts, or new ways of thinking; percepts, or new ways of seeing and hearing; and affects, or new ways of feeling” (N 164-165). See Deleuze’s further discussion of this point in TRM 238 and 325-326.

54 “The artist is always adding new varieties to the world. Beings of sensation are varieties, just as the concept’s beings are variations, and the function’s beings are variable” (WP 175).

55 “As percepts, sensations are not perceptions referring to an object (reference)” (WP 166). See WP 22 where they discuss the concept being without reference.

56 “A concept requires not only a problem through which it recasts or replaces earlier concepts but a junction of problems where it combines with other coexisting concepts” (WP 18). Deleuze and Guattari write that “what is distinctive about the concept is that it renders components inseparable within itself. Components, or what defines the consistency of the concept, its endoconsistency, are distinct, heterogeneous, and yet not separable” (WP 19).


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Regarding the significance of the friend as a conceptual personae to Greek thought, for example, Deleuze and Guattari write that “the friend who appears in philosophy no longer stands for an extrinsic persona, an example or empirical circumstance, but rather for a presence that is intrinsic to thought, a condition of possibility of thought itself, a living category, a transcendental lived reality” (WP 3). The notion of form is central to ancient Greek philosophy. Beginning with Socrates, the task of thought consists in discovering forms. However, doing so requires a particular method. This consists in dialogue, where questions are posed and answers are given, slowly but surely whittling away false opinions to arrive at the form as truth. Here the friend plays an essential role.

No longer is the friend conceived as accidental and extrinsic to thought but as essential and intrinsic. Conceived as dialogue, thought can only take place in the presence of an interlocutor. For this reason, the friend is a transcendental condition of thought, a condition for the possibility of philosophy when conceived in these terms. Depending on the conception of philosophy with which one works – and the concepts to which one is committed – different conceptual personae take on greater and lesser importance.57

Hence, the Socratic commitment to the concept of form as an index of truth determines the significance of the friend as a conceptual personae in ancient Greek philosophy. If the object of knowledge is a form – and one can only reach this form through dialogue – then the friend, as interlocutor, becomes a necessary condition of thought as such. In a sense then, the questions one asks determine the answers one receives.58 Although concepts do not take as their references either an objective world or inter-subjective community, they nonetheless refer to a wider milieu. Here the significance of the plane of immanence comes to the forefront.

Although the plane of immanence acts as a ground for concepts and conceptual personae, it is distinct from and should not be confused with them.59 Deleuze and Guattari equate conceptual personae with unique sets of

57 “Friend, lover, claimant and rival are transcendental determinations that do not for that reason lose their intense and animated existence, in one persona or in several… The list of conceptual personae is never closed and for that reason plays an important role in the evolution or transformations of philosophy” (WP 4-5).

58 On this score, Deleuze and Guattari write that “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts. But the answer not only had to take note of the question, it had to determine its moments, its occasion and circumstances, its landscapes and personae, its conditions and unknowns” (WP 2).

59 Introducing this notion in contradistinction to that of the concept, Deleuze and Guattari write that “a plane, and a ground…must not be confused with them but that shelters their seeds and the personae who cultivate them” (WP 7).

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relations – “proper names” – intrinsic to thought, which occupy a particular plane of immanence.60 Reciprocally determining concepts and conceptual personae are thus unique to the planes of immanence on which they occur. Deleuze and Guattari characterize this notion in terms of the relation between philosophy and non-philosophy, philosophy and pre-philosophy: “the plane of immanence must be regarded as pre-philosophical. It is presupposed not in the way that one concept may refer to others but in the way that concepts themselves refer to a non-conceptual understanding” (WP 40). The plane of immanence is thus pre-philosophical insofar as concepts refer to non-conceptual understanding. It is easy to misunderstand this point.

Here Deleuze and Guattari’s use of “pre-philosophical” and “non-conceptual” should not be understood in terms of “commonsensical.” The plane of immanence is not a storehouse of commonsense intuitions against which philosophical positions would be measured, providing fodder for conceptual analysis as in analytic philosophy. Rather, the plane of immanence is pre-philosophical and non-conceptual to the extent that it intersects with the plane of composition on which the creations of percepts and affects take place in art. Insofar as the activities of both philosophy and art are themselves determined by the planes of immanence and composition on which the creations of concepts, percepts, and affects occur, the point at which these planes intersect is extremely important.

Deleuze and Guattari say the brain lies at the intersection of these planes, those of philosophy, art, and science.61 The significance of this claim bears on not only the importance of philosophy and art to an account of human nature but also the creative, material nature of these activities. The supposedly mental objects and vital ideas belonging to philosophy and art – concepts, percepts, and affects – are themselves constitutive of brain tissue. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that the brain should not be conceived in organic terms, where its parts would be organized and integrated in terms of an ultimate goal or end.62 This would be to understand the brain in terms of opinion, as an instrument

60 Further describing the relation between concepts, conceptual personae, and the plane of immanence, Deleuze and Guattari write that “proper names are intrinsic conceptual personae who haunt a particular plane of consistency” (WP 24). See previous chapters regarding the nature of proper names as unique sets of relations.

61 “The brain is the junction – not the unity – of the three planes” (WP 208).62 “If the mental objects of philosophy, art, and science (that is to say, vital ideas) have a place,

it will be in the deepest of the synaptic fissures, in the hiatuses, intervals, and meantimes of a nonobjectifiable brain, in a place where to go in search of them will be to create… That is to say, thought, even in the form it actively assumes in science, does not depend upon a brain made up of organic connections and integrations” (WP 209).


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of opinion on the model of recognition.63 As an object of science, the brain appears in this way, as merely an instrument for communicating opinion, establishing correspondences in recognition between external perceptions and internal affections, thereby integrating individuals into wider communities through discussion.

As with their criticisms of psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex, however, Deleuze and Guattari do not doubt this is how the brain appears. It appears as a series of relations organized and integrated in terms of an ultimate function.64 Thus, their charge is not that science invents or fabricates a conception of the brain along these lines. Scientists discover rather than invent the brain – understood in terms of the organic model and opinion. Given that the starting point and touchstone of Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses are neither the organic worldview nor a commonsense experience on which it is based, they raise a question regarding this conception of the brain.65 Are cerebral pathways pre-established or incidental and variable? In other words, is the brain necessarily and inevitably an instrument for communicating opinion or could it work differently?66

Although Deleuze and Guattari do not address this issue straightforwardly in What is Philosophy?, as is the case with Anti-Oedipus and the possibility of a non-Oedipal form of literature, one can find Deleuze addressing the nature of the brain elsewhere. He does so in “Three Questions on Six Times Two,” included in Negotiations.

There Deleuze makes a rather unexpected equation between images, things, and motion; he proclaims a relation of equivalence between these three.67 This claim is not only rather strange but also less than obviously true. One can begin to make sense of this by remembering that the metaphysical underpinnings of Deleuze’s thought are thoroughly modern, where fundamental distinctions

63 “It is not surprising,” they write, “that the brain, treated as a constituted object of science, can be an organ only of the formation and communication of opinion: this is because step-by-step connections and centered integrations are still based on the limited model of recognition (gnosis and praxis; ‘this is a cube’; ‘this is a pencil’)” (WP 209).

64 “Certainly, when the brain is considered as a determinate function it appears as a complex set of horizontal connections and of vertical integrations reacting on one another, as is shown by the cerebral ‘maps’” (WP 208).

65 Thus, a methodological constant throughout Deleuze’s work is the specificity of the experience on which his various transcendental analyses are based, from Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus through What is Philosophy? See chapter three for a fuller explication of this point. I return to this in chapter six in terms of the specificity of American experience and its relation to American literature.

66 “The question, then, is a double one: are the connections preestablished, as if guided by rails, or are they produced and broken up in fields of forces?” (WP 208).

67 He says there is “no difference at all between images, things, and motion” (N 42).

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between things are explained in terms of motion and rest – relations of slowness and speed – rather than with reference to form.68 One can thereby understand why Deleuze would equate things and motion. However, it is still unclear why he would associate these two with images. The fact Deleuze does so while discussing film points in a definite direction.

According to Deleuze, film creates and works with images. Images are its distinctive medium. However, his conception of the image is idiosyncratic. An image is not simply a picture or mental representation. Rather, the image has a material content. It functions as a force in the world interacting with other material forces.69 In these terms, one can understand why Deleuze would equate images with things and motion.

As with Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of art in general, filmmakers not only establish images in their films but also in the world. More specifically, according to Deleuze, images establish circuits in the brain.70 Cerebral pathways are not pre-established but determined by stimuli. For this reason, neither is the brain necessarily nor inevitably an instrument for communicating opinion. It can work differently.71

This is precisely the task of philosophy: “There’s a special relation between philosophy and neurology… Our current inspiration doesn’t come from computers but from the microbiology of the brain: the brain’s organized like a rhizome… New connection, new pathways, new synapses, that’s what philosophy calls into play as it creates concepts” (N 149). Here the importance Deleuze attributes to neurology consists in not only the insights it offers regarding the brain but also the possibilities these offer to philosophy. Specifically, he notes that the brain is organized like a rhizome, that it should be conceived in terms of the model of the body without organs rather than the organism.

68 See my discussion of this in “Individuals, Communities, and Sympathy: Lawrence and Spinoza” in chapter two, as well as “The Specificity of Schizophrenic Experience” in chapter three.

69 Again, Deleuze’s earlier engagements with Proust shed further light on this point. See PS 96-97 regarding the way that material impressions reach us through our senses, his characterization of the way the sign forces us to think, and the contingent nature of this encounter.

70 “Creating new circuits in art means creating them in the brain too” (N 60). “Cerebral circuits and connections do not preexist the stimuli; the corpuscles, or particles that trace them” (TRM 283).

71 See Eric Alliez’s Signature of the World for a discussion of the brain in the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, especially where he refers to Francisco J. Varela’s conception of the brain as one that functions independently of a central processing unit, one in which “all its components resonate” (29).


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Deleuze goes on to say that philosophy establishes new synapses, new circuits in the brain, that the creation of new cerebral pathways conditions new ways of thinking (N 176). Just as relations of ideas give rise to a subject in Deleuze’s reading of Hume, so too do relations of the brain give rise to a subject here.72 The brain is not merely or primarily an instrument in the service of opinion, in the service of human beings. The creative activities of philosophy, art, and science themselves determine the nature of the brain and its functions. But if the creation of concepts, percepts, and affects condition new ways of thinking through the creation of brains, then it is necessary to examine the way concepts, percepts, and affects are created.

A widespread and by no means fully articulate consensus seems to dominate when Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of philosophy and art as the creation of concepts, percepts, and affects comes up for discussion. This consists in the vague hunch that the creation of concepts, percepts, and affects takes place by means of imagination, where one simply thinks about various things, the way that – all too often – for undergraduates philosophy consists in the sloppy activity of letting their thoughts run wild – “Look at me mom! I’m creating concepts!” This is certainly not what Deleuze and Guattari mean by creating concepts, percepts, and affects.

They mention a hypothesis that touches on these processes. “At present we are relying only on a very general hypothesis,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “from sentences or their equivalent, philosophy extracts concepts (which must not be confused with general or abstract ideas)…and art extracts percepts and affects (which must not be confused with perceptions or feelings)” (WP 24). Philosophy and art thus begin with sentences or their equivalents. Insofar as sentences are composed of – at the very least – a subject and verb, the equivalents of sentences would be something composed of similar elements, a subject doing or undergoing something. From these philosophy extracts concepts, while art extract percepts and affects.

Here Deleuze and Guattari make clear that percepts and affects should not be confused with perceptions or feelings and that concepts should not be confused with general or abstract ideas. The difference between percepts and affects and perceptions and affections consists in their relations to a subject. For Deleuze and Guattari, the basic nature of reality is a maelstrom

72 “It is the brain that thinks and not man – the latter being only a cerebral crystallization… Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject” (WP 211). Regarding the way relations of ideas give rise to a subject in Deleuze’s reading of Hume, see my discussion in chapter four.

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of percepts and affects from which artists form a chaosmos.73 This is similar in nature to what Deleuze later refers to as a “transcendental field,” a stream of pre-reflexive, impersonal consciousness (TRM 384).74

Perceptions and affections are always related to a subject in a particular manner, implying a relation between perceptions and affections, as well as a subject, the objective world, and an inter-subjective community. For Deleuze and Guattari, both subjects and objects are conceived as habitually joined amalgamations of percepts and affects (DR 96-97 and WP 213). The difference between concepts and general or abstract ideas consists in their specificity. General or abstract ideas – as their names make clear – have been generalized or abstracted from concrete circumstances. On the other hand, concepts are always specific to the relation between the conceptual personae and plane of immanence in which they occur.

Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that concepts, percepts, and affects can be extracted from sentences or their equivalents can be understood on this basis. Language is useful precisely because its elements are general and abstract enough to refer to similar but not specific states of affairs. Although sentences suppose subjects, percepts and affects can be extracted from sentences or their equivalents. This conceptual difference concerns the relation philosophy and art have to chaos.

5. Relation of Philosophy and Art to Chaos: Uneasy Alliance

Just as opinion can be understood in terms of its relation to chaos, so too can philosophy and art. The relation opinion has to chaos is one of denial, denying variances in correspondences between particular perceptions and affections. In this manner, opinion claims to act as a protection against chaos.75 The relation of philosophy and art to chaos is one of alliance. Although philosophy and art act as protections against chaos, according to Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy and art are also engaged in an even greater struggle against opinion. For this reason, philosophy and art enlist the help of chaos, establishing a pact

73 Again, for an excellent discussion of the “chaosmos” and its relation to the “cracked-self ” as immanent ideas, see Smith 106-121. I return to this below.

74 In addition, on this point Deleuze writes that percepts “aren’t perceptions, they’re packets of sensations and relations that live on independently of whoever experiences them. Affects aren’t feelings, they’re becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them (thereby becoming someone else)” (N 137).

75 The problem is that opinion claims to act as a protection against chaos but does not actually do so. I return to this point in chapter six.


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or relation of alliance with chaos.76 In this account, Deleuze and Guattari turn again to Lawrence for inspiration.

Introducing the nature of Lawrence’s contribution, they write the following: “In a violently poetic text, Lawrence describes what produces poetry: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions” (WP 203). Here they are referring to a short introduction Lawrence wrote for Harry Crosby’s Chariot of the Sun, entitled “Chaos in Poetry.” In that piece, Lawrence says that opinions are like an umbrella that protect against chaos, fixing correspondences between perceptions and affections for the sake of regularity.77 Every now and then, however, poets find it necessary to tear open the umbrella and let in chaos.78 Deleuze and Guattari ascribe this same function to philosophers and artists.79 Insofar as chaos is the infinite speed by which forms arise and vanish, only through a pact with chaos are philosophy and art capable of disrupting the correspondences established between perceptions and affections that constitute opinions.80

In the first place, the nature of this alliance consists in tearing open the firmament that protects against chaos, disrupting the correspondences between perceptions and affections that constitute opinion, which Deleuze and Guattari also refer to as “clichés.” 81 In this respect, philosophy and art battle against clichés or opinions.82 The creation of concepts, percepts, and affects by

76 “It is as if the struggle against chaos [in philosophy and art] does not take place without an affinity with the enemy, because another struggle develops and takes on more importance – the struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself ” (WP 203). Henry Miller describes a similar relation, one that establishes a link between Deleuze and Guattari’s earlier schizophrenic perspective and an alliance with chaos as described here. Miller says anyone who has ever “caught the truth of certitude was a little cracked and it is only these men who have accomplished anything for the world” (Sexus 170).

77 “But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent” (WP 203).

78 Regarding its impetus, Lawrence says, “nothing will ever quench humanity and the human potentiality to evolve something magnificent out of a renewed chaos” (FU 56).

79 “Philosophy…and art want us to tear open the firmament and plunge into the chaos. We defeat it [opinion] only at this price” (WP 202).

80 On this point, they write the following: “if art battles against chaos it is to borrow weapons from it that it turns against opinion, the better to defeat it with tried and tested arms” (WP 204).

81 “Because the picture starts out covered with clichés, the painter must confront the chaos and hasten the destructions so as to produce a sensation that defies every opinion and cliché” (WP 204).

82 “This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon forth) than against the ‘clichés’ of opinion” (WP 204).

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philosophy and art thus supposes the destruction of clichés and opinions.83 This activity corresponds to one of the elements belonging to philosophy and art, that of establishing the planes on which philosophy and art work, planes of immanence and composition.84 Hence, in the creation of concepts, percepts, and affects, the first task of philosophy and art consists in tearing open the umbrella, casting “planes over the chaos” (WP 202).

However, chaos introduces unfamiliarity, such that practical interest ne-cessitates the establishment of new opinions, the solidification of new cor-respondences between perceptions and affections.85 The planes of immanence and composition thus need to be constantly renewed.86 Deleuze and Guattari note, however, that this tendency is religious in nature, such that the processes by which philosophy and art operate might be mistaken for those of religion.87

Religion has been and continues to be one of the most widespread and effective means by which people make sense of existence, a protection against chaos that gives meaning to life and the world.88 Further, in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception, religion makes reference to transcendence, otherworldliness. This emphasis results in the denigration of the everyday. To an extent then, religion also appears as a struggle against opinion, against an order of quotidian existence. Ultimately, however, they are not the same. Although religion also struggles against opinion, it makes reference to an

83 “The painter does not paint on an empty canvas, and neither does the writer write on a blank page; but the page is already covered with preexisting, preestablished clichés that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision” (WP 204). Deleuze says the same in FBLS 71.

84 “The plane of immanence is like a section of chaos and acts like a sieve” (WP 42).85 “Then comes the crowd of imitators,” they say, “who repair the umbrella with something

vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions: communications. Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see” (WP 204).

86 See FBLS 79 as well, where Deleuze says the fight against clichés must be constantly renewed. Again, on this point, Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the relation between philosophy, art, and opinion seems to gain inspiration from Anglo-American writers, specifically, the way the latter deal with the problem of making a “clean break,” getting away and staying away. See Crack-Up 81 concerning the way that survival consists in making a clean break, making the past cease to exist, which is different from what Fitzgerald refers to as a “jail break,” fleeing from one prison to another. See Miller, Sexus 189 regarding his reflections on needing to make a clean break.

87 “We thus come back to a conclusion to which art led us: the struggle with chaos is only the instrument of a more profound struggle against opinion, which lends to it a religious taste for unity or unification” (WP 206).

88 See my fuller discussion of these points in chapter three.


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otherworldliness to organize experience and make sense of this world. This provides the basis for opinion in general.89

Insofar as gods or a God would be responsible for either the organization or creation of both the world and humankind, the relation between the world and human beings is based on a common reference to God.90 This common reference provides a measure between external perceptions, referring to an objective world, and internal affections, referring to an inter-subjective community. Hence, invoking “dynasties of gods, or the epiphany of a single god” provides the basis for correspondences between perceptions and affections in which opinions consist. Like opinion, the relation religion has to chaos is ultimately one of denial.91

Both philosophy and art not only recognize chaos but also form an alliance with it. This alliance consists in establishing planes of immanence and composition by wiping away clichés, making slits in the umbrella of opinion to let in chaos. The creation of concepts, percepts, and affects is based on this same process, from materials that result when one establishes a plane. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the materials with which philosophers and artists work as “daughters of chaos” or “chaoids.” Different daughters of chaos or chaoids result, depending on the type of plane one establishes, depending on the way one makes slits in the umbrella of opinion.92 Insofar as Deleuze and Guattari claim philosophy and art begin with sentences or their equivalents, this claim should be understood in terms of a broader conception of language and the metaphysics it implies.

Sentences and their equivalents are composed of at least a subject and verb, a subject doing or undergoing something. In this scheme, categormatic terms take the subject position and syncategorematic terms the verb position. Implied by this account of language is a broader conception of reality, one where categormatic terms refer to things and syncategorematic terms to their relations. The basic constituents of reality then are terms and their relations,

89 “These three disciplines are not like religions that invoke dynasties of gods,” they write, “or the epiphany of a single god, in order to paint a firmament on the umbrella, like the figures of an Urdoxa from which opinions stem” (WP 202).

90 See my discussion of this in terms of Descartes in chapter one.91 More specifically, religion recognizes that chaos once existed or continues to exist, but tells

a story regarding its being vanquished, or provides guidelines concerning how it can be kept at bay. See my discussion of this point in chapter three.

92 “In short,” they write, “chaos has three daughters, depending on the plane that cuts through it: these are the Chaoids – art, science, and philosophy – as forms of thought or creation. We call Chaoids the realities produced on the planes that cut through the chaos in different ways” (WP 208).

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where relations only make sense with reference to preexisting terms.93 Deleuze and Guattari’s worldview is diametrically opposed to this scheme as is their corresponding conception of language.

The basic constituents of reality are relations, where terms do not preexist relations. Language is itself conceived as a relation, a material force that interacts with other forces, rather than as a quasi-spiritual entity, simply an intermediary between ideas whose task consists in reference. This understanding establishes a link between Deleuze and Guattari’s earlier schizophrenic perspective and the alliance with chaos as described here.

In schizophrenia, language is powerless to create a distance from reality, such that words fall into things and things fall into words.94 Hence, Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in sentences – their hypothesis that philosophy and art begin with sentences to extract concepts, percepts, and affects – concerns the value of language as a relation, a material entity with the capacity to establish new relations, to transform the terms and relations with which it comes into contact.

Although concepts suppose knowledge, the creation of concepts neither consists in abstract knowledge nor does it refer to states of affairs. Rather, this knowledge concerns events – the ways events constitute states of affairs and relations give rise to terms.95 Creating concepts consists in utilizing language as a material force to establish new relations in thought.96 As constituents of the creative activities of philosophy and art, chaoids or daughters of chaos are synonymous with the different types of relations that result from language as a material force.97 Whereas philosophy discovers and cultivates these relations to condition new ways of thinking, art discovers and cultivates these relations to condition new ways of perceiving and feeling.

Although philosophy and art form an alliance with chaos to struggle against opinion, insofar as they also provide protection against chaos, neither

93 See Gyula Klima’s “Syncategoremata” on this.94 See Van Haute 230, my discussions of the material nature of language in chapters two and

four, as well as its relation to schizophrenia in chapter three.95 “The concept is obviously knowledge – but…what it knows is the pure event, which must

not be confused with the state of affairs in which it is embodied” (WP 33)96 “The task of philosophy when it creates concepts, entities,” they write, “is always to extract

an event from things and being, to set up the new event from things and beings, always to give them a new event: space, time, matter, thought, the possible as events” (WP 33).

97 Regarding the relation between chaos and the event in Leibniz’s thought, Deleuze asks the following: “What are the conditions that make an event possible? Events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes” (FLB 76). The “screen” to which Deleuze here refers would be the equivalent of a “plane” on which concepts, percepts, and affects are created.


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are they chaotic nor do they produce chaos. Once again, the creative activities of philosophy and art do not consist in the sloppy activity of letting one’s thoughts run wild but are specific operations of composing chaos, making slits in the umbrella of opinion and establishing planes so as to think, perceive, and feel differently, without at the same time being overwhelmed by chaos.98 The relation of philosophy and art to chaos is thus ambivalent, courting chaos to battle against opinion while at the same time avoiding total immersion.99 Insofar as this uneasy alliance serves the battle against opinion, and opinion always concerns relations between individuals and community, so too does the pact of philosophy and art with chaos bear on relations between individuals and community.

When opinion triumphs, the perceptive-affective correspondences of which opinions consist are determined in individuals by the community to which they belong. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the resulting opinions belong to a particular generic subject, that of the capitalist, such that the building of consensus through the attenuation of opinion is part of a process that facilitates the spread of global capitalism. A conception of politics as consensus is thus based on fixed opinions all are capable of recognizing, and discussion precipitates this recognition through which all are capable of membership in a global capitalist community. In their battle against opinion then, philosophy and art are also engaged in a struggle against global capitalism and a conception of politics as consensus.100

Not only do philosophy and art condition new ways of thinking, perceiving, and feeling in the individual, but also struggle against the entire framework in terms of which opinion takes place, altering the relations between thoughts, perceptions, and feelings, and relations between individuals and community to which these give rise.101

98 “Art is not chaos,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes…a chaosmos, a composed chaos – neither foreseen nor preconceived” (WP 204).

