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Susan Sellers, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 166–79.
Critchley, Emily (2010), ‘When I say I believe women’, in Infinite Difference, ed.
Carrie Etter, Exeter: Shearsman, pp. 177–84.
Culler, Jonathan (1982), On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1982), Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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Irigaray, Luce (1993), An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Irigaray, Luce (2002), The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček, London: Continuum.
Jones, Ann Rosalind (1981), ‘Writing the body: toward an understanding of “Écriture Féminine” ’, Feminist Studies, 7: 2, 247–63.
Joyce, James (1966), Letters, vol. II & III, ed. R. Ellman, New York, NY: Viking.
Kristeva, Julia (1982), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez, Oxford: Blackwell.
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Chapter 7
Schiz oanalysis: An Incomplete Project
Ian Buchanan
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scHiZoanalYsis
There is no straightforward way to say what schizoanalysis is. The problem
is not so much that the question is not answered by Deleuze and Guattari
or that it is somehow unanswerable; rather the problem is that it has sev-
eral answers. Unwilling to provide any kind of ‘formula’ or ‘model’ that
would enable us to simply ‘do’ schizoanalysis as a tick-box exercise in which everything relates inexorably to one single factor (e.g. the family), which is what they thought psychoanalysis had become, Deleuze and Guattari
observe a quite deliberate strategy of providing multiple answers to the
questions their work raises. Guattari’s insistence that schizoanalysis is a form of meta-modelling makes it clear that this supple approach is quite
deliberate. Meta-modelling is something like the ‘scenario planning’ utilised by ‘risk managers’ in complex organisations who try to foresee and ‘manage’
the variety of possible transformations an institution such as a university might undergo if circumstances changed (e.g. how would it cope with an
earthquake?). Meta-modelling tries to grapple with the realm of ‘what might happen’ that constantly dogs the realm of ‘what is happening’. Deleuze
and Guattari’s elaborate system of new terms and concepts (many of them
contrived from obscure literary sources) is of a piece with this strategy of providing multiple answers to basic questions and should be seen as deliberately guarding against the reductive tendencies of the ‘practically-minded’.
As I will explain in more detail in what follows, one has to read Deleuze
and Guattari’s work with an eye toward the resonances (which is not to say
equivalences) between their many ideas and from that develop a ‘machine’
that can be put to new purposes. This is not to say schizoanalysis is either incoherent or impractical, as many of its detractors are quick to claim, but to insist that its practice cannot be divorced from its theory and that to engage with one it is necessary to engage with the other.
Schizoanalysis can usefully be considered an ‘incomplete project’ because
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it exists in a state of ‘permanent revolution’. Throughout Deleuze and
Guattari’s lifetime it was subjected to ongoing construction and modifica-
tion in light of both the new theoretical problems its own development threw up and the constantly shifting and changing social and political circumstances it encountered. One can see this very clearly in the transition from Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus in which the crucial concept of the desiring-machine is abandoned in favour of the assemblage. Deleuze and
Guattari even admit that they are not sure that each of them used terms
like the body without organs in the same way as each other. This is why
Deleuze and Guattari often say ‘everything begins in the middle’ – there is no step-by-step way of applying schizoanalysis because life itself is not like that. My point is that it is no denigration of schizoanalysis to describe it as an incomplete project. Indeed, it joins some very illustrious company in this regard – Walter Benjamin’s arcades project is incomplete, as is Karl Marx’s capital project and so too Hegel’s philosophical project, at least according to Fredric Jameson, who is something of a connoisseur of the incomplete
project. The incompleteness of these projects owes nothing to the premature deaths of the respective authors – the projects are incomplete because they are intrinsically ‘unfinishable’. How, for instance, could one ever be done analysing the inner workings of capital when capital itself is so volatile?
