Vibrating the Full-Void

Abstract

This chapter invites the reader into a creative questioning of the limits of Freudian and Lacanian theories when it comes to the clinic of anxiety. Thinking with Spinoza and Rosi Braidotti, as well as the artist Lygia Clark, we open space to the possibilities of anxiety as an affect.

Departing from Freud and Lacan’s theories of anxiety—which see anxiety as an ‘affect’ and as ‘an encounter with the Real’—we will now explore such interruption or rupture of the Symbolic net and the Imaginary frame that characterises anxiety via the concept of a ‘vibrational body’. Here I discuss, extrapolate and construct bridges through the dilemma between the abyss-within and possible horizons-beyond the subject as accounts of the Real.

How could we start thinking—and writing—about affect, about the Real, and about anxiety if what we are trying to reach is precisely the ‘limits of language’? To anchor our thinking and to challenge the conceptualisation of the body in the context of anxiety I will discuss the notions of a ‘vibrating body’, the ‘Plane’ and the ‘full-void’ in the art work of Lygia Clark, which we started thinking about in the first chapter of this book. It is possible to make a parallel between Clark’s ‘abandonment of art’ and such limits of language that are alive in the experience of anxiety as we will see in what follows. Clark’s ‘vibrational body’, as observed by the Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik (1989, 2000), not only pushes the definition of the status of the ‘body’ and affect in psychoanalysis as it offers a scope for an ontological debate over the status of the subject in and out of language. What Clark allows me to do is to travel beyond what she calls the ‘Plane’ of the Other, putting not only Oedipal sexual difference in check but also the barriers between psychoanalysis and an ethics of multiplicity instead of Lacan’s ethics centred on the dialects of Desire—a move into the many beyond the two of the One, since this world is not one either, but many worlds at the same time.

In the next pages, Clark’s work opens a discussion about affect, the Real, Oedipus and the limits of language; themes approached via an engagement with the interrogation: “What can a body do?” This puzzling question posited by Spinoza in the seventeenth century and picked up by Deleuze and Guattari from late 1960s is, we could easily agree, one that also moors the psychoanalytic clinic. From ‘conversion hysteria’ in Freud’s couch to contemporary psychosomatic disease and at times ‘unexplained’ chronic illness, the body’s capacity to produce symptoms, to react and to ‘speak’ appears as an important riddle of any analytical trajectory—and, as seen, in anxiety. The excessive, chaotic, unbound Real that is, across much of Freud and Lacan’s work in need of ‘castration’, here will find ways into the sinthôme through a collectivising assemblage. Clark’s vibrations ‘beyond the Plane’ allude to the realm of creativity and collectivity of affect that neither Freud nor Lacan articulate in their work of anxiety—but only hinted at in their ‘vibrational moments’.

Following Guattari (2000), I agree that psychoanalysis needs an ethico-aesthetic reinvention; one that will move away from ‘cultivating it’ and its theories like an ‘ornamental garden’:

In short, the mythic and phantasmatic lure of psychoanalysis must be resisted, it must be played with, rather than cultivated and tended like an ornamental garden! [my emphasis] Unfortunately, the psychoanalysts of today, more so than their predecessors, take refuge behind what one might call a ‘structuralization’ of unconscious complexes, which leads to dry theorisation and to insufferable dogmatism; also, their practice ends up impoverishing their treatments and produces a stereotyping which renders them insensible to the singular otherness [alterité] of their patients. (Guattari, 2000, p. 39)

Guattari is referring to Lacanians and the structuralist foundations of Lacan’s theories of the unconscious that dominated his teaching specially during the 1960s. The trouble with this kind of psychoanalysis is, to Guattari, that it tries to encompass everything—all possibilities, all symptoms, all discourses—within its structural mapping (where the Other is the locus of all signifiers), making little space for the rise of and relationships among singular others. As such, working with this idea of vibration takes us to the realm of ‘chaos’, a threshold of creativity and immanence that posits an ontological and epistemological challenge to contemporary clinical practices. My intention is to discuss the limits and problems of a conceptualisation of the body and the Real through the dichotomy inherent in the Freudian and Lacanian ‘drive’—a founding psychoanalytic concept that presupposes a division between language and flesh; between the realms of a castrating Symbolic and a chaotic body. Agreeing with Braidotti (2006), I see one central problem with the psychoanalytic theory of the drive in Lacan as that it relies on a Hegel-inherited negativity of desire and a dialectics of ‘sexual difference’, structuring subjectivity into a nuclear and out-dated family drama.

In what follows, we will dive deeper into the world of chaos by taking not just Guattari and Deleuze as companions, but also Spinoza, whose Ethics can illuminate the vibrating possibilities of anxiety. Art practice, here, will be crucial to our push beyond critique and towards creativity in the field of psy-care, unfolding mainstream theories through vibration.

