Drive and Desire: Zizek and Anti-OedipusDRAFT VERSION

Aaron Schusteraaron_schuster@yahoo.com

Outline1. Introduction2. An overview of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia3. From desire to drive: Freud and Lacan 4. Primary repression…5. … and the birth of the symbolic 6. Against Interpretation, or Serge Leclaire on the ‘reality of desire’7. The problem of genesis in Zizek

Introduction

In Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Slavoj Zizek rejects Anti-Oedipus as “arguably Deleuze’s worst book,” an easy escape from the theoretical deadlock that traverses his earlier solo work, especially The Logic of Sense.1 This deadlock concerns the relationship between, on the one hand, the radical gap separating bodily causes from the immaterial field of sense (in Lacanian parlance, the symbolic order) and, on the other, the production of discrete bodies from out of the pure flow of becoming.2 In short, Deleuze is criticized for having abandoned, supposedly under the influence of Guattari, the problem of the “logic of sense,” the theory of the event as an autonomous surface-effect, in favor of—to cite Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon—the “logic of sensation,” the depths of chaotic flows and forces that both constitute and tear apart bodies.

It would not be difficult to turn this argument around and claim that is it precisely Deleuze’s ‘Guattarian turn’ that brings him into (surprising) proximity with some of the key developments of the so-called late Lacan. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari’s project in Anti-Oedipus could be read, in Lacanian terms, precisely as a shift from desire to drive, and hence is consonant with one of the major themes of Zizek’s work from the late 1990s onward: the privileging of drive over desire as the final frontier of Lacanian theory. When Zizek criticizes his own first English book The Sublime Object of Ideology as “endorsing a quasi-transcendental reading of Lacan, focused on the notion of the Real as the impossible Thing-in-itself,”3 one can ask whether this was not already, in 1972, the aim of Deleuze and Guattari’s “auto-critique of psychoanalysis”: to disabuse Lacanian theory of the quasi-transcendental orthodoxy that threatened to squelch its radical core. Against the heroism of failure, the somber dictum that the subject must reconcile itself to castration, that the object is desire is forever lost, that the dialectic of law and transgression is the ultimate horizon of

1 Slavoj Zizek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 21.2 Ibid.3 Zizek, For they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a political factor, “Forward to the second edition” (London: Verso, 2002), p. xii.

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analytic experience, and so on, Deleuze and Guattari champion the more uncanny acephalous realm of the drive and its potential to revolutionize the established coordinates of a given symbolic order.

There is also a third possibility. Rather than an unresolved deadlock or “inherent impasse”4 in Deleuze’s work, the “two becomings”5 that Zizek identifies can be viewed as a positive virtue: the achievement of Deleuze is precisely to think together these two supposedly incompatible levels. If this is correct, then is there is less a ‘turn’ in Deleuze’s thought than a working out or an elaboration—often with completely divergent technical vocabularies—of different ways in which these levels relate. I will argue that the two becomings or two levels of genesis in Deleuze, one of the surface and one of the depths (to follow the division of The Logic of Sense), can be productively translated in Lacanian terms as follows. First there is the static genesis, which describes the symbolic constitution of reality. This process leaves a fissure in the world, a displaced and displaceable gap which Deleuze designates as the sense event, aleatory point, or quasi-cause, all regarded by Zizek as synonyms for the objet a. This evasive ‘object cause’ of desire is that point in reality more real than reality itself, discernible in the way that it warps or distorts the latter’s smooth functioning. Here Zizek praises Deleuze for maintaining the gap between the sense event, described as the “emergence of New,”6 and corporeal causality as the network of connections that comprises everyday reality. Yet he fails to see that, for Deleuze, the very surface on which the event plays is itself the product of another genesis. This is the dynamic genesis, which explains the origin of the surface from out of the pre-symbolic realm of the drives, a process that proceeds through a number of “passive syntheses” until it forms a ‘writing pad’, i.e. a surface for symbolic inscription. This is the domain of the untamed, non-castrated body beneath the ‘unconscious structured like a language’ (as Deleuze and Guattari say of Lacan, “the symbolic organization of the structure … has as its reverse side the real inorganization of desire”7). There are two senses of the real at stake here: one as a fleeting ‘evental’ point inscribed within yet exceeding the frame of reality, the other as a chaos of forces that precedes and conditions the installation of the symbolic order. The first adopts the perspective of the synchronic functioning of the symbolic, while the second inquires into the pre-history of this order. One of the confusing aspects of Zizek’s argumentation is that while he definitely grapples with this latter problem of the passage from the real to the symbolic, he refuses to recognize it as a key concern of Deleuze, and especially of Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus.

This essay forms a part of a broader inquiry into the relation between psychic individuation in Deleuze and subject formation in Lacan. Deleuze’s relationship with psychoanalysis is complicated to say the least. He may alternatively be viewed as deeply sympathetic to Freud, Klein, and Lacan, translating their insights into his own metaphysical vocabulary; or else a sarcastic critic of psychoanalytic ideology, as in his collaborative works with Guattari; or else simply indifferent to Freud and his legacy, nourishing himself on other, largely forgotten romantic and irrationalist philosophies of the unconscious: Jung, Bergson, D.H. Lawrence, Aleister Crowley...8

4 Zizek, Organs Without Bodies, p. 20.5 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 165.6 Zizek, Organs Without Bodies, p. 27.7 A-O, p. 328.8 For the latter approach, see Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious (London: Continuum, 2007).

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In spite of its relentless anti-Freudian polemics and seeming conceptual anarchy, I believe that Anti-Oedipus should be read as a serious attempt to engage with Lacanian theory. If anything, Deleuze and Guattari see themselves as faithful because iconoclastic adherents to Lacan’s program against the stale sloganeering of his disciples. As Deleuze explains, “Lacan himself says ‘I’m not getting much help’. We thought we’d give him some schizophrenic help. And there’s no question that we’re all the more indebted to Lacan, once we’ve dropped notions like structure, the symbolic, or the signifier, which are so thoroughly misguided, and which Lacan himself has always managed to turn on their head to bring out their limitations.”9 Anti-Oedipus might well be viewed as a monstrous offspring of Lacanian psychoanalysis, in the sense that Deleuze conceived his philosophical enterprise as creative buggery, producing ‘children’ of great thinkers that were misshapen and improbable but nevertheless their own.10 Jacques-Alain Miller has claimed that Anti-Oedipus, with its critique of naïve oedipalism and its humor-laden praise of madness, was indeed recognized by Lacan as a delirious progeny.11

An overview of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia in Anti-Oedipus designates less a clinical entity than the deep ontological structure of the world, the Heraclitean flux out of which more or less stable figures emerge like temporary islands in a ceaselessly flowing river. This flux is the madness of creation, a maelstrom of forces which threatens to engulf individuated things, collapsing their borders and blurring identities, but which also holds the promise of radical renewal and revolutionary change. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze writes of the “extraordinary … moments in which philosophy makes the Abyss (Sans-fond) speak and finds the mystical language of its wrath, its formlessness, and its blindness: Boehme, Schelling, Schopenhauer.”12 Anti-Oedipus can be viewed as an attempt to give voice to the Abyss in a properly modern way: no longer as an obscure pulsating Will or Divine fury but as an immensely complex technical apparatus. A machinic Abyss for the modern techno-era. To fully explain Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of machines—which makes use of, among others, Lewis Mumford, Samuel Butler and Bruno Bettelheim’s case history of Joey the ‘mechanical boy’—would take us too far afield here. Suffice it to mention that this theory marks a sea change with respect to the classical conception of the machine, in particular the relation between technological artifacts and organic life. If philosophy traditionally sought to comprehend life in terms of dead mechanism (with the clock serving as a privileged model for the intricate machinery of living beings), contemporary thought increasingly understands machines as quasi-living organisms, with the capacities of evolution, reproduction and self-organization. In an essay from 1965 Georges Canguilhem summed up this momentous turn by saying “One has almost always tried to explain the structure and functioning of the organism starting from the structure and functioning of an already constructed machine. Yet rarely has it

9 Deleuze, “On Anti-Oedipus,” Negotiations transl. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia, 1995), p. 14.10 Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” ibid., p. 6.11 “L’Anti-Oedipe est une variation sur un thème de Lacan, la critique de l’oedipianisme naïf, enrichie d’un éloge, non sans humour, de la schizophrénie. C’est d’ailleurs une progéniture que Lacan a reconnue, tout en la taxant de délirante.” Interview with François Ewald, Magazine Littéraire no. 271 (November 1989), p. 24.12 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 106.

