Background for Deleuze and Analysis
Pulsating Between Lack and Excess for a New Kind of Philosophy
Deleuze and Analysis is a year-long/ten session course that starts January 15th. To learn more or to sign up, see:
What will structure the background of the upcoming course at Philosophy Portal “Deleuze and Analysis” led by Prof.
is the concept of “pulsation” at the “diamond punch” (◊) of “lack” ($) and “excess” (a). This is not just an “abstract concept” but a “concrete conceptual result” of a 44 year “pulsation” that Blake himself has lived in the in-between space of Lacan and Deleuze, psychoanalysis and philosophy.Blake’s story starts with an immersion in post-modern French theory that includes a foundational understanding of the Freudo-Lacanian tradition. For Blake, all of the key thinkers in post-modern French theory, from Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, were all also fundamentally immersed in this tradition. In this way, we might tentatively explore or entertain the hypothesis that what we call post-modern French theory is a response internal to philosophy that is trying to work out the destabilising consequences of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis. We might also suggest that this response internal to philosophy of the destabilising consequences of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis is something that the rest of philosophy, as well as culture in general, has yet to process.
From my vantage point, this is an important hypothesis to explore/entertain, insofar as there is a tendency for emerging philosophers today to react/recoil from post-modern French theory back to “more solid ground” (either in a conservative form of German Idealism, or further back, to ancient philosophies of Plato and Aristotle). The form of this reaction/recoil is often in the form perverse disavowal:
“I know very well that post-modern French theory introduces something fundamentally new that I need to grapple with, but nevertheless I am going to return to [insert conservative form of German Idealism or ancient Aristotelian/Platonic philosophy] anyway.”
But what if this reaction/recoil to “more solid ground” is a failure internal to philosophy itself to really understand the consequences of psychoanalysis for philosophy, and what if the seed-form of that understanding is already contained in the work of Deleuze, as well as Deleuze-Guattari?
Blake’s work is here helpful and instructive to guide us in the exploration and entertainment of this hypothesis insofar as his being itself responded to the rupture between Deleuze-Guattari and psychoanalysis with the disposition of “both-and”. In other words, after the publication of Deleuze and Guattari’s infamous book Anti-Oedipus, there was the tendency to:
either attempt to retain a faith to Lacan vs. Deleuze-Guattari,
or to convert to Deleuze-Guattari over Lacan
This “either-or” disposition is the result of, for Blake, a complex lexical, political, and conceptual strategy on behalf of the followers of both Lacan and Deleuze-Guattari (which I will expand upon shortly).
However, first and foremost, what Blake’s “both-and” “pulsation” between Deleuze-Guattari and Lacan teaches us, or what he shows might be possible here, is:
neither a (1) wishy-washy perspective that Deleuze-Guattari and Lacan are saying the same thing,
nor a (2) schizophrenic divide applying the two thinkers in different contexts,
but rather a (3) striving for a new way of looking/thinking that pushes philosophy forward as a sublation of psychoanalysis as opposed to a recoil to a before-times (i.e. conservative German Idealist position, or an ancient philosophical position)
For Blake, this new way of looking/thinking involves how we might think of difference and desire, on the one hand; and how we might think of the signifier and jouissance, on the other hand; as constitutive of writing and performing as philosophers.
This pathway has not yet been developed internal to philosophy, according to Blake, because of the way in which the rupture between Deleuze-Guattari and Lacan was handled by academic politics. He suggests that a fundamental rift has opened up:
on the imaginary level of academic writing in regards to establishing the ontological differences between Deleuze-Guattari and Lacan’s project;
on the symbolic level of micro-politics in regards to institutional desire demanding the separation of their projects; and
on the real level of conceptual directionality in terms of the future of philosophy establishing a zero-sum situation or unproductive/uncreative deadlock
Blake claims that Lacan was interested in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus project, considering they were not simple minded followers but creative re-inventors; but at the same time, Blake claims Lacan didn’t totally understand Deleuze and Guattari’s project either. Also key here, is that Lacan’s followers held the disposition to greet Anti-Oedipus with silence and let it die away. On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari were trying to develop a different vocabulary from the psychoanalytic tradition, not only to mask the connection with Freud and Lacan, but also to develop a new conceptual line internal to philosophy. This is at the heart of the fundamental rift articulated above in the imaginary of academic writing, the symbolic of institutional micro-politics, and the real of conceptual directionality.
What needs to be better understood is the way in which Lacan is explicitly working on the shoulders of a giant (Freud), whereas Deleuze and Guattari are explicitly or not so explicitly working on the double shoulders of Freud and Lacan. According to Blake, in the same way that Lacan is trying to take what is most radical in Freud (e.g. starting point of the death drive) and radicalise it further from Freud’s institutional followers (e.g. ego psychologists); Deleuze and Guattari are trying to take what is most radical in Freud and Lacan (e.g. excess of the drive) and radicalise it further from Lacan’s institutional followers (e.g. “Lack-anians”).
