The Logic of Sexuation in Deleuze and Lacan Matthew Lovett
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Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 5-11-2018 The Logic of Sexuation in Deleuze and Lacan Matthew Lovett Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Part of the Continental Philosophy Commons, Feminist Philosophy Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Psychiatry and Psychology Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Lovett, M. (2018). The Logic of Sexuation in Deleuze and Lacan (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1418 This One-year Embargo is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE LOGIC OF SEXUATION IN DELEUZE AND LACAN A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Matthew Thomas Lovett May 2018 Copyright by Matthew Thomas Lovett 2018 THE LOGIC OF SEXUATION IN DELEUZE AND LACAN By Matthew Thomas Lovett Approved March 2, 2018 ________________________________ Dr. Daniel Selcer Dr. Tom Eyers Associate Professor of Philosophy Associate Professor of Philosophy (Committee Chair) (Committee Member) ________________________________ Dr. Claire Colebrook Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University (Committee Member) ________________________________ ________________________________ Dr. James Swindal Dr. Ronald Polansky Dean, McAnulty College of Liberal Arts Chair, Department of Philosophy Professor of Philosophy Professor of Philosophy iii ABSTRACT THE LOGIC OF SEXUATION IN DELEUZE AND LACAN By Matthew Thomas Lovett May 2018 Dissertation supervised by Dr. Daniel Selcer In The Logic of Sexuation in Deleuze and Lacan, I argue for an account of sexual difference that responds to a tension in feminist philosophy, namely, the problem of the ontological status of the sexed body. In so doing, I turn to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. I argue that, rather than being antithetical, the two can be productively read together, in particular with regard to this very question. Ultimately basing my reading in the Deleuzian passive syntheses and dynamic geneses of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense as well as in Lacan’s twentieth Seminar on sexuation with respect to the phallic function, I argue that we should see sexual difference as a kind of generative void that propels the subject forward in its perpetual processes of becoming. Thus we get a materialist but non-reductive account of sexual difference or sexuation as a kind of back- turning relation of thought and the body in a constitutively incomplete interplay. iv DEDICATION For my parents, in their inexhaustible patience. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I have to thank, of course, my dissertation committee; the Philosophy faculty at Duquesne; and the members of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh for their time and effort in supporting the creation of this project. Beyond this, special thanks go to Kelsey Ward, Martin Krahn, Becky Vartabedian, Boram Jeong, Chellie Bowman, Tavia Nyong’o, Brittany Leckey, William Harwood, and Julie Beaulieu for talking me off several academic cliffs. Perpetually consumed by my own anxieties, I regularly turned to them for their all-too-gracious encouragement. Many thanks as well to Celeste Pietrusza for her willingness to regularly suffer my incessant Lacanian jokes and interpretations, and for responding in kind. I have been lucky enough to form both a local and an international Queer Techno Family™ who consistently remind me why it’s important to create anything at all. I am quite certain that, without Hot Mass, Berghain, Movement, or Honcho, without any number of other overcrowded, pulsating sweatboxes, I would feel nothing of the vitalism that Deleuze champions as the essence of philosophy itself. Be it in Berlin, Detroit, Pittsburgh, New York, or elsewhere: I’ll see you on the dance floor. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... iv Dedication .............................................................................................................................v Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. vi Introduction ....................................................................................................................... viii Chapter One: The Problem of Sexual Difference: Irigaray, Butler, Deleuze ........................1 Chapter Two: On The Sexual Genesis of Thought: Deleuze & Psychoanalysis .................33 Chapter Three: Ungrounding Grounds: Deleuzian Ideas & the Lacanian Sinthome ...........88 Chapter Four: Deleuzian Sexuation, via Lacan .................................................................145 Conclusion: A Return to Feminist Theory through Deleuzian Sexuation .........................201 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................233 vii INTRODUCTION PROJECT OVERVIEW: SOME TENSIONS The goal of this dissertation is to articulate a materialist but non-reductive and non- essentialist account of sexual difference, and one that can account for a variety of different subject positions without a normative frame. This is a tall order. As such, it positions itself as follows: it attempts to resolve a tension between Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray by reading together Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. These may seem strange bedfellows. There are a few possible prima facie incompatibilities that need to be reconciled before going forward with my argument. As stated, my dissertation will read Deleuze and psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, together in order to respond to the tension in feminist philosophy with respect to the status of the sexed body. Thus this may well seem an unlikely marriage, considering some presumed hostility between Deleuze and psychoanalysis on the one hand, and between gender feminism, sexual difference feminism, and psychoanalysis on the one other. In this section, I want to indicate why I am taking this approach. Once I do this, I will be in a better position to state the overall thesis of my project. In this dissertation, I will be explaining Deleuze’s genetic ontology in his early work. In so doing, I will be demonstrating his explicit deployment of psychoanalytic terminology in these early texts. However, it is well known that Deleuze’s later work with Guattari is very critical of psychoanalysis in many respects, and much contemporary Deleuze scholarship focuses primarily on these later texts. As I will try to make clear in the following chapters, there are compelling political and theoretical reasons to parse out Deleuze’s use of psychoanalysis in these texts. More than this, I will argue that his use of viii it is of central and not merely peripheral importance. One thing to be recognized is simply that, especially in Difference & Repetition and The Logic of Sense, psychoanalysis provides a major theoretical framework for Deleuze. Second, even in his later criticisms of psychoanalysis, he does not seem to reject psychoanalysis as such, only its arguably myopic focus on certain elements to the exclusion of others (as psychoanalytic feminism would concede).1 Indeed, Deleuze suggests that Lacan himself is the inspiration for his criticisms of psychoanalysis. As Dan Smith argues, “Lacan’s significance … lies in the way in which he was able to push psychoanalysis to the point of its auto-critique, and it is precisely this Lacanian critique of psychoanalysis that Deleuze and Guattari take up and pursue.”2 I thus maintain that we get a better understanding of Deleuze’s own project if we understand his relationship to Lacan.3 For Deleuze, Lacan was already embarking on the project he takes up with Guattari. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write, “we owe to Jacques Lacan the discovery of this fertile domain of a code of the unconscious,” and in Negotiations Deleuze maintains, “[I] owed so much to Lacan. But I felt it would all work even better if one found the right concepts, instead of using notions that didn’t even come 1 Even in “Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse” in Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 77-123, and “Five Propositions on Psychoanalysis” in Desert Islands, ed. David Lapoujade and trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004) 274-280, Deleuze critiques certain incidental aspects of psychoanalysis as a practice (for instance, that it simply falls into the structure of capitalist moneymaking), but his critique is never of psychoanalysis itself. Later, when he tries to move beyond psychoanalysis with Guattari, I would suggest that he is engaging in the same kind of critique of psychoanalysis that Lacan himself was enacting. 2 Dan Smith, “The Inverse Side of the Structure” in Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 316. 3 The more personal aspects of their relationship as what we might call “frenemies”