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been attempted to understand the very construction of the machine on the basis of the structure and functioning of the organism.”13 Deleuze and Guattari take up this challenge, forging a ‘living technics’ that aims to transcend the alternatives of mechanism and vitalism by recasting the metaphysics of creation in terms of an expanded theory of machines. “Everything is a machine … Everywhere producing machines, desiring machines, schizophrenic machines, all generic life.”14

Anti-Oedipus tells the story, or even double-story, of how subjectivity arises from the hurly-burly of desiring machines (Chapters I & II), and the course of universal history as a succession of mega-machines (social forms) that organize, canalize and repress desire (Chapters III & IV). The first story supports and subtends the second, as the desiring machines constitute the “infrastructure” of the massive social organizations. In psychoanalytic terms, the two stories together lay out the split between the unconscious and consciousness, i.e. the unfathomable multiplicity of molecular flows and partial objects on the one hand, and the realm of representation with its molar formations and large aggregates (objectities) on the other. Though Anti-Oedipus does not employ this vocabulary, this split could also be understood in terms of Deleuze’s well known division between the virtual and the actual; in this comparison, Anti-Oedipus describes both the construction the virtual, which is never simply given but itself the product of complex synthetic processes, and the actual as a series of concrete social-historical forms. Though these two layers are opposed in various guises throughout the book—production versus representation, molecular versus molar, desiring machines versus Oedipus, schizophrenia versus paranoia, and so on—, this opposition is too simple (and too structural) as it stands. Unfortunately, the polemical tone reinforces the impression that the first term in these proliferating dualisms is “good” and the second “evil,” and, even further, that the second should be done away with in favor of its more anarchic, energetic and revolutionary cousin.15 “To overturn the theater of representation into the order of desiring production” is a typical formulation.16 Because Anti-Oedipus is usually read in ethico-political terms, as a “guide to the non-fascist life,” a blueprint for the multitude, or what not, I think it is important to emphasize its other, less flashy dimension: its descriptive task, to provide an account of the genesis of representation from the realm of production, to show how Oedipus comes into being through the immanent workings of desiring machines.17

The story of Anti-Oedipus culminates with the rise of capitalist civilization, which is paradoxically close to the schizophrenic core of creation itself. In a word, capitalism is crazy, “mad from one end to the other and from the beginning.”18 It volatilizes previously existing social bonds, displaces populations and geographic boundaries, breaks up traditional belief systems, and dissolves established identities. ‘All that is solid melt into air’: the galloping insanity of capitalism is part and parcel of its 13 Georges Canguilhem, “Machine et organisme,” La connaissance de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 1965), p. 130; my translation.14 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 2; translation modified.15 Here I am solidary with Zizek in his opposition to this duality of “the Good versus the Bad”; see Organs Without Bodies, p. 28. However, I think that this duality can be undermined from within Anti-Oedipus, through a more attentive reading of the book. There is no need to turn to the theory of the sense-event in The Logic of Sense to problematize the supposedly flat becoming of the real in Anti-Oedipus. As we shall see, the symbolic dimension is definitely not missing in the latter.16 A-O, p. 271; emphasis added.17 Joe Hughes emphasizes this aspect in his excellent Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (London: Continuum, 2008).18 A-O, p. 373.

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consummate rationality, which subordinates everything to the single-minded pursuit of surplus value, or, to parody Deleuze and Guattari’s language, its perpetual becoming-profit. There is a kind of poetry of capital to be found here. And Deleuze and Guattari are critical of capitalism not for its madness, which is rather a term of praise, but because it is not mad enough. While unleashing an “awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy,”19 capitalism always “reterritorializes” what it had just torn asunder: it brings back the ego (the consumer), the order of representation (the commodity form), and the social link (Oedipus), thereby interrupting its own schizophrenic process. Indeed, precisely because capitalist civilization is closest in nature to schizophrenic desiring production, it mobilizes a stronger and more devious apparatus of repression than anything hitherto imagined.20 What interests Deleuze and Guattari is the possibility of radicalizing the dynamic unleashed by capitalism and turning it against its own order. “The schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process … is the potential for revolution.”21

Schizophrenia has a peculiar double status in Anti-Oedipus. It is both a ‘timeless’ ontological structure and an affliction of the human mind which emerges at a precise historical moment. “Schizophrenia is our very own ‘malady’, modern man’s sickness. The end of history has no other meaning.”22 Here we have a kind of clinical version of the end of history thesis: after Hegel’s philosopher, Schelling’s artist, Nietzsche’s prophet, and Kojève’s dictator, Deleuze and Guattari present the schizo as avatar of pure difference bringing to a close the history of representation. (Despite important differences with Hegel, Anti-Oedipus may justly be considered Deleuze’s Phenomenology of Spirit). To grasp the schizophrenic’s world historical significance, it is necessary to first rescue him from his psychiatric diagnosis. For psychiatry confines schizophrenia to pathology, conceiving it in strictly negative terms, as defect, deficiency or conflict. The case of psychoanalysis is more complicated, but not much better. Deleuze and Guattari fault Freud for modeling the psyche after neurosis, turning the schizo into a failed neurotic; Lacanian orthodoxy is similarly criticized for tasking the psychotic with insufficient integration in the symbolic order. The aim of Anti-Oedipus is to reverse these judgments and produce a positive portrait of schizophrenia. No longer a mangled or lacking subject, the shattered universe of schizophrenia instead bears witness to the miraculous powers of the body. The schizo’s wide-ranging world delirium and fantastic organ machines provide an answer to Spinoza’s question ‘What can the body do?’,23 and Deleuze and Guattari approvingly quote R.D. Laing’s description of schizophrenia as a “voyage of initiation, a transcendental experience of the loss of the Ego.”24 In Deleuze’s words, madness is “a rupture, an eruption, a break-through which smashes the continuity of a personality and takes it on a kind of trip through ‘more reality’, at once intense and terrifying, following lines of flight that engulf nature and history, organism and spirit.”25 A controlled schizophrenia is itself the cure for the forces that menace life, chief among them the bad (neurotic) lunacy of personal identity. Like Lacanian

19 A-O, p. 34.20 A-O, p. 337.21 A-O, p. 341.22 A-O, p. 130.23 “However, nobody as yet has determined the limits of the body’s capabilities: that is, nobody has yet learned from experience what the body can and cannot do…” (III, 2, Scholium). Spinoza, Ethics, transl. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992). 24 A-O, p. 84.25 Two Regimes of Madness, p. 27.

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psychoanalysis, the end-point of Deleuzoguattarian schizo-therapy is subjective destitution—a movement of depersonalization conceived in Anti-Oedipus as opening onto a more profound anonymous life of scattered molecules, piercing sensations, and aleatory events.

Since its publication Anti-Oedipus has been dogged by the criticism that it romanticizes madness. Do its authors have no sense for the tremendous suffering of the mentally ill? Though this is a specious accusation, one of the crucial theoretical problems of the book is distinguishing ‘divine schizophrenia’, madness in the profound, ontological sense, from debilitating psychopathology. Are mentally ill schizophrenics essentially “suicided by society,” rendered sick by the forces of social repression and the psychiatric cuckoo’s nest? Or must this classic anti-psychiatry thesis be altered, so that the danger comes not from only from priests, judges, and doctors but from something in the nature of the schizophrenic process itself which threatens destructive dissolution? “Lines of flight … turn out badly on their own account, as a result of a danger which they conceal. Kleist and his suicide pact, Hölderlin and his madness, Fitzgerald and his destruction, Virginia Woolf and her disappearance.”26 The successful schizos are the artistic ones, the ones who are able—to use a more Freudian vocabulary—to sublimate their suffering and give expression to the explosive corporeal forces precisely as a catastrophe of meaning and representation.27 It is from such artists, rather than psychiatric manuals or hospital wards, that we can best learn about schizophrenia. But the capacity for artistic expression is no guarantee against cracking up. In one of their better formulations of the problem, Deleuze and Guattari offer a cautionary note: “Schizophrenia is at once the wall, the breaking through this wall, and the failure of this breakthrough.”28

From desire to drive: Freud and Lacan

In my opinion the title “Anti-Oedipus” is unfortunate with respect to Deleuze and Guattari’s enterprise for at least three reasons. First it vastly overestimates the cultural power of psychoanalysis. Even if orthodox psychoanalysis effectively is an ideology of repression, it is hardly a socially significant one. Here the book is very local and dated in its concerns. Second, Deleuze and Guattari are wrong about the ‘unholy alliance’ of Oedipus and capitalism. Capitalism need not depend on a patriarchal structure for its perpetuation: on the contrary—and to the chagrin of free market cultural conservatives—it is capitalism that has effectively de-oedipalized society, breaking up the traditional family unit and denigrating the father’s symbolic authority. Far from opening onto a new freedom, this liberation from oedipal constrains has generated even worse superego pressures: the neurotic Oedipal subject, guilty for its inevitable betrayal of the introjected ideal, has given way to the hollow ‘narcissistic’ character type bombarded by images of enjoyment.29 Third, the ‘Oedipus’ that the book so vehemently attacks is far from being the most interesting or nuanced one in the dramatis personæ of psychoanalytic theory. Lacan too criticized the naïve version of the Oedipus complex, and, like Deleuze, focused more on Oedipus at Colonus—the

26 Dialogues, p. 140.27 See Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks on the final paintings of William Turner, A-O, p. 132.28 A-O, p. 136.29 See Christopher Lasch’s valuable essay “The Freudian Left and Cultural Revolution,” New Left Review no. 129 (September-October 1981). See also Zizek’s “Whither Oedipus?” in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999).

