After mapping ‘vibrational moments’ in both Freud and Lacan as possible entries into ‘becomings’ versus a dividualising ‘being’ as the clinical paradigm of anxiety, we will dive deeper into the concept of vibration and its genealogy in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. We will cross their theories of affect and subjectivity in order to find grounds for a ‘vibrational clinic’. Building on the co-poietic method of the artist Lygia Clark in her later works, and especially Structuring of the Self series, I will map a possible model of clinical assemblage in Guattari’s ‘transversal’ take on anxiety. The difficulty and at times contradictions of Deleuze and Guattari’s varied and rich work and their Anti-Oedipal approach anchor our alliance with Lygia Clark: here as a horizon-beyond a view of anxiety that is reduced to an abyss-within (or an enigma of the body of the order of sexuality as organised under the phallic paradigm).

Deleuze and Guattari have offered important critiques of psychoanalysis in the second half of the twentieth century as part of their philosophical, political and clinical enterprise. Together and separately, they have questioned the model of repression and negative repetition in symptoms, the centrality of a subjective organisation structured under the Oedipal model and the form of an ‘ego’, as well as the clinical relationship framework based on a dual transference that, to them, “modelled itself after the contractual relationship of the most traditional bourgeois medicine: the feigned exclusion of a third party; the hypocritical role of money, to which psychoanalysis brought farcical new justifications” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 84). The psychoanalytic frame perpetuated and practiced by the establishment also relied on “the pretended time limitation that contradicts itself by reproducing a debt to infinity, by feeding an inexhaustible transference, and by always nursing new ‘conflicts’” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 84). To use Deleuze’s (1992) own word, psychoanalysis wished to propose a life in touch with the unconscious but remained ‘dividualising’ or alienating and modulating subjectivity through a stiff ideological mechanism and onto-epistemic foundation.

Their work has been influential in the field of critical theories, new philosophical interventions and the arts. However, within the clinical landscape (from psychoanalytic training programmes to institutional practices in mental health care), their concepts have been largely ignored or swiftly brushed off in defensive accusations of mis-reading Freud and Lacan—for example, in their famous critique to the psychoanalytic privileging of a neurotic subject (David-Menard, 2014). Save for a very limited array of attempts to question the potentialities of the body, affect and the limits of language as a tool of interpretation and punctuation (Suely Rolnik and Monique David-Menard being two important examples, in Latin America and in Europe), their ‘schizoanalysis’ is mostly discussed in theoretical works that dispute the concept of ‘desire’ (Schuster, 2016) and the discrepancies between the philosophical approaches of Hegel and Spinoza (Moder, 2017). In this cartographic exercise, I do not wish to pursue an in-depth investigation on the possibilities of ‘correcting’ psychoanalysis with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas. Neither do I wish to call in a psychoanalytic ‘authority’ over Deleuze and Guattari’s writings (Felman, 1982), which would be to denounce their naiveté facing ‘real’ suffering or even their theoretical alliance to a kind of postmodern neoliberal affirmation without necessary antagonism (Žižek, 2010, 2017). Rather, my aim is to find in their theory and practice, respectively, points that can illuminate the knots on Freudian-Lacanian conceptions of anxiety in an attempt to establish a common ground between these two theoretical approaches and clinical practices that bring about an eco-feminist ethics in light of the contemporary psychosocial context—namely, the possibilities for interdependence rather than domination as the matrix of relation to others instead of with the Other—which I do so by following Rosi Braidotti (1994, 2006a, 2006b, 2011, 2013, 2017, 2019).Footnote 1 My way into this complex endeavour is via the formulation of the concept of ‘anxiety as vibration’ and the guiding compass is the search for affirmative and differential nuances in the psychosomatic (or psychic and somatic) experience of the affect of anxiety. Informed by the clinical and conceptual ‘dividualisations’ reproduced in psychoanalysis and by the potency of its critique in Lygia Clark’s ‘full-void’ vibrational body, in what follows, I trace the ‘trail’ of vibration in Deleuze and Guattari’s work in relation to affect, possibility and the friction between ‘being’ and ‘becomings’, as a ground that moves the rupture of the affect of anxiety from an abyss-within into a horizon-beyond.

