I’m posting this for a few reasons. First, to illustrate Deleuze and Guattari’s deference towards Lacan. Second, to give a clear example of the focus of their argument against psychoanalysis (second bolded section). Third, to recommence the discussion I begin in my thesis around the topics of dualism and vitalism. Two desiring-regimes (vocational and libidinal, paranoiac and schizophrenic) can be seen as underlaid by a vital substance, and yet, if we are going to allow for this notion of a One, we need to be clear about how it expresses itself individually. D&G argue against the processes by which the human individual, in fact a network (rhizome) of dissociated functionalities, comes to be understood as totalized, unified, self-willing subject. The illusion of totality leads to a vacuolization (tiny-bubble-forming) of lack in the blood of thought. Lack is impressed, one lacks with regard to totalities that exist only in the vocational logic of consciousness. To elude the impression of lack, one begins to think the self as multiple and divided. The person as a multiplicity of partial organs and desiring-machines. Intensities, units, multiples, non-signifying signs, dispersed elements of desiring-machines themselves dispersed, random drawings…. all of this in place of ‘objective representations.’ It is not that all is repudiated, or that God is dead. That is only the Eden story in the religion of lack, and it is an anthropomorphic representation of meaning. Meaning is found in the multiplicity unearthed when the body is understood as a disjunctive synthesis of organs, functions, and causes micro-political beyond imagination.

pp.307-9

Psychoanalysis makes its ambition clear: to relieve the wanting family, to replace the broken-down familial bed with the psychoanalyst’s couch, to make it so that the “analytic situation” is incestuous in its essence, so that it is its own proof or voucher, on par with Reality.

In the final analysis that is indeed what is at issue, as Octave Mannoni shows: how can belief continue after repudiation, how can we continue to be pious? We have repudiated and lost all our beliefs that proceeded by way of objective representations. The earth is dead, the desert is growing: the old father is dead, the territorial father, and the son too, the despot Oedipus. We are alone with our bad conscience and our boredom, our life where nothing happens; nothing left but images that revolve within the infinite subjective representation. [...] Everything, the myth of the earth, the tragedy of the despot, is taken up again as shadows projected on a stage. The great territorialities have fallen into ruin, but the structure proceeds with all the subjective and private reterritorializations. What a perverse operation psychoanalysis is, where this neoidealism, this rehabilitated cult of castration, this ideology of lack culminates: the anthropomorphic representation of sex! In truth, they don’t know what they are doing, nor what mechanism of repression they are fostering, for their intentions are often progressive. But no one today can enter an analyst’s consulting room without at least being aware that everything has been played out in advance: Oedipus and castration, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, the great lesson of the inadequacy of being or of dispossession. Psychoanalysis as a gadget, Oedipus as a reterritorialization, a retimbering of modern man on the “rock” of castration.

The path marked out by Lacan led in a completely different direction. He is not content to turn, like the analytic squirrel, inside the wheel of the Imaginary and the Symbolic; he refuses to be caught up in the Oedipal Imaginary and the oedipalizing structure, the imaginary identity of persons and the structural unity of machines, everywhere knocking against the impasses of a molar representation that the family closes round itself. [...] As partial objects the desiring-machines undergo two totalizations, one when the socius confers on them a structural unity under a symbolic signifier acting as absence and lack in an aggregate of departure, the other when the family imposes on them a personal unity with imaginary signifieds that distribute, that “vacuolize” lack in an aggregate of destination: a double abduction of the orphan machines, inasmuch as the structure applies its articulation to them, inasmuch as the parents lay their fingers on them. To trace back from images to the structure would have little significance and would not rescue us from representation, if the structure did not have a reverse side that is like the real production of desire.

This reverse side is the “real inorganization” of the molecular elements: partial objects that enter into indirect syntheses or interactions, since they are not partial (partiels) in the sense of extensive parts, but rather partial (“partiaux“)

(Here, the translators insert a note: partiel: partial, incomplete; partial (pl. partiaux): partial, biased, as a biased judge. We have chosen to translate objets partiels throughout as “partial objects” rather than as “part-objects” (as in Melanie Klein), in anticipation of this point in the book where Deleuze and Guattari shift from Klein’s concept of the partial objects as “part of,” hence as an incomplete part of a lost unity or totality (molar), toward a concept of the partial objects as biased, evaluating intensities that know no lack and are capable of selecting organs (molecular).)

like the intensities under which a unit of matter always fills space in varying degrees (the eye, the mouth, the anus, as degrees of matter); pure positive multiplicities where everything is possible, without exclusiveness or negation, syntheses operating without a plan, where the connections are transverse, the disjunctions included, the conjunctions polyvocal, indifferent to their underlying support, since this matter that serves them precisely as a support receives no specificity from any structural or personal unity, but appears as the body without organs that fills the space each time an intensity fills it; signs of desire that compose a signifying chain but that are not themselves signifying, and do not answer to the rules of a linguistic game of chess, but instead to the lottery drawings that sometimes cause a word to be chosen, sometimes a design, sometimes a thing or a piece of a thing, depending on one another only by the order of the random drawings, and holding together only by the absence of a link (nonlocalizable connections), having no other statutory condition than that of being dispersed elements of desiring-machines that are themselves dispersed.