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outcast, the human waste, the inassimilable remainder—than Oedipus ‘the family man’.30

What, then, is the real aim of their criticism? It should be emphasized that Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Oedipus is an immanent one. Their goal is not to tear down psychoanalysis (“Freud is dead!”) but to recover its properly subversive core, a rescue operation that takes aim not only at later orthodoxies but, more fundamentally, at the reactionary tendencies of Freud himself. Deleuze and Guattari actually poke fun of themselves here, comparing their difficulty to that of the dogged Marxist separating the good communist wheat from the Stalinist shaft. “Psychoanalysis is like the Russian Revolution; we don’t know when it started going bad.”31 (One thinks also of Heidegger’s quest to uncover the precise moment when authentic Greek thought was infected by metaphysics). So, when did psychoanalysis go off the rails? “Oedipus is the idealist turning point.”32 On the one hand, “what Freud and the first analysts discover is the domain of free syntheses where everything is possible: endless connections, nonexclusive disjunctions, nonspecific conjunctions, partial objects and flows.”33 This is the revolutionary Freud who denied the psychiatric distinction between normality and pathology and demolished the teleological conception of sexuality, the theorist of the psyche’s polymorphous perversity as a riot of partial drives ruled not by self-preservation or any egoistic striving but by the blind imperative of pleasure. There is, however, another Freud, the Freud who re-inscribes his subversive insights back into a familiar normative scheme, turning the drives into developmental stages and superimposing on the dispersed domain of infantile sexuality an adult drama of love and hatred, law and transgression.34 To recover the early subversive Freud against the later gentrifying one is the goal of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique. In a word, what Anti-Oedipus aims to salvage is the Freudian notion of Trieb from its Oedipal domestication.

The same logic of immanent critique guides Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Lacan. Broadly speaking, Anti-Oedipus engages Lacan in a double manner, vehemently rejecting the so-called orthodox aspects of his theory (the bad ‘Lacanism’ of lack and the signifier), while elaborating what Deleuze and Guattari take to be his most original and productive concepts (notably, the objet a). “Lacan’s admirable theory of desire appears to us to have two poles: one relation to ‘the object small a’ as a desiring-machine, which defines desire in terms of real production, thus going beyond any idea of need and any idea of fantasy; and the other related to the ‘great Other’ as a

30 “We remember Oedipus’ dirty little secret, not the Oedipus of Colonus, on his line of flight, who has become imperceptible, identical to the great living secret.” Deleuze, Dialogues p. 46. Deleuze and Guattari in fact credit Lacan throughout Anti-Oedipus with deconstructing the Oedipal myth.31 A-O, p. 55.32 A-O, p. 55.33 A-O, p. 54.34 Along these lines, Philippe Van Haute offers a Deleuzoguattarian reading of Freud, showing how the later introduction of Oedipus occults Freud’s earlier insights into infantile sexuality, and is responsible for a veritable “turn” in his work. “The Oedipus complex, as Freud defines it, undoes the radical opposition between infantile and adult sexuality, and as a result makes it possible to think in developmental terms. More specifically, the reintroduction of a normative and essentialist definition of ‘normality’ is the inevitable counterpart of this shift. It is therefore—at least this is my hypothesis—the introduction of the Oedipus complex in the 1920s which explains the Kehre in Freud’s text.” “The introduction of the Oedipus Complex and the reinvention of instinct: Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” Radical Philosophy no. 115 (September-October 2002), p. 8.

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signifier, which reintroduces a certain notion of lack.”35 This brief statement sums up the essentials of Deleuze and Guattari’s approach. Lacanian theory is effectively bifurcated: the imaginary and the symbolic (along with the concept of fantasy) are denigrated, and the real developed in a new (delirious) direction. For Deleuze and Guattari the real is the only ‘real’ domain; the imaginary and symbolic are realms of illusion and alienation, falsifying the chaotic dynamics of real experience, i.e. the machinic productions of the unconscious. “Anti-Oedipus was about the univocity of the real, a sort of Spinozism of the unconscious […] The people who hate ’68, or say it was a mistake, see it as something symbolic or imaginary. But that’s precisely what it wasn’t, it was pure reality breaking through.”36 As they state unequivocally: “For the unconscious itself is no more structural then personal, it does not symbolize any more than it imagines or represents; it engineers, it is machinic. Neither imaginary not symbolic, it is the Real in itself, the ‘impossible real’ and its production.”37 Correcting Lacan on this last point, Deleuze and Guattari explain that the real is the domain where “everything becomes possible” since it is a “sub-representative field”: only in the symbolic is “the fusion of desire with the impossible is performed, with lack defined as castration.”38 We are thus left with the (libidinal) object without the (signifying) Other—which could well serve as motto for Deleuze and Guattari’s selective appropriation of Lacan: a theory of pre-personal intensities and desiring machines in opposition to the subject split by language, the order of signifiers (the Other) in which it finds its identity as barred, inconsistent, lacking. Such is the “reverse side of the structure” uncovered by Anti-Oedipus.39

Arguably, the development of Lacan’s own thought moves in exactly the same direction. There are two passages in particular in Lacan’s oeuvre that seem to jibe with Anti-Oedipus, both from what is usually considered Lacan’s middle period in which he undertakes a reappraisal of the Freudian concept of the drive. First is Lacan’s characterization of the drive in Seminar XI as a montage of heterogeneous fragments, a kind of “surrealist collage”: “If we bring together the paradoxes that we just defined at the level of Drang, at that of the object, at that of the aim of the drive, I think that the resulting image would show the workings of a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap, a peacock’s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful.”40 Large portions of Anti-Oedipus might be read as an extended riff on this passage. As Lacan elaborates in that seminar, the drive should be conceived as a headless (acephalous) circuit turning around a partial object, a “radical structure in which the subject is not yet placed.”41 Subjectivity proper—the split subject of the signifier—is a secondary development which emerges from out of the circular loop of the drive. Second is the distinction between drive and desire proposed in the écrit “On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire”: “[D]esire comes from the Other, and jouissance is located on the side of the Thing”; “the drive divides the subject and desire, the latter sustaining itself only by the relation it misrecognizes between this division and an object that causes it. Such is the structure

35 A-O, p 27fn.36 “On Philosophy” in Negotiations, pp. 144-45.37 A-O, p 53.38 A-O, pp. 27, 300, 306. See also p. 83.39 A-O, p 309.40 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 169.41 Ibid, pp. 181-82.

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of fantasy.”42 This distinction would appear to provide a relatively clear-cut scheme for understanding the relationship between jouissance and subjectivity. On the one hand, enjoyment is linked to the Thing and its corporeal figures, the various objets a: this is the ‘immanent’ domain of the drive, radically closed in on itself in an autoerotic loop. Desire, on the other, is bound up in an intersubjective dialectic whose very essence is interpretive openness: desire is desire of the ‘transcendent’ Other, turning around the unfathomable question ‘what does the Other want?’. These two levels meet in the fundamental fantasy, which provides a kind of (unconscious) answer to the enigma of the Other’s desire by ciphering it in a bizarre bodily scenario—fantasy is the imaginary side of the partial objects, i(a). By doing so, however, it obscures what Deleuze and Guattari would call the real desiring production, so that the subject ‘misrecognizes’ its non-fantasmatic real ‘cause’. Much more important than the trumpeted critique of Oedipus and allegorical-style interpretation (truck = Daddy, etc.), Anti-Oedipus is, in Lacanian terms, a theory of the drive against desire (to avoid possible confusion: what Deleuze and Guattari call desire is referred to by Lacan as drive).

Zizek presents the relationship between the Other and the object in the following way: “Identification takes place at the level of logos, it is always identification with a signifier; as such it comes after the ‘impossible’ relationship between a drive qua real and its object, objet petit a … symbolic identification (ultimately identification with the Master-Signifier that represents the subject) compensates for the ‘impossibility’, the structural failure, of the subject’s traumatic relationship towards objet a.”43 This schematization of Lacan’s mature theory, setting the drive and its object on one side and the subject’s constitution via symbolic identification on the other, agrees with the bifurcation made by Deleuze and Guattari. Except for one major difference. For Zizek, the origin of subjectivity is explained as an escape from an unbearable trauma at the level of the drive. The relation to the object is failed, impossible; it can only be dealt with (i.e. elaborated symbolically) in the field of the Other. As we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari abjure this vocabulary of impossibility. In the sub-representative realm everything is possible; it is the Other that introduces the notions of lack and castration, thereby crushing the free productivity of desiring machines. Instead of a story of escape, Anti-Oedipus presents one of alienation and capture—or so it seems.

Primary repression…

Could the aim of schizoanalysis, then, be reformulated as liberating the creative power of the drives from crushing grip of Oedipal desire? Such is the persistent hippie misreading of Anti-Oedipus, which transforms Deleuze and Guattari into blissed out prophets of a ‘summer of desire’. Though not their intention, Deleuze and Guattari are partly responsible for this flaccid interpretation, in the same way that Lacan bears some responsibility for the misconstrual of his theory as preaching tragic resignation before the impossibility of jouissance, the humble acceptance of castration, finitude, etc.44

42 Lacan, “On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire” in Écrits, transl. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. 724.43 Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), p. 48; emphasis in original.44 As Philippe Mengue argues, in the confrontation between Deleuze and Lacan we must guard against both a negative and pessimistic vision of desire and an affirmative vitalist politics bereft of any sense of the tragic. Gilles Deleuze ou le système du multiple (Paris: Kimé, 1994), p. 107.