Vibration between Ontology and Ethics

Deleuze’s ontology is centred on difference. His thinking is heavily influenced by his original reading of Nietzsche, Bergson and Spinoza, as well as Leibniz and Simondon, all of whom had been extremely unfashionable during the 1950s and 1960s in France, where the ‘three Hs’ (Hegel, Heidegger and Husserl) reigned in Philosophy departments, according to Dosse (2010). Deleuze takes from Spinoza the idea that an ontology that works against the notion of the transcendent in favour of immanence (in general terms, accepting that there is just one substance, God and nature being this same substance) is the basis of an ethics. It is with shy irony that Deleuze points out in his course on Spinoza, delivered in Vincennes, that Spinoza did not call his seventeenth century monograph ‘Ontology’, rather, he named it his ‘Ethics’. In what touches Deleuze’s critique of psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis and the absorption of the Freudian concepts of the resolution of the Oedipus Complex into a structuralist model, this detail assumes particular relevance.

To start the examination of the concept of vibration, we could consider this ethical and ontological dispute as follows. Culturally specific, and perhaps culturally hegemonic, language/Symbolic structures take the transcendental ‘One’ (the phallic father inscribed in the Oedipal myth) as a necessity or even a ‘given fact’ in ‘reality’, informing thus several aspects of our subjective inscription, such as the potential and possibilities for life under or outside the ‘Law’. In this sense, here we situate Lacan’s Other and the Law-of-the-Father as anchors of the Symbolic register and towards which a subjective structure is directed, revealing a particular inscription of transcendentalism in Lacan—seeing that the fundamental structuring of the subject relies on preconditions external to it, a definition of ‘transcendental’ offered by Jean Wahl (1944 [2016]).Footnote 2 Neurosis, perversion or psychosis are then seen as the only possible outcomes of this necessary relation. Under the ethical and ontological approach proposed by Deleuze and by Guattari, there is something more primordial to the ‘subject’ as framed in ‘culture’ as such that pertains to the relation of the unique ‘substance’ that appears in the world only in different intensities, as Spinoza posits in his Ethics. These intensities, in Spinoza, and as rescued by Deleuze in his first book on the Dutch philosopher from 1968 (Spinoza et le problème de l’expression), the second from 1981 (Spinoza—Philosophie pratique) and the Vincennes lectures, compose what is called ‘affect’. An interesting definition of affect from Deleuze’s lecture in Vincennes on the 24th of January 1978 reads: “Every mode of thought insofar as it is non-representational will be termed affect” (Deleuze, 1978).Footnote 3 This relation between affect and thought and their logical, intrinsic and extrinsic differences is unpacked in this particular lecture of his Sur Spinoza course, a crucial difference, as we will see in what follows. Not only the non-representability of affect, but its collectivity, the point that it does not feature in the Symbolic and the connection it holds with the body are the basis for the ‘vibrating’ ability of such intensities that cross bodies, which constantly affect each other. Affect, in this model, also resists the need for a transcendental ‘third’ or ‘power’ anchoring it, it does not need an ‘Other’ with capital ‘O’.Footnote 4 Affect is, for Spinoza, “the power to affect and be affected” (Massumi, 2015, p. ix), rather than a ‘substance’ or ethereal potion travelling through bodies like electricity as other affect theorists will mistakenly interpret.Footnote 5 Affect, for Deleuze, is more of an ethical capacity beyond universal frames of representation than an ‘electric current’ behaving like a contaminating virus across bodies.

