Deleuze and the Symptom: On the Practice and Paradox of Health
2010; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3366/dls.2010.0001
ISSN1755-1684
Autores Tópico(s)Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics
ResumoThe concepts of health, illness and medicine are a persistent and recurring concern in Deleuze’s work, yet the secondary literature shows only a scant interest in the topic, with Daniel W. Smith’s excellent introduction to his English translation of Essays Critical and Clinical (Deleuze 1997) remaining one of the few sustained pieces of commentary on this aspect of Deleuze’s thought. The reasons for this very possibly have to do with the complexities of Deleuze’s own intellectual peregrinations. In an interview given in 1967, following the publication of his book on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Deleuze stated his plans to write a series of works on literary authors in order to ‘articulate a relation between literature and clinical psychology’ on the basis of the symptomatological method he had discovered in Nietzsche (Deleuze 2004a: 133). If these books were never written, with the pieces collected in Essays Critical and Clinical our only real clues as to what they might have looked like, it is no doubt because after May ’68 and the meeting with Guattari the importance of generating a ‘universal clinical theory’ took on a different and renewed impetus (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 311). There is a certain divergence, then, in Deleuze’s conception of the clinical which remains to be clarified. If, in the symptomatological register, the symptom is diagnostic, relating to the creation of new clinical entities, in the schizoanalytical mode it is therapeutic, an injunction to produce. As Deleuze put it, ‘you must produce the unconscious. Produce it, or be happy with your symptoms, your ego, and your psychoanalyst’ (Deleuze 2006: 81). And yet, there is an undeniable continuity linking these two periods in Deleuze’s thought. It is the fact that health always implies a practice that links the different clinical theories of symptomatology and
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