JustinG wrote: ↑Tue Jul 13, 2021 1:34 am
Regarding
Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari's attack on Freud is partly based on the premise that desires produce bodies rather than the other way around. This has strong panpsychist/idealist connotations and could perhaps be related to BK's ideas on alter formation.
Here is what Claire Colebrook says about desire in her introductory book on Deleuze (
https://www.amazon.com/Gilles-Deleuze-R ... 0415246342):
Colebrook wrote:
Desire for Deleuze, is not to be reduced to sexual relations between persons. On the contrary, 'persons' are formed through the organisation of
desire. I become a body through a relation to other bodies, eventually investing, perhaps, in an image of myself as an enclosed ego.
The crucial challenge of Deleuze's theory of desire, against psychoanalysis and against common sense is the idea that life and desire do not begin
from bounded organisms. There is a flow of life or genetic material, the 'intense germinal influx', which passes through and across bodies. In its
original and differential power life is not organised into bodies; bodies are formed from investments, or from active and ongoing interactions of
becomings. I do, however, think of myself as a closed and autonomous being, bounded by death: but this is because of a long history in which we
have invested in the organised and enclosed human individual.... Life does not begin from the bounded organism but from flows.
These are fascinating things to consider. I am seriously not trying to impose my own favorite thinkers onto another person's ideas - I am of the genuine opinion of what I referred to before, i.e. the postwar (WW2) philosophers in the circle of Deleuze are abstractly critiquing what has already been critiqued
concretely by phenomenologists prior to them. Steiner's lectures on psychoanalysis, and specifically his comments on re: Freud, Adler, and Jung, are great examples of what I am referring to. I have no idea to what extent and detail Deleuze & Guatarri go into the nature of this "theory of desire" but, if my suspicions are correct, all of that detail will be in the hyper-abstract manner we can see from the book review quoted above. We are given the lowest possible resolution concepts on "desire", "bounded organism", "investments", "germinal influx", "differential power", etc. Contrast that with Steiner (or even Jung) below:
Jung said to himself: “Oh well, one cannot say that Freud is wrong [about sexual desires as root cause of psychic pathology]; what he observed is there, and one cannot say that Adler is wrong [about "power" as root cause of pathology]; what he observed is also there. So it is probably sometimes one way, and sometimes the other!”
That is quite reasonable; it is sometimes one way and sometimes another. But Jung built upon this a special theory. This theory is not uninteresting if you do not take it abstractly, simply as a theory, but see in it instead the action of our present-day impulses, especially the feebleness of our present knowledge and its inadequacy. Jung says: there are two types of people. In one type feeling is more developed, in the other thinking.
Thus an “epoch-making” discovery was made by a great scholar. It was something that any reasonable man could make for himself within his own immediate environment, for the fact that men are divided into thinking men and feeling men is sufficiently obvious. But scholarship has a different task: it must not regard anything as a layman would, and simply say: in our environment there are two types of people, feeling people and intellectuals — it must add something to that. Scholarship says in such a case: the one who feels his way into things sends out his own force into objectivity; the other draws back from an object, or halts before it and considers. The first is called the extroverted type, the other the introverted. The first would be the feeling man, the second the intellectual one. This is a learned division, is it not? ingenious, brilliant, really descriptive up to a point — that is not to be denied!
Steiner does go on to critique Jung's abstract intellectual approach as well, but the point is this - can you sense the difference in resolution there? The way in which Steiner's elaboration (in 1917) points us towards the concrete realities that all of these different people were speaking of? And that is just one small section of the first lecture in a five-part lecture series on psychoanalysis. It only gets more concrete and detailed from there. Jung, who was writing at the same time as Steiner, is much more concrete than any later post-modern critics of reductive psychoanalysis (of which Jung certainly was not one), and Steiner is really no comparison. He felt Jung, Bergson, and many others were speaking way too abstractly about these things (although if he had known about Jung's visionary experiences and how that informed his empirical research, he may have been less critical). In the post-modern age, especially, abstract vs. concrete language can change the entire meaning of what is being said. Steiner's criticism of that sort of abstraction is more relevant today than it ever was in his day.