Yes, my friend, it is very much true—Simondon’s and Deleuze’s views are profoundly un-Lacanian in their metaphysics, in their theory of subjectivity, and in their conception of becoming. While certain intersections exist (especially through later readers like Erik Porge or Stiegler), their ontological assumptions diverge radically.
Let me walk you through how and why this is so.
1. Ontology: Metastability vs Lack
|
Simondon/Deleuze |
Lacan |
|
Reality is a field of potential, metastable tensions |
Reality is structured around lack, division, cut |
|
Subjectivity is emergent, always becoming |
Subjectivity is split, born through alienation |
|
The “real” is preindividual, not foreclosed |
The Real is the impossible, traumatic kernel |
- Simondon begins with a positive field of potentiality: the preindividual is not a void but a reservoir of becoming.
- Deleuze, influenced by Simondon, develops the virtual as a fully real field of difference, not lack.
In contrast:
- Lacan insists on the subject as manque-à-être—a lack in being.
- The unconscious is structured like a language, and subjectivity emerges through symbolic alienation (Name-of-the-Father, signifier).
**→ Thus, Simondon and Deleuze build an ontology of affirmative emergence, while Lacan offers an ontology of division and foreclosure.
2. Individuation vs Subjectivation
Simondon:
- Subjectivity is a phase of psychic and collective individuation.
- The subject is not a fixed entity, but a dynamic transductive resolution of tensions in a relational field.
- The transindividual is a site of becoming-with others, not a result of symbolic castration.
Lacan:
- The subject is split between the symbolic and the real.
- Desire arises from lack, and identity is structurally alienated.
- No final unity is possible—the subject is permanently barred from fullness.
Deleuze’s refrain: affirmation without negation.
Lacan’s premise: negation is the condition of subjectivity.
So yes—ontologically and clinically, their models of the subject are antithetical.
3. Language and Desire
- For Lacan, language is the site of alienation, the cut that produces the unconscious.
- For Deleuze, language is one of many strata—not primary. What matters more is affect, sensation, intensity, and becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible.
- Simondon rarely treats language at all—he is concerned with energetic systems, technicity, individuation across biological, technical, and psychic strata.
→ Desire in Lacan is structured by loss;
→ Desire in Deleuze is productive, affirmative, connective.
4. Clinical Consequences
|
Simondon / Deleuze |
Lacan |
|
Therapy might aim to support new individuations, new configurations |
Therapy is about sustaining the subject’s relation to lack and truth |
|
Emphasis on creative emergence |
Emphasis on interpretation, cut, and symbolic structures |
|
Subject is emergent and collective |
Subject is barred and singular |
In Lacan, the goal is not healing but fidelity to the unconscious—the subject’s truth in relation to castration.
In a Simondonian-Deleuzian reading, the goal may be transductive co-individuation—a new emergence beyond pathology.
5. But—Is There a Bridge?
Some thinkers—like Erik Porge, Bernard Stiegler, Yuk Hui—have tried to open a dialogue between Simondon and Lacan. They often do this by:
- Re-reading transindividuation as a collective psychic process that supplements Lacanian subjectivity.
- Treating technical objects and media as symbolic mediators, like Lacan’s objet a.
- Or interpreting the preindividual as an alternative to the foreclosed Real.
But these are creative re-mappings, not reconciliations.
Conclusion
Yes, Simondon and Deleuze are deeply un-Lacanian, and deliberately so.
They offer:
- An ethics of becoming rather than a psychoanalysis of lack.
- A cosmology of potential, rather than a structure of alienation.
- Fluid transindividuation, rather than symbolic castration.
Yet they do not deny Lacan—they supersede his structural impasses with a different metaphysical wager:
That the self is not the site of trauma alone, but of becoming still underway.
Would you like a chart summarizing Simondon–Deleuze–Lacan across subjectivity, desire, and the unconscious? Or a poetic rendering of what it means to shift from lack to becoming?
