And back to Deleuze, is the same violent sort of misreading as in the case of Hegel not also clearly discernible in Deleuze's treatment of psychoanalнysis, with special regard to Lacan? What Deleuze presents as "Oedipus" is a rather ridiculous simplification, if not an outright falsification, of Lacan's position. In the last decades of Lacan's teaching, topics and subнtitles like "au-dela de l'Oedipe," TOedipe, un reve de Freud," and so forth abound; not only this, but Lacan even presents the very figure of Oedipus at Colonus as a post-Oedipal figure, as a figure "beyond the Oedipus complex." What, then, if one conceives of the Lacanian "obнverse of the Oedipus" as a kind of Deleuzian "dark precursor" mediating between the two series, the "official" Oedipal narrative of normalization, on the one side, and the presubjective field of intensities and desiring machines, on the other side? What if it is this that Deleuze desperately tries to avoid, this "vanishing mediator" between the two series? What one should do is thus to repeat, apropos of Deleuze's reductionist readнing of (the Freudian) Oedipus (his other uncanny exception, in terms of a botched, simplistic interpretation), the same gesture as the one that imposes itself in relation to Hegel.

In today's theory, especially in cultural studies, reference to Oedipus is often reduced to the extreme of a ridiculous straw man: the flat sceнnario of the drama of the child's entry into normative heterosexuality. To fulfill this rhetorical function, the Oedipus complex has to be ascribed a multitude of inconsistent functions. Let me quote the following typical passage (which will tactfully be allowed to remain anonymous):

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"In the Oedipal scenario, the young boy desires to conquer his mother sexually in order to separate himself from her and begin to grow as an adult. For him to succeed, he must destroy his father, his sexual competitor." So, it is not the father whose "castrating" function is to separate the boy from his mother. In fact, the boy has to do three inconsistent things simulнtaneously: conquer his mother, separate himself from her, and destroy his father. What Jerry Aline Flieger did[11] is something subversive in its properly Hegelian simplicity: she reinscribed-retranslated Oedipus back into Deleuzian territory, (re)discovering in it an "abstract machine," a nomadic agent of deterritorialization, the supreme case of what Deleuze and Guattari call the "lone wolf" who stands for the limit of the pack of wolves, opening a "line of flight" toward its outside. And effectively, does OedipusЧthis stranger who blindly (in both senses of the term) followed his trajectoryЧnot stand for the extreme limit of the pack of human wolves, by way of realizing, acting out, the utter limit of human experience, finishing alone (or, rather, with a pack of exiles of his own) as, literally, a homeless nomad, a living dead among humans? One should thus repeat here the same operation as the one that, apropos of Hegel, enabled us to (re)discover in him the philosopher who shows how neнcessity emerges out of contingency, the philosopher of the vertiginous fluidity of concepts in which the subject is constantly displaced. The conнcept that this "Freudo-Lacanian buggery of Deleuze" should focus on is, predictably, that of the phallus, the Deleuzian term for which is "dark precursor." Deleuze introduces it in Difference and Repetition: "Thunderнbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor [precurseur sombre], which deнtermines their path in advance, but in reverse, as though intagliated."[12] As such, the dark precursor is the signifier of a metadifference:

Given two heterogeneous series, two series of differences, the precursor plays the part of the differenciator of these differences. In this manner, by virtue of its own power, it puts them into immediate relation to one another: it is the in-itself of difference or the "differently different"Чin other words, difference in the second degree, the self-different which relates different to different by itself. Because the path it traces is invisible and becomes visible only in reverse, to the extent that it is traveled over and covered by the phenomenon it induces within the system, it has no place other than that from which it is "missing," no identity other than that which it lacks: it is precisely the object=x, the one which is "lacking in its place" as it lacks its own identity.[13]

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Or as Buchanan puts it in a concise way: "Dark precursors are those moments in a text which must be read in reverse if we are not to mistake effects for causes."[14] In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze develops this concept through a direct reference to the Lacanian notion of "pure signifier"-. there has to be a short circuit between the two series, that of the signifier and that of the signified, for the effect-of-sense to take place. This short circuit is what Lacan calls the "quilting point," the direct inscription of the signifier into the order of the signified in the guise of an "empty" signifier without signified. This signifier represents the (signifying) cause within the order of its effects, thus subverting the (mis)perceived "natural" order within which the signifier appears as the effect/expression of the signified.