99 Deleuze says painters “embrace the chaos, and attempt to emerge from it” (FBLS 84). For this same reason, he criticizes “catastrophe painting,” where sensation remains in a confused state. Rather, it should be confined; the violent method cannot be given free reign, submerg-ing the whole. See FBLS 89 on this. See Jean-Claude Pinson’s “Poéthique de Deleuze” 198 for a further discussion of this point.

100 However, this is not to say there is an “other” of capitalism for which philosophy and art are fighting. Rather, they struggle against an understanding – and the establishment – of relations between individuals and community in terms of inclusive universalism, central to both global capitalism and a conception of politics as consensus. I return to this in chapter six.

101 On this point, Deleuze and Guattari write that “we do not fight against perceptual and affective clichés if we do not also fight against the machine that produces them” (WP 150).

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6. Political Significance of Philosophy and Art: Inventing a People, Making Brains

Just as the relation of opinion to chaos conditions a conception of the political, so too does that of philosophy and art. Conceived in terms of the creative activities of philosophy and art, this consists in “inventing a people who are missing” (ECC 4). Creativity is the central feature of a conception of the political modeled on the activities of philosophy and art, which Deleuze and Guattari oppose to “discussion.” However, what it means to invent a people who are missing is by no means clear. In the first place, this can be understood in terms of “fabulation,” a faculty of storytelling.

Deleuze links the invention of a people to the creative activities of philosophy and art through Bergson’s conception of fabulation, thus giving this notion a political sense (N 174). Fabulation constitutes the invention of a people as a faculty that consists in storytelling (N 125-126). The link between the invention of a people and the activities of philosophy and art consists in the creation of novel modes of existence, genuinely new ways of thinking, perceiving, and feeling – not only individually but also communally.102 However, fabulation should not be understood in nationalistic terms, as an activity that consists in establishing the identity of a people through a type of literature that arises from – and can be identified with – a people. This would be to speak for and in the place of others.103 Fabulation consists in an alliance with chaos where philosophy and art discover in sentences and their equivalents a material reality with the capacity to establish new relations, to transform the terms and relations into which it comes into contact through different motions, different proportions of speed and slowness.104 Here the priority Deleuze and Guattari give to relations, its significance to their conception of the brain, and the creation of a people comes to the forefront.

The brain lies at the intersection of the planes on which the creative activities of philosophy and art take place. The relations between the creation

102 “We are dealing here with a problem concerning the plurality of subjects, their relationship, and their reciprocal presentation” (WP 16).

103 See my fuller discussions of these points in chapter four.104 On this point, Deleuze and Guattari write that “the concept is an act of thought, it is

thought operating at infinite (although greater or lesser) speed” (WP 21). Describing this process in terms of sensation in the work of Francis Bacon, Deleuze writes the following: “at one and the same time I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other. And at the limit, it is the same body that, being both subject and object, gives and receives the sensation. As a spectator, I experience the sensation only by entering the paining, by reaching the unity of the sensing and the sensed” (FBLS 31).


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of concepts, percepts, and affects – and the establishment of planes of immanence and composition – determine the nature of the brain. Cerebral pathways are not pre-established, says Deleuze, but determined by stimuli. Thus, the brain is not necessarily an instrument for communicating opinion. The political significance of philosophy and art consists in discovering this and changing the brain. As a conception of the political modeled on the creative activities of philosophy and art, inventing a people who are missing consists in making brains. The creative activities of philosophy and art establish new synapses and circuits in the brain, conditioning new ways of thinking, perceiving, and feeling, not only individually but also communally, thereby establishing different relations between individuals and community, novel modes of existence. For this reason, it seems mistaken to separate the creative nature of philosophy and art from an understanding of political activity.105

Attempts to do so are the result of misunderstanding – misunderstanding the inherently social and political nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s accounts of philosophy and art. There is no need to give either the social or the political privileged positions, because philosophy and art are always already thoroughly political and social in nature. They have the same status and function in the same manner as theory.106 Philosophy and art are both political and social in terms of their creative actions, in terms of their capacities to invent a people who are missing by creating brains.107

105 However, Patton does precisely this in his defense of the compatibility of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought with that of political liberalism (“Deleuze and Democracy” 409). This move is related to Patton’s claim that What is Philosophy? lacks an account of the social (“Order, Exteriority” 26) and Patton and Mengue’s claim that it lacks a specific account of the political, that Deleuze and Guattari fail to give this notion an appropriately privileged place (Deleuze et démocratie 52 and “Deleuze and Democracy” 402).

106 “There is only action,” Deleuze writes, “the action of theory, the action of praxis, in the relations of relays and networks… theory does not express, translate, or apply a praxis; it is a praxis” (DI 207).

107 Although Patton mentions Deleuze and Guattari’s claim regarding this point on multiple occasions (“Order, Exteriority” 22 and “Deleuze and Democracy” 210), he never attempts to explain its precise meaning – neither what it would mean to invent “a people who are missing” nor how philosophy and art would accomplish this task – such that Patton’s account of the broader political significance of Deleuze’s work is not only incomplete but also misses their point. He lays out his reading of the relationship between Deleuze’s thought and the political in the aptly named Deleuze and the Political. This book represents the major engagement of Deleuze’s thought with the question of the political in secondary scholarship. His central claim is that deterritorialization should be considered a norm of political action, where actions would be right or wrong – good or bad – depending on the extent to which they effect a process of deterritorialization. See chapter three where I argue that, insofar as deterritorialization is related to a process of courting or confronting chaos – and the problem of social and political orders is precisely to keep chaos at bay – it seems untenable to ascribe such a position to Deleuze and Guattari. Rather than considering deterritorialization a norm

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As in Deleuze’s engagements with Anglo-American literature and the specificity of the American social milieu, the political problem Deleuze and Guattari address here consists in the fact that relations between individuals and community are potentially fraught with strife. The political import of philosophy and literature thus consists in establishing relations of sympathy, cultivating shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings, determining what does and does not work between people to establish novel modes of existence.108 A certain affinity exists here between these themes and Lawrence’s conception of classic American literature, and its relation to the formation of an American identity. One can support this claim by closely examining a concrete instance where Deleuze and Guattari think this occurs, with Proust’s conception of jealousy: They say Proust creates jealously as an affect.109

As the creation of an affect, jealously concerns not only a new way of feeling but also a reconceptualization of the relation between perceptions and affections belonging to opinion. Insofar as relations between perceptions and affections determine those between individuals and community, this leads to the reconceptualization of relations between individuals and community. No longer are these considered in terms of the organic model but what Deleuze describes in his work on Proust as the “vegetal realm” of pathos (PS 174-175). In this scheme, “criteria of organic totality…are precisely the ones [Proust] rejects,” such that to read Proust as having anticipated a unity in the first place is to read him badly, “missing the new conception of unity he was in the process of creating” (PS 116).

of political action, it seems as though their conception of the political is based on the creative activities of philosophy and art such that the invention of a people who are missing consists in creating novel modes of existence, by making brains.

108 Once again, insofar as the work of Fitzgerald addresses this issue in terms of the American social milieu, one can make sense of Dos Passos’ comments that “a firmly anchored ethical standard” exists in Fitzgerald’s work, one towards which America had been striving (Crack-Up 339).

109 The tremendous influence of Proust on Deleuze helps explain why he took such an interest in Proust and Signs. Although Deleuze rarely returned to and revised his books for new editions, he reworked this book twice. These editions differ, but they share a common critique and reconceptualization of traditional philosophical commitments in terms of the thought of Proust. Examining this development sheds light on the significance of literature to Deleuze’s conception of philosophy, especially the development of his conception of philosophy as a creative endeavor, political in nature.


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Deleuze goes on to describe this unity as a problem specific to art – discovering a type of unity not based on the organic model (PS 164). However, insofar as the unity belonging to the organic model is an assumed unity – one thought to exist naturally – discovering a type of unity not based on this model consists in creation. Proust’s work is important to Deleuze because Proust takes seriously the problem of chaos, the threat chaos poses to both thought and social life. Deleuze praises Proust for impugning a simplistic philosophical understanding of thought that would naturally tend towards truth, as well as a corresponding conception of part-whole relations, where the integration of individuals into community would be the result of a natural process.110 Rather, the Proustian universe is one in fragments (PS 184). According to Deleuze, this results from a thematic preoccupation, the fact Proust is so specifically concerned with time.

As opposed to conceiving time as a whole – a vast container in which everything happens – on Deleuze’s reading, time cannot possibly be conceived as a whole. Time is the form of all that changes and thus prevents the emergence of a whole.111 The problem of time is thus intimately related to that of chaos, where both time and chaos threaten the emergence of thought, precipitating discord between individuals and community.

In his reading of Proust, Deleuze claims only the work of art can give order to a world of multiplicity and chaos, “without unifying or totalizing objects or subjects” (PS 168). Later, Deleuze and Guattari ascribe precisely this task to philosophy in its creation of concepts.112 Unifying and totalizing both subjects and objects would consist in understanding these from the perspective of the organic model. As with opinion, the relation the organic model has to chaos

110 See PS 94 where he discusses the establishment of an image of thought by Proust against that of philosophy, where truth would be the natural telos of thought, thus assuring agreement between minds, PS 105 and 112 regarding the logos as a universal dialectic, a conversation among friends where the faculties voluntarily collaborate – linking wholes to parts and parts to wholes – and PS 112-113 concerning micro-macrocosmic relations of parts to wholes in terms of a “great Organism.”

111 See PS 161, as well as B 131-132 where the problem of time and the whole – the prevention of the emergence of a whole because of time – is addressed in the work of Bergson. It is precisely this problem to which Hegel’s philosophy is a response, especially the importance Kojève gives to the end-of-history thesis in his reading of Hegel. See my explication of this point in “Spirit as Ground and the Dialectical Method in Hegel” in chapter one. I return to this in Deleuze’s reading of Whitman in chapter six.

112 They say that the “concept is a whole because it totalizes its components, but it is a fragmentary whole. Only on this condition can it escape the mental chaos constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it” (WP 16). I return to this below. Smith addresses this point in his excellent “On the Becoming of Concepts,” which concerns Deleuze’s account of concepts in relation to time – what Deleuze means by “concepts” if they are not simply discovered as eternal and unchanging but created as varying continuously (122-145).

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is one of denial. Although art brings order to chaos, it does so differently from the organic model, “unified only by a creative viewpoint that itself takes the role of an incongruous part within the whole” (PS 114). This creative viewpoint is but one perspective among others. The difference between the organic model’s confrontation with chaos in a relation of denial and art’s as one of uneasy alliance consists in the variability of the perspective from which art brings order to chaos.113 Deleuze and Guattari’s account of jealousy as the creation of an affect by Proust highlights this variability.

They start by addressing a widely held understanding of Proust’s conception of jealousy, that Proust describes “jealousy in…minute detail” (WP 175). According to Deleuze and Guattari, however, this understanding is mistaken. Rather, they claim “he is inventing an affect” (WP 175).114 Going on to describe the nature of this invention – how and why Proust can be understood as creating an affect – they write that he “constantly reverses the order in affections presupposed by opinion, according to which jealousy would be an unhappy consequence of love” (WP 175). Creating jealousy as an affect consists in reconceiving the relation between affections supposed by opinion, where jealousy would be a consequence of love. To understand this claim, it is necessary to explore how jealousy could be conceived as a consequence of love in opinion, such that reversing this relation would consist in the creation of jealousy as an affect.

Opinion supposes that specific qualities within perceptions precede and precipitate specific affections within a subject. The correspondence between these perceptions and feelings is determined with reference to an inter-subjective community that, in turn, takes an objective world as its reference. Depending on the community, love would be an inter-subjective relation occasioned by qualities within perceptions, for example, a letter, diamond ring, particular look, etc.115 Here jealousy would be secondary, only ever parasitic on love. As an ambiguity or mistake regarding correspondences between perceptions and affections, jealousy occasions questions such as: Why was she talking with him? What does it mean? How should I take that? As an ambiguity or failure of recognition, jealousy can be clarified and dispelled. Conceived in terms of opinion, jealousy thus supposes love as an ideal.

113 I return to the importance of the variability of this perspective with regard to the tension between inclusive universalism and exclusive particularism discussed in chapter six.

114 Deleuze makes a similar claim in Proust and Signs, saying jealousy goes further than love as the creation of an affect (8-9).

115 See Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time vol. 1 Swann’s Way 394-397 and 512-514 for examples in the case of Swann.


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Love would consist in a translucent correspondence between perceptions and affections – determined by an inter-subjective community – which act as points of reference, according to which the subject orients itself in relation to this community and the objective world. The clarification of jealousy thus bears on one’s relation to a community, one’s orientation within a community that determines which feelings do or do not correspond to certain qualities extracted from perceptions.116 Jealously can thus be resolved into either love or hate on the basis of the community to which one belongs or seeks membership. Different communities determine correspondences between perceptions and affections that constitute love differently. Escaping opinion, Proust reverses the relation between love and jealousy.

Deleuze and Guattari say that, for Proust, “jealousy is finality, destination; and if we must love, it is so that we can be jealous, jealousy being the meaning of signs – affect as semiology” (WP 175). Negatively, the invention of jealousy as an affect consists in disengaging jealousy from love, such that jealousy can no longer be understood as an ambiguity or failure to distinguish between love and hate. Positively, the invention of jealousy as an affect signals a reconceptualization of the model of thought on which this conception of jealousy would be based. Love does not here take priority, acting as a standard by which jealousy is assessed. Neither, however, should a characterization of jealousy in terms of finality or destination be understood as implying that either Proust or Deleuze and Guattari understand jealousy as taking priority, such that it would act as an ideal or standard against which love would be assessed. Rather, they say that jealousy consists in “the meaning of signs – affect as semiology.”

Published in 1964, the first edition of Proust and Signs addresses the need to transform philosophical methodology in terms of a Proustian universe of signs, resulting in a reconceptualization of philosophy as semiology-interpretation. With the exception of a brief discussion in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze first addresses the image of thought and its related problematics in his book on Proust.117 The image of thought and its critique, says Deleuze, are the most important parts of Difference and Repetition. Additions to the second and third editions of Proust and Signs concern the conditions of the production of signs in the work of Proust, leading to an understanding of philosophy as creation.

116 Here a point of continuity between opinion and the organic model comes to the foreground: On Deleuze’s reading, Proust opposes the establishment of an anti-logos to that of the logos, organ, and organon, where “meaning must be discovered in the whole to which it belongs” (PS 146). See my discussions of this point in “Spirit as Ground and the Dialectical Method in Hegel” in chapter one, as well as chapter three.

117 See NP 96-99 for his discussion of the image of thought in relation to Nietzsche.

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This move from a conception of philosophy as interpretation to one of creation can be explained, in part, biographically: During the early to mid 1960’s, structuralism was a major intellectual force in France, such that this paradigm and the centrality of semiology influenced Deleuze and his reading of Proust, whereas structuralism’s influence had waned considerably by the 1970’s. Between these two editions, Deleuze met and collaborated with Guattari. Guattari brought to Deleuze’s thought an awareness of the shortcomings of interpretive paradigms – especially structural interpretations of psychoanalysis – in exchange for a conception of thought that stressed its creative nature, as well as a turn towards the political.118

Taken together, the equation of jealousy with “the meaning of signs” thus concerns not only a critique of traditional philosophical conceptions of thought – what Deleuze identifies with the image of thought in his early work, and Deleuze and Guattari equate with opinion in What is Philosophy? – but also the reconceptualization of thought as a creative endeavor based, in part, on interpretation. These related commitments concern a reassessment of thought in general, in terms of the relation between percepts, affects, subjects, and inter-subjective communities, and – in all cases – the political significance of these relations.

No longer are affects conceived as feelings or changes of feelings in a subject that arise from qualities in perceptions. Rather, affects are experienced and then perceptions are discovered adequate to these affects. A tendency exists to search out and decipher a percept in experience as one would a sign. In this way, Proust’s invention of jealousy as an affect consists in an understanding of affects as signs, semiology as a science of signs. Affects are determinative of percepts rather than perceptions being determinative of affections. If perceptions are conceived as occasions for the actualization of jealousy, then qualities can no longer be the result of a perception from which they are extracted. Further, rather than perceptions and affections being tied to a subject – where their correspondences refer to an objective world and inter-subjective community in terms of which the subject is oriented – the tendency to search out and decipher percepts in experience is constitutive of subjectivity and inter-subjective communities.

Deleuze says jealousy discovers the lover as a collection of partial objects – the transexuality of the lover – rather than as a full person conceived on the model of substance (PS 139-140). This process is itself one of creating

118 See TRM 66 concerning the way politics comes into play with Anti-Oedipus, as well as my discussion of this in chapter three.


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sympathy, which Deleuze associates with art and love rather than philosophy and friendship (PS 30).

Animated by an affect, one seeks out a percept. Thought is not here conceived in terms of the expression of a universal mind but as the result of haphazard impressions that force one to think (PS 95). Unlike opinion, this relation is understood as extrinsic and variable, determined by chance encounters open to change and revision. The correspondences established determine the nature of subjectivity and the kinds of relations into which subjects enter, which in turn determine the inter-subjective community formed as a result. Just as Masoch and Sade establish novel modes of existence with corresponding political commitments, so too does Proust. Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s constant interest is in the way that the novel modes of existence that writers establish are no longer tied to the model of the organism. The activity of these writers consists, rather, in constructing a body without organs (TP 150-151).

Conclusion

Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of opinion – and liberal ideals by extension – bear on philosophical anthropology, a conception of what it means to be a subject and the kinds of relations that exist between individuals and community. In opinion, subjectivity is characterized by two capacities – a faculty of perception and a faculty of affection. When opinion triumphs, the perceptive-affective correspondences of which opinions consist are determined in individuals by the community to which they belong. According to Deleuze and Guattari, widespread contemporary opinion belongs to a particular generic subject, that of the capitalist. Thus, the building of consensus through the attenuation of opinion is part of a process that facilitates the spread of global capitalism. Just as opinion implies a philosophical anthropology, so too does philosophy and art.

Whereas opinion begins with terms, philosophy and art begin with relations, extrinsic and variable relations that condition fluid terms. They bring about both worlds and inter-subjective communities, where relations between philosophy and non-philosophy concern the plane of immanence on which the creation of concepts takes place. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the brain lies at the intersection of the planes of philosophy, art, and science. Insofar as Deleuze claims cerebral pathways are not pre-established but determined by stimuli, the creative activities of philosophy and art establish new circuits and synapses in the brain through their relations to chaos. Although philosophy

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and art act as protections against chaos, according to Deleuze and Guattari, they are engaged in an even greater struggle against opinion.

Opinions are like an umbrella that protect against chaos. Philosophers and artists tear holes in the umbrella and let in chaos. Only through a pact with chaos are philosophy and art capable of disrupting correspondences established between perceptions and affections by opinion. However, chaos introduces unfamiliarity, such that practical interest necessitates the establishment of new opinions. Thus, the planes of immanence and composition need to be constantly renewed. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the materials with which philosophers and artists work as “daughters of chaos” or “chaoids.” They claim that philosophy and art begin with sentences or their equivalents, which should be understood in terms of a broader conception of language and the metaphysics it implies.

Language is conceived as a relation, a force that interacts with other forces to establish new relations. Creating concepts, percepts, and affects thus consists in utilizing language as a material force to establish new relations in thought. Insofar as this uneasy alliance serves the battle against opinion – and opinion always concerns relations between individuals and community – so too does the pact of philosophy and art with chaos bear on relations between individuals and community: Not only do philosophy and art condition new ways of thinking, perceiving, and feeling, but also relations between them, and relations between individuals and community.

The relation of opinion to chaos conditions a conception of politics as consensus under the sway of global capitalism; the relation of philosophy and art to chaos results in a critique of consensus and capitalism, a conception of the political. This consists in inventing a people who are missing. Creativity is thus the central feature of a conception of the political modeled on the activities of philosophy and art. The political import of philosophy and literature consists in establishing relations of sympathy, cultivating shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. Insofar as relations between perceptions and affections determine those between individuals and community, this leads to a reconceptualization of part-whole relations.

Art brings order to a world of multiplicity and chaos in a manner different from that of opinion and the organic model, where the creative viewpoint responsible for this order is but one among others. The difference between the organic model’s confrontation with chaos in a relation of denial and philosophy and art’s as one of uneasy alliance thus consists in the variability of the perspective from which the latter bring order to chaos. Unlike opinion, the relation by which philosophy and art bring order to chaos is conceived as


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extrinsic and variable, determined by chance encounters. The correspondences established determine the nature of subjectivity and the kinds of relations into which subjects enter, which in turn determine the inter-subjective community formed as a result. The creation of percepts and affects in writing establishes novel forms of individuality, community, and relations between the two – novel modes of existence.

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Chapter Six

Creating a People to Come

Introduction: Liberalism and its Failures

In his first speech as Prime Minister, David Cameron announced the failure of multiculturalism in the UK. Although he singled out Muslim groups specifically, to combat extremist tendencies of all types, Cameron argued for the need to build a strong sense of national identity (“State multiculturalism”). Even before events such as September 11th and the killing of Theo Van Gogh brought the problem of “Islamism” to popular consciousness, Samuel Huntington proposed a similar course of action in his 1996 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. As the last remaining superpower and guardian of Western values, he argued the United States must develop a strong national character to lead the world. Despite criticisms and a show of support for inclusive liberal ideals by the left, these positions are indicative of a growing sentiment.

The recognition of and appreciation for cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity associated with inclusive liberal values – evident in multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism – have not materialized to the extent expected. In some sense, these integrative projects have also fueled an intense backlash. In the wake of September 11th a program such as that proposed by Huntington came to dominate the domestic and foreign policy of the Bush administration, generally associated with “neoconservatism.” As is relatively clear with hindsight, however, this program failed. It not only failed to achieve its intended ends but also fueled an intense backlash. In terms of image and potential for world leadership, eight years of Bush administration policies caused the United States to lose prestige in the eyes of the world. In terms of security and stability, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq lasted longer than anticipated. Although the situation has improved, both conflicts confirm the role of the United States as an imperial hegemon, further enforcing and strengthening distain towards the Western world.

Not only are extremist tendencies increasingly pronounced in minority and immigrant populations such as those associated with Islam, but one also sees increasingly conservative tendencies in the social and political spheres, in traditionally open societies such as the United States, the Netherlands,


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and Denmark.1 A strong national identity or exclusive particularism seems to provide an antidote to the perceived shortcomings of the openness associated with inclusive liberal values. Ironically, liberal ideals are themselves invoked to justify conservative tendencies, stressing the extent to which these ideals provide the basis for Western society and must be protected against threatening foreign elements.2

In this way, inclusive liberalism appears threatening to Western society. If society is itself under threat, then neither these projects nor the ideals on which they are based seem to serve the ends of social order. Rather, they appear as disembodied liberal dogma, disconnected from and incapable of addressing concrete social concerns. In both its political and academic manifestations, the left has been largely incapable of mounting an effective response. Parties towards the left of the political spectrum acquiesce to the demands of global capitalism, while theorists grasp desperately at the reeds of a bygone era on which to hang their hopes.

Perhaps the irony is that Western liberalism is open to and welcoming of cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity assuming, of course, that, at bottom, these share the same ideals. Indeed, these ideals themselves seem to result from a certain conception of human nature, a philosophical anthropology in which human beings are inherently rational and rational with respect to their self-interests, such that people naturally tend towards consensus through discussion. For this reason not only is a liberal perspective incapable of resolving such disputes but cannot even adequately explain their persistence. The failures and backlash against the inclusive universalism characteristic of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism seem to thus call this account into question. As these ideals are themselves neither accidental nor incidental – but rooted in a universal philosophical anthropology – their failures should be considered from the perspective of philosophical anthropology.3

1 For example, in Europe with the rise of rightwing parties and their distain for immigrants and Islam, and in the United States with increasingly right-leaning tendencies fueled by Christianity in the Republican party. For a discussion of these issues in a philosophical context, see Rudi Visker’s “In Praise of Visibility.” Much of the work of Visker and Paul Moyaert explores precisely these issues in the context of Levinas’ philosophy and Lacanian theory.

2 See Robert Fisk’s “Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands dead – and nothing learnt” for an assessment along these lines.

