CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE CRITICISMS ADDRESSED TO LACANISM IN THE ANTI-OEDIPUS¹

ABSTRACT.

In this article, we analyze the criticisms that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari address to lacanism in “The Anti-Oedipus”. We analyze the theoretical and conceptual peculiarities of this conflict based on a methodological path composed of two interconnected procedures. The first one consists in identifying the authors, works and contents targeted by Deleuze and Guattari. This action has a propaedeutic character, since it allows delimiting the thematic fields from which the anti-Oedipus machinations are connected with some versions of Lacan’s teaching. In the second procedure, linked to the previous one, we evaluate these themes in consonance with the argumentative contexts in which they are covered. We show how the clashes developed at the frontiers between psychoanalysis, linguistics and anthropology are articulated to the deleuze-guattarian gesture that rehabilitates the function of the Real in the analytic, desire and production ambits. To this aim, we investigated some books written at a time still strongly influenced by the structuralist program. We found that these works are criticized in The Anti-Oedipus for reducing the unconscious to the structural-symbolic dimension.

Keywords:
Psychoanalysis; structuralism; schizoanalysis

RESUMO.

Abordamos nesse artigo as críticas que Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari dirigem ao lacanismo em O Anti-Édipo. Analisamos as particularidades teórico-conceituais desse embate com base em um itinerário metodológico composto por dois procedimentos interligados. O primeiro consiste na identificação dos autores, das obras e dos conteúdos visados por Deleuze e Guattari. Esta ação tem cunho propedêutico, pois permite delimitar os campos temáticos a partir dos quais as maquinações antiedipianas se conectam com algumas versões do ensino de Lacan. No segundo procedimento, vinculado ao anterior, avaliamos esses temas em consonância com os contextos argumentativos nos quais são trabalhados. Mostramos como os embates desenvolvidos nas fronteiras entre a psicanálise, a linguística e a antropologia se articulam ao gesto deleuzo-guattariano que reabilita a função do Real nos âmbitos analítico, do desejo e da produção. Para tanto, investigamos alguns livros escritos em uma época ainda fortemente influenciada pelo programa estruturalista. Constatamos que essas obras são criticadas em O Anti-Édipo por reduzirem o inconsciente à dimensão estrutural-simbólica.

Palavras-chave:
Psicanálise; estruturalismo; esquizoanálise

RESUMEN.

Abordamos en este artículo las críticas que Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari dirigen al lacanismo en “El Anti-Edipo”. Analizamos las particularidades teórico-conceptuales de ese embate sobre la base de un itinerario metodológico compuesto por dos procedimientos interconectados. El primero consiste en la identificación de los autores, de las obras y de los contenidos dirigidos por Deleuze y Guattari. Esta acción tiene un carácter propedéutico, pues permite delimitar los campos temáticos a partir de los cuales las máquinas antiedipianas se conectan con algunas versiones de la enseñanza de Lacan. En el segundo procedimiento, vinculado al anterior, evaluamos estos temas en consonancia con contextos argumentativos en los que son trabajados. Se muestra cómo los embates desarrollados en las fronteras entre el psicoanálisis, la lingüística y la antropología se articulan al gesto deleuzo-guattariano que rehabilita la función del Real en los ámbitos analítico, del deseo y de la producción. Para ello, investigamos algunos libros escritos en una época todavía fuertemente influenciada por el programa estructuralista. Constatamos que esas obras son criticadas en El Anti-Edipo por reducir el inconsciente a la dimensión estructural-simbólica.

Palabras-clave:
Psicoanálisis; estructuralismo; esquizoanálisis

Introduction

In spite of the process of creation of The Anti-Oedipus Deleuze made the following comment:

What we did with Felix was an agency to two, where something happened between the two, that is, they are physical phenomena, it is like a difference, for an event to happen, it takes a potential difference, two levels are necessary in order to have a difference of potential. Then something happens, lightning passes, or not, a little stream... It is the field of desire (Deleuze & Parnet, ^{1994-1995/2016}, p. 19).

When we read The Anti-Oedipus we are driven through a multitude of territories. The work that inaugurates the partnership of Deleuze with Guattari consists of a true machine that captures multiple and heterogeneous sets of knowledge. Its schizo style ingeniously connects theoretical-conceptual couplings from literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, ethology, cinema among so many other domains.

In this article we follow only one of the small streams that skim the surface of the Anti-Oedipus text. In it, we analyze the criticisms that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari address to Lacan's interpreters and disciples. To achieve this goal, we follow a methodological itinerary composed of two interdependent and not necessarily sequential procedures. In the first one we identify the studies, the texts and the notions referenced by the authors. This action has a propaedeutic character, as it allows us to propose some thematic fields from which the conversations of Deleuze and Guattari with the Lacanians stem. In the second procedure, linked to the previous one, we evaluated how these themes are coupled in The Anti-Oedipus and how they serve strategically as counterpoints to the elaboration of the Anti-Oedipus theory of the machine-desire.

