Daniela Voss

University of Hildesheim

The Machinic Unconscious: Deleuze, Guattari, Spinoza

18 October 2022, 17h00 (Lisbon Summer Time — GMT+1)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy) | School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

How can we desire our own repression? This is according to Deleuze and Guattari the “fundamental problem of political philosophy […] precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly” (Anti-Oedipus, p. 29). Spinoza posed this question for the first time in the Theological-Political Treatise, and since then it has been taken up by various thinkers, for instance, Wilhelm Reich. Yet attempts to solve this paradox commonly make use of the concept of ideology, assuming that the masses have been deceived. By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari propose a ‘materialist psychiatry’ that overcomes the dichotomy between the rationality of social production and the irrationality of imaginary production. This paper sketches out their approach to this problem by focusing on their concepts of the unconscious and of desire, and in doing so we will return to Spinoza’s thought.