Gilles Deleuze

CHAPTER 6 GILLES DELEUZE Learning from the Unconscious For the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, rational Cartesian consciousness as the sole constituent of thought is insufficient because what is yet “unthought” is equally capable of producing practical effects at the level of human experiences. Deleuze considers “an unconscious of thought [to be] just as profound as the unknown of the body” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 19; italics Deleuze’s). The quality of profundity is signi- ficant and relates Deleuze’s particular mode of production of human subjectivity, that he together with social psychologist Felix Guattari called “schizoanalysis”, to Jung’s depth psychology. Kerslake (2007) notices that Deleuze’s conception of the unconscious is closer to the Jungian rather than the Freudian. Jung’s dynamic process of the individuation of the Self as the goal of analysis is akin to Deleuze’s concept of becoming, and specifically becoming-other as a process of learning from the unconscious embedded in experience. The Jungian collective unconscious is by definition transpersonal, thus exceeding the scope of traditional Freudian psychoanalytic conception as narrowly personal and simply repressed. Contrary to behaviorist psychology positing an individual as born in the state of a blank slate, tabula rasa, the Jungian unconscious is always already inhabited by archetypes. Analogously Deleuze is adamant that “one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle” (Deleuze, 1988a, p. 123, italics Deleuze’s). According to Deleuze, the world consists not of substantial “things” but of relational entities, or multiplicities, and the production of subjectivity is necessarily embedded amidst the relational, experimental and experiential, dynamics. The dynamics of becoming, when any given multiplicity “changes in nature as it expands its connections” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 8), is a distinctive feature of Deleuzian thought: becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-world, becoming-child, and always becoming-other. This constant becoming-other constitutes the process of individuation, and “[i]ndividuation …precedes matter and form, species and parts, and every other element of the constituted individual” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 38). Deleuze posits the virtual field of becoming which is as real as the actual plane of manifested phenomena, and an object of experience is considered to be given only in its tendency to exist in its virtual, potential form. The realm of the virtual is reminiscent of, but not limited to, the Jungian archetype of the Shadow that hides in the collective unconscious or, at the plane of expression, for Deleuze, in the shadow around the words. This means that unconscious ideas need a means of expression other than words and sentences; they can take the form of legible images and symbols 61 CHAPTER 6 that we can read and interpret so as to makes sense of, and create meaning for, our experiences. For Deleuze, “Sense is essentially produced” (Deleuze, 1990a, p. 95). The unconscious, which is over and above its personal dimension, is conceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari as Anti-Oedipal, that is, irreducible to Freud’s master- signified. Similar to the Jungian collective unconscious, it always deals with social and collective frame and is “a productive machine…at once social and desiring” (Deleuze, 1995, 144). In contrast to solely theoretical knowledge, it is desire or affect that educates the human psyche by means of its active participation in life- experiences in the process of creative subject-formation. The process of becoming- other is embedded in the multiplicities of experiences and events, just like in the story of Eros and Psyche that we presented in chapter 2. The intensive capacity “to affect and be affected” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. xvi) is part and parcel of the dynamic subject’s complex rules of formation. The production of subjectivity includes an encounter with pure affect analogous to Psyche encountering Eros and, from now on led by Love, necessarily engaging in Praxis. Importantly, Deleuze’s theoretical framework is inseparable from practice. Theory itself plays a practical, instrumental role – not unlike the theoretical step-stones that we have laid so far in the preceding chapters and especially as regards the “box of tools” quality of Tarot addressed in chapter 5 – and “must unsettle and disturb those who would use them [tools] in order to bring new objects and events within range of thought” (Murphy, 1998, p. 213). Archetypes as virtual tendencies have the potential of becoming actual through the process of multiple differentiations of the transcendental and “initially undifferentiated field” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 10) analogous to Jung’s field of the collective unconscious. We remember the undifferentiated abyss of freedom in The Fool picture (chapter 4) stepping into which the Fool begins to learn from his experiences, that is, he becomes able to differentiate between them, evaluating and re-valuating singular experiences along his long road towards becoming fully individuated in the image of The World, the archetypal Self. In order to become one’s authentic Self one has to engage with the world of experiences and become able to “to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 141). Indeed without the Fool taking a risk and leaping ahead into the abyss – tracing a line of flight – he would have forever remained a Fool, without the possibility of ever reaching the final Arcanum, The World. It is the lines of flight – the lines of becomings – that lead us into The World, or The Universe. As Deleuze says, “Each one of us has his own line of the universe to discover, but is only discovered through tracing it” (1986, p. 195), through living and learning as the means of acquiring Gnosis as we said in chapter 3, through becoming conscious of the unconscious embedded in the virtual space of the Deleuzian “outside”. For Deleuze, The outside is…animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside but precisely the inside of the outside. … The inside is an operation of the outside: … an inside … is … the fold of the outside (Deleuze, 1988b, pp. 96–97). 62 .

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