Beautiful books, but ...

Deleuze and Guattari's interlocutions with Lacan's interpreters are diverse. They serve various uses and purposes and can not be qualified restrictively in terms of opposition.

In Section II.1.2, The Oedipal Twist in Psychoanalysis, for example, the authors cite a text by Laplanche and Pontalis (^1964/1985) to validate the thesis that psychoanalysis does not develop without doubts, deviations and regrets. In that text, Fantasme originaire fantasme des origines. Origines du fantasme, Lacan's students explain that although Freud "discovered" the Oedipus complex in his self-analysis in 1987, it was only in Me and that - text of 1923 - that the construct acquired a theoretical formulation. In this interpretative framework, the abandonment of the theory of traumatism and seduction does not imply the univocal determination of the Oedipus or the description of a spontaneous infantile sexuality of an endogenous character. Therefore, “... everything happens as if" Freud could not mutually articulate Oedipus and infantile sexuality", referring to a biological reality of development and to a psychic reality of the phantom ...” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1964, quoted by Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 76).

Other Lacanians are also cited, evaluated and qualified positively in different contexts. Let us see some of these occurrences: “Cf. the excellent article by Elisabeth ^Roudinesco on Lacan, “L’Action d’une métaphore ...” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 276). "Octave Mannoni, in his beautiful analysis of the phenomena of belief ..." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 403). "André Green makes a deep analysis of the representation-theater-structure-unconscious relations ..." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 403). "It was in depth that, from this perspective, Serge Leclaire attempted to define the reverse of structure as the pure being of desire" (Deleuze & Guattari, ^1972/2010, p. 408).

However, the tone of the dialogue with Lacan's sympathizers changes when the subject addressed is the use they make of his theory of desire. In this account, critics acquire a strong contestatory bias and denounce "the furious Oedipalization to which psychoanalysis is delivered, either in practice or theory, with the combined resources of image and structure" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 75).

The targets of the attacks are the "beautiful books" written by psychoanalysts, ethnologists and anthropologists who in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s enjoyed prestige among French intellectuals. These works articulate psychoanalysis with the clinical, social and institutional-psychiatric fields and have in common the appreciation for sectoral aspects of Lacanian teaching. They bear witness to how "... the symbolic order of Lacan was diverted, used to support an Oedipus structure applicable to psychosis, and to extend the familistic coordinates out of its real and even imaginary domain" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 477).

Section II.4.5, Does the border pass between the symbolic and the imaginary? offers a panoramic view on the subject. The theoretical effort to overcome the simplistic conceptions of Oedipus - based on the parental images -, replacing them by the structural model of the symbolic functions, is on screen. Deleuze and Guattari question whether there would be a substitute for:

... the traditional father-mother by a mother function and a father function... ", another intention different from "finding the universality of Oedipus beyond the variability of images, to weld even better the desire for law and prohibition, and to maximize the process of Oedipalization of the unconscious? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 114).

Such criticism is about the interpretations of Lacanism which, "openly or secretly pious", invoke the Oedipus-structural conception "... to bring us back to the question of the father to Oedipalize even the schizo, and to show that a hole in the symbolic could take us to the imaginary and that, conversely, the insufficiencies or confusions would take us to the structure (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 114).

The authors believe that the distinctions between the imaginary and the symbolic do not even pass tangentially to what actually defines the unconscious, because for them:

... the true difference of nature is not between the symbolic and the imaginary, but between the real element of the machinic, which is the desiring production, and the structural set of the imaginary and the symbolic, which forms only a myth and its variants (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 115).

Deleuze and Guattari try to demonstrate that this clash leads to the postulate of a a priori cultural symbolism and the generalization of the legitimating premises of familism. It is a pendulum movement that throws the unconscious from side to side. It consists of a paralogism that imprisons desire in a disjunctive-exclusive logic, in which with the fact that we reassemble "from images to structure, from imaginary to symbolic functions, from father to law, from mother to great Other, we are actually only postponing the issue" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 115-116).

These considerations are part of an argumentative strategy that aims to establish a theoretical-practical-conceptual path alternative to the Lacanian vulgate. It consists in approaching the unconscious not by the problematic distinction between the imaginary versus structure, but by the description of the functioning of the "machines of desire which are neither reducible to the structure nor to the persons and which constitute the Real in itself, beyond or falling short both the symbolic and the imaginary" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 75). It is therefore a question of denouncing "pious" interpretations that do not recognize the potency of reality in Lacan's unconscious.

Lacan had traced a totally different route. Unlike an analytical squirrel, he was not content to turn in the wheel of the imaginary and the symbolic, the Oedipal imaginary and the oedipal structure, the imaginary identity of the people and the structural unity of the machines, entering at any moment in shock with impasses of a molar representation that the family encloses about itself (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 406).