Having said that, each of these unfinished projects is, in some paradoxical way, the richer for being unfinished and unfinishable, because they have
inspired countless attempts to finish them and in the process have given rise to productive reworkings that keep the projects alive for new generations of readers. In this light I am even tempted to say that schizoanalysis is almost the poorer for the fact that it is not widely regarded as an incomplete project.
To say schizoanalysis is an incomplete project is to acknowledge, first
of all, the glaring fact that nowhere in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings do they explain exactly how one should do schizoanalysis. While it is clear that Deleuze and Guattari intend their work to be a resource to action – in interviews they describe it as an exercise in pop philosophy, by which they mean it should be treated as a kind of self-help apparatus – it is not clear just what kind of a resource it is. The conclusion of Anti-Oedipus defends its lack of a model or programme to follow on the grounds that it is not speaking
for anyone or anything – if schizoanalysis is a revolution, and Deleuze and Guattari patently want us to see it as such, it is nevertheless a revolution without either a name or identity or even a specific goal, save that we should
‘liberate’ ourselves (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 380).1 But that does not
mean we should give up trying to develop a schizoanalytic methodology
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say schizoanalysis is an incomplete project – no matter how difficult it is to extrapolate a method for doing schizoanalysis from Deleuze and Guattari’s work, without the constant attempt to do so their thought is literally inert.
By failing to try and complete schizoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari scholars are missing an opportunity to realise schizoanalysis and are thereby condemning it to live on in a ghostly and increasingly insubstantial way, to adapt Theodor Adorno’s famous pronouncement on the fate of philosophy itself
(Adorno 1973: 3). Schizoanalysis’ potential is unrealised, in other words,
precisely because it is assumed that its theoretical development is complete; conversely, the more we consider schizoanalysis to be incomplete in its
development the better the position we are in to actually realise its potential.
In his review of François Dosse’s biography of Deleuze and Guattari,
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, Peter Osborne makes a different, but not unrelated claim concerning schizoanalysis’ status today.
He observes that Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus
remain to be adequately received, despite the millions of words of intro-
ductory summaries and secondary exposition to which they have been
subjected by the middle tier of an academic publishing industry that is
tending increasingly towards its ‘real subsumption’ to capital via authorial branding. That is, they have yet to become the enabling conditions of
theoretically significant new productions. There is, in the way there are
thriving fields of post-Foucauldian study, for example. There is, largely,
simply fetishistic terminological repetition. (Osborne 2011: 151)
Unlike the self-serving critiques of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, which
read more like the declamations of jealous rivals than genuine philosophical engagements, Osborne’s comments cut to the quick. Leaving aside his tart
snipe at ‘middle tier’ academic publishers, which reeks of ressentiment and is in any case simply irrelevant, Osborne’s claim that there is no post-Deleuze-and-Guattarianism is a serious one. Although he does not offer any evidence in support of this claim, its ‘truth’, if you will, is not hard to discern in the secondary literature, which is, as Osborne implies, overwhelmingly focused
on the basic task of explaining Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts. Osborne
blames the obscurity of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing for this weakness in the secondary literature, but this is at best only a partial answer. Certainly the obscurity of Derrida’s writing, for example (but one could just as well say the same of Nancy’s, Rancière’s or Irigaray’s writing), does not seem to have had any significant limiting effect on either the creativity or productivity of commentators. The question we are left with is how does one realise the
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schizoanalytic project? My answer, in brief, is that our approach must be to try to complete it, to finish the unfinishable as it were.
