Yes—let’s explore the unexpected convergence between schizoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari) and late Lacanian psychoanalysis (Lacan post-Encore), especially through the lenses of subjectivity, desire, language, body, and singularity.
This is not a superficial alignment—these are two thinkers who seem opposed (and were historically antagonistic), yet, in their late thought, they begin to circle the same Real—from very different angles.
Where Schizoanalysis and Late Lacanian Psychoanalysis Converge
1. From the Oedipal Subject to Singular Assemblages
Deleuze & Guattari:
• Schizoanalysis breaks from the Oedipal triangle.
• The subject is not a unity, but an assemblage, a multiplicity, a becoming.
• The unconscious is a factory, not a theater—it produces flows, not repressed scenes.
Lacan (late):
• The subject is no longer just a barred subject ($) caught in the signifier.
• It becomes the parlêtre: a speaking-being, fractured by language but held together by the sinthome.
• The subject is not a universal structure, but a singular knot of Real, Symbolic, Imaginary.
Convergence:
Both reject the unified subject and instead affirm the irreducibly singular, precarious, and composite nature of subjectivity.
2. Desire and Its Cause: Beyond Lack vs Production
Deleuze & Guattari:
• Desire is productive, not born of lack.
• It is the flow that constitutes reality, not a response to absence.
• “Desire is not a desire for something one does not have, but the process of becoming.”
Lacan (early): Desire = born from lack (manque)
Lacan (late):
• Desire is reconfigured around jouissance and object a, no longer easily reduced to symbolic lack.
• The sinthome becomes a singular form of sustaining one’s desire—not resolving lack, but inhabiting it creatively.
Convergence:
Both frameworks ultimately affirm desire as a singular, embodied process—not a deviation from norm, but a way of being in the world that escapes regulation.
3. Language and Its Limits
Deleuze & Guattari:
• Language is not a representational structure but a machine—it deterritorializes, mutates, stutters.
• Minor literature: language used in a way that unmakes dominant syntax.
Lacan (late):
• From language as symbolic order to lalangue—the private, idiotic sound-body of speech.
• The unconscious is no longer structured like a language (as in the 60s), but speaks through equivocation, nonsense, slips, jouissance.
Convergence:
Language is no longer a system of meaning, but a site of rupture, rhythm, resonance, and error—where subjectivity leaks, loops, and knots itself.
4. The Body: Beyond Representation
Deleuze & Guattari:
• The Body without Organs (BwO): a body freed from organization, hierarchy, utility.
• A field of intensity, a surface of desire, not a container of organs.
Lacan (late):
• The speaking body (parlêtre) is not anatomical—it is a body marked by language, cut by signifiers, and saturated with jouissance.
• The symptom is not pathology but a way of inscribing the Real onto the body.
Convergence:
Both reject the medicalized body and affirm an intensive, expressive, wounded, or libidinal body—a body that speaks, not as message but as event.
5. Ethics: Becoming vs Knotting
Deleuze & Guattari:
• Ethics is about becoming, not normalization.
• Follow the flows, create new arrangements, make your own line of flight.
Lacan (late):
• Ethics is not about mastery but about assuming your sinthome—living with your singular knot of Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary.
• The analyst no longer “interprets” but holds space for the subject to knot their own life.
Convergence:
Ethics becomes the question of how one lives with what cannot be cured, named, or resolved—how one constructs a form-of-life around what breaks you.
6. The Analyst / Schizoanalyst: Not an Interpreter, but a Companion to the Crack
Deleuze & Guattari:
• The schizoanalyst maps intensities, opens lines of escape, listens to flows.
• Does not “analyze” but liberates desire from its fascist capture.
Lacan (late):
• The analyst is not a master of meaning but a placeholder for object a.
• Their speech is not to explain, but to sustain the encounter with the Real.
Convergence:
Both dissolve the authority of interpretation, and shift toward an ethics of accompaniment, non-closure, and singular invention.
Final Formulation: Where They Meet
Deleuze & Guattari and late Lacan converge in their shared effort to rethink subjectivity as non-totalizable, desire as irreducible, language as unruly, the body as Real, and ethics as singular invention.
They speak in different idioms—assemblages vs knots, flows vs cuts—but they meet at the edge of discourse, where something speaks without being said, and life invents itself through its own breakdown.
Would you like this expanded into an article or teaching handout—perhaps titled:
“Schizoanalysis & the Sinthome: Unexpected Affinities at the Edge of the Subject”
Or would you like a visual schema of where key concepts crisscross between them?