Deleuze and Guattari criticize this type of debate that has been established around the Lacanian teaching, but they do not think that the debate is totally devoid of foundation. The strictly symbolic-structural interpretations of the unconscious would find support in the Lacan-Jakobson-Saussure device, or rather in the conception of the unconscious structured as a language. The molar appropriation of the Lacanian unconscious would not be linked, the authors ask:

... to the fact that Lacan seemed to maintain a kind of projection of signifying chains into a despotic signifier, and to leave everything hanging from an absent term, a term that lacks self and which reintroduces the lack in the series of desire, to which he imposed an exclusive use? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 116).

Let us dwell a little more on this.

What Lacan is this?

An unsystematic investigation of the use of the name-of-the-father concept in Lacan's texts offers insights that make this hypothesis reasonable. In seminar 4 - lesson The pants of the mother and the lack of the father, - and in seminar 5 - lesson Forclusion of the Name-of-the-Father - we read respectively:

The symbolic father is the name of the father. This is the essential mediating element of the symbolic world and its structuring. It is necessary for this weaning, more essential than primitive weaning, by which the child comes out of its pure and simple coupling with maternal omnipotence. The name of the father is essential to every articulation of human language, and this is why Ecclesiastes says: The fool has said in his heart: there is no God (Lacan, ^{1956-1957/1995}, p. 374).

“... which I call the Name-of-the-Father, that is, the symbolic father ... a term that subsists at the level of the signifier, which, in the Other as the seat of law, represents the Other. It is the signifier that gives the law its mainstay, which promulgates the law. This is the Other in the Other" (Lacan, ^{1957-1958/1999}, p. 152).

In From a preliminary question to every possible treatment of psychosis, [^1957-58 / (1998) there are at least three passages in which the concept of the name-of-the-father is used in the same sense: "... metaphor that places this name as substitute of the place first symbolized by the operation of the mother's absence". (Lacan, 1957-1958/1998, p.563). "It is ... in the forclusion of the Name-of-the-Father of the Other, and in the failure of the paternal metaphor, that we point out the failure that confers to psychosis its essential condition, with the structure that separates it from neurosis". (Lacan, 1957-1958/1998, p. 582). "Name-of-the-Father - that is, of the signifier which in the Other has the place of the signifier; it is the signifier of the Other as the place of law" (Lacan, 1957-58/1998, p. 590).

However, the value and meaning of the propositions listed here can be problematized. ^{Miller (2014}) draws the reader's attention to the peculiarities of his teaching. During the seminar 6, for example, there is "... from one lesson to another, advances, corrections, changes of perspective that demand to be highlighted, pointed out, refined each time" (Miller, 2014, p. 1). In fact, some notions are reformulated and others are not retaken in later stages. Given these indications, we question along with Miller (2014) whether:

... when Lacan defines here and there a term so that it will remain unique, should we emphasize it in our reflection? Should this be resumed by the fact that Lacan would have uncovered an unknown aspect here, or is it a slip, a drift that will then be corrected? (^{Miller, 2014}, p. 1-2).

This hypothesis is also shared by Deleuze (^1990/2008, p. 24): "Lacan himself always knew how to turn his back to show the apposite side".

Transposing this problematization to the concept of the name-of-the-father, we find that he acquires different nuances and formulations over time. At the seminar Introduction to the Names-of-the-father (^1963/2005) the notion is relativized, but if we go back a bit in Lacanian teaching, to seminar 6 to be more precise, we notice that there it changes its status:

There is not, I told you, Another of the Other. There is no signifier in the Other who can at the time respond for what I am. And to say things in a transformed way, this hopeless truth of which I have just spoken to you, this truth which is found at the level of the unconscious, is a truth without a figure, it is a closed truth, a truth that can be collapsed in all senses. We know too much, it is a truth without truth (Lacan, ^{1958-1959/2002}, p. 315).

So, how pertinent are the anti-Oedipus attacks on the "beautiful books" written by certain Lacanians, in view of the state of art in which Lacan's thought was at the 1969-70/1992.³ We find these criticisms pertinent, but restricted to certain statements and precepts that are strongly marked by French intelligentsia of the 1950s and 1960s.

Moreover, the delimitation of the statute of what Deleuze and Guattari affirm on the Lacanian psychoanalysis must take into account the detailed study of the ideas developed by its founder. We question, then, whether there would have been theoretical markers throughout Lacan's teaching, especially in the aforementioned seminar of 1969-70/1992, indicating, if not the rectification of the conception of the unconscious structured as a language, but at least the prelude to a theory of the real unconscious? Now, in this case, the anti-Oedipus machine would function as a catalyst acting on aspects of Lacan's teaching for the sake of the hermeneutical perseverance of his disciples. After all, it is Deleuze himself who says that helping Lacan "... would be better if ... notions that are not even Lacan's creator but those of an orthodoxy that was formed in around him were used" (Deleuze, 1990/2008, p. 23-24).

