Small Review of Guillaume Collett's The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School (2018)

I finished reading Guillaume Collett's The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School not too long ago, and since there is almost nothing I can find that's been written about it, here's a small review.

Published in 1969, Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense has by now garnered a small handful of dedicated studies, each of which continues to plumb the depths of that strange yet magnificent book (cf. the work of James Williams, Sean Bowden, Piotrek Świątkowski, and Mehdi Parsa). Guillaume Collett’s contribution, The Psychoanalysis of Sense, is distinguished by its focus on Deleuze’s engagement with psychoanalysis (as advertised!), as well as doing the one thing which has been desperately needed for a while now: reading the book back to front. For, as any reader of the Logic of Sense knows, its already brutal level of difficulty is compounded by the book’s organizational schema, composed as a series of loosely overlapping chapters (or ‘series’), whose exact architecture is not always clear. Further, the book is roughly split into two, with the latter half detailing the emergence of ‘sense’ from ‘bodies’ (the so-called ‘dynamic genesis’), while the first half runs over the functioning and status of ‘sense’ itself, once emerged (the ‘static genesis’).

By beginning with the dynamic genesis, Collett manages to narrativise the story of sense, beginning at the beginning, as it were, and letting it unfold, as distinct from Deleuze’s (perhaps more thought-encouraging?) cold opening in medias res. Proceeding stage-by-stage then, The Psychoanalysis of Sense moves ‘up’ the ladder of language: from ‘noise’ to ‘voice’ to ‘speech’, to ‘language’. This is, after all, among the guiding questions of Deleuze’s book: how does one get from the roil and bump of mere(?) bodies to the eloquence of the speaking, loquacious being? Or, how, from the ‘depths’ of howls and breath does one become installed at a ‘surface’ of sense, from which our ability to designate and talk about things proceed? Questions, in other words, central to psychoanalysis. After all, what is the famous ‘Oedipus complex’ other than an account of the birth into speech by which psychoanalysis frames its handling of neuroses and psychotherapy?

Written before Deleuze’s iconoclastic and (in)famous turn ‘against’ psychoanalysis in 1972’s Anti-Oedipus (with Felix Guattari), The Logic of Sense was Deleuze’s last effort to “render psychoanalysis inoffensive” (as he later wrote). Among Collett’s great merits is to take this seriously as his guiding thread for the book. The Psychoanalysis of Sense reads Deleuze - if not exactly as a psychoanalyst - at least in deep and respectful conversation with a few them. That said, the so-called “Lacanian School” which marks the book’s subtitle is mostly one guy - Serge Leclaire, a student of Lacan whose occasional positive reference by Deleuze is shunted front-and-centre as a key to unlock the the mysteries of the dynamic genesis. For Collett, it’s Leclaire’s renewed emphasis on the body - as distinct from Lacan’s more ‘signifier-centered’ practice - that helped furnish Deleuze with the necessary resources to rework psychoanalysis just so (Melanie Klein and Antonin Artaud get their due too, of course).

Taken together as ruses for reading - the back-to-front approach, and the highlighting of Leclaire - The Psychoanalysis of Sense does an excellent job of bringing out the stakes of The Logic of Sense. While some of the book’s more properly philosophical references are better treated elsewhere (there is little here on the Stoics or on Leibniz for instance), when Collett gets going the going gets good. You’ll be hard pressed to find better discussions of some of the Logic of Sense’s more puzzling themes and concepts: the phantasm, the ‘esoteric word’, the ideal game, the empty square, the verb, Alice in Wonderland - obscure items when listed without context like this, but central to understanding how the book’s pieces ultimately fit together as an open whole. To end on a practical note: it’s probably best to read this after, or along side the Logic of Sense itself. This is not a work of introduction, and Collett more or less assumes a working knowledge of the primary material. If you’ve got that under your belt, give this a go.