And effectively, the relationship of Deleuze to the field generally desнignated as that of "structuralism" is much more ambiguous than it may appear. Not only is the key notion of "dark precursor" in The Logic of Sense directly developed in Lacanian structuralist terms; at the same time, Deleuze wrote "A quoi reconnait-on le structuralisme?" a brief, concise, and sympathetic account that, precisely, presents structuralism not as the thought of fixed transcendent Structures regulating the flux of expeнriences, but as deploying a consistent theory of the role of nonsense as the generator of the flux of sense.[15] Furthermore, Deleuze here explicitly refers to (and develops in detail) the Lacanian identification of this signifier as phallus.[16] How, then, are we to read his later obvious "hardening" of the stance toward "structuralism?" Why is the very Lacanian reference of the "dark precursor" reduced to the status of a "dark precursor" in the later Deleuze's thought, turned into a kind of "vanishing mediator" whose traces are to be erased in the finished result?

Perhaps it is all too hasty to dismiss Deleuze's endorsement of "strucнturalism" as a feature belonging to an epoch when he was not yet fully aware of all the consequences of his basic position (thus, the "hardenнing" would be conceived of as a necessary radicalization). What if this hardening is, on the contrary, a sign of "regression," of a false "line of flight," a false way out of a certain deadlock that resolves it by sacrificing its complexity?

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This, perhaps, is why Deleuze experienced his collaboration with Guattari as such a "relief": the fluidity of his texts cowritten with Guattari, the sense that now, finally, things run smoothly, is effectively a fake reliefЧit signals that the burden of thinking was successfully avoided. The true enigma is hence: why does Deleuze succumb to this strange urge to "demonize" structuralism, disavowing his own roots in it (on account of which one can effectively claim that Deleuze's attack on "structuralism" is enacted on behalf of what he got from structuralism, that it is strictly inherent to structuralism)? Again, why must he deny this link?

Is the Freudian Oedipus complex (especially in terms of its Lacanian interpretive appropriation) not the exact opposite of the reduction of the multitude of social intensities onto the mother-father-and-me matrix: the matrix of the explosive opening up of the subject onto the social space? Undergoing "symbolic castration" is a way for the subject to be thrown out of the family network, propelled into a wider social networkЧOedipus, the operator of deterritorialization. However, what about the fact that, nonetheless, Oedipus "focuses" the initial "polymorphous perversity" of drives onto the mother-father-and-me coordinates? More precisely, is "symbolic castration" not also the name for a process by means of which the child-subject enters the order of sense proper, of the ABSTRACTION of sense, gaining the capacity to abstract a quality from its embeddedness in a bodily Whole, to conceive of it as a becoming no longer attributed to a certain substanceЧas Deleuze would have put it, "red" no longer stands for the predicate of the red thing but for the pure flow of becoming-red? So, far from tying us down to our bodily reality, "symbolic castration" sustains our very ability to "transcend" this realнity and enter the space of immaterial Becoming. Does the autonomous smile that survives on its own when the cat's body disappears in Alice in Wonderland also not stand for an organ "castrated," cut off from the body? What if, then, phallus itself, as the signifier of castration, stands for such an organ without a body?

Is this not a further argument for the claim that Deleuze's quasi cause is his name for the Lacanian "phallic signifier"? Recall how, according to Deleuze, the quasi cause "extracts singularities from the present, and from individuals and persons which occupy this present,"[17] and, in the same movement, provides them with their relative autonomy with regard to the intensive processes as their real causes, endowing these impassive and sterile effects with their morphogenetic powerЧis this double movement not exactly that of "symbolic castration" (whose signifier is phallus)?

