Lacan’s Borromean knot: three interlinked rings (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real). In his late work, Lacan adds a fourth ring (the sinthome) to knot the triad together. The sinthome (Σ) is a unique loop that anchors the subject’s jouissance where meaning fails .
Late Lacanian therapy, on the other hand, is often summed up by the slogan: the aim is *not to “cure” by eliminating symptoms, but to lead the subject to “identify with their symptom.” In Lacan’s final phase, the conclusion of an analysis is marked by what he calls subjective destitution and the assumption of the sinthome . Rather than freeing the subject from all symptoms, the analytic process should bring the subject to recognize their fundamental fantasy and the singular way they enjoy beyond meaning. “In the final decade of his teaching, Lacan describes the end of analysis as an identification with the sinthome” – the subject integrates their symptom as a knowing partner rather than an alien tormentor. This is closely tied to Lacan’s use of the Borromean Knot schema. In Seminar XXIII, Lacan formalized his earlier three-ring model (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) by arguing that a fourth ring is needed to hold the others together: this fourth ring is the sinthome . If one’s symptom is not properly knotted into one’s psychic structure, the whole chain can unravel (resulting in psychosis or a breakdown of meaning). Thus, the analyst’s job is no longer to decipher every symptom as a coded message (since some symptoms are “pure jouissance…addressed to no one” ), but to help the analysand tie a new knot – to live with their singular sinthome in a stable, inventive way. Lacan famously saw James Joyce as someone who “knew how to knot his sinthome” through art, avoiding psychosis by making his symptom (his writing) into a substitute for the Name-of-the-Father. In practical terms, late Lacanian clinicians often focus on the real aspect of a symptom (the jouissance it embodies) and encourage patients to make use of it rather than trying to erase it . The process is about achieving a reconciliation with one’s mode of enjoyment – finding a way to bear the Real. This stands in stark contrast to schizoanalysis: Lacan is not interested in unleashing endless flows (which he’d see as potentially perilous jouissance) but in tethering the subject’s enjoyment to a sinthome that allows them to function. Both approaches critique the classical medical cure – neither expects a neat removal of all symptoms – but schizoanalysis advocates a revolutionary unleashing of desire’s flows, whereas Lacan aims for a delicate rewiring of the psyche’s knots so the subject can “jouir” (enjoy) their symptom knowingly.
Desire: Productive Immanence vs. Jouissance and the Object a
Perhaps the starkest opposition between Deleuzo-Guattarian schizoanalysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis lies in their theories of desire.
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire is deliberately anti-Lacanian. They reject outright the idea that desire is born from lack or oriented toward an impossible object. In schizoanalysis, desire is a positive, productive force – “a power of synthesis that constructs an assemblage in order to increase its power of acting” . Far from being a longing for what one does not have, desire creates its objects and realities. As one commentator neatly puts it, Lacan sees desire within a negative ontology of lack, whereas Deleuze & Guattari see in desire a positive force characterized by abundance . They portray the unconscious as a factory, where “desiring-production” is constantly churning out connections and novelties: “Desire is never something that is missing, forbidden, or signified: desire is a synthesis of forces…” . In fact, D&G turn the tables on the Freudian view: it is not that we desire because we lack – rather, lack is a produced effect of desire . They write that desire “has no object (whose lack would trigger and sustain its movement): desire is a purely virtual movement that has always reached its destination, whose moving is itself its own destination.” In other words, desire is immanent – it doesn’t seek something outside itself, it expends itself in continuous processes of creation. For example, the “desire” of a painter is not aimed at a specific pre-existing object; it is the productive flow of painting itself, which creates a new visual reality. Because of this immanent, processual nature, Deleuze and Guattari align desire with joyous experimentation (and even link it to Spinoza’s conatus or Nietzsche’s will to power ). They explicitly oppose it to the psychoanalytic notion of desire as lack and law (associated with castration and the Oedipal no). Schizoanalysis thus speaks of “machines” of desire and “flows” – terms emphasizing that desire works and produces real effects, rather than eternally yearning for what cannot be obtained. Importantly, this desire is not merely individual: it immediately invests the social field. Factories, cities, and political movements are as much machines of desire as the family is. There is for D&G no fundamental gap between desiring-production and social production – libido and economy are one single process . This contrasts sharply with Lacan’s more psyche-bound notion of desire. In sum, schizoanalysis champions a vision of desire as life-force: polymorphous, inventive, and inherently subversive (since it escapes any fixed structure by continuously reforming connections).
