Deleuze’s general hostility to psychoanalysis in general is well known; his relation to Lacan in particular seems more obscure.

Deleuze’sLogic of Sense(1969) concludes with long and enthusiastic references to concepts adapted to some degree from Lacan: castration, lack, the sublimation of drives, the phallus, Oedipusitself. When inAnti-Oedipus(1972) these concepts are brusquely abandoned along with the surface-depth relation they served to mediate, Lacan continues to appear in a mainly sympathetic light.¹ InAnti-OedipusDeleuze and Guattari credit Lacan with nothing less than the discovery of ‘the real production of desire,’ desire understood in terms of “the ‘real...

In the section on ‘Desire’ in his 1980s television interviews with Claire Parnet (The ABC of Gilles Deleuze), Deleuze expresses regret about misunderstandings generated by the notion of desire inAnti-Oedipus, which, he says, was “meant to express the simplest thing in the world,” but instead ended up suggesting to many a simplistic affirmation of brute, immediate ‘spontaneity.’ It is indeed a strange situation when a concept that apparently expresses ‘the simplest thing in the world,’ becomes so dangerously open to misunderstanding. A genealogy of the concept of desire in Deleuze’s work is therefore called for. For, although Deleuze is...

Two threads of thought are woven together in Sigmund Freud’s writing: The first, the Oedipal construction, setting off intense debates on and criticisms of the notions of subjectivity, identity, sexuality, and gender; the second, the defense mechanisms that are at work in the unconscious, instigating discussions on therapeutic techniques and notions such as resistance, projection, transference, and counter-transference.⁵⁰ The latter aspect runs from Freud’s 1895 essay ‘The Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (SE 1) through Freud’s papers on technique and his case histories. It is a thread that has remained in the background of most discussions of the Oedipal constitution...

Gilles Deleuze’sColdness and Cruelty(1967) is a fascinating analysis of the literary works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch but has no relevance for theclinicalunderstanding of masochism. With this appeal to a clear-cut distinction between literature and clinical practice, psychoanalysts have all too easily dismissed Deleuze’s critique of Freud’s theory of masochism (Laplanche 1980, 297). Freudians who invoke the distinction between the literary and the clinical as if this distinction goes without saying, should raise our suspicion. After all, it was Sigmund Freud who liberated the study of the neuroses from the straitjacket of scientific positivism by trying to...

A question thrown to the children of the expired century: literature, what is it for, how does it work, and so on?

There is an answer that engages Deleuzeintoliterature, in the guise of an inevitablefrom where it leads[d’où ça mène]: literature, when it works, serves toannul the father and his lack (of being) [manque (à-être) ] and his death (Death) [la Mort] (this non-being from which every negation is fuelled by a symbolisation).

On the basis of this line to be drawn over the father [de ce trait à tirer sur le père], of this...

InDifference and Repetition(1968) Deleuze elaborates a highly paradoxical notion of subjectivity. He proposes a notion of the self that is not defined by a unity of apperception, a substantial essence, nor a constituting consciousness, but a dissolved self. The dissolved self opens up on to an impersonal repetition, a flow of neutralised energy that consists in a plurality of disjunctive series of intensities which have nothing to do with contradiction or opposition. Repetition becomes the automatic movement of the event that constantly produces differences. This is the object of a radical vitalism in which Deleuze does not deny...

Nowadays, it is interesting to see how Deleuze has populated the landscape of philosophy with a huge number of new concepts. Not only did he inject existing concepts with new meanings (e.g. desire, love, the unconscious, repetition, perversion, masochism, partial objects, etc.), he also created many concepts all his own (e.g. rhizome, de-and reterritorialisations, ritornel, desiring machines, lines of flight, etc.). As the contributions in this volume show, Deleuze’s wide range of interests, and the many questions he raised, have elicited a large variety of discussions. The literature on Deleuze has figured in many different domains, of which psychoanalysis is...