In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, first published in 1981, Deleuze famously affirms that “sensation is vibration” (Deleuze, 2003, p. 45). In this piece, Deleuze writes about how Bacon was trying to paint ‘sensations’ rather than figurative representations when painting bodies. I find this a useful analogy to approach this question of language and of the ‘representability’ of things, taking us on a journey to think how words are charged with affect but also to meet, in clear psychoanalytic terms, the limits of identification (Imaginary identification being the frame of anxiety, as per Lacan in Seminar X; and it is based on the principle of ‘Sameness’ grounded over the idea of the ‘One’, as proposed by Braidotti, 2006a). Deleuze’s work on sensation presents us with a view of a body that is ‘beyond’ language, is vibrating, and is also in movement as it affects and is affected by other bodies. We must, however, be careful to see in this non-representability an ethical stance rather than a mystical ‘feeling’, ‘emotion’, ‘electric current’ or a production of the body beyond words that gets transmitted through bodies. Honing into the matter of affect and exploring this ethical ontological project, started by Deleuze and carried on through his encounter with Félix Guattari and scholars influenced by them since, will take us to a questioning of what is representable according to Freud and Lacan and how have both psychoanalytic models accounted for what is not. The Lacanian Real, which is carefully sculpted through the decades of his teachings, is the central contrast with the model of ‘sensation’ that we find in Deleuze. As we will rescue, across their work and very clearly in Guattari’s sole writings, the matter of ‘representability’ versus ‘non-representability’ is diffracted further into the notion of ‘polyvocity’ (Genosko, 2002) that is central to what I identify here as Guattari’s theory of anxiety.

A longer definition of ‘affect’ in Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza invites us to consider ‘variation’ and ‘possibility’ as elements of affect that resonate a further excursion into Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘vibration’. Deleuze’s lesson on Spinoza in Vincennes in late January 1978 elicits the ethical and ‘relational’ character of affect in its detailed difference from an ‘idea/thought’. Relational here, is not as a relation between similar ‘objects’, in a traditional psychoanalytic sense as per the British Tradition, for example, but of all ‘bodies’, thus nature as ‘all there is’, following Spinoza. Deleuze unpacks affect, first saying that we can differentiate an ‘idea’ and an affect by considering that an idea is a mode of thought that represents something, whilst an affect is a mode of thought that represents nothing. This is a technical and nominal differentiation based on ‘external and extrinsic’ factors. The second layer of this differentiation Deleuze reads in Spinoza is more complicated: whilst an idea has an intrinsic reality, “affect is the continuous variation or the passage from one degree of reality to another” (Deleuze, January 24, 1978).Footnote 6 Beyond the nominal difference, we have now also a ‘real difference’, which opens up the ‘possibilities’ of a thing and not just its description. Affect, he continues, “it is the continuous variation of the force of existing of anyone” (Deleuze, January 24, 1978).Footnote 7 The force of existing, as Spinoza outlines in his ethics, is named ‘conatus’; thus, affect would be this continuous variation of conatus. He completes: “insofar as this variation is determined by the ideas one has” (Deleuze, January 24, 1978).Footnote 8 This ‘determination’ of affect by ideas and yet the irreducibility of affect to ideas is the conundrum Deleuze explores in the differentiation of Spinoza’s terms ‘affectio’ and ‘affectus’, Latin terms he claims were all mistranslated from the Ethics as ‘affect’, but which still carry a difference, and one interesting to psychoanalysis. Affectus would be ‘affect’, and what we have described so far, whilst ‘affectio’ is ‘affection’, defined as the ‘mixing’ (mélange) of bodies and the changes or consequences that entail the effects over the nature of these bodies. Being in the world and the mélange of bodies resonate—affectio—on ideas (representational), which, in their turn, determine affectus, the non-representational kinds of thoughts. Affect, thus, seems to be not just transindividual but collective or ‘collaborative’ in essence, an ethical disposition.