A Horizon-beyond the Plane of Oedipus

One of the central critiques to the project of psychoanalysis conferred by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their seminal Capitalism and Schizophrenia two-volume work, from 1972 and 1980 respectively, concerns the reactionary politics of the psychoanalytic clinic, from its institutional arrangements to the politics of its assumed subject. Perhaps, we could argue, whilst not a direct feminist intervention on the psychoanalytic model and its ties with a patriarchal arrangement of power in social bond and psychic life, Anti-Oedipus, does, however, manage to challenge very clearly one problem relevant to what we are looking into: the question of ‘excess’ in light of ‘castration’. Excess, in this case, both as what exceeds meaning and as what accumulates in the form of a ‘libidinal energy’ and the mechanism of its destinies according to Freud, post-Freudians and Lacan. What is described as a ‘molar’ and ‘neurotic’ tree-like unconscious is contrasted, famously, with a ‘molecular’, ‘rhizomatic’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 1987) and thus multiple version not bound to a Symbolic cut guaranteed by what Lacan calls the ‘Father function’ of Oedipus’ castrating moral necessity.

The Freudian Oedipal resolution was absorbed into Lacanian structuralism.¹ So, instead of its dissolution resulting in the Super-Ego, Ego and Id, we will then speak of language and the effects of the signifier on the mythical pre-Symbolic subject (the one represented by the delta in the bottom right of the Lacanian Graph of Desire). The entrance into the Symbolic, thus, has a structuring effect akin to an invitation into neurosis. Upon failure to joining ‘civilisation and its discontents’ we find psychosis.² Yet, a philosophical enquiring of the psychoanalytic subject here leads me to the following question: is there anything beyond psychosis outside this patriarchal conception of the possibilities for the subject? What are the grounds for rupture in the clinic? Is everything that aligns to a Real outside of the scope of the Other necessarily on the side of psychosis? The close readings of Freud and Lacan suggest that anxiety remains at an impasse in the clinic: it points to a rupture, but the rupture was repeatedly circumscribed within an Oedipal alienating frame, although not always limited to it (the vibrational moments in Freud and Lacan’s theories of anxiety attesting as much). Lygia Clark’s push beyond the Plane, as I will argue in what follows, inspires an ethics of multiplicity that works itself against the dominance of the Oedipal model of the unconscious.

What I propose in what follows is that there is plenty there beyond psychosis, escaping language, escaping Oedipal binaries and escaping castration—and through the experience of the affect of anxiety we are in touch with this excess that is both radical and expanding as well as paralysing and excruciating. This ‘surplus’ in anxiety marks the rhythm of what Deleuze and Guattari named as ‘becomings’ (devenir). Anxiety is what persists, insists and opens up to a possibility in subjective experience directly emerged from the vibrational body facing the limits of language. To arrive at this understanding we must, however, salvage this ‘vibrating body’ from the enthralment of the Other, Oedipus and the Symbolic, thus, of patriarchy and its ideological allies. Such endeavour consists in rescuing Spinoza’s affective ‘surplus’—noticeably an important influence on Deleuzian and Guattarian thought—in Freud’s very early and very late writings on anxiety, and Lacan’s later teachings and what they may mean to a theory of anxiety. This reading also throws some light on Lacan’s very complicated late teachings and assigns, therefore, a political potency to the ubiquitous and necessary experience of anxiety. An experience central not only to the very development of psychoanalysis as well as to twentieth century psychiatric diagnosis and the psycho-political arrangement of contemporary late-capitalism.

The Oedipal foundations of sexual difference is a matter that has historically permeated the debates between an ‘essentialist’ current in feminist thought, specially of 1970s second wave feminism and the queer interventions of the 1990s. Antoinette Fouque, a member of the French Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF), for example, a follower of Lacan and Irigaray and companion of Serge Leclaire and Monique Wittig, proposes as part of the group Psychanalyse et Politique a return to sexual difference from the perspective of women. Fouque (1995), as found in the collection Il y a deux sexes: essais de féminologie. 1989–1995, believed in the ‘feminine libido’, which was not reliant on the phallic dominance of Freudian and Lacanian theory, which she understood to only account for the sex of the ‘one’—men. This feminine libido was incarnated in the experience of symbolic gestation, which she saw as offering an ethical position of subjective production, alliance and alterity against the patriarchal ‘brotherhood’ of post-1968 France.³ This symbolic function of the mother was her way into a psychoanalysis of the ‘two’ sexes, rather than the ‘one’ of its Oedipal matrix. Fouque, as well as Irigaray, was an important figure of inspiration for the development of a branch of Italian feminism that is concerned with sexual difference—with thinkers such as Luisa Muraro, Lia Cigarini and Lea Melandri.⁴

