Deleuze and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Essays on Deleuze's Debate with Psychoanalysis

Preface: Desire and Schizophrenia

7 Preface: Desire and Schizophrenia Leen De Bolle Gilles Deleuze is well-known as a philosopher who has profoundly and extensively debated with psychoanalysis. These discussions are situated in the aftermath of the revolutionary climate of May ’68. In spite of his detailed and far reaching debates with psychoanalytical theory, Deleuze can hardly be reduced to a critic of psychoanalysis alone. The universe in which he thinks and writes is chaotic, divergent, heterogeneous, and plural. It is a universe consisting of a variety of concepts, authors, ideas, and traditions. Not only philosophy, but also many other disciplines, are present throughout Deleuze’s oeuvre: literature, poetry, mathematics, physics, biology, theatre, dance, architecture, and so on. All of these disciplines have their own points of view or different perspectives. Instead of being opposed to each other or finding themselves in contradiction to one another, however, all of these disciplines contribute to the rich patchwork of Deleuze’s rhizomatic style. The rhizome is a subterranean root that branches off into many directions without a beginning or an end. The different disciplines, authors, or systems make up the many different entrances or exits of the rhizome. Nevertheless, Deleuze is—like Henri Bergson—convinced of the fact that an important author always thinks through one and the same idea. A great author formulates an idea and remains loyal to it, exploring and refining this idea through his entire oeuvre. This could also be said of Deleuze. In spite of the divergent directions of his thinking, the rhizomatic pluralism, the many references to a variety of disciplines and authors, the nervous and extremely dense style of writing, he remains loyal to one and the same intuition. Not only his early works, but also the later ones, are impregnated with the same idea: philosophy needs to be liberated from the systems or those moments that restrain it: the one, the truth, the good, the object, the subject, God, or man. Deleuze’s philosophy is always situated in the sphere of free and unbound thinking that is released from the burden of representation, of the primacy of the cogito, of intentional consciousness, of phenomenology, of pathology, of the Oedipus-complex, and so on. This all fits very well with what Deleuze calls his ‘nomad philosophy.’ The nomad is the one, par excellence, who is freed from a fixed place, a fixed identity. During his travels, the nomad has to create his identity over and over again. The nomad breaks out of the given orders, Leen De Bolle 8 the institutional settings, and so forth. He carries his roots on his back. He has no origin, no native country. This absolute liberation can easily be associated with the revolutionary context of May ’68. One can hardly deny that Deleuze was a product of his time, but as is the case with all great thinkers, his original style of thinking and his profound discussions with all kinds of authors in the history of philosophy show that his work transgresses the boundaries of the historical context. His discussions with psychoanalysis should be seen in the wider context of a great thinker who has invented his own style of writing, his own vocabulary, and his own philosophical system. It is true that psychoanalysis became the companion, the rival, and the intimate enemy of Deleuze’s philosophy. But times have changed, and nowadays it is interesting to see what we can still learn from these earlier discussions. This volume consists of various contributions that shed new or different lights on them. Each contribution is a different point of view or a different entrance into the ‘rhizomatic’ thinking of Deleuze. But let us, first of all, by way of introduction, have a closer look at the fundamental issues that are at stake in the debate between Deleuze and psychoanalysis. To the negative sphere of psychoanalysis, the pathological figures, traumas, sad youths, repressions, projections, compulsive behaviours, and unfulfilled desires, Deleuze opposes the creative and productive forces of the unconscious. Instead of representing the unconscious, he finds it much more interesting to explore the wild and uncontrolled productions of the unconscious without repressing them. In his early works, he shows a great deal of interest in all sorts of authors or artists who do justice to the creative forces of the unconscious: Bergson, Nietzsche, Leibniz, Artaud, Bacon, Beckett, and Proust. Many concepts that are mentioned both in the theories of Deleuze and in psychoanalysis, such as repetition, remembrance, desire, pleasure, death instinct, perversion, schizophrenia, and so...