To summarise and clarify, Deleuze’s take on Spinoza’s theory of affect has it that affect is not of the order of representation, it escapes it; affect has to do with the variations of one’s force of existing; and these variations will be determined by the effects of our encounter with other bodies—determined, not reduced to, neither represented by—which can only be grasped by our ideas of the consequences of such encounters (e.g. the sun on my skin, meeting someone on the street, etc.). The difficulty of these abstract lectures may be why Deleuze’s (as well as Guattarri’s) ideas have been so misinterpreted as it is easy to read affect as something quite ‘magical’ and beyond words that happens when we meet others in the world. Deleuze here reminds us of another layer of Spinoza’s oeuvre that is essential to keep in mind: his view of the limitations of our repertoire of ‘ideas’, our experience of grasping reality through ideas one after another vis-à-vis the passages of one degree of reality to another, which is the character of affect, as we have just seen. Drawing on Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (published posthumously in 1677), Deleuze points out that to him we are fabricated as spiritual automatons, with ideas succeeding one another all the time in us, determining our potentiality of acting or our force of existing in a continuous line. Spinoza sees the ‘soul’ as a machine of ideas, immanent and self-determined. Catherine Malabou (2016) in fact adds to the Deleuzean reading of the Ethics, by arguing that Spinoza’s Treatise functions between the duality of transcendence and immanence, proposing a theory of the origin of the Symbolic (in the Spinozean monist version of God/the sacred) with no reference outside of itself. Here we reach a paradox in relation to psychoanalysis, for, if anything, words and ideas are in Lacan necessarily crossed by the field of the Other, or Symbolically arranged, and a rupture in this crossing would indicate the side of psychosis. What Deleuze draws from Spinoza and what goes on to influence so much of his work with Guattari and the thinkers influenced by them to present day (such as Rolnik and Braidotti, as I we engage with closely across this cartography of anxiety)—the notion of desire as immanent and of affect as an excess to representation that travels in encounters—disputes the central Structuralist and Post-Structuralist tenets of Lacanian psychoanalysis that see in a Symbolic arrangement the net in which subjectivity is constructed, either through meaning or gaps in meaning, nonetheless determined by symbolisation. Here, again, we find an interesting alignment with what I called Freud and Lacan’s ‘vibrational moments’ as well as with Lygia Clark’s vibrational ‘full-void’: there is scope for an immanent production of affect which does not cross or is not reduced by its relation to the Oedipal Other and the Symbolic as such. Rather, we find here sustenance for a view of the sinthôme as an articulation of the Real into novel Imaginaries—as Lacan (1975) proposes in his Seminar XXIII, being a creative solution that does not call for interpretation; rather, as Lygia Clark proposes and I hold onto here, calling for a communal, collective construction, a co-poiesis.

Deleuze and Guattari work through this ethical-ontological muddle throughout their lives. In what concerns psychoanalysis their quest could be translated, as I read it, in simple terms, by asking “how much of me is left beyond representational ideas?”; “what are the qualities of what is left?”; and “can we think of an ethical and political landscape of these excesses?”. In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus they try, in more direct psychoanalytic terms, to meditate through libido, the Real, the drive, the body and language. They go beyond the sources that founded psychoanalysis and of psychoanalysis itself to think through these ethical possibilities, contextualising the psychoanalytic discourse as pertaining to a context of capitalism and repression, binarism and patriarchy. An ethical capacity beyond the dualism of representation would open the way for the invention of new worlds and novel forms of living—or a sprout/seedling of the world that lives in us, ‘gérmens de mundo’ (Rolnik, 2019), an opening of the ‘paradoxical body’ (Gil, 1998) would be mobilised in this affective turn. Such co-poietic processes of reinvention would start with the body (in affects, symptoms, ruptures) and create new words and worlds, invoking a collectivity without crossing the field of the Other as a subordinate. In other words, it is from affects that ‘being’ can be extended into ‘becomings’.

