Abstracts

Mehdi Parsa (Bio)

Ethics of psychosynthesis: desiring the event

This talk aims to give a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The main question that I’m targeting refers to a claim that Michel Foucault in his preface to Anti-Oedipus makes: “Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics”. Foucault elaborates briefly on his suggestion, focusing on the way Deleuze and Guattari’s book can be considered an ethical manual against fascism, “an introduction to non-fascist life”. I refer to this line of thought partially in my paper. But what I mainly try to do is to elaborate on this suggestion in light of, first, Deleuze’s reading of Stoic ethics in Logic of Sense, and second in light of Jacques Lacan’s discussions on Ethics of Psychoanalysis in his 1959-60 seminar which is published under the same title. Deleuze formulates his reading of Stoic ethics in terms of the priority of event, which is, the priority of real synthesis over subjective analysis. I will try to rework this picture in conversation with Lacan’s account of ethics of psychoanalysis which is defined in terms of the exteriority of desire. Of course, this results in a critique of Lacan’s structuralism and the primacy of symbolic order in his thought. As I will discuss, Deleuze and Guattari consider the exterior unconscious desire at the level of the real. This is why they distinguish the socius as the element of collective unconscious from the so-called intersubjectivity. This means making a connection between the notions of unconscious desire and exterior event and I will try to build my reading on this connection.