Fifth Day: The Schizoid and the Depressive (Deleuze)

December 3, 2020

In an early essay that first appeared in 1967 and published as an appendix to Logique du sens (1969), “Michel Tournier et le monde sans Autrui,” Gilles Deleuze employs Tournier’s “philosophical novel” to pose the following question: “Must we conclude that sexuality is the only fantastic principle able to bring about a deviation from the rigorous economic order assigned by the origin?”

This question must be understood in two senses, the first of which requires a radical revision of Heidegger’s concept of world as a “whole structure” and the role of others as constituent parts of this structure by incorporating the fundamental component of sexuality in what Deleuze calls the “Other-Structure.” Why? Because, in the case of Heidegger’s ontology, one can easily apply Derrida’s earlier claim that there is “no trace of woman” (pas trace de femme)—actually, no trace of any sexuality whatsoever! The second sense of the question, which I will return to at the end, concerns replacing sexual difference at the origin of human subjectivity with what he and Guattari later call “becoming” (as in “becoming-woman,” “becoming-animal,” “becoming-molecular,” etc.)—that is to say, to replace sexual difference as an origin with the deviation from normative sexuality as a “final end,” and so as an analogy to a psychoanalytic understanding of the goal of perversion. Corresponding to both senses of the above question, Deleuze employs Tournier’s version of Robinson as an “instrument of research” to investigate the effects of the absence of the Other-Structure in the extremely artificial situation of the fable of another Robinson. As Deleuze writes, “Philosophical reflection can benefit from what the novel shows with so much force and life.”

First, what Tournier’s novel reveals is the crucial role that the presence of the Other-Structure plays in the entire “organization” of the world from its margin or background, the transitions from one field of perception to the next. In short, the presence of Others already attests to a structural organization of the world in both its center and in its margins, but also operates the possible transitions from the unseen depths of the subject’s own body to the visible surfaces of objects. Drawing in part on Sartre’s phenomenological analysis of the Other in Being and Nothingness, Deleuze describes the normal functioning of the perceptual field that is conditioned by the presence of others as follows:

The part of the object I do not see I posit as visible to others; so when I will have walked around to reach this hidden part, I will have joined up with the others behind the object to create a totalization I had already anticipated. And as for the objects behind my back, I sense them coming together to form a world, precisely because they are visible to, and are seen by, others. . . . In short, the others assure the margins and transitions in the world.

Contrary to Sartre’s earlier analysis, however, Deleuze argues that this crucial phenomenological significance only comes into view from the effects artificially produced in the novel by the absence of actual others. (In some ways this claim also corresponds to Heidegger’s central argument in Being and Time concerning the disruption that may occur in the whole structure of the world through the damage or loss of one of its constituent parts.) For example, if we recall the effects caused by the immediate absence of others from Robinson’s consciousness in the initial phase of his solitude on the island, they are described as “optical illusions, mirages, hallucinations, waking dreams, imagined sounds, fantasy and delirium.” These effects occur as a direct result of the absence of an Other-Structure that is normally actualized through the concrete presence of others, causing the relationship between depth, margin, and center in perception-consciousness to fundamentally become disoriented and disorganized.

Second, I have already recounted the gradual transformation of the phenomenological sense attached to Robinson’s own body, which becomes merely a neutral object among other objects on the island. In addition, there is also a sense of the violent dispossession of the body’s own sexual organization that is the direct result of the absence of others and touches on the struggle between the depths of Robinson’s body and the surface that was formerly organized by genital sexuality, specifically the crucial role played by the “good object” that is suddenly discovered to be missing or lost altogether. Many of my fellow castaways will claim that the subject of Robinson in Tournier’s version is no different than Defoe’s; according to the captain’s description, he is also a twenty-two-year-old “typical heterosexual white male” who has abandoned his wife and two children in England. However, this merely assumes that the subject of Robinson at the beginning of Tournier’s version is the same Robinson at the end, an assumption that corresponds to many contemporary “theories of the Other” that claim that race or certain organizations of sexuality are substantial components of the Other-Structure, predicated on their phenomenological appearance to consciousness as “thing-like,” present-to-hand, and visible to others. Nevertheless, this only proves that the manifestation of race and sexuality can only acquire their meaning in the presence of the Other-Structure—for example, when the subjective embodiment of race assumes the same unconscious significance of “origin” that was formerly assigned to the phallus in the organization of sexual difference, and merely represents another phallocentric organization of the body’s essential and contingent attributes.