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We need to examine in greater detail what I’ve been calling Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the drive. A distinction from Lacan can help us out here. In Television Lacan distinguishes between suppression and repression, in a way which at first sounds like an ironic refutation of Anti-Oedipus. “Freud didn’t say that repression comes from suppression: that (to paint a picture) castration is due to what Daddy brandished over his brat playing with his wee-wee: ‘We’ll cut it off, no kidding, if you do it again’.”45 So much for the supposed primacy of mommy-daddy-me: for Lacan, the classic image of the castrating father—along with all other forms of suppression emanating from the social sphere—is founded on a more primordial instance of psychic repression which has nothing to do with the family per se. “Why couldn’t the family, society itself, be creations built from repression? They’re nothing less.”46 A succinct formulation of this same idea was already put forward by Freud’s colleague Victor Tausk: “For the living organism reality is unbearable, and [...] the task is incumbent upon it of creating a substitute for reality formation that is more bearable: culture.”47 In short, all of culture is a gigantic collective defense mechanism that allows human beings to live with the otherwise intolerable reality that is their libido. And Deleuze and Guattari say exactly the same thing: “if the family is able in this manner to slip into the recording of desire, it is because the body without organs on which this recording is accomplished already exercises on its own account, as we have seen, a primal repression of desiring-production. It falls to the family to profit from this, and to superimpose the repression that is properly termed secondary.”48 In order to understand this, it is necessary to backtrack a little and explain how the mechanism of primary repression works and its relation to the desiring machines.

Everything begins in Anti-Oedipus with the chaotic realm of partial objects, what Deleuze calls in his study of Hume ‘the delirium of the given’: “a collection without an album, a play without a stage, a flux of perceptions … The depth of the mind is indeed delirium.”49 This pre-Oedipal universe is described in The Logic of Sense as one of unspeakable violence where “bodies burst and cause other bodies to burst in a universal cesspool.”50 Clearly we are far from a blissful Eden. The problem that Deleuze and Guattari confront is essentially the same as the one set forth in the Hume book: how can the given transcend itself, through what processes does the disconnected medley of the mind become subject? This problem is all the more imperative given the brutal and dizzying nature of partial objects: their pounding and throbbing is too much and must be somehow neutralized, evaded. In Anti-Oedipus the movement of transcendence is first initiated through the creation of a body without organs which repels the noxious flux. And this is what primary repression is about, the “repulsion of desiring-machines by the body without organs.”51 At this point the “paranoiac machine” is born, wherein the drives become “an overall persecution

45 Lacan, “Television,” transl. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, October no. 40 (Spring 1987), pp. 31-32; emphasis in original.46 Ibid., p. 32.47 Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society Volume II1: 1910-1911, ed. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, transl. M. Nunberg (New York: International University Press, 1962), p. 30.48 A-O, pp. 120-21; emphasis in original.49 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, transl. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia, 1991), p. 23.50 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 187.51 A-O, p. 9; emphasis in original.

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apparatus” emanating from some alien exterior.52 As bad as this may sound, the new configuration at least provides for a margin of breathing room compared to the previous state. For that primordial schizophrenic pandemonium is strictly untenable: subjectivity is made possible by a minimal paranoia that keeps the purely corporeal forces at bay. Desiring production is opposed by a liberating moment of “anti-production.”53

In an interview from 1980 Deleuze described Anti-Oedipus as a kind of Russian Constructivism of the unconscious.54 In the same spirit, there are two fundamental trends at work in Deleuze and Guattari’s material unconscious, which we could name after Stakhanov (the hero of Soviet socialist productivity) and Oblomov (the lazy aristocrat of Ivan Goncharov’s eponymous novel). In its Stakhanovist mode, the unconscious is endlessly productive and creative, forging new connections and proliferating flows; this overwhelming output, however, is opposed by the Oblomovist tendency to absolute indolence, which brings all the feverish activity to a crashing halt. It does not eat, breathe, shit, and fuck; it stays in bed. Or to quote Deleuze and Guattari: “From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned.”55

In the reception of Anti-Oedipus relatively little attention has been paid to “anti-production,” even though it is here that can be found the Deleuzoguattarian equivalent of the death drive.56 Five years earlier, in Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze recast Freud’s speculations in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in terms of transcendental philosophy. According to Deleuze, Freud is effectively both Newton and Kant: at the empirical level, he demonstrates how pleasure is, without exception, the regulating principle of psychic life and at the transcendental level he describes the operations of binding and unbinding as the necessary conditions for the pleasure principle’s reign.57 This constitutive activity is now renamed ‘machinically’ as production and anti-production, but Deleuze and Guattari do not intend these terms to taken as a new dualism à la Eros and Thanatos. Rather, the desiring machines work by breaking down, or break down because they work too well: the risk of collapse, destruction, and exhaustion is intrinsic to their excessive driving force. Production and anti-production (which is equality to the polarity: organs-without-bodies and body-without-organs) are two facets of one and the same desiring production. Taken together they are opposed to the organizational forms and larger totalities that use their power for their own purposes (self-preservation, social reproduction, etc.). “The body without organs and organs-partial objects are opposed conjointly to the organism.”58 Or, put in Zizekian terms, the death drive qua hyperbolic exuberance is opposed to the domesticating force of the symbolic structure.

This leads to an important correction of the standard portrait of Anti-Oedipus. Contrary to Zizek, for Deleuze and Guattari evil does not consist only in “the

52 Ibid.53 A-O, p. 8.54 Two Regimes of Madness, p. 175.55 A-O, p. 7.56 An exception to this neglect is Jean-François Lyotard’s essay “Energumen Capitalism,” transl. James Leigh, Semiotext(e) vol. II no. 3 (1977), pp. 25-26.57 See Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty in Masochism, transl. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone, 1991), pp. 111-117.58 A-O, p. 326.

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subordination of the flux of desire to an Ideal which truncates its assertive life-power, its multiple productivity.”59 Rather there is an evil, ‘anti-productive’ dimension of desire as such, that “profound and almost unliveable Power”60 which constitutes psychic life. This insight leads to a new appreciation of Oedipus. Though Oedipus is tirelessly condemned throughout the book, it nonetheless plays a crucial (even necessary?) protective function, taming the anarchic schizophrenic forces while never fully mastering them.61 Oedipus, as the hegemonic form of social repression, leans on and is built from that primary repression which renders psychic life possible in the first place. “Oedipus is a requirement or consequence of social reproduction, insofar as this latter aims at domesticating a genealogical form and content that are in every way intractable.”62

… and the birth of the symbolic

Let us take our reading of Anti-Oedipus a little further. Despite its ‘rhizomatic’ appearance as a hodgepodge of concepts and references, Anti-Oedipus has in fact a classical philosophical structure, full of sharp distinctions and tripartite schemas. (Guattari complained about not being able to recognize himself in Anti-Oedipus because of it “polishedness” and “perfection” 63 —indeed, Anti-Oedipus is a nightmare not of chaos but of order). It may be read as an socio-historical elaboration of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, and in fact displays a remarkable continuity with his earlier work despite the book’s novel vocabulary. Without excavating the whole philosophical background of these notions, let us look at how Deleuze and Guattari describe the process whereby the unconscious is constituted. The unconscious is composed, they tell us, by three passive syntheses. “Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies … The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious.”64 These syntheses operate freely and blindly, without a master plan or directing instance (which is why they are called “passive”: they happen to and through the unconscious, rather than being carried out by a transcendent agent). To give a brief summary of their operation and how they build upon one another:

● The first connective synthesis involves the proliferation of partial objects and their polymorphous connections, and how their unbearable frenzy is countered by the body with organs. The body without organs repels the partial objects, setting up a “counter flow of amorphous and undifferentiated fluid.”65 This is the first step towards subjectivity as liberated from the obscure and suffocating corporeal depths: the “paranoiac machine.”

● In the second disjunctive synthesis, the body without organs appropriates the partial objects as its own, recording their connections on its smooth surface. The “associative

59 Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, p. 113.60 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation transl. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University Minnesota, 2003), p. 39.61 On this important point, see Steven Shaviro, “God, or the Body Without Organs,” p. 23fn; available at http://www.dhalgren.com/Othertexts/God.pdf62 A-O, p. 13.63 Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, ed. Stéphane Nadaud, transl. Kélina Gotman (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), p. 404.64 A-O, p. 26.65 A-O, p. 9.

