Deleuze and Ricœur: Disavowed Affinities and the Narrative Self (review)

A book on the self by a practising psychiatrist might facilitate much needed dialogue between post-structuralist philosophy and the medical establishment. Sheerin has, at least explicitly, surprisingly little to say about the more habitual topic of the unconscious, however, and, in the broader context of his otherwise beautiful presentation, what he says about it is not always clear. The work's principal aim is to use Deleuze to shore up the simultaneous flimsiness and rigidity of Paul Ricœur's reduction of the self to narrative. Deleuze's status as the thinker of the ungrounding of the self makes this something of a paradoxical undertaking, and there a number of difficulties. Yet Sheerin has produced a striking and valuable account of a concept that, for all its undoubted importance, is frequently treated only by way of shorthand, dismissed as a modern philosophical dogma we can simply do without. In addition to sustained and thorough readings of both Deleuze and Ricœur, he draws on a range of illustrations from film and literature, notably the Irish legend of Mad Sweeney, but also Blade Runner, whose presence serves considerably to anchor intricate philosophical argumentation. The multiple literary and theoretical voices in the text capture the rearticulation of the self around multiple, overlapping, provisional narratives, even multiple selves, weaved together through the imagination. Following a lucid account of the Kantian conception of selfhood, Sheerin takes as his point of departure Ricœur's reproach of Heidegger. Ricœur rejects the latter's overemphasis on being-toward-death, the uncertainties of the future, at the expense of the formation of identity through the inheritance and narration of past events. Sheerin argues that to account for the birth and infancy that precede the ability to narrate, phenomenological hermeneutics must be supplemented by an 'ontogenesis' of narrative. This leads him to the Deleuzian virtual, a transcendental field of experience that does not ordinarily yield itself to representation. The virtual becomes the site of multiple pre-narrative selves that introduce difference and multiplicity into a thinking of narrative difference, allowing narrative to come into existence at the interface between virtual and actual. Deleuze's references to larval selves and an 'âme' existing on the plane of immanence underwrite the argument, and Sheerin reads him fairly literally, despite drawing attention to the (anti-metaphorical) philosopher's own recourse to metaphor. The case for some sense of virtual selfhood is made quite rigorously, but Deleuzians would still want to take issue with what will be seen as an anthropomorphism of his constitutive antihumanism. The discussion of virtual ideas, for example, at times gives the impression that they inhere in consciousness, as opposed to being the intensities from which the organization of consciousness emerges. Related to this, perhaps not enough is said about Deleuze's identification of the virtual with the unconscious and how this applies to Lacan, sporadically invoked in relation to an underdeveloped idea of jouissance féminine. Sheerin thus provides the analytical rigour that the concept of selfhood deserves, but teeters towards reintroducing it via the back door.