Life as a Process of Production

Larry Davidson and Golan Shahar’s paper presents a welcome and timely introduction to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and its relevance to psychopathology. Their paper is welcome because Deleuze’s philosophy has been relatively neglected, particularly within Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Their paper is timely because of the resources Deleuze’s philosophy offers for developing a model of psychopathology that, in being sensitive to individual experiences and in focusing on action and agency rather than deficits, supports the growing international movement towards empowerment of patients (Christodoulou, Fulford, and Mezzich, forthcoming).

In this commentary, I expand on some of the concepts on which Davidson and Shahar draw in their paper and I indicate the rich resource of additional Deleuzean concepts that could support further development of an action model of psychopathology.

Since writing Difference and Repetition, published in 1968, Gilles Deleuze’s project has been to redirect philosophy back to the richness and vitality of the generative forces from which the reality of the world of everyday things, both animate and inanimate, is woven. In contrast to idealistic thought, the aim of which is to displace reality away from experience, Deleuze has consistently sought to engage philosophy directly with the hic et nunc—the here and now. This is the good news that Deleuze never ceases to announce: Reality is not withdrawn to a higher plane outside the world, it is not to be found in thought as an ideal that can never be achieved, it has nothing to do with a game that both reveals and veils a reality that we never reach; to the contrary, reality is a product of the many different forces that work together actively to create everything both within us and outside of us. This ‘metaphysics of difference’ (métaphysique de la différence), as it might be called, a metaphysic of the very wide variety of different forces from which the mosaic of the world is drawn, is not unprecedented in philosophy. But as I have argued elsewhere (Evangelista da Silva 2000,2002), we have to go right back to the great pre-Socratics to find the origins of this metaphysic in their attempts to account for the world without leaving the world.

In their article, Davidson and Shahar have been inspired by Deleuze’s project to explore an action model of psychopathology, a model falling outside the idealist parameters that have traditionally been used to analyze psychic phenomena in terms of the categories of lack, deficit, dysfunction, and mere reaction. It is from the notion of “schizoanalysis” in particular, as developed by Deleuze with his long-term collaborator, the philosopher Felix Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1973), that Davidson and Shahar have been able to conceptualize a model of psychopathology in terms of “desire as opposed to deficit, . . . function as opposed to dysfunction, and . . . the activity of human subjects as opposed to the reactivity of human objects” (Davidson and Shahar 2007, 216). Freudian and even Lacanian psychoanalysis (as in the problem of the Big Other; Deleuze and Guattari 1973, 34), repeat the idealistic conception of desire, defended by Plato in The Banquet (Platon 1950/200AB, 731), as being created by deficit. According to this idealistic model, if there is desire, this is because there is lack. The Platonic lack of an ideal essence (the Good with which one can never come face to face) thus corresponds directly with the psychoanalytic lack of the lost object, which, never found, makes desire a mere generator of phantoms, of substitutes for reality.

The traditional “psychoanalysis of deficit” thus proceeds like modern philosophy: It seeks to establish universal and ideal models from which one tries to comprehend the world of phenomena. What is the result of such an undertaking? Desire is always delayed (out of phase) in relation to such psychoanalytic universals, cited by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1973, 86, 99, 118), as the lost object, the image of the Father (as employed by Freud), and the name of the Father (as in Lacan’s work). In What...