Third, I have already spoken about the gradual fading of Robinson’s relationship to his own body as a subjective property (i.e., the phenomenological sense of “having a body that is mine”), but this is also clearly revealed in Robinson’s experience of his own nakedness, which undergoes an even more fundamental estrangement. During his self-described periods of “wallowing in the mire,” Robinson is defined as the “excrement of Speranza” and often sleeps and defecates without any concern for cleanliness or propriety, which can only exist as a subjective form of concern (or “care,” in the Heideggerian sense of Sorge). Thus the state of “being naked” is more extreme than the nudity that only addresses the relative relationship of the body’s depths and surfaces always from the perspective of the world of others. Rather, Tournier describes the experience of nakedness as a severe exposure to the depths of the body, or as a return to an inorganic substance, as the extreme point of desubjectivation.

Nakedness is a luxury in which a man may indulge himself without danger only when he is warmly surrounded by his fellow man. For Robinson, while his soul has not yet undergone any change, it was a trial of desperate temerity. Stripped of its threadbare garments—worn, tattered, and sullied, but the fruit of civilized millennia, and impregnated with human associations—his vulnerable body was at the mercy of every hostile element.

Eventually, Robinson’s former body is reduced to being an empty surface of pure sensation to every painful blow, every collision, every encounter with objects and other bodies in a flat and desubjectivized space of pure relations. In many ways, this also recalls Emmanuel Levinas’s description of a purely impersonal and anonymous plane of Being, of the “there is” (il y a) described as the “horror” of a nocturnal space where there is neither object nor even the profile of an object, but rather only a “a swarming of points” that do not refer to one another as in illuminated space, since there is no perspective either. The question we need to ask is what this existential attunement of “horror” that comes from the depths of the body has to do with the surface constituted by sexuality, and what is the relationship of this surface to what Deleuze calls the “Other-Structure”?

Employing the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Melanie Klein (as well as Lacan’s theory of the “symbolic,” which is an essential component in Deleuze’s own conception of the “Other-Structure”), Deleuze reorients the role played by sexuality in the organization of the relation between the depths of the body produced by the primary processes and the partial surfaces or “territories” produced by the organization of genital sexuality. The construction of the erogenous zones on the body results from the creation of a pure surface that does not have, on its underside, the depth of the body filled with partial objects; rather, the other side of the surface comprises the absence of the lost or missing object that is completely separate from the depths and situated in the field of the Other, according to the well-known Lacanian formulation that “Human desire is Other-desire.” Recalling Lacan’s famous description of the “mirror stage” that precedes the organization of sexuality—and the genital organization, in particular—it is the Ego’s jubilant assumption of its own ideal image that becomes the prototype for this separation and subsequent “alienation” (aphanasis) of a lost or missing object—namely, the Ego’s own imago, which can be defined as a pure surface upon which the sexual determination of the “good object” will come to be reflected at a later stage.

Following Klein’s insistence on the positive and “reparative” role of the formation of the surfaces produced by the organization of genital sexuality, Deleuze also highlights the function of the phallus defined as the image of the good object projected on the genital zone of the “body without organs” as “restorative” of a surface that mends and protects the Ego itself from the destructive drives that are constantly and violently pushed back into the depths of the body. (In short, the body without organs is literally stitched up so that the body’s orifices are closed by the erogenous zones to prevent the depths of the body from leaking out.) “Above all,” Deleuze writes, “it is here that the child pursues on his own body the constitution of a surface and the integration of the erogenous zones, thanks to the well-founded privilege of the genital zone”—something, I would add, that occurs repeatedly throughout the subject’s sexual life, especially when the object is repeatedly discovered to be missing, stolen away, or lost altogether. Therefore, it is only from the “depressive position” that results from the loss of the good object and the surface that was formerly constituted by genital sexuality that Deleuze will deduce the crucial role that sexuality plays in constructing his own theory of the “Other-Structure.”

At this point, recalling Tournier’s account of Robinson’s own depression after the discovery of the lost or missing object of sexual desire, the first effect of the absence of the Other-Structure is the return of the depths constituted by the oral and the anal drives and the alimentary and excremental partial objects that are introjected into the Ego’s own body, but also and more crucially, into the bodies of others where they will function as the Ego’s own partial objects. Deleuze will interpret this first moment as a regression to what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position and the return of the fragmented body composed of partial objects of the drives. It is here we discover the real “horror” of the drives, including the paranoid feelings of being persecuted by the bad introjected objects of the depths and hallucinatory visions that rise to the surface of consciousness in dreams. These are the manifestations of the partial objects that are either introjected and restrained in the depths of the body by the organization of genital sexuality or projected into the bodies of others, where they are aggressively pursued and persecuted—especially in the body of the mother, which becomes the prototype for the paranoid-schizoid aggressiveness that the Ego will project onto all future sexual relations.