We believe that the criticisms of Deluze and Guattari seem to operate with the tension resulting from the meeting between two positions adopted before the Lacanian teaching. The first prioritizes the theoretical aspects that can be translated by the structuralist view. The second sees in the Lacanian text some theoretical-conceptual indications that express the power of the real in the theory of desire.

^{Santiago (1995}) proposes a similar diagnosis when explaining that:

The emphasis on the Lacan-Jakobson coupling was such that in the 1960s most of their students reduced the entire Lacanian conception of the unconscious to the work of metaphor and metonymy. What constitutes the innovative contribution of his encounter with Freud's text, namely, the object (a) - the contribution that relaunches the third time of foundation of his teaching - is thus suppressed (^{Santiago, 1995}, p. 218).

The Anti-Oedipus offers numerous examples from both perspectives. In this article, because of the scope to which it is circumscribed, we limit ourselves to analyzing the criticisms addressed to the first of them (structuralist strand of Lacanian teaching). In order to carry this out, we go through the sections in which Deleuze and Guattari make explicit references to authors who were directly or indirectly influenced by Lacan's ideals. We developed this trajectory based on three subunits, namely, Is this a structure? The crazy depoliticized, universal Oedipus? It is an artifice created to facilitate the transmission of a complex content that is elaborated, originally, in a diffuse and fragmentary way. Here, content is necessarily simplified into three sets of problematizations. They deal with the formalization of Oedipus under the structural prism and on the application of this construct in the clinical-institutional and theoretical environments, especially in the interface of psychoanalysis with linguistics and anthropology.

Is this a structure?

Some works aligned with structuralism - obviously from the deleuzo-guattarian point of view - are theoretical-practical exercises in the application of paralogisms. They find in "... everywhere the great game of the symbolic signifier that embodies the meanings of the imaginary - Oedipus as a universal metaphor" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 404).

For the authors, the oedipal theater, properly formalized, functions as a privileged theoretical operator because we can identify the elements that make up the structural unconscious, namely desire, law, lack, and meaningful logic. These criticisms have certain recipients! Let us appreciate some excerpts from the texts that in Deleuze and Guattari's view make Oedipus a type of universal Catholic symbol. “... the Oedipus is not a myth, but the structure which, by means of rivalry, links the subject to a symbolic order, thus subordinating to one and the same Law the advent of truth and desire" (Safouan, ^1968/1973, p. 86).

The Oedipal problem can not, of course, be ... brought to the sole question of tolerance of real incest within a completely "generous" revolution of manners. The meaningful articulation of Oedipus must be understood with what is operative for the individual (organized by the game of the signifier) regarding the law of interdiction of incest, which is at the basis of the castration crisis (Mannoni, ^1970/1981, p. 55).

"... we shall consider the means by which the Oedipal organization plays a role in psychoses; then we will ask for the forms of psychotic pre-genitality and how they can maintain the Oedipal reference"(unidentified author) (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 74).

The list of quotations is extensive and serves to demonstrate how the structure solves the desire with the impossible by defining the lack as castration. On the structure:

... the most austere song stands in favor of castration: yes, yes, it is through castration that we enter into the order of desire - once the desiring production spreads through the space of a representation that only lets it subsist as absence and lack of self (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 404).

The structural model, problematized as The Anti-Oedipus, imposes on the desiring machines a molar organization in which partial objects are reported to a totality that can only be apprehended as "... what they lack, and what, lacking in them, lacks in itself ..." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 404). The structural operation transforms the family relationship into a metaphor for all others, that is, a protoform that rests the social set on the microcosm of the family.

Consequently, all desiring production is brought to the double impasse of the subjective representation that makes us choose between the tragic-imaginary Oedipus and the familial-functional system. Viewed from this perspective, the structure does not break with the familistic agency; "... on the contrary, it strangles, it gives the family a universal metaphorical value at the very moment that lost its literal and objective values" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 406).

Deleuze and Guattari identify in this exchange - from the tragic Oedipus to the structural Oedipus - a counterassessment, since the attachment of Lacanism to the structural invariant occurs precisely in a mode of production that makes decoded flows their absolute outer limit, that is, in the capitalist machine. In The Anti-Oedipus, capitalism is described on the basis of an original theory which understands its functioning from the tension resulting from a seemingly antagonistic but complementary set of forces or tendencies. On the one hand - a despotic or paranoid tendency - the capitalist machine sets itself on the ruins of a State form (Urstaat), whose remains tend to regulate, distribute, to a maximum degree of surveillance and control. On the other hand - schizophrenic tendency - it feeds on the decoding and deterritorialization of the flows.