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flow” of partial object is thereby turned into “signifying chains,” yet the sign elements are “not themselves signifying. The code resembles not so much a language as a jargon, an open-ended, polyvocal formation.”66 These primitive inscriptions are similar to what Lacan calls lalangue, signifiers coagulated with enjoyment, and what Zizek designates via Schelling as the interstitial domain of “spiritual corporeality”: material fragments no longer purely bodily but not yet fully meaningful.67 At this point the body without organs undergoes an important transformation: it becomes a “miraculating machine,” “arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi-cause.”68 This is the same quasi-causality that Zizek affirms in The Logic of Sense as responsible for maintaining the autonomy of the symbolic order. On the surface there exists a quasi-cause (aleatory point, the phallus as signifier of castration) that liberates it from strict material determination and provides a new orientation; in Anti-Oedipus this function is taken over by the body without organs, which in the second passive synthesis presents itself as the source of production, ‘miraculating’ the partial objects, even though it is their material product.

● In the third synthesis of consumption and consummation the body without organs is submitted to a further development, becoming a field of intensities. These intensities are based on gradients of attraction and repulsion produced by the prior two syntheses: the repulsion of the partial objects in the first synthesis, and their attraction onto the recording surface in the second. “The forces of attraction and repulsion, of soaring ascents and plunging falls, produce a series of intensive states based on the intensity = 0 that designates the body without organs.”69 On this field of intensities is also produced “something of the order of a subject”70 who enjoys (consumes) them: this is the “celibate machine.” This subject is not yet a symbolic one, it is not Lacan’s split subject of the signifier. It is rather the autos of auto-erotism, the acephalous subject of the drive, the subject of an “I feel” that is at a deeper level than the “I see, I hear” of hallucination and the “I think” of delirium.71 “Here it is not a case of the hallucinatory experience nor of a delirious mode of thought, but a feeling, a series of emotions and feelings as a consummation and a consumption of intensive quantities, that form the material for subsequent hallucinations and deliriums.”72 The body without organs now figures as the pure form of auto-affection (intensity = 0), and the nomadic subject the base for the elaboration of more complex psychic processes (hallucinations, delirium).

In his comments on Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze distances himself from the way he distinguished surface and depth in his prior work, particularly The Logic of Sense. “Anti-Oedipus no longer has height or depth, nor surface. In this book everything happens, is done, the intensities, the events, upon a sort of spherical body or scroll painting: The Organless Body.”73 “I’ve undergone a change. The surface-depth opposition no longer concerns me. What interests me now is the relationship between

66 A-O, p. 38.67 Zizek, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997), p. 47.68 A-O, p. 10.69 A-O, p. 21.70 A-O, p. 16.71 A-O, p. 18.72 A-O, p. 84.73 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 65-66.

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a full body, a body without organs, and flows that migrate.”74 It is this shift to pure materialist becoming that Zizek denounces in Organs Without Bodies, accusing it of being but a variant of idealist ‘empiriocriticism’, a species of irrationalist Lebensphilosophie.75 As should be already clear, however, the situation is not so simple. Pace Deleuze, in Anti-Oedipus the surface/depth distinction is not so much abolished as historicized. The three levels in The Logic of Sense of the schizophrenic depths, the surface of sense, and the tertiary order of propositions are transformed by Anti-Oedipus into the flux of desiring machines, the recording surface of the body without organs, and the universal history of socio-political forms.76 More precisely, it is in the second passive synthesis that there is an initial constitution of the symbolic, as a recording surface whose autonomy is guaranteed by the body without organs qua quasi-cause. But the surface proper does not emerge until much later, with the rise of Despotic Regime and the advent of the master signifier. “It is perhaps at this juncture that the question ‘What does it mean?’ begins to be heard, and that problems of exegesis prevail over problems of use and efficacy.”77 (In terms of the The Logic of Sense, this is the tertiary realm, the point at which full-fledged propositions can be formed). What follows in Anti-Oedipus is the story of the breakdown of this order. The passage from the ‘closed’ Barbarian Empire to the ‘infinite’ universe of Capitalist Civilization (or, in Lacanian terms, from the master’s to the capitalist discourse) entails a fateful mutation of the symbolic surface. The master signifier can no longer guarantee the consistency of meaning. We enter into a condition of generalized slavery, where the reigning despot or figure of authority is replaced by the abstract law (axiomatic) of Capital. “‘I too am a slave’—these are the new words spoken by the master.”78 It is this partial collapse of the symbolic order—the destruction of social codes by the capitalist axiomatic—that gives birth to the schizophrenic as the monstrous child of modernity.

Against Interpretation, or Serge Leclaire on the ‘reality of desire’

One of the central motifs of Anti-Oedipus was perfectly well spelled out by Susan Sontag in her famous 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” a text whose Nietzschean polemics fit well the categorical style of Deleuze and Guattari. Interpretation, whose most fundamental operation is that of substitution, ‘A is really B’, is derided for its contempt of appearances and metaphysical ressentiment: “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’.”79 Criticism should show how an artwork functions, how it creates it effects, its unique intensive experience, and not tell the story of what it means. “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art”80—the phrase is eminently Deleuzoguattarian, and schizoanalysis may be quite accurately conceived as an erotics rather than a hermeneutics, i.e. an analysis of interacting drive-intensities and flows instead of a translation of one set of representations into another. “The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The question posed by desire is not ‘What does it mean?’ but rather ‘How does it work?’”81

74 Deleuze, Desert Islands, p. 261.75 Zizek, Organs Without Bodies, pp. 22-23.76 On this parallelism, see Joe Hughes, Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation.77 A-O, p. 206.78 A-O, p. 254.79 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1966), p. 7.80 Ibid., p. 14.81 A-O, p. 108; emphasis in original.

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In their critique of allegorical interpretation Deleuze and Guattari are in fact deeply Lacanian, if not Freudian. For Freud had already emphasized that analysis is not an infinite interpretive endeavor: if it is interminable it’s not because the web of meanings is inexhaustibly rich, but because interpretation inevitably runs up against stubborn ‘sticking points’ which it cannot dissolve or move beyond—hence the importance of what Freud called the economic factor. Lacan similarly argued that, far from multiplying meanings, the aim of analytic interpretation is to reduce meaning to nonsense. Not any nonsense, however, but that very precise and singular nonsense that organizes the subject’s libidinal existence. “Interpretation is directed not so much at the meaning as towards reducing the non-meaning of the signifiers, so that we may rediscover the determinants of the subject’s entire behavior … not … in its significatory dependence, but precisely in its irreducible and senseless character qua chain of signifiers.”82 One of the major difficulties Lacan faced was clarifying the exact status of these pregnant nonsensical elements, “the paradoxical grounding point of the Symbolic”83 at once interior and exterior to it. Anti-Oedipus can be read as one long explanation of where these elements come from, how they are put together, and how they become entangled in larger circuits of meaning that distort their true machinic nature.

In the context of the above quotation Lacan refers approvingly to Serge Leclaire’s work on interpretation, which also plays an important role in Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari specifically cite his essay “La réalité du désir” as crucial to their understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis and a key influence on their own theory of desiring machines. It is therefore instructive to review Leclaire’s main line of argument, and examine how Anti-Oedipus re-interprets it.

Taking up Freud’s distinction between the plasticity and adhesiveness of the libido—in spite of the libido’s incredible openness, it tends to get stuck on the same dumb satisfactions that repeat throughout a person’s life—, Leclaire describes a realm of “pure singularities,” fixed elements that compose the final syntax of the subject’s desire: the odor of a woman’s neck, the modulation of an echoing voice that seems to say ‘You’, the hint of acidity in baked apples, the fullness of the hand as it seizes a ball, a beauty mark.84 He calls this collection of irreducible elements the “pure being of desire,” a “fiction” of the unconscious in-itself without any conscious or preconscious entanglements. This is the most primordial level of the psyche, the “reality of desire.” We encounter it when, in the course of analysis, certain ideas or impressions no longer participate in the sphere of meaning, when a psychic content falls out of the play of connections, associations and substitutions that constitute meaningful discourse. Such elements insist in psychic life, they are stubborn, they do not budge, (“on bute indéfiniment sur le même ensemble de ‘pures singularités’”), but one can no longer say why: they cannot be exchanged for other signifiers or explained or further analyzed. They are basic (molecular) terms. Though they have no relation to one another they form a definite ensemble; as Leclaire writes, they are “soldered”

82 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 212.83 Dominiek Hoens and Ed Pluth, “The sinthome: A New Way of Writing an Old Problem?,” in Reinventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan, ed. Luke Thurston (New York: Other Press, 2002), p. 12.84 This is Leclaire’s set of examples, the descriptions slightly shortened. Serge Leclaire, “La réalité du désir” in Écrits pour la psychanalyse 1 1954-1993 (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 149.

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together precisely by their “absence of link.”85 They are nonsense but also pure sense, meaningless and at the same time too meaningful; in Freudian terms: too charged with energy to participate in the movement of representations, their intensity bends and warps the functioning of other mental processes; in Lacanian terms: both radical lack and surplus, objets a. Deleuze and Guattari enthusiastically approve “the rule of the right to nonsense as well as to the absence of link,” repeating with Leclaire “you will not have reached the ultimate and irreducible terms of the unconscious so long as you find or restore a link between two elements.”86 This point deserves to be underlined: although Anti-Oedipus can be read as a poetic elegy to the infinite plasticity of the libido, it is in fact what Freud called points of fixation (not flow!) that are at the heart of the desiring machines. Rather than sheer chaos or flux, what interests Deleuze and Guattari are the rigid molecular elements that determine the ever-shifting network of libidinal flows.

