TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

itself a Western bourgeois assumption" (5). Her theory is supple. The lyric-"I," as Blasing
deploys the mother-tongue in symbolic language, serves to reify the structural
distinctions Lacan describes between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, while at
the same time preserves her indebtedness to post-structural theories of subject formation
formulated by Gilles Deleuze, the theorist most responsible for bringing the idea of
virtuality to the psychoanalytic table, and for whom the ―Symbolic‖ is the objet de crise:
In the largest terms, my argument is that poetic language generates
such theoretical oppositions yet resists their terms because it
remembers the history that creates the gaps internal to language.
These distinctions come to be posited through a lived history of
language acquisition, the passage from body language into
symbolic language. (10)
Blasing's reading of Deleuze and Guattari is obvious in her appraisal of the
historical construction of ―body language‖ and the resistance it offers to structural
analyses of the subject. (She dedicates the third chapter of her book to a close reading of
Deleuze's Logic of Sense.) The presence of their notion of a "Body without Organs" or,
less cryptically, the idea of personhood on which "assemblages" (adapted from their
narrow reading of Marx's Capital) of "desiring machines" (they abandon this term after
writing Anti-Oedipus but retain the concept in a "delirium" of new replacement terms in
Mille Plateaux) or "part objects" coalesce, inscribe, and deteriorate, is clear. The care
Blasing gives in showing that the unconscious is constructed, and not a feature of an
oceanic and deep cultural expression, a central feature of Guattari and Deleuze‘s
rethinking of psychoanalysis after their work on ―body language,‖ does her reading of
their work credit which makes her retention of the Lacanian structure within her
Deleuzian discussion of subject-formation all the more strange. Blasing retains the
psychoanlaytic "Symbolic" order to maintain her greater claim that discourses of reason
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