In Italy, however, the feminist movements, which were, in the 1970s, close to Marxist and psychoanalytic ideas, take ‘difference’ away from only the difference between two sexes (male and female), anchoring it as a difference within oneself (Zamboni, 2019). Difference, in this tradition of feminist psychoanalytic thought, is what guarantees a critique of the depoliticising absorption into the status quo, therefore into patriarchy, as a ‘piece’ of its puzzle without real emancipation.⁵ A plural, multiple version of sexual difference, which takes it away from the Oedipal inscription and its consequential dialectic framing upon a ‘phallogocentric’ referential, and into the realm of a ‘nomadic subjectivity’ is Braidotti’s contribution to the field, since the early 1990s. She holds on to sexual difference as a significant tool for political analysis, revisiting the topic in light of contemporary political, ecological, scientific and social debates, whilst maintaining a dialogue with contemporary feminists that do not consider sexual difference as a conceptual problem for feminism at all (such as ‘post-Deleuzian’ feminists Moira Gatens & Genevieve Lloyd, 1999; or Claire Colebrook, 2000). Whilst this book is not focused on resolving the vast discussion of sexual difference within feminist theory, nor on offering a detailed genealogy of this debate, it is important to mention how the reduction of difference into a binary is still characteristic of contemporary Lacanian works. Without dismissing the reality of patriarchy, oppression and exploitation in concrete but also in its psychological and unconscious traumatic consequences, an understanding of difference that moves beyond the Plane of Oedipus also allows us to think of the Real and its irruptions in anxiety as unbound by the One of the Other and pertaining to the sphere of affect that is creative, collective and in movement (rather than a rupture limited to the side of psychosis).

Alenka Zupančič (2017), an important contemporary feminist scholar, defends sexual difference as an equation of logics: we can only have difference and the failure of encounter, the gap in subjectivity, if we set out a system of two. Zupančič is not, however, being simplistic, essentialist or anti-feminist with this remark about her defence of sexual difference as a concept; quite the opposite, her argument is that only within such a logic of two (which does not have to do with gender, or ‘real’ ‘man’ or ‘woman’, but with subjective positions), can we account for a power relation of inequality and oppression. This is, without a doubt, a powerful and important point. The ‘One’ has oppressed the ‘Not-one’, this ‘Not-all’ that does not (think to) have the phallus; and the Imaginary-Symbolic repertoire of modern humanism foreclosed the Real and any experience as part of a ‘common’ (Federici, 2019, 2020). The calculation of unequal status, for Zupančič (2017), needs this artifice of difference. Following Copjec, she argues that ‘sexual difference’, in Lacan, is a logic of two that allows us to see the power relation and the inconsistency that crosses the subject (a difference not between ‘man’ and ‘woman’, but a difference within ‘oneself’). It is her understanding that gender theory took this difference to the level of the surface, rather than depth, calling for a multiplicity that does not account for such ‘difference’, or the ‘gap’ that produces the relation between the two.⁶ Her argument, as she explains:

goes—both methodologically and ideologically—against the grain of the “times we live in,” refusing to abandon the construction site in favour of more polished “conceptual products,” “services,” or “singular experiences.” [The pages that follow] grew out of a double conviction: first, that in psychoanalysis sex is above all a concept that formulates a persisting contradiction of reality. And, second, that this contradiction cannot be circumscribed or reduced to a secondary level (as a contradiction between already well-established entities/beings), but is—as a contradiction—involved in the very structuring of these entities, in their very being. In this precise sense, sex is of ontological relevance: not as an ultimate reality, but as an inherent twist, or stumbling block, of reality. (Zupančič, 2017, p. 3)

‘Sex’, according to this argument, guarantees this ‘too-muchness’ of the abyss-within, an understanding that needs to be salvaged from the full trust in the signifier that tries to encapsulate identity in new names and definitions for such inconsistency. This view, whilst radical in its own manner, seems to be still thinking of psychoanalysis as ‘an ornamental garden’ (Guattari, 2000) that needs to be well kept rather than transformed with time. This view—sexual difference or barbarism/neoliberalism (or worse, in Millot and Morel: sexual difference or psychosis/madness)—can easily turn ideological and sour.

Such a view echoes Žižek’s (2004) criticism of post-Deleuzian work, which he holds as not accounting for any antagonism inherent to subjectivity, and fitting in very nicely with neoliberal accumulation and eternity of production.⁷ He slips, however, when asserting that the proliferation of gender and sexual identities in the twenty-first century (including within it all expressions of affirmation of non-conforming identities, such as trans) are all ideological escapes of such antagonism. Žižek writes, in a very polemical essay for The Philosophical Salon, in 2016, that “difference ‘in itself’ is thus not symbolic-differential, but real-impossible—something that eludes and resists the symbolic grasp” (Žižek, 2016).⁸ Whilst this affirmation is fine and ‘sound’ in terms of its faithfulness to Lacanian concepts, it seems to be a view that ‘tends to the ornamental garden’ of psychoanalysis, pruning its concepts for theoretical fruits that look more perfect—a move that sounds, to me at least, exactly like the blind-faith in the signifier that this rather conservative approach tries to antagonise. The ‘phallus’, in this approach, is maintained as essential, making of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ sexuation a conceptual binary that follows unquestioned. The fact that a ‘binary’ is the only guarantor of any ethical probity (with ‘lack’ in its centre) is not only problematic on the surface (implying that calling masculine and feminine something else, something ‘neutral’, A or B, would resolve it); rather, it is more complicated in depth.⁹ This binary that sustains lack is problematic in its very principle, following the dynamics of ‘difference and separation’ that Denise Ferreira da Silva (2016) connects so astutely with the onto-epistemological pillars of colonialism, patriarchy and human exceptionalism. In defence of a collective entanglement, she writes:

Without separability, knowing and thinking can no longer be reduced to determinacy in the Cartesian distinction of mind/body (in which the latter has the power of determination) or the Kantian formal reduction of knowing to a kind of efficient causality. Without separability, sequentiality (Hegel’s ontoepistemological pillar) can no longer account for the many ways in which humans exist in the world, because self-determination has a very limited region (spacetime) for its operation. When nonlocality guides our imaging of the universe, difference is not a manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement. (Ferreira da Silva, 2016, p. 65)

Fittingly, when contemporary philosophers and psychoanalysts call for a move beyond the colonial unconscious—as Braidotti, but also Preciado (2020) and Rolnik (2015, 2019) do—multiplicity, immanence and becoming-with are the grounds for conceiving an idea of subjectivity and the unconscious based on an ecosophy (Guattari, 2000). By ecosophy, following Guattari’s method in The Three Ecologies (2000), I mean a social, ecological and psychic entanglement of the subject, and an onto-ethical framework that departs from such entanglement, rather than the post-Kantian distance from the world. Going back to Lygia Clark, the phantasmatics of the body, the ‘full-void’ and their vibrations in collective poieses are elaborations that speak closely to ‘difference’ without ‘separability’ and, rather, differences within multiplicities.

Moving beyond the binary of sexual difference—taking seriously the mechanisms of production and reproduction that engender this still limited Oedipal and phallic arrangement, namely a universalist modern humanism anchored in dominance and extraction—is a task that resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s work since Anti-Oedipus.¹⁰ The critique of such unitarian and universal points of referencing that are assumed as structuring is at the core of Guattari’s clinical, theoretical and political project, since “Guattari contests the unitary, homogeneous and authoritarian model of organisation, and privileges instead a type of system with multiple, a-centred connections” (Sauvagnargues, 2016, p. 141). The mechanism and the machine are the conceptual resources mobilised by Deleuze and Guattari to trace the possibilities of becoming, taking, as it is well known, psychoanalysis for a radical and yet conservative praxis, rescuing it from Oedipus (or the structure of production and reproduction of the One in the colonial and patriarchal capitalist delirium).

In The Machinic Unconscious, from 1979, Guattari “proposes a ‘machinic’ unconscious and not a structural one, an unconscious populated to be sure with images and words, but also with the mechanisms of reproductions of these images and words (Guattari, 1995b). This unconscious is thus not representative or expressive, but productive” (Sauvagnargues, 2016, p. 153). There is something here I hold on to in terms of the ethical and feminist potency of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which, in a certain way, is characterised by a movement of attempting to trace the mechanisms of becoming, situated, however, in its own contextual blindness. Juliet Mitchel, in her introduction to the volume on Feminine Sexuality co-authored with Jaqueline Rose in 1982, writes very succinctly and with clarity about the somewhat ‘post-humanist’ potency in psychoanalysis, for it pulls back the curtain of the mirage of the subject:

The humanistic conception of mankind assumes that the subject exists from the beginning. At least by implication ego psychologists, object-relations theorists and Kleinians base themselves on the same premise. For this reason, Lacan considers that in the last analysis, they are more ideologues than theorists of psychoanalysis. In the Freud that Lacan uses, neither the unconscious nor sexuality can in any degree be pre-given facts, they are constructions, that is, they are objects with histories and the human subject itself is only formed within these histories…This immediately establishes the framework within which the whole question of female sexuality can be understood. As Freud puts it: `In conformity with its peculiar nature, psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is—that would be a task it could scarcely perform—but sets about enquiring how she comes into being.’ (Mitchell, 1982, p. 4)

In this sense, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis set out to elucidate the mechanisms of the machine that is the unconscious, with limits, of course, but still stirring a revolution within hegemonic onto-epistemic ideals of their time. The subject, therefore, is not ‘pre-given’, but a coming into being, or, rather, a ‘coming into becoming’. Freud and Lacan, at the very least, lift the veil of the alienation that is neurosis or the entrance into the Symbolic and succumbing to the Law. Preciado, in closing remarks of his published speech addressed to the École de la cause Freudienne de Paris from November 2019, calls for a revolutionary mutation of psychoanalysis, one that addresses and moves beyond its patriarchal and colonial presuppositions.¹¹ For Preciado, the answers to our situated and contemporary ecological, social, political as well as epistemological, scientific and ontological matters are not to be found in reading and re-reading Freud and Lacan (or tending to the ornamental garden), rather, being faithful to the revolution in thought inaugurated by Freud means to ‘decolonise the unconscious’ (Preciado, 2020).¹²