Deleuze and Guattari go on to ingeniously reinterpret Leclaire’s “pure being of desire” in Spinozistic-Leibnizian terms, reading the ‘absence of link’ that defines unconscious singularities in terms of the metaphysical concept of ‘real distinction’: the ultimate desiring-elements are like the infinite attributes of God that are strictly independent of one another yet participate in a common divine substance. “Likewise for the partial objects and the body without organs: the body without organs is substance itself, and the partial objects, the ultimate attributes or elements of substance.”87 This is their ‘Spinozism of the unconscious’: the body without organs refers to the One substance of which the partial objects (or “organs without bodies” to cite Zizek) comprise its specific irreducible elements, and both stand opposed to the ‘organism’, i.e. the organization of desire according to the (oedipal) dialect of subject and Other. Leclaire’s “pure being of desire” thus becomes “a pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity, without unity or totality, and whose elements are welded, pasted together by the real distinction or the very absence of distinction.”88

Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysical re-interpretation of Leclaire entails one crucial difference from him. Whereas Leclaire carefully qualified his “pure being of desire” as a fiction, since one can never seize it directly but only through its effects on other mental processes, Deleuze and Guattari insist that it is the real itself.89 For Leclaire the “reality of desire,” the field of nonsensical pre-personal singularities, has the status of a construction which serves to explain the gaps, fissures, and inconsistencies in consciousness. “The Real is an entity which must be constructed afterwards so that we can account for the distortions of the symbolic structure.”90 What ultimately lies behind these elements is the void, the lack of closure or inconsistency of the symbolic order itself. Deleuze and Guattari insist instead on the primacy of the real, which is no longer conceived as a gap or fissure but a “pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity.” It is this additional turn of the screw, from the gap in the symbolic to the positive ‘inorganization’ of the real, that Leclaire misses. For Leclaire, on the other hand, the fault of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is its abstraction of the real from any symbolic and imaginary mediation, which renders it totally opaque. Whereas Anti-Oedipus presents the real as ground and the imaginary and symbolic as superstructures, in 85 Ibid., p. 150.86 A-O, p 314.87 A-O, p 309fn.88 A-O, p 324.89 A-O, p 314.90 Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 162.

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Lacan the objet a “belongs in a fourfold structure that includes the signifier, which is dual (S1 and S2), and the subject (crossed-out S).”91

One can wonder whether the positions of Leclaire and Deleuze and Guattari are really so far apart. For as the authors of Anti-Oedipus specify, “The movement of deterritorialization can never be grasped in itself, one can only grasp its indices in relation to the territorial representations.”92 To say that we can access only the ‘indices’ of deterritorialization but never the pure flux itself, is tantamount to arguing that the real is always at least minimally fictionalized: the drive is always-already entangled in desire.93 This would seem to confirm Leclaire’s criticism, and to a certain degree Deleuze and Guattari could agree that it makes no sense to radically separate the objet a from the circuits of the imaginary and symbolic—or in their terms, to isolate movements of deterritorialization and lines of flight from the molar representations in which they both are embedded and exceed. Despite this broad agreement, however, the key question of the starting point remains. Should one begin with the schizophrenic production of the real, and derive the genesis of the symbolic from its turbulent internal dynamics; or should one begin with the symbolic structure and endeavor to show how it necessarily generates a troubling symptomal point, an intrinsic stumbling block?

The problem of genesis in Zizek

The major aim of Zizek’s philosophical project can be summed up as thinking together Lacanian psychoanalysis with the German Idealist problem of the constitution of subjectivity and reality. In this endeavor, Lacan’s theory of psychosis plays a pivotal role. It is the extreme fractures of the psyche that reveal the most primordial processes at work in the genesis of self and world: philosophy is here put to the test of madness.94 In Zizek’s more recent work, the elaboration of this problem has proceeded primarily via a reinterpretation of F.W.J. Schelling, focusing on his idea of Divine creation as a kind of therapeutic escape from madness. Schelling is not only read through the lens of Lacan, but Zizek advances a novel Schellingian hypothesis regarding the category of the real.

In The Fragile Absolute, Zizek identifies what he calls a “fundamental oscillation” in Lacan’s oeuvre: “what comes first, the signifier or some deadlock in the real?” It is

91 “Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back…” (op. cit.), p. 224.92 A-O, p. 316.93 This is the essence of Jacques Rancière’s critique of Deleuzian aesthetics: however Dionysian in intention, Deleuze always ends up re-inscribing pre-personal forces and singularities in stable Apollonian forms. Central to Rancière’s strategy is showing how Deleuze time and again relies on a classic allegorical interpretation of artworks in order to ‘represent’ their more radical anti-representative nature; thus Bartleby becomes a hero in a story about redemption, and not a pure ‘formula’; the end of the movement-image in Hitchcock’s cinema is allegorized by the photographer’s motor paralysis in Rear Window; and so on. See “Existe-t-il une esthétique deleuzienne?,” in Gilles Deleuze: une vie philosophique ed. Éric Alliez (Paris: Institut Synthélabo, 1998); “Deleuze accomplit le destin de l’esthétique,” Magazine littéraire no. 406 (February 2002); La Chair des mots (Paris: Galilée, 1998), last chapter on Deleuze and Bartleby; and, La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001), chapter on Deleuze and cinema. 94 In a recent essay Zizek accuses Heidegger of failing this test: Lacan is not a Heideggerian insofar as the latter cannot think psychosis. See “Why Lacan is not a Heideggerian,” Lacanian Ink no. 32 (Fall 2008).

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worth quoting the passage in full, as it provides a succinct summary of Zizek’s position.

Sometimes, Lacan presents the traumatic colonization of the live body by the parasitic symbol sic Order as the primordial fact: it is the intervention of the Symbolic that derails, throws out of joint, the natural organism in its balanced circuit, transforming natural instincts into a monstrous drive that can never be fully satisfied, since it is condemned to an eternal ‘undead’ returning to its path, persisting forever in an obscene immortality. At other times, in a more speculative-mythical mode, he is searching for some kind of natural excess or imbalance, a malfunctioning, monstrous derailment, and then he conceives the symbolic Order as a secondary in(ter)vention destined to ‘gentrify’ this monstrous excess, to resolve its deadlock. One is tempted to claim that it is here, between these two versions, that the line runs which separates materialism from idealism: the primacy of the symbolic Order is clearly idealist; it is ultimately a new version of Divine intervention in the natural order; while the second version—the emergence of the symbolic Order as the answer to some monstrous excess in the Real—is the only proper materialist solution.95

For the remainder of this essay I shall offer a few comments on this provocative thesis.

It is in order to more fully elaborate the materialist solution that Zizek turns to Schelling. More precisely, it is the ‘middle’ Schelling of the Ages of the World that allows Zizek to theorize the genesis of the symbolic order from out of a deadlock or impasse in the real, rather than the real being immanently determined as the stumbling block of the symbolic. These great speculative writings, at times reminiscent of the psychotic world system of Dr. Schreber, present an esoteric mythological narrative about the creation of the universe. Put very briefly: Before creation proper “there is the chaotic-psychotic universe of blind drives, their rotary motion, their undifferentiated pulsating”96 (it is this abyssal universe that Deleuze and Guattari endeavor to describe in modern machinic terms). God’s inaugural act consists in a desperate escape from this suffocating, closed domain into the light of creation.What is described here is the passage from “the pre-symbolic chaos of the Real to the universe of logos,”97 or, put otherwise, from “‘closed’ rotary motion to open progress, from drive to desire.”98 The greatness of Schelling’s philosophy is to the think the real as itself unbalanced, unhinged, ‘out-of-joint’—an insight which Schelling himself does not consistently maintain, but obscures in his turn to pre-modern sexual mythology and dreams of a final reconciliation.99 This idea is what some of Lacan’s

95 Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, or why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? (Verso: London, 2000), p. 91-92. Zizek has more recently posed “the key materialist question” thusly: “if the Real has not subsistence of its own, if it is inherent to the Symbolic, how, then, are we to think the emergence-explosion of the Symbolic out of the presymbolic X? Is the only alternative to naïve realism a kind of “methodological idealism’ according to which ‘the limits of our language are the limits of the world’, so that what is beyond the Symbolic is strictly unthinkable?” The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT, 2006), p. 390; emphasis in original.96 Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, p. 13.97 Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder, p. 7.98 Ibid., p. 13.99 Ibid., pp. 72-73.

