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

ely on the aboriginal poetic, lyric, language that we call the "mother-tongue." In a deft
piece of dialectical thinking, she holds that the non-rational language of the mother-
tongue subsumes the acquired languages of reason and the irrational. The worlds of
rationalized symbolic logic and the dream-logic of the irrational Imaginary constitute
reifying opposites. The non-rational is then free to become the antinomial Other to that
opposition.
Deleuze‘s strategy for undoing the authority of the Symbolic order is something
less dialectic. He rethinks the statutory prescriptions as they had come to be described
and practiced within the institution of French Psychoanalysis. The Symbolic and its
preference for signifiers and interpretation over that which they signify – the signified
and a world knowable through sensation – demarcates subjects and objects independent
of context. Deleuze laments that the institution of psychiatry had granted itself this
authority by forgetting about the meaning of the content of the signified and its
connection to reality. Deleuze's purpose, in part, was to examine how the Imaginary, as it
is spurred by contractual remonstrations with the empirical Real, eludes the false
constraints of the axioms enlisted by sovereign Symbolic "different(c)iations" (Difference
and Repetition) and as such opens itself to any variety of delirious opinion about
reasonable predication. Prior to their axiological encoding by the psychoanalytic
Symbolic Order, subjects and objects are haecceities, events, or unique mixings of parts
and conditions in time.
Deleuze's misgivings about psychoanalysis are founded in his rejection of
institutionalized definitions and fixities that faith in the Symbolic order bequeath and
which help to obviate the multiplicity of part-objects that compose the assemblage of the
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