The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 28
“bodies without organs” ’ (Deleuze and Parnet 2006: 17). Other concepts,
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on old concepts as well as entirely new trajectories. The reality is, then, that some of Guattari’s experiments evolve into workable concepts and others
do not and it seems to me we have to be prepared to set aside those concepts which either confound the conceptual matrix at the core of schizoanalysis
or, what amounts to the same thing, fail to add to it in any meaningful way.
Guattari’s political activism was informed by his clinical practice. He was of the view that psychiatry cannot be regarded as a stand-alone discipline, or practice, and that it must incorporate everything that makes life the complex reality that it is. And he did mean literally everything – one of the things that makes reading Deleuze and Guattari so difficult is the astonishing
scope of the materials they pull together, which ranges from philosophy
and literature to biology, physics and higher mathematics. This is especially true of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) which bears the traces of the active involvement of the dozens of participants in the seminars Deleuze and Guattari taught together in the mid 1970s. Guattari seems to
have been a kind of intellectual vortex, constantly drawing in new ideas, new materials, new concepts and so on, with an almost relentless appetite and
capacity for ‘the new’. The concepts Guattari would go onto invent, such as the assemblage and the rhizome, reflect precisely this approach to the world of inquiry and they aim to give us the analytic means of describing the way the subject is a product of multiple forces both internal and external, the conscious and the unconscious. However, while it is clear that Guattari’s
work is keenly informed by his own practical experience – and Dosse tells
us that it was precisely his practical experience with schizophrenics that
intrigued Deleuze, although he was apparently horrified at the idea of meeting an actual schizophrenic himself – we know very little about Guattari’s
day-to-day practice as a clinician. Unfortunately, even with the aid of
François Dosse’s generally quite detailed biography we are still very much in the dark with regards the actual practice of schizoanalysis. He provides only the scantiest details of Guattari’s clinical career, which is a real pity because it would be extremely interesting to know how Guattari treated his patients.
What Dosse does tell us raises some quite important questions that one
hopes future research in the area will be able to settle. There are, I think, two questions in urgent need of clarification. Firstly, Dosse informs us that Guattari worked as an administrator at the private psychiatric clinic La Borde founded by Jean Oury, which specialised in the treatment of schizophrenia.
Opened in 1953, La Borde aimed to provide a radically new form of care
which in the jargon of the times attempted to ‘de-institutionalize the institution’. Sometimes associated with the so-called ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement
led by the UK-based psychiatrists R. D. Laing and David Cooper, La Borde
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was much more cautious in its approach and tended to view many of the
reforms advocated by ‘anti-psychiatry’ as both dangerous and irresponsible.
Guattari’s review of Mary Barnes’s autobiographical account of her treat-
ment in Kingsley Hall, which like La Borde was an experimental de-insti-
tutionalised institution for schizophrenics, makes apparent the theoretical and practical differences between his own thinking and that of Laing and
Cooper. In Guattari’s view, the situation at Kingsley Hall remained all too Oedipal, all too locked within psychoanalysis’ familialist framework, which constantly seeks to explain the significance of present actions by reference to a particular account of childhood and which focuses exclusively on the
libidinal interactions between a child and his or her parents. Guattari also observes that Kingsley Hall does not take into account the matter of money
and for him this is decisive: one cannot get away from Oedipus, he argues, if one does not interrogate the nexus between psychoanalysis and capitalism
(Guattari 1995: 177–85). These kinds of comments seem to indicate a pro-
found practical knowledge on Guattari’s part concerning the treatment of
schizophrenics, yet Dosse says nothing at all about this aspect of Guattari’s professional life. We learn nothing at all about Guattari’s interaction with patients from Dosse. Indeed, he almost makes it seem he did not have any
clinical interaction with patients, which goes against the established view of Guattari’s career (which may now turn out to have been nothing more than
conjecture in any case).
The second area calling for clarification is Dosse’s claim that Guattari
maintained a separate private practice as a psychoanalyst. What he does not clarify is whether Guattari followed his Lacanian training or utilised his
own schizoanalytic ideas. If the latter is the case, then it would be invaluable to know exactly what those ideas were and more particularly how they were
applied in a clinical setting. What did Guattari actually say to his patients?
This, it seems to me, is an incredibly important question and it is quite
surprising that Dosse does not pursue it. What we know is this: Guattari
received formal training in psychoanalysis from Jacques Lacan, France’s
most important interpreter of Freud, achieving the status of analyste membre (member analyst) licensing him as a pyschotherapist. Although he remained
a member of Lacan’s school, the Ecole freudienne de Paris, from its incep-
tion until its dissolution in 1980 shortly before the master’s death, Guattari’s relationship to Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis was at best ambivalent.
