Notes on a Debate "From Within the People"

My first surprise in reading Daniel W. Smith's critique of my Deleuze book is his insistence on how I use Deleuze only in order to "Lacanize" him, not being attentive to Deleuze's precise line of argumentation ... look who's talking! Is, of all philosophers, Deleuze not the one known for his ruthlessly appropriative reading of other philosophers, for using them as vehicles to articulate his line of thought! Linked to this is my second surprise: after outlining his basic point about Lacan and Deleuze (how Deleuze was effectively much closer to Lacan than it may appear, how Anti-Oedipus aims at saving Lacan from Lacanians, etc.), one would expect Smith to confront (critically reject or whatever) my specific reading of Deleuze: the central thesis on two heterogeneous currents in his thought (becoming as the impassive sterility of the event versus becoming as the generative process), the insistence on Deleuze's disavowed proximity not only to Lacan but also to Hegel, and so forth. What we get instead of this is the expanded version of the standard "Deleuzian" party line on Lacan: it is already Lacan who, especially in his late writings, breaks out of the Oedipal constraints, searching for a more direct approach to the texture of the Real; in their Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari merely want to go further (to the end) in this direction. All the principal concepts of Anti-Oedipus, from "body without organs" to flux of desire, are different names for the pre-Oedipal libidinal dynamics of the Real, for a multitude not yet totalized into a One through the Oedipal prohibition.

My reply to this line of thought is that it misses the point of the Lacanian Real: the Real, for Lacan, is in itself thwarted, the name for the gap of a radical "negativity," it stands for a paradoxical (non)entity that has no ontological consistency in itself, but can only be discerned retroactively, from its effects, as their absent Cause. For this reason, for Lacan, to "go to the end" and approach "the Real in itself" is precisely what one should not do. Nowhere is this difference more palpable than in the different ways Lacan and Deleuze deal with the relationship between neurosis (hysteria) and perversion. Deleuze and Guattari ultimately condone the standard "libertarian" approach: neurosis (as exemplified by the feminine hysteria) is a compromise formation, a half-protest against the oppressive Law that simultaneously remains attached to it, while a perverse subject "goes to the end," directly enacting what the neurotic subject is only able to fantasize about. Lacan, however, restores hysteria to its Freudian place of honor, agreeing with Freud that a perversion, far from directly displaying the unconscious, blocks the access to it most thoroughly—nowhere is the unconscious more occluded than in perversion.

In other words, my thesis is that in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze/Guattari do to Lacan what Carl Gustav Jung did to Freud. Remember that for Jung also, the Freudian unconscious was not yet the deeper "real" unconscious, the impersonal domain of collective archetypes; it remained caught in the superficial social and familial web. No wonder, then, that an admiration of Jung is Deleuze's corpse in the closet: the fact that Deleuze borrowed a key term (rhizome) from Jung is not a mere insignificant accident—rather, it points toward a deeper link.¹ In his early text on Sacher-Masoch (1961), Deleuze extensively relies on Jung in his critique of Freud.² His reproach to Freud concerns three clearly interconnected features. First, because of his focus on the figure of the father, Freud neglects the key role of the woman (Mother) in masochism: the masochist contract is a contract with the all-devouring Mother; as such, masochism stages a "regression" toward the earlier period of (individual and collective) history in which women played a crucial role in society—Sacher-Masoch cannot be properly understood without Bachofen. Second, the Freudian unconscious remains the...