Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze

Abstract

In their critique of Sigmund Freud’s (psycho)analysis of The Wolf-Man in A Thousand Plateaus, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari take on the methodology and ideology of psychoanalysis, which they see as ‘a mixed semiotic: a despotic regime of significance and interpretation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 125), and so, the regime of Modernism itself. For Deleuze and Guattari, Freud misreads the Wolf-Man’s narrative, imposing nominalist, patriarchal presuppositions on the narrative’s multiplicity, reducing the assemblage to the name of the Father, or the name of the Wolf-Man, in the crafting of a coherent, unified subconscious. Deleuze and Guattari replace the constrictive unity of psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the subconscious with the multiplicity of Schizoanalysis and its emphasis on the unconscious. Freud’s misreading confuses the two, the unified subconscious with an unconscious as assemblage that is ‘fundamentally a crowd’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 29), an analysis of Freud that parallels Deleuze’s critique of Heidegger’s Sein. Deleuze and Guattari are careful to distinguish, in its Bergsonian echo, between the simple multiplicity of space, ‘numerical or extended multiplicities’, and that of the assemblage with its ‘qualitative’ multiplicities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 33).