Perhaps the best way to do this is to briefly turn back the clock and retrace the steps of schizoanalysis’ development. Schizoanalysis is the result of one of the most productive collaborations between two critical theorists of the twentieth century. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari began corresponding
with one another in April of 1969, but did not actually meet until June that same year when they were introduced by Deleuze’s former student from
the University of Lyon, Jean-Pierre Muyard, who happened to be working
as a psychiatrist at the private psychiatric clinic La Borde, where Guattari worked as an administrator. Deleuze was in touch with Muyard because
he was interested in following up on the theoretical speculations he had
made about how schizophrenics use language in The Logic of Sense and, as fate would have it, Guattari had recently given a lecture on that topic
for Jacques Lacan’s seminar, later published as ‘Machine and structure’
(in Guattari 1984), drawing on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. According to Deleuze and Guattari’s biographer François Dosse, ‘Guattari and Deleuze immediately connected. Guattari’s
conversation was full of topics that interested Deleuze, such as mental
illness, La Borde, and Lacan …’ (Dosse 2010: 3). Both men were at turning
points in their lives – Guattari was restless and dissatisfied with Lacanian psychoanalysis, while Deleuze was casting about for his next project. In their different ways, both felt that psychoanalysis had made a fundamental wrong
turn when Freud ‘discovered’ Oedipus. And it was on this basis that they
agreed to work together despite their very different professions and very
different backgrounds. Because Deleuze was already a well-established full
professor of philosophy, he is generally credited with the ‘senior’ role in their collaboration, with Guattari consigned to some junior helpmeet role when
not ignored altogether. That the truth was very different to this is not that hard to see if one simply reads their work attentively.
There are two clichés about the collaboration. The first, spouted by the
likes of Alain Badiou, Manuel DeLanda and Slavoj Žižek is that Guattari’s
wild thought contaminated the purity of Deleuze’s philosophy. Against this
obvious injustice, Deleuze offers two quite beautiful images that put their working relationship into its proper perspective: first, he describes Guattari as a diamond miner and himself as a diamond polisher; second, he compares
Guattari to the ocean, characterised by endless movement, and himself to
a hill that appears like an island amidst the sea (Dosse 2010: 7, 10). No one can fail to notice that the works Guattari wrote with Deleuze are superior
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must also be said that the pieces Guattari wrote on his own are in many ways more inventive and more experimental than anything co-signed by Deleuze
(the restless ocean at work). The second widely held cliché is that Guattari politicised Deleuze, the implication being that before he met Guattari he
was somehow apolitical. That this is patently untrue can be gleaned from his writings about Palestine, among other topics, which show a long awareness
of and keen concern about day-to-day political issues. Along the same lines, it is often said that Guattari was the activist while Deleuze was the mandarin, aloof where the other was engaged. But this misunderstands activism, making it seem that the only form of political engagement is that which takes
place in the streets, which is not only false but also fundamentally anti-
intellectual. It implies that thinking, making new concepts, creating new
ideas and modes of being are not in themselves revolutionary acts, which is precisely the opposite of what Deleuze and Guattari’s entire oeuvre argues!
Of the two, Guattari seems to have been the most prolific in terms of the
invention of new concepts. As Deleuze explained to his Japanese translator
Kuniichi Uno:
I have never met anyone who is so creative, or who produces more ideas.
And he never stops tinkering with his ideas, fine-tuning them, changing
their terms. Sometimes he gets bored with them, he even forgets about
them, only to rework and reshuffle them later. (Deleuze 2006: 238)
For example, the concept of the desiring-machine, which was abandoned
in the writing up of A Thousand Plateaus, returns without explanation or clarification in Chaosmosis (Guattari 1995: 52). As one might expect of someone described as being like the sea, ‘always in motion’, Guattari’s work is studded with new concepts, not all of them as successful or coherent as
those he produced in collaboration with Deleuze (Deleuze 2006: 237). Some
of these less successful concepts appear to be experimental sketches for
concepts that would be worked out more satisfactorily in the collaborative
work. Others, and these are the most problematic, appear to be attempts
to take existing concepts in new directions – here I am thinking of the way Guattari uses the concept of the body without organs in his diaries (Guattari 2006: 330). But as Deleuze himself notes, even those moments where they
seem to be at cross-purposes are instructive in their own way. As Deleuze
puts it: ‘From time to time we have written about the same idea, and have
noticed later that we have not grasped it at all in the same way: witness