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most interesting interpreters refer to as the “barred real.”100 Though to my knowledge the term was never employed by Lacan himself, in one of his last seminars Lacan does remark that “nature is not so natural as all that”: “[I]n conformity with what Edgar Morin says in a recent book where he interrogates the nature of nature, it is completely clear that nature is not so natural as all that, and it’s even in this which consists that rottenness that is generally referred to as culture.”101 This passing reference to Edgar Morin’s La nature de la nature is instructive. Morin characterizes nature as “more Shakespearian than Newtonian,” a complex system where chaos, waste, disorder, and cataclysm cannot be dissociated from order, law, and organization.102 The crux of Morin’s argument is that the human being constitutes a hyperbolic exacerbation of the universe’s complexity, a violent opening up or dis-ordering of the natural world, what he calls “hypercomplexification.” Contrary to an all too simplistic idea of Darwinian adaptation, Morin defends imagination, delirium, and insanity as belonging to mankind’s essential being. It is by virtue of humanity’s successful dis-adaptation, its seemingly useless and even self-destructive aptitudes, that it is capable of all the accomplishments of rationality and technical civilization: homo sapiens is at the same time and inextricably homo demens.103 Zizek’s Schelling affirms this evolutionary paradigm: “[T]he features we refer to in order to emphasize man’s unique status—the constitutive imbalance, the ‘out-of-joint’, on account of which man is an ‘unnatural’ creature, ‘nature sick unto death’—must somehow be at work in nature itself, although—as Schelling would have put it—in another, lower power (in the mathematical sense of the term).”104

In his reply to Daniel Smith, however, Zizek changes tack and defends the primacy of the symbolic: the real “has no ontological consistency in itself, but can only be discerned retroactively, from its effects, as their absent Cause”105—a definition familiar from The Sublime Object of Ideology, and consonant with Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis that deterritorialization is discernible only through its effects on territorial representations. But if this is the case, then strictly speaking it makes no sense to speculate about a “natural excess or imbalance” which the “secondary intervention” of the symbolic order would then serve to stabilize.

The main difference between the Schellingian Zizek and Deleuze and Guattari concerns the object of primary repression. For Zizek it is not the primal pulsional chaos that forms the core of repression, but rather a special ‘originary’ signifier which, in sinking into unconsciousness, simultaneously pushes back the drives and inaugurates the symbolic order.106 For Deleuze and Guattari primary repression bears instead on the desiring machines themselves, as the moment of their breakdown, anti-production. In a more Nietzschean vein, Deleuze and Guattari posit a conflict between drives: the body without organs repulses the partial objects and thereby forms the first 100 “The Real that will have been barred by the Symbolic was always already barred in itself.” Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge: MIT, 2007), p. 217. See also Adrian Johnston, Zizek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern, 2008), p. 92.101 Lacan, Seminar XXIV L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre 1976-77 (unpublished), Session of May 17, 1977.102 Edgar Morin, La méthode 1. La Nature de la Nature (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 368.103 Edgar Morin, Le paradigme perdu: la nature humaine (Paris: Seuil, 1973); see especially pp. 123-126.104 Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 1996), p. 220; emphasis added.105 Zizek, “Notes on a Debate ‘From Within the People’,” Criticism vol. 46 no. 4 (Fall 2004), p. 661.106 Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder, p. 33.

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paranoiac machine which then serves as the basis for symbolic inscription. Despite these differences, both theories are versions of what Deleuze calls in The Logic of Sense “dynamic genesis,” which moves from the clamorous depths to the production of surfaces; i.e. from drive to desire, from real to symbolic.107 Here I think Eugene Holland is right to compare, while not identifying, the body without organs to the unary trait since both serve the function of introducing signification to the psyche.108

Where does Lacan stand with respect to this? Is there, in fact, a “fundamental oscillation” in his work? I am convinced that, for the most part, Lacan ascribes to an ontological dualism in which body and signifier, or the pre-symbolic real and the order of language, are radically distinct. This position has three main sources. First, it can be seen as an inheritance of Alexandre Kojève, who in his lectures on Hegel categorically rejected the master’s philosophy of nature, ascribing it to the unfortunate influence of Schelling (!): “All of this, in my opinion, is an error on Hegel’s part … the real (metaphysical) and ‘phenomenal’ Dialectic of Nature exists only in Hegel’s (Schellingian) imagination.”109 This idea was then echoed by Bataille and Queneau (the editor of Kojève’s lectures),110 and later taken up by Sartre in his debates with the French Communist Party, where he defended the autonomy of historical dialectics against its (Stalinist) ‘naturalization’.111 Lacan’s innovation was to make use of the theological notion of creatio ex nihilo to attack what he viewed as the theological underpinnings of a certain teleological evolutionism: the symbolic order is absolutely novel, and the “dialectic of desire” its instantiates cannot be derived from any pre-existing need or natural development.112 Strictly speaking, the symbolic order has no pre-history. Nothing precedes it, or rather whatever primal Stoff was there can only be thought from within the coordinates of the already given horizon of language. Second, this dualism is derived from the specific situation of psychoanalytic therapy, as a practice based on speech. It is this fundamental fact that Lacan wished to recall analysts to in his “return to Freud”: psychoanalysis is a “talking cure” in which, contrary to hypnosis or behavioral therapies and close to the ancient aspirations of philosophy, something true is revealed about the subject. Language, and more specifically how language works in the cure, is therefore the paramount concern of psychoanalytic theory. The standard criticism that Lacanian theory is a linguistic idealism which ignores bodily drives and affects is in my mind specious. Of course there are drives and affects—the point is that, in the course of analysis, what matters is not these forces as such but how they are spoken about, symbolized. The ground 107 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 186.108 Eugene Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 30.109 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel transl. James H. Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell, 1969), p. 217.110 See Georges Bataille and Raymond Queneau, “The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic,” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939 transl. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie (Minneapolis: University Minnesota, 1985).111 The debate that took place on December 7, 1961 at La Maison de la Mutualité in Paris between Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Hyppolite, on one side, and Roger Garaudy, Jean-Pierre Vigier and Jean Orcel on the other still makes for interesting reading. The transcripts were published under the title Marxisme et existentialisme: controverse sur la dialectique (Paris: Plon, 1962). In his later Marxist philosophy, Sartre remains faithful to the ontological dualism of his first great work Being and Nothingness. One should also mention Merleau-Ponty’s intervention in this debate, a plea against scientism and mechanism in Marxist thought: “Marxism and Philosophy,” Sense and Non-Sense, transl. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Chicago: Northwestern, 1964).112 See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 213-14.

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and medium of analysis is not any Erlebnis or immediate affective experience but speech;113 in particular that strange quasi-automatic speech freed from rules of propriety, morality and common sense, and without any goal (even a therapeutic one) beyond its own aleatory movement—what Freud called free association. In this sense, the great antipode of Freud’s talking cure is Wilhelm’s Reich’s orgasmic vegetotherapy which aims to directly manipulate bodily forces via massage, trance, and mystical technologies. Lacan’s theorization of the creative power of the symbol should be understood first and foremost as an attempt to explain the efficiency of the talking cure. Third, and perhaps most interesting, Lacan’s thesis of the primacy of the symbolic is based on his understanding of the relationship between psychoanalysis and modern science. The essence of Lacan’s critique of phenomenology is that it fetishizes immediate experience at the expense of missing the broader symbolic network—Freud’s “other scene”—that secretly determines the very character of this experience, how it ‘immediately’ appears; though consciousness has no direct awareness of this order, and cannot if it is to function properly, it is nonetheless responsible for one’s most intimate feelings, thoughts, and so on. For all his talk of surmounting the natural attitude and the prejudices of everyday life, the phenomenologist proceeds in a naïve way, thinking that perception grants access to things as they are in themselves. But as any scientist knows, reality is hardly accessible through perception: the real can only be expressed by abstract mathematical formulae which have no intuitive fulfillment whatsoever.114 Just as, contra Husserl, the mathematical idealization of nature cannot be founded on the intuitive evidence of the life-world (this is the sense in which modern science is ‘creationist’), so the symbolic order cannot be derived from phenomenological experience however raw or savage. The most profound effect of modern science on the human condition is its radical decentering of the universe with respect to sensuous experience—reality becomes thoroughly non-anthropocentric, divorced from human perception—, and Lacan argues that the Freudian split subject is the proper heir of that decentering.

One of the clearest statements of Lacan’s position can be found in Seminar XVII: “Our first rule is never to seek the origins of language, if only because they are demonstrated well enough through their effects. The further we push back their effects, the more these origins emerge. The effects of language are retroactive, precisely in that it is as language develops that it manifests what it is qua want-to-be.”115 To paraphrase Heidegger, ‘the origin of language is language as origin’. Here it is possible to mark a major difference between Freud and Lacan. Whereas Freud analyzed the symbolic logic of dreams, neurotic symptoms, and other unconscious formations, it was Lacan who argued that human beings are inherently prone to psychopathology because we are speaking beings: it is language—the autonomy of 113 See Lacan, Seminar IX L’Identification (unpublished), session of 13 December 1961.114 As Lacan argues against Merleau-Ponty: “Why not confirm that the theory of perception no longer elucidates the structure of reality to which physical science makes us accede? … Everything shows us that it is by refusing the perceived intuitions of weight and impetus that the Galilean dynamics annexed the heavens to the earth, as the heavy cost, though, of introducing what we nowadays feel in the experience of the cosmonaut: a body that can open and close itself weighing nothing and bearing on nothing.” “Merleau-Ponty: In Memoriam,” Merleau-Ponty and Psychology, ed. Keith Hoeller transl. Wilfried Ver Eecke and Dirk de Schutter (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 74; translation modified.115 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis 1969-1970, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), p. 155. See also SEMINAR X… Catherine Malabou recalls this passage to argue against Lacan’s idealism…

