We Who Wrestle with Lacan◊Deleuze
Contextualising "Destroy, Destroy" as the Challenge of the Symbolic-Real
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“When we speak about myths in psychoanalysis, we are effectively speaking about one myth, the Oedipus myth — all other Freudian myths […] are variations on it.”1
In the early lectures of Terence Blake’s Deleuze and Analysis course, he is zeroing-in on the tension between Lacan and Deleuze in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Blake is framing this tension point in the transition from the Symbolic to the Real. The stakes of this transition are high: do we remain within a Symbolic tethered to the Imaginary myths or are we capable of building Symbolic structure capable of orienting towards the Real?
To frame these stakes in regards to the symptoms of our time: can we build symbolic structures that transgress Jordan B. Peterson’s “mythological wrestling”, or traditional religious identifications that are isolated/closed from secular pluralistic society, or simplistic populist authoritarianisms stabilised by absurd origin stories, or liberal institutions that remain caught in the myths of the 20th century?
Blake emphasises that the Lacan of the 1960s was still making the transition from the Symbolic to the Real — with the Écrits (1966) representing Lacan’s “symbolic phase”. In the Écrits it is clear we are dealing with Lacan’s “Oedipal wrestling” with negativity and prohibition — the “No” of the Father vis-à-vis incestuousness of full jouissance. In this stage we are always at risk of imaginary mythological identifications which keep us trapped/locked in dualistic representations of desire for the lost Other, and unable to operate from the standpoint of the drive.
I think the single sentence in Lacan’s Écrits that best captures the way he works through the Symbolic towards the Real, can be found in the following reflection:2
“Castration means that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire.”
Here to simplify:
“Castration means that jouissance has to be refused” = the No of the Father in regards to the imaginary identification with the desire for the (M)Other
“in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire” = the Real of jouissance as “attained”/encountered in the opposite direction to pre-Oedipal desire
This Lacanian movement from the Symbolic to the Real is very clearly situating this movement as an Oedipal processing, a movement that at once affirms the Oedipal structure of our social psyches, and seeks to overcome it. For Lacan, if we do not engage this double movement at the level of the Symbolic-Real, our symbolism (or our “symbolic world”), can remain trapped in a myth of the Oedipal origin, the desire for union with the undifferentiated Other.
In regards to the symptoms of our time, this can take the form of identification with the actual historical reality of Christ (e.g. Peterson on the mysterious question of literal crucifixion/resurrection), the desire for unity with the original “one true Church” (e.g. the contemporary “Orthodox moment”), the myths of an original State purity (e.g. Trump’s MAGA), or even the fantasy of a permanent safety within liberal institutions (e.g. academic careerism). This is the level of the sociopolitical or theopolitical implications of psychoanalysis in regards to the Imaginary-Symbolic or the Symbolic-Real.
Furthermore, and in this context, we should remember the addressee of the Écrits: its critique is primarily directed at psychoanalysts and the institution of Freudian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, analysts remain trapped in the myth of Freud (not Oedipus, but literally the myth of Freud as a man), as opposed to working with the real conceptual structures and methods that Freud left for us (e.g. psychic topography, unconscious speech, free association, etc.). In the process, the Freudian analysts of the time, for Lacan, left their ego identities intact as the ideal standard for an analytic process, as opposed to helping the voice of unconscious subjectivity move through an ultimately kenotic (self-emptying) work towards the drive. For Lacan, this meant that Freudian psychoanalysis was using myths to block the real, as opposed to letting the real of the drives mythify.3
Back to Blake: he emphasises that Deleuze and Guattari — who were of course also both heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as the works of Lacan — may have seen Oedipus as a type of “progress” (from the Imaginary to the Symbolic), but also saw that there was another step: Anti-Oedipus. For Blake, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus signals yet “another step” beyond the Symbolic (with its Oedipal prohibitions) and “into the Real” directly. In short, Blake is emphasising that we would be wrong to think that Deleuze and Guattari as just a pure regression into the pre-Symbolic domain by way of rejecting castration, i.e. a refusal to work with the symbolic logic of negativity in the figure of the Father. For Blake, Deleuze and Guattari were looking for the beyond of the Oedipal identification process itself as a “Real One”; where we could escape the “mommy-daddy-me” triad — or the structure of the prohibition against the fullness of incestuous jouissance — and into a genuine multiplicity of differentiations.