As Braidotti (2006) acknowledges in Transpositions, but also as any attentive reader of Deleuze and Guattari can grasp, Spinoza’s monism and theory of affects, that inspired them greatly, allows a logic in which ‘sexual difference’ does not need to be anchoring of subjectivity as such. We don’t need to think through Oedipal sexual difference and the mirage of a One that is All (following the Freudian myth in Totem and Taboo), nor of the Not-All as its binary opposition, always caught in the Master’s eyes; rather, it is a matter of understanding all subjective arrangements as necessarily not-all, since ‘all’ does not exist except in an ideological onto-epistemic mirage.¹³ This view contradicts that of Alenka Zupančič (2017, 2019), for example, as mentioned previously, that a system of two, regulated by the Phallic Law, is necessary in order to account for dominance, and therefore for patriarchal violence to be broader, an argument carved out of mathematical logics, which nonetheless turns a blind eye to its own violent reproductions.

The Vibrational Body and Anxiety, an Encounter Beyond the Plane

Whilst Deleuze and Guattari were sharp critics of psychoanalysis, Guattari’s later works curiously turned to Freud’s early works and the notion of libido beyond the constraints of an Oedipalised subject—which are systematised in this early theory of anxiety. In June 1983, Guattari was part of a colloquium in Cerisy, France, about the work of the physical chemist Ilya Prigogine where he presented a paper entitled ‘Semiotic Energetics’. This paper later composed his book Schizoanalytic Cartographies, from 1989, and marks what Watson (2009) points at being his ‘return to Freud’ via a rather cryptic formulation of energetics (Guattari, 1989). Central to his argument is the understanding that Freud’s early texts gave more emphasis to the ‘energetic’ factor of an essential ‘libidinal energy’ that was side-lined in his second topography. In this sense, what Freud’s project envisaged, writes Guattari, was “to establish passageways between sexual libido and effects of meaning […] [in] his initial hypothesis of an energy whose effects were simultaneously physical and psychic” (Guattari & Rolnik, 2007, p. 394). However, such energy metaphors (which Guattari found in the pre-psychoanalytic texts and letters to Fliess) were lost in the second model of the psyche, resulting in what Guattari diagnosed as “the psychoanalytic movement never stop[ping] submitting the concept of libidinal energy to a wide variety of treatments in order to try to dominate the theoretical scandal of which it is the vehicle” (Guattari & Rolnik, 2007, p. 394). Freud, post-Freudians and also Lacanian structuralism thus committed to “nothing more nor less than its [libidinal energy’s] virtually total liquidation in the form of a chain of signifiers” (Guattari & Rolnik, 2007, p. 394). The Symbolic order, charged with social, subjective and epistemological constructions of the colonial patriarchal arrangement, gives consistency to a clinic that is founded upon a surplus—the unconscious—yet articulated through the very motor that subsumes the rupture, or the potency of the flux of becomings of this very excess.

The principles of their schizoanalysis and a conceptualisation of desire as production broke away from the psychoanalytic focus on the ‘individual’, favouring a “collective economy, collective assemblages of desire and of subjectivity that can be individualised in some circumstances or some social contexts” (Guattari & Rolnik, 2007, p. 343). This intrinsically political view of desire, the unconscious and subjectivity, therefore was fruitful to feminist thinkers. Feminist scholars have dug into the work of Deleuze and Guattari and their schizoanalytic model to challenge the psychoanalytic understanding that language, or the Symbolic, was structuring. Bracha Ettinger, for instance, presents an affirmative, or generative, matrix for subjective variation in her ‘metramorphosis’ (Ettinger, 2006) alive in her painting and clinic. Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti, on the other hand, flesh out the philosophical underpinnings to an affirmative understanding of desire in debates on the ontological, ethical and political concepts that permeate subjectivity, materiality, ‘scientific’ biological discourses and technology (Grosz, 2008, 2017; Braidotti, 2017). What I propose here, as a small gesture into this debate, however, is to go back to Spinoza, the Dutch seventeenth century philosopher who influenced Deleuze and, later Guattari, greatly in their understanding of the body and affect. What I intend is to map the possibilities that Spinoza’s monism offers to Lygia Clark’s full-void, phantasmatic, ‘vibrating body’. More specifically, we will be looking for a possible transindividual connection in his Ethics, and a political or collective linkage of the understanding of affects, symptoms and subjective formation that is present in Spinoza’s ontology as a ground to think, with Lygia Clark, of what is the horizon-beyond the Plane.

A zigzag of subject, affect and conditions of subjectivity framed by ideology in the social bond is present my psychosocial or critical reading of psychoanalysis. According to such approach, a ‘subjective truth’ occurs both in the dynamic of symptom formation and the singular function of symptoms. This is Lacan’s clear contribution to clinical work: situating the subject and symptoms, by identifying their function within a particular cartography he called the Symbolic. Yet, beyond a structural focus on meaning and deciphering of the symptom, Freud’s very early ‘energetic’ grounds for a bodily source of anxiety see anxiety as an affect of surplus: it emerges when something in the material experience of the body or in the realm of ‘ideas’ limits the flux of the libidinal energy that characterises the life of the body (in a Bergsonian sense of a ‘life’ being a tendency that “‘unfolds’ that which is folded in matter” (Grosz, 2007, p. 295)).

