THE DELEUZE READER. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas

Deleuze, Gilles. THE DELEUZE READER. Ed. with introduction by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

BIOGRAPHIC AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC

At publication, Boundas was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Trent University, Canada. He edited Deleuze's Logic of Sense and translated Empiricism and Subjectivity.

Acknowledgments, vii

Editor's Instroduction, 1

PART I Rhizome

1. Rhizome Versus Trees, 27

PART II Difference and Repetition

2. What Is Becoming?, 39
3. What Is an Event?, 42
4. What Is Multiplicity?, 49
5. Individuation, 54
6. A Theory of the Other, 59
7. Ethics Without Morality, 69
8. Ethics and the Event, 78
9. The Selective Test, 83,
10.Eternal Recurrence, 90
11.Man and Overman, 95

PART III Desire and Schizoanalysis

12.Pscychoanalysis and Desire, 105
13.Delirium: World-Historical, Not Familial, 115
14.Becoming-Animal, 122
15.The Signs of Madness: Proust, 127
16.What Is Desire?, 136

PART IV Minor Languages and Nomad Art

17.Language: Major and Minor, 145
18.Minor Literature: Kafka, 152
19.Nomad Art: Space, 165
20.Cinema and Space: The Frame, 173
21. Cinema and Time, 180
22.Painting and Sensation, 187
23.The Diagram, 193
24.Music and Ritornello, 201
25.One Manifesto Less, 204

PART V Politics

26.On the Line, 225
27.Capitalism, 235
28.The Three Aspects of Culture, 245
29.Toward Freedom, 253

Notes, 257
Works by Gilles Deleuze, 285
Index, 297

SELECTED SUMMARY NOTES ON THE TEXT

PART III: Desire and Schizoanalysis

12. Pscyhoanalysis and Desire, 105-114.

The first part of this essay traces the changes that altered the original Freudian psychoanalysis. Deleuze saw it moving from the edge to the center of power, justifying itself as a new structure of order. This change involved a reductionism that allowed only a "forced choice" in terms of psychoanalytic categories. He analyzes the change in psychoanalysis from three different angles.

Psychoanalysis changed by displacing its center "from the family to married life." (108) "It sets up between spouses, lovers, or friends rather than between parents and children." This change was social rather than clinical and bore on the way pscychoanalysts built their clientele.
Psychiatry failed to solve the notion of madness, and psychoanalysis linked up with this failure. That is, psychiatry and psychoanalysis both were "accused of treating as insane certain people who are not exactly so, and of not seeing in time the madness of others who clearly are." (109) This led to "a whole 'psychopathology of everyday life.'" This was the world of neurotics, where psychoanalysis "had become interminable...in principle." (109) No cure was ever reached. This led from the contract between client and analyst to statutory fixity. It thus became "a lifelong affair." (110) Psychoanalysis aspired to be an "official language" in cahoots with linguistics.
The theory itself changed. It no longer sought significant symptoms as the externally distinguishable "signified." It turned instead to looking for symptoms in the signifier (not the signified). This gave psychoanalysis "its own references" with "no more use for an external 'referent.' Everything that happens in psychoanalysis in the analyst's consulting room is true." (110/111) D. likens the analyst to a journalist: "he creates the event."
"When it [psychoanalysis] discovers the signifier, it appeals to a specifically psychoanalytic order (the symbolic order in opposition to the imaginary order of the signified), whose only need is itself, because it is statutory or structural...." (111)

Deleuze saw the attempt of psychoanalysis to become the official formation of power as a failure. It was failing because the forces of life and creativity were "fleeing" it by "talking, thinking, acting, and becoming in other ways." (112)

Deleuze implicitly aligns psychoanalysis ("Oedipus") with the officialdom it was striving to become. He contrasts this with the idea of desire in Anti-Oedipus, which he wrote with Felix Guattari. Mainly he says that the idea of "the priest" (officialdom) is that desire is constituted as lack--"the holy castration, the split subject, the death drive, the strange culture of death." (112) Desire from that perspective is a bridge between subject and object: "the subject of desire cannot but be split, and the object lost in advance." (113)

Over against this psychoanalytic-official concept of desire, Deleuze places his idea that "desire was beyond those personological or objectal coordinates." (113) Desire, instead, is a process. It "unrolled a plane of consistence, a field of immanence, a 'body without organs.'" (113) Desire does not set up "lack" as its mode and does not seek an object to fill that lack. "Far from directing itself toward an object, desire can only be reached at the point where someone no longer searches for or grasps an object any more than he grasps himself as subject." (113) Desire as Deleuze sees it includes "voids" but not "lacks" and that leads him to associate it with Zen. Then he proceeds to characterize desire in various ways. You already have it, but you have to construct it. It is Nietzsche's "will to power." It is "grace." It does not involve the resentment and bad conscience of the "crooners of castration."

Significance of Psychoanalysis and Desire

Deleuze's attack in this short essay parallels the attack he and Guattari mounted against the entire edifice of Freud in Anti-Oedipus. If we think of the symbolic dualism of Freudian psychology as a central feature of modernist thought, D's contrary argument represents a vigorous opposition to modernism. Deleuze's idea of desire as a process beyond subject/object gives us an essential feature of postmodern sensibility.

QUOTABLE QUOTES

SIGNIFICANCE, EVALUATION, AND RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORK

CAVEAT: Work will resume on this incomplete file.

13 February 1999

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