Deleuze and Guattari as readers of Freud

Objectives

The aim of this article is to show that the critique of the place and function of the Oedipus complex in Freudian psychoanalysis implies a critique of Freudian aesthetics.

Method

We will first propose a reconstruction of what Deleuze and Guattari take from Freudian aesthetics, namely an aesthetics of form, centered on the theater, and starting from Freud's experience as a spectator of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In a second movement, we will try to identify what Deleuze and Guattari intend to propose to replace this aesthetic of form, and which they name “schizophrenic literature,” situate in the short story rather than in the theater, and explicitly referring to delirium.

Results

This strategic reconstruction allows us to formulate a hypothesis: that Freud would have implicitly made the theater the matrix of subjectivity, first in its aesthetics, but also in his individual aesthetic experiences and his preferences for a certain type of literary work.

Discussion

This systematic reading of Freudian “creative writing” theory challenges the concept of sublimation as the point of doctrine that rests on the selection of an “Oedipal” corpus and type of art. If the aesthetics of the form can be located in Freud's biography as a “literary effect” whose aesthetic pleasure is found in the economy of the spectator's projections onto the objects on stage, the aesthetics of the formless that is expressed by “schizophrenic literature” mobilizes a violence proper to the sublime: it is not definitively formalizable, and calls for very different feelings that transfigure the coordinates of an aesthetic experience.

Conclusion

This schizophrenic tendency of literature leads to an ecological approach to the psychic, attentive to a context where the distinction between nature and culture is never clear.