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eplicating its appearance of 1883. This project,
completed in 1998, indeed played the course of history
backward, mimicking in reverse the movie of the
cathedral’s demolition. In 1919 Kashmir Malevich had
written: “One should have more regrets over a screw
with a broken thread than over the destruction of the
church of Vasili the Blessed.”’
Let us take another reading. For Félix Guattari
castration is indeed a phantasm and a capitalist mode
of regulation. A desire that bites into the forbidden
fruit and interiorisation of bourgeois repression.
Identification with Oedipus is also total, ‘resignation
to Oedipus, resignation to castration, girls renouncing
the desire for the penis, girls renouncing male protest,
in a word, “assumption of sex”. That something common,
that great Phallus, the Lack of two faces that cannot
be superimposed, is purely mythical: it is the One of
negative theology, it introduces lack into desire and
brings out the exclusive series to which it sets an
end, an origin and a resigned course.’ And he goes
on with Gilles Deleuze in the Anti-Oedipus: ‘It will be
necessary to affirm the opposite: there is nothing in
common between the two sexes and yet they never
cease to communicate, in a transverse mode in which
each subject possesses both, but walled off, and
communicates with one or the other sex of another
subject. That is the law of partial objects. Nothing is
missing, nothing can be defined as a flaw, as a lack;
and the disjunctions in the unconscious are never
exclusive, but are the object of an inclusive use that
we shall have to analyse.’ Basically, it is a matter of
not accepting the dictatorship of reality in any of its
appearances, as opposed to the individual construction
that pivots in the presence – Oedipus, superego, etc. –
or absence – castration, lack, etc. – of a centre the
community multiplies i.e. the castration-erection of
monuments is a broad, spatial and not only temporal
movement, the demolition of the Monument is a
gesture, an action that is trying to become a rule,
continuously over and over again because it aims at
the abolition of all centres, the rhizomatous expansion
of the community. ‘When the notion of group phantasm
was conceived in the perspective of institutional
analysis, the first task lay in pointing out the difference
in its nature from the individual phantasm. It then
appeared that the group phantasm was inseparable
from the “symbolic” structures that define a social
field as real, while an individual phantasm focused
the whole of that field on “imaginary” data. If we
extend this first distinction we see that the individual
phantasm itself is plugged into the existing social
field, but captures it under imaginary qualities that
confer a kind of transcendence or immortality on it
under whose aegis the individual, the ego, plays out
his pseudo-destiny: what does it matter if I die, says
the general, if the army is immortal. The imaginary
dimension of the individual phantasm is of decisive
importance on the death impulse, and so the immortality
conferred on the existing social order involves in the
ego all the cathexes of repression, emasculation,
the phenomena of identification, of ‘superegoisation’
and castration, all the resignations-desires (to agree
in general, to become a low, medium or high rank),
included in them resignation to die in the service
of that order, while the same impulse is projected
outwards and turned towards others (death to the
foreigner, to those who do not belong to our group!).
The revolutionary pole of the group phantasm, on the
other hand, appears in being able to live one’s own
institutions as mortal, being able to destroy them or
change them according to the structures of desire and
the social field, when the death impulse becomes a
true institutional creativity. So there lies the criterion,
at least the formal one, between the revolutionary
institution and the enormous inertia the law passes on
to the institutions in an established order. As Nietzsche
says, churches, armies, states, which of these dogs
wants to die? From which one deduces a third difference
between the group phantasm and the phantasm
called individual: the subject of the latter is the ego
as determined by the legal and legalised institutions
in which “one imagines”, to the extent that even in
its perversions the ego adapts to the exclusive use
of the disjunctives imposed by the law (for example,
oedipal homosexuality). But the subject of the group
phantasm is no longer anything more than its own
impulses and the desiring machines that form with
the revolutionary institution. The group phantasm
includes the disjunctives, in the sense that each
one, stripped of its personal identity, but not of its
peculiarities, begins to relate to the other following
the communication appropriate to partial objects:
each one passes to the body of the other on the
body without organs.’ The community makes itself,
in that continuum of emasculations and ejaculations,
that diversity of the actions that make the social
body free itself from the individual phantasm, from
the death impulse that irremediably extinguishes the
subject. The social institution moves forward despite
that, does not have to subject itself to a centre and
its ‘nomadic wanderings through the empty spaces of
the cities has the logic of its own meaning, now I open
a hole, now I cover a hole, the riddled space of the
community’. Guattari’s criticism of the architectural
utterance in Schizoanalytic Cartographies is based
on that premise to make neighbourhood community
spaces ‘plateaued and pierced’, with a thousand
holes and a thousand plateaus, forgetting about the
deep and the high if we want to make a community.
Let us return to our story, the Descoberta da linha
orgânica entry in F.X. Archive, and to how, from the
gesture observed in Lygia Clark’s painting it was
important to develop other entries in the thesaurus, to
make it more complex than a mere iconoclastic action.
In the chain of photographs and their corresponding
entries, all titles of works by the Brazilian artist, it is
made clear that the utterance they make does not have
so much relation to the first story about castration but
is fully identified with the second. Nevertheless, it is
important not to lose the first link, very closed around
the phallocratic moment that Susan Buck-Morss is
also narrating about Constructivism. In the constructivist
painting Descoberta da linha orgânica a series of
operations are triggered which can only be read
in terms of community, in pursuit of the collective,
multiple phantasm advocated by Deleuze and Guattari,
from the works that follow in which emasculation is
generalised until it acts in the orbit of cannibalism
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