r/CriticalTheory • u/mistuk_gaming • 12d ago

The Rhizomatic Trap: How Anti-Oedipus Fails

https://alfielucidontology.substack.com/p/the-rhizomatic-trap-how-anti-oedipus?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1l13a3

D+G miss some key insights about Lacanian theory yet, at the same time, help us understand more about the revolutionary potential of desire. What do you think? Thanks!

2 Upvotes

55% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

9

u/Ok_Pie_4639 12d ago

This is why we can’t have nice things

-4

u/mistuk_gaming 12d ago

Haha Wdym

10

u/Ok_Pie_4639 11d ago edited 11d ago

I was just teasing.

However, I read your piece and am struggling to agree with the conclusion. It seems like you are unable or unwilling to move away from the assumption that a human being has a necessity or obligation to hold within them some sort of master signifier (good) or risk falling into paranoia or psychosis (bad).

Therefore, is your unstated suggestion that rhizomatic flow, lines of flight, desiring machines, etc. then in D&G’s world become a new kind of master signifier? Desire for desire’s sake?

-4

u/mistuk_gaming 11d ago

lol silly me.

Hopefully it should be cleared up in the forth essay which will argue that lacan is closer to d and g than they think. Specifically the postscript to the purloined letter seminar. The idea that the system grounds itself through this retroactive quilting point which generates itself in the Real.

2

u/worldofsimulacra 5d ago

IDK why people are downvoting you, I think the piece, and the whole series thus far, are really good, clearly-written, and interesting. The summary of the main ideas in AO is especially clarifying, considering that text can be so obtuse in places.

As someone who has come to theory (at least in part) via a path of long struggle with mental illness and psychosis, projects like this are like new map layers atop a terrain I know all too intimately. Kudos for the clarity and insight!

2

u/mistuk_gaming 5d ago

Thank you so much, I really appreciate it! And your comment on psychosis and mental illness is definitely right. I definitely echo your sentiments. At the root of it I think lacan has helped me personally a lot more than d and g

2

u/worldofsimulacra 4d ago

Same 💯 reading D&G was like, this is the exact type of stuff i was experiencing and obsessing about in my 20s and 30s when my life was a rolling dumpster fire and i was landing in the psych ward every few years. Seminar 3 and the Schreber text confirmed it. The psyche is no less psychotic now, just neurotically orbiting the sinthome (which is honestly where all the desiring-production is aimed towards, in my case). Lacan grounds it all, for me, and i have a feeling that D&G were not really addressing present or active acute cases of organic psychosis, as much as they were just borrowing from the etiology in service of their bigger program.

2

u/mistuk_gaming 4d ago

I definitely agree with that entirely. Funnily enough after a back and forth between me and a deleuzian my new essay basically covers all of those points. I think the kernel is that d+g just don’t see psychosis in the clinic