The publication of Guattari’s notebooks, Écrits pour L’anti-Œdipe (2004; The Anti-Oedipus Papers, 2006), has made it clear just how strained relations were between them, especially after the publication of Anti-Oedipus (even though that work was, in the words of its authors, designed to save
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Lacan from the Lacanians). Guattari wanted to work with Deleuze precisely
because he thought Deleuze could help him resolve a number of theoretical
impasses he found in Lacan’s work (Deleuze 1995: 13–15). In particular,
Guattari rejected the idea that the unconscious is structured like a language, which is the cornerstone of Lacan’s structuralist re-interpretation of Freud.
This is why Deleuze’s book The Logic of Sense interested him so much, it offered a much richer account of the relationship between language and the
unconscious than Lacan’s work did.
When he met Guattari, Deleuze had recently completed his Doctorat
d’État (required by the French academic system for progression to full
professor) at the University of Lyon, consisting of two book-length works,
both published in 1968 – Différence et repetition ( Difference and Repetition) and Spinoza et le problème de l’expression ( Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza). Some measure of the impact of these works can be gleaned from the fact that it was in his 1970 review of Difference and Repetition and the book Deleuze published a year later, Logique du Sens (1969, Logic of Sense), that Foucault made the infamous pronouncement that perhaps one day the
twentieth century would be known as Deleuzian. Deleuze himself did not
take Foucault’s prophecy too seriously; he saw it as a joke, an attempt to
provoke enemies. But even before this, Deleuze had already gained wide-
spread attention with a sequence of short but incisive monographs on David
Hume, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch and Baruch Spinoza that established him as a thinker to be
reckoned with. He is often credited with bringing about a wholesale revival of Nietzsche, an author very much out of favour in France because of the
way his work was appropriated by Nazi ideology. Deleuze would later add to
this already-impressive oeuvre two books on cinema as well as monographs on Gottfried Leibniz, the artist Francis Bacon, and his close friend Michel Foucault. Deleuze himself specified that the presiding aim of his work was to overturn Platonism, a project he adopted from Nietzsche. He meant by this
that philosophy should seek the conditions of real experience in simulacra
(or what he would later call affects and becomings) not simulations (or what he would also call representations; Deleuze 2004: 298).
After their first meeting, Deleuze and Guattari agreed to work together
and over the next few months they met and shared ideas and developed a
work that was simultaneously a critique and a rethinking of both Karl Marx
and Sigmund Freud (particularly the Lacanian interpretation of the latter)
and a synthesis of a new methodology they proposed to call ‘schizoanalysis’.
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for hours at a time, then after several weeks of this Deleuze cut himself
off from the world – including Guattari – and wrote. He showed Guattari
work-in-progress drafts of the manuscript, which the latter commented on,
but without the expectation that Deleuze would necessarily incorporate his
comments. The trust implicit in this process is quite amazing and speaks to the depth of not only their friendship, but their real intellectual connection.
Essentially, then, Deleuze wrote their books on his own, having soaked up as much of their preparatory dialogue as he could. This perhaps accounts for
their amazing consistency of tone, and seamlessness of style and argument;
but what really amazes (and in many cases infuriates) Deleuze’s readers
is just how radically different that tone and style is when compared to his previous works. That the argument remains essentially the same is lost on
most readers. The philosophical purists tend to object to both its extensive use of literature and its foray into contemporary politics, as though to say Deleuze’s philosophical thinking had somehow been corrupted as a consequence. On its publication in 1972, L’Anti-Oedipe ( Anti-Oedipus) was an immediate sensation, but it divided opinion quite sharply between those
like Fredric Jameson who heralded it as a radical intervention and those like Perry Anderson who dismissed it as irrationalist nonsense.
