Lecture by Matteo Pasquinelli (KIM HfG Karlsruhe) and Elena Vogman (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) on “Catastrophe and Schizophrenia”.
The lecture will take place on 13 January 2023 within the context of the atelier Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Year 51 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain.
How things turn fascist or revolutionary is the problem of the universal delirium about which everyone is silent, first of all and especially the psychiatrists
Every delirium is first of all the investment of a field that is social, economic, political, cultural, racial and racist, pedagogical, and religious
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1972.
What is the legacy of Anti-Oedipus today, 51 years after its publication? A major inspiration for queer-feminist and critical theories, and a vector for rethinking sexual politics, Anti-Oedipus directed its scathing critique towards ‘psychoanalysm’ (Robert Castel) and the reduction of psychoanalysis to familialism. Politicizing desire meant including its social, economic, and cultural dimensions into the theoretical and practical field. However, in order to immanently build up their arguments, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari engaged precisely with the milieu of critical psychiatry, viz. institutional psychotherapy.
In this two-day atelier, we seek to inquire into the complexity of Anti-Oedipus with regard to its clinical implications – its manifold resonances with institutional psychotherapy and the traumatic experiences of World War II – on the one side, and its perspectives on present-day entanglements between ‘capitalism’ and ‘schizophrenia’ on the other. How did the revolutionary psychiatric work of Francesc Tosquelles, presented by Carles Guerra and Joana Masó in the exhibition Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field, prepare the ground for Anti-Oedipus? How might we construct an institutional analysis of the parapolitics of contemporary rising nationalisms, ‘fossil fascism,’ and the continuity of colonial regimes? Is it possible to engage in a critical therapeutic attitude within and beyond these catastrophic horizons?
The atelier also aims at unfolding a number of implicit dialogues and tensions inherent in Anti-Oedipus. How do Deleuze and Guattari engage with the French psychoanalyst Maud Mannoni to show the dangers of the ‘adaptation police force’ that haunts traditional psychiatry? How do they adapt institutional psychotherapy to both deepen their analyses and criticize traditional psychoanalytical concepts? With Jean Oury, they address the traps of extended oedipalization in which certain anti-psychiatric movements fell; with Gisela Pankow, they denounce the notion of ‘regression’ regarding the formulation of schizophrenia. How then to understand contemporary modes of subjectivity, society, and power from the perspective of Anti-Oedipus?