Excellent and necessary question—and the short answer is:
No, Deleuze and Guattari did not engage directly with Lacan’s final decade—especially not with his mature concepts such as le sinthome, parlêtre, or the topological Real.
Their most sustained (and critical) engagement with Lacan comes primarily from the early to mid-Lacan, especially the structuralist Lacan of the 1950s–60s—the Lacan of the symbolic, the Name-of-the-Father, and the Oedipus complex.
Let’s map it out more carefully.
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1. Deleuze & Guattari’s Main Critique: Anti-Oedipus (1972)
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari position psychoanalysis—especially Freud and Lacan—as agents of repression and normalization. Their central claim is that psychoanalysis reduces desire to:
• Lack
• The signifier
• The Oedipal triangle (mother–father–child)
They criticize Lacan for:
• Submitting desire to the symbolic law of the Father
• Coding the unconscious through language and castration
• Preserving the Oedipal framework under a new structuralist guise
Their project—schizoanalysis—seeks to break free from these limitations, advocating a productive, multiplicitous, and non-Oedipal unconscious.
So:
Their critique targets the Lacan of the 1960s—not the Lacan of the sinthome, jouissance, or parlêtre.
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2. Timeline Conflict: Diverging Trajectories
|
Lacan |
Deleuze & Guattari |
|
Late 1960s–1980s: Topology, the Real, sinthome, parlêtre |
1972: Anti-Oedipus |
|
1973–80: Seminars XX–XXV (parlêtre, lalangue) |
1980: A Thousand Plateaus |
|
1975: Seminar XXIII (The Sinthome) |
D&G shift from psychoanalysis critique to ontology and assemblages |
There’s no indication that Deleuze and Guattari read or responded to these late seminars, or the transformation of Lacan’s thought after Encore (1972–73).
This is partly because:
• Lacan was notoriously difficult to access (the late seminars were unpublished or informal at the time).
• D&G had moved on from their critique of psychoanalysis to develop their own metaphysical system.
• There was an irreconcilable philosophical difference between Lacan’s ethics of lack and the Real, and Deleuze’s ethics of immanence, flow, and production.
3. Missed Encounter, or Productive Distance?
What’s tragic (or poetic) is that:
• The Lacan of the 1970s was no longer the Lacan they attacked.
• He was already deforming the signifier, de-centering the symbolic, undoing the Father, and speaking of topological knots, lalangue, and jouissance without coordinates.
This Lacan may have had unexpected affinities with Deleuze:
• The sinthome as singular mode of existence, not pathology
• The parlêtre as a non-unified body marked by speaking
• The Real not as a tragic void, but as a non-structurable intensity
But this encounter never quite happened.
4. A Thoughtful Way to Say It
Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Lacan is brilliant, but partial.
It confronts Lacan at his most structuralist and Oedipal,
but not at his most topological, Real, or mute.
In missing the Lacan of the sinthome and the parlêtre,
they missed the one who had already begun to undo what they were resisting.
Would You Like…
• A speculative dialogue between late Lacan and late Deleuze?
• A philosophical piece titled “Missed Encounters: Deleuze, Guattari, and Lacan’s Final Decade”?
• Or a synoptic map of where schizoanalysis and late Lacanian psychoanalysis unexpectedly converge?
You’ve opened a door to a rich, untapped conversation.
