Platform Oedipus
Anti-Oedipus, fifty years on: an interview with Fadi Abou-Rihan
Philip Baker and Christopher Skeaff
Fifty years on, what of Anti-Oedipus? Are we any closer to receiving it today than when it was first published? It’s still a monstrous book of mind-boggling scope. Weaving a revolutionary politics of desire through a quasi-vitalist philosophy of machines, it combines an explosive polemic against psychoanalysis with a complex affirmation of schizophrenia. To these components it adds a genealogy of the state, a sweeping historical anthropology, a critique of linguistics, and a radical analysis of capitalism. While integrating the latest in genetics research, it invents hordes of concepts—schizoanalysis, bodies without organs, desiring-machines, nonhuman sexes—all along staying in dialogue with Freud, Marx, Beckett, Artaud, D. H. Lawrence, Nietzsche, Wilhelm Reich, and others. What’s more, the authors wear their ambition loosely, not so much unworried about the book’s sense as apparently doubting there’s even a clear sense to be made. Deleuze once said that “the book was written for fifteen- to twenty-year-olds,” adding (probably more seriously): “There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like plugging into a circuit.”
And yet this flippancy stands in uproarious contrast to the work’s structure. Beneath its chatty surface, the book’s argument advances with classical philosophical rigor, playing a slew of shapeshifting triadic structures against a series of fundamental dyads. It does this with such insistence that, in the end, for readers following these congruences, the surrealist collage the book might otherwise pretend to be reveals a systematic construction that, while Hegelian in scope, repels any dream of equilibrium. Only five books in a century might be so weird and cacophonous and exacting.
One would expect a book entitled Anti-Oedipus to have run riot through the consulting room. In actuality, its impact there has been harder to gauge. It’s safe to say, at least, that Deleuze and Guattari themselves weren’t as focused on the consulting room as they were on a world turned into a consulting room. The Oedipus they’re so anti is a normalizing, essentializing, hegemonic Oedipus, the discovery of Freud’s that strove to contain his earlier elaboration of an irrepressible unconscious. For Deleuze and Guattari, Oedipus cornerstones a stultifying familialism that primes subjects for conformity and subservience in a world dominated by capital. If today’s Oedipus happens to be more of a platform Oedipus, trapping us in obscure rivalries, identifying us with credit scores, and indebting us to everything, its core function is only getting stronger: to keep subjects segregated from the real forces of indeterminacy, chaos, and catastrophe. The book is about the liberations that come with missing out and breaking down.
Opening psychoanalysis itself to lapse and disorganization—to the unconscious processes that constitute its object—the better to get a grip on life, may indeed be the psychoanalytic legacy of Anti-Oedipus to which we remain partially blind, as Fadi Abou-Rihan has argued. In this interview with Abou-Rihan, we discuss that legacy alongside questions regarding the historicity of the unconscious, the political and technological dimensions of the clinical situation, and more.
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Deleuze and Guattari did their thing; we now have to do ours
Philip Baker: A significant contribution made by your Deleuze and Guattari: A Psychoanalytic Itinerary consists in showing that Anti-Oedipus is more amenable to the tradition and practice of psychoanalysis than many have thought. Not only do you write that Anti-Oedipus remains “faithful to Freud’s core insights” (77), but you also articulate the common ground Deleuze and Guattari share with Lacan—as well as where they part ways. Can you talk a little about your own intellectual trajectory when it came to developing your reading and use of Anti-Oedipus?
Fadi Abou-Rihan: It is very tempting to tell a story here, a convenient little story with the requisite insight and humility. Much as analysis has taught us to be wary of manifest contents and secondary revisions, we analysts still love to be told stories: we may not look and we may not touch but we may—nay, must—listen. So, here’s my story, or at least the version I’m comfortable sharing at this point.
An analysand’s words at the beginning of a session will often frame most of what follows. In that spirit, the essay on Nietzsche I chose to open the book with communicates much of the background as well as the gist of the remaining six essays. It took up what I had reached over ten years prior in my research on repetition in Nietzsche and Freud and infused it with what the clinic was teaching me. The earlier Deleuze helped bridge the eternal return with the death drive in a way that made sense. After that, and in spite of its challenges, Anti-Oedipus struck a note more familiar than most of the vignettes I was reading in the clinical literature.