For Brian Massumi, “the concept of affect is politically oriented from the get go” (Massumi, 2015, p. viii). Massumi is part of a generation of theorists dedicated to ‘affect’, an early-2000s theoretical trend known as the ‘affective turn’, which counts with diverse names such as Rosi Braidotti, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Silvan Tomkins and Elizabeth Grosz. Ideas proposing that affects vibrate, especially in relation to the body, which is an archaic, pre-linguistic, transindividual body, and of the level of a ‘body knowledge’ (Massumi, 2015, p. 210), are relevant to my delineation of ‘anxiety as vibration’, and require that we go through Deleuze and Guattari’s work in more detail, stressing Guattari’s realm of ‘chaos’ rather than the paradigm of a ‘repository’ as Massumi (2015) seems to propose. The confusion and the danger of thinking of what is not of the order of representation—or what is beyond the Plane, in Clark’s words—and that leaves traces on the body as a kind of ‘magical substance’ have been pointed out by several critics of the affect theorists for the risk of a lack of ethical possibilities when focusing on states beyond cognition/consciousness (Hemmings, 2005; Leys, 2017). We could think of this as simply the ethical possibilities of the unconscious, and, more precisely, as the ethical possibilities of the ‘body whilst unconscious trace’, much as contemporary Lacanians work with the idea that the speaking-body is the twenty-first century unconscious (Miller, 2014), or the ethics of the Real (Brousse, 2007). I take this question as central to the psychopolitics of the clinic, once it is necessary to account for the process of ‘dividualisation’ and estrangement from anxiety. Being able to mobilise possibilities that further the subject reduced to a dividual would be the ethical and political necessity of a contemporary ‘couch revolution’ that is truly faithful to Freud’s project in light of contemporary epistemological demands (Preciado, 2020)—namely, ecological, social, political changes and urgencies that challenge the epistemology of alienation found in the psychoanalytic dividualising Oedipal abyss-within.

Deleuze’s philosophical project, which starts with the 1953 publication of Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume and ends with the 1993 publication of Critique et Clinique, can be understood in the context of his engagement with a particular version of empiricism and a critique of transcendentalism in philosophy, from which he will thus enter the field of psychoanalysis along the way, alone and with Félix Guattari. For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy, published in English in 1994, philosophy was an empirical project insofar as it involved ‘conceptual creations’. They write: “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 2) and this creation is done without appeal to a transcendental illusion. Deleuze writes in the preface to the English edition of Dialogues that he always considered himself to be an empiricist thinker, by which he means he is a ‘pluralist’. In this rich short introduction to his dialogue with Claire Parnet, he explains that, for him at least, empiricism involved accounting for multiplicity without resorting to a universal or eternal in order to explain the “conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. vii), without abstracting the totalities of the One, the Whole or the Subject, rationalist traps that, as he sees it, psychoanalysis has fallen into. Empiricism, or his philosophical endeavour, starts by “analysing the states of things, in such a way that non-pre-existent concepts can be extracted from them. States of things are neither unities nor totalities, but multiplicities” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. vii). This idea of multiplicity is important to comprehend; it:

Designates a set of lines or dimensions which are irreducible to one another. Every ‘thing’ is made up in this way. Of course a multiplicity includes focuses of unification, centres of totalization, points of subjectivation, but as factors which can prevent its growth and stop its lines.[…] In a multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what there is ‘between’, the between, as set of relations which are not separable from each other. Every multiplicity grows from the middle, like the blade of grass or the rhizome. We constantly oppose the rhizome to the tree, like two conceptions and even two very different ways of thinking. (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, pp. vii–viii)