For example, we might recall that in Defoe’s original version, Crusoe is initially overcome by anxiety and the paranoid fear of being eaten by predators or cannibals, which represents the return of the paranoid-schizoid aggressiveness of the infantile oral drive. In Tournier’s version, however, recalling the captain’s astute diagnosis of Robinson’s anal-erotic character, we see that the effects of the return of the anal drive results in Robinson’s body being turned into excrement. “He relieved himself where he lay, and rarely failed to roll in the damp warmth of his own excrement. He moved less and less, and his brief excursions always ended in his return to the depths of the mire. . . . Only his eyes, nose, and mouth were active, alert for edible weed and toad spawning drifting on the surface.” As an aside, the role played by the drives and their partial objects might provide an alternative ontological account of the origin of what Heidegger called “moods,” and particularly anxiousness (Sichängsten). Of course, Heidegger himself would never accept the “ontic” theory of the primordial role of the drives in infantile consciousness as even a partial explanation of what he calls the “pre-ontological” character of existential moods.

Returning to the second phase of Robinson’s depressive position, this is represented by all his attempts to recover the missing or lost object by projecting it onto the surface of the island that has now replaced Robinson’s own Ego. Accordingly, this phase represents the depressive position proper that succeeds the manic-schizoid position of the drives and their partial and introjected objects and, which again, represented Robinson’s attempt to “repair” the surface that was lost in the previous schizoid stage and was caused by the initial “disorganization” of genital sexuality. For example, in the pages of the books that had been erased by the tides and bleached by the sun, Robinson begins to create a new organization for the surface of Speranza, constructing articles of government, polity, penal systems, calendars, days of fasting and celebration, ritual forms of internment, burial, and commemoration. The fact that all this work of restoration of the surface appears to take place from a “a great height,” as if from a bird’s-eye view of the island itself, is significant in showing the new distance from the depths of the body that are affected by the superficial order that Robinson now constructs on the surface of the island itself. As Deleuze writes: “Height, in fact, has a strange power of reaction to the depths. It seems, from the point of height, that depth turns, orients itself in a new manner, and spreads itself; from a bird’s eye view, it is but a fold easily undone, or rather a local orifice surrounded or stitched to the surface.” Nevertheless, the organization of surfaces constructed from the depressive position usually succumb to failure in the end, causing the Ego to crash back into the infinite depths of the body—that is, its continued vulnerability to all manners of “wallowing in the mire.”

At this point in his interpretation of the fable, however, Deleuze departs from both Freud and Klein by arguing that a more profound “splitting” (Spaltung) of the subject transcends the division between the depths of the body constituted by the drives and their partial objects and the partial surfaces of the erogenous zones constituted by the sexual objects (including any number of the arrangements of genital sexuality that are produced by the perversions). In fact, the real struggle detected in the reaction of the depressive position is between the depths of a body containing the explosive, noxious, and threatening introjected and projected internal objects and what Deleuze calls a “body without organs and without mechanisms renouncing both projection and introjection” that is produced primarily as a means of protecting the Ego from its own body composed of both organs and partial objects. This will lead him to the discovery of a third position, which Deleuze calls “the sexual-perverse,” and can be defined by the autonomy proper to the organization of its own surfaces and erogenous zones in the relative absence or negation of the “Other-Structure.” In other words, it is the relative autonomy of the organization of surfaces composed of erogenous zones that already prefigures the possible separation of the Ego itself as the “body without organs,” which is now opposed to the bodies produced by the depths of the schizoid position and the partial surfaces constructed by the depressive position: a body that takes the Ego itself for the “good object” and, more importantly for our purposes, substitutes for the original organization of genital sexuality an anorganic form of immanent desire that no longer requires the detour through another body.

It is around the “goal” represented by this third position that we can now return Deleuze’s question of “becoming” that psychoanalysis has only understood negatively as the symptomatic role of the perversions in resisting the normative function of the Other-Structure. Following the orientation of Klein, Deleuze assigns perversion a more positive and potentially transformative role: rather than repairing or reconstructing the broken or damaged surfaces of the body constructed by the erogenous zones, the sexual-perverse position attempts to bypass the origin of sexuality difference altogether and to replace this origin with another goal—that of becoming “otherwise than the other sex!” If we examine the “becoming” of Friday-Robinson represented by the third metamorphosis, the first things we should notice is that Robinson has managed to bypass not only the paranoid-schizoid position of the drives that had dominated in the first stage, but also the manic-depressive position in the second stage, since this was too dependent on the subjugation of an external body (first, the body of woman, and then the body of Speranza herself, the earth). As Robinson claims: “The truth is that given the height to which we have soared, Friday and I, the difference between the sexes has been surpassed.” At this point in the fable, the formerly separated bodies of Robinson and Friday spinning in a white disc until the yoke of Robinson’s former body is blended with Friday’s yoke, and the single body of Robinson-Friday exhibits “the beauty of glass and metal and of shining surfaces, a glitter that does not belong to living things.” Finally, once the goal of Robinson-Friday’s becoming is achieved, all the sadness and loss that originally belonged to sexuality is now completely surpassed by what Deleuze now calls (for the first time, I believe) a complete “body without organs.” “Voila!” Deleuze writes, “this is Robinson’s final discovery: discovery of the pure surface, of an elemental beyond, of an ‘otherwise than another’” (l’autre qu’autrui).

