philoSOPHIA

Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism is a timely, ambitious, and wonderfully diverse collection of essays that aims to forge a new feminist methodology. Described as a “delirium” with the potential to “unleash new ideas, new desires, and new imaginings” (Sholtz and Carr, 1), the editors adopt Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis as the basis for this methodology. They argue that this juxtaposition of feminist theory and schizoanalysis might synthesize and advance research on notions like becoming-woman, rhizomatics, deterritorialization, assemblage, immanence, and material vitalism (2) that have propelled feminist work on Deleuze and Guattari over the last several decades. Moreover, in the volume’s critical reevaluation of schizoanalysis, it strives to reimagine “the philosophical, ethical, aesthetic, and political” (1) by incorporating the evolution of feminist thought since Deleuze and Guattari’s time. The volume is, indeed, important reading for feminist continental philosophers in search of fruitful applications of Deleuzo-Guattarian thought to a wide, intersectional diversity of feminist theory.

Citing Buchanan and Colebrook’s Deleuze and Feminist Theory (2000) as the origin of a productive and less skeptical feminist engagement with their work, the volume aims to advance a new generation of feminist Deleuzo-Guattarian thought that departs from a radically heterogeneous, schizoanalytic foundation [End Page 192] asking, “what can philosophical concepts do?” (2). The editors also mention the recent uptake of schizoanalysis as a methodology by reference to the Schizoanalytic Applications series in which the volume is published. There, its application “to contemporary issues and uses in critically oriented and socially engaged philosophical approaches” (4) is explored in a variety of otherwise targeted collections. They suggest that the relevance of schizoanalytic methodology “to feminist theory can be similarly situated in providing a new lens for critical and social engagement,” which the volume explores under the guise of discovering what this “new encounter” between feminism and schizoanalysis “might yield” (4). Thus, the collection is a dual-pronged, dynamic investigation, where one trajectory investigates the potentials for forging a feminist schizoanalytic framework and the other considers the ways that feminism might nuance or reshape the contours of schizoanalysis that were established across Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative works (1).

Furthermore, the editors cite the publication of Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies (2013) as additional inspiration. And it is, indeed, in part from Guattari’s visionary work that the joint project with Deleuze—including the articulations of schizoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus, Kafka, and A Thousand Plateaus— came into being (see: Guattari 2006). As Stephane Nadaud explains, their collaboration was designed to “counter . . . despotic, solitary enunciation—with their own collective one,” which transcends the Cartesian “unity of our ego—the famous I that thinks, and therefore . . . the cogito” (Guattari 2006, 19). It is, thus, curious that the volume’s title omits Guattari’s name (though other books in the series include it) and that contributors make scarce reference to his individual work. For, it is the very process of their collaboration, which entails their essential duality and the schizoanalytic becoming-imperceptible of their respective individualities, that becomes an archetype for schizoanalytic praxis.

The aforementioned delirium, which is at the heart of schizoanalysis, originates from the split or break implied by the “schizo,” meaning that schizoanalysis seeks to locate then mobilize these breaks toward the creation of delirious, impersonal subjectivities. Merging desire and delirium, which he considers “in a deep sense” indistinguishable, Deleuze emphasizes that “desire-delirium is by its nature a libidinal investment of an entire historical milieu, of an entire social environment” (2004, 275). The schizoanalysis process, according to the editors, thus aspires to be a liberatory short-circuit of the rigidly enclosed “Oedipal constraints on the unconscious,” which, in turn, decouples “the unconscious libidinal investment[s] . . . from the preconscious investments of class and interest” (Shultz and Carr, 4). This echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s well-known invocation: “Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction— a whole scouring of the unconscious, a...