Deleuze and Guattari found a psychotic out on a walk more interesting than a neurotic on a couch; I was, and still am, less invested in the categories than in what my analysands are saying. Perhaps it is the luck of the draw, but I don’t recognize the meek and petty neurotic Deleuze and Guattari wrote about. What resonated instead was the text’s dispersive energy, the intensity and movement of its associations. No matter the presentation, people in analysis are motivated by much more than the quick fix; many will have exhausted every other option available before they end up on a couch—and that is often a positive prognostication. What they are actually looking for varies from one person to the next; ditto what they walk away with. What they share is the desire to be or to do otherwise, a desire often so faint it is lost in the cacophony of symptoms and resistances, yet a desire so defiant, so resilient, so shameless in the demands it places on their resources. Anti-Oedipus didn’t so much express or illuminate that desire as it reproduced it, beyond reserve or earnestness.
And so, I came to read the text in a “conditional relation” to desire. The expression is Nietzsche’s; it betrays how much the philosopher was conditioned by his own maddening thoughts. In that same vein, Anti-Oedipus communicated the unconscious in two ways: something it knew to speak about and, much more significantly, something by which it was conditioned. Here, I found myself both a theorist who could understand and a clinician who could analyze.
Christopher Skeaff: Should psychotherapists and psychoanalysts read Anti-Oedipus? Why or why not?
Fadi Abou-Rihan: I will answer your question in three moments.
I believe people should read Anti-Oedipus as much and as little as they should read anything else in the literature. Neither Deleuze nor Guattari was keen on being canonized. Neither launched an institute or a college and neither preached from the podium. The general understanding is that, early in their careers, one had been pegged as Sartre’s heir and the other as Lacan’s. That did not come to be. As minoritarians, Deleuze and Guattari went on to work their craft and not be that preoccupied with legacy. Do we have a responsibility to build them an edifice or install them as part of the tradition? They did their thing and we are now doing ours; those who come after us will hopefully treat us with the same irreverence.
I don’t hold out much hope for the future of Anti-Oedipus in clinical circles. On the one hand, the culture that invigorated the text is not part of our surround. The Situationist International, Marx, Nietzsche, structuralism, the tradition of the weekly public seminar, the ways in which philosophy, art, history, and politics were folded into psychoanalysis as a practice—in the broadest sense of the term—these are all now foreign to most clinical ears. (This is especially true in the English-speaking world, where the gaps between the clinical, the theoretical, and the so-called applied are wider and more deeply entrenched.) On the other hand, the demonization of the clinic in the humanities and the recruitment of theory in the effort to trivialize and defend against individual suffering haven’t done much by way of warming clinicians’ hearts to Anti-Oedipus or, for that matter, to a host of other texts of its kind.
Last but not least, it seems to me that, along with the changes in cultures, politics, and crises from the early ’70s to today, the unconscious may have undergone its own mutations. Obviously, as per Didier Anzieu, psychoanalysis ought to address the discontents it encounters in each and every era, so that it might be a response of and to its time as, indeed, Freud, Klein, Lacan, and Guattari’s projects were. Little attention has been paid to the possibility that the unconscious itself, rather than simply its science or environment, is transforming. One lesson we’ve learned from Anti-Oedipus is that the unconscious is hardly an immutable thing-in-itself, that it is a product by virtue of the fact that it is a desiring-production.
The history of psychoanalysis, then, ought not to be only the history of a body of work and its surround but also the history of its object of study. The very structure of our inner worlds cannot be immune to irreversible environmental devastation, economic deprivation, and cultural violence. Lack and production seem barely enough as descriptive or interpretive categories at a point where hope is being relegated to the end-of-life care wing. We feel pain differently and we respond to it equally differently. When we can, we harness new tools in order to mount original strategies of social or political resistance and, might I add, accommodation. We need to acknowledge the real likelihood of emerging parallel unconscious dynamics the discipline has not yet fully grasped. Deleuze and Guattari did their thing; we now have to do ours.