However, it would be a great mistake to identify the capitalist flows with the schizophrenic flows, even though there is great affinity between them. Capitalism causes flows-schizophrenia to pass everywhere, but does so on the condition of subjecting them to an even more rigorous axiomatic basis that holds them tied to the body of capital. Its outer-absolute limit is schizophrenia, but it does not stop it from conjuring it, substituting it for internal relative limits which are reproduced in "an ever greater scale, or by an axiomatic design of the fluxes that subject the tendency to despotism and to the most firm repression" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 481). Capitalism gives concretism to the abstract, replaces territorial codes and the despotic overcoding by the decoding of flows, but under the condition of creating new archaisms.

The capitalist machine, approached in Section IV.5.9, What sickness does the schizophrenic person have?, it plays with the forces we just described. In this context, they are analyzed in terms of antagonistic libidinal investments. At one pole we find paranoid reconstruction, and at the other, the schizophrenic escape lines. The tensions aroused in this struggle are manifested in three ways, namely, adhesion, resistance and affirmation. Lacan's teaching, as appropriated by some of his disciples, focuses on the second modality. In it, the schizo process becomes unintelligible to the "... strange use of the Lacanian discoveries ...", not mentioned by the "modern resources" of the symbolic phallus, forclusion of the name of the father... (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 482).

In the anti-Oedipus text, the unconscious is described as schizophrenic process bearer of the decodified flows. At various points, Deleuze and Guattari bring this conceptualization close to the fragments of Lacan's teaching. They impute to certain notions developed by the French psychoanalyst theoretical resonances that go against the conception of the real-machinic unconscious. According to the authors, both theories identify in the unconscious something that is unassimilable to the symbolic structure of the signifying chain. This does not necessarily imply the outcome of psychosis, as the Lacanian vulgate advocates, but in the affirmation of a procedural duty in the ambit of desire.

In treating desire as a productive process, Deleuze and Guattari invest a positive value in this concept. He fails to preach psychic or phantasmatic attributes, to indicate the act of building the real. Seen from this angle, the structuralist version of psychoanalysis conveyed by the Lacanians functions as a perverse operation, an ideology of lack. It perverts the law of partial objects - according to which nothing is defined as lack - in favor of a conception of desire moved by an original lack that acts as a cause. A perspective that reverses, therefore, the ontological predominance of what causes desire. Bottom line, even the conceptual instruments revisited by Lacan's disciples are nothing more than an illusion of movement, a forced choice between two modes of totalization:

... one, when the socius gives them a structural unity under a symbolic signifier that acts as absence and lack in a set of departure; another, when the family imposes on them a personal unit with the imaginary meanings that they spread, which "vacuolize" the lack in a set of arrival: they are two abductions of machines, because, while the structure applies their articulation, the parents put their fingers to them (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 406).

At this point in our analysis, it is evident that the object of anti-Dianetic criticism focuses especially on Lacan's overly structuralist readings. Let us see how this interpretative bias is manifested, having as a parameter a "beautiful psychoanalytic-antipsychiatric book".

The depoliticized madman

The structural perspective of the unconscious explained earlier was an idea widely diffused among Lacan's interpreters. It produced resonances with the fields of institutional analysis, antipsychiatry, clinical psychoses, and anthropology.

On the frontiers between psychoanalysis and antipsychiatry, Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the book of Maud Mannoni, The psychiatrist, his madman and psychoanalysis,published in 1970. This work has some The Anti-Oedipus, because it demonstrates, in a paradigmatic way, how to conduct an analysis of psychosis by suppressing the sociopolitical contents. In Section II.5.4, ​​the author is accused of codifying delusion in Oedipal terms, when in fact its content is notably geographic, historical-worldwide, political, racial. In fact, there is the error of redirecting "... the historical and political content of delusion to an internal familial determination" so that "everything is crushed, ground, triangulated in the Oedipus; everything is supported in the father, in order to reveal the insufficiency of an Oedipal psychoanalysis the most crudely possible" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 124).

Deleuze and Guattari argue that this reductionist interpretation is not a privilege of Freudian hermeneutics. It is actually also present in the clinic of the structural unconscious, but by other devices. This application is patent in the case study carried out by Maud Mannoni. In The psychiatrist, his madman and psychoanalysis, the psychoanalyst describes and analyzes the paranoid delirium of Georges Payote, a Martinique natural man hospitalized for 10 years in a health establishment. In his delusion, Georges makes references to the Arabs, the Algerian war, the Gauls' dynasty among other political-racial themes. Let us consider a fragment of his account:

I fell ill because of the Algerian problem. He had done the same silly thing of them (sexual pleasure). They adopted me as a brother of race. I have Mongolian blood. The Algerians used me in every achievement. I had racist ideas. Rumors have been spread about me in the Paris region when I felt persecuted. ... I was always a martyr when I was a child. My aunt made me feel her contempt. I led a life of a wolf; I got my student's degree. My name is Payote. Descending from the Gauls' dynasty. On this sense, I have noble value. I wanted to reproduce in the style of Martinique. In Martinique, I was picked up by the Mongols and breastfed with paid milk, this made me live (Mannoni, 1970/1981, p. 101).