Lacan’s later view of desire maintains his classical notion that desire is born from a lack (manque) – “desire is the desire of the Other,” meaning it arises in the gap between what the symbolic order gives us and what we irretrievably lost in entering language. Throughout Lacan’s teaching, desire is structured by the objet petit a, the elusive object-cause of desire. This object a is not a concrete object but a placeholder for the void around which desire turns. It represents whatever in the subject has been alienated in the symbolic process (the primordial loss of unmediated jouissance). Thus, Lacanian desire is inherently transitive: one desires something absent, a “phantasmic object” that is actually a projection of one’s own lack . As the Stanford Encyclopedia explains, the objet a is a “spectral, virtual construct” that “causes” the subject to desire particular empirical things, but none of those things ever fully satisfies, because the objet a itself is an unrealizable ideal . In essence, there is an insurmountable gap in Lacanian desire – a “lack in being” that keeps the subject perpetually longing and moving. However, in Lacan’s later work, there is a notable shift of emphasis from desire to jouissance. Jouissance (enjoyment) is a kind of excessive, pain-tinged pleasure that transgresses the pleasure principle. In Seminar XX (Encore), Lacan famously distinguishes between the jouissance of “the Other” (sometimes associated with a feminine or mystical jouissance beyond the phallus) and the normative, phallic jouissance regulated by the symbolic. By the 1970s, Lacan is increasingly concerned with how every drive is a drive toward jouissance – even if it threatens the subject’s well-being . Desire, from this perspective, can be seen as a strategy to stall or regulate jouissance. That is, we desire in the realm of the symbolic (chasing objects we think will make us whole) as a way to avoid the overwhelming Real of full jouissance, which is “impossible” and traumatizing . Late Lacan thus introduces new formulas of sexuation and speaks of how “there is a jouissance beyond the phallus” that is not completely caught in the signifier. The Real comes to the forefront: desire is no longer the ultimate motor; rather, jouissance (the insistent enjoyment that often underlies symptoms) is key. In clinical terms, this led Lacanians to pay more attention to the jouissance in symptoms (the satisfactions that sufferers unwittingly derive) and less to the narrative of desire. The sinthome itself is essentially a mode of jouissance (“the way in which each subject enjoys the unconscious” ).
Despite these differences, a certain parallel can be noted: both theories critique the conventional notion of desire as stemming from a conscious, rational lack. Both agree that conscious wants are not sovereign – there’s an unconscious process at work. But they conceive that unconscious process in opposite terms. Deleuze/Guattari see unconscious desire as excess of life (productive flows) where lack is a fiction; Lacan sees unconscious desire as lack of being structured by language, where every productive act is a kind of loop around a void. In a way, Lacan’s Real of jouissance (a nonsensical, generative turmoil in the psyche) could be likened to what D&G call the BwO (Body without Organs) or the raw “machine” of desire – both concepts point to a substratum of intensity beneath structured reality. But Lacan insists this Real must be approached cautiously (through the sinthome), whereas D&G urge us to ride its waves. The result is that emancipation looks different: for schizoanalysis, to liberate desire is to let it create freely; for Lacan, to truly confront one’s desire is to accept its impossible nature and navigate one’s jouissance without delusion.
Politics: Deterritorialization vs. Discourse and Ideology
Both schizoanalysis and Lacanian theory extend their analysis to the social and political field, but they do so with different emphases and vocabularies.