3 See Žižek’s discussions of multiculturalism in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, as well as the New Americanists on their critique of liberal humanism and its complicity with a conservative ontology.

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In liberalism, the integration of individuals into community is based on mutual aims and shared interests, where people naturally tend toward agreement through discussion. Ultimately this results from the types of creatures human beings are. The account of philosophical anthropology implied thus gives priority to immaterial over material conditions in an understanding of human existence.4 An inclusive liberal framework neglects the central importance of material conditions to human existence, as well as the importance of differences between these conditions to people, the importance of particularism in an understanding of human existence. The problem presented in the failures of multiculturalism and its backlash thus concern a tension between an inclusive universalism and exclusive particularism as they bear on an understanding of human nature. The importance of Deleuze’s work here comes to the forefront.

Central to Deleuze’s critique of psychoanalysis and the superiority of Anglo-American literature are issues of philosophical anthropology. These are themselves political in nature. They support a critique of an understanding of political activity as a natural process, one where the integration of individuals into community occurs through natural processes, based on an understanding of desire as lack and discussion as tending towards consensus.5 At the same time, Deleuze establishes an alternative based on the creative activities of philosophy and art. Insofar as these two are intertwined, the merit of this account consists in not only establishing a novel perspective but also explaining why those criticized are convincing, why they are in fact the mainstream. The work of Deleuze is thus capable of not only explaining the persistence of these disputes – rooted as they are in human nature – but also pointing towards their resolution. Here one finds a framework in which to fruitfully address the contemporary failures of and intense backlash against liberal ideals, although not in the manner one might expect.

In one of the few texts Deleuze addresses an issue generally associated with multiculturalism, he does so in a woefully simplistic fashion. Deleuze discusses the headscarf in France in “A Slippery Slope.” Although he shies away from either endorsing or condemning the practice, the criterion Deleuze proposes to decide the issue seems to miss the point: He asks if the headscarf is indicative of a movement to introduce Islam into France’s secular social milieu, whether the next step would be the introduction of religious texts in

4 See my discussions of these points in previous chapters.5 Once again, Deleuze’s critique of human rights should be understood in these terms. See

N 122, where he says “the rights of man” provide “eternal values.” Deleuze criticizes Kant for similar reasons, saying that in Kant critique “amounts to giving civil right to thought considered from the point of view of its natural law” (DR 136).


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French schools (TRM 359-360). If this is the case, then Deleuze says it is wrong. The criterion he proposes is relatively straightforward and based on the separation of church and state. Deleuze thus assumes secularism as a universal norm. Insofar as this is a largely Western ideal – and central to multiculturalism is a confrontation between the East and West, South and North – in terms of multiculturalism, his assessment seems to miss the point.

In works written towards the end of his life, however, Deleuze addresses themes related to the failures and backlash against multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, themes related to the tension between an inclusive universalism and exclusive particularism. He does not do so in popular newspaper or television interviews but in his engagements with the work of D.H. Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence, and Walt Whitman. Here his focus is on fundamentalism, exclusivism, and nationalism. These three issues form the hardcore of a contemporary exclusive particularism directed against inclusive liberal values. Based on a conception of the political modeled on the creative activities of philosophy and art, one can here discern Deleuze developing an account of relations between individuals and community characterized by inclusive anti-universalism, by inclusive particularism.

In his engagement with D.H. Lawrence, Deleuze explains the rise of a hate-filled form of Christianity, similar to fundamentalist strands, in terms of a reaction against modern Enlightenment ideals.6 Precisely this dichotomy lies at the heart of the contemporary impasse one finds between a liberal inclusivist view that affirms the value of religion as a basic human good and a virile form of religion associated with fundamentalist strands.7 Their redemptive value – the reason people embrace these forms of fundamentalism – consists in their emphasis on exclusive particularism, their emphasis on concrete conditions of human existence. In Lawrence, this account is linked to a somatically grounded theory of the drives that supports a corresponding conception of the self. Here one can thus discern a connection between the political significance of religious fundamentalism and a theory of drives, connecting Deleuze and Guattari’s earlier criticisms of psychoanalysis with those of liberal ideals in opinion. What is redeeming in fascism – why the masses were not fooled

6 Forms of religious fundamentalism are by no means archaic throwbacks but thoroughly modern – or even postmodern – insofar as they are reactions against modernity. Regarding this point, see Armstrong 368-369.

7 Regarding religion as a fundamental human good, John Courtney Murray writes the following: “The fact may be embarrassing to the highminded believer, but it is nevertheless a fact that the development of religious freedom in society bears a distinct relationship to the growth of unbelief and indifference” (58).

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but clamored for fascism – consists in its emphasis on the importance of the body, community, and concrete conditions in an understanding of human existence, an understanding of relations between individuals and community in terms of exclusive particularism.

In his reading of T.E. Lawrence, Deleuze addresses the question of how people from different backgrounds and traditions work together in times of tumultuous change or revolution. According to Deleuze, a necessary condition of cooperation is the maintenance of difference – that people are neither equal nor the same. Failure to maintain this difference results in the breakdown of social cooperation altogether. Here Deleuze emphasizes Lawrence’s reconsideration of the development of the relation between mind and body, as well as its significance to the political import of literature. From this perspective, the political significance of literature consists in a galvanization of the mind by the body, bringing people together by establishing relations of sympathy, which at the same time supposes and enforces difference by establishing relations of antipathy. Once again, the contemporary relevance of this account consists in its emphasis on the value of exclusive particularism, the redemptive value of reactions against inclusive universalism.

Finally, in his engagement with Walt Whitman, Deleuze explores the nature of relations between individuals and community in terms of a nationalism unique to the United States. Again, his focus is in on a tension between inclusive universalism and exclusive particularism. In terms of the specificity of the social and political milieu of America, Deleuze develops an account of relations between individuals and community characterized by inclusive anti-universalism, by inclusive particularism. Following Whitman, Deleuze refers to these as relations of “camaraderie.” These relations are not natural. They do not result from expressions of innate dispositions within human nature but from the creative activities of philosophy and art. Understood in these terms, the political significance of philosophy and art consists in not only establishing relations of sympathy but also antipathy, bringing people together while at the same time maintaining differences between them. Whitman refers to this as “Unionism,” a form of nationalism unique to America, which supports social cooperation by establishing relations between individuals and community different from those of inclusive universalism. Central to all three of Deleuze’s engagements is the importance of the creative activities of philosophy and art as a model for the political.


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1. Inclusive Particularism: The Political Significance of Philosophy and Art

Insofar as the problem of the political concerns the integration of individuals into community – in terms of neither inclusive universalism nor exclusive particularism, but the development of inclusive particularism – the political significance of philosophy and art consists in striking a balance. This balance concerns the relation philosophy and literature have to chaos in contradistinction to opinion, maintaining a balance within – rather than denying – chaos. In this way, philosophy and art provide a true protection against chaos.

The correspondences opinion establishes between perceptions and affections are fixed and inflexible, although the nature of reality is a chaotic maelstrom where relations between percepts and affects are singular and unique. In this way, neither does opinion correspond to reality nor is it capable of accommodating reality. Given time, opinions crack. They break down in a radical fashion, and social reality is engulfed by chaos. The failures of – and strong backlash against – multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and liberal values can be understood in these terms, in terms of a radical rejection of a conception of politics as consensus based on opinion and characterized by inclusive universalism. Since philosophy and art enter into a pact with chaos to struggle against opinion, they provide a true protection against chaos.

Philosophy and art establish relations for the sake of warding off chaos, while at the same time courting chaos in their battle against opinion. As opposed to fixed relations, this maintenance of balance within chaos allows for the establishment of variable relations. In this way, philosophy and art correspond to reality. This balance within chaos contributes, in turn, to a balance between individuals and community, between individuality and collectivity, thereby addressing the backlash against inclusive universalism. Hence, although the alliance of philosophy and art with chaos is an uneasy one, insofar as this relation serves philosophy and art in their struggle against opinion, they stave off worst-case scenarios involving the inundation of social life with chaos, as well as the strong backlash against inclusive universalism in the form of exclusive particularism.

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2. D.H. Lawrence, Christianity, and Fundamentalism

The influence of D.H. Lawrence on Deleuze is by no means marginal but plays a central role. In part this can be explained biographically, by the fact that Fanny Deleuze translated works by Lawrence into French. Together the couple wrote a preface for the French edition of Apocalypse, Lawrence’s last book. This was later revised and included in Essays Critical and Clinical under the title “Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos.” In this essay, Deleuze explores similarities and differences between Nietzsche’s criticisms of Paul and Lawrence’s of John of Patmos. The import of this essay, however, far surpasses that of this simple comparison. Rather, one finds here an engagement by Deleuze with an issue only raised in a circumspect fashion in his earlier work with Guattari. The importance of this account concerns the claim, in Anti-Oedipus, that desire desires its own repression, that the masses were not fooled but clamored for fascism. Central to this problem is a concern with the nature of power.

Under the sway of Lawrence, Deleuze develops a conception of power similar in nature to that of Foucault. As with Foucault, the problem of power concerns its positive nature – not a negative but a positive and productive conception of power, one that produces reality (Discipline and Punish 194).8 The conception of power Deleuze develops in his reading of Lawrence thus comes close to what Deleuze and Guattari mean by desire in Anti-Oedipus.

Power increases rather than decreases one’s abilities.9 As with desire in Anti-Oedipus, in Deleuze’s engagements with Lawrence his concern is with the nature of power as it bears on relations between individuals and community. Belonging to a community increases one’s ability to act, increases power. Like Foucault, the problematic involved here concerns how individuals relate to community, benefiting by becoming parts of powerful collective organizations without at the same time begin swallowed up by these collectives.10 On the

8 In an early text entitled “Instincts and Institutions,” Deleuze frames this problem in terms of the difference between law and institutions. He says that whereas law limits one’s actions, institu-tions provide “a positive model for action” (DI 19). Both instincts and institutions are “proce-dures of satisfaction,” positive processes through which one’s abilities are increased (DI 19).

9 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault says that an increase in aptitude is tied to an increase in domination, adapted to respond to particular needs: “If economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labour, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination” (138).

10 In “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault asks the following: “How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from intensification of power relations?” (Essential Foucault 55). Negri touches on similar themes in his reading of Spinoza, when he describes obedience as a prior condition of sociability, collectivity, or human reproduction (Savage Anomaly 105). The issue of power in the work of Foucault is, however, more complex than this alone.


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basis of a superficial reading, however, this perspective is by no mean obvious in Deleuze. It only becomes apparent by turning to Lawrence’s Apocalypse in conjunction with “Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos.”

3. The Meaning(s) of Revelation

Apocalypse is an analysis by Lawrence of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament that consists in a prophetic vision foretelling the end of the world and Christ’s return at the final judgment. He originally undertook this project as a preface for a work by Fredrick Carter on the book of Revelation and its symbols. After extensive research, Lawrence decided to write his own book on Revelation (A 12). Following Carter, for Lawrence Revelation is a multi-layered work.11

Lawrence associates each of these levels and layers of meaning with different traditions, written by different authors for various peoples at different times.12 He identifies three main traditions or central layers that contribute to Revelation. The first comes from an ancient pagan ethos. Lawrence says it incorporates themes such as reverence for the cosmos, mystery rites, etc.13 Whereas this first layer is pagan and orgiastic in nature, according to Lawrence, the second is Jewish in origin and hostile to the first.

Frustrated by defeat after defeat, at this point in their history the Jews started looking forward to the end of the world.14 Rather than a people with imperial aspirations, after the destruction of the Temple, the Jews became a people of postponed destiny, looking forward to the end of the world and writing apocalypses. Lawrence says that early forms of this are already apparent in prophetic books of the Old Testament.15 The third layer is Christian in

11 He says it has “various levels or layers of meaning. The fall of the World Rule and the World Empire before the Word of God is certainly one stratum” (A 41). In a fragment not included in the original work, Lawrence writes, “But from the start, it is obvious it cannot be taken at its face meaning. The words are not intended to mean just what they say. They are intended to have a wrapped-up meaning, or perhaps a whole series of wrapped-up meanings: three or four separate meanings all wrapped up in the same sentence” (A 176).

12 “Gradually we realize the book has no one meaning. It has meanings. Not meanings within meanings: but rather, meaning against meaning… the Apocalypse is a compound work. It is no doubt the work of different men, of different generations and even different centuries” (A 48).

13 “The oldest part, surely, was a pagan work, probably the description of ‘secret’ ritual initiation into one of the pagan Mysteries, Artemis, Cybele, even Orphic” (A 85).

14 “After the destruction of the temple by Antiochus Epiphanes,” Lawrence writes, “the national imagination ceased to imagine a great natural Jewish Empire… The Jews became a people of postponed destiny. And then the seers began to write Apocalypses” (A 79-80).

15 “An early Apocalypse is the book of Daniel…another is the Apocalypse of Enoch” (A 79).

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nature. Taking inspiration from Nietzsche, however, here Lawrence makes an important qualification. He distinguishes between two types of Christianity. In his own reading of Apocalypse, Deleuze takes precisely this difference as his point of departure.

4. Christianity: Aristocratic and Popular

The point of orientation in Deleuze’s reading of Apocalypse is the rise of a vengeful, hate-filled form of Christianity similar in nature to contemporary strains of religious fundamentalism. He begins “Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos” by discussing the difference between John the Apostle and John of Patmos. Following Lawrence, Deleuze says John of the Gospel cannot have been the same John who wrote Revelation.16 According to Deleuze, this distinction by Lawrence is based on a particular method of evaluation, “typology.”

Lawrence and Deleuze treat Revelation as a symptom or phenomenon, and then they characterize the mode of existence it implies, the combination of forces harnessed by a particular will that animates this phenomenon.17 Concerning the results of this typology, Deleuze writes that the “gospel is aristocratic, individual, soft, amorous, delicate, always rather cultivated. The Apocalypse is collective, popular, uncultivated, hateful, and savage… John of Patmos deals with cosmic terror and death, whereas the gospel and Christ dealt with human and spiritual love. Christ invented a religion of love (a practice, a way of living and not belief ), whereas the Apocalypse brings a religion of Power [Pouvoir] – a belief, a terrible manner of judging. Instead of the gift of Christ, an infinite debt” (ECC 36). Deleuze’s characterization of Lawrence’s distinction between these two types of Christianity is similar in nature to Nietzsche’s.

Nietzsche distinguishes between the doctrine taught by Jesus and that popularized by Paul. Whereas the first consists in what he refers to as “passive nihilism” – which Nietzsche says comes close to Buddhism – the second consists in an internalization of ressentiment. The hatred originally directed towards the world in Judaism turns inward. The difference Lawrence identifies is between Jesus and John of Patmos, the Christianity one finds in the Gospel

16 “Lawrence intervenes with very passionate arguments, which have all the more force in that they imply a method of evaluation, a typology: the same man could not have written the Gospel and the Apocalypse” (ECC 36).

17 See my discussion of this method at length in chapter two.


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and that belonging to Revelation. This is the third layer Lawrence identifies in Revelation.

He says it is not based on Christ’s message of love but comes from John of Patmos and other early Christians persecuted by Rome.18 Whereas Christ’s message of love in the Gospel consists in what Lawrence refers to as “thoughtful religion,” John’s hatred in Revelation constitutes “popular religion.” Hence, like the second Jewish layer, this form of Christianity is hostile towards life, looking forward to a beyond. It results from a frustrated desire to have power in this life.19 As with Nietzsche, however, Lawrence thinks the hatred one finds in Revelation goes beyond that of the Jews – is worse than and more destructive of life. Lawrence points towards this in their different understandings of hell.

Hell takes on a meaning in Christianity it never had in Judaism.20 Not only must the downtrodden triumph, but their enemies must also suffer to make victory worthwhile. With the advent of Revelation’s Christianity, triumph becomes synonymous with achieving the power to make suffer. Victory is hollow without also achieving the power to punish the defeated.21 As with Nietzsche’s characterization of slave morality, the conception of power one finds in Revelation is reactive. It can only become strong by making others weak.

However, neither Nietzsche nor Lawrence think that Judaism and Christianity have to be this way, that there is anything inherent to these religions or religion in general that necessitates their developing in this fashion. If this were the case, then neither Nietzsche nor Lawrence could distinguish between two types of Christianity and their respective characteristics. Having something akin to an essence, Christianity would develop in one and only one form. In the cases of both Nietzsche and Lawrence, this possibility results from more basic commitments that shape Deleuze’s thought.

According to a method of Nietzschean typology – which Deleuze also attributes to Lawrence – Christianity should be treated as a symptom, as a phenomenon. Christianity appears as it does because of the mode of existence to which it is tied, the combination of forces harnessed by a particular will

18 “If it is not Jesus, it is John. If it is not Gospel, it is Revelation. It is popular religion, as distinct from thoughtful religion” (A 63).

19 “This business of reigning in glory hereafter went to the root of Christianity: and is, of course, only an expression of frustrated desire to reign here and now” (A 67).

20 Whereas “the old Jewish hells of Sheol and Gehenna were fairly mild, uncomfortable abysmal places like Hades… This was not good enough for the brimstone apocalyptist and John of Patmos. They must have a marvelous, terrific lake of sulphureous fire that could burn forever and ever, so that the souls of the enemy could be kept writhing” (A 112).

21 “This is the vision of eternity of all Patmossers. They could not be happy in heaven unless they knew their enemies were unhappy in hell” (A 112).

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that animates this phenomenon. Religion becomes reactive when active forces cease to act, when they are separated from what they can do. Unlike Nietzsche, however, in Apocalypse Lawrence does not make reference to forces and wills to explain the difference between the Christianity of the Gospel and Revelation. Rather, Lawrence speaks in terms of selves. He distinguishes two types of selves and uses this distinction to explain the differences between these types of Christianity.

5. Selves: Individual and Collective

Lawrence distinguishes between two types of selves to explain the difference between the thoughtful Christianity taught by Jesus and the popular one he associates with John of Patmos. Lawrence uses this distinction to explain the difference between the loving acts practiced by Christ and the hate-filled tirades of John of Patmos. Those who feel weak follow Revelation, whereas those who feel strong follow the Gospel.22 Lawrence explains this in terms of the Gospel’s emphasis on giving and charity.23

Given that the strong are strong enough to obtain what they need, they can give away what they have. They do not need the support of a collective, tending away from collective bodies, being more independent, more individual. Given that the weak are too weak to obtain what they need, not only are they incapable of charity but also demand what the strong have. They need the support of a collective, tending towards collective bodies, being less independent and more collective.24 Weak, collective persons need what the strong acquire, attempting to bring down and take from the strong what they cannot obtain themselves.

On the one hand, Lawrence says some persons are, by nature, strong individuals. Their natures are powerful and aristocratic, and they are masters. They can only act humbly or renounce power when they are alone, by themselves. Once among others, writes Lawrence, their superiority is clear. On the other hand, Lawrence says other persons are not naturally powerful

22 “We are speaking now,” he writes, “of two sorts of human nature: those that feel themselves strong in their souls, and those that feel themselves weak. Jesus…and the greater John [the Apostle] felt themselves strong. John of Patmos felt himself weak” (A 65).

23 He writes that “the religion of the strong taught renunciation and love. And the religion of the weak taught down with the strong and the powerful, and let the poor be glorified” (A 65).

24 “The vast mass are,” writes Lawrence, “these middling souls. They have no aristocratic individuality… So they skulk in a mass and secretly are bent on their own ultimate self-glorification. The Patmossers” (A 68).


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but weak and collective, although they refuse to accept this.25 As opposed to accepting their collective natures – their natures as collective selves – and giving homage to powerful individuals, they seek to destroy both powerful individuals and power in general, catering to those who are weak and collective. According to Lawrence, this is John of Patmos’ technique in Revelation. The cosmos manifests an awesome power. Since John cannot attain this power, he promotes its destruction – the destruction of the entire universe rather than doing without power. Following Lawrence, however, Deleuze says this procedure results in the transformation of power rather than its renunciation.26

Being upset they cannot obtain power, the weak decide if they cannot have power then nobody should. The good things they think they deserve – the things they could obtain if they were strong and had power – are put off for another life. Instead of renouncing power in this fashion though, says Deleuze, power is transformed. Power becomes authority. As authority, power supposes the lives of the weak – those without power – become archetypes. The lives of the weak become a standard against which actions and behaviors are judged, for the sake of determining who will and will not obtain what in an afterlife.

Forms are thus established – rules of action and conduct in terms of which to obtain an end. Authority takes the place of power as a submission to these forms. This authority is related to a transcendent being who carries out judgment and imposes punishment, procedures the weak are incapable of performing themselves.27 Here God is responsible for the destruction of

25 Describing specific examples of these character types, Lawrence says it is only “when he is alone, can man be a Christian, a Buddhist, or a Platonist. The Christ statues and Buddha statues bear witness to this. When he is with other men, instantly distinctions occur, and levels are formed. As soon as he is with other men, Jesus is an aristocrat, a master. Buddha is always the lord Buddha, Francis of Assisi, trying to be so humble, as a matter of fact finds a subtle means to absolute power over his followers. Shelley could not bear not to be the aristocrat of his company. Lenin was a Tyrannus in shabby clothes” (A 68).

26 He discusses this point in “To Have Done with Judgment,” also included in Essays Critical and Clinical. Referring to Lawrence, Deleuze writes that “Christianity did not renounce power, but rather invented a new form of power as the Power to judge: the destiny of man is ‘postponed’ at the same time that judgment becomes a final authority. The doctrine of judgment appears in the Apocalypse or the Last Judgment” (ECC 127).

27 Deleuze describes this in terms of war: “War is only a combat-against, a will to destruction, a judgment of God that turns destruction into something ‘just.’ The judgment of God is on the side of war… In war, the will to power merely means that the will wants strength [puissance] as a maximum of power [pouvoir] or domination. For Nietzsche and Lawrence, war is the lowest degree of the will to power, its sickness” (ECC 133). Following Lawrence, Deleuze says war is symptomatic of a weak, diseased nature. At other points in Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze associates war with a situation where relations breakdown altogether. I return to this shortly.

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power. God makes “just” or justifies this destruction. Authority is a new form of power Deleuze associates with Christianity, the power to judge on the basis of forms.28 However, this transformation is by no means an exclusively religious issue. As a religious issue, its import goes beyond religion alone.

For Lawrence, the transformation from power into authority concerns secular governmental institutions and their relation to society at large. Lawrence says that power wanes when denied, but that power relations form the basis of social relations, such that society is ungovernable without relations of power.29 His position here is strikingly close to that of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. There desire is conceived as an impersonal, material force of production, similar in nature to what Spinoza refers to as conatus. It is a life force that traverses all things, always present in human affairs.30 It is especially evident when people come together for constructive, creative endeavors. Engaging in such projects power circulates. All share in the flow of power by participating.

However, in its schizophrenic state, power or desire produces in a disorganized and haphazard fashion, introducing chaos into the social world. The problem of society consists in the organization of these productive but haphazard forces. Although mutual aims and interests seem to animate social relations between individuals and community, these ultimately have their basis in power, in material forces of production.31 Mutual aims and interests only come afterwards, on the basis of power relations.32 However, even addressing 28 Lawrence describes this as follows: “But by the time of Christ all religion and all thought

seemed to turn from the old worship and study of vitality, potency, power, to the study of death and death-rewards, death-penalties, and morals. All religion, instead of being religion of life, here and now, became religion of postponed destiny, death, and reward afterwards, ‘if you are good’” (A 83-84).

29 He writes the following: “Deny power, and power wanes. Deny power in a greater man, and you have no power yourself. But society, now and forever, must be ruled and governed” (A 68).

30 Describing power as a vital life force in relation to the body without organs in the work of Lawrence, Deleuze writes that the body without organs “is traversed by a powerful, nonorganic vitality” and that “Lawrence paints the picture of such a body… a powerful, inorganic affect that comes to pass on this vital body… Lawrence ceaselessly describes bodies that are organically defective or unattractive…but are nonetheless traversed by this intense vitality that defies organs and undoes their organization” (ECC 131).

31 Deleuze and Guattari say that although aims and interests provide the cover by which people participate in society, more fundamentally there is a “disinterested love of the social machine, of the form of power, and of the degree of development in and for themselves” (AO 346).