Spinoza’s conception of nature, human existence and the mind are detailed in his Ethics, where a view of an infinite substance (which he calls God) that is constantly modified and has different attributes opens a way for the debate on possibility and flux of said substance and the differences in such attributes. In Part I, Proposition V, Spinoza states that “there cannot exist in the universe two or more substances having the same nature or attribute”. In this sense, nature is understood for its differential values, not of different substances as such (as put in a Note to Proposition X, Part I “there is but one substance in the universe, and that it is absolutely infinite”) but of its different modes. Whilst God is an infinity of possibility, a body is a ‘finite mode’ of expression of this substance, Part II, Def. I. (Curley, 1994). This focus on ‘differential values’ and, thus, a disequilibrium as a structural necessity is what allows Spinoza to shed light on this complicated relation between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ (Kordela, 2007). His monism did not simply clear the slate of any difference; rather, it speaks of ‘thoughts’ and ‘bodies’ as different in attributes and nature, thus, in ‘value’. A surplus in this differential arrangement is evident in the following passage from Part I, Definition II “A thing is called ‘finite after its kind’\ when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature; for instance, a body is called finite because we always conceive another greater body. So, also, a thought is limited by another thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body”. In this sense something of the existence of the body cannot be grasped by thoughts in the same way that thoughts do not find total representation in the body. This very simple conceptual interpretation of a ‘surplus’ when it comes to the subject as a ‘being’ of concomitant dissonant values speaks to the Freudian earlier conception of anxiety as an excess that finds no grounds in either the ‘body’ or the ‘mind’.

This conception of surplus here also brings another layer of complication to that notion of ‘excess’ immanent to language, or to the Symbolic in Lacan’s early works. Lacanian scholars, and noticeably Žižek (1992), stress how psychoanalysis should not take the patient’s complaint at face value, following Freud, a fair and radical point, especially in regards to therapeutic practices that reject the unconscious and serve well the hegemonic ideology of the contemporary late-capitalism. Instead, psychoanalysis would then look for the ‘excess’ of meaning in what the patient comes to say, or the “surplus of what is effectively said, not the intended message, but the message in its true, inverted form” (Kordela, 2007, p. 7). This version of the Real, in Lacan’s terms, aside from being contested by contemporary literature on his later teachings (Miller, 2003; Soler, 2014; Schuster, 2016), still ascribes psychoanalysis to a mode of interpretation of symptoms that can be radical as a “new mode of semiotization of subjectivity” inaugurated by Freud’s work with patients diagnosed as hysterics, but still needs further breaks “with the universes of reference” (Guattari & Rolnik, 2007) it reproduces. Going beyond ‘interpretation’ (as Clark did in Structuring of the Self) means, for Guattari, going beyond the ‘power’ of an analyst and also of ‘words’ within their universal referential (Other), meant to embark on ‘analytic revolutions’ that break away with predetermined or pre-inscribed “stratified modes of subjectivation” not solely bound to the clinical encounter. He writes of this radical commitment with the surplus as being part of “modes of asignifying rupture, which appeared simultaneously in literature, Surrealism, painting, and so on” (Guattari & Rolnik, 2007, p. 381). Instead of a ‘rest’ to what we can ‘think’ of, this excess in anxiety could be thought of in relation to what Guattari calls ‘chaos’. Chaos speaks closely to the full-void, addressing precisely a horizon-beyond the abyss-within.

To Guattari, ‘a body’ is a reality that presents itself in constant tension between the ‘chaotic’ accumulation and flux of libidinal energy and what harnesses it, either allowing new conjunctions to emerge or posing a limit (Berardi, 2015). The contour of a body marked by words, words of a Symbolic realm structured within a colonial patriarchal modus operandi, would suggest a circularity of the repetitions under the logic of the Death Drive (Khanna, 2003). For such libidinal flow evident in Freud’s very early texts, so cherished by Guattari, to carry an affirmative character, what needs to be redefined is precisely the mythical pre-subjective state that Lacan (and not Freud) granted to be a ‘negativity’ (at least in early and mid-life works). It is Hegel’s influence in the accounting of time and history that fostered the privileging of a Symbolic that could not change effectively, and so limited the very notions of creativity, singularity, potency and affirmation (Braidotti, 2017). Contrary to superficial readings, the Spinozist twist of Deleuze and Guattari’s project was not offering a view of the subject as having a ‘reservoir of positivity’ to start with that is then ‘lost’ as we encounter the mad-bad-sad Oedipal Capitalist order. In Guattari’s elaboration on the notion of ‘chaos’ in Chaosmosis, 1992, and in the collection Chaosophy, 1995, we see this ‘libidinal energy’ that Freud observes to be floating through the body in the earlier texts on anxiety not as an ‘originative beginning’, but as a middle, a flux that breaks with the duality body/word and focuses on the ‘threshold’, the ‘frontier’ (Guattari, 2009). As such, this frontier, the a-signifying ruptures of the unconscious, should not be interpreted out of such reservoir, rather, they should be mobilised into poiesis.¹⁴ A tension, a threshold, a zone of inventiveness, transformation and creativity are, in this sense, of the level of ‘chaos’.