Philip Baker: One wonders what effect technological change over the past fifty years has had on transforming the unconscious. I don’t think the word “computer” appears in Anti-Oedipus, for instance. There’s a sense in which Guattari (and to a lesser extent Deleuze) embraces technology’s liberatory potential; what’s more, from a certain vantage point, Silicon Valley “disruption” loudly proclaims its own disjunctive ethos of play. But that ethos, no doubt, exemplifies better than anything before it what Deleuze and Guattari conceived as the trap of the capitalist axiomatic. Do you have thoughts on how present-day technological capacities to automate and control attention affect our ability to discover the unconscious?
Fadi Abou-Rihan: This is a really tough yet crucial question. As far as discovering the unconscious is concerned, the COVID-19 pandemic moved the question of technology center stage. Teletherapy had been one of the worst-kept secrets in the profession since many of us were already incorporating it into our practices and hardly anything was said about the sanctity of couch and consulting room. What was playing out instead was a focus on territoriality and profit. While, for instance, most analytic trainees were forbidden from seeking supervision outside their geographies, the powers that be thought it perfectly legitimate to use video conferencing and electronic publishing in order to export their clinical and supervisory skills—the expansionist project of the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance is a case in point. When psychoanalysis is a commodity, it tends to be sold under strict, often monopolistic, rules. COVID-19 forced the profession into a corner: loosen the restrictions on the use of the available technologies or face serious financial repercussions. Hence my distrust of much of the recent hand-wringing in the name of the analytic process and its integrity.
We now find ourselves compelled to rethink the ways in which we practice and to recognize, yet again, that there is hardly anything that is natural about the psychoanalytic setting. The shibboleths of frame and couch and evenly suspended attention are in fact among the technologies we’ve set up in order to focus our work and explore certain corners of the unconscious. These components are not without their histories and need to be under constant revision. The therapeutic wager of analysis is that its so-called tools are best at making room for latent dynamics to emerge and for troubling wishes to be sorted out. Deleuze and Guattari’s observations on the subtle processes of production are invaluable in this context: the technologies analysis deploys are neither neutral nor noninterventionist; they structure and orient what they claim to simply record.
As much needs to be said of web-based technologies once put to clinical use: they not only help us take stock of what is already there, they too generate altogether new phenomena and dynamics. The dethroning of the physical consulting room by telehealth is shaking our clinical habits. As analysts and analysands, what does it mean for us to be robbed of our opportunity to perform blindness? Once reliant on the clinical comforts of physical proximity, how might we negotiate our ambivalence in relation to this new experience of solitude? To what extent has the consulting room been but an iteration of the Platonic Cave? What new projections is telehealth promoting? If evicted, in what new structure may we seek refuge? And from what exposure specifically we are now hiding?
Beyond the issue of clinical habits and strategies, the question, as you rightly frame it, is not simply one of access but of transformation. The technologies that have taken over our everyday have helped galvanize just about every conceivable expression, from the Arab Spring to MAGA fascism; they have provided a stage for phenomena that thrive on display and for stealth microcommunities that can only function on the margins. Manifestly, the agility fostered by these technologies seems to fit well with an unconscious that is itself unstable, fragmented, discontinuous; meanwhile, behind the scenes, surveillance is expanded, capital is accumulated, and the opportunities for genuine movement are ever narrowing.
We can’t stop our assessment here and be comfortable with the distinction between a tool and what it may be used for, since tools create uses and shape users. As I said at the beginning, this is a difficult question and I’ve only been able to provide a long- winded way of saying I have no clear answer. I do have a few possible starting points, though, specifically in relation to social media. One: with the option for countless edits and deletes, everything is now correctable; with the blurring speed, nothing seems to be a mistake; the classic lapsus is losing its status as both a psychodynamic operation and an interpretive tool. Two: with the seemingly endless capacity to record and archive, memory is reduced to findability while absence, as gap or loss, is a glitch in the machine; repression and remembrance now call for an urgent reformulation. Three: what of finitude and castration in the face of an Other the medium has exposed as a voracious, versatile, omnipresent yet oh so mundane other?