This account is used in the anti-British machine to exemplify how metaphysical, political, and racist themes are obnubilated in favor of a remarkably formal theoretical scheme of psychosis. In Mannoni's account of Payote's illness, nothing is found but a symbolic void of the father's signifier. In fact, it uses the concept of forclusion as a device of forced Oedipalization, that is, as an operator that:

... seems to indicate a properly structural gap, thanks to which the schizophrenic is naturally took to he oedipal axis, referred to the Oedipal orbit, from the perspective of the three generations, according to which the mother could not reaffirm her desire towards her own father, nor towards her son, and then, towards the mother (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 74).

The structural gap implies a double impasse in which the absence of the Oedipus is interpreted as an empty place or a hole in the structure, in order to lead the analysis to the pole of the imaginary identifications of the undifferentiated maternal side. The whole process is translated in terms of imaginary identifications which occur under the yoke of Oedipus or what the subject lacks in order to be Oedipalized (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010).

Oedipal characters are in their place, but in the game of permutations that takes place, there is a kind of empty space ... What appears as rejected is all that concerns the phalus and the father ... Every time Georges attempts to apprehend himself as wishful, he is referred to a form of dissolution of identities. He is another, captivated by a maternal image ... He remains captured in an imaginary position in which he is captivated by the maternal image; it is from this place that the Oedipal triangle is situated, which implies a process of impossible identification, always implying, in the manner of a pure imaginary dialectic, the destruction of one or the other partner (Mannoni, 1970, quoted by Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 125).

Deleuze and Guattari do not deny that family and logical-functional determinants exert specific functions in the processes of subjectivation. They disagree only with respect to the importance and the role assigned to these stimuli, that is, "... an initial role as a symbolic organizer (or disorganizer) from which the floating contents of the historical delirium would derive ..." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 126). Parental figures do not play the role of organizers, but simple inducers endowed of any values.

It is therefore in this theoretical domain, perhaps, that anti-Oedipus critiques assert themselves and at the same time become simplified. In fact, there are studies that try to articulate ethnology with psychoanalysis, having as a common point the problem of the universality of Oedipus.

Universal Oedipus?

In They do not know what they do, those who Oedipalize, section II.4.4, Deleuze and Guattari present a brief genealogy of the controversy erected around the problem of the universality of Oedipus. It began in the debates between Malinowski and Ernst Jones, continued with Abram Kardiner, Erich Fromm and Géza Roheim and was taken up by readers of Lacan. Among these are the theorists who gave an Oedipian interpretation to the Lacanian doctrine, giving it an ethnographic extension. Deleuze and Guattari identify two poles from which the universality of the Oedipus is justified.

... one, perhaps out of fashion, makes Oedipus an original affective constellation and, at the limit, a real event, the effects of which would be transmitted by phylogenetic heredity. And the other that makes Oedipus a structure that, in the limit, must be discovered in the phantom, in relation to biological prematurity or neoteny (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 227).

From the deleuzo-guattarian prism, these postulates differ only on the function that Oedipus exerts in the limit. While those who advocate in favor of the first pole think that Oedipus functions as the real original matrix, the representatives of the second strand say that Oedipus is structural.

However, even though it is more complex, the structural version of Oedipus does not solve the problem of universality. On the contrary, it actualizes "the old metaphysical operation which consists in interpreting denial as a deprivation, as a lack: the symbolic lack of the dead father, or the great Significant" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 228).

Among the culturalists and ethnologists oriented by the universalist-structural perspective, the Oedipus is present through multiple triangulations. They consist of variations of the same structural unit, that is, different figures for the same symbolic operation. The conflict produced in this field oscillates:

... always between the two famous poles, the pre-Oedipal maternal pole of the imaginary and the Oedipal paternal pole of the structural, both having the same axis, speaking the same language as a familiar social, in which one designates the maternal dialects and the other, the strong law of the father's language (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 231).

The debate of anthropology/ethnology with the structuralized version of Lacan is established, to a great extent, by the application of the paralogism of extrapolation. In this paralogism, a universal-common element functions as a logical operator that introduces the lack in desire or, what is the same thing, fixes the subject precisely because it is an absence for him. The desire is inserted in a process that institutes, from the beginning, a unit that precedes its realization. This presumed totality is posed as that which is lacking to partial objects and, by derivation, to the subject of desire. Extrapolation, then, acts as a formal reference for fixation of the subject, since it does nothing but rediscovering" ... everywhere ... something transcendent and common, but only a mutual universe to introduce the lack in the desire, to fix and specify people and an I under such face of his absence ..." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 101).