Spinozist lenses here reveal then that the ‘affirmation’ is a matter of difference, of the surplus generated in the ‘middle’, as life goes on rather than a power that was there and is then ‘lost’ by our entrance into culture. In this sense, thinking of anxiety as the affect of affirmation (thus, difference and transformation rather than repetition and resistance) also speaks to the trope of finding in melancholia and therefore in ‘failed mourning’ an identification with what is lost as a way to resist power. Butler’s (1997) work in The Psychic Life of Power (which draws the line between Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault) presupposed some linearity of time even if in an ‘ideal’ form. Also radical in its critique of identitarian oppression, the focus on ‘loss’—either of what was there and then was lost or even pushing it into the loss of what ‘could be there’ but was not allowed to—does not break with the transcendental universal of the Other and time in its struggle for recognition. In this sense, it will also not break away from the pre-eminence of language as located in the Other, or the patriarchal-colonial Symbolic and the consequent dialectics of recognition therein inscribed.¹⁵ To put it differently, following the vocabulary of my engagement with Lygia Clark, we will still be harnessing multiplicity and the full-void into the realm of the One of Sameness. An exploration of what lies beyond the logic of patriarchy, thus, an ‘excess’ that is produced by the difference of the ‘middle’ that is alive in the affect of anxiety proves to be more fruitful to thought.

To connect this differential production of the ‘middle’ with the libido of early-Freud’s ‘energetic’ flows, another core concept from Spinoza’s Ethics is helpful: conatus. From the Latin for a tendency to ‘strive’, Spinoza defines it as “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being”, Proposition VI, Part III (Curley, 1994). Not simply carrying on ‘being’, or self-preservation, but also having their ‘power of action increased’, is what Spinoza defines for the conative quality of bodies. This ‘affirmative’ tendency is necessarily ‘shared’ or ‘collective’, relational instead of self-referential, once it is related to the increase or decrease of the capacity to be affected and to affect other bodies. His ontology thus proposes that we share the same substance which is in the world in different and differential modalities. In sharp contrast with the negativity of desire (not to mention its connection with a ‘need’ and ‘demand’ that subscribe it to the phallic function in Lacan’s early teachings), what moves our lives is not a repetition of negativity, but an affirmative tendency to produce difference anchored in this ‘surplus’ that is an excess of the order of experience. In this sense, conatus is more akin to Freud’s early texts that attribute value to such libidinal energy that is ‘converted’ into various symptoms or into anxiety.

For Berardi, the answer to this ethical riddle is in co-poiesis, creating together something new and of the order of sensibility. Here, echoing Lygia Clark’s method in Structuring of the Self very beautifully. Poetry can attune subjectivity to the order of Chaos, or “an environment that is too complex to be decoded by our available explanatory frames, an environment in which fluxes circulate too quickly for our minds to elaborate” (Berardi, 2018, p. 39). Such a definition of chaos, for Berardi, makes explicit the rhythmic encounter with the ‘vibration of the world’, whilst “poetry is an attempt to tune into this cosmic vibration, this temporal vibration that is coming and coming” (Berardi, 2018, p. 17).

‘Difference’ and ‘antagonism’ are two philosophical notions of particular importance when mapping the Clark’s full-void ‘vibrational body’ in relation to surplus. A vibrational body, thus, connotes a surplus beyond the limits of Symbolic language in its Oedipal foundation, a surplus at stake in the formulations of anxiety seen both in Freud and Lacan, but which I am trying to mobilise psycho-politically (also out of a Modern humanist and patriarchal matrix). Surplus, in a Spinozist understanding, presupposes difference (such as the full-void). So instead of thinking of an ontology of the subject in which affirmation is without ‘antagonism’ (as Žižek, 2010, would put it in a bold critique of post-Deleuzean materialism, as mentioned previously), the very constant production of surplus is plenty antagonistic, and it is this complication of a conative differential conception of the subject, nature and the body that makes life move ‘forward’. This mode of continuity is also necessarily singular and creative as it will not repeat in negativity but transform in rupture. The chaotic rupture Guattari attributes to what is beyond language can be traced back to the experience of anxiety at the same time as it also informs the contemporary debate around a ‘preservation’ of sexual difference as an antidote to neoliberal capitalism. In very simple terms, a cartography of this logic could be mapped as such: it is only by ‘going on’ existing and living that the difference between the different attributes of substance is accumulated as a surplus. Surplus is this chaotic ‘libidinal energy’ that Freud observed as trying to find escape, in order to affect and be affected by other bodies, to move and in its detours is experienced as anxiety; it is the anxiety in the centre of Lacan’s Borromean Knot, akin to a Real that is not entirely attached to the Symbolic.