At this point, a footnote refers the reader to a passage in Lacan, where he emphasizes the disorganization of the unconscious. The footnote, by D&G, goes on:

Serge Leclaire has made a profound attempt to define within this perspective the reverse side of the structure as the “pure being of desire”. In desire he sees a multiplicity of prepersonal singularities, or indifferent elements that are defined precisely by the absence of a link. But this absence of a link– and of a meaning– is positive, “it constitutes the specific force of coherence of this constellation.” Of course, meaning and link can always be re-established, if only by inserting fragments assumed to be forgotten: this is even the very function of Oedipus. But “if the analysis again discovers the link between two elements, this is a sign that they are not the ultimate, irreducible terms of the unconscious.” It will be noticed here that Leclaire uses the exact criterion of real distinction in Spinoza and Leibniz: the ultimate elements (the infinite attributes) are attributable to God, because they do not depend on one another and do not tolerate any relation of opposition or contradiction among themselves. The absence of all direct links guarantees their common participation in the divine substance. Likewise for the partial objects and the body without organs: the body without organs is substance itself, and the partial objects, the ultimate attributes or elements of substance.

(text continues)

It is this entire reverse side of the structure that Lacan discovers, with the “o” as machine, and the “O” as nonhuman sex: schizophrenizing the analytic field, instead of oedipalizing the psychotic field.

pp. 323-4 The next passage, a few pages beyond, builds on topics mentioned in this last footnote: the ‘link’ between the elements of desire, and the existence of ‘prepersonal singularities.’ This breakdown of the self is something I think we should strive to understand. These new words demand study. Where once there was thought to be a self, there may be prepersonal singularities in a state of dispersion, neighboring cells, objects within them partial to this or that cause, desiring-machines ushering to this or that production, ribosomes, mitochondria, dna, cytoplasm, golgi apparati, a nucleus, a nucleus…

Let us therefore return to the rule so clearly stated by Serge Leclaire, even if he sees this only as a fiction instead of the real-desire: the elements or parts of the desiring-machines are recognized by their mutual independence, such that nothing in the one depends or should depend on something in the other. They must not be opposed determinations of a same entity, nor the differentiations of a single being, such as the masculine and the feminine in the human sex, but different or really-distinct things, distinct “beings,” as found in the dispersion of the nonhuman sex (the clover and the bee). As long as schizoanalysis has not arrived at these disparate elements, it has not yet discovered the partial objects as the ultimate elements of the unconscious. It is in this sense that Leclaire used the term “erogenous body” not to designate a fragmented organism, but an emission of preindividual and prepersonal singularities, a pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity, without unity or totality, and whose elements are welded, pasted together by the real distinction or the very absence of a link. Such is the case in the schizoid sequences of Beckett: stones, pockets, mouth; a shoe, a pipe bowl, a small limp bundle that is undefined, a cover for a bicycle bell, half a crutch (“if one indefinitely runs up against the same set of pure singularities, one can feel confident that he has drawn near the singularity of the subject’s desire”). To be sure, one can always establish or re-establish some sort of link between these elements: organic links between organs or fragments of organs that eventually form part of the multiplicity; psychological or axiological links– the good, the bad– that finally refer to the persons or the scenes from which these elements are borrowed; structural links between the ideas or the concepts are apt to correspond to them. But it is not in this respect that the partial objects are elements of the unconscious, and we cannot even go along with the image of the partial objects that their inventor, Melanie Klein, proposes. This is because, whether organs or fragments of organs, the partial objects do not refer in the least to an organism that would function phantasmatically as a lost unity or a totality to come. Their dispersion has nothing to do with a lack, and constitutes their mode of presence in the multiplicity they form without unification or totalization. With every structure dislodged, every memory abolished, every organism set aside, every link undone, they function as raw partial objects, dispersed working parts of a machine that is itself dispersed. In short, partial objects are the molecular functions of the unconscious. That is why, when we insisted earlier on the difference between desiring-machines and all the figures of molar machines, we were fully aware that they were both contained in, and did not exist without, one another, but we had to stress the difference in regime and in the scale between these two machinic species.

In this last sentence, we see how a dualism of regimes– the individual and the socius, the molecule and the mass– is contained in the nucleus called ‘one another.’ There is something in this phrase. To ‘one’ another, to make something whole in one’s perception, to understand things as totalities: how human! The act of one’ing another: is it not humanity’s very particular expression of desiring-subjectivity? Is it not love? And then to make a ‘one’ of this very principle, to make a totality of totalization, an idea of intellect, which would love infinitely– what is that but God? We need to discover the hero no less than the fool in our discarded despots. And our essence, our functioning understood and conceptualized as a totality, if it be desiring-subjectivity, if our desire to ‘one another’ (a phrase vague enough to include both subject formation and sexual intercourse, our two means to survival) is truly our fullest aim, the most thorough expression of our deepest happiness, then desiring-subjectivity is the blood coursing through the rhizome of one’self, or better, it is the nucleus, the expressive nucleus engendering the difference of prepersonal singularities within one self.