Schizoanalysis is inherently political – Anti-Oedipus was subtitled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” and was explicitly intended as a work of political theory as much as psychology. Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is directly invested in social and political systems. Every arrangement of power, from the nuclear family to the nation-state, works by coding and capturing desire. A fundamental thesis of schizoanalysis is that “every unconscious libidinal investment is social”, and these investments can take one of two poles: “a paranoiac, reactionary, fascisizing pole and a schizoid revolutionary pole.” In plainer terms, our desires can be bent to desire oppression (even our own) or to desire liberation. The authors confront the provocative question that had also troubled thinkers like Wilhelm Reich: “Why did the masses desire fascism?” . Their answer is that microdesires and social libidinal energy can attach to repressive structures – “desire can be made to desire its own repression” . Fascist regimes, for instance, engineer desires (through spectacle, myth, and neurosis) so that people libidinally invest in authority and cruelty. Schizoanalysis seeks to map and undo these investments. It identifies the “fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” As Michel Foucault wrote in his preface to Anti-Oedipus, the book is an “Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life” . Political liberation, on this view, requires a massive deterritorialization of desire from the fixed representations that trap it. Schizoanalysis champions experimentation with new social arrangements – subcultures, revolutionary groups, communal projects – that allow desire to flow in non-oppressive ways. It aligns itself with anti-fascist resistance not only in the macro sense (opposing dictators), but in the micro sense of combatting conformity, sadomasochistic power relations, and rigid identities in daily life. Notably, D&G also analyze capitalism as a social machine that decodes and recodes flows of desire in its own way: unlike feudal or despotic societies that trapped desire in fixed codes, capitalism liberates flows (money, commodities, desires) only to constantly reterritorialize them on the axiomatic of profit . Thus, capitalism carries a schizoid potential (constant change, “creative destruction”) but also channels desire into production/consumption loops that can become nihilistic. Schizoanalysis encourages “lines of flight” – escapes – not only from fascist authoritarianism but from the subtle ideological trapping of desire under capitalism. It is deeply suspicious of “the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack…)” which it sees as tools of social repression . In short, the political stance of schizoanalysis is revolutionary and anti-authoritarian: analyze how power uses desire, and then flip the script to free desire as a force of social transformation. Its vision of politics is molecular and libidinal – change happens by transforming desires, not just policies.
Late Lacanian thought, while less overtly activist, provides potent tools for analyzing discourse, ideology, and the formation of subjects in society. Lacan himself engaged with the social dimension through his theory of the Four Discourses (outlined around 1969–70) . These discourses – Master, University, Hysteric, Analyst – are formal structures that describe how power and knowledge circulate in different social bonds. For example, the Master’s Discourse captures the classical authoritarian social link: a Master signifier commands, the subject is split and alienated beneath that command, knowledge is produced to serve the Master, and an excess (objet a, surplus) is generated in the process. This schema can be used to understand how ideological authority functions (for instance, the leader’s command in a authoritarian state, or even the command of consumer society: “Enjoy!” as Žižek would later elaborate). The University Discourse describes the rule of expertise and technocracy (knowledge in the dominant seat, transmitting norms to a subjected other) . The Hysteric’s Discourse embodies the position of the protesting subject who doesn’t know what they want, and thereby provokes a new truth from the other . And crucially, the Analyst’s Discourse flips the Master’s: here the analyst (or subversive agent) occupies the position of the object a (provoking desire) to cause the subject to speak truth, undermining power pretenses . Through these discourse formulas, Lacan offers a kind of framework to critique ideology: any social situation can be analyzed in terms of which discourse is in play, revealing who is claiming truth, who is barred from speech, and what surplus enjoyment is being produced. For instance, Lacan even spoke of a hypothetical “Discourse of the Capitalist” in a 1972 address. In that model, the capitalist system places the barred subject ($) in the driver’s seat addressing an impersonal Market (as the hidden Master signifier) and produces consumer objects (a) in an endless cycle that bypasses any collective Truth or social bond . The result, Lacan observed, is a society of increasingly “individualistic, egoistic” subjects where the Market’s demand has taken the place of symbolic Law . This is remarkably prescient as a critique of neoliberal ideology – showing how even freedom and individualism can be an impersonal mandate that yields new forms of alienation.