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First, the impassive-sterile Event is cut off, extracted, from its virile, corporeal, causal base (if "castrations" means anything at all, it means this). Then, this flow of Sense-Event is constituted as an autonomous field of its own, the autonomy of the incorporeal symbolic order with regard to its corporeal embodiments. "Symbolic castration," as the elementary operation of the quasi cause, is thus a profoundly materialist concept, since it answers the basic need of any materialist analysis: "If we are to get rid of essentialist and typological thought we need some process through which virtual multiplicities are derived from the actual world and some process through which the results of this derivation maybe given enough coherence and autonomy."[18]

The problem, of course, is the following one: the minimal actualization is here conceived as the actualization of the virtual, after its extraction from the preceding actual. Is, then, every actual the result of the actualization of the preceding virtual (so that the same goes for the actual out of which the actualized virtual was extracted), or is there an actual that precedes the virtual, since every virtual has to be extracted from some actual? Perhaps the way out of this predicamentЧis the virtual extracted from the actual as its impassive-sterile effect or is it the productive process that generates the actual?Чis the ultimate, absolute identity of the two operations, an identity hinted at by Deleuze himself when he described the operation of the "pseudo cause" as that of visualization (extraction of the virtual) and, simultaneously, minimal actualization (the pseudo cause confers on the virtual a minimum of ontological conнsistency). What if, as we know from Schelling, what makes from the field of potentialities an actual reality is not the addition of some raw realнity (of matter) but, rather, the addition of pure ideality (of logos)⁷. Kant himself was already aware of this paradox: the confused field of impresнsions turns into reality when supplemented by the transcendental Idea. What this fundamental lesson of transcendental idealism means is that virtualization and actualization are two sides of the same coin: actuality constitutes itself when a VIRTUAL (symbolic) supplement is added to the pre-ontological real. In other words, the very extraction of the virtual from the real ("symbolic castration") constitutes realityЧactual reality is the real filtered through the virtual.

The function of the quasi cause is therefore inherently contradictory. Its task is, at one and the same time, to perform a push toward actualнization (endowing multiplicities with a minimum of actuality) and to counter actualization by way of extracting virtual events from the corporeal processes that are their causes. One should conceive of these two aspects as identical.

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The properly Hegelian paradox at work here is that the only way for a virtual state to actualize itself is to be supplemented by another virtual feature. (Again, recall Kant: how is a confused multiplicity of subjective sensations transformed into "objective" reality? It happens when the subjective function of transcendental synthesis is added to this multiplicity.) This is the "phallic" dimension at its most elementary: the excess of the virtual that sustains actualization. And, this reference to the phallic signifier also enables us to answer one of the standard reproaches to the Lacanian notions of phallus and castration: the idea that they inнvolve a kind of ahistorical short circuit, that is to say, the complaint that they directly link the limitation serving as a condition of human existence as such to a particular threat (that of castration) that relies on a specific patriarchal gender constellation. The next move is, then, usually the one of trying to get rid of the notion of castrationЧthis "ridiculous" Freudian claimЧby way of claiming that the threat of castration is, at its best, just a local expression of the global limitation of the human condition, which is that of human finitude, experienced in a whole series of constraints (the existence of other people who limit our freedom, our mortality, and, also, the necessity to "choose one's sex"). Such a move from castration to an anxiety grounded in the very finitude of the human condition is, of course, the standard existential-philosophical move of "saving" Freud by way of getting rid of the embarrassing topic of castration and penis envy ("Who can take this seriously today?"). Psychoanalysis is thus reнdeemed, magically transformed into a respectable academic discipline that deals with how suffering human subjects cope with the anxieties of finitude. The (in)famous advice given to Freud by Jung when their boat approached the coast of the United States in 1912 (that Freud should leave out or at least limit the accent on sexuality to render psychoanalysis more acceptable to the American medical establishment) is resuscitated here. Why is it not sufficient to emphasize how "castration" is just a particular instance of the general limitation of the human condition? Or, to put it in a slightly different way, how should one insist on the link between the universal symbolic structure and the particular corporeal economy? The old reproach against Lacan is that he conflates two levels, the allegedly neutral-universal-formal symbolic structure and the particular-gendered-bodily references; say, he emphasizes that the phallus is not the penis as an organ but as a signifier, even a "pure" signifierЧso, why then call this "pure" signifier "phallus"? As it was clear to Deleuze (and not only to Lacan), the notion of castration answers a very specific question: how does the universal symbolic process detach itself from its corporeal roots? How does it emerge in its relative autonomy? "Castration" designates the violent bodily cut that enables us to enter the domain of the incorporeal.

