Description
Book SynopsisIn his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault notes that in the late sixties, there is a turn away from Freud and a movement toward what he calls an “experience and technology of desire that is no longer Freudian”. Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari were interested in, and engaged with this shift and their collective work in these areas spawned a larger post-Freudian literature.
This book gathers contributions from international scholars with the aim of exploring the social, political, and philosophical dimension of Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Foucault’s critical encounters with psychoanalytic thought: Their possible connections, their divergences, the fields of reflection that these encounters open, and the problems and debates that led Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari to engage with psychoanalysis in the ways that they did. In doing so, the main goal of the book is not to engage in a critique of the discipline of Psychoanalysis as such, but to investigate how Foucault’s and Deleuze’s critique of Psychoanalysis gives rise to a political reflection that draws on some of Psychoanalysis key notions. Among these, the concept of Desire is central as it allows us to grasp the different ways in which Foucault and Deleuze politically engage with Psychoanalysis: for Deleuze, Desire is the element through which Revolution becomes possible, whereas for Foucault Desire is a cornerstone of the modern mechanisms of subjection.
Drawing both on new material like Confessions of the Flesh, the 4th volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality and on Foucault and Deleuze main work, the book covers a variety of topics including the contrast between Foucault’s and Deleuze political understanding of desire and pleasure; the genealogy of desire as a way to investigate the historical shaping of psychoanalysis; the relationship between psychoanalysis and the normalizing mechanisms of power (e.g. biopolitics and disciplinary regimes); the ways in which psychoanalysis and neoliberalism come together in particular moments, the status and role of desire in revolt, resistance, and transformation; Foucault and Deleuze’s different approaches to the unconscious; the role of desire in the formation of identity; etc.,. In the 50th anniversary of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, one of the major references that inspires the many chapters in this book, we aim to pay homage to these two important figures of contemporary thought by enriching and opening new lines of thought and problematization of the political reflection on Desire that Foucault and Deleuze developed.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Agustín Colombo (Postdoctoral Researcher at the Fonds national de la recherche scientifique (F.R.S. - FNRS) at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium), Geoffrey Pfeifer (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Edward McGushin (Stonehill College)
Section 1: Oedipus, Unconscious and Sex
- Rethinking Oedipus: Foucault and Deleuze on Knowledge, Forgetting, and Fractured Selves.
Corey McCall, the Cornell Prison Education Program
- Knowledge, the Unconscious, and Desire.
Serene Richards, New York University, London / EHESS.
- Psychoanalysis in question: Foucault, Castel, Deleuze-Guattari.
Philippe Sabot, University of Lille 3.
- The Christian Invention of the Sexual. In Pursuit of psychoanalysis.
Frédéric Gros, Sciences Po, France.
- Panthasms and their Vicissitudes.
Laure Hengehold. Case Western Reserve University.
- Sex(uality) as a State of Exception.
Cindy Zeiher, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
- “Twisted”
Lynne Huffer, Emory University.
SECTION 2: Obedience, Revolution, and Resistance
- You Can’t Always Want What You Get: The Psychoanalytic Ambivalence of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze
Julian Bourg, Boston College.
10. On Foucault and Deleuze Disagreement on Desire and Pleasure: Desire as an Object of Veridiction.
Agustín Colombo, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Fonds national de la recherche scientifique (F.R.S. - FNRS) at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
11. Desire’s Tyranny: Deleuze and Guattari on Desire, Capitalism and Authoritarianism in our Contemporary Moment.
Geoffrey Pfeifer, Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
- Foucault’s Troublesome Hypothesis: Notes on a New History.
John Rachjman, Columbia University