Later Lacanians (such as Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, and Ernesto Laclau) have built on Lacan’s ideas to decode modern ideologies. Žižek, for example, argues that every ideology has a libidinal underpinning – a fantasy that organizes our jouissance (enjoyment). Where schizoanalysis speaks of fascist or capitalist libidinal investments, Žižek uses Lacan’s concepts to show how subjects enjoy their ideology – how objet a appears in the guise of the scapegoat or commodity that animates desire, and how the Real of an unsymbolizable antagonism is domesticated by ideological narratives. For instance, racist ideology might provide an outlet for jouissance by fantasizing that “the Other is stealing our enjoyment”; political nationalism often involves an imaginary fullness lost thanks to some enemy, etc. These analyses owe to Lacan’s insight that the subject is fundamentally split and pines for a wholeness that it never had – a dynamic readily exploited by ideological discourses (which often promise to restore wholeness if only the “foreign element” is removed, etc.). Lacan himself did not advocate political programs, but he unmasked the hidden structures in how we relate to authority, knowledge, and law. Notably, Lacan’s concept of the “big Other” (the symbolic authority that is supposed to know) is a powerful tool to understand ideology: societies function as if the big Other (e.g. God, History, The Markets) is watching and guaranteeing meaning, and individuals derive enjoyment from believing or rebelling in certain ways relative to that presumed Other. Late Lacan, by stressing the non-existence of the big Other (“il n’y a pas de grand Autre”) and the importance of the sinthome, implicitly suggests a stance of each-one inventing their own way. This has parallels with the ethos of schizoanalysis (which wants people to craft new modes of life rather than obeying universal structures). Both perspectives are critical of totalizing universals – D&G flatly refuse “totalizing paranoia” , and Lacan deconstructs the guarantors of the universal (the big Other, the phallic order).
In terms of political action, however, the two diverge. Schizoanalysis aligns with leftist revolutionary politics (it was born from 1968’s spirit, after all); it calls for drawing lines of flight and forming new assemblages – essentially grassroots experimentation to overturn oppressive codes. Lacanian politics, as gleaned from late Lacan and his followers, is more subtle: it often focuses on symptomatically reading power. For example, Lacan’s “critique of liberalism” in the form of capitalist discourse suggests that our modern ideology tries to foreclose the lack (by flooding us with commodities), but this very foreclosure produces new forms of discontent – new symptoms. Lacanians might say the political task is to traverse the fantasy that sustains our attachment to the system and to assume the empty place of the symptom in order to instigate change from within (much as the analyst’s discourse subverts the master). There is a convergence in that both approaches see desire as key to politics: D&G highlight libidinal desire as the battleground of micro-fascism vs. liberation, while Lacan(ians) highlight how unconscious desire and enjoyment tether people to ideological structures. Both reject a purely rationalist or economistic view of politics. Yet, in tone, schizoanalysis is affirmative and utopian, imagining a “deterritorialized” social field of free-flowing desire, whereas Lacan is agnostic and diagnostic, mapping how every utopia might still be tied up with the Real of enjoyment and thus spawn new symptoms.
To synthesize the comparison, the following table summarizes the key differences (and some shared elements) across our four dimensions:
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Dimension
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Schizoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari)
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Later Lacanian (Post-Seminar XX)
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Subjectivity
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– Subject as multiplicity (a fluid assemblage of “desiring-machines”).– No fixed identity or center; the ego is a fiction that impedes desiring-production .*(Both reject the autonomous ego; D&G dissolve it into impersonal forces.)
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– Subject as parlêtre (“speaking being”), constituted by language and marked in the body.– A unique sinthome (symptom-knot of jouissance) gives consistency to the subject , which is otherwise divided and lacking.
