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Criticism 46.4 (2004) 635-650



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The Inverse Side of the Structure:

Žižek on Deleuze on Lacan*

Purdue University

In an interview in 1995, shortly before his death, Gilles Deleuze was asked by French scholar Didier Eribon about his relationship with Jacques Lacan. In response, Deleuze told the following story:

Lacan noticed me when he devoted a session of his seminar to my book on Sacher-Masoch [1967].1 I was told—although I never knew anything more than this—that he had devoted more than an hour to my book. And then he came to a conference at Lyon, where I was then teaching. He gave an absolutely unbelievable lecture.... It was there that he uttered his famous formula, " Psychoanalysis can do everything except make an idiot seem intelligible. " After the conference, he came to our place for dinner. And since he went to bed very late, he stayed a long time. I remember: it was after midnight and he absolutely had to have a special whisky. It was truly a nightmare, that night.

My only great encounter with him was after the appearance of Anti-Oedipus [1972].2 I'm sure he took it badly. He must have held it against us, Félix and me. But finally, a few months later, he summoned me—there's no other word for it. He wanted to see me. And so I went. He made me wait in his antechamber. It was filled with people, I didn't know if they were patients, admirers, journalists.... He made me wait a long time—a little too long, all the same—and then he finally received me. He rolled out a list of all his disciples, and said that they were all worthless [ nuls ] (the only person he said nothing bad about was Jacques-Alain Miller). It made me smile, because I recalled Binswanger telling the story of a similar scene: Freud saying bad things [End Page 635] about Jones, Abraham, etc. And Binswanger was shrewd enough to assume that Freud would say the same thing about him when he wasn't there. So Lacan was speaking, and everyone was condemned, except Miller. And then he said to me, "What I need is someone like you" [ C'est quelqu'un comme vous qu'il me faut .].3

This is a revealing anecdote, for at least two reasons. First, one might say that the disciple Lacan wound up "getting" was not Gilles Deleuze but Slavoj Žižek (among others), which puts Žižek's encounter with Deleuze in Organs without Bodies (hereafter, OB) in an interesting retrospective light. Second, and more importantly, Deleuze's personal encounter with Lacan took place after the publication of Anti-Oedipus (hereafter, AO) in 1972. Anti-Oedipus presents, among other things, a famous critique (though not rejection) of psychoanalysis, which Deleuze and Guattari pursued, in part, by means of an engagement with Lacan's work. In this sense one could say that Deleuze was indeed a Lacanian, but in the exact same manner that he was a Spinozist or a Leibnizian: he was neither a slavish follower nor a dogmatic reader of Lacan, but followed the internal trajectory of Lacan's thought to the point where he would push it to its "differential" limit (Deleuze's all-too-well-known image of philosophical "buggery," which makes thinkers produce their own "monstrous" children). Despite Deleuze's initial worries about Lacan's reaction to Anti-Oedipus, Lacan obviously did not dismiss the book. On the contrary, not only was his reading of the book the apparent basis of his "summons" to Deleuze, but he even seems to have been influenced by Anti-Oedipus in his own thinking. Žižek himself suggests that Lacan's later work (after Seminar XI in 1964) is marked by an increased interest in the theory of the drives and anti-Oedipal themes (OB 102, 176). Given the complex status of the drives that one finds elaborated in Anti-Oedipus (for instance, the thesis that the "drives are...

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