To: <deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.driftline.org>
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:51:50 +0100
Subject: Re: [D-G] Mystic, psychosis, ,


Hi Ruth and all fellow companies,

> The question of clarity is an interesting one-clear in relation
> to what? According to the DSM, psychosis is manifest as
> disordered thinking in so far as it is not ordered by the order
> words of the DSM!

DSM sucks..

> Te clarity described by different kinds of yogic traditions is
> the clarity achieved when order words break down. Yet most also
> describe a disciplined and focused method precisely to avoid the
> chaotic immeersion in psychotic experience.

Indeed, but how to distinguish the two, in practice?

> You both seem to know
> your way around the literature and proabably know more than I
> about this but I would want to draw a line between a disciplned
> mediational technique and the states of consciousness that can be
> achieved and the seeming randomness of florid psychosis-this may
> be constrolled mediationally-indeed I have worked quite hard at
> doing this but meditatation is still an apparatus of capture.

Is it?

> As I understand lacan, psychosis is what occurs when the father's
> law is not internalised or if it breaks down. One of the things I
> have observed in my own episodes and the episodes of colleagues
> is the construction of new linguistic rules in th episodes. These
> are quite often paranoic rules-being persecuted by various
> agencies, for example, is one that inflates the importance of the
> person experiencing this and shores up primary narcisism.

Well, is it primary narcissism? Or is it the consequence of a thoroughly
consequent mature kind of idealism & solipsism. There is one clear dividing
line between at the one hand Lacan & Deleuze-Guattari and at the other hand
phenomenologists like Louis Sass, but also the older german school, which
is, that in the end the lacanians and deleuzians consider psychosis as a
step back towards a father-less or law-less stage, while in fine-grained
psychiatric phenomenology (as clear inn Sass' Madness and Modernism)
psychosis is a more advanced serene state of consciousness which takes all
those cerebral intellectual stances like absolute idealism and solipsism
seriously. My bet is on the phenomenologists!

> Experiencing myself as  a spaceship, alternatively, was a
> transient way of constructing my own big Other at the fringes of
> this logic-and also narcissitic (but very necessary at the time).
> So I'm not so into romanticizing what happens in psychosis as
> revolutionary-some of it is ultra paranoic. For example,
> delusions are like religion in so far as they only attend to the
> evidence that supports them-This sets up the production of closed
> repetitions at another level of embodiment. Because this evidence
> is experienced through the senses, it is
>   real for the expereincer. The ontological status of this real
> is highly ambiguous. It is not real ( as in not actual) for
> everyone else in the room. So for these people, the reality is
> unextended and virtual. For the experiencer, the reality is
> actual and extended. This embodied ambiguity occupies a space
> that confounds the father's law. If Lacan's 'real' is
> discursively founded on lack than the reality of the person who
> expereince psychosis cannot 'be'-yet it undoubtedly is for many
> people that I know.

In Lacanian terms it remains quite unclear whether psychosis is a mature
state of the morror stage - endlessly experiencing reflections of oneself -
or meeting the Real (which is the more romantic reading).

This is enough for me to support a conception
> of the real based on plenitude. But I would still not link
> psychosis with clarity (despite the oceanic moments where it
> feels like all is clear). Rather, I would suggest this perception
> is the ultimate in the grandiose self deception-encountering
> being as a clamour, alternately, is more like an unclarity that
> deafens-I don't really have words for it and as stated earlier,
> one could not live there for long.

Some of us live there for long, although from the outside it it looks not
like a very pleasant 'place' :-)

> The advice about saving
>   a bit of land is very sound in this respect and, in my view,
> psychotic delusions are much more about the fictive construction
> of land than the deterriorialiation of land as such. Maybe,
> making new territories (David Wood talks about time shelter) is
> what the de and resubjectifications of psychosis are about.
> However, I can only speak for the lands I have made and
> abandoned. They are of little interest to anyone but myself.

I dont think so. In all psychosis similar themes seem to flourish: like the
thing with rays, the flip-flop of paranoia and megalomania, and experiences
of complete union.

> It
> would be interesting to hear from another pathway through
> expereinces of psychosis.

I would say...read my book "Pure Waanzin". Unfortunately however, it is only
in Dutch.

Have a good time!

Wouter Kusters

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