Psychoanalysis, under this logic, is at first ‘empiricist’ enough, but it surrenders to the rationalist (and typically modern, colonial and patriarchal) illusion of totalities and loses its political potency. Freud, for Deleuze, at first sees the multiplicities in the polymorphous perversion of the “skin as a collection of pores, the slipper, the field of stitches” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. viii), yet he “constantly fell back on the calmer vision of a neurotic unconscious which plays with eternal abstractions” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. viii). Klein, “even Melanie Klein” he writes, granting her special respect, also succumbs to the same logic for her “partial objects still refer to a unity, even if it is lost, to a totality, even if it is to come, to a subject, even if it is split” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. ix). What Deleuze strives with his philosophical project, and the collaboration with Guattari, is to create concepts that engage with multiplicity, as a means to imagine novel possibilities of being. He writes: “It seemed to us [him and Guattari] that politics is at stake as well and that in a social field rhizome spread out everywhere under the arborescent apparatuses” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. ix). The conditions for the emergence of such novelty is the kernel of a possible “couch revolution”, that a feminist and Deleuzian-Guattarian critique of psychoanalysis calls for (Preciado, 2018).

The way Deleuze starts engaging with such multiplicities is by his reading, interpretation and creation of concepts from the works of Spinoza and Bergson (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), mainly, as they allow him to consider a ‘radical empiricism’ through the idea of a ‘plane of immanence’. Such a plane, Deleuze and Guattari write, “does not present a flux of the lived that is immanent to a subject and individualised in that which belongs to a self. It presents only events, that is, possible worlds as concepts, and other people as expressions of possible worlds or conceptual personae” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, pp. 47–48). This ‘plane of immanence’ is, as they write, “surrounded by illusions” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 49): the illusion of transcendence, the illusion of universals, the illusion of the eternal and the illusion of discursiveness (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). These illusions lock possibilities and erase multiplicity condemning it into a relation to a referential and transcendental One (interestingly resonating Lygia Clark’s Nostalgia of the Body essay). Here we can see their resistance to tracing concepts by a traditional genealogy that stays firmly closed to a tradition of history of philosophy, as the historical is a taming of the potentiality of multiplicity and invention of new modes of being—which they call an ‘event’. They write:

Philosophy cannot be reduced to its own history, because it continually wrests itself from this history in order to create new concepts that fall back into history but do not come from it. How could something come from history? Without history, becoming would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but becoming is not historical. Psychosocial types belong to history, but conceptual personae belong to becoming. (Deleuze &Guattari, 1994, p. 96)

In this sense, we cannot reduce an ontology (conceptual personae) to history as we will then be simply describing what exists under the agreed universal conditions—or illusions—rather than opening up possibilities of the order of the plane of immanence. In other words, “psychosocial types are historical, but conceptual personae are events” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 110). The question of their relation to the plane of immanence and a critique to the transcendental takes us back to the question of ‘affect’ and how affects cannot be reduced to ‘opinions’ or pre-arranged set-ups; rather, they should be allowed to be recombined, coupled, to vibrate and to ‘create’ or ‘become’. Discussing literature, art and psychoanalysis, they point at the limiting of ‘opinion’ or ‘ideas’ over affects, of imposing ‘knowledge’ over an affect and thus classifying it and mapping preconditioned futures to such affective possibilities and ‘becomings’.

Psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature and art should engage with such immanence instead of being limited to the transcendental ‘tree’ of universal referential conditions such as the ‘Other’ and the ‘Law’. Psychoanalysis should then, according to this logic, account for the possibility of vibrations—of affect recombination, creation and a political ontology that is in tune with contemporary epistemological, ecological and political demands that stem off the epistemology of alienation and the logic domination—rather than map and reproduce psychosocial historical subjects. With this motivation in mind, I embark on a search for vibration.

In order to dive fully into what Deleuze and Guattari mean by ‘vibration’, and to prepare the ground to my thinking of ‘anxiety as vibration’, I follow below with a cartographic genealogy of the concept of vibration, discussing how it is crucial to the understanding of notion of ‘sensation’ and of ‘affect’ within this tradition of thinking. My reading method is cartographic-rhizomatic, meaning that I follow the word ‘vibration’ across key texts from Deleuze and Guattari, opening up into their conceptualisations of the body, affect and an ontology in the dynamic genesis of language and its relation to the limits of the Symbolic (not to forget, a Symbolic that is, for them, Oedipally framed and thus charged with the Eurocentric colonialist patriarchal and capitalist subjective mode within the epistemology of alienation and domination), pausing and digressing as ‘vibration’ leads.