Christopher Skeaff: You’ve argued that the anti in Anti-Oedipus names a certain reflexivity at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s analytic project. With specific attention to the figure of Oedipus, could you explain how such reflexivity bears on both psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis?
Fadi Abou-Rihan: Part of the frame of the analytic encounter is a willed, performed blindness meant to free the parties from the burden of visual cues. One of the reasons why the couch is such a useful analytic tool is that it replicates the blindness of the unconscious to aspects of the outside world and to some of its own workings. (Incidentally, one of the other reasons Freud favored the use of the couch is that it spared him the discomfort of being stared at all day long by the people he was treating.) Blindness is now harnessed in the service of something greater than insight.
The main idea behind reflexivity, what I’ve termed the “becoming-unconscious” of psychoanalysis, is really quite basic. One becomes an analyst only on the condition that one has already been in analysis and continues on understanding oneself analytically. It’s a truly sad day when the analyst ceases to dream or forget or displace or lapse and take hold of these instances as the raw materials of the craft and, by extension, of their status as analyst.
The same may be said of psychoanalysis—as a theory, as a practice—to lapse and take hold of itself analytically by giving its unconscious room to materialize—blind yet transformative. Lacan knew this—which is why he spoke the unconscious in his seminars rather than speaking about it and why he implemented the variable-length session. Winnicott also knew it—hence his playful style, at his writing desk as much as in his interactions with his young patients. Though he seemed less thrilled by the prospect, Freud knew it too—almost every one of his texts brought about an unsettling original idea that mimicked the volcanic eruption to which he likened the instinct’s vicissitudes. Given these moments—which are neither coincidences nor mysteries— the becoming-unconscious of psychoanalysis, its reflexivity, is a bit of a misnomer if it is taken to suggest a futurity. I find the term useful because of its intentionality; psychoanalysis is a deliberate engagement with a component of life as much as it is a contemplation or a formulation.
Philip Baker: For English readers, you make several clarifying corrections regarding the translation of concepts central to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. For instance, you note how translating se rabbatre sur as “to fall back onto,” as the English translation generally does, is essentially the opposite of what Deleuze and Guattari intend. In fact, it’s pretty much the position they set out to critique. You suggest “to come to or to reach something” instead. Another instance you point to is the misleading implications of translating détraquée as “breaking down.” Could you elaborate on the significance of these obfuscations and perhaps on other aspects of the text that get lost in translation?
Fadi Abou-Rihan: Anyone who’s ever done it will tell you that translation can be a thankless task. That said, the editors at Viking Press decided to assign Anti-Oedipus to translators who were eventually highly respected for their work on major literary and intellectual figures but who, nevertheless, were not experts in psychoanalysis. It shows. It is perhaps a bit too easy to point to the translation’s disagreements with the original or even to the inconsistencies within the text. As a theorist, these have been key concerns for me. As a clinician, I feel more realistic, even more grounded by the inevitability of distortion. We owe a debt of gratitude to Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane, and to all those who helped disseminate Anti-Oedipus beyond its French readership.
Nevertheless, translations are rereadings that need to be updated with the times’ skills and priorities.
Philip Baker: To follow up on the distinction between “to fall back onto” and “to come to,” my sense is that this movement—from falling back to coming to—is central to your understanding of Anti-Oedipus and its potential contribution to psychoanalysis today. When you write that “the question that has so far preoccupied psychoanalysis has been the identification and resolution, or at least containment, of the conflict that underlies any particular formation through a retrograde analysis that will trace it back to its earliest possible scenarios” (51), you indicate that psychoanalysis, traditionally practiced, has sought to fall back upon a set of stable pillars and the interpretations they generate. For you, by contrast, a central tenet of the clinical setting involves undoing these ossified structures while affirming in their place the unforeseeable set of machinic effects generated by the analytic encounter. Are there any fundamental changes you’ve had to make when seeing patients and putting these insights into practice, or is the traditional setting of analysis sufficiently flexible to allow for this approach?
