From: Kalapsyche-AT-aol.com
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 05:32:43 EST
Subject: Re: guilt as symbolic mediator


In a message dated 1/5/1999 5:15:51 AM EST, daniel-AT-tw2.com writes:

<< I don't know if I meant this "in freud's sense" as I'm not sure what his
 sense would be... but certainly freud was in my mind.  I find a lot of
 freud's writing incredibly interesting and astute, as far as it goes;
 but it remains within a discourse that has some major problems! -
 regarding freud and anti-oedipus I tend to think the problem that d&g
 work over is that freud dodges (a little hysteria, perhaps?) the
 "social" bit of "social reality" and consequently inserts his own
 culturally conditioned sensibilty into the psyche as a supposedly
 non-cultural given. so the unconscious ends up being structured only by
 and in relation to the conscious (as a "theatre of representation"), and
 the demand to face (social) reality represses the need to liberate
 unconscious desire: he seems to come to the conclusion that we're all
 neurotic, which is "okay" (that is, "normal") as long as we're not
 psychotic... (especially not schizophrenic!). this is, as many people
 have comented, to replace one original sin with another --- but if we 
 re-emphasise the "social" in social reality then it is also an amazingly
 insightful recognition of the fucked up way society conditions our
 behaviour! >>

Daniel--

I really enjoyed your comments in this posting, but I'm a little confused on
the critique you're levelling against Freud here.  When you talk about re-
emphasising the social in social reality, are you claiming that this gives us
a different perspective on Freud's notion of the ego that allows us to
critique it?  This would make sense to me because the ego in Freud seems to
largely the result of transference relations.  Secondly, in the above portion
of your letter, you seem to differentiate unconscious desire from the demands
of social reality and claim that the latter represses the former.  At this
point I'm a little bit confused as to what a non-social unconscious could
possibly be.  In Capitalism and Shizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari claim that
all desire is social desire.  Since all that belongs to the realm of desire in
D&G is unconscious, this means to me that all desire must be social in nature.
The case is really no different in psychoanalysis (Freudian, Kleinian, or
Lacanian) where the unconscious gets structured symbolically, which is to say,
socially.  For me, the difference between liberatory and castrated desire in
D&G seems to be dealt with in terms of Molar and Molecular flows, but this
doesn't quite work either insofar as D&G talk about molecular fascism in a
number of different places.  With these points in mind, I was wondering if you
might expand a little more on what you mean by a non-social unconscious
desire.

Thanks!

Kala