With pleasure, my friend. Here’s a fictional sketch of a schizoanalytic session, unfolding not in a clinic, but in a space that’s already leaking boundaries—a roadside van, or maybe a quiet park bench with a highway humming behind. Let’s call the participant “X” (not a patient), and the schizoanalyst “K” (not an authority).
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Scene: Under an overpass, wind rustling plastic bags like ghosts of capital. X sits on a folding chair, staring at a crumpled map. K lights a cigarette.
K:
So, what brings you here today? (laughs) Sorry, that’s the wrong question. I mean—
What machine broke down in you?
X:
I stopped dreaming.
I mean, I still sleep. But nothing visits me anymore.
Even my anger feels… unemployed.
K:
Unemployed anger. That’s a beautiful phrase.
Maybe your dreams went on strike.
Maybe your anger got laid off by the neoliberal affect economy.
X:
I used to write. Poems, you know? Wild ones. About rivers turning into snakes, lovers turning into fog.
Now I just scroll. And scroll. My thumb is more alive than I am.
K:
So your writing machine got replaced by the algorithmic scrolling machine.
Your hand still moves. But not toward expression.
What would it take to reroute that flow?
X:
I don’t know. Maybe unplugging?
K:
Too easy. Everyone says that now. “Digital detox,” “touch grass,” and so on.
But you’re a desiring machine, not a monk.
Let’s trace it.
When did the poetry machine seize up?
X:
(Moment of silence)
My father died.
And suddenly words tasted like cardboard.
I tried to write, but everything sounded like an obituary.
K:
Not a blockage then.
A reterritorialization. Grief took over the poetic factory, installed new managers.
But maybe… maybe it wasn’t death that shut you down.
Maybe it was the grammar of mourning you were forced to speak.
X:
What do you mean?
K:
Did you have to be “appropriate”?
Did people expect you to “process,” to “move on”?
Maybe your desire didn’t want closure. Maybe it wanted to melt.
X:
Yes.
I wanted to become fog too.
Disappear into mist like my poems used to do.
K:
Aha. That’s your line of flight.
Not healing, not returning to the old you, but becoming mist.
Can we write from there?
X:
Now?
K:
Always now.
Here’s charcoal. (hands over a small charcoal stick)
Don’t write about your father.
Write as fog. As if you were the grief-weather moving across a dry field.
X:
(Hesitates, then begins to draw lines on the back of the crumpled map)
K:
No interpretation. No “how does that make you feel.”
Let the lines speak. Let the desire flow.
We’re not healing your soul—we’re unlocking your machine.
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Session ends with silence. The paper is not folded, not filed. It’s burned. X smiles, for the first time. Not because they’re cured. But because they’re moving.
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🌪 What Just Happened?
• No diagnosis, no pathology.
• The past (father’s death) is not rehashed but rewired into a flow of affect and desire.
• The analyst doesn’t interpret but facilitates connections.
• “Cure” is not resolution but movement—toward new assemblages, new intensities, new selves.
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Would you like another scene—perhaps one involving dreams, capitalism, or gendered machines? Or shall we co-write a “Manual for Schizoanalytic Practice in the 21st Century”?
