This essay will attempt to conduct a twofold experiment: on the one hand, it will attempt to make the shift from a psychoanalytic thinking about lesbianism as identity corresponding to a certain psycho-social mode of ‘being a lesbian’, to a schizoanalytic thinking that conceives of it as a becoming-lesbian, a schizophrenic process that constitutes ‘a rupture, an eruption, a break-through which smashes the continuity of personality and takes it on a kind of trip through “more reality” ’ (Deleuze 2006: 27). The essay will thus argue for a ‘schizophrenic’ lesbian desire not in its clinical but in its critical meaning: an ‘anoedipal, schizoid, included, and inclusive’ desire whose excess (rather than lack) violates strict definitions and exceeds linguistic meaning and signifiers; a desire whose ‘meaning’ can be nothing else than its forces and effects.

Deleuze's use of medical terms in philosophy resonates with his belief that philosophy, art and science, although distinct and autonomous, necessarily enter into relations of mutual resonance and exchange.