Fadi Abou-Rihan: My answer is yes to both parts of the question. I’ve been able to make new connections with what I’ve mined in the literature and spared myself the need to reinvent the wheel.
Take the transference; its primacy as an affective repetition and/or a symbolic structuring is a basic tenet of psychoanalysis. As with any other machine, the driving concern is around what the transference can do and what it is good for since it not only helps engage age-old problems, it also generates its own challenges. However, a new sensibility emerges once this transference is understood in terms of a series rather than as the fount or pivot of the analytic experience. This is where the line Jean-Paul Valabrega was pursuing in the ’60s turns out to be very useful. Valabrega opened up the analytic scenario beyond the dyad of analyst and analysand to include the analyst’s own analyst as well as their supervisor. With (at least) four people in the room, the relational vectors are multiplied and the tendency to simply “fall back onto” the proverbial oedipal triangle as a hermeneutic schema is upset. Taking stock of such connective transferential series reveals the extent to which the intimacy of the consulting room has not only been shaped by unconscious processes but also been directed by institutional affiliations and hierarchies all along. It then becomes much easier to recognize how, more than an inclination or an interest, the political ought to be at the heart of the analytic. Of course, the moment the “p” word is dropped, the esteemed clinical nose gets bent out of joint.
Aside from thinking about the dynamic echoes of training, belonging, and power, I’ve become more interested in the Winnicottian category of playing and how much it dovetails with desiring-production. If there are passages in Anti-Oedipus that read as if they’d been lifted from Marx, others strike me as deeply evocative of the found object Winnicott identified. This object has little to do with consumption and even less with fetishism. Instead, it is the site where one can see the disjunctive syntheses at work, where identities get built and worlds are manipulated. From found object to playing, to analysis as playing; from new tools to solve familiar problems to the creation of new problems that incite the construction of new tools; from the transference as a game with its own scripts and expectations to the indeterminacy of playing and desiring that always seem to lead somewhere else, beyond the analytic space. These considerations can’t but filter through to the clinical moment.
Christopher Skeaff: You mentioned how Valabrega’s reconceptualization of transference helped to illuminate the constitutively political character of the analytic situation. Guattari’s innovation on this score was the concept of transversality, which, we could say, not only reintroduced politics into (group) psychoanalytic theory and practice but also brought analysis into (revolutionary) politics. Could you talk a bit about how you see transversality at work in Anti-Oedipus? Where might the concept have purchase today, whether clinically or politically, in individual or collective life?
Fadi Abou-Rihan: Transversality stands contra hierarchy and structure and contra horizontality and uniformity, as a line that fuels the move from subjection/subjectivation to subjectivity. Transversality crosses boundaries and intersects with a number of other lines (never just the one), suggesting not only points of intersection but a momentum that lifts off of these lines certain concepts, practices, or tools as they lead it in an unfamiliar direction. Multiplicity, movement, exchange, impact, influence. Guattari’s transversality is grounded in institutional psychotherapy rather than in the classic analytic scenario; in fact, it is meant to stand as the other to the analytic dyad and its transferential structures. That said, Guattari often presented the category provisionally; he spoke of it in terms of degrees, considered it at best a project rather than a procedure, and called for the regular reassessment of its effects.
Under the sign of transversality, the tools of the analytic trade are not simply interpretation, a one-to-one correspondence between a manifest sign and its underlying reference, or construction; they are a combination of interpretations that may now tell a story. Analysis grasps an experience and mobilizes it in the service of the construction of construction, which is to say in the service of constructing ever more associations, interpretations, constructions, and subjectivities. For all parties concerned, this allows for a move beyond the staged transference, beyond the need and the demand to seduce, arouse, or gratify the other, to convince that other of one’s version of truth or health, even if such a version is the thorough unsettling of the institutions of truth or health.
Philip Baker: In your book, you argue that contemporary psychoanalysis presumes a standard of health (roughly, “good parenting”) that ultimately traps desire within norms of biological reproduction. To what extent do you see this peculiar focus on reproduction today—what you call the psychological commandment of “Thou shall multiply”—as a modification or extension of the process Deleuze and Guattari describe as oedipalization?