In this sense, it is not simply or solely sexual difference as ‘structuring’ of the subject that can guarantee singularity—the route, as mentioned before, Zupančič’ defends in What is Sex? (2017) for a critique of gender and queer theories which she sees as harnessed in the Imaginary. There is something of the order of the affective (affecting and affected) body, as it is experienced, that is excessive. This surplus generated in the difference between the full-void, phantasmatic, ‘vibrating body’ and ‘consciousness’ as such that reveals singularity and creativity in subjectivity is what is present in anxiety and, thus, fruitful to a non-Oedipal reading of Freud and Lacan. Anxiety, as an affect of rupture, brings up a body in flux, open to actualisations that are not bound to thought or symbolisation, thus a marker of a ‘full-void, affective vibrating body’, as inspired by Lygia Clark. Anxiety, in Freud’s pre-1920s texts, cannot be subsumed in words, or interpretation and meaning. Anxiety, in this sense, is ‘meaningless’ but it is transformative as it insists and pushes the libidinal energy that is ‘Life’ onto the materiality of the body. This chaotic rupture, in its overwhelming presence, resonates what is described by ‘attacks’ of anxiety, or anxiety with all its deafening loud volume. At the same time, Lacan’s ‘lalangue’, this poetic enjoyment of the order of the body, this unique, singular, inventive mode of speaking is also part of such ‘chaos’. In this light, anxiety marks a territory of tension, this threshold between the relation to the Law (and by extension the patriarchal arrangement) and all that exists beyond it, the chaos that is in flux through the body and cannot be captured by language or words.

Chaos, Vibration and the Clinic

Why insist on psychoanalysis, if it reproduces exactly what Clark moved beyond, namely, the Plane? Because not only can psychoanalysis denounce patriarchy by describing its operations and effects (Mitchell, 1974), but it may stop prescribing it, as long as it turns more chaotic, and less ‘dividualising’. Following the trail of Clark, we can find clues for destabilising problematic anchors of psy-care practices, which limit the clinical treatment of rupture into an Oedipalised frame. More precisely, the ‘full-void’ of Clark’s vibrational body proposes a subjective creation that starts from where there is no subject: in the void, there is fullness. It dismantles the necessity of subjective reproduction in accordance with the cultural echoes passed on by the colonial and patriarchal Symbolic as structured by the Phallic Law that is so pervasive in psy-practices.

Affect, symptom, noise and vibration. A body speaking in the world and an ecology that allows some sort of radical, resisting and transformative poietic existence is what I see in Lygia Clark’s series Structuring of the Self. Her work invites us to Spinoza, whose “conative bodies are also associative or (one could even say) social bodies, in the sense that each is, by its very nature as a body, continuously affecting and being affected by other bodies” (Bennet, 2010, p. 21). This ontology thus proposes that we share the same substance which is in the world in different and differential modalities—akin to entangled ‘differences without separability’, as the epistemological and political turn proposed by Ferreira da Silva (2016). In sharp contrast to the negativity of desire (not to mention its connection with a ‘need’ and ‘demand’ that subscribe it to the phallic function in Lacan’s early teachings), what moves our lives is not a repetition of negativity, but an affirmative tendency to produce difference anchored in this ‘surplus’ that is an excess of the order of experience that vibrates chaotically and creatively the ‘full-void’. In other words, Clark’s ‘full-void’ beyond the Plane operates as a metaphor, or a poetical wording of an understanding of affect as differential. This nuance is the reason why her practice is also specifically fruitful to my project that aims at re-orienting the psychoanalytic clinic of anxiety. It enables me to think-with Braidotti’s ‘nomadic subjectivity’ in the clinic of this affect that is, ultimately, an affect of rupture, and thus being, claims space beyond a psychoanalytic clinic grounded on interpretation and its Oedipal foundations.

Guided by Clark’s chaotic vibration—her full-void beyond the Plane; her sensations of the unconscious—we can think through what happens to the ‘body in/of the world’ and to the ‘world with/of bodies’ through the potency of a subjective full/void that vibrates independently from any Other. Here, the sinthôme Patricia Gherovici (2017) rescued in Lacan as a queer solution is expanded into collectivity—instead of working out one’s excesses alone, Clark teaches us that what is beyond the Plane needs to be mobilised together, in co-poiesis. This collective nature of affect is exactly where we travel to in the foundations of the concept of ‘vibration’ in Deleuze and Guattari and take it with us to the clinic. Thinking-with Lygia Clark in alliance with Deleuze, Guattari, Braidotti, Rolnik and Spinoza has taken us to the fullness of the frontier, the novelty of chaos: In chaos we avoid the total reign of language and identity as well as materialist biological reductionism of experience. We meet chaos in the frontier of the vibrating ‘full-void’ of bodies.