32 From this perspective, everyone thus receives something from capitalism, from the power – or what Deleuze and Guattari call the “mutant flows” – of capitalism. Since mutual aims and interests only come afterwards, one can understand how and why even the most disadvantaged and excluded from society also invest in it (AO 346).


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this problem is impossible if one misunderstands the nature of desire. If one conceives of desire as lack, then it appears as though mutual aims and interests form the basis of social relations. From this perspective, the aim of society appears as organizing individuals for the sake of fulfilling lack, rather than producing relations of sympathy. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari go to great lengths in Anti-Oedipus to clarify the nature of desire.33 Here Lawrence does the same.

If one denies power relations, then power wanes. The nature of power relations as the basis for social relations becomes opaque. Lawrence raises the question of the nature of social relations in the absence of power relations. Like Deleuze, Lawrence’s response concerns authority. In terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire – as the basis of social relations – power supports a conception of political activity as one of creating sympathy. Authority, on the other hand, consists in an admission born of a resentment of the weak against the strong. Authority is the weak admission that society must be governed, establishing rules and regulations to serve this end.34 When authority takes the place of power as the basis of social relations, the task of political activity consists in producing agreement or consensus rather than establishing relations of sympathy. According to Lawrence, however, this satisfies no one.

Quibbling politicians act as the arbiters of social rule, vying against each other to achieve the interests of their constituents, achieving universal consensus only as the lowest common denominator of agreement between people.35 Although authority appears to serve the interests of the weak, according to Lawrence, this is not the case. He says that when authority takes the place of power as the basis of social relations everyone suffers. Lawrence grounds this claim in his philosophical anthropology.

Lawrence says the majority of people are weak and collective, which explains the triumph of a vengeful, hate-filled Christianity.36 Although Lawrence has specific people in mind when he refers to the “weak” – as opposed to the “strong” – stopping there fails to capture the broader trajectory of Lawrence’s thought, as well as its influence on Deleuze. On this point, the commitments of Lawrence should be understood in terms of Nietzsche.

33 See my discussion of these points in chapter three.34 He says, “the mass must grant authority where they deny power. Authority now takes the

place of power, and we have ‘ministers’ and public officials and policemen” (A 68).35 “Then comes the grand scramble of ambition,” Lawrence writes, “competition, and the mass

treading one another in the face, so afraid they are of power” (A 68-69).36 He writes that “since there are always more weak people than strong, in the world, the

second sort of Christianity has triumphed and will triumph” (A 65).

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According to Deleuze, reading the master-slave distinction in Nietzsche as one referring to actual persons – where the master would be a person who represses the slave – results in a fundamental misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s work. Deleuze says this distinction should be understood as referring to qualities of the will, the differential relation between types of forces seizing the will. An analysis of forces such as one finds in Nietzsche is by no means foreign to the thought of Lawrence. Insofar as Trieben are understood as drives rather than instincts – in terms of general forces rather than the goal-directed activities of organisms – an analysis in terms of forces and wills stands at the heart of Lawrence’s criticisms of psychoanalysis. The theory of the drives he develops in Fantasia of the Unconscious is an analysis of drives or forces similar in nature to Nietzsche’s.

There he explains the behaviors of individuals and their relations to community in terms of two basic tendencies, a drive to be by oneself and a drive to be with others, the voluntary drive and sympathetic drive. The two selves result from and correspond to these two basic tendencies. As with Deleuze’s reading of the master-slave relation, Lawrence’s distinction between the weak and the strong should be understood in terms of forces, in terms of relations between the voluntary and sympathetic drives.37

Each and every person is both individual and collective, composed of an individual and a collective self. Relations between the voluntary and sympathetic drives thus determine relations between the individual and collective self, such that – in some sense – everyone is both weak and strong. A person composed of a higher degree of individual self feels stronger than a person composed of a higher degree of collective self, and vice versa. The distinction between these two types of selves – itself based on the more basic distinction within the drives – corresponds to the two types of Christianity. On

37 To a large extent, one can discern a similar understanding in Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses in Anti-Oedipus. There they characterize the socius in terms of two basic poles, the paranoiac and schizophrenic. These correspond to two basic movements of flows in relation to the socius, the tendency of flows to be coded-captured and the tendency of flows to be decoded-escape. For example, they say that because capitalism gives rise to and thrives on decoded flows (a schizophrenic movement of flows away from the socius), it has to resurrect and align itself with the Urstaat (a paranoiac movement of flows towards the socius) (374). Insofar as Deleuze and Guattari declare that delirium “is the general matrix of every unconscious social investment,” where they understand delirium as the general movement of desire-the unconscious, it seems as though their conception of desire-the unconscious should also be understood in terms of these two basic poles, in terms of these two basic movements (AO 277). The drive theory implied in Anti-Oedipus is thus dualistic in nature, a conception of desire with two basic movements that correspond to Lawrence’s account in the following manner: paranoiac : sympathetic :: schizophrenic : voluntary.


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this basis, Lawrence explains the triumph of the Patmossers, the widespread popularity of a vengeful, hate-filled Christianity.38

Principles corresponding to the individual self do not hold for the collective self, and vice versa. If persons were composed predominantly of individual self – in other words, if only the voluntary drive ruled the actions and behaviors of persons – then thoughtful religion would be a universal success, but this is not the case. Even the most independent persons are to some extent dependent, composed of collective self, animated by the sympathetic drive.

However, just as Lawrence claims the Oedipus complex is socially and historically conditioned – that it results from broader circumstances concerning relations between men and women, education, etc. – so too does he think the splintering of Christianity is socially and historically conditioned. Particularly interesting here is the fact that Lawrence identifies similar social and historical circumstances in both cases. Changing relations between men and women, modern education, etc. are responsible for the rise of both the Oedipus complex and a fundamentalist form of Christianity.39

6. People and Power

In the lives of individual persons and their relations to community, the two selves should be balanced – a balance between the drive to be with others and the drive to be by oneself. Here the contemporary problem of navigating the tension between inclusive universalism and exclusive particularism comes to the forefront. Just as with the Oedipus complex, according to Lawrence, the rise of a vengeful, hate-filled form of Christianity results from a mis-relation between these two selves, from social ideals that privilege the voluntary drive at the expense of the sympathetic drive.

Under the pressure of modern social ideals and education, says Lawrence, people have neglected their collective selves and the sympathetic drive. No longer is homage paid to the strong, natural human tendency to join with others to form collective bodies for the sake of creative undertakings. Modern social ideals put a premium on autonomy, the individual self, and voluntary

38 Describing the failures of “thoughtful” religions such as those he associates with the Gospel, Lawrence says that “religions of renunciation, meditation, and self-knowledge are for individuals alone. But man is individual only in part of his nature. In another great part of him he is collective” (A 67).

39 See Armstrong 368-369 regarding the way religious fundamentalism is linked to – and constitutes – a kind of psychopathology, a kind of neurosis.

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drive, at the expense of dependence, the collective self, and sympathetic drive. Emphasizing the individual nature of human existence, people are taught to be independent, neglecting the collective nature of human existence, the natural drive to be dependent and with others. This first tendency works against the second.

The problem consists not only in failing to achieve these objectives of autonomy and independence but also becoming frustrated and swinging too far back in the opposite direction. People are unable to achieve the unnatural goal of absolute independence. They thus become frustrated and give total sway to their collective selves and the sympathetic drive, resulting in an immersion in the collective, becoming swallowed up by the crowd.40 From this perspective, one can understand the value Lawrence and Deleuze find in fundamentalism and fascism.

Lawrence identifies precisely this tendency in Revelation, referring to it as the “power-spirit.” Although Lawrence finds the pathos of Revelation odious, he says it reveals something important, the danger involved in denying the collective self, the sympathetic drive.41 This is to privilege the upper at the expense of the lower self, giving priority to the ideal over the material in an understanding of human existence. Insofar as sympathetic relations are rooted in the lower self, denying the lower self at the same time denies these relations. Privileging the psychical at the expense of the physical – the mind at the expense of the body – is also to deny power as the basis of social relations. This results in the abovementioned understanding of social relations in terms of authority, an unhappy conception of politics as consensus.

As an alternative, Lawrence recommends the recognition of power as the basis of social relations. As opposed to an inclusive universalism, Lawrence recommends the frank admission of differences between people in terms

40 Miller describes this as wanting to be “purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea” (Tropic of Capricorn 70). See Berger 60, regarding the way this constitutes a certain form of religious orientation, where the individual is not sharply distinguished from the collective. Deleuze and Guattari point towards precisely this problem in Anti-Oedipus, when they write that “the world…lays the two traps of distance and identification for us,” either giving total sway to the individual self and voluntary drive, such that individuals are disconnected from community, or giving total sway to the collective self and sympathetic drive, such that the collective immerses the individual (39).

41 “And the Apocalypse,” Lawrence writes, “repellent though its chief spirit be, does also contain another inspiration. It is repellent only because it resounds with the dangerous snarl of the frustrated, suppressed collective self, the frustrated power-spirit in man, vengeful. But it contains also some revelation of the true and positive Power-Spirit” (A 73).


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of particularism.42 Just as emphasizing the psychical at the expense of the physical results in the mis-development of the physical as well as the psychical, so too does emphasizing similarity at the expense of difference result in the mis-development of difference as well as similarity. At the basis of human nature is a drive towards sympathy, being a member of a group. Membership in one group itself supposes particularity.

Belonging to a community consists in relations of sympathy as shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. However, belonging to one group rather than another supposes that the sympathetic relations of the group to which one belongs are different from those of another. Both individuals and community need to distinguish themselves on the basis of difference. According to Lawrence, people should recognize and pay homage to their collective selves, joining collective bodies in creative endeavors. When they do so, then power flows from one to the other and back again.43 However, denying the particularity of power relations in this form results in a backlash against power altogether, evident in Revelation. Denying power in terms of difference makes identification with a particular group in contradistinction to another impossible; denying power in this form results in the denial of power or difference altogether. The price one thus pays for universal inclusivism is exclusive particularism, the destruction of all power whatsoever and difference in its entirety.

Hence, if a conception of the political modeled on the creative activities of philosophy and art exists in the work of Deleuze, then this account cannot be understood in terms of the production of sympathy alone. There must be an awareness that the philosophical anthropology this conception implies consists not only in universalism but also particularism. From the perspective of human affairs, relations of sympathy themselves imply ones of antipathy.44

42 “Power is there, and always will be. As soon as two or three men come together, especially to do something, then power comes into being, and one man is a leader, a master. It is inevitable. Accept it, recognize the natural power in the man, as men did in the past, and give it homage” (A 68).

43 Referring to this in terms of power, Lawrence writes that there “is a stream of power. And in this, men have their best collective being, now and forever. Recognize the flame of power, or glory, and a corresponding flame springs up in yourself. Give homage and allegiance to a hero, and you become yourself heroic” (A 68).

44 Foucault relates sympathy and antipathy to principles of identity and difference (Order of Things 24). See my previous discussions of these points in chapter two.

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7. T.E. Lawrence, Arabs, and Exclusivism

Also included in Essays Critical and Clinical, in “The Shame and the Glory: T.E. Lawrence” Deleuze explores the relation between T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and his struggles with the Arabs. One can here discern an engagement with the question of how people from different backgrounds and traditions can live and work together. Following the problem Deleuze raises in his engagements with Apocalypse, however, a necessary condition of this cooperation is the maintenance of difference. Failure to maintain this difference results in the breakdown of social cooperation altogether: People swing from an inclusive universalism to an exclusive particularism. According to Deleuze, the relation of Lawrence to the Arabs is based on not only sympathy but also antipathy.

Deleuze emphasizes the fact that, although Lawrence lived and worked with the Arabs, he did not become like them. To explain how he did so, Deleuze discusses two related issues: The development of the relation between mind and body and the political significance of literature. Lawrence succeeds in his endeavors with the Arabs through the creation of shame as an affect. Just as the creation of jealously as an affect by Proust consists in a reversal of the traditional relation between jealousy and love, so too does the creation of shame by Lawrence. It consists in a reversal of the traditional relation between mind and body. The creation of shame results in novel relations between Lawrence and the Arabs, ones that balance the individual with the collective self, fostering an inclusive particularism.

8. The Creation of Shame as an Affect

Lawrence succeeds in his endeavors with the Arabs through the creation of shame as an affect. A novel mode of existence is established between himself and the Arabs through shame. Just as the creation of jealousy by Proust consists in a reversal, so too does the creation of shame by Lawrence. In the case of Lawrence, this concerns the development of the relation between mind and body. The mind takes a perspective of shame towards the body. However, this perspective does not imply a denigration of the body.45 In the mainstream of the philosophical tradition, the mind has taken priority over the body. Here precisely the opposite is the case. From the perspective of shame, the body has

45 On this point, Deleuze writes the following: “Never before has shame been sung like this, in so proud and haughty a manner” (ECC 120).


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a certain priority. But for this reason “shame” can no longer be understood in its colloquial sense.

Shame consists in the mind becoming aware of the body’s autonomy, that the body is not subordinate to the mind.46 Just as with Spinoza, this is not to say the mind and body are independent from each other.47 Rather than a dualistic account, the mind and body are related in a parallel fashion. Insofar as one does not know what a body can do, undiscovered ways of acting or affects of the body exist, which correspond in a parallel fashion to undiscovered affects in the mind, ways of thinking. Taking this perspective towards the body thus implies a method.48

The creation of shame as an affect consists in a perspective regarding the relation between mind and body. The body is not merely a vehicle for the mind. The body is implied by and inextricably linked to each and every action of the mind. Only from this perspective, says Deleuze, does the body actually appear. Otherwise one forgets about the body as a mere tool of the mind.49 Explaining the aim of the body from this perspective, Deleuze makes a break with Spinoza in his reading of the relation between the mind and body in Lawrence.

According to Spinoza, human beings are initially and naturally dominated by passions. Escaping these passions requires the development of the intellect – through the discovery of common notions – rising from knowledge of the first to knowledge of the second kind. This facilitates the development of a perspective, such that people can begin to view themselves and their relations to the world in a disinterested, intellectual fashion, as they would any other natural phenomena. Spinoza associates this perspective with an “intellectual love of god” (VP32C). Deleuze locates a similar development in the thought of Lawrence, although he describes this development as moving in the opposite direction.

46 Describing this awareness in Lawrence, Deleuze refers to Spinoza: “Being ashamed for the body implies a very particular conception of the body. According to this conception, the body has external autonomous reactions. The body is an animal. What the body does it does alone. Lawrence makes Spinoza’s formula his own: we do not know what a body can do… For all the more reason, in its normal state, the body never ceases to act and react before the mind moves it” (ECC 123).

47 Lawrence “has shame because he thinks the mind, though distinct, is inseparable from the body; the two are irremediably linked” (ECC 123).

48 See my discussion of this point in chapter four.49 “In this sense,” writes Deleuze, “the body is not even a means or a vehicle for the mind, but

rather a ‘molecular sludge’ that adheres to all the mind’s actions. When we act, the body lets itself be forgotten. But when it is reduced to a state of sludge, on the contrary, one has the strange feeling that it finally makes itself visible and attains its ultimate aim” (ECC 123).

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Whereas for Spinoza one only arrives at a disinterested perspective after a long and burdensome period of intellectual development, according to Deleuze, this is the starting point for Lawrence.50 Only after this initially disinterested perspective is the mind “affected, it becomes an impassioned witness, that is, it experiences for itself affects that are not simply effects of the body, but veritable critical entities that hover over the body and judge it” (ECC 124). The second step in this account concerns the passions, the mind becoming impassioned in relation to the body. However, Deleuze quickly notes that this galvanization of the mind by the body consists not merely in the mind being affected by the body but also concerns what he calls “critical entities” and at other points refers to as “abstract ideas.”

Neither critical entities nor abstract ideas should be conceived as inert mental representations. Rather, they possess a certain power. This power consists in bringing about movement in things and bodies.51 Although Deleuze equates these with emotions and affects, if they do not belong to the body in relation to the mind, then the significance of this equation is far from clear.52 Deleuze equates critical entities and abstract ideas with powers and words that shock the body, as visual and sonorous images, powers and words that hollow out the body. Here abstract ideas and critical entities are described in terms similar to those of concepts, percepts, and affects in What is Philosophy?53

Universal ideas and critical entities are themselves constituted in relation to what Deleuze refers to as “the Open.” Insofar as he can here be understood as making a tacit reference to Heidegger – where the Open is that part of the two-fold Heidegger associates with Being, whereas he associates the other part with beings that come to appear in the Open – the Open would refer to the intersection of the planes philosophers and artists establish in the creation

50 “The mind begins by coldly and curiously regarding what the body does, it is first of all a witness” (ECC 124).

51 Describing the role these play in the development of the mind in relation to the body, he writes that they “rise up and act on the mind when it contemplates the body… its Powers and its Words. What we hear in Lawrence’s style is the shock of entities. But because their only object is the body, they provoke, at the limit of language, the apparition of great visual and sonorous images – images that hollow out these bodies” (ECC 124).

52 Deleuze writes that they “are not dead things, they are entities that inspire powerful special dynamisms… things, bodies, or beings” (ECC 119), that critical entities or abstract “ideas are not what we think they are: they are emotions or affects” (ECC 124).

53 They are like a “haze, solar haze” similar in nature to Stoical events as constitutive of things (ECC 115).


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of concepts, percepts, and affects.54 Philosophy and art begin with sentences and their equivalences, utilizing material relations within language. Insofar as these relations are equivalent to motion and images, visual and sonorous images can be understood as material relations within language, ones that act directly on the body and constitute brains. This process establishes novel relations between concepts, percepts, and affects, novel modes of existence that imply different relations between individuals and community.55

Insofar as these relations are different from those of opinion – which are based on an understanding of the body as an organism – here hollowing out bodies consists in establishing novel relations between concepts, percepts, and affects.56 The very activity of writing consists in this process.57 Whereas for Spinoza the goal of the development of the mind in relation to the body consists in establishing a disinterested perspective, for Lawrence and Deleuze it consists in establishing impassioned, particular dispositions, novel forms of subjectivity, community, and relations between the two as ones of sympathy. The political does not consist in the disinterested pursuit of universal consensus through discussion based on intellection, but the production of particular relations of sympathy and antipathy through bodily affects created by philosophy and art.

From the perspective of shame, the account Lawrence gives of the development of the mind in relation to the body supports a conception of the political based on the creative activities of philosophy and art. As with jealously in Proust, shame in Lawrence implies establishing novel modes of existence, the creation of sympathy between Lawrence and the Arabs. 54 The “Idea, or the abstract, has no transcendence. The Idea is extended throughout space, it

is like the Open… Ideas are forces that are exerted on space following certain directions of movement: entities or hypostases, not transcendences” (ECC 115). See my discussion of the relation between the creation of concepts, percepts, and affects, and the establishments of the planes on which they are created in chapter five.

55 Hence, in his reading of Lawrence, Deleuze asks about the nature of “these subjective entities, and how are they combined” (ECC 120).

56 See my further discussion of this account in chapter five. Deleuze and Guattari discuss this same process in Thousand Plateaus. Describing the suppositions on which this position is based, they write the following: “We witness a transformation of substances and a dissolution of forms, a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favor of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and matter, such that a body or word does not end at a precise point. We witness the…power of that intense matter, that material power of that language. A matter more immediate, more fluid, and more ardent than bodies or words… between two inseparable planes in reciprocal presupposition” (TP 109).

57 In “Literature and Life,” Deleuze says writing liberates “life wherever it is imprisoned by and within man, by and within organisms and genera” (ECC 3).

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However, of the utmost importance to Deleuze is the fact that Lawrence succeeds in maintaining his difference from the Arabs. A necessary condition of their cooperation is the maintenance of difference. Thus, in his reading of T.E. Lawrence, Deleuze raises an issue central to his engagements with D.H. Lawrence.

9. The Political Significance of Literature

Through literature, Lawrence succeeds in establishing relations of sympathy between himself and the Arabs, while at the same time maintaining his difference. This difference is itself a condition of their working together. The question then becomes what it is about the work of Lawrence that allows for this possibility. The political significance of philosophy and art here comes to the forefront, in terms of their relation to chaos.

As opposed to denying chaos as does opinion, philosophy and art maintain a balance within chaos. Struggling against opinion, they thereby provide a true protection against chaos. Philosophy and art disrupt fixed and inflexible correspondences between perceptions and affections, thus navigating the tension between inclusive universalism and exclusive particularism, fostering an inclusive particularism. This perspective is based on Lawrence’s conception of reality.

For Lawrence, reality is a chaotic maelstrom, one where relations between percepts and affects are singular and unique. Deleuze points towards this in Lawrence’s conception of color.58 Insofar as perceptions are composed of color, and color is in constant movement, so too are perceptions. Percepts are in constant movement and are thus constantly changing, as are affects. These are not discrete but continuous entities.59 Percepts and affects change constantly, depending on the percepts and affects to which they are related. These relations are absolutely unique, and the power of the writer consists in recognizing this.

The dispositions of writers allow them to recognize the unique nature of these relations.60 Deleuze goes on to equate these dispositions with “character,”

58 He writes that “color is movement, no less than the line; it is deviation, displacement, sliding, obliquity. Color and line are born together and meld into each other…they are always in movement” (ECC 116).

59 “Every entity is multiple,” writes Deleuze, “and at the same time is linked with various other entities” (ECC 120).

60 Deleuze says that the finest “writers have singular conditions of perception that allow them to draw on or shape aesthetic percepts like veritable visions, even if they return from them with red eyes” (ECC 116).


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which are unique sets of relations; writers are themselves unique sets of relations.61 These relations condition a certain relation with chaos, a relation of alliance whereby the writer disrupts correspondences between perceptions and affections. Describing this process, Deleuze links his account from Anti-Oedipus to that of What is Philosophy? The disposition of the writer – the unique set of relations composing the writer – consists in desire or power.62 This conception of desire is a positive one, desire understood in terms of projection and creation rather than need and lack, the production of physical reality as sensuous human activity rather than the production of psychical reality as imagination or representation.63

Hence, when Deleuze refers to the tendency of the writer to project his image into things, he is not referring to a mental entity, an idea the writer has of himself. Since the term “image” has an idiosyncratic sense in the work of Deleuze – which he equates with motion and things – the image of the writer should be understood as a unique set of relations, relations of slowness and speed between forces that affect and are affected by the forces into which they comes into contact.64 The images Lawrence projects are ones of intensity, relations of force that act on and are reacted on by other forces, thus establishing novel modes of existence. The disposition and image of the writer is thus conceived as a “multiplicity” or “becoming.”65

Here fundamental distinctions between things are explained in terms of motion and rest – relations of slowness and speed – rather than with reference to form as in ancient and pre-modern accounts.66 Things are conceived as

61 Character “must not be confused with an ego… there is not an ego but rather the singular composition, an idiosyncrasy… It is this combination that is named Lawrence” (ECC 120).

62 He says it is “a question of a profound desire, a tendency to project – into things, into reality…an image of himself…so intense that it has a life of its own…continually growing along the way” (ECC 117-118).

63 Regarding a conception of desire in these terms, see my discussions in chapters one and three.

64 See my discussion of Deleuze’s conception of the image in chapter five.65 The terms “multiplicity” and “becoming” are synonymous: “becoming and multiplicity are

the same thing” (TP 249).66 With respect to becoming-animal, for instance, Deleuze and Guattari write the following:

“I must succeed in endowing the parts of my body with relations of speed and slowness that will make it become dog, in an original assemblage proceeding neither by resemblance nor by analogy” (TP 258). Becoming-dog thus consists in taking on relations of motion and rest characteristic of a dog. Deleuze says that in the work of Francis Bacon the animal functions as a “trait” rather than a form, which establishes a zone of indiscernibility: “It is never a combination of forms, but rather the common fact: the common fact of man and animal” as movements (FBLS 20). See FBLS 21 where Deleuze says their common zone is “meat.” Again, I am grateful to Trevor Perri for having pointed this out to me. See my discussion of this point with respect to Spinoza in chapter two.