What we know today as schizoanalysis was conceived by Deleuze and
Guattari over the course of the next decade, beginning with the already-
mentioned bestseller Anti-Oedipus and ending with A Thousand Plateaus (1980). In between they wrote a book on Franz Kafka, which despite its
many merits as an intervention into Kafka studies, is ultimately a transitional work that departs from Anti-Oedipus in significant ways, but does not arrive fully at where A Thousand Plateaus begins. Like the book Dialogues (1977), which Deleuze wrote with his friend Claire Parnet as a kind of anti-interview interview and published a few years before A Thousand Plateaus appeared, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975) is best read as a kind of route map that guides the reader in how to approach the conceptual labyrinth of A Thousand Plateaus. In addition to these three books, Deleuze and Guattari also gave several interviews on their work, some of which are collected in
Negotiations (1995), as well as dozens of lectures and seminars, many of which can now be found on the Internet. A decade after A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari wrote another book called What is Philosophy? (1991), but it does not mention schizoanalysis and instead speaks of something they call geophilosophy and though it is not a negation of schizoanalysis – as
Isabelle Stengers (2011) implies – it is nevertheless a very different kind of project from their previous collaborations. It may well be (as Dosse’s
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should perhaps be read as Deleuze’s own attempt to settle accounts with
the discipline of philosophy (Dosse 2010: 456). I would add that if it must be insisted that Deleuze wrote a philosophical last will and testament, as
Giorgio Agamben seems to think, then it is this work, and not the somewhat
incoherent fragment ‘Immanence: a life’ (1995) that was allegedly the last
thing Deleuze wrote before taking his own life, that should be assigned that role (Agamben 1999).
Guattari was not purely practical in his contribution to the development
of schizoanalysis any more than Deleuze was purely philosophical in his. It could perhaps be said he was a theorist who worked with practical problems, but even that has to be taken on faith, in a certain sense, because nowhere in Deleuze and Guattari’s work does one find actual clinical case histories or case studies. In Dialogues Deleuze cites a couple of examples of clinical cases he knew of through Guattari and it seems clear that these actual cases did factor in their thinking. Beyond this, though, there is no direct evidence of the influence of Guattari’s clinical work anywhere in their collaborative writing; nor are there any detailed case analyses in Guattari’s own writings which one might draw on to supplement their collaborative work and fill in
the missing pieces. The resulting impression that schizoanalysis is somehow detached from the actual world of ‘madness’ is compounded by Deleuze
and Guattari’s repeated exclamations that they have never met a schizo. It
may be that they were being ironic in saying this, but the fact is it fits the evidence. The bulk of the case material Deleuze and Guattari refer to is
drawn from written sources, predominantly diaries, letters, memoirs and
fiction (poetry, prose and drama). There are also multiple references to
Freud’s case histories, particularly Little Hans, the Wolfman and Schreber, as well as references to both Melanie Klein’s cases and Lacan’s. Either way, it is still written and not ‘live’ examples they mostly work from, which raises questions about their referential or empirical value. It would be difficult, for example, to determine whether Artaud’s poetry can be said to prove the
existence of the clinical entity referred to as a body without organs in the schizoanalytic literature.
What we know today about schizoanalysis is in fact very limited in scope.
Deleuze and Guattari have not been all that well-served by their commen-
tators, who for the most part seem incapable of seeing the forest for the
trees (I do not exclude myself from the charge). Most attempts to simplify
Deleuze and Guattari’s work, and there have been many, tend to focus on
the tantalising new concepts, some of which have become veritable slogans
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in their thought. In large part this is because most readers take at face value Deleuze and Guattari’s often vituperative rejection of Freud’s writing and
seemingly of psychoanalysis as a whole, as though that were somehow even
possible in a critical age that was in many ways invented by Freud. The fact is, though, Deleuze and Guattari do not reject either the whole of Freud
or the whole of psychoanalysis, nor indeed do they reject parts of Freud or parts of psychoanalysis. They propose rather to re-engineer psychoanalysis
and until it is grasped what exactly that entails their work will never be fully understood and schizoanalysis, their joint invention, will continue to ring hollow (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 82). What exactly did Deleuze and
Guattari want to reengineer in Freud’s work? There is a simple answer to
this question, which holds the key to schizoanalysis and explains why they
lambasted Freud. It has to do with association, which is to say the con-
nections or links we make in our minds between ideas, thoughts, images,
memories, feelings, sensations and all other forms of stimuli both internal and external. Understanding how Deleuze and Guattari’s model of association differs from Freud’s is the key to understanding their entire project. All of their most important concepts pertain to association.
Freud tended to use the term binding ( Bingung) rather than association, but the issue is the same: why does one thought, feeling, memory or sensation seem to go with or somehow belong to another? For example, the whole
of Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu unspools as it does because of the seemingly endless loops of associations that Marcel finds himself entangled in when he dunks his madeleine into his lime-blossom tea. Why does the
narrator draw together the images, the ideas, the reflections, the memories that he does? Is there an underpinning logic to their selection? Deleuze’s
hypothesis is that Proust should be read as a kind of Egyptologist, someone who sets themselves the task of learning a discourse consisting of signs
whose meanings are known only to those capable of using them, to those
select few who have been initiated into their particular mysteries (Deleuze 2000: 91). The figure of Marcel is that of the analyst, but of a type superior to Freud because he does not assume there is an external key to the coded
