[D-G] Deleuze and the symbolic

[sid littlefield]

I am not sure if thinking and acting are re-united in D&G, since speaking and action are united but thinking does not take place under a sign, hence is not linguistic. Maybe look at the end of LoS where the sexual body is broken in order to think.  Maybe this is just a mundane point that one cannot think while one is fucking, but I think not...

sid

----- Original Message -----
From: "James Depew" <spatium at gmail.com>
To: deleuze-guattari-driftline.org at lists.driftline.org
Subject: [D-G] Deleuze and the symbolic
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 17:34:24 +0100

> 
> I don't have an answer either, but here goes...
> 
> The caesura of psychoanalysis, as I understand it, is the break that
> open the space between action and thought enabling one to perceive
> oneself "in the act".  However, the thought is not, in this case, in
> the act at all.  I think part of what D&G are attempting to provide,
> is something like an alternative whereby thought and act are reunited.
>   In therapy, this space occurs in a relationship between analyst and
> patient which the patient is eventually supposed to develop with
> himself.  The space has to come to exist in the patient.  Many
> theorists seem to think that Winnicott's transitional object is such a
> space.  However, Guattari disagrees.  He reformulates Winnicott's
> space into the "institutional object" which exists as the
> intersubjective locus of development.  So the site typically reserved
> for the ego is replaced by a generalized, or perhaps neuter, site of
> differential relations.  The subject is still void, thought here it is
> no longer dispersed amongst structural sites that eventually holds
> symbols for the construction of the subject – the filling in of the
> gap – instead the gap is already distributive.  As far as I can tell,
> this gap becomes the smooth space of the social and the circulation of
> forces across this space the virtual potential for formalization.  The
> social as subject.  However, when the social actualizes, striates, the
> circulation is inevitably(?) coded, channeled, controlled.
> 
> I recently read somewhere about Blanchot's reading of Serge Leclair.
> Blanchot points to the third person position that disperses the power
> of the "I" as a matter of refusal.  I believe he uses the term neuter.
>   Here, the ego is always trying to destroy the third person that
> refuses to accept determination of "is".  The third person refuses to
> be negated by particularization.  A pure "he" or "it" without the "is"
> predicate.  In that refusal, that displaceability of the third person
> exists a multiplicity of experiences without particulars, a
> virtuality.  Guattari often refers to this "third".  This is how D&G
> turn the subject into a void, though not in the Lacanian sense.
> Yesterday I sat in on a lecture by Jean-Luc Nancy, and he suggests
> that poetry operates the same way – according to a break.  He points
> to the structure of the verse (versus: from vertere, to turn) as
> always returning to a baseline degree 0 site where it can begin again.
>   Poetic truth, he suggests, is torn from the void only to return to
> the void in order to speak again. (Unlike philosophy which just goes
> on and on...)
> 
> Anyway, it seems to me that the symbolic has a differentiating
> function for D&G.  The third person continues to disperse itself in
> symbols, but not in the attempt to create a stable position, an ego,
> rather it is a kind of refusal of all particularization.  The symbolic
> is always intercalary, filling the void, and a mask for the sake of
> masking.  Thought and act reunited?
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