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matter in motion, where movement takes the place of form.67 This process implies what Deleuze and Guattari call “zones of indiscernibility,” entering a zone of indiscernibility where the relations of motion and rest that constitute things become blurred. Writing plays a role in this process.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, writing initiates processes of becoming that imply zones of indiscernibility.68 It taps into chaos and uses the material relations of language to create novel modes of existence, such that language reaches its highest function by acting directly on the senses.69 Writing opens zones of indiscernibility and initiates becomings. Things brought together in writing and literary creation thus change.70 However, this does not mean they go from being one thing to another, from one thing to something else. Entering zones of indiscernibility, things become different from what they were before, different from any preexistent thing.71

Like chaos, as a unique set of relations of slowness and speed, Lawrence’s disposition disrupts correspondences between perceptions and affections established by opinion.72 The projection of Lawrence’s image in writing thus gives rise to critical entities as percepts and affects, relations of movement belonging to language that bring about becomings in the world.73 Although these entities are specific to and result from the projection of Lawrence’s

67 On this basis, Deleuze and Guattari say that becoming “is to emit particles that take on certain relations of movement and rest because they enter a particular zone of proximity. Or, it is to emit particles that enter that zone because they take on that relation” (TP 273).

68 For example, they say “writing should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming” (TP 276).

69 In “Literature and Life,” Deleuze makes this same connection between writing and becoming. He says that writing is “a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from becoming” (ECC 1). In relation to this point, see Bogue 106 regarding language as continuous variation and its relation to function-matter.

70 “To become is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished… One can institute a zone of proximity with anything, on the condition that one creates the literary means for so doing” (ECC 1-2).

71 “Becoming is always ‘between’ or ‘among’: a woman between woman, or an animal among others” (ECC 2). See my discussion of this point with respect to the relationship between the writer and animal in chapter four.

72 “Lawrence’s special disposition” is “a gift for making entities live passionately in the desert, alongside people and things… this gift confers something unique on Lawrence’s language…endowing the English language with new powers” (ECC 119).

73 When Deleuze says, “alongside people and things,” he means that language is a force that affects other forces in the world, and when Deleuze says, “endowing the English language with new powers,” he means these forces in the world affect language in turn.


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image, according to Deleuze, this process is impersonal.74 The significance of this claim is two-fold.

In the first place, Lawrence does not go about this intentionally. As Deleuze and Guattari note in Anti-Oedipus, art is all the more revolutionary the less concerned it is about its meanings from a social perspective.75 Lawrence “is interested in Ideas rather than ends and their means,” is interested in ideas rather than the role they play in producing predetermined outcomes (ECC 118).76 The revolutionary potential of Lawrence’s literature does not then consist in a socialist realist agenda where the meaning of his work would be determined by the end or goal of social change. In some sense, this would be a conception of art as propaganda.77 The literature of Lawrence is not an attempt to make the project in which he is engaged with the Arabs conform to his plans, thoughts, or ideas.

In the second place, this claim concerns the maintenance of difference between Lawrence and the Arabs. Lawrence does not project his ego, imposing himself on the Arabs and making them conform to him.78 But this is not to say that Lawrence becomes like the Arabs. Difference is maintained between them. Writing and literature mediate relations between Lawrence and the Arabs, establishing relations of inclusive particularism, such that neither do the Arabs become like Lawrence nor does Lawrence become like the Arabs. Regarding this process, Deleuze says the “projection machine is inseparable from the movement of the Revolt itself,” such that the projection of Lawrence’s image in and through writing is itself inextricably linked to the revolution (ECC 118). The Arabs and the desert affect Lawrence and the English language, just as Lawrence and the English language affect the

74 Literature “does not consist in imagining or projecting an ego” (ECC 3).75 See my fuller elucidation of this point in chapter three.76 Further elaborating on this point, Deleuze says Lawrence defines himself “solely in relation

to the force through which he projects images into the real, images he was able to draw from himself and his Arab friends” (ECC 118).

77 See Leonard Harris’ “The Great Debate: W.E.B. Du Bois vs. Alain Locke on the Aesthetic” 20-24 for an account of the difference between Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey’s understanding of art in these terms. Harris discusses this distinction in terms of their respective appraisals of Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and other works included in The New Negro. Although Locke subscribes to an instrumentalist understanding of art, it is far from the socialist realism advocated by Du Bois and Garvey. Although the themes and content of works of art may be distinctly racial according to Locke, their value as artistic works hangs on their ability to introduce uniquely African American forms and idioms, which can then act as novel criteria for assessing broader social concerns. This is what allows them to escape the narrow confines of forms and criteria that characterize a propagandist conception of art. See Harris 24-26 on this.

78 The projection of his character does not consist in “some sort of contemptible individual mythomania that compels Lawrence to project grandiose images on his path” (ECC 118).

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Arabs and the desert. The two are inextricably linked, determining each other and being determined in turn. Writing thus initiates becomings between Lawrence and the Arabs, implying zones of indiscernibility where Lawrence takes on relations of movement characteristic of the Arabs, just as the Arabs take on relations of movement characteristic of Lawrence. As a result, neither Lawrence nor the Arabs are the same anymore.

As forces that act on and are reacted on by other forces, critical entities mediate relations between Lawrence and the Arabs.79 Like “particles that take on certain relations of movement and rest,” they initiate becomings in which neither do the Arabs become like Lawrence through the projection of his ego nor does Lawrence become like the Arabs by being immersed in their collectivity (TP 273). Both enter into processes of becoming and change at the same time, such that neither could the Arabs become like Lawrence nor could Lawrence become like the Arabs. These processes themselves refer “to the subjectivity of the revolutionary group,” where “Lawrence’s writing…acts as its relay: the subjective disposition, that is to say, the force through which the images are projected,” which “is inseparably political, erotic, and artistic” (ECC 118).

Explaining the role Lawrence’s disposition plays in this process, Deleuze says “a world of entities” thus “passes through the desert, that doubles the images, intermingling with them and giving them a visionary dimension” (ECC 120). The doubling to which Deleuze refers consists in the intensification and magnification of images, the intensification and magnification of the unique sets of relations that reciprocally determine Lawrence in relation to the Arabs. The character and writing of Lawrence act as feedback mechanisms. In the process though, all these relations change, constituting novel modes of existence as a result.80 This process of magnification and intensification is synonymous with the production of relations of sympathy between Lawrence and the Arabs.81 It consists in establishing particular, impassioned dispositions, novel forms of subjectivity, community, and relations between the two.82

79 The “critical entities” that arise in this process “do not cancel each other out, but can coexist and intermingle, composing the character of the mind, constituting not an ego but a center of gravity that is displaced from one entity to the next” (ECC 124).

80 “As the Arabs join the Revolt, they are molded more and more on the projected images that individualize them” (ECC 120-121).

81 “Lawrence himself helps them transform their paltry undertakings into a war of resistance and liberation… it is as if the Arabs…capture the reflection of Vision and Beauty” (ECC 125).

82 In “To Have Done with Judgment,” Deleuze describes a similar account, where language is conceived as a material power that directly acts on and transforms bodies. He writes that power “is an idiosyncrasy of forces, such that the dominant force is transformed by passing


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10. Becoming (with but not like) Arab

Time and again, Deleuze stresses the fact that although Lawrence possesses a disposition that compels him to live and struggle with the Arabs, he never becomes like them.83 Although Lawrence and the Arabs are related through sympathy – points of continuity in perceptions and conceptions – a difference exists between them: “Lawrence insists on his difference from the Arabs” (ECC 123). According to Deleuze, the difference of Lawrence from the Arabs is itself a condition of his writing, a condition of the intensification and magnification of relations reciprocally determining Lawrence and the Arabs. Although the desert presents novel perceptions, this milieu is not itself a sufficient condition of Lawrence’s literature.84

If relations constitutive of Lawrence were exactly the same as those of the Arabs – relations of movement constitutive of percepts and affects – if they fully coincided and were related through sympathy alone, then Lawrence would simply be an Arab. Lawrence’s own disposition would not be special, could not act as a mechanism for the intensification and magnification of these reciprocally determining relations through literature. Deleuze goes on to caution against misunderstanding the nature of this difference.

The difference of Lawrence from the Arabs is of neither a national nor personal type. It stems from neither the projects in which he is engaged for the English (a point of destination towards which he is tending) nor the personal history of Lawrence (a point of origin from which his actions arise).85

into the dominated forces, and the dominated passes into the dominant – a center of meta-morphosis. This is what [D.H.] Lawrence calls a symbol: an intensive compound that vibrates and expands, that has no meaning but makes us whirl about until we harness the maximum of possible forces in every direction, each of which receives a new meaning by entering into relation with the others” (ECC 136). Here “power” should be understood in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of desire in Anti-Oedipus, where desire is a general force of material production on the basis of which language originates as a writing on bodies directly. See my discussions of these points in chapter three, especially “Primitive Territorial Machine.”

83 “In Lawrence, there is a private desert that drives him to the Arabian deserts, among the Arabs, and that coincides on many points with their own perceptions and conceptions, but that retains an unmasterable difference… Lawrence speaks Arabic, he dresses and lives like an Arab, even under torture he cries out in Arabic, but he does not imitate the Arabs, he never renounces his difference” (ECC 117).

84 “Are there not rather subjective conditions,” Deleuze asks, “that certainly require a favorable and objective milieu, are deployed in it, can coincide with it, but nonetheless retain an irresistible and irreducible difference from it?” (ECC 117).

85 “Lawrence’s difference does not simply stem from the fact that he is English, in the service of England… But neither is it his personal difference, since Lawrence’s undertaking is… an infinitely secret subjective disposition, which must not be confused with a national or personal character” (ECC 117).

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His difference from the Arabs consists in a struggle against an understanding of individuality in these terms, “a cold and concerted destruction of the ego” in terms of nationalism, personalism, and egoism (ECC 117).86

Returning to the conceptual framework Deleuze develops in his reading of D.H. Lawrence and Apocalypse, one could say this difference results from a basic human drive, the voluntary drive to be away from others and by oneself. Implied by this commitment is an understanding of the self in broadly Spinozistic-Nietzschean terms, the self as a unique set of relations between competing drives. Referring to this as “character,” Deleuze says Lawrence discovered “the secret of character” by living in the desert with the Arabs (ECC 120). The secret of character consists in the recognition that sympathy is inextricably linked to and determined by antipathy, that the voluntary and sympathetic drives must be equally recognized and balanced to avoid pitfalls at either end of the spectrum. Rather than either inclusive universalism or exclusive particularism, relations between individuals and community should be based on inclusive particularism. Lawrence balances his individuality with the Arabs’ collectivity.

The fact that he does so in a situation of revolution is especially important. Lawrence succeeds in avoiding being swallowed up by a revolutionary collective or breaking with it altogether. Deleuze points towards this fact in the distinction he makes between guerrilla warfare versus wars and armies. Whereas human beings are simply considered “types” in the case of wars and armies, the problem of guerrilla warfare consists in maintaining individuality.87

In the case of wars and armies, the basis of relations between individuals and community is universal inclusivism, where individuals are conceived as simply parts of a whole. Although everyone is here welcome, this inclusion is based on a universal typology. The inclusion or integration of individuals into community as parts is based on – and determined by – the function or end they fulfill in terms of – and with reference to – the community as a whole. In this way, the individual is simply a part of the whole, a cog in the collective. The group swallows up the individual. But this immersion gives rise to a two-part backlash.

86 See my discussions of these points in chapters three and four.87 “The problem of guerrilla warfare merges with that of the desert: it is the problem of

individuality or subjectivity, even if it is a group subjectivity, in which the fate of freedom is at stake, whereas the problem of wars and armies is the organization of an anonymous mass subjected to objective rules, which set out to turn the men into ‘types’” (ECC 121).


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In the first instance, insofar as human behavior is governed by not only a sympathetic drive to be with others but also a voluntary drive to be by oneself, complete immersion in a collective is instinctually unsatisfying. If the only possible relation between individuals and community is total immersion, then individuals break with community altogether, such that war entails the total breakdown of relations between people.88 In the second instance, insofar as differences between individuals and community are themselves conditions of individuality and group membership – insofar as individuals, groups, and group membership are themselves determined by differences from other individuals and groups – universal inclusivism frustrates the expression of not only the voluntary but also the sympathetic drive. Membership in one universal community is, in some sense, a false one since this group has no counterpart against which to differentiate itself and thus solidify its own identity. Lacking membership in a community, the individual is left by herself. The emphasis on the voluntary drive and upper self in what D.H. Lawrence refers to as “modern education” concerns this lonely individual, a Western ideal emphasizing the inherently rational nature of human existence, where the individual is left to rely on herself alone.89

In the modern era, the mainstream of Western civilization has failed to take cognizance of – and give proper credence to – both the body and community, the importance of the lower self and the sympathetic drives in an understanding of human nature. Failing to properly balance the body with the mind, and community with individuality, people swing too far in the other direction. In strains of religious fundamentalism and rightwing nationalism, the emphasis is on concrete, material conditions of human existence. Central to this emphasis is a sense of belonging through membership in a community. This situation activates the sympathetic drives in a radical fashion, resulting in either the acceptance of immersion in the collective by the individual or an attempt by the individual to join or form her own group, where relations between individuals and community would be based on exclusive particularism. As the counterpoint to wars and armies, the problem of guerrilla warfare consists in navigating the tension between inclusive universalism and exclusive particularism, establishing relations between individuals and community on the basis of inclusive particularism. Philosophy and art here play an essential role.

88 Deleuze refers to this situation as one of “war.” I return to this shortly.89 See Klein 267-268 regarding the relation between global capitalism and the way people are

encouraged to be totally self-reliant.

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Their relation to chaos is one of balance, courting chaos while at the same time warding it off. Based on this relation to chaos, a conception of the political modeled on philosophy and art does not support an understanding of relations between individuals and community in terms of inclusive universalism. Reality is conceived as a chaotic maelstrom where relations between percepts and affects are singular and unique. Hence, a conception of the political modeled on philosophy and art corresponds to reality, allowing for the possibility of variable, singular correspondences between percepts and affects.

This relation to chaos as one of balance also supports the maintenance of balance between the individual and collective self, the voluntary and sympathetic drives. Insofar as relations between perceptions and affections determine membership in a community, and relations between percepts and affects are conceived as variable and singular by philosophy and art, a conception of the political modeled on philosophy and art supports an understanding of relations between individuals and community as variable and singular. These relations are inclusive without being universal, particular without being exclusive. They are inclusively particular.

Although this relation to chaos is an uneasy one, it is far better than the alternative, where chaos is denied altogether. A conception of the political in these terms supposes an uneasy balance between the individual and collective self, maintaining individuality while at the same time paying homage to the collective self and power spirit. As D.H. Lawrence shows with respect to Revelation, although paying homage to the collective self and power spirit are potentially threatening – resulting in and justifying inequality and mass-mindedness – denying power and the collective self altogether has far worse consequences.

In Deleuze’s engagements with T.E. Lawrence, the concern with relations between individuals and community arises directly out of an initial focus of the relation between mind and body. Following the problem of inclusive universalism versus exclusive particularism raised in relation to a somatically grounded theory of the drives in D.H. Lawrence, Deleuze’s concern in T.E. Lawrence is with the balance of the individual self of Lawrence with the collective self of the Arabs, how Lawrence becomes with but not like the Arabs. In his engagements with Walt Whitman, Deleuze uses the framework established in his readings of D.H. and T.E. Lawrence to explore the nature of relations between individuals and community in the context of an American social and political milieu.


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11. Walt Whitman, America, and Nationalism

Deleuze’s “Whitman” explores the relation between Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days and the social and political milieu of the United States, articulating a form of nationalism unique to the United States. Once again, his focus is on the navigation of a tension between inclusive universalism and exclusive particularism. In terms of the specificity of the social and political milieu of America, Deleuze develops an account of relations between individuals and community characterized by inclusive particularism. Following Whitman, he refers to these relations as ones of “camaraderie.” Deleuze arrives at these conclusions by addressing three related themes in the work of Whitman.

The first concerns the specificity of the American experience. This experience acts as a touchstone and point of reference in a quasi-transcendental analysis by Deleuze. He begins with the tragic nature of the American experience – the constant threat of war connected with American writing – working backwards to the conditions of its possibility. This leads to a conception of nature with which the United States is linked, a second theme in the work of Whitman.

The American experience is itself determined by and in relation to nature. Rather than an understanding of nature as a well-ordered and unified whole, however, this is a conception of nature as chaotic and fragmented. Just as with philosophy and art, the American experience is thus determined by and in relation to a confrontation with chaos, in terms of its fragmented nature. Insofar as this relation with nature bears on relations between individuals and community, this confrontation with chaos thus supports an understanding of the political in terms of philosophy and art.

In the third place, a conception of the political along these lines supports a uniquely American form of nationalism. If nature is neither well ordered nor unified, then the integration of individuals into community appears as neither an easy nor a natural process. Thus, rather than conceiving relations between individuals and community in terms of part-whole relations – where individuals are simply parts of the whole in an organic fashion – these are conceived as organized fragments in terms of the model of the body without organs.

12. The Specificity of American Experience

Deleuze’s interest in America can be understood as that of a “special case.” The United States is a limit case, an outlier that nonetheless reveals something fundamental. In his engagements with Whitman, this concerns

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the nature of part-whole relations. As opposed to a totality or organized whole, Deleuze characterizes the United States as an “open” or “fragmented” whole.90 This distinction concerns the nature of the parts involved, as well as the process by which they are brought together.

In the case of a totality, parts are conceived as relatively similar to one another, and the processes that bring them together are finite, definite, and limited. In the case of an open whole, parts are conceived as different from one another, and the processes that bring them together are infinite, indefinite, and unlimited. Deleuze’s commitments here are grounded in the specificity of American experience.

The fragmented nature of the United States results from its makeup, not only the nature of its parts but also the way they are put together. America is a country of immigrants from all over the world.91 The parts of which the United States is composed are thus heterogeneous, and the process that brings these together never stops: People from all over the world continue coming to America. The Unites States is thus an open or fragmented whole. For these same reasons, however, the situation of America is a tragic one. Conflict is a constant threat. The threat of war lies at the heart of the United States’ experience, which is inseparable from American writing.92 The specificity of this experience results from the nature of relations between individuals and community. Deleuze puts this descriptive observation in the service of an ethical prescription.

He says Europeans should learn from Americans: “Europeans have an innate sense of organic totality, or composition, but they have to acquire the sense of the fragment, and can do so only through a tragic reflection or experience of disaster” (ECC 56). Since its organization as a fragmented whole constitutes the tragic nature of American experience, Deleuze’s prescription concerns an understanding of relations between individuals and community.

90 Deleuze describes America as “a collection of heterogeneous parts: an infinite patchwork, or an endless wall of dry stones… The world as a sampling: the samples (‘specimens’) are singularities, remarkable and nontotalizable parts extracted from a series of ordinary parts” (ECC 57). In developing the difference between the organic model and the model of the body without organs in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari make reference to the notion of an open whole in the work of Bergson. See my discussion on this in chapter three.

91 “America brings together extracts,” Deleuze writes, “it presents samples from all ages, all lands, and all nations” (ECC 57).

92 Deleuze writes that if “the fragment is innately American, it is because America itself is made up of federated states and various immigrant peoples (minorities) – everywhere a collection of fragments, haunted by the menace of secession, that is to say, by war” (ECC 56-57 – emphasis added). “The experience of the American writer is inseparable from the American experience,” Deleuze writes, “even when the writer does not speak of America” (ECC 57).


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Understood in a European fashion – in terms of a totality or the organic model – the integration of individuals into community appears as a natural process.93 Conceiving these relations as always potentially fraught with strife – as haunted by war – the integration of individuals into community does not appear this way. Hence, considering the tragic nature of the American situation consists in taking seriously the integration of individuals into community as a political problem.

Whereas Europeans have an innate feeling for totality and need to acquire a sense of the fragment, Americans have a natural feeling for the fragment and should acquire a sense of totality.94 Unlike his prescription to Europeans, however, Deleuze does not recommend that Americans look to Europeans.95 Although he mentions the need for Americans to acquire a feel for totality, recommending they acquire this in organic terms would seem strange. In the first place, this would run against the broader trajectory of Deleuze’s thought. In the second place, if a European perspective is assumed to be natural – and, therefore, innate – then recommending that one adopt this perspective does not itself make any sense. Rather, Deleuze equates a feeling for totality with that of “beautiful composition,” such that the sense of totality he recommends to Americans is different from that of Europeans: not a feeling for totality understood in organic terms but one that consists in creation (ECC 56). This distinction itself rests on a more basic one, two different ways of conceiving nature.

13. An Alliance with Nature as Fragmented Reality

The distinction Deleuze makes between these two understandings of totality is based on two different ways of conceiving nature. A conception of nature on which beautiful composition is based follows what he calls the “law of fragment.” Deleuze associates the American feeling for the fragmentary with a more basic conception of nature, one shared with history, the earth, and war. All of these have this fragmentary character as their cause. Understood in terms of beautiful composition, totality is, therefore, something that has to be created. The feeling for totality in which Americans are in need consists

93 See my discussions of these points in chapters one, three, and four.94 Whereas Europeans should acquire a feeling for the fragmentary, Deleuze writes that

America must conquer “the feel for the totality, for beautiful composition” (ECC 56).95 “Melville notes that ‘no American writer should write like an Englishman.’ They have to

dismantle the English language” (ECC 58).

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in a creative endeavor.96 However, Deleuze points out a confusion made by Whitman regarding the nature of this whole.

At times Whitman speaks as though the whole is given, comes beforehand, or is preexistent. Based on this supposition, the whole appears as something in which to be installed, in which to seek rightful orientation, such that the task of both individuals and community is one of fusion.97 Given this perspective, Whitman refers to himself as a Hegelian.98 According to Deleuze, Whitman is wrong to adopt this perspective, describing it as European rather than American. This European perspective consists in an inflation of the ego or a personalization of nature.99 It is based on the view that nature, in general, is modeled on human nature. This is a narcissistic enterprise in which explorations of nature reveal to human beings what was there from the beginning, revealing human beings to themselves. However, when Whitman speaks in his own voice, says Deleuze, something much different appears.

The alternative is a depersonalization of personhood through pantheism, the view that human nature is coextensive with nature in general.100 This consists in the creation of a whole, a process that is itself paradoxical. Although the creation of a whole of this type works with and organizes fragments, it leaves them as fragments. This process does not turn the fragments with which it works into parts of a whole.101 Deleuze explains this apparent paradox with reference to nature. This paradox arises from conceiving nature in terms of a metaphysics based on the notions of substance, form, and teleology.

96 “The law of the fragment is as valid for Nature as it is for History, for the Earth as for War… For War and Nature indeed share a common cause: nature moves forward in procession… But if it is true that the fragment is given everywhere, in the most spontaneous manner, we have seen that the whole, or an analogue of the whole, nonetheless has to be conquered and even invented” (ECC 58).

97 “Yet Whitman sometimes places the idea of the Whole beforehand, invoking a cosmos that beckons us to a kind of fusion” (ECC 58).

98 Whitman “asserts that only America ‘realizes’ Hegel, and posits the primary rights of an organic totality” (ECC 58).

99 Whitman is “expressing himself like a European, who finds in pantheism a reason to inflate his own ego” (ECC 58).

100 From the point of view of this depersonalization, Deleuze says “the Self [Moi] of Anglo-Saxons, always splintered, fragmentary, and relative, is opposed to the substantial, total, and solipsistic I [Je] of the Europeans” (ECC 57). See my discussions in chapter three concerning the relation between schizophrenia and the nature of desire as an inorganic process of material production.

101 On this score, Deleuze writes the following: “it turns out that a kind of whole must be constructed, a whole that is all the more paradoxical in that it only comes after the fragments and leaves them intact, making no attempt to totalize them” (ECC 58).


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The nature of things and their characteristic relations are not determined by a preexisting whole, a top-down organic model. Instead, Deleuze says nature is a process of establishing relations. Nature is itself inextricably linked to sociability, entering into relations. This process involves not only sociability and conviviality but also difference, different types of beings. The characteristics and characteristic relations of things are themselves determined by the types of relations into which they enter. This process not only changes the nature of the things involved but also the process itself, the ways things enter into relations.102 The nature of this constructed whole is determined by variable fragments, a bottom-up model of the body without organs based on a Pre-Socratic-Spinozistic metaphysics.103 Deleuze goes on to associate this model with empiricism.104

Both Hume and Whitman conceive of relations as external to their terms. Relations do not result from terms but terms result from relations. Relations are not given as fixed and immutable but variable and changing.105 However, this gives rise to a problem similar in nature to that of chaos, one facing both Hume and Whitman. Deleuze points towards this problem when he claims the Americans give new meaning and development to the externality of relations.