Deleuze and Guattari take an excerpt from the African Oedipus - a work developed by the psychoanalyst Marie-Cécile Ortigues in collaboration with the philosopher Edmond Ortigues - as a model of extrapolation. The fragment in question reads as follows: "In order to fulfill the conditions necessary for the existence of a structure in the family institution or the Oedipus complex, at least four terms are necessary, that is, one more term than what is usually required" (Ortigues & Ortigues, 1966, quoted by Deleuze & Guattari 1972/2010, p. 83).

The African Oedipus had a major repercussion and its importance was attested in a critical review written by Pierre Smith and disclosed in the Issue nº 3 of the French magazine of anthropology L'Homme of 1967. The book discusses the universality of the Oedipus complex based on the reports of psychotherapeutic consultations of school-age children living in the city of Dakar. The study is based on theoretical constructs derived from psychoanalysis and social anthropology. Clinical data are interpreted in the light of Lacan's readings and uses of the ideas of Freud and Levi-Strauss, especially his notions of prohibition of incest and of covenant rules. In the work, Oedipal themes - castration anguish, the father's phantasmatic murder, the institution of incest - are qualified as human experiences with universal symbolic validity. The Oedipus complex is universalizable as a formal structure that varies only according to the pathways of resolution that each society constructs for itself historically (Smith, ^1966/2017).

The research of Ortigues and Ortigues does not reveal the same mechanisms and attitudes in Western and African Oedipus". This is not an embarrassment because what matters to them is the common structural substrate, that is, the formal system that makes Oedipus the universal device of colonization of subjectivity. This formula² was replicated by other researchers at the time. Géza ^{Roheim (1967}), in the book Psychoanalysis and anthropology, interprets cultural phenomena from a reading grid that allows it to converge a series of variables into a potentially universal symbolic core.

It is precisely these interpretations of Lacanian teaching - emphatic in applying the "potentially universal symbolism" to the theory of the unconscious - that receive the harshest criticism. They are often mentioned to serve as an "anti-model", that is, as an example of a mistaken perspective on the workings of the unconscious.

Faced with these notably formalizing conceptions, Deleuze and Guattari propose schizoanalysis as a theoretical-political device sensitive to the deterritorialized flows, to the molecular elements of desiring production. It takes for itself as a practical rule what in Leclaire's comment on Lacan (^1965/1998) is described as nonsense, the last and irreducible terms of the unconscious that subsists in the absence of bondage.

But why, then, to see in this extreme dispersion, in these machines dispersed in every machine, only a pure "fiction" that must give way to the Reality defined as lack, letting Oedipus or castration return at full gallop, at the same time in that it is based on the absence of nexus in a "signifier" of the absence in charge of representing it, of connecting it to itself and of sending us from pole to pole of displacement? We fall into the molar hole by intendin to unmask the real (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 416).

In short, we will say that the anti-Oedipus unconscious is not structured as a language, nor is it a distorted Greek tragedy. Their products (the dream, the delirium...) function as indexes of deterritorialization, since:

... the machine is always hellish in the family dream. It introduces cuts and flows that prevent the dream from closing inside its own scene and of being systematized in its representation. It gives force to an irreducible factor of nonsense, which will develop elsewhere and out there, in conjunctions of the real as such (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 418-419).

Schizophrenizing the field of the unconscious and the historical social field so that the yoke of the Oedipus can be exploded and rediscovered the force of the desiring production. This is, perhaps, the slogan that best translates the anti-Oedipus intente

Final considerations

We suggested, earlier, that Deleuze and Guattari try to enable the function of the Real in the debates they establish with the Lacanism around the theory of desire. They propose a new concept of the unconscious conceived as a non-structural and impersonal process that does not symbolize, imagine and figure, since it is only Real. The authors start from the premise that desire is the product and producer of reality, a libidinal investment in the immediate historical social real. They seek, among other things, to promote a reflection on the participation of psychoanalysis in the reproduction and in the increase of the Oedipal agency of subjectivities in capitalism.

The Anti-Oedipus is the initial, and still incipient, act of creating a new problematic field for the notion of desire and its unconscious processes. Deleuze and Guattari go through numerous theoretical-conceptual territories to demonstrate and substantiate their arguments. They operate true bricolage with terms and notions derived from linguistics, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis and so many other domains.

Our analyses have demonstrated how sinuous are the paths drawn in studies inspired by the Lacanian teaching. There are numerous references in the anti-Oedipus text to authors who, directly or indirectly, used Lacan to propose - or only reproduce - formulations applicable to clinical, political and social fields. We peered more closely at the "beautiful books" written at a time still strongly influenced by the structuralist program. We found that these works are criticized precisely for reducing the unconscious to the structural-symbolic dimension.

The dialogue with the interpreters of Lacan basically covers the uses they make of sectorial constructs. At first glance, we noticed that direct mentions to Lacan occur in a constructive way, and to some extent, in order to signal potential convergences. We questioned, however, whether this impression resists further investigation. Such a problem is instigating and deserves to be dealt with in another endeavor.