And it should be noted that there is a Lacanian logic at work here in the aforementioned quote from Lacan, which points towards the weird reality of what we might call: “jouissance attained on the inverse scale.” While Lacan is obviously suggesting the passage through the Oedipus complex is necessary to “attain” this jouissance (which may otherwise be destructively overwhelming), Deleuze and Guattari seem to start working with an alternative hypothesis. How compatible or incompatible is it with Lacan’s work?
Here Blake seeks to contextualise Deleuze and Guattari’s movement beyond the Symbolic-Real of psychoanalysis, and into the Real directly, in the passage “Destroy, Destroy” from Anti-Oedipus:4
“Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction—a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage [a procedure to scrape and remove tissue from the inner lining of the uterus]. Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, the law, castration. It is not a matter of pious destructions, such as those performed by psychoanalysis under the benevolent neutral eye of the analyst. For these are Hegel-style destructions, ways of conserving. How is it that the celebrated neutrality, and what psychoanalysis calls—dares to call—the disappearance or the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, do not make us burst into laughter? We are told that Oedipus is indispensable, that it is the source of every possible differentiation, and that it saves us from the terrible nondifferentiated mother. But this terrible mother, the sphinx, is herself part of Oedipus; her nondifferentiation is merely the reverse of the exclusive differentiations created by Oedipus, she is herself created by Oedipus: Oedipus necessarily operates in the form of this double impasse. We are told that Oedipus in its turn must be overcome, and that this is achieved through castration, latency, desexualization, and sublimation. But what is castration if not still Oedipus, to the nth power, now symbolic, and therefore all the more virulent? And what is latency, this pure fable, if not the silence imposed on desiring-machines so that Oedipus can develop, be fortified in us, so that it can accumulate its poisonous sperm and gain the time necessary for propagating itself, and for passing on to our future children? And what is the elimination of castration anxiety in its turn—desexualization and sublimation—if not divine acceptance of, and infinite resignation to, bad conscience, which consists for the woman of "the appeased wish for a penis . . . destined to be converted into a wish for a baby and for a husband," and for the man in assuming his passive attitude and in "[subjecting] himself to a father substitute"? We are all the more "extricated" from Oedipus as we become a living example, an advertisement, a theorem in action, so as to attract our children to Oedipus: we have evolved in Oedipus, we have been structured in Oedipus, and under the neutral and benevolent eye of the substitute, we have learned the song of castration, the lack-of-being-that-is-life; "yes it is through castration/that we gain access/to Deeeeesire." What one calls the disappearance of Oedipus is Oedipus become an idea.”
For a condensed summary of the meaning of this quote, or if you just do not want to bother reading it in detail, what we find here is the following:
Schizoanalysis destroys Oedipus (as ego, superego, guilt and law of castration)
Operates as destruction of the origin (birth) beyond a neutral analytic gaze
For the indispensable source of all possible differentiation beyond castration and sublimation
Castration is the Oedipus complex in Symbolic form (1) propagating itself to our future children and (2) silencing the real of desire/drive
Reduces the life of Woman to desire for baby/husband to replace the missing penis; reduces the life of Man to desire in becoming a Father substitute
Imposes a worldview of the lack in life’s being
Here Blake is interested — in contextualising “Destroy, Destroy” — to both:
affirm the project of Deleuze and Guattari, to move beyond the Symbolic register and into the Real,
but also avoid a zero-sum impasse between Deleuze and Lacan, but rather point towards a convergence in Lacan’s own entry into the Real
Blake represents these two paths using the following formalisms:
LacanΔDeleuze = incompatible/incommensurable
Lacan◊Deleuze = wrestling/positive antagonism
In short, Blake thinks that the common interpretation, that of the zero-sum incompatible and incommensurable relation between Deleuze and Lacan, makes two mistakes:
Too quickly leads to an interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari as “wild deterritorialisation” (of the Symbolic) without a logic of negativity (he will argue that there is an implicit logic of negativity in Deleuze and Guattari)
Too quickly reifies Lacan in his logical “middle (symbolic) period” and obfuscates his own process of working through the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real within the clinic which prevents a premature/destructive encounter with the Real
In contrast to these two mistakes, Blake’s “wrestling/positive antagonism” between Deleuze and Lacan points in the following directions:
Deleuze and Guattari as working towards a “prudent” deterritorialisation of Oedipus as the only possible source of differentiation/sublimation (a “Real One”), and towards a genuine multiplicity of possible differentiations/sublimations
Lacan as logically traversing the negativity of the Symbolic (the not-One) in order to improve the work of clinicians before confronting the Real of jouissance beyond Oedipal identification (which is potentially destructive/disorienting)
In this double move we create a unity that overcomes a:
“too progressivist” Deleuze and Guattari, which obfuscates the way in which Oedipus objectively functions in subjective processes of differentiation (even if it is is not an actual “One-All”)
as well as overcoming a “too conservative” form of Lacanianism, which too dogmatically clings to Lacan’s own Symbolisms and formulas as a Master or University discourse covering all possible Reals outside the clinic
Blake’s work suggests that, on the Deleuzian side of the problematic interpretation, it is wrong to think of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus as the affirmation of an anarchist structurelessness (and its inevitable result: the tyranny of structurelessness). For Blake, Deleuze and Guattari were aware of the impossibility of an anarchist structurelessness, and even though they wanted to “destroy” Oedipus, they still believed “good structure” was necessary to turn towards the Real (that an “other structure” to Oedipus was possible, again: it is not a “One-All”). One might suggest that for Deleuze and Guattari and for schizoanalysis, objectively speaking, an “Oedipal dialectic” was not the only possible source of “good structure”.
Here Blake reminds us that Deleuze and Guattari, as philosophers, were really trying to differentiate from psychoanalysis, and for Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy was the creation of concepts, and in this context, their movement in Anti-Oedipus, was introducing a radical “strategy of renaming”. The reason for this “strategy of renaming” is two-fold:
While Deleuze and Guattari were both strongly influenced by the Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition, they also saw the trap of Symbolic reifications in both (i.e. the way Freudians reify Freud’s symbols towards an “ego-psychology”; and the way Lacanians reify Lacan’s symbols towards a “system of lack”)
Both Deleuze and Guattari were operating outside of the psychoanalytic clinic and thinking philosophically on the level of the creation of new conceptual machinery, so that they did not get trapped into either previous systems of philosophy, or current psychoanalytic systematisations
In short, if Lacan required a “strategy of renaming” to differentiate the failures of the Freudian tradition to think its own internal rupture (away from ego psychology via the death drive); then Deleuze and Guattari required a “strategy of renaming” in order to move the insights of analysis from the clinic regulated by the “neutral analyst”, to the real of society itself (and the challenges of capitalism, politics, etc. of the cybernetic era).
Moreover, for Blake, this strategy of renaming came from the “meta” view that language is dangerous, and risks “holding us back to the Imaginary side” of things. We see this challenge as an eternal problem that manifests between “leaders and followers” of any given tradition (including Deleuzianism). When we become too comfortable within the given framework of any tradition, we risk getting caught on the “Imaginary” qua “Mythological” side. This was already emphasised in regards to Freud and Lacan’s project, but we should also remember, that using the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari also present the same risk: mythifying the real, as opposed to deriving our myths from the real itself.
As it relates to Lacan’s work, Blake frames the issue in the following way: lack without excess leads us back to an imaginary form of lack. (One might suggest that this is a risk of Lacanian analysis: if we use Lacan’s symbolisms and structures of lack without recognising an excess, we may find ourselves operating from the standpoint of an imaginary form of lack as a way to avoid the real of subjective destitution).
As it relates to Deleuze’s work, we might also propose the following equation: excess without lack leads us back to an imaginary form of excess. (One might suggest that many Deleuzians in our day often do just this: operate from the standpoint of an imaginary form of excess without lack, i.e. “wild deterritorialisation” that can lead to pure destruction without the logic of negativity/prohibition).
However, to think Lacan◊Deleuze in the diamond punch is to think Lack◊Excess in the diamond punch. For Blake, this requires thinking both: the Real of subjective destitution (Lacan); and deterritorialisation vis-a-vis the constraints of the Symbolic. In these double moves we do reach, for Blake, the same place: the movement from desire to what drives desire. Here we find themes about the incompleteness of subjectivity, gaps and cracks of any given system as a confrontation with excess. Here one needs the real of subjective destitution to see the Symbolic as in constant systemic crisis (including Freud and Lacan’s system); and one needs deterritorialisation in order to think the space of possible Symbolic systems (for example, philosophy beyond psychoanalysis).
