THE SUBJECT: DELEUZE-GUATTARI AND/OR LACAN (IN THE TIME OF CAPITALISM)?

Abstract

This paper addresses the question, whether Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the human subject, as articulated in (mainly) Anti-Oedipus, is as irreconcilable with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical  theory of the subject as one might expect, given Anti-Oedipus’ attack on the “Oedipal†basis of psychoanalysis. The notion of the multiplicitous “subjectâ€, as fleshed out in Anti-Oedipus, is reconstructed with the requisite attention to Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of flows, desiring-machines, desiring-production, schizophrenia, the “body without organs†and the emergence of a “spectral†kind of subject. It is argued that the so-called “body without organs†may be read, in one sense, as their term for the concept of (ego-) identity, which is anathema to the dynamism of the process of desiring-production. For purposes of comparison, Lacan’s theory of the subject is briefly reconstructed as well in terms of the registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and the “realâ€, with a view to uncovering those aspects of it that are compatible with Deleuze and Guattari’s ontological emphasis on process and becoming, instead of substance. Finally, the problem of the relation between capitalism, on the one hand, and Deleuze/Guattari’s process-ontology, as well as Lacan’s understanding of the discourse of capitalism, is addressed in light of the question of the subject of capitalism, and of the possibility of a critical understanding of capitalism.