Ethics of schizoanalysis

Authors

  • Mehdi Parsa Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59391/inscriptions.v5i1.154

Keywords:

ethics, unconscious, schizoanalysis, Anti-Oedipus, desire

Abstract

In this essay I read Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia from an ethical point of view. My main question refers to a claim that Michel Foucault made in his preface to Anti-Oedipus: “Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics”. I try to elaborate on this suggestion in conversation with Jacques Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis, a 1959-1960 seminar published under the same title. This essay responds to Lacan’s formulation of an unconscious desire by way of Deleuze and Guattari’s social-machinic perspective. In my interpretation Anti-Oedipus accounts for an ontological ethics in terms of an unconscious desire that is exteriority. I take the notion of socius as the key element of this exterior desire and therefore as the true site of ethics.

Author Biography

Mehdi Parsa, Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts

Mehdi Parsa received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Bonn in 2021 with a dissertation on Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. His recent publications include ‘Speculative vs. Transcendental: a Deleuzian Response to Meillassoux’ in La Deleuziana, Issue No. 11 (2020): 171-185, and ‘Gilles Deleuze and the desert island as a material utopia.’ Inscriptions 3, no. 2 (July 2020): 70.

References

Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester, and Charles J. Stivale. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Deleuze, Gilles. Logiques du Sens. Paris: Les Edition de Minuit, 1969.

Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts. Edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Michael Taormina. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Lacan, Jacques. Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: Norton and Company, 1997.

Lacan, Jacques. Formations of the Unconscious: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V. Translated by Russell Grigg. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.

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Published

2022-01-15

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2022): Being and event

Section

Academic articles

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Mehdi Parsa

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