This represents the radical Nietzscheanism of Deleuze’s moral question concerning the “fantastic principle” of perversion, which was intended to release the surface produced by phantasy from its secondary and derivative position in the organization of “desiring economy” (i.e., Oedipus). It is this positive discovery of a complete body with organs composed of pure elements and surfaces that explains why Deleuze, even in his earlier commentary on the subject of masochism, often claims a positive and transformative role for phantasy as the “virtual” production of desire that expresses a substance of becoming rather than original organic determination of substance by the instincts, as in Freud. Nevertheless, this expression of “becoming” is normally demoted to servicing the imaginary, where the productive and potentially transformative nature of desire is always trapped by the different genital organizations of sexuality that must always refer to the “Other-Structure” for their actualization. In other words, the plane constituted by desire must also detour through the framework of institutions and myths for the most common fantasies that populate the “Other-Structure”—as in the case of the myth of Oedipus and certainly in the case of the fable of Robinson Crusoe! Consequently, the sexual-perverse position risks producing yet another post-Oedipal myth of the same conflict between the depressive and schizoid poles that serves to organize the drives and their partial objects, which is why Deleuze also observes that the body without organs it produces often appears as a “sterile double” of the “Other-Structure.”

Finally, at the conclusion of his own research on the question of whether perversion can offer us the “fantastic principle” that will convert sexual difference as an origin into the goal of becoming “otherwise than the other sex,” Deleuze must now also acknowledge that the price one must pay for the liberation of a pure and elemental desire is the murder of both the “Other” and of all “the others.” Thus the goal of “all perversion is an ‘Other-cide’ and an ‘altruicide.’” Moreover, when the “Other-Structure” is found to be completely absent or somehow negated by purely artificial means, henceforth the only role that “real ‘others’ can play, in the second structure, is the role of bodies-victims, bodies-doubles, or the role of accomplice-doubles, or the role of accomplices-elements.” For example, recalling the third metamorphosis of the fable, it would no longer be even accurate to say that Robinson and Friday can become others to each other since the whole “Other-Structure” is now gone, and along with it, the possibility of another and of all the others! What has taken their place are pure simulacra—that is, pure doubles or twins created to serve a new plane of immanence that assumed the ultimate goal of Robinson’s image of “Great Health,” the plane of immanent desire that is produced by a return to primary narcissism.

However, even more troubling are what I have already alluded to earlier as other existential attunements that can be associated with a situation of extreme solitude, attunements of desire that demand nothing less than the sacrifice of the organic body itself as the price one must ultimately pay for producing a complete body without organs. This is true for the body without organs that is produced by alcoholism, certain drug addictions, and naturally, suicide—and it is certainly true in most of cases involving the body without organs produced by real psychosis and real schizophrenia! Finally, because he must acknowledge that these dangers also define a process of “becoming” that replaces an origin with a goal, Deleuze must also conclude that certain becomings cannot exist in a world of others, since the world created in the absence of others is composed of an atmosphere that expresses “a strange Spinozism lacking any oxygen in favor of the elemental energy of the drives.” For example, concerning the goal that is represented by the final “becoming” of “Robinson-Friday,” one can only say: “They” is longer from this world; “They” now come from the giant sideway ice-planet, Uranus; “They” is now Uranian!

In conclusion, I began my own investigation by asking what use we might have for yet another fable of Robinson Crusoe today. I have argued that the fable is still useful as a cautionary tale concerning the dangers of living in a world without others, especially since everybody (tout le monde), in a certain respect, lives on a desert island today. However, I also observed, concerning the original fable of Crusoe, that one cannot choose to become a castaway and to live alone on one’s own desert island in a world with others, since the “Other-Structure” is the a priori condition of any subject whatsoever. In saying this, I realize—even before the time of the pandemic—that many of my fellow castaways have been experimenting with their own “desert island sexuality” in an attempt to escape the more oppressive and sad effects of the “Other-Structure.” I would suggest that the success or failure of your experimentation can be assessed by a simple empirical test that consists of two questions: First question: “How stable is your own body without organs?” Is it relative smooth and seamless, or is it prone to frequent ruptures, causing you to crash back into the depths of the organic body? In other words, is it smooth and round like a hard-boiled egg, flat like a crepe, or does it always come out looking like scrambled eggs? Second question: “What role do you assign the ‘others’ in your immanent plan of desire?” In other words, are there any real “others” living on your desert island, or only the simulacra of others (e.g., victims, accomplices, co-conspirators, body doubles, and body-organs)?