Introduction

From ‘From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism’ (1961) to Anti-Oedipus (1972), Deleuze's primary target when writing about psychoanalysis has been what he calls in 1961 Freudian psychoanalysis's ‘inflation of the importance of the father’. By 1967's Coldness and Cruelty he was training his sights on the Lacanian ‘Name-of-the-Father’, remarking critically that ‘Lacan appears to look upon this as a primary and irreducible operation which is independent of all maternal influence.’ In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze pulls no punches, explicitly associating the Lacanian Name-of-the-Father with the despot in ‘barbarian’ societies, who phonetically re-‘codes’ and ultimately represses the primarily visual graphic inscription of desire on the body in ‘primitive’ societies (as carved out of ‘mother’ nature). Yet, as can be inferred from the above, while being critical of certain aspects, Deleuze also took psychoanalysis seriously enough during this decade of work to develop in painstaking technical detail an internal reconstruction of psychoanalysis's conception of, amongst others, infantile development, language acquisition and Oedipus.

Of these texts, Anti-Oedipus with its combative historicisation of the ontogenetic necessity and universality of the Oedipus complex has undoubtedly received the most attention. Yet a quieter, ‘structuralist’, critique of Oedipus already appeared in the pre-Guattari The Logic of Sense from 1969, and it is this critique that is arguably more interesting from a psychoanalytic and Lacanian perspective. Anti-Oedipus, with its nascent post-humanism, would pave the way for the cosmic theory of machines completed in A Thousand Plateaus, but The Logic of Sense remained embedded in a framework which, while philosophically antithetical to Lacanian concerns, was close enough theoretically to structuralism-influenced psychoanalysis to offer partial and productive bridges.

A reason for this, not least, is the historical coincidence of Deleuze's work in The Logic of Sense with parallel developments occurring at the time within the Lacanian school. Lacan famously elaborated a structural theory of Oedipus in the 1950s, reducing the father to the prohibitive ‘No!/ Name’ (Non/Nom, the two are homophonous) which metaphorises the infant's libidinal attachments to the mother (the ‘Desire-of-the- Mother’) such that, as signifiers, they are collected and repressed as the unconscious signified of the Name-of-the-Father (as signifier of symbolic Otherness and castration).

Introduction: The Phantasm between Speech and Language

For Deleuze, speech is a structure summed up by the series title ‘Good Intentions Are Inevitably Punished’ and by the formulation ‘intention-result’ – it is a self-dividing intention constitutive of the event (the ‘result’). Thus the event is not actually the result of speech but of its intention, which in its self-division divides between speech and something else, in relation to which alone the event can be seen as a ‘result’ of speech. This something else is language. As Deleuze writes, ‘Speech is never equal to language. It still awaits the result, that is, the event which will make the formation effective.’ However, we saw in the previous chapter how the event as castration-effect retroactively constitutes the Voice as a language that will have castrated the infant: it is in relation to language – as a ‘pre-sense’ insisting in the heights – that the infant develops ontogenetically; yet, paradoxically, to accede to language and its sense, the infant must contribute to it the event – which is inherent to language if outside it, and essential to language's functioning – as the difference between speech and language, or as the limits of sense retroactively imposed on speech (speech is nonsense only in relation to language). Thus, if Deleuze writes soon after his discussion of Poord'jeli as esoteric word that ‘Nonetheless, there is still no language; we are still in a prelinguistic domain’, this is because speech is literally pre-linguistic – it ontogenetically precedes language. Despite this (or rather because of it), speech acts as the crucial mediating structure between language and the bodies from which language must distinguish itself so as to constitute itself as language.

Now, while we have established that in ultimately speaking the event speech genetically founds language, it is nonetheless ultimately language which expresses the event by retroactively framing speech.

Introduction: Humour, or the Univocity of Sense

There are a number of ways to view the genesis of sense in The Logic of Sense. One way that has been emphasised in the secondary literature is as the emergence of consciousness from the body's affects. There is, however, a more interesting and important genesis at stake beneath this one. If the first genesis takes us from the verb to the logical proposition and empirical consciousness, the second off-piste route goes from the verb to the univocity of being. As Deleuze writes, playing on the literal meaning of the scholastic term univocity – one voice (voce) – ‘The univocity of Being signifies that Being is Voice, that it is said.’

This second genesis thus remains at the level of – and indeed is the very culmination of – language's secondary organisation (the surface), and is explicitly discussed throughout the final series of the dynamic genesis, the ‘Thirty-Fourth Series of Primary Order and Secondary Organisation’. It is for this reason that the book concludes at the level of the secondary organisation, and at the level of the relation between speech and language, rather than with the tertiary ordinance of language or of the logical proposition. Hence the genesis at stake in Deleuze's logic of sense as a whole moves from noise to the voice, the voice to speech, speech to the verb and from the verb to univocity, without ever moving all the way up to language (as cut off from speech). As such, the current chapter will complete the account of Deleuze's theory of the phantasm given in the previous chapter, which it will do through the addition of the ontological and literary components needed to move from its beginning in sexuality and language to its never fully realised ending beyond sexuality in the univocity of being.

