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

subject. Deleuze's 1977 discussion of psychoanalysis with Claire Parnet, occurring just
after the writing of Anti-Oedipus, offers the most candid evidence of this rejection and
the replacement of the Symbolic order in his thought by the contractual, machinic,
extrinsic, assemblage he calls "desire" (mixing Spinozan/ Erigenean "haecceities" and
Nietzschean "will") that is formed directly between the Imaginary (plane of consistency)
and the Real (field of transcendence) without Symbolic mediation:
Psychoanalysis then has, in effect, its own references and has no
more use for an external ―referent.‖ Everything that happens in
psychoanalysis in the analyst's consulting room is true. What
happens elsewhere is derived or secondary. An excellent method
for encouraging trust. Psychoanalysis has ceased to be an
experimental science in order to get hold of an axiomatic system.
Psychoanalysis, index sui; no other truth than that which emerges
from the operation which presupposes it; the couch has become the
bottomless well, interminable in principle. Psychoanalysis has
stopped being ―in search of‖ because it is now constitutive of
truth...[quotes Serge Leclaire on the contra-rational inflation of
figures into literal behaviors that Psychoanalysis prefers] ... The
psychoanalyst has become like the journalist: he creates the event.
At any rate, psychoanalysis advertises its wares. So long as it
interpreted or so long as it interprets (search for a signified), it
returns desires and utterances to a condition which is deviant by
comparison with the established order, by comparison with
dominant meanings, but by the same token localizes them in the
pores of this dominant, established body, like something which can
be translated and exchanged by virtue of a contract. When it
discovers the signifier, it appeals to a specifically psychoanalytic
order (the symbolic order in opposition to the imaginary order of
the signified), whose only need is itself, because it is statutory or
structural: it is it which develops a body, a corpus sufficient by
itself. Once again we clearly come up against the question of
power[.] (Dialogues 87)
The deployment of multiplicity of meanings over totality and symbol is worth
thinking about, as it touches upon recent theories of the lyric and poetic-subjectivity. The
lyric "I", if we are to take Deleuze‘s anti-Symbolic argument seriously, cannot believe
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