Excellent question. You’ve touched the nerve of a deep philosophical divergence: Lacan’s void as constitutive lack, versus Deleuze’s generative field of immanence. While Lacan (and classical psychoanalysis) builds structure out of a lack, Deleuze builds becoming out of a plenum, a plane of virtual multiplicities rather than a central absence.
Let’s lay this out clearly:
1. Lacan: The Void at the Center of Subjectivity
- For Lacan, lack (manque) is ontological:
- The subject is constituted around a primordial lack, a hole in the Symbolic.
- The Real is a kind of black hole—a void that resists symbolization.
- Desire arises not to fulfill, but to circle the lack—like orbiting a gravitational singularity.
Lacan’s void is:
The structured absence from which the symbolic order is born.
The hole in the Other, the gap that gives the signifier its power.
2. Deleuze (and Guattari): Against Lack as Ground
Deleuze radically rejects lack as a primary category:
“Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is not a lack of the real, it is a production of the real.” (Anti-Oedipus, AO 26)
- For Deleuze, to define desire or being in terms of lack is to already buy into the Oedipal repression machine.
- He views psychoanalysis’ fascination with lack as a theology in disguise—a metaphysics of negativity and absence, rooted in Hegelian dialectics and Freudian castration.
Instead, Deleuze proposes:
- Immanence, difference, and multiplicity as the starting points.
- The virtual, not as absence, but as intensity, potential, folded forces.
3. So, How Does Deleuze Deal With the Void?
He doesn’t ignore the void—but he reconceptualizes it.
a.
The Void is Not Lack, but Excessive Potential (Virtual)
In Difference and Repetition, the virtual is a field of differential relations—not what is missing, but what is yet to be actualized.
- The virtual is full, teeming with intensities and tendencies.
- What looks like a void (from the standpoint of the actual) is in fact a field of pre-individual singularities—a kind of “productive darkness”, like quantum fields before collapse.
“There is no lack, only flows, breaks in flows, and machines.” (AO)
b.
The Body without Organs (BwO)
Deleuze’s BwO resembles a void—but again, not one of lack:
- It is not a gap, but a field without organization, without stratification.
- A zone of potentiality—a plane where intensities move, but without fixed identity.
It is close to a cosmic egg or a white hole, more than a black one.
c.
The Fold (in The Fold, on Leibniz and the Baroque)
- Deleuze speaks of the world as infinitely folded, not centered on a hole.
- The void is not outside the fold, but the movement of folding itself—a dynamics of form and force.
4. In Comparison: Lacan vs Deleuze on the Void
|
Concept |
Lacan |
Deleuze |
|
Core of Subjectivity |
Lack in the Other |
Desiring-production |
|
Ontology |
Structured around absence |
Grounded in positive difference |
|
The Void |
The Real (traumatic, unsymbolizable) |
The Virtual (generative, immanent) |
|
Symbolization |
Emerges from a gap |
Emerges from flows and assemblages |
|
Ethics |
Traversing the fantasy, accepting the lack |
Creating new modes of becoming, lines of flight |
5. Poetic Synthesis
Lacan: “There is a hole in being.”
Deleuze: “Being is a flowing surface without holes—just folds.”
Lacan’s void is what forecloses meaning.
Deleuze’s void is what overflows it.
6. Closing Reflection
Deleuze does not deny the black hole—but he refuses to treat it as fundamental.
Where Lacan sees the subject circling the abyss, Deleuze wants the subject to become a line of flight, a diagram of intensities, a constellation in movement.
So yes:
Deleuze replaces the black hole of lack with a white hole of emergence.
Not a wound to be traversed, but a field to be composed.
Would you like a comparative dialogue—imagined or real—between Lacan’s void and Deleuze’s virtual?