Referências

• ¹
  Deleuze G. (2008). Conversações. São Paulo: Editora 34. (Trabalho original publicado em 1990).
• ²
  Deleuze G., & Guattari F. (2010). O Anti-Édipo: capitalismo e esquizofrenia. São Paulo: Editora 34 . (Trabalho original publicado em 1972).
• ³
  Deleuze G., & Parnet C. (2016). Abecedário de Gilles Deleuze. Recuperado em 02 de junho, 2016, de Recuperado em 02 de junho, 2016, de http://stoa.usp.br/prodsubjeduc/files/262/1015/Abecedario+G.+Deleuze.pdf (Trabalho original publicado em 1994-1995).
  » http://stoa.usp.br/prodsubjeduc/files/262/1015/Abecedario+G.+Deleuze.pdf
• ⁴
  Lacan J. (1969-1970/1992). O seminário. Livro XVII. O avesso da psicanálise. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. (Trabalho original publicado em 1969-1970).
• ⁵
  Lacan J. (1995). O seminário. Livro IV. A relação de objeto. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar . (Trabalho original publicado em 1956-1957).
• ⁶
  Lacan J. (1998). De uma questão preliminar a todo tratamento possível da psicose. In Lacan J. Escritos (pp. 537-590). Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar . (Trabalho original publicado em 1957-1958).
• ⁷
  Lacan J. (1999). O Seminário. Livro V. As formações do inconsciente. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar . (Trabalho original publicado em 1957-1958).
• ⁸
  Lacan J. (2002). O seminário. Livro VI. O desejo e sua interpretação. Porto Alegre: Associação psicanalítica de Porto Alegre. (Trabalho original publicado em 1958-1959).
• ⁹
  Lacan J. (2005). Introdução aos Nomes-do-pai. In Lacan J. Nomes-do-pai (pp. 57-87). Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar . (Trabalho original publicado em 1963).
• ¹⁰
  Laplanche J., & Pontalis J-B. (1985). Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines et origine du fantasme. Paris: Hachete Littératures. (Trabalho original publicado em 1964).
• ¹¹
  Leclaire S. (1998). La réalité du désir. In Leclaire S. Écrits pour la psichanalyse 1: Demeures de l’ailleurs. (1954-1993) (pp. 139-159). Paris: Seuil/Arcanes. (Trabalho original publicado em 1965).
• ¹²
  Manonni M. (1981). O psiquiatra, seu Louco e a psicanálise. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar . (Trabalho original publicado em 1970).
• ¹³
  Miller J-A. (2014). Apresentação do Seminário 6: O desejo e sua interpretação , de Jacques Lacan, por Jacques-Alain Miller. Opção Lacaniana online nova série, 14(5), 1-19. Recuperado em 08 de fevereiro, 2017, de Recuperado em 08 de fevereiro, 2017, de http://www.opcaolacaniana.com.br/pdf/numero_14/Apresentacao_do_seminario_6.pdf
  » http://www.opcaolacaniana.com.br/pdf/numero_14/Apresentacao_do_seminario_6.pdf
• ¹⁴
  Róheim G. (1967). Psychanalyse et anthropologie: cultura, personnalité, inconsciente. Paris: Gallimard.
• ¹⁵
  Roudinesco E. (1967). L’Action d’une métaphore. La pensée: Revue du rationalisme moderne. Arts. Sciences. Philosohie, 162, 54-73.
• ¹⁶
  Safouan M. (1973). Estruturalismo e Psicanálise. São Paulo: Cultrix. (Trabalho original publicado em 1968).
• ¹⁷
  Santiago J. (1995). Jacques Lacan: a estrutura dos estruturalistas e a sua. In I. Domingues, H. Mari & J. Pinto (Orgs.), Estruturalismo: memórias e repercussões (pp. 217-224). Rio de Janeiro: Diadorim.
• ¹⁸
  Smith P. (1966). Marie-Cécile et Edmond Ortigues, O Edipe africain [Resenha do livro OEdipe africain, de M-C. Ortigues & E. Ortigues, Paris]. L’Homme, 3(7), 106-109. Recuperado em 11 de fevereiro, 2017, de Recuperado em 11 de fevereiro, 2017, de http://www.persee.fr/doc/hom-0439-4216-1967-num-7-3-366902
  » http://www.persee.fr/doc/hom-0439-4216-1967-num-7-3-366902

• 1
  Apoio e financiamento: Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa de Minas Gerais (Fapemig)

• 3
  The references to the teaching of Lacan in The Anti-Oedipus go until this period.
• 4
  "... the formula of the Oedipus is 3 + 1, the one of the transcendent phallus without which the terms considered would not form a triangle" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2010, p. 101).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  13 Mar 2020
• Date of issue
  2018

History

• Received
  03 July 2017
• Accepted
  27 Feb 2018