The Trail of Vibration

When discussing the oeuvre of Bergson, who will, along with Spinoza, prove to be a fundamental influence in Deleuze and Guattari’s ontological model, in the book Bergsonism, first published in 1966 in French, Deleuze delineates the materialist monism of Bergson in relation to perception, time (duration) and what extends ‘beyond us’ or our experience beyond the individual as per Bergson’s monograph Matter and Memory. He writes:

At each instant, our perception contracts “an incalculable multitude of rememorized elements”; at each instant, our present infinitely contracts our past: “The two terms which had been separated to begin with cohere closely together… What, in fact, is a sensation? It is the operation of contracting trillions of vibrations onto a receptive surface [my emphasis]. Quality emerges from this, quality that is nothing other than contracted quantity”. (Deleuze, 1991, p. 74)

Perception and memory, or recollection, become ‘one’ in Bergson under this energetic metaphor of quantity of vibrations from the ‘outside’, or beyond the body, into a sensation where it can turn into a ‘quality’, in what I read to be similar to what in Spinoza and in Deleuze will be called affect. As Deleuze writes, “Matter and Memory recognizes intensities, degrees or vibrations in the qualities that we live as such outside ourselves and that, as such, belong to matter” (Deleuze, 1991, p. 92). According to Elizabeth Grosz (2007), Bergson’s influence on Deleuze allows him to think not in terms of vitalism (even though Bergson speaks of an élan vital) that would presuppose finality or a total, rather in terms of life as a process, or affirmation since for Bergson “life assumes a continuous, never ceasing relation of change” (Grosz, 2007, p. 294). To think in terms of intensities that vibrate takes Deleuze away from other dominant modes of thinking about life and the body, moving away from organicism and from phenomenology once “each places the functional or experiencing body as a given rather than as the effect of processes of continual creation, movement or individuation” (Grosz, 2007, p. 289). For Grosz this ecological ontology that we see in Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari—and very clearly in Guattari’s solo work such as The Three Ecologies, from 1989—can be traced to the influence of Bergson, since, as she writes it is Bergsonism that contributes with “an understanding of individuality as a kind of dynamic integrative absorption of an outside that is always too much, too large, to be ordered and contained within life alone, but which extends life beyond itself into the very reaches of the inorganic” (Grosz, 2007, pp. 288–289).

In Difference and Repetition, first published in French in 1968, Deleuze speaks to psychoanalysis very closely as he offers a unique reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The question of primary repression and of the origins of the unconscious is tackled by invoking terms from philosophy and literature to think of ‘habit’, ‘memory’ and what is it that makes repetition repeat. Deleuze, already in this piece, forces a reading of repetition against the model of repression: “I do not repeat because I repress. I repress because I repeat, I forget because I repeat. I repress, because I can live certain things or certain experiences only in the mode of repetition. I am determined to repress whatever would prevent me from living them thus: in particular, the representation which mediates the lived by relating it to the form of a similar or identical object” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 18). Repetition is seen as a positivity, it is akin to a rupture, or a gap, that is central to the conflict of the drives (Eros and Thanatos, as he takes from Freud). Rather than being a characteristic of a ‘glitch’ of the conscious system, it entails difference or new qualities each time we repeat. In this book, on the first page, Deleuze uses the word vibration for the first time in relation to the unconscious. He does not develop this idea in the book at all, but the meaning it bears here, of a reverberation of a conative (in Spinoza’s terms) character of the body, remains important. Deleuze writes: “To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent. And perhaps this repetition at the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 1). The positive and differential unconscious emerges through the movement of the drive, it vibrates in repetition. If what is repressed, