Lacan's Graph

“Lacan’s graph of sexuation “prefigures” Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction of the different images of thought, embodying the fundamental choice between pluralism or monism, and between immanence or transcendance, after the event because it was first expounded in his seminar in 1973, one year after the publication of ANTI-OEDIPUS, and it represented a very weak and watered down appropriation of insights that Deleuze and Guattari had elaborated over the preceding four years.”

“Guattari tells us:

When I was put in touch with Deleuze in 1969, I grabbed the opportunity. I progressed in my contestation of lacanism on two points: oedipal triangulation and the reductionism of his doctrine of the signifier (Dosse, GILLES DELEUZE ET FELIX GUATTARI, 13, my translation).”

““Machine et structure” was a conference given also in 1969, using the concept of the machine to break through the purported omnipresence of the signifier.”

“So in 1969 Guattari was already arguing for

1) the abandonment of Freudian psychoanalysis and its Lacanian variant

2) the critique of oedipal triangulation

3) the exit from a preoccupation with discursive formations

4) the transition from the hegemony of the signifier to a machine ontology.”

“Guattari makes no attempt at a synthesis of Lacan’s signifier-ontology and Deleuze and Guattari’s own machinic ontology, but calls for and effectuates a conceptual revolution, a radical paradigm change, an incommensurable leap. Levi Bryant ignores all this, falsifies the historical record, and tries to annex Deleuzian and Guattarian insights into a paradigm whose fundaments they totally rejected.”

“This strategy of tacit annexation and adulteration was one of Lacan’s preferred modes of erudition and “creativity”. Levi Bryant continues this strategy: he has even claimed that Lacan was the first “anti-oedipus” because in his system “men don’t have the phallus” and “the place of the sovereign can never be occupied”. But such language retains the jargon of the psychoanalyst-priest and his vision of anarchy as mysteriously exemplifying the negation of the negation, as that which does not fall under the function of castration.”

“Bryant involuntarily confirms my thesis that there is no possible synthesis of Lacan and Deleuze & Guattari, and that all attemps at such a synthesis void Deleuze and Guattari of their conceptual singularity and amount to a curious neo-lacanian de-concepted hodge-podge masquerading in deleuzian vocabularies voided of their sense.”

“Deleuze and Guattari always maintained that immanence is not enough, and that it must be associated with positivity and abundance (this is their Nietzschean engagement).”