To be precise, Deleuze and Guattari sought to critique and condemn the use of lack (as well as the synonyms which circulate around it: crack, cut, abyss, void, gap) by Lacanians (or “Lack-anians”) as a dogma where “desire = lack” (which can be traced back to Socrates). Consequently, for Deleuze and Guattari, the interpretive tradition of Freud and Lacan had turned rotten and needed to begin again somewhere in the middle (perhaps in the cut between Freud-Lacan themselves), via a process of radical renaming to find words that work for our time and for philosophy as opposed to for the clinic. Where the interpretive tradition of Freud and Lacan turns rotten for Deleuze and Guattari is in the erecting of a totalising structure or system of signifiers around lack itself.
In contrast to this tendency, Deleuze and Guattari seek to develop a system that foregrounds synonyms for the excessive drive. For Blake, what this project obfuscates is that lack (and its synonyms) are still very much present at the heart of their work, even if only implicitly. Blake gives the example of “desiring machines”, which are often seen as “excessive” but which actually work only because their “flows” (a synonym for excess) break down in “cuts” (a synonym for lack). Here we might point out that the nature of the excess of the drive functions in the “positive-negativity” of cuts/gaps (via perspective shift on what desire thinks of as a pure negativity). Here Blake also suggests that the project of Deleuze and Guattari reaches a kind of re-convergence with Lacan in the work of What Is Philosophy? via an explicit rehabilitation of the negative (which may also be the bridge between Deleuze and Žižek’s work).
On the point of this re-convergence, it is not only that Deleuze and Guattari attempt to rehabilitate the negative, but that their very performativity as a philosophical effort is instructive insofar as it is fully immersed in the dynamics or the pulsation of the unconscious. He emphasises that this is most clear in the way Deleuze and Guattari thinks the pulsating relation between concept and image. For Deleuze and Guattari, according to Blake, the “image has a conceptual charge” that destabilises every ontological image. Thus — and to connect this work back around to the aforementioned claim that many emerging philosophers today are reacting back to a conservative German Idealism or an ancient Platonism or Aristotelianism — for Deleuze, we cannot think about images as providing for us a clear ontological ground for our concepts. Instead, the challenge for philosophy after psychoanalysis is to work with the pulsation of concept-image as every image contains within itself a destabilising conceptual force as opposed to a cozy metaphorical resting place that we could call home.
To demonstrate the power of the philosophical orientation in contemporary philosophy, Blake gives an example from Žižek’s work in Sex and the Failed Absolute, where we find Žižek situating absolute knowledge in a disruptive ontology between the incommensurable contradiction of man and woman (and not in a clear imagistic metaphor that would end our disorienting conceptual struggle in and with sexuality).
From this standpoint, what I will be taking into the course with Blake on a personal level is the question about the future of philosophy after psychoanalysis, a question that is very much alive in the work that I have done on Alenka Zupančič’s What Is Sex? The starting point for this discussion, according to Blake, is a basic existential disposition that accepts contradiction and incommensurability at the heart of being itself, and thus, what must be affirmed as at the core of the philosophical project itself. This idea points to not the conservative form of German Idealism, but rather its radicalised form. Blake suggests that there is a tendency in the analytic philosophical tradition to try and smooth over this contradiction and incommensurability with reconciliation. He gives the example of Hegelian philosopher Robert Brandom’s Spirit of Trust as pointing in this direction.
However, for Blake, if we are to accept the Deleuzo-Guattarian (and Lacanian) challenge to philosophy, we must go further than that, and even radicalise contradiction and incommensurability at the level of the desire and drive within thought and action itself. We are never simply thinking pure thought, but rather thought must always be situated in and as a desire or a drive. In this context, Blake asks of us: how do we, as desiring and driving beings, perform the destabilising ideas that we discuss and write about as philosophers influenced by both the continental tradition and the psychoanalytic tradition?
"Deleuze and Analysis: Lack◇Excess" is a ten-session course that delves into the philosophical intersections between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, focusing on the dynamic interplay of lack and excess as central themes in their works. Through critical readings and discussions, the course examines how both thinkers conceptualize desire, drive, machinism, language, subjectivity, and the production of jouissance. By exploring key texts and integrating perspectives from philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of how Deleuze and Lacan's ideas converge and diverge, contradict and sublate, enriching contemporary philosophical research programmes.
The course employs the diamond-punch ◇ as a creative heuristic to navigate complex theoretical landscapes, fostering insightful analyses of concepts such as desire as production, the creation of concepts, and the ontology of the Real.
Designed for individuals interested in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, this course invites participants to engage deeply with transformative ideas that challenge traditional paradigms and open new avenues for thought.
To learn more, or to get involved, see: