Theatres of Terror and Cruelty: From Noise to the Voice

While, for many, Deleuze’s philosophy is synonymous with his concept of the ‘body without organs’, and even though he first explicitly develops this concept in The Logic of Sense, a large part of the present book argues that it is rather the organ-ised body – here figuring specifically as incarnated structure, building explicitly on Leclaire – on which his onto-logic of sense hinges. Nonetheless, this body only emerges later on in the ‘dynamic genesis’, the psychoanalytic portion of The Logic of Sense which provides a psycho-sexual account of language acquisition and of the emergence of sense, and first we must turn to the dis-organ-ised body of Klein and Artaud. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze develops his conception of the body without organs based on a reading of the work of Antonin Artaud.

Logic of the Phantasm: From Speech to the Verb

Now, while we have established that in ultimately speaking the event speech genetically founds language, it is nonetheless ultimately language which expresses the event by retroactively framing speech. At the end of the previous chapter I started touching on the articulation between speech and language, but primarily from the side of speech; to examine this articulation in more depth and detail, it is necessary to now turn to Deleuze’s theory of language (or of the proposition), in relation to which, I will show, speech takes on the function of the verb. Furthermore, this articulation is a specifically phantasmatic framing of speech by language, and therefore also brings us to an analysis of the functioning of the psychoanalytic phantasm in the dynamic genesis. The phantasm is the culmination of the dynamic genesis or the structure it generates, as well as underpinning The Logic of Sense’s theory of the proposition, and finally it also dramatically opens onto the book’s ontological and literary themes which I will discuss in the following chapter. Indeed, it is through the phantasm that all these elements combine giving The Logic of Sense its topological continuity.

The Three Syntheses of the Body: From the Voice to Speech

Firstly, this marriage of language and the unconscious – or this paradoxical unity of sense and nonsense – appears to allude to the work of the Lacanian school, which he later adds has ‘completely renewed the general problem of the relations between language and sexuality’.2 Secondly, to contribute something original, in light of Lacan’s work – but also, it is implied, because Lacan’s work has not yet reached its own ground (as conceived by Deleuze) – Deleuze is saying here that we need to turn to the work of Carroll, so as to examine ‘what else’ language and the unconscious are connected with. This third term, it is implied, is more fundamental than either language or the unconscious taken separately, underlying them both and accounting for the importance of their relation.

Introduction

While subtitled ‘Deleuze and the Lacanian School’, the primary aim of the present book is to provide a close reading of Deleuze’s 1969 work The Logic of Sense faithful to the text. This presents an immediate difficulty in that the text is itself highly fragmentary, being comprised of thirty-four miniature chapters or ‘series’ whose interrelations are never fully spelled out – indeed, the form and content of the work aligned, the text’s series are ‘nonsense’ yet collectively as a ‘structure’ generate sense as their superficial (yet not insignificant) by-product. The wager of the present book is that ‘sense’ can be made of The Logic of Sense by approaching this structure as a psychoanalysis of sense. Although I will be primarily focusing on the latter portion, the so-called ‘dynamic genesis’ which provides a psychoanalytical account of language acquisition, by reading it in parallel with a number of the book’s earlier series I will show how psychoanalysis underpins the larger project.

The Speculative Univocity of Being and Language: From the Verb to Univocity

There are many ways to view the genesis of sense in The Logic of Sense. One way that has been emphasised in the secondary literature is as the emergence of consciousness from the body’s affects.1 There is, however, a more interesting and important genesis at stake beneath this one. If the first genesis takes us from the verb to the logical proposition and empirical consciousness, the second off-piste route goes from the verb to the univocity of being. As Deleuze writes, playing on the literal meaning of the scholastic term univocity2 – one voice (voce) – ‘The univocity of Being signifies that Being is Voice, that it is said.’3

The Body of the Letter: From Name-of-the-Father to Re-père

Freud considers the Oedipus complex – the classical narrative of the boy’s desire to sleep with his mother and to kill his father – to constitute the ‘peak of infantile sexuality’.1 For Freud, in the Oedipus complex the boy develops an attachment or ‘object-cathexis for his mother’,2 originally related to her breast. The boy deals with the father by ‘identifying himself with him’, and while for a time these two relationships (boy–mother, boy–father) ‘proceed side by side’, the ‘intensification’ of the boy’s ‘sexual wishes’ in regard to his mother portrays the father as an obstacle and it is, for Freud, from this that the Oedipus complex originates.3 Despite emphasising the heterosexual nature of the complex (boy–mother), Freud sees the erogenous zones as ‘subordinated to the primacy of the genital zone’4 only after puberty.