This all gives us the “full context” for Blake’s thesis on “Destroy, Destroy…”:
Destruction in Deleuze and Guattari is not towards a nihilist chaos (i.e. wild deterritorialisation beyond Oedipus); but rather towards a “noetic clarity” in the “logic of negativity” itself (in the Real not the Symbolic)
In other words: in the destruction of Oedipus as a Symbolic norm one is invited into Real thinking and conceptual creativity.
While one can think that this is merely semantic, approaching dimensions of the “Oedipus complex” via a “complex strategy of renaming”, we cannot, at the very least, equate this approach with the Symbolic level of Oedipus (of an external prohibition). We might even say that this is an approach towards the Real that in order to construct a new Imaginary-Symbolic (mythify the Real) that one needs contact with the Real itself (which can be destructive). Deleuze and Guattari seem to be saying: that destruction is itself clarity, allowing us to see structures and possibilities that we are blind to within an Oedipal reduction.
If we do want to stay with the challenge in Lacanian terms, we might even interpret this move in the following way: as opposed to staying within the Symbolic level of Oedipus with an externally imposed prohibition one can destroy this normativity to discover the Real level of Oedipus in terms of what the unconscious itself identifies as the limit of Imaginary-Symbolic constructions. Here we should remember Žižek’s insistence that Oedipus (at Colonus) is paradoxically the only person who does not struggle with the Oedipus complex. In other words, there is a Real to Oedipus beyond the Symbolic.
However, in the spirit of a Real wrestling at the level of Lacan◊Deleuze, we should also note the short-comings of a reactionary direct immersion in the Real (Deleuze and Guattari), as opposed to a dialectical processing of the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real (Lacan). Here consider Žižek on the model of the unconscious that we find in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:5
“The famous first paragraph of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus […] begins with a long list of what the unconscious (“it”, not the substantialised “Id”, of course) does: “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks.” Talking is conspicuously missing from this series: for Deleuze and Guattari, there is no “ça parle”, the unconscious does not talk. The plethora of functions is in place to cover up this absence — as was clear already to Freud, multiplicity (of phalluses in a dream, of the wolves the Wolf-man sees through the window in his famous dream) is the very image of castration. Multiplicity signals that the One is lacking.”
While this is “getting ahead” of Blake’s work, where we will surely come to the tensions between Deleuze and Žižek, we can see the outlines of a potential reactive dimension of “Deleuzian progress”: a psychotic foreclosure of unconscious speech, a perverted identification with machinic organic repetitions. In such potential reactivity, we do not create a philosophy beyond psychoanalysis, but rather regress to a potentially pre-Freudian understanding. The absolute key: multiplicity must be read from the standpoint of the negative One. This means that the Oedipus complex on the level of the Symbolic tethered to an Imaginary myth may appear from a certain perspective as a “Real One”, its truth points towards something much darker, even more destructive: the absence of the Real One is the power of differentiation itself.
One might claim that this is a “Christian Atheist” insight, which is why Žižek suggests: “Oedipus himself” is a “precursor of Christ”, pointing towards a Real of becoming:6
“nothing but scum and refuse of the polis — the “shit of the earth”, as St. Paul racily describes the followers of Jesus, or the “total loss of humanity” which Marx portrays as the proletariat — Oedipus is divested of his identity and authority and so can offer his lacerated body as the cornerstone of a new social order.”
In that context, Lacan’s work ultimately does not point towards the Oedipus complex but the “Real of Oedipus”; and in that context, Deleuze’s “destroy, destroy” may be pointing towards that same Real as well.
The Deleuze and Analysis course will be unfolding throughout 2025. Our upcoming class schedule can be found below:
Wednesday April 2nd @ 7pm CET / Session 3: The Noetic Paths of Deleuze and Lacan
Wednesday April 16th @ 7pm CET / Session 4: Deepening the Understanding of Deleuze and Lacan’s Paths
Wednesday May 21st @ 7pm CET / Session 5: Moving Beyond Stereotypes
Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 951.
Lacan, J. 2005. The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 700.
Lacan, J. 2005. On Freud’s “Trieb”. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 723-4.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. 1972. Anti-Oedipus. Penguin Classics. p. 311-2.
Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 757-8.
Ibid. p. 99-100.
Complete fire, Cadell: this piece with Blake illuminates well the heart of key tensions that define our present moment. I've taken notes to think and write through.