Since relations are not given as fixed and immutable, they must be created.106 However, creating relations takes time and proves difficult. In this respect, the problem of the externality of relations is similar in nature to that of chaos. Insofar as chaos is the infinite speed by which forms take shape and disappear – making not only thought but also social relations impossible – both chaos and the externality of relations thus pose a threat to human existence. Human beings cannot live without relations. Deleuze describes the situation where all relations breakdown as one of war, “the generalized hospital” where human beings “coexist absolutely solitary and without relation” (ECC 59).

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari refer to the association of ideas in Hume in terms of opinion, as rules for connecting ideas that act

102 “Nature is not a form, but rather the process of establishing relations… Nature is inseparable from processes of companionship and conviviality, which are not preexistent givens but are elaborated between heterogeneous living beings in such a way that they create a tissue of shifting relations, in which the melody of one part intervenes as a motif in the melody of another (the bee and the flower). Relations are not internal to a Whole; rather, the Whole is derived from the external relations of a given moment, and varies with them” (ECC 59).

103 See previous chapters for fuller characterizations of these two positions.104 “This complex idea depends on a principle dear to English philosophy, to which the

Americans would give a new meaning and new developments: relations are external to their terms” (ECC 58).

105 Hence, they “can and must be instituted or invented” (ECC 58).106 “Parts are fragments that cannot be totalized, but we can at least invent non-preexisting

relations between them” (ECC 58).

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as protection against chaos. There they associate these rules with the subjective side of opinion, the way perceptions are linked to affections through invariable relations. The thought of Hume provides the basis for opinion.107 Although Hume discovers the externality of relations, this discovery opens onto a problem to which he gives an inadequate response. According to Deleuze, the externality of relations stands at the center of Whitman’s work, such that Whitman faces this same problem. However, at no point does Deleuze associate Whitman with opinion. Rather, it seems as though Whitman succeeds where Hume fails. Whitman succeeds because of the way he creates relations, as singular and variable rather than universal and fixed. Once again, insofar as relations between percepts and affects determine membership in a community, this distinction lies at the heart of the political significance of philosophy and art.

14. The Creation of Relations as Camaraderie

Human beings cannot live unrelated but must establish relations as protection against chaos. The solution Hume gives to this problem is the association of ideas. Insofar as relations between percepts and affects determine membership in a community, the establishment of relations within thought bears on the establishment of relations between individuals. In terms of the former, the association of ideas fixes relations between affections and perceptions, providing the subjective side of opinion.

Whitman succeeds where Hume fails, says Deleuze, because his poetry has as many meanings as it has interlocutors, “as many meanings as there are relations with its various interlocutors: the masses, the reader, States, the Ocean” (ECC 58). Whitman succeeds in relating different things without making them the same, relating various fragments or heterogeneous elements without turning them into homogeneous parts of a whole. Rather than conveying one meaning – establishing fixed and invariable relations as does Hume – the poetry of Whitman succeeds in establishing as many types of relations as there are terms involved. According to Deleuze, these interlocutors are neither individual persons nor groups alone. He considers the states and the ocean interlocutors as well. The relations Whitman establishes between his poetry and its interlocutors concern geography as well as persons and groups.

According to Deleuze, the way Whitman establishes relations represents a counterpoint to the narcissistic endeavor of projecting one’s ego onto the cosmos

107 See my discussions in chapter five for a fuller account of these points.


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and nature. This is the goal of American literature. The poetry of Whitman is different from the narcissistic Hegelian enterprise of discovering human beings in the cosmos and nature, projecting one’s ego. A depersonalization of personhood occurs through the establishment of relations between people and geography.108 At the same time, however, this process does not consist in the merging of personhood with nature, human nature being swallowed up by nature in general. Rather, it requires balance.

This is not an easy task. In the work of Whitman, Deleuze refers to it as a “gymnastic.”109 Here neither is nature understood in terms of personhood nor is personhood understood in terms of nature. Whitman succeeds in relating human beings to nature and nature to human beings – different things or various fragments – without, at the same time, undermining their difference. Something passes between them, relations of speed and slowness.110 Human beings enter into a becoming-nature.111 Just as Deleuze contrasts Whitman’s understanding of the relation between human beings and nature with that of Hegel’s, so too can this contrast be brought to bear on an understanding of the relation between the political and literature.

The goal of American literature consists in establishing ever greater, increasingly subtle relations between diverse elements. Rather than making these elements homogenous – establishing relations between them in terms a single goal or end – the goal of American literature consists in maintaining heterogeneity between these fragments.112 This is determined, in part, by the specificity of the American milieu.

108 “The object of American literature is to establish relations between the most diverse aspects of the United States’ geography – the Mississippi, the Rockies, the Prairies – as well as its history, struggles, loves, and evolution. Relations in ever greater numbers and of increasingly subtle quality” (ECC 59).

109 On this same score, in “Life and Literature,” Deleuze says that all writing involves this “athleticism…this athleticism is exercised in flight and in the breakdown of the organic body” (ECC 2).

110 “Whitman enters into a gymnastic relationship with young oak trees,” Deleuze writes, “a kind of hand-to-hand combat. He neither grounds himself in them nor merges with them; rather, he makes something pass between the human body and the tree, in both directions, the body receiving ‘some of its elastic fibre and clear sap,’ but the tree for its part receiving a little consciousness (‘may-be we interchange’)” (ECC 59).

111 This is not to say, however, that nature enters into a becoming-man. Deleuze says becoming “does not move in the other direction, and one does not become Man, insofar as man presents himself as a dominant form of expression that claims to impose itself on all mater” (ECC 1).

112 For this reason, the “simplest love story” in American literature “brings into play states, peoples, and tribes; the most personal autobiography is necessarily collective, as can still be seen in Wolfe or Miller. It is a popular literature created by the people, by the ‘average bulk,’ like the creation of America, and not by ‘great individuals’” (ECC 57).

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Socially, politically, and geographically, the United States is varied and diverse. For this reason, relations need to be constantly invented and further nuanced, such that ever-greater numbers of people and things become related, which at the same time prevents fragments from becoming related simply as parts of a whole.113 In terms of its political significance, Whitman refers to the relations established in this process as ones of “camaraderie.” Relations between people are not given but have to be invented.114 Rather than denying chaos and conceiving relations in terms of the organic model or opinion, a conception of the political based on philosophy and art is related to an alliance with chaos or a fragmented nature, where relations are malleable and changing. Once again, for this reason, a conception of the political modeled on philosophy and art provides a true protection against chaos.

Concepts, percepts, and affects are themselves formed chaos. They are not pure chaos but bits of composed chaos determined by the types of planes philosophy and art establish.115 Philosophy and art act as protections from chaos by struggling against opinion, navigating the tension between inclusive universalism and exclusive particularism, conditioning a balance between the individual and collective self.

As opposed to fixed relations, this maintenance of balance within chaos allows a “web of variable relations” to be woven, “which are not merged into a whole” (ECC 60). Deleuze refers to the situation where social relations breakdown altogether and social reality is inundated by chaos as “war.”116 This can be understood as a worst-case scenario where opinions break down in a radical fashion, as a strong backlash against inclusive universalism. Establishing relations of inclusive particularism in camaraderie, philosophy and art can ward off exclusive particularism as a reaction against inclusive universalism.

113 According to Deleuze, this “is what gives the fragmentary work the immediate value of a collective statement… there is no private history that is not immediately public, political, and popular: all literature becomes an ‘affair of the people,’ and not of exceptional individuals. Is not American literature the minor literature par excellence, insofar as America claims to federate the most diverse minorities” (ECC 57).

114 “It is the same, finally, in the relationship between man and man. Here again, man must invent this relation with the other. ‘Camaraderie’ is the great word Whitman uses to designate the highest human relation, not by virtue of the totality of the situation but as a function of particular traits, emotional circumstance, and the ‘interiority’ of the relevant fragments” (ECC 59).

115 Again, see my fuller discussions of these points in chapter five. 116 Deleuze writes that “its acts of destruction affect every relation, and have as their consequence

the Hospital…the place where brothers are strangers to each other, and where the dying parts, fragments of mutilated men, coexist absolutely solitary and without relations” (ECC 59).


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Deleuze associates this process with a uniquely American form of nationalism modeled on philosophy and literature.

This form of nationalism is based on an understanding of relations between individuals and community in terms of camaraderie, what Whitman refers to as “Unionism.” As in his engagements with T.E. Lawrence, here Deleuze describes the establishment of sympathetic relations in terms of the galvanization of the mind by the body, the establishment of “virile and popular loves” (ECC 60). Through the establishment of relations in thought that bear on the establishment of relations between individuals and community and vice versa, it organizes heterogeneous fragments without reducing these to homogeneous elements, without establishing “a totalism or a totalitarianism” (ECC 60).117

As opposed to universal inclusivism, particularism characterizes Unionism. It is thoroughly situational.118 The nature of the organized fragments changes depending on the parts of which it is composed. Deleuze says that even these “fragments – the remarkable parts, cases, or views – must still be extracted by means of a special act, an act that consists, precisely, in writing” (ECC 57). Here he means that writing battles against the correspondences established by opinion to create novel relations between percepts and affects.119 Insofar as relations between percepts and affects determine membership in a community, and writing establishes new relations between percepts and affects, here writing

117 In full, it “is in America,” Deleuze writes, “that the relation of camaraderie is supposed to achieve its maximum extension and density, leading to virile and popular loves, all the while acquiring a political and national character – not a totalism or a totalitarianism, but as Whitman says, a ‘Unionism.’ Democracy and Art themselves form a whole only in their relationship with Nature” (ECC 60).

118 “Selecting singular cases and minor scenes is more important than any consideration of the whole” (ECC 57).

119 Describing in similar terms the process by which writing struggles against opinion – the process by which one forms a foreign language within language – Deleuze says “a foreign language cannot be hallowed out in one language without language as a whole in turn being toppled or pushed to a limit” (ECC 5). He describes the way this process leads to the creation of novel relations between percepts and affects as follows: Language is pushed “to an outside or reverse side that consists of Visions and Auditions that no longer belong to any language. These visions are not fantasies but veritable Ideas that the writer sees and hears in the interstices of language, in its intervals” (ECC 5). Deleuze describes this process in terms of the framework of Anti-Oedipus: “They are not interruptions of the process, but breaks that form part of it, like an eternity that can only be revealed in a becoming, or a landscape that only appears within movement. They are not outside language, but the outside of language. The writer as seer and hearer, the aim of literature: it is the passage of life within language that constitutes Ideas” (ECC 5). The appearance of veritable ideas does not result from pathological processes belonging to schizophrenia – where processes of life are interrupted – but breaks that constitute the process itself; percepts, affects, and writing are all intimately related as material forces that interact with each other.

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consists in the establishment of novel modes of existence. Deleuze refers to these relations as ones of “camaraderie.”120 On the basis of its situational nature, Unionism thus navigates the tension between inclusive universalism and exclusive particularism in the form of inclusive particularism.

Conclusion

The failures of and backlash against both multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism point towards a broader backlash against inclusive universalism, where an exclusive particularism seems to provide the antidote. Insofar as liberal ideals are not themselves incidental but based on a philosophical anthropology, this backlash should be considered from the perspective of human nature. Deleuze does precisely this in his engagements with D.H. Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence, and Walt Whitman, where his focus is on fundamentalism, exclusivism, and nationalism. These three issues form the hardcore of a contemporary exclusive particularism directed against liberal values.

In the modern era, the mainstream of Western civilization has failed to take cognizance of – and give proper credence to – both the body and community in an understanding of human existence. Failing to properly balance the body with the mind, and community with individuality, people swing too far in the other direction. This results in the individual either seeking immersion in a collective or attempting to join or form a group where relations between individuals and community would be based on exclusive particularism. The emphasis in strains of fundamentalism, exclusivism, and nationalism is on concrete, material conditions of human existence. Central to this is a sense of belonging through membership in a community.

In his engagements with D.H. Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence, and Walt Whitman, the value Deleuze finds in fundamentalism, exclusivism, and nationalism consists in their reactions against inclusive universalism. Here Deleuze emphasizes the importance of the body for an understanding and establishment of relations between individuals and community, which supports a conception of the political modeled on philosophy and art. Unlike the exclusive particularism characteristic of contemporary religious, social, and political movements, Deleuze uses his engagements with D.H. Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence, and Walt Whitman to develop a conception of the political that cultivates relations of inclusive particularism. The political significance of 120 “Camaraderie is the variability that implies… a march of souls in the open air, on the ‘Open

road’” (ECC 60).


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philosophy and art consists in striking a balance based on the relation they have to chaos.

As opposed to fixed relations, this maintenance allows for the establishment of variable relations. This balance within chaos in turn contributes to a balance between individuals and community. A conception of the political modeled on philosophy and art thus supports an understanding of relations between individuals and community as variable and singular. These relations are inclusive without being universal, particular without being exclusive, but inclusively particular. The alliance of philosophy and art with chaos serves in the struggle against opinion, staving off a worst-case scenario involving the inundation of social life with chaos.

In his engagement with D.H. Lawrence, Deleuze explains the rise of a hate-filled form of Christianity in terms of a reaction against modern Enlightenment ideals. Although the pathos of Revelation is odious, says Lawrence, it reveals the danger involved in denying the collective self and the sympathetic drive. Denying power relations and their particularity results in the backlash against power evident in Revelation, making identification with a particular group in contradistinction to another impossible, such that the price one pays for universal inclusivism is exclusive particularism, the destruction of all difference whatsoever.

Following up this problem, Deleuze’s concern with T.E. Lawrence is the balance of Lawrence’s individual self with the Arabs’ collective self. Deleuze says Lawrence discovered the secret of character: the recognition that the voluntary and sympathetic drives must be equally recognized and balanced to avoid pitfalls at either end of the spectrum. Deleuze explains this in terms of two related issues, the development of the relation between mind and body and the political significance of literature. Whereas for Spinoza the goal of the development of the mind in relation to the body consists in establishing a disinterested, universal perspective, in his reading of Whitman, Deleuze says it consists in establishing impassioned, particular dispositions. Writing initiates becomings between Lawrence and the Arabs, zones of indiscernibility, novel forms of subjectivity, community, and relations between the two.

In his engagements with Walt Whitman, Deleuze uses the framework established in his readings of D.H. and T.E. Lawrence to explore the nature of relations between individuals and community in the context of an American social and political milieu, a form of nationalism unique to the United States, Unionism. Considering the tragic nature of the American situation consists in taking seriously the integration of individuals into community as a political problem. The American experience is itself determined by and in relation to

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nature as chaotic and fragmented rather than as well-ordered and unified. As opposed to universal inclusivism, particularism characterizes Unionism – its thoroughly situational nature – where the nature of the organized fragments changes depending on the parts involved.

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Conclusion

Political Anthropology, Liberalism, and Deleuze

Although classical and modern thought has traditionally grounded its analyses of concepts belonging to the political sphere with reference to human nature, the mainstream of contemporary political thought has – for good reasons – largely abandoned such an approach. Abandoning this strategy has itself been understood as a precondition for justice, a line of thought associated with “liberalism.” However, this shift is problematic for at least two reasons: Not only is it impossible to divorce political thought from philosophical anthropology but even attempting to do so is also perilous.

Refraining from making strong claims regarding the nature of the good life, morality, etc. – based on robust conceptions of personhood or accounts of human nature – is indicative of an attempted neutrality in political thought. Insofar as increasing social and political polarity characterizes the contemporary situation, the account of human nature on which this ideal is based seems misguided. The major significance of Deleuze’s thought today, I argue, consists in providing a theoretical framework in terms of which this can be understood: A political anthropology exists in the thought of Deleuze, where an understanding of the political makes reference to accounts of human nature. Hence, versus the mainstream of contemporary political thought, the importance of Deleuze’s work can be understood in terms a contribution to political anthropology, the way Deleuze grounds his understanding of the political with reference to human nature.

However, this perspective is by no means an obvious one. Rather, it only becomes apparent when one turns to two related themes in Deleuze’s thought: his critique of psychoanalysis and claims Anglo-American literature is superior to its Franco-Germanic counterparts. In both cases, Deleuze’s thought is informed by the theoretical work of English writer D.H. Lawrence, such that Deleuze can only be fully understood in terms of Lawrence. The fact that this contribution takes shape in terms of Lawrence’s thought on psychoanalysis and classic American literature is significant.

With respect to both psychoanalysis and classic American literature, Lawrence’s emphasis on the body and the importance of strong communal relations seems indicative of proto-national socialist sympathies as well as sexism and political conservatism. One must thus be sensitive to the influences of Lawrence on Deleuze, showing how Lawrence’s critique of psychoanalysis


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and praise for classic American literature ultimately bear on the relation between politics and human nature in Deleuze’s thought, giving rise to a political anthropology.

Examining Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious against the backdrop of the history of psychoanalysis and philosophy, in chapter one I showed how Lawrence’s critique of psychoanalysis ultimately bears on the conception of human nature it implies: Psychoanalysis begins as a mind-body dualism in Freud and ends in a linguistic idealism in Lacan. These commitments influence Lawrence’s claim that literature and poetry should be given priority over philosophy. This view breaks with the mainstream of the philosophical tradition. Deleuze and Guattari hold a view similar to Lawrence concerning the relationship between life and theory. This relationship opens onto a broader issue concerning the possibility and means by which existing social orders can be criticized and changed.

Marx addresses this possibility while at the same time offering a novel perspective on philosophical anthropology. Versus Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, who give ontological and explanatory priority to the mind and psychical processes in their accounts of human existence, for Marx and Engels praxis determines a specifically human mode of existence. This perspective provides a basis to understand the philosophical implications of Lawrence’s critique of psychoanalysis.

According to Lawrence, there is nothing specifically psychical about the unconscious, but consciousness results from the proper development and coordination of bodily drives. Lawrence’s conception of the unconscious is thus a dualistic, somatically grounded theory of the drives. The development and coordination of these drives alway depend on others. Unlike Freud, however, if the development and coordination of these drives take place in a proper manner, then relations in later life should neither resemble nor be modeled on those of the family. However, this is rarely the case.

According to Lawrence, contemporary society is plagued by neurosis, resulting from the Oedipus complex. Lawrence is thus in agreement with Freud in identifying the Oedipus complex as the nuclear complex of psychopathology, although, for Lawrence, the Oedipus complex results from social and historical conditions rather than being constitutive of human nature. To begin to understand how these problems should be addressed, it was necessary to turn to a different understanding of human nature than that evident in the mainstream of psychoanalytic thought.

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For this reason, chapter two was a close reading of Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, from which one can divine his alternative account of philosophical anthropology. This, in turn, provides a framework for understanding Deleuze’s praise for Anglo-American literature and its political anthropological implications. The primary importance of classic American literature, says Lawrence, consists in the way it establishes the identity of an American people, destroying the old European consciousness and establishing a new one. He claims classic American literature accomplishes this positive movement by changing the blood of the American people, signaling a commitment to the importance of material over ideal conditions in an understanding of human life. This shapes both Lawrence and Deleuze’s criticisms and re-conceptualization of literary criticism.

The mainstream of criticism has conceived literary works in an a-political manner, supporting an understanding of works as self-subsistent entities existing for themselves alone, where critics interpret meaning. Throughout history, however, this perspective represents the minority view. Rather, works have been conceived as units of force, where critics categorize relations between words and things.

Hence, whereas Lawrence criticizes psychoanalysis for its dualistic commitments, he lauds classic American literature because it does not give priority to the mind, a perspective that can be understood in terms of materialism and parallelism. This position results in a reconceptualization of the nature of and relations between individuals and community: an understanding of individuals as modes of substance – aggregates of thoughts, perceptions, and feelings – community as a larger, further-reaching mode of substance, and relations between the two in terms of sympathy, shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. Hardt and Negri designate a community of this type in the work of Spinoza with the term “multitude.”

Whereas their use of this term is positive, Spinoza’s is not, highlighting the anti-democratic tendencies that run throughout his thought. Even more pronounced in Lawrence’s work, there these tendencies could be described as proto-fascist, sexist, and racist. Given the influences of Spinoza and Lawrence on Deleuze, I claimed these tendencies are important to Deleuze’s political commitments.

Having established a framework based on Lawrence’s thought in terms of which to understand the political anthropological significance of Deleuze’s critique of psychoanalysis and praise for classic American literature in chapters one and two, in chapter three I brought this framework to bear on Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus. As with


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Lawrence, Deleuze and Guattari’s engagements with psychoanalysis concern the metaphysics it implies and conception of human nature it supports: a reformulation of the metaphysical commitments guiding the mainstream of this tradition.

On the one hand, the philosophies of Aristotle and Hegel represent an “organic model.” This results in an understanding of individuals as substances, community as a collection of substances, and relations between these in terms of goal-directed activity. On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the “body without organs” comes from the Pre-Socratics and Spinoza. Here individuals are conceived as modes or unique chances, community is understood as further-reaching aggregates of modes, and relations between the two are conceived in terms of sympathy – shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. This difference results from a particular transcendental orientation, the specificity of the experience with which Deleuze and Guattari begin, that of schizophrenia.

Since schizophrenic experience is different from commonsense experience, so too must be its conditions of possibility. This leads Deleuze and Guattari to criticize psychoanalysis’ “representative account of the unconscious,” a conception of the unconscious along idealist lines, opting instead for a materialist conception of the unconscious based on Marx and Engels’ conception of praxis, which is productive of reality. The idealist perspective results from a misunderstanding of reality and supports a flawed conception of desire. Deleuze and Guattari explain this misunderstanding in terms of an illegitimate understanding and employment of the “syntheses of the unconscious,” which ultimately result from different social machines.

In chapter four, I brought this framework to bear on Deleuze’s praise for Anglo-American literature in “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature.” Deleuze’s praise for Anglo-American literature concerns the metaphysical commitments it implies and conception of human nature it supports, pointing towards an understanding of “Anglo-American literature” as a philosophical concept. His criticisms of structuralism and “Franco-Germanic literature” aim at notions belonging to the organic worldview. Deleuze associates Anglo-American literature with the model of the body without organs, supporting a different understanding of individuals, community, and relations between them, which he explains with reference to the philosophies of Hume, Spinoza, and the Stoics.

In terms of Hume’s account of the exteriority of relations, the empiricist discovery consists in beginning with relations rather than terms, considering the nature of these relations and the way they constitute terms; methodologically,

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Anglo-American literature implies experimentation. In contradistinction to interpretation, experimentation can be understood in terms of a quasi-materialist methodology, related to Deleuze’s concern with the Spinozistic doctrine of parallelism. Based on an understanding of parallelism, through an experimental methodology, one discovers a metaphysics based on the model of the body without organs, as well as resolving the paradoxical problem of critique and social change mentioned in chapter one. For these reasons, bodies and relations take precedence in Deleuze’s description of the Stoic worldview. His engagements with the Stoics result in an understanding of things on the basis of events (becomings) rather than an understanding of events on the basis of things. Taken together, Deleuze’s reading of these philosophers culminates in his concept of the assemblage.

This notion itself gives rise to a problem specific to the Anglo-American milieu, where the integration of individuals into community is by no means a process that appears as either easy or natural. On this basis, the political value of Anglo-American literature consists in establishing relations of sympathy, cultivating shared thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. Deleuze thus develops a conception of the political based on ethics in a Spinozistic sense, based on experimentation. The political significance of writing, reading, and art concerns a creative process of determining what does and does work between people, establishing novel modes of existence.

With this framework in place, in chapter five I explained Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of opinion and liberal ideals in What is Philosophy? in terms of philosophical anthropology. On the one hand, widespread contemporary opinion, claim Deleuze and Guattari, is determined by capitalism, where the attenuation of opinion results in consensus and facilitates the spread of global capitalism. On the other hand, philosophy and art bring about both worlds and inter-subjective communities, where relations between philosophy and non-philosophy are based on the relation between the planes of immanence and composition. The brain lies at the intersection of these planes, say Deleuze and Guattari, such that the creative activities of philosophy and art establish new circuits and synapses in the brain through their relations to chaos.