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And, the same goes for the topic of fmitude: "castration" is not simply one of the local cases of the experience of finitudeЧthis concept tries to answer a more fundamental "arche-transcendental" question, namely, how do we, humans, experience ourselves as marked by finitude in the first place? This fact is not self-evident: Heidegger was right to emphasize that only humans exist in the mode of "being-towards-death." Of course, animals are also somehow "aware" of their limitation, of their limited power, and so forthЧthe hare does try to escape the fox. And yet, this is not the same as human finitude, which emerges against the backнground of the small child's narcissistic attitude of illusory omnipotence (of course, we do indeed say that, in order to become mature, we have to accept our limitations). What lurks behind this narcissistic attitude is, however, the Freudian death drive, a kind of "undead" stubbornness denounced already by Kant as a violent excess absent in animals, which is why, for Kant, only humans need education through discipline. The symbolic Law does not tame and regulate nature but, precisely, applies itself to an unnatural excess. Or, to approach the same complex from another direction: at its most radical, the helplessness of the small child about which Freud speaks is not physical helplessness, the inability to provide for one's needs, but a helplessness in the face of the enigma of the Other's desire, the helpless fascination with the excess of the Other's enjoyment, and the ensuing inability to account for it in the available terms of meaning.

When Roman Jakobson wrote on phonemes and the bodily grounding of language, he focused on the crucial gap between embodied gestures and the free-floating symbolic network of phonemesЧthis gap is what Lacan calls "castration." Jakobson's crucial point is that it is only the SIGNIFIER, not meaning, that can do this job of deterritorialization: meaning tends to revert to our concrete life-world embeddedness (the premodern antropomorphic mirroring of interior and exterior is the atнtitude of meaning par excellence.) So, the phallus, far from signalling the rootedness of the symbolic in our bodily experience (its territorializa-tion), is the "pure signifier" and, as such, the very agent of deterritorialization. Here, Jakobson introduces the key dialectical notion of secondary grounding in bodily experience: yes, our language shows overall traces of this embodiment (the word "locomotive" resembles the profile of an old steam locomotive; the word "front" is formed in the front of our oral cavity, and the word "back" in the back of itЧand so on and so forth). However, all of these are reterritorializations against the background of the fundamental cut that is the condition of meaning.[19] This is why the anthropomorphic model of mirroring between language and the human

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аbody, the reference to the body as a fundamental frame of reference for our understanding, is to be abandonedЧlanguage is "inhuman." (The аprocess thus has three phases: (1) primordial territorialization as the "assemblage of bodies"Чan organism marks its suroundings, its exchanges with it, in a texture of affective inscriptions, tatoos, and so forth;

(2)   deterritorializationЧpassage to the immaterial, virtual production of senseЧmarks are freed from their origins (enunciator, reference);

(3)   reterritorializationЧwhen language turns into a medium of communication, pinned down to its subject of enunciation whose thoughts it expresses, to the reality it designates.)