Cate Watson: Identification and desire: Lacan and Althusser versus Deleuze and Guattari. A short note @ International Journal of Žižek Studies 7 (2013)
The paper constitutes an exploration of the construction of academic identities through a retrospective autoethnographic narrative analysis. In what is an essentially experimental mode I set out to examine processes of identification, and in particular, the understanding of desire that lies at the heart of them, for, it can be argued without desire there is no identity. Therefore, I begin my analysis by following two lines of thought concerning desire. The first, drawing on the work of Lacan, conceives of desire negatively as lack (Fink 1995; Lacan 2001). The second deriving from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1987, 2004/1972) constructs desire as abundance, a positive force. These two conceptualisations may, at first sight, appear to be opposed but is this necessarily the case? The question to be examined then is, to what extent can these two conceptualisations of desire – as lack and as abundance - be held to be incommensurable? And following this, can an unstable accommodation between desire as lack and desire as abundance be drawn on in theorising processes of identification and the subjectivities that these processes give rise to? If identification is always (already?) an inherently unstable process, located within a space, which I shall designate a narrative space, how does a mobilisation of desire which moves between lack and abundance enable a creative and experimental conceptualisation of processes of identification to emerge?
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Pic: Paul Gauguin "Christ in the garden of Olives"
Description: Félix Guattari was a French political militant, practicing psychoanalyst and international public intellectual. He is best known for his work with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, one of the most influential works of post-structuralism. From the mid-1950s onward, Guattari exerted a profound yet often behind-the-scenes influence on institutional psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, radical politics and philosophy.
Guattari’s Diagrammtic Thought examines the writings that Guattari authored on his own, both before and during his collaboration with Deleuze, providing a startlingly fresh perspective on intellectual and political trends in France and beyond during the second half of the twentieth century.
Janell Watson acknowledges the historical and biographical aspect of Guattari’s writing and explores the relevance of his theoretical ideas to topics as diverse as the May 1968 student movement, Lacanian psychoanalysis, neo-liberalism, ethnic identity, microbiology, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, ecology, the mass media, and the subjective dimensions of information technology. The book demonstrates that Guattari’s unique thought process yields a markedly Guattarian version of many seemingly familiar Deleuzean notions.
Table of Contents: Introduction: Schizoanalysis as Metamodeling
1. Lacan's Couch, Guattari's Institution: Accessing the Real
2. The Cosmic Psyche: Capitalism’s Triangular Traps
3. An Energetics of Existence: Creative Quadrants
4. History as Machinic Phylum: Socio-political Schemas Afterword: From Cartography to Ecology
Bibliography
Index.
Author(s):
Janell Watson,
Janell Watson is Associate Professor of French at Virginia Tech University, USA. Her previous publications include Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust (CUP, 1999).