Although philosophy and art act as protections against chaos, they also fight opinion. Opinions are like an umbrella that protect against chaos, and philosophers and artists tear holes in the umbrella to let in chaos. Only in this way are philosophy and art capable of disrupting opinion. Insofar as chaos introduces unfamiliarity into the world, however, practical interest necessitates the establishment of new opinions, such that the planes of immanence and composition need to be constantly renewed. This perspective is based on a


306

broader conception of language and implies a metaphysics, where language is conceived as a relation, a force that interacts with other forces to establish new relations.

Just as the relation of opinion to chaos conditions a conception of politics as consensus, so too does the relation of philosophy and art to chaos result in a conception of the political. The difference between opinion’s confrontation with chaos in a relation of denial and philosophy and art’s as one of uneasy alliance consists in the variability of the perspective from which philosophy and art bring order to chaos. The creation of concepts, percepts, and affects in philosophy and art establish novel forms of individuality, community, and relations between the two, novel modes of existence.

Finally, in chapter six, I brought this perspective to bear on contemporary failures of and backlashes against both multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, where an exclusive particularism seems to provide the antidote. Insofar as liberal ideals are not themselves incidental but based on a philosophical anthropology, this backlash should be considered from the perspective of human nature. One can understand Deleuze as doing precisely this in Essays Critical and Clinical.

In his engagement with D.H. Lawrence, Deleuze explains the rise of a hate-filled form of Christianity in terms of a reaction against modern Enlightenment ideals. His concern with T.E. Lawrence is the balance of Lawrence’s individual self with the Arabs’ collective self. In his engagements with Walt Whitman, Deleuze uses the framework established in his readings of the first two writers to explore the nature of relations between individuals and community in the context of an American social and political milieu, a form of nationalism unique to the United States, Unionism. In all three cases, Deleuze emphasizes the importance of the body for an understanding and establishment of relations between individuals and community.

The mainstream of modern Western civilization has failed to take cognizance of and give proper credence to both the body and community in an understanding of human existence. Failing to properly balance the body with the mind and community with individuality, people swing too far in the other direction. The emphasis in strains of fundamentalism, exclusivism, and nationalism is on concrete, material conditions of human existence. Central to this perspective is a sense of belonging through membership in a community, which one finds in fundamentalism, exclusivism, and nationalism, which form the hardcore of a contemporary exclusive particularism directed against liberal values.

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Unlike the exclusive particularism characteristic of contemporary religious, social, and political movements, Deleuze uses his engagements with D.H. Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence, and Walt Whitman to develop a conception of the political that cultivates relations of inclusive particularism. The political significance of philosophy and art consists in striking a balance based on their relation to chaos; the alliance of philosophy and art with chaos serve in their struggle against opinion, staving off a worst-case scenario involving the inundation of social life with chaos.

Understood through the lens of D.H. Lawrence, Deleuze’s critique of psychoanalysis and praise for Anglo-American literature thus concern political anthropology. The conception of human nature criticized by Deleuze in psychoanalysis and Franco-Germanic literature is similar to that on which liberal thought is based. When taken up by Deleuze, the merit of Lawrence’s thought consists in making sense of the strong contemporary backlash against neutrality with respect to claims regarding the nature of human existence. Rather than an endorsement of Lawrence’s conservatism, only by engaging in these lines of thought can one hope to combat them, understanding the allure of sexism, nationalism, and fundamentalism – forms of conservatism in terms of which the backlash against liberalism develops.

This backlash should be understood from the perspective of philosophical anthropology: In terms of their emphasis on the body and reconceptualization of individuality, community, and relations between the two, the thought of Lawrence and Deleuze makes sense of this tendency and these movements, pointing towards a political anthropology in terms of which they can be better understood and addressed.

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321

Index

Aabsolute idea 55absolute knowledge 46, 51abstract ideas: as critical entities 277;

versus concepts 240-241actuality-potentiality 55Adler, Alfred 63Adorno, Theodor 194aesthetic figures 235aesthetics 36, 92affections 218, 221, 224-228, 238, 242-

244, 249, 251-253, 255, 262, 279-281, 287, 293; of the capitalist 230; versus affects 240-241

affects 191, 208, 210, 221, 224, 230, 234-235, 237, 242-244, 248, 253, 262, 277-279, 284, 287, 293, 295, 306; in language and literature 87, 212, 241, 245, 255-256, 281, 296; in Masoch and Sade 194; and the mind-body relation 92, 94, 276; as modes 201-203

Afghanistan 257aggressiveness 69alienation 56-57, 175allegory 211 (see “myth” too)alliance (relations) 157-161, 164-

168, 171, 180; as repressing representation 157-158, 160

Alliez, Eric 65, 239Althusser, Louis 42American experience 182, 184, 238,

288-290, 298American identity 78-81, 83-85, 88-89,

93-94, 102, 183-185, 190, 198, 209-210, 249, 303

American writers 79, 83, 92-94anthropology 131

analogy: doctrine of 45; Kant’s third 52analytic philosophy 21, 237and (the conjunctive versus the verbal

form is) 198, 200-201antipathy: in Foucault 274; in T.E.

Lawrence 261, 274-275, 278, 285; in Spinoza 99, 101

Anglo-American literature 15-16, 25, 27-29, 37, 78, 88, 91-92, 105, 140, 181-215, 232, 249, 259, 301, 303-305, 307; versus English 209, 290

Anglo-American writers 190, 193, 202, 209, 243

animism 164anomy 152apperception 48, 114 (see “subjectivity”

too)apprenticeship 213Aquinas, Thomas 45-46Arabs 275, 278, 282-285, 287, 298,

306arche 51, 53, 128; in familial relations

142archetypes 66Aristotle 18, 51, 133, 136, 223, 304;

and Hegel 51, 55, 96, 106, 143, 145, 176, 178, 304; human nature 17, 37, 107; account of knowledge 50, 54; and the Pre-Socratics 111

Arkes, Hadley 17-18art 185, 217, 234, 254-255, 305-307;

and the brain 212, 217, 237-241; and chaos 241-251, 288; and ethics 81-83, 213, 215; and philosophy 36-37, 40-41, 74, 79, 96, 235, 259; and philosophical anthropology 218; political import of 44, 86-87, 213, 215, 218, 260-262, 274,

Index

322

278-279, 286-287, 293, 296, 298; propagandistic conception of 282; revolutionary potential of 192-193, 282

Artaud, Antonin 27, 88-91, 101, 109, 156, 181

assemblage(s) 120, 183, 195, 199, 203, 206-212, 214, 280, 305; as hodgepodges 120

association of ideas 27, 197-198, 224, 292-293

atheism 21athleticism 294attributes: in Deleuze and Guattari 124,

137; in Descartes 45-46; in Spinoza 92-93, 99, 124, 200-201

Augustine 46auto-eroticism 125-126, 135author, the role of the 38, 78-80, 83,

92-94, 181, 190, 192-193, 210-211 authority 70, 143, 167, 269-270, 273; European 80; familial/parental 142;

male 68 autonomy 272-273; of the body in

shame 276axiomatization 170-172, 174, 176-177Aztec civilization 161

Bbacklash 20-21, 30, 257-260, 262, 274,

285, 295, 297-298, 306-307Bacon, Francis 89, 247, 280 Badiou, Alain 21, 28 barbarian despotic machine 153, 162-

169, 170, 173, 180Baur, Michael 33, 128beatific vision 45becomings (multiplicities) 15, 27, 183,

191-193, 199, 201, 206, 208, 212, 214, 241, 281, 283, 298, 305

Beekman, Issaac 46being (versus having) 39 Bennett, Tony 87

Benveniste, Emile 39Bergen, Véronique 27Berger, Peter 152, 164-165, 273 Bergson, Henri 24, 108, 110, 120, 212; fabulation 247; open whole 107, 289;

time 250; continuity between human and animal life 119

Berlin, Isaiah 18bêtise 119beautiful composition 290Binswanger, Ludwig 112biology 131, 153Black Elk 164Blanchot, Maurice 140, 193, 195, 213blood: association with fascism 20, 101;

changing the 77, 81-85, 88-89, 93, 101-102, 303

bodily resurrection 46body 31, 154-155, 162, 167, 211-212,

263, 280, 294, 296-298; of capital 152, 170-171, 180; of the despot 152, 162-163, 165-166, 168, 170; of the earth 152, 154-155, 161-162, 166, 168, 170, 174; in Freud 125, 135, 302; the full 152, 154-155, 161-164, 166, 174; in Lacan 40, 130-131; in D.H. Lawrence 30, 61-63, 66-68, 70, 73, 75, 77-78, 81-83, 97, 301; and mind 29, 34-35, 37, 42, 45-47, 59, 90, 103, 116, 118, 136, 178, 182-183, 200-203, 205, 214, 261, 273, 286-288, 306-307; and shame 175-178; in Spinoza 91-95, 98-101, 190

body without organs 106, 109, 119, 124, 145-146, 148, 152, 169, 179, 181, 188-189, 200, 203, 206, 213, 239, 254, 269, 288-289, 292, 304-305

Bonaparte, Marie 38, 40, 74Borde, la 28Bogue, Ronald 77, 88, 91, 188, 194,

212-213, 281

323

Index

bourgeois class 58brain 89, 212, 218, 237-240, 247-249,

254, 278, 305breakdown (versus breakthrough) 184,

191breast 67, 70, 125-126, 134-135bricolage 151Buchanan, Ian 34, 119, 129, 143, 146-

147, 151, 172, 183Buddhism 265Bush administration 257Butler, Judith 115, 152Butler, Samuel 108, 120

CCameron, David 257camaraderie 261, 288, 293, 295-297capitalism 169-170, 174, 180,

194, 258, 269, 271, 286; and axiomatization 175-178; conditions of 169-173; and literature 181, 191; and opinion 218, 228, 230-233, 246, 254-255, 305

capitalist: as a generic subject 227, 230-231, 233, 246, 254, 322; mode of production 56

Carroll, Lewis 27, 91, 205castration 33, 55, 134, 137categories: in Kant (see “concepts” too)

113categorematic versus syncategorematic

terms 246cathartic method 90, 135cerebral pathways 238-240, 248, 254chaoids (daughters of chaos) 244-245,

255chaos 111, 151-152, 168, 171, 174,

177, 218, 222-225, 233, 241-248, 250-251, 254-255, 262, 269, 279-281, 287-288, 292-293, 295, 298, 305-307

character, secret of 284-285, 298characters: American 188-189, 193,

198, 209; French 185-187charity 267child 39, 64, 66-68, 70-74, 125-126,

130, 133-139, 142, 145, 148childhood 38, 123, 125, 137, 142, 144;

in D.H. Lawrence 72-73; sexuality 37

Chomsky, Noam 186Christendom 54Christianity 20, 258, 260, 263, 265-

272, 298, 306church fathers 46citizens 18, 52-53, 232-233citizenship (in Aristotle) 17civilized capitalist machine 153, 169-

178, 180classic American literature 29-30, 73,

77-103, 178, 183-184, 188, 190, 249, 301-303

clichés 242-244, 246close reading 23, 91, 183, 303coding 79, 111, 140, 146, 149-152,

154-155, 161-163, 164, 166-172, 174-177, 180-181, 187, 191

code(s), true 139; surplus value of 174-175

cognitivism 105Colebrook, Claire 112, 155, 217, 221,

226, 231collective self 271-273, 275, 287, 295,

298, 306commodities 56-57, 171-173, 175common goals 29common notions 97, 202, 205, 276common sense 138, 219, 228commonsense experience 110, 113-114,

120, 122, 179, 238, 304commonsense intuitions 21, 237communism 58comprehensive doctrines 19conatus 117, 269concept(s) 197, 207, 221, 225-226,

277-278; Anglo-American literature

Index

324

as a 182; creation of 234-237, 239-245, 248, 250, 254-255, 295, 306; Deleuzian 23-24; in Kant 48, 114, 121 (see “categories” too)

conceptual analysis 21, 237conceptual personae 235-237, 241conjunctive synthesis 123, 140-148,

153, 170, 175, 179, 187connective synthesis 121, 123-128, 134,

137, 141, 153-155, 165, 179-180contradiction: in Hegel 50; in Marx

58-59consciousness 43, 58, 88, 119-120, 179,

202-203, 241; in Hegel 51-54; in D.H. Lawrence 60-61, 64-65, 68, 73-75, 79-84, 93, 102, 302-303; unity of 35, 44-45, 47-49, 56-57

consensus 29, 96, 192, 208, 218, 225-233, 246, 254-255, 258-259, 262, 270, 273, 278, 305-306; in Badiou 21

conservatism 30, 106, 257-258contemplation 19-20, 228, 230Cooper, James Fenimore 97 corporations 232-233cosmopolitanism 20, 22, 257-258, 260,

262, 297critique, problem of the possibility of

35, 40-42, 75, 83, 85, 199, 203-203, 305

cruelty 156, 167cultural phenomena 137Curd, Patricia 110-111

DDarwin, Charles 21, 64David-Ménard, Monique 34Daseinanalysis (see Binswanger)Dawkins, Richard 21death drive (Nirvana principle, thanatos)

52, 63-65, 69decoding 79, 152, 169, 176, 180, 187-

188, 190-191, 193

decoded flows 146; and capitalism 169-177, 180; and despotism 152, 164, 168; and revolution 192; and society 152, 168, 271

Deleuze: Anti-Oedipus 27-28, 33-34,48, 57-58, 74, 79, 88, 105-185, 188, 190-195, 199, 202-208, 211, 213, 228-229, 232, 238, 253, 263, 269-271, 273, 280, 282, 284, 289, 296, 303; Dialogues 182; Difference and Repetition 23-28, 50, 108, 111, 204, 211-212, 219-220, 228, 238, 252; Empiricism and Subjectivity 26, 197; English-language scholarship 15, 23, 25; Essays Critical and Clinical 91, 94, 139, 257-299, 306; “To Have Done with Judgment” 101, 268, 283; French-language scholarship 23; “Instincts and Institutions” 263; “Letter to Reda Bensmaïa, on Spinoza” 235; “Literature and Life” 278, 281; Logic of Sense 27-28, 91, 204; Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty 77, 85, 194; Negotiations 238; Nietzsche and Philosophy 79, 108, 252; “Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos” 263-265; “Plato, the Greeks” 220, 229; Proust and Signs 77, 108, 186, 229, 249-252; his sources 29, 34; “A Slippery Slope” 259; Spinoza: Practical Philosophy 82, 117; “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature” 80, 91, 181-215, 304; “The Shame and the Glory: T.E. Lawrence” 275-288; Thousand Plateaus 109, 111, 120, 169, 183-184, 186, 188, 190, 194-195, 199, 203, 206, 207, 210, 212, 230, 278; “Three Questions on Six Times Two” 238; What is Philosophy? 79-80, 98, 108, 111, 194, 212, 217-256, 277, 280, 292, 305; “Whitman” 139,

325

Index

288-297 Democritus 111, 204, 213democracy 95, 97, 107; Deleuze’s critique 211, 233; hostility towards

100-101demonic 187Dennett, Daniel 21Derrida, Jacques 20, 157, 163Descartes, René 44-47, 56-59, 66, 75,

91-92, 98-99, 110, 116, 131, 219, 244, 302; Discourse on Method 219; and language 88; Meditations 45-46, 110; Principles of Philosophy 46

desire 47, 98, 128-129, 139, 141-142, 145-151, 153, 158-161, 175-176, 183, 191, 199, 202-203, 207, 259, 266; desiring its own repression 42, 114-115, 232, 263; in Hegel and Lacan as a-/non-biological 51-52, 189; in Freud 57, 135, 137-138; and idealism 33, 304; in Lacan 39-40, 96, 133-134, 163, 170; in D.H. Lawrence 64; as power 115, 117-118, 280; as praxis/labor 117-122, 124, 173-174, 179-180, 191, 195, 232; as pure/disorganized/material production 150-151, 154, 157, 169, 208, 211, 222, 269-271, 281, 291

desiring machines 115, 120, 141, 146, 148, 151

despot 150, 153, 162, 165-168, 170, 173-174, 180, 187; the body of (see “body”)

despotic representation 162-163, 165-171, 174, 177

detachments from signifying chains 111, 124, 129, 139, 145, 147, 152, 169, 188-189, 191, 193, 196; as “true codes” 139

deterritorialization 79, 185, 187-188, 190-191, 193; as a political norm 15, 152, 248

developmental stages 125, 127, 130,

136, 138, 148diagonal movement 156dialectic 53-55, 58, 84, 107, 127, 218,

250dialectical method 49-50, 53dialogue 96, 236Dicker, George 45-46difference 157Ding, Das 40, 51discussion 226-227, 229, 233, 238,

246-247, 258-259, 278disjunctive synthesis 112, 123, 128-

141, 152-153, 162, 165, 179-180displaced represented (homosexual

incest as) 153, 157 divine concurrence 46double bind 138doctrine of the faculties 24-25, 27dreams 37-38drives (Trieben, instincts) 62-66, 68-69,

71, 73, 75-76, 82, 84-85, 125, 127-128, 134-135, 191, 260, 271, 284-287, 298, 302; in Lacan 55

dualism 131; in the drives 63-65, 75, 273, 302; mind-body 35, 44, 59, 83, 90-93, 136, 302

Du Bois, W.E.B. 282

Eearth 98, 154-155, 162, 173-175, 290-

291; the body of (see “body”); as a symbol 164-166

economic markets 22, 232-233Eder, David 65education 69, 272, 286ego 134, 145, 185; in Lacan 130;

in D.H. Lawrence 60; in T.E. Lawrence 280, 282-283, 285, 291, 293-294

ego identification 39, 64, 130ego psychologists 39, 134élan vital 119Eliade, Mircea 151, 155, 164-165, 167

Index

326

end of history 55, 58, 128, 176, 189Emerson, Ralph Waldo 83emotions 61, 68, 79, 277; ambivalence

of 37Empedocles 111empiricism 196-198, 292;

transcendental 110, 197 Engels, Friedrich 42-44, 56, 58-59, 75,

118-119, 179, 211, 302, 304enlightenment ideals 260, 298, 306episteme 50, 54erogenous zones 125eros 63, 65, 69 (see “love” too)essence(s) 15, 17, 57, 123, 177, 210,

266 (see “form(s)” and “natures” too); in Aristotle 54-55; in Hegel 53; in Sartre 26; in Spinoza 99, 139

ethics 17, 28, 120, 210, 305; versus morality 82-83

ethnology 97Euripides 36European identity 80-81, 83, 85, 94Europeans 80, 289-291event(s) 27, 183, 203, 204-206, 208,

210, 214, 221, 245, 277, 305exchange value 172exclusive particularism 251, 258-262,

272, 274-275, 279, 285-288, 295-298, 306-307

experience: imagistic versus proposition-al accounts of 47; pre-categorical conditions of 48, 56-57, 110, 146, 219 (see “apperception,” “neurosis,” and “schizophrenia” as well)

experimentation 78, 97, 189-190, 200-203, 210, 213; versus interpretation 77, 199, 214, 305

exploitation 114, 175, 263exteriority/externality of relations 183,

196-203, 206, 210, 214, 292-293, 304

extra-familial groups 141, 143-144

Ffabulation 210, 247family 123, 140-141, 144-145, 148,

150, 154, 161, 167, 302; in Aristotle 17; in Freud 70, 126, 137, 142; in Hegel 55; in D.H. Lawrence 64, 66-68, 75, 98

fascism (proto-fascism) 100-101, 114, 260-261, 263, 273

father 126, 142, 145, 153-154, 159-161; in Freud 39, 137-138; in Lacan (see “name of the father”); in D.H. Lawrence 64, 66-68, 70, 74

fatherhood 97Felman, Shoshana 38Feuerbach, Ludwig 43Fichte, J.G. 49filiation (relations) 142, 157-159, 165-

166, 173film 239final causality (finalism) 96, 107-108,

201Findlay, John 23, 50, 52, 55Fitzgerald, F. Scott 184; The Crack-Up

190, 195, 209, 243, 249; Love of the Last Tycoon 198, 209; Tender is the Night 210, 212-213

flows (flux) 111, 121, 126, 128-129, 135-140, 145, 147, 150-151, 153-163, 165-167, 172, 178-179, 181, 184, 188-193, 221, 269, 274, 278

Flynn, Elizabeth 86fore-pleasure 135foreclosure 113, 134form(s) 15, 128-129, 169, 186, 189,

192, 201, 208 (see “essence(s)” and “natures” too); Aristotelian 50, 197; and authority 268; and chaos 152, 222, 224, 242, 292; Platonic/Socratic 36, 197, 236

Foucault, Michel 83, 146, 159, 166-167, 173, 212; Discipline and Punish 115, 263; relation between

327

Index

discursive and non-discursive formations 156; Order of Things 88, 156, 274; Madness and Civilization 24; “What is Enlightenment?” 263

fragment, a sense of the 289-291France 253, 259Franco-Germanic literature 29-30, 78,

182-187, 189, 210, 213, 218, 304, 307

Frede, Michael 55freedom 18-19, 204-205; in Hegel 52,

84, 128; religious 80, 102, 260; in Spinoza 84

Freud, Anna 39Freud, Sigmund 28, 33-40, 57, 59-60,

62-66, 69-70, 72, 74-75, 85, 105, 113, 116-117, 119, 122,125-127, 130-131, 134-137, 142-143, 147, 149, 179, 186, 197, 204, 302; “The Aetiology of Hysteria” 72, 116; “An Autobiographical Study” 38, 60, 125, 136; Beyond the Pleasure Principle 63-65; Civilization and Its Discontents 69; “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” 37-38, 197; earlier versus later thought 63, 90, 135; The Ego and the Id 39, 59; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 39, 143; Interpretation of Dreams 60; and Klein 126-127, 134; versus Lacan 28, 39, 131, 134; An Outline of Psycho-Analysis 63, 65, 70; “Psychopathic Stage Characters” 38; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 72, 125-126, 135-136, 142-143; “The Unconscious” 63

friendship 229, 254Fukuyama, Francis 231-232fundamentalism 30, 260, 263, 265,

272-273, 286, 297, 306-307

GGalston, William 19Gardner, Sebastian 48, 219Garvey, Marcus 282gender roles 30genealogist 79, 82generalized chromaticism 210generic subject 222, 225-231, 233, 246,

254geometry (Euclidean versus

Riemannian) 170George, Robert 19, god(s) 114, 156, 173, 187, 198, 232,

244, 269; in Descartes 45-46; in Hegel 50-51, 54-55, 128; immanent regulatory versus transcendent creator 163-167; in D.H. Lawrence 264, 268; projections of 43; in Spinoza 27, 92, 99, 276

Goethe, J.W. 181, 186, 210good sense 219Gospel 54, 265-267, 272Grayling, A.C. 21Greek philosophy/thought 87, 229, 236 guerrilla warfare 285-286

HHabermas, Jürgen 96, 227, 231Hadot, Pierre 83hand (its relation to eye and voice) 155,

157, 167Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 100-

101, 103, 178, 232-233, 303 Hardy, Thomas 181, 189Harris, H.S. 23Harris, Leonard 282Hawthorne, Nathaniel 78, 83headscarf 259Hegel, G.F.W. 23, 35, 39, 43-44, 46,

50-51, 59, 66, 75, 107, 116, 127, 189-190, 197, 210, 227, 302; and Aristotle 51, 55, 96, 106, 143, 145, 176, 178, 250, 304; and Kant

Index

328

49, 128; and Lacan 47, 52, 96, 106, 113, 129, 157, 176; Logic 52; Phenomenology of Spirit 52-53; Philosophy of History 52; Philosophy of Right 51, 55; social and political commitments 53, 56-58, 84, 96, 98, 232; and time 50, 54, 186 (see “end of history” too); theological commitments 54; and Whitman 291, 294

Heidegger, Martin 20, 23, 110, 210, 277

hell 266history 66, 131, 185-186, 209; in Hegel

50-55, 58, 95-96, 107-108, 128, 189-190, 232, 250 (see “end of history” too); of a people 20

Heraclitus 111, 184Hermann, Imre 64, 75Hitchens, Christopher 21Hobbes, Thomas 17-18, 45, 88, 96,