Fadi Abou-Rihan: There is nothing unique about psychoanalysis reproducing itself in its own image. Interestingly, though, the order and uniformity meant to sustain the discipline’s continuity also pave the way for its disruption.
The psychoanalytic field is exceptionally rich in orientations, backgrounds, techniques, metapsychologies. This richness bespeaks incredible skill as it favors multiplicity rather than mere repetition. And yet, it seems as if psychoanalysis hasn’t grown into its fullest as a discipline, as if it is still trying to sort out what it is and what it does.
Although each and every analyst has been trained to assume the position of analyst as opposed to other available positions (friend, counselor, judge, or mentor), they have also been enjoined, repeatedly, uncritically, to think of themselves as anything but an analyst (good-enough mother, benign superego, competent purveyor of health or expert tradesman), and, correspondingly, to think of the work as frequently anything but an analysis (nurture, absolution, cure, or apprenticeship). One could patiently, even generously, explain this phenomenon as telling of a discipline that, while a quarter of the way into its second century, is still struggling through its adolescence as it seeks to model itself in terms of its similarity and difference with respect to some of the more established functions and trades.
Despite all outward appearances, individuation remains a struggle for psychoanalysis as a discipline that has yet to acquire a secure sense of its distinct theoretical and clinical identity. Unfortunately, psychoanalysis continues to oedipalize itself needlessly as it maintains its rivalries with the practices that predate it, all the while thinking itself more healing than medicine, more nurturing than the family, more observing than history, more appreciative than aesthetics. You get the drift. Obviously, the thing about Oedipus isn’t just that little Johnny wants to fuck Mummy and kill Daddy but that he also finds out Daddy had been gunning for him all along; Johnny will grow up to assert his status by trying to get his own offspring out of the picture as well.
We’ve seen this cycle unfold with just about every chapter in the history of psychoanalysis: the controversies in the British Psychoanalytical Society, Lacan’s departure from the IPA, the vicious infighting and splits in a number of North American settings. Ironically, it’s taken psychoanalysis losing its luster and its status in the general culture for the stakes to be less grandiose and the egos less heated for practitioners to begin to free themselves from oedipal reproduction and its attendant paranoias: clinically, by disabusing themselves of the fantasy that proper analysis culminates in the osmosis of benign superegos, transmuting selfobjects, or what have you; institutionally, by divesting themselves from the cast systems of training analysts and lay analysts and analysts tout court; economically, and here we’ve only barely just begun, by challenging the class structures that determine not only who can afford to be in analysis but also who can afford to become an analyst.
Christopher Skeaff: What, in your view, distinguishes Anti-Oedipus from “applied psychoanalysis” or “psychoanalytic political theory”?
Fadi Abou-Rihan: We are curious and want to know. Yet, in the name of applied
psychoanalysis, we’ve often fallen into the trap of heading toward other territories with less interest than we claim, searching instead for proofs of our findings. We’re all too familiar with the work that has gone into tracking the Oedipus in this, the depressive position in that, or the objet a in the other. Hallelujah! Now that we’ve confirmed our expertise yet again—not that we really needed to, of course—and taught the uninitiated a few useful lessons, we may retreat safely back to our consulting rooms.
On those occasions when we do learn something from our forays, when, in other words, we reverse if not altogether dismantle the order of application and bring into the analytic scene insights, concepts, and tools from other disciplines, we may break new ground. This was part of the genius of Freud, although it also fed his resentment toward other endeavors—to wit, philosophy and, to a certain extent, archaeology. This was also part of the genius of both Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, though, in their case, without the strong undercurrent of one-upmanship.
Fadi Abou-Rihan is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Toronto. Straddling the academic-clinical divide, he has authored Deleuze and Guattari: A Psychoanalytic Itinerary (Continuum, 2008; Bloomsbury, 2011). His most recent book is Finding Winnicott: Philosophical Encounters with the Psychoanalytic.