AGAINST THE LITTLE DELEUZIANS: Schizoanalysis is all around us

Deleuze is dead. He has been dead for twenty years. We cannot keep on talking and writing as if nothing significant in philosophy and relevant to his thought has happened since his last book, WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?, published in 1991 (25 years ago). It is unreasonable, and somewhat ridiculous, to discuss Deleuze’s philosophy as if Badiou’s LOGICS OF WORLDS (2006), Laruelle’s PHILOSOPHIE NON-STANDARD (2010), Stiegler’s STATES OF SHOCK (2012), Zizek’s LESS THAN NOTHING (2012), and Bruno Latour’s AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE (2012) did not exist.

Yet this is what the little Deleuzians of my title continue to do. Either they have converted Deleuze into the object of the discourse of the University or, perhaps better, they jealously hold on to his books as a vade mecum for intellectual marginals and other hysterics. There is no schizoanalysis in what they are doing, just scholarship or histrionics, paranoia or hysteria.

-Yes, one might reply, but what exactly is « schizoanalysis »? Noone can say, noone is sure. We do not even know if it exists or has ever existed, even in Deleuze (or Guattari’s) head.

-Schizoanalysis exists, another might answer, we do not need the prefix « schizo », analysis will do just fine. This is what Badiou, Laruelle, Stiegler, Zizek, Latour, and many others are doing right now. There is no mystery to solve by poring over Deleuze and Guattari’s texts, no secret of clinical practice to discover or invent. We must move on.

If we make use of Lacan’s schema of the four discourses (the university, the hysteric, the master, and the analyst), we can see that these philosophers are constantly circulating between the discourse of the hysteric, the master, and the university.

-But what about the discourse of the analyst?

-This circulation (or pulsation, or metamorphosis) is itself the mode of enunciation of the analyst. It can be found under diverse guises and to varying degrees in the works of Alain Badiou, François Laruelle, Bernard Stiegler, Slavoj Zizek, Michel Serres and Bruno Latour. This is the sort of philosophy that Deleuze would be doing today, and would be in dialogue with, whatever his agreements or disagreements. This is schizoanalysis at work.