117, 151, 231Hölderlin, Friedrich 156Holland, Eugene 34, 57, 110, 119-120,

142, 144, 150, 161, 167, 172, 177-178

Holland, Noman 78homosexual incest (as displaced

represented) 157, 160-161Horkheimer, Max 194Hughes, Joe 27human condition (versus human

nature) 27 human nature (philosophical anthro-

pology) 15-20, 22-23, 25-30, 35, 37-43, 56, 59, 66, 69, 75-76, 78, 85, 88, 94, 99, 101, 105-106, 118-120, 123, 132, 178, 182-183, 213, 218-219, 221, 225, 234, 237, 254, 258-259, 261, 270, 274, 286, 291, 295, 297, 301-307

Hume, David 24, 27, 183, 195-200, 202-206, 213-214, 224, 240, 304;

and apperception 47; and religion 164; and Whitman 292-293

Huntington, Samuel 257Husserl, Edmund 47, 110, 163hysteria 90, 122, 134

IId 65, 85idealism 27, 44, 59, 73, 91-92, 196-

197; in Europe 83; psychoanalysis as 33-35,

77, 106, 116, 118, 129-131, 302ideas (in the Kantian sense) 123, 163ideology 58, 143, 156, 174image: in Aquinas 45; in Deleuze 239,

280-282image of thought 24, 108-109, 218,

228, 250, 252-253imaginary register/function 39-40, 117,

129-133, 138, 143, 185 imitation 192, 281immanent criteria 49-50immanent critique 113immortality (of the soul) 45-46inclusive particularism 260-262, 275,

279, 282, 285-286, 288, 295, 297, 307

inclusive universalism 20, 22, 252, 258, 259, 262, 272-273, 275, 279, 285-288, 295, 297

incest 134, 138, 153, 166, 206 (see “homosexual incest” too); in Freud 142; in Lacan 133; in D.H. Lawrence 74

individuality 31, 35, 94, 123, 178, 256, 262, 267, 285-287, 297, 306-307; in Aquinas 45; in Hegel 84, 95-96; in D.H. Lawrence 65, 67-68, 95-96; in literature 186, 189; in Spinoza 99, 145

individual self 271-273, 287, 298, 306individuation 63-66, 68, 70, 146, 189,

211

329

Index

insult 226-227intellectual love of God 276intensities 119, 146intensive germinal flux (as repressed

representative) 157-159interpretation 78, 89, 92, 185, 213

252-253; versus experimentation (see “experimentation”)

intuitions 21, 48, 113-114, 121, 163, 237

involution 188Iraq 257Iser, Wolfgang 86Islam 20, 166, 257-259

Jjealousy 249-253, 275Jesus 265-268John the Apostle 265, 267John of Patmos 263-268justice 17-19, 301judgment(s) 198, 211, 219, 268;

critique of 101; final 264; in Kant 48, 58, 113; system of 167

Jung, Carl 63, 65-66, 70-71, 75

KKafka, Franz 101, 182, 195; and desire

118Kant, Immanuel 24, 35, 44, 47-50, 52,

56-59, 75, 110, 113-118, 121-123, 128, 146, 163, 197, 219, 259, 302

Kearney, Richard 47Kerouac, Jack 181, 184Kerslake, Christian 34kinship 154, 158, 167; with animals

164; relations (see “filiation”)Klein, Melanie 126-127, 134, 204 Klein, Naomi 177, 47knowledge 166, 187, 245; in

empiricism 196; as episteme 50; in Foucault 24, 156, 167; in Hegel 46, 51, 55; and idealism 33; in

Kant 114; in Lacan 133; in D.H. Lawrence 61, 67-69; in opinion 219; in Plato 236; self- 272; in Spinoza 97, 201-202, 206, 276

Kojève, Alexandre 50-52, 54-55, 95, 107, 131, 250

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth 28

Llabor 131, 152, 158, 172-175; as desire

118-119; in Hegel 43, 52; in D.H. Lawrence 71; as praxis 44, 56-57, 58-59

laborer 57Lacan, Jacques 28, 33-35, 49, 52, 55,

66, 130-131, 162, 168, 170, 176, 204, 302; and Derrida 157, 163; and lack 47, 51, 132-133, 180; and Levinas 258; and literature 37-40, 74, 96, 106, 185; lost object/encounter 133; and pathoanalysis 127; and the real 117; and schizophrenia 112-113, 134

lack 33, 117-118, 128, 132, 138, 141, 148, 151, 161, 170, 175-176, 180, 195, 259, 270, 280; in Augustine 46; in Derrida 157; and language/meaning 39, 47, 51, 133, 112-113, 129, 134, 163

Lakota 164language 167-168, 186, 207, 241, 278;

in Artaud 88-91, 156; in Lewis Carroll 91; in Deleuze 77-78, 85-86, 88-91, 153-157, 188, 194, 212-213, 244-245, 255, 277-278, 281-284, 296, 306; in Descartes 88; and desire 39-40, 133, 211, 284; in Foucault 88, 156, 212; in Hobbes 88; in Lacan 40, 47, 112-113, 130-133, 162-163; in D.H. Lawrence 77, 88-90; in T.E. Lawrence 277, 281-283, 296; in Nietzsche 91, 155-156; in the Pre-Socratics 91;

Index

330

in schizophrenia 91, 112-113, 156, 212, 245; in the Stoics 91

Laing, R.D. 34, 145Lamark, Jean-Baptiste 105Laplanche, Jean 62, 64, 75latency 125latent states 60Lawrence, D.H.: Apocalypse 66, 263-

275, 285; “Chaos in Poetry” 242; Fantasia of the Unconscious 29, 35, 79, 84-85, 271, 302; “open road” 95-96; poetry 74, 242, 302; Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious 29, 35, 84, 302; Studies in Classic American Literature 29, 78-85, 88-98, 303

Lawrence, T.E. 260-261, 275-287, 296-298, 306-307

Lear, Jonathan 51, 136Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 25, 195, Lefebvre, Alexandre 108, 217, 220Leninism 21Leucippus 111Lévi-Strauss, Jean Claude 34, 116, 131-

132, 151, 154, 158, 197Levinas, Emmanuel 47, 163, 258liberalism 18-19, 22, 30, 230-233, 248,

254, 257-260, 297, 301, 305-307libido 60, 63, 72, 118, 121, 147-148,

161, 202line of flight 184-188, 190, 209literary critic 79, 82, 86-87, 92, 102literary criticism 36, 38, 77, 86-87, 92,

102, 303 little Hans 66Locke, Alain 282Locke, John 231love: Christianly 69; in Deleuze 146,

195, 211, 254, 269, 294, 296; as a final cause 55; in Freud 38, 70 (see “eros” too); versus jealousy 251-252, 275; in Lacan 39; in D.H. Lawrence 70-73, 85, 97, 98, 265-267; in the

Pre-Socratics 111Lyotard, Jean-François 15

MMallarmé, Stéphane 156Marrati, Paola 23, 108, 128, 188, 210,

217, 219-220, 230Marx, Karl 28, 34-35, 59, 66, 71, 75,

84-85, 118-119, 152, 171-172, 175, 179, 302, 304; The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 43, 56-58; German Ideology 42-44

marriage 97, 153, 159-161Masschelein, Anneleen 34master-slave dialectic 39, 52, 189master-slave distinction 271masterwork 24materialism 28, 34-35, 42-44, 56, 66,

73, 77-78, 89, 90-92, 103, 116, 119, 167, 179, 199, 203, 214, 303-305

May, Todd 82Mauss, Marcel 152McBride, William 42-44, 58Melville, Herman 78, 83, 209, 290Mengue, Philippe 33, 108, 210, 217,

220, 226-227, 229, 231, 233, 248men and women, relations between 70-

71, 159, 272meta-narratives 15metaphor and metonymy 132-133, 163metaphysics 55, 122-123, 178, 212,

244, 255, 258, 304, 306; in Hegel 54; in Lacan 116; and literature 41; and opinion 221; in the Pre-Socratics/Stoics 204-205, 214, 292; in Spinoza 201-203, 292, 305; substance 108, 111, 199, 223-224, 291

methodology 197, 214; in Deleuze 63, 109-110, 199, 203, 252, 305; in Kant 113

331

Index

Michaux, Henri 151micro-/macro-scopic correspondences

107, 136, 145, 159, 165, 250 Miller, Henry 145, 181, 184, 294; Sexus

195, 197, 202, 213, 242-243; Tropic of Capricorn 180, 195, 209, 273

Miller, Kenneth 21 mind (see “body”)minor literature 77, 295mnemotechnics 88, 155modern life 62, 68, 85modes: of existence 41, 79-80, 82, 94,

97, 120, 192, 202, 218, 231, 235, 247-249, 254, 256, 278, 280-281, 283, 297, 305-306; individuals as 78, 99, 103, 108-109, 179, 201, 203, 210, 303-304

monarchy 53, 166money 161, 171-175, 177morality (see “ethics”)mother 134-135, 140, 153, 159-161;

as an archetypical object 137-138; identification with 39, 130-134, 142; in Klein 126; in D.H. Lawrence 64, 66-68, 70, 72-74

motion 111, 184, 190; relation to images and things 278, 280; as relations of slowness and speed 99, 212, 224, 238-239, 281

Moyaert, Paul 52, 258multiculturalism 20, 22, 257-260, 262,

297, 306multitude 100-101, 103mutual aspirations/interests 29, 96,

189, 195, 208, 259, 269-270mysticism 185myth 66, 133, 151, 154, 165, 194;

versus allegory 211

Nname of the father 113, 132-134, 157,

162, 168, 176narcissism 38, 291, 293-294

nation 53, 143, 186, 232national identity 143, 187, 210, 247,

257-258National Socialism 20nationalism 22, 30, 260, 285-286, 297,

307; American form of 261, 288, 296, 298, 306

Native Americans 94natural law 18, 259nature 119-120, 154, 158, 165, 173,

291-293natures (see “essence(s)” and “form(s)”

too) 15, 26, 154, 180, navel 67 Negri, Antonio 58, 100-101, 119, 263

(see “Hardt and Negri” too)neoconservatism 257neo-Platonism 54neurosis 33, 37, 75, 117, 122, 134,

136, 138, 302; as a model of psychopathology 65, 113, 116, 123; and religion 272

neurotic experience 113, 122-123, 138, 148

neurology 239neutrality 18-19, 30, 301, 307new Americanists 258new criticism 85-86New Testament 264Nietzsche, Friedrich 24, 34, 36, 91,

101, 108-109, 114, 117-119, 155-156, 252, 263, 265-268, 270-271, 285

nomadic war machine 169nomadism, pure 157

Oobject x 48-49, 57, 113, 219object relations 39, 127Oedipus complex 33, 123, 133, 141-

142, 150, 154, 157, 179, 238, 272, 302; in Freud 136-137; in D.H. Lawrence 74-76; and literature 181

Index

332

Old Testament 264ontogenesis 125ontological hierarchy 45ontology (see “metaphysics”)Open, the 277-278opinion 108, 144, 192, 217-256, 260,

262, 278-279, 281, 295-296, 298, 305-307; and Hume 224, 240, 292-293

organs 106-108, 147, 159, 164, 166, 171-172, 201, 225; in D.H. Lawrence 61; reproductive 120

orthodoxy 222, 229-230Oury, Jean 28overcoding 152, 162-164, 166-168,

170, 177, 180, 187, 206

Ppagan 264parallelism, mind-body 63, 73, 77, 91-

93, 103, 200-203, 206, 214, 303 305

paralogisms of reason 48, 114-115paralogisms of the unconscious 47, 115,

122, 147, 150, 160, 181partial objects 111, 121, 124-129,

133-140, 145-147, 152, 154-155, 158-159, 161-162, 167, 169, 179, 188-191, 193, 253

passions 118, 201; in D.H. Lawrence 61, 69, 71; in Spinoza 82, 100, 276-277; in the Stoics 204-205

pathoanalysis 122 Patton, Paul 15, 24, 115, 152, 217,

221, 223, 226, 230-231, 233, 248 Patzig, Günter 55perceptions 29, 78, 80, 82, 94, 96, 99,

103, 113, 120, 179, 210-212, 214, 221, 224-228, 230, 235, 238, 240-244, 246, 249, 251-253, 255, 262, 274, 279-281, 284, 287, 293, 303-305; of the capitalist 230; versus percepts 240-241

percepts 194, 224, 234-235, 237, 240, 242-244, 248, 253, 262, 277-279, 284, 287, 293, 295, 306; in language and literature 241, 245, 255-256, 281, 296; in Masoch and Sade 194

Perri, Trevor 212, 280persona 65personal identity 35, 44, 78, 130, 132,

145-146, 187persons, full 123, 126-128, 134-137,

140, 153-154, 157-159, 180, 253perversion 117, 125phallus 40, 51, 133-134phenomenology 46-47, 197, 218philosophy: and art (see “art”); and

the brain 212, 218, 237-240, 247-248, 254, 305; and chaos 218, 222, 225, 241-248, 254-255, 262, 279, 288, 295, 298, 305-307; elements of 218, 220-221, 234-241, 243; history of 23-24, 35, 74, 116, 196, 198; and philosophical anthropology 218; political 28, 114-115, 169; non-/pre- 237, 254, 305; of religion 21

philosophical anthropology (see “human nature”)

phylogenesis 125physics 119pleasure principle 65 (see “death drive”

too)planes of consistence/composition/

immanence 201, 226, 235-237, 241, 243-248, 254-255, 277-278, 295, 305

Plantinga, Alvin 21Plato 17, 37, 91, 107-108, 151, 196-

197, 219-220, 222-223, 227, 229; and desire 117

Poe, Edgar Allen: in Bonaparte 38; in Lacan 38-40, 132; in D.H. Lawrence 78, 81, 83, 93, 102

333

Index

poets 36, 87, 242political 16, 18-20, 25, 28, 293, 301;

and Anglo-American literature 183, 207-215, 294-295, 305; and art and philosophy versus opinion 217-256, 306; in Deleuze 15, 27, 41, 108, 139, 144, 152, 183, 192, 260-262, 274-275, 278-279, 287-288, 297-298, 307; in Hegel 95

political activism 28political aestheticism 210pollyanalytics 36, 40-41, 74, 197pornology versus pornography 194postmodernism 15, 260power 117-121, 148, 151, 173-174,

201-203, 232, 265-270, 277-279, 284; in Foucault 115, 166-167, 263; in D.H. Lawrence 263, 272-274, 287, 298; in Nietzsche 63; as pouvoir (potestats) versus puissance (potentia) 119; in Spinoza 27; of words/literature 87-88, 212, 283

power spirit 273, 287, 278pragmatics 88praxis 42-44, 56-57, 59, 71, 75, 118-

119, 158-159, 174, 179, 232, 248, 302-304

Pre-Socratics 111, 124, 179, 204-205, 214, 304; account of language 91, 212

primitive territorial machine 153-162, 164-168, 170-171, 174, 180, 284

private property 58, 232proper names 147, 208, 237Proust, Marcel 107, 229, 250; and

jealousy (see “jealousy”); pathos 109, 249; signs 90-91, 186, 195, 212-213, 239, 252-254

Prussian state 53, 95, 128, 189psychic (primary/organic) repression

(see “repression”)psychoanalytic biography 38psychopathology 22; in Freud 76,

105, 127, 136, 302; in Lacan 112, 134; in Jung 65; religion as 272; in Schotte 122

psychosis 110, 112, 117

Qquestions: in Deleuze 26, 197; in

jealousy 251; in Lacan 113, 134; in Plato 236

RRancière, Jacques 18, 209Ransom, John Crowe 86reader-response criticism 85-87, 102recognition: in Hegel 39, 52, 95, 189;

in opinion 218, 223, 228-229, 238, 246; in the syntheses 121, 124, 147

relativism 50, 53religion 20-22, 50, 80, 143, 155, 163-

165; and chaos 151, 243-244; as a human good 260; in D.H. Lawrence 80, 84, 98, 102, 260, 263-274; and liberalism 18, 257-259, 286, 297, 307; in Marx 43; philosophy of (see “philosophy”); in psychoanalysis 137

religious impulse 98Reich, Wilhelm 34, 114, 117representation 118-119; despotic

162-168, 170-171, 174, 177; and psychoanalysis 118-119, 121; and social machines 150, 153; territorial 154-162, 164-168, 170-171

repressed representative 153, 157-158repressing representation 153, 157-158,

160repression 38, 42, 59, 115, 125, 137,

142, 158-159, 191, 232, 263; network forms of 167; versus oppression 114; psychic (primary/organic) 116-117, 119, 127, 149-150, 153, 175; social (secondary) 116-117, 119-120, 149-150, 153-154, 175

Index

334

retention 144reterritorialization 79-80, 176, 191Revelation 264-268, 273-274, 287, 298rhizome 24, 109, 239Richardson, William 23rights 17; Badiou’s critique of 21;

Deleuze’s critique of 231-232; in Foucault 115; negative versus positive 18

Rome 266Rorty, Richard 20, 227, 230

SSacher-Masoch, Leopold von 77, 194,

197, 254Sade, Marquis de 77, 194, 254Said, Edward 194Sandel, Michael 18Sartre, Jean Paul 26, 110, 130-131Saussure, Ferdinand 132Sauvagnargues, Anne 23Saville, Anthony 48, 114Schelling, F.W.J. 49schizoanalysis 29, 145-146, 149, 182,

206; as a materialism 34 schizophrenia 58, 152, 296; and desire

150-151, 291; in Jung 65; and language 112-113, 134, 245; and literature 182, 211; as a model 110, 117, 122, 138, 169, 179, 199, 304; as a process 184; versus neurosis 123

schizophrenic experience 49, 58, 109-115, 117, 120, 122, 138-139, 149, 152, 169, 179, 182, 184, 199, 304; and religious experience 152

Schopenhauer, Arthur 117Schotte, Jacques 122, 127Schreber, Daniel Paul 113Schweickart, Patrocinio 86science 20-21, 217, 234, 237-238,

240, 244, 254; the revolutionary potential of 192-193

self-reliance 286

September 11th 257sensations 70, 189, 198, 212, 221, 224,

234-235, 241senses 77-78, 86, 89-90, 194, 211-

212, 239, 281; in Aquinas 45; in empiricism 196; in D.H. Lawrence 61

sexism 30, 34, 301, 307sexuality 17, 62, 106, 125-128, 135-

136, 143, 147, 167shadow (in Jung) 65shame (as an affect) 275-279 signifier 33, 39-40, 51-52, 112, 131-

133, 162-163, 167-168, 176, 185, 207, 211

sloughing 79, 81, 94, 102, 188Smith, Daniel 23-24, 33, 199, 229,

241, 250social change: possibility of 35, 42, 44,

75, 199, 202-203, 305; reason for 56, 190, 194, 282

socialism 58social machines 27, 120, 141, 148-178,

180-181, 208, 304social organization 119-120, 137, 151,

157-158, 161-162, 169, 174, 176, 179, 222

socialist realism 36, 282social (secondary) repression (see

“repression”)socius 151-152, 154-158, 174, 180,

192, 271 (see “body” too); the fear of the 169-170

Socrates 36, 223, 236solar plexus 61, 67soul(s) 88, 100, 164, 200-202, 204-

205; in Aristotle 17; in Kant 48, 114; in D.H. Lawrence 71, 81, 83-84, 96-97, 203, 266-267, 297; in Plato 17

sovereignty 17, 115, 232Spanos, William 193Spinoza, Baruch 84, 108-109, 114, 117,

335

Index

119, 124, 139, 183, 195, 212-213, 263, 269; anti-democratic 101-103, 303; Ethics 84, 97, 100-101, 201; human nature 17, 27, 30, 145, 179, 304; parallelism 30, 63, 77, 82-83, 91-100, 199-206, 214, 276-278, 298; Political Treatise 27, 30, 100-101

state 17, 108, 115, 165-169, 173, 228; and democracy 231-233; in Hegel 52-53, 55, 58, 95, 128, 189; and literature 186-187, 194, 210; non- 169, 232

Stoics, the 183, 195, 204-207, 213-214, 304-305; and language 91

stomach 66, 75structural anthropology 158, 185structuralism 39, 129, 132, 185, 197,

207-208, 213, 253, 304stupidity 110, 119style 78, 94, 211, 235, subject(ivity) 15, 27, 50, 145-147, 149,

170, 189-190, 197-198, 206-207, 218-219, 221, 278, 283, 285, 298; and group identification 140-141, 144, 179, 253-254, 256; in Kant 47-49, 57; in Lacan 40, 130, 132; in D.H. Lawrence 72 (see “soul” too); in Marx 56-57; and Oedipal relations 137; in Spinoza 92; substance theory of 112, 114, 145, 189, 208; transcendental 47-49, 146, 219

sublimation 118, 148substance 57, 106-108, 111-112, 114,

122-123, 128, 137, 139-141, 149, 152-153, 169, 178-181, 187-188, 198-199, 203-204, 224, 253, 278, 291, 304; in Aristotle 55; in Descartes 44-49, 56, 98-99; in Hegel 53; individuals/subjects as 29, 79, 103, 105, 185-186, 189, 197, 207-208; in Spinoza 91-92, 99,

124, 145-146, 190, 200-201, 303; and writing 193, 209

suicide 52super ego 70, 181supplement 157surface of recording (see “body”)surplus value 56, 172, 174-177, symbolic register 39-40, 112-113, 117,

130-134, 138sympathy 29, 67, 73, 78, 94-103, 109,

145, 179, 191, 210-212, 214, 249, 254-255, 261, 270, 274-275, 278-279, 283-285, 303-305

Spirit 49-50, 52-55, 58, 95-96, 107, 128, 176

symbols 90, 121, 132; in D.H. Lawrence 66, 211, 264

symptomatology 112, 120synapses 239-240, 248, 254, 305synthesis (in Kant) 48, 120-121, 146 synthetic judgment 48

TTaylor, Charles 19Teellinck, Willem 46teleological thought 58, 141, 189-190,

211 (see “final causality (finalism)” too)

territory 98, 159, 192Thales 164thanatos 63theodicy 51theological thought 43-47, 49, 54, 80,

95-96, 129therapy 28, 39, 105thoracic ganglion 61, 68thumb 135time: in Deleuze 15; in Proust 186,

250; relation to knowledge 46, 50-51, 54

Tomiche, Anne 91Tompkins, Jane 86-89, 93totemism 164

Index

336

trace 157traitor 8, 189, 192-194transcendence 108, 139, 184-185, 220,

222, 229, 233, 243, 278transcendent values 137, 233transcendental empiricism (see

“empiricism”)transcendental field 120, 241transcendental illusions 48, 114transcendental methodology 47-49, 57,

109-112, 120, 138, 197, 219, 238, 288, 304

transversality 28trauma 127, 137trickster 192truth 15, 96, 109, 228-229, 236, 250;

in Hegel 51, 53-54 two-fold, the 277typology 82, 265-266, 285

Uumbrella 225, 242-244, 246, 255, 305unconscious: in Deleuze and Guattari

33, 57, 106, 115-122, 124, 128, 140, 150, 160; in Freud 59-60, 63; in Jung 65; in Lacan 130, 163; in D.H. Lawrence 35, 59-62, 64, 66, 68, 72, 75, 84; as representative 60, 116, 118-119, 179, 304

Unionism 261, 296-299, 306universal mind 109, 254

VVan Haute, Philippe 33, 37, 40, 57, 62,

64, 112-113, 116, 122, 125-127, 130-133, 135, 245

Van Gogh, Theo 257Visker, Rudi 258

veil of ignorance 19vibrations 98, 145-147, 208vitalism 107-108voluntary drives 64, 67-68, 271-273,

285-287, 298

Wwar 268, 286, 288-292, 295Westerink, Herman 39, 46, 136Western civilization 257, 286, 297, 306Westphal, Kenneth 54white-collar work 71Whitman, Walt 78, 83-85, 88-89, 94,

96-97, 102, 139, 203, 250, 260-261, 306-307, 287-298; as Hegelian 291; his poetry 81, 93, 293-294; Specimen Days 288

whirl 111Will to Power 63, 118Wippel, John 46writing 193-195, 207, 210-214, 256,

278, 288-289, 305; bureaucratic 167, 170, 180; in Derrida 157, 163; in D.H. Lawrence 40, 79-80, 93-94; in T.E. Lawrence 281-284, 298; in territorial representation 156, 167-168; in Whitman 294, 296

Woolf, Virginia 184

YYeomans, Christopher 54young Hegelians 43

ZŽižek, Slavoj 18, 21, 27-28, 191, 258zones of indiscernibility 188, 281, 283,

298Zourabichvili, François 23, 25

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