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the self-relating symbolic order with respect to the natural world—that transforms animal instincts into unruly drives and insatiable desires. (This is illustrated by the ‘graph of desire’ elaborated in Seminar V and the important écrit “Subversion of the Subject”: the starting point of the graph is a raw instinctual need which is then retroactively transcoded by the discourse of the Other and transformed into a demand; one is always already inside language, and the very idea of a ‘starting point’ can only be presented mythically). The crucial seminar on this topic is the unpublished Seminar IX L’Identification (1961-62). Anticipating Deleuze’s major study, there Lacan links together difference, as introduced by the unary trait, the most primitive symbolic element, and repetition, the peculiar insistence of human drives which break with the natural cycle of need and satisfaction. Ultimately, what repeats is difference as such, the rupture instituted by the autonomous order of language with pre-symbolic nature.116

However, in that same seminar Lacan also explicitly situates the subject between two poles, the “idealizing effects of the signifying function” and a “vital immanence” which he warns should not be confused with the “drive” (presumably because the drive cannot be understood outside the ‘idealizing effects’ of the signifier).117 In what consists this second pole? To what extent can ‘vital immanence’ be determined on its own? Against his own predominantly dualistic perspective, Lacan occasionally appears to endorse a kind of biological pre-history of the transcendental subject, as if desire’s dialectic were preceded and prepared by structures found in nature. Such is the conclusion one could draw from his argument that, for example, the symbolic law operates on the naturally occurring division between pleasure and enjoyment (jouissance), as “what binds incoherent life together”;118 or his emphasis on “man’s prematurity at birth” as the evolutionary underpinning of his theory of subjectivity;119 or his assertion that the lack and negativity proper to language find a natural ‘fit’ in the openings and rims of bodily orifices; or his references to the specific characteristics of the human phallus in comparison with penises throughout the animal kingdom—as Jared Diamond notes, the function of relative enormity of the human penis still remains a mystery for evolutionary biologists;120 or his speculations on the homology between his topological figures of subjectivity, like the torus, and embryological structures (the blastosphere); or his musings on the infinite pain pervading nature…121

116 See the session of… SEMINAR IX references…117 Lacan, Seminar IX L’Identification (unpublished), session of 20 December 1961.118 “But it is not the Law itself that bars the subject’s access to jouissance—it simply makes a barred subject out of an almost natural barrier. For it is pleasure that sets limits to jouissance, pleasure as what binds incoherent life together…” Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Écrits, op. cit., p. 696.119 Lacan, “Presentation on Psychic Causality,” Écrits, p. 152; emphasis in original.120 Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 62-64.121 In Seminar XVII Lacan comments on a passage from the Gospel of Matthew, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin” (6:28). To this image of a carefree nature, typically interpreted as hymn to God’s joyful creation and an exhortation to the ‘simple life’, Lacan opposes his own wild speculation. Might it not be the case that the plant suffers from an infinite pain? That far from exhibiting a graceful and harmonious balance, nature is suffused with a terrifying masochistic jouissance? (Seminar XVII, p. 77) Marx and Engels had already ridiculed the pastoral vision of Matthew: “Yes, consider the lilies of the field, how they are eaten by goats, transplanted by ‘man’ into his buttonhole, how they are crushed beneath the immodest embraces of the dairymaid and the donkey-driver!” (The German Ideology in Collected Works Volume 5 1845-1847, New York: International Publishers, 1976, p. 472) But Lacan goes further. Beyond deriding an idealist and conciliatory conception of nature, his suggestion of a pained plant is reminiscent of a Diderot or

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As is well known, the position of Deleuze and Guattari is that of monism or immanence. Sometimes Lacan’s stance is called, in opposition to Deleuzian immanence, a ‘transcendence within immanence’, in reference to the logic of extimacy: at the heart of immanence there is an inaccessible foreign kernel that transcends immanence and prevents it from closing up on itself.122 Evoking the specter of such claustrophobic self-enclosure, Leclaire once remarked about Anti-Oedipus that “The book puts your more perceptive readers in the situation of a single and unique perspective that leaves them feeling absorbed, digested, bound, even negated by the admirable workings of your so-called machine! […] It seems to put the reader in the situation of feeling cornered, by the simple fact of speaking and asking a question.”123 This is the perfect Lacanian rejoinder to Anti-Oedipus: Deleuze and Guattari’s supposedly open and liberated (anti-)system effectively plunges us into the worst hell, a suffocating maternal prison. However, I maintain that Deleuze’s immanence is not really opposed to Lacan’s transcendence-in-immanence. In fact, as I previously argued, it is precisely the aim of Anti-Oedipus to think the genesis of transcendence from out of immanence, representation from production, Oedipus from the blind whirr of partial objects and desiring machines. Transcendence is not simply

Whitehead-style panpsychism where all of nature is alive and teeming with enjoyment. “From the elephant down to the flea […] from the flea down to the sensitive and living molecule which is the origin of all, there is not one speck in the whole of nature that does not feel pain or pleasure.” (D’Alembert’s Dream in Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream transl. Leonard Tancock, London: Penguin, 1966, p. 182) Indeed, Lacan’s darker intimations in Seminar XVII fall squarely in the purview of the romantic Naturphilosophie of Schelling or the putrefying, self-destructive nature of Sade.

Lest we think that this passage is a mere hapax, it is instructive to note that Lacan repeats the same point in the following seminar: “[The pleasure principle] can only have one meaning, not too much enjoyment. Because the stuff of every enjoyment is close to suffering, that is even how we recognize its finery. If the plant was not manifestly suffering, we would not know that it was alive.” (Seminar XVIII D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, unpublished, session of March 17, 1971) A few years later Lacan reformulates his (Schellingian-Sadeian) hypothesis in a more scientific manner. Again he raises the question of whether nature ‘enjoys’, this time in relation to the pioneering studies of bacterial conjugation conducted by François Jacob and Elie Wollman. Can one speak of enjoyment at the level of the sexual life of bacteria (e.g. the infection of bacteria by the bacteriophage)? Do bacteria too suffer an inconceivable masochistic pain? Here Lacan focuses not on what he now calls the “religious mousse,” the fiery stuff of enjoyment, but the actual regulatory structures at work in living beings. In the case of E. coli K12 (the main subject of Jacob and Wollman’s experiments) the difference between donor (male) and recipient (female) bacteria is determined by a single sex factor F: the presence or absence of this genetic factor determines the sexual character of the bacteria strain. The relation between the different strains, Lacan notes following Jacob and Wollman, is asymmetrical: the F- type is incapable of mutating to the F+ type, except via contact with donor bacteria; conversely, in conjugating with recipient bacteria the F+ type does not mutate to the F- type. The transfer of genetic material is strictly one-way: there is no sexual ‘relation’ or reciprocity, no balanced interchange. Now what interests Lacan is the highly suggestive analogy (or “strange isomorphism” as he puts it) between biological and symbolic structures, the (real) fact that bacterial sexuality is dictated by a single sex factor, and the (symbolic) determination of human sexuality by the presence or absence (+/-) of the phallus. At both levels, what we find is not two positive or substantial (sexual) identities, but rather a disjunction turning on the presence or absence of a single element: in other words, a non-rapport.

Lacan’s comments on Jacob and Wollman are found in Seminar XXI Les non-dupes errent (unpublished), session of April 23, 1974, and D’un Autre à l’autre Le séminaire livre XVI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991), pp. 221-222. Lacan claims to have read Jacob and Wollman’s study in the original English: Sexuality and the Genetics of Bacteria (New York: Academic Press, 1961).122 See Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge: MIT, 2006), pp. 165-166.123 “Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back…” in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, transl. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 221. Originally published in La Quinzaine Litteraire no. 143 (June 16-30, 1972), pp. 15-19.

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opposed to but a necessary part and product of immanence (though this is sometimes not acknowledged by Deleuzians, and sometimes not by Deleuze and Guattari either). What is barred by this approach is the classic Lacanian idea that the symbolic intervenes ‘from out of nowhere’—don’t inquire about its origins!—into a undifferentiated and, in essence, unthinkable real, similar to the Sartrean model of the for-itself negating the inert in-itself. This is what Zizek calls Lacan’s idealism. Now, one should not overlook the great advantages to this scheme, which effectively preempts the idea of a natural adaptation between the subject and the real. Yet this dualism might not be the only or best way to save Lacan’s insights into the successfully dis-adapted character of the human psyche. For the main targets of Lacan’s creationism, Stalinist nature dialectics and teleological evolutionism à la Teilhard de Chardin, are no longer really threats or interesting opponents, and the refrain of the ‘absolute novelty’ of the symbolic is an increasingly weak riposte in the face of contemporary evolutionary theory (like Stephen Jay Gould’s Nietzschean notion of ‘exaptation’).124 Insofar as Zizek asserts in his most recent work the primacy of the real, he moves into a theoretical space occupied by, among others, Deleuze and Guattari. Here a genuine dialogue with Anti-Oedipus is possible.

124 One of the great strengths of Zizek’s work is his confrontation of Lacanian theory with work in the natural and cognitive sciences.

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