Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8bljj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-29T10:56:03.178Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Baroque Structuralism: Deleuze, Lacan and the Critique of Linguistics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2017

Samo Tomšič
Affiliation:
Humboldt University in Berlin
Boštjan Nedoh
Affiliation:
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Andreja Zevnik
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Get access

Summary

Nowadays it is still common to see Deleuze and Lacan as two rivals standing on entirely opposite shores. The legitimation of this opposition is sought in Deleuze and Guattari's notorious Anti-Oedipus project, whose very name attacks one of the cornerstones of Freudian psychoanalysis, the Oedipal drama of castration and the corresponding notion of negativity. On the other side, Lacan's teaching is said to have pushed structuralism to the extreme, privileging lack and negativity, while also promoting an overall pessimistic vision of politics. However, this perspective could also be inverted. Deleuze and Guattari's project contains a peculiar radicalisation of psychoanalysis, a consequent substitution of the psychological with the schizological: schizo-analysis took a step further in the depsychologisation and deindividualisation of the mental apparatus, or if one prefers, of thinking. Anti-Oedipus pursued the anti-humanist orientation of their ‘arch-rivals’, structuralism and psychoanalysis, whereby it went beyond the boundaries of concepts such as structure and analysis. With Freud, psychoanalysis took the first step by abolishing the metaphysical hypothesis of the soul. The etymology of ‘psychoanalysis’ already contains this point: analysis (decomposition, dissolution, deconstruction) of psyché. Freud's discipline is anti-psychology, which still remains logos of psyche, the science of the soul. With the discovery of the unconscious no soulhypothesis could be sustained any longer, and in this respect Freud indeed produced a ground-breaking epistemological, philosophical and political rupture. From here on the subject could finally be envisaged beyond its anthropomorphic mask: the subject of the unconscious has no human face; it is a decentralised, constitutively alienated and split entity. Yet, Freud did not go beyond the split that the abolition of the soul revealed in the psychic reality. Consequently, psychoanalysis never made the effort to become more than a royal road to negativity, while other attempts to step out of Freud's shadow only amounted to worse. Jung's mysticism brought about the obscurantist regression, while the Anglo-Saxon development continues to represent a conformist regression in accordance with the demands of the free market ideology. Then there is Wilhelm Reich, the bastard psychoanalyst, who in an exaggerated and somewhat delusional way demonstrated that there is something beyond the schism of the mental apparatus discovered by Freud.

Type
Chapter
Information
Lacan and Deleuze
A Disjunctive Synthesis
, pp. 123 - 140
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×