There has been some truly wonderful work produced in the field of Lacanian theory in the last few years, such as A. Kiarina Kordela's Surplus: Spinoza, Lacan (2007) and Samo Tomšič's The Capitalist Unconscious (2015), which use their fusion of Lacan with, respectively, Spinoza and Marx to bring dramatic insights into the value of his work. Aaron Schuster's The Trouble with Pleasure manages the same approach by bringing together Lacan and Deleuze.

Such a strategy seems, at first glance, rather unusual, as these two thinkers are often seen as radically opposed to each other. Whereas Lacan is (supposedly) a thinker of lack and negativity, Deleuze is (supposedly) a affirmative philosopher in the vitalist tradition. And anyway, didn't Deleuze and Guattari sound the death knell for psychoanalysis when they published Anti-Oedipus (1972)? Wouldn't that book be the ultimate take-down of both Lacan and his Freudian buddies?

When I was undergraduate, I certainly swallowed this dichotomy hook, line, and sinker, but more recently I have come to question its validity. François Dosse's dual biography of Deleuze and Guattari, Intersecting Lives (2007), revealed just how close Deleuze and Guattari - especially the latter - actually were to Lacan. Rereading Anti-Oedipus, I also noticed just how little they actually criticize Lacan in any direct or meaningful way. By the time I came to read Schuster's book, then, my mind had already been re-opened to the possibility of a convergence.

Schuster opens his book in an unexpected and seemingly disconnected preface: an extended commentary on the practice of complaining. He starts from a psychoanalytic perspective, using a famous Jewish joke about being thirsty to demonstrate how the purported object of a complaint is a misdirection: the real source of dissatisfaction is with existence itself. This then leads to a meditation on another famous joke about the misfortune of being born. This then shifts the theoretical focus to Deleuze, who analyzes this joke as an acknowledgment of the relative disempowerment of the ego: life is more vast than my own self. We should not be distracted then, by the negativity or lack in the act of complaining, for what it really attests to is the vitality of the drive (Lacan) or desire (Deleuze).

The book begins in earnest with an introduction that considers the split between Lacan and Deleuze. Schuster asks: "If anything, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuzian philosophy are unbearably close, and the real problem is: what generates the gap between their two positions?" (p.30). After all, at various points in his career, Deleuze has moved from affirming psychoanalysis, to critiquing it, to ignoring it altogether. The trajectory of Schuster's thought lies in the direction of the death drive, the beyond of the pleasure principle, this principle of negative that converges most clearly in Lacan and Deleuze through their readings of Sade. Schuster asserts that he will use this convergence to "present a less positive and less affirmationist Deleuze, to abjure the all too easy opposition between negativity, impossibility, castration, and lack versus creativity, difference, and becoming, and instead to interpret Deleuze’s philosophy as an extended and highly original attempt to think negativity and the violence of the negative differently" (p. 46).

Chapter 1 attempt again to articulate the difference between Lacan and Deleuze, this time along the lines of sensibility (Deleuze) and language (Lacan), which in turn represent two aspects of Freud's thought. This simplistic division is broken down, however, by the concept of the drive. Schuster thus argues that "the split between Lacan and Deleuze can ultimately be understood as different theoretical approaches to what is for each a similarly double-sided 'topology'—a topology which is strongly linked to the 'impossible synthesis' of the two aspects of Freudian metapsychology, the speaking subject and the drive-machine" (p.49). Through a careful reading of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, Schuster shows the way in which drives/habits form who we are in the absence of an ego, and that pleasure is inscribed into these habitual practices. "How and where the organism finds pleasure is a function of its habits, not the other way around" (p. 54). Schuster further ties this idea to the influence of Bergson and Proust on Deleuze, who provide the idea that memory itself is like a drive.

"What Deleuze’s Bergsonism adds to the psychoanalytic concept is the accent on time: for Deleuze, partial objects are not so much separated body parts as autonomous temporal organs or, to use his own term, destinies. Just as the body is conceived 
by psychoanalysis as a body-in-pieces, so too should time be conceived as a fragmented “body,” a collection of temporal fragments without any single unifying stream or history." (p.60).

There is always a risk of the Deleuze habit/drive turning into something negative, and this is where he returns to the death drive. In Deleuze's case, it is Kant's critique of Descartes that provides the equivalent of the Lacanian notion of the split subject. Turning then to Lacan, Schuster contemplates that Lacan's insight is also to question the relationship between the symbolic order of language and the "headless" drives.

to be continued... ( )