The Oedipus Complex from Freud to Lacan

Freud considers the Oedipus complex – the classical narrative of the boy's desire to sleep with his mother and to kill his father – to constitute the ‘peak of infantile sexuality’. For Freud, in the Oedipus complex the boy develops an attachment or ‘object-cathexis for his mother’, originally related to her breast. The boy deals with the father by ‘identifying himself with him’, and while for a time these two relationships (boy–mother, boy–father) ‘proceed side by side’, the ‘intensification’ of the boy's ‘sexual wishes’ in regard to his mother portrays the father as an obstacle and it is, for Freud, from this that the Oedipus complex originates. Despite emphasising the heterosexual nature of the complex (boy–mother), Freud sees the erogenous zones as ‘subordinated to the primacy of the genital zone’ only after puberty. Prior to puberty,

For him, the Oedipus complex targets boys and girls differently – the girl undergoing a ‘negative’ form of the complex – but he seems to contradict himself by allowing the heterosexuality of the complex to coexist with a non-genital reading of the zones prior to puberty. Prepuberty, the zones are autonomous and independent of the genital zone for both the girl and boy, and treated much the same for both sexes.

Because of what he calls ‘complet[e] contradict[ions]’ in the Freudian conception of the relation between the genital and other zones, Lacan considers both girls and boys to undergo the same initial stages of the Oedipus complex. Lacan argues that the two sexes only fully differentiate themselves upon the initial resolution of the complex, and that the parents’ sexes are also only fully distinguished from one another for the infant at this stage.

Artaud and Klein

While, for many, Deleuze's philosophy is synonymous with his concept of the ‘body without organs’, and even though he first explicitly develops this concept in The Logic of Sense, a large part of the present book argues that it is rather the organ-ised body – here figuring specifically as incarnated structure, building explicitly on Leclaire – on which his onto-logic of sense hinges. Nonetheless, this body only emerges later on in the ‘dynamic genesis’, the psychoanalytic portion of The Logic of Sense which provides a psycho-sexual account of language acquisition and of the emergence of sense, and first we must turn to the dis-organ-ised body of Klein and Artaud.

In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze develops his conception of the body without organs based on a reading of the work of Antonin Artaud. In the radio play To Have Done with the Judgement of God (1947), Artaud writes:

Artaud considers the ‘Judgement of God’ to ‘construct’ the body as an organism, which is to say a body composed of organs. Above all, for Artaud, this means organ-ising the body in terms of sexuality. As Susan Sontag explains, ‘Artaud demonizes sexuality in everything he wrote’, opposing it to a ‘pure body – divested of organs and […] lusts’. Furthermore, along with sexuality Artaud denounces language itself. For Sontag, writing in Artaud is experienced as ‘an agony’ that ‘supplies the energy for the act of writing’, which ‘give[s] form to intelligence’. This in turn defines the body for Artaud in terms of a corresponding ‘capacity for intelligence and for pain’, and not a ‘capacity for sensuous pleasure’.

While subtitled ‘Deleuze and the Lacanian School’, the primary aim of the present book is to provide a close reading of Deleuze's 1969 work The Logic of Sense faithful to the text. This presents an immediate difficulty in that the text is itself highly fragmentary, being comprised of thirty-four miniature chapters or ‘series’ whose interrelations are never fully spelled out – indeed, the form and content of the work aligned, the text's series are ‘nonsense’ yet collectively as a ‘structure’ generate sense as their superficial (yet not insignificant) by-product. The wager of the present book is that ‘sense’ can be made of The Logic of Sense by approaching this structure as a psychoanalysis of sense. Although I will be primarily focusing on the latter portion, the so-called ‘dynamic genesis’ which provides a psychoanalytical account of language acquisition, by reading it in parallel with a number of the book's earlier series I will show how psychoanalysis underpins the larger project.

I will argue that this psychoanalysis of sense comprises three key components, which Deleuze touches on in the preface when he writes that for him The Logic of Sense is ‘an attempt to develop a logical and psychoanalytical novel’. Firstly, insofar as ‘Psychoanalysis is the psychoanalysis of sense’ – at least within the construction or constructivism of The Logic of Sense itself – Deleuze intends to map psychoanalysis directly onto the logic and ontology of sense developed in the book as a whole. This makes his psychoanalysis of sense directly ontological and not merely psychological. Secondly, this logic and ontology of sense does not pre-exist (though outstrips) its construction by language. Thirdly, the psychoanalytical clinic of logical and ontological (or better onto-logical) sense completes itself in the literary work. In short, psychoanalysis is integral to Deleuze's onto-logic of sense even if the latter outstrips the former.

Introduction: Lewis Carroll's Three Types of Esoteric Word

In the preface to The Logic of Sense, Deleuze spells out his aims in this book. He writes that in Lewis Carroll's work one finds a ‘chaoscosmos’ or paradoxical unity of ‘sense and nonsense’, ‘but’ that

Firstly, this marriage of language and the unconscious – or this paradoxical unity of sense and nonsense – appears to allude to the work of the Lacanian school, which he later adds has ‘completely renewed the general problem of the relations between language and sexuality’. Secondly, to contribute something original, in light of Lacan's work – but also, it is implied, because Lacan's work has not yet reached its own ground (as conceived by Deleuze) – Deleuze is saying here that we need to turn to the work of Carroll, so as to examine ‘what else’ language and the unconscious are connected with. This third term, it is implied, is more fundamental than either language or the unconscious taken separately, underlying them both and accounting for the importance of their relation.

It is clear, not least from the book's title, that this third term is ‘sense’ or more precisely ‘the Univocity of sense’, in short univocal sense understood as ontologically bypassing what are termed ‘sense’ and ‘nonsense’, or language and the unconscious/sexuality/the body, respectively, when taken separately. For Deleuze, univocal sense is both the ontological ground of, as well as being produced by, the articulation of the unconscious/sexuality and language, bodies and language or, more fundamentally, being and thinking.