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Therapy
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– Free the flows of desire: break down repressive structures (Oedipal family, guilt, etc.) .– Deterritorialize the unconscious – no interpretation, but rather unleashing of new possibilities (an “anti-cure” that favors creativity over normalization).
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– Tie the knot of the symptom: the goal is not to eliminate symptoms but for the analysand to assume their sinthome .– Focus on knottings of Real, Symbolic, Imaginary; therapy ends when the subject can live with their jouissance integrated (a new equilibrium rather than symptom removal).
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Desire
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– Productive and immanent: desire is a positive process that directly produces reality (not driven by what’s missing) .– Defined by flows, becomings, and creations; it is self-fulfilling motion, “a pure process” rather than a goal-oriented lack.
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– Lack-based: desire circles around an absence and the objet petit a (cause of desire) which can never be obtained .– Jouissance (excess enjoyment) is pivotal: desire is a lure that keeps the subject from being overwhelmed by the Real of jouissance . (Lacan acknowledges desire’s power, but ultimately subordinates it to the management of enjoyment.)
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Politics
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– Micropolitical: examines how desire infiltrates social institutions; every fascism is rooted in micro-desires. Calls for “desiring-revolution” against micro-fascism .– Advocates deterritorialization and experimentation to resist conformity – an explicitly anti-fascist, anti-capitalist ethos .
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– Discursive: analyzes the structures of discourse (Master, University, etc.) that shape social bonds , revealing the hidden ideological jouissance at work.– Investigates how subjects are produced by power/knowledge networks (e.g. capitalist discourse yielding consumer subjectivity ). Political change is seen through the lens of shifting discourse or traversing the fundamental fantasy rather than immediate liberation of instincts.
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Conclusion
Schizoanalysis and later Lacanian psychoanalysis offer two radically different visions of the psyche and its liberation. Schizoanalysis presents a world where desire is primary and productive, every person is “a crowd” rather than a single unity, and the revolutionary task is to uncage the polymorphic flow of desire from the prisons of family, identity, and oppressive social codes. In this view, therapy and politics merge into a project of freeing life’s potentials – it is exuberant, if at times abstract, in its hope that one can “accelerate the process” and escape the tyrannies of Oedipus and capital. Lacan’s late teaching, by contrast, is more sobering: it insists on the ineluctability of structure and the Real. The subject cannot simply become a free-flowing assemblage, because it is caught in the web of language and marked by a constitutive lack. Lacan doesn’t promise a life beyond all limits; instead, he offers a way to make do with our symptom, to find a singular modus vivendi with our jouissance. Where D&G speak of breaking open the flows, Lacan speaks of tying a new knot that holds us together. Yet, for all their differences, there are surprising resonances. Both approaches reject the idea of a natural, fully self-aware ego and uncover the unconscious processes beneath social life. Both are deeply critical of how modern society restricts desire – whether by Oedipal normalization or by ideological interpellation – and both ultimately seek a form of liberation (schizoanalysis through proliferating new desires, Lacan through acknowledging the truth of one’s desire and thus being less enslaved by unacknowledged enjoyments). In a sense, schizoanalysis paints the bright face of the unconscious (productive, joyous, revolutionary) while Lacan illuminates its dark contours (lack, compulsion, the necessity of symbolic mediation). Together, their dialogue – sometimes explicitly adversarial – has enriched our understanding of subjectivity, therapy, desire, and politics, showing how intimately the political economy of desire intertwines with the deepest layers of the psyche. Each invites us, in its own way, to “live a non-fascist life” – for Deleuze and Guattari, by riding the schizoid lines of flight, and for Lacan, by refusing to give our enjoyment over to the Master and instead answering for our own desire.
Sources: The analysis above draws on Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and commentaries , including Foucault’s preface , as well as Jacques Lacan’s seminars XX and XXIII and scholarly expositions of his late concepts . References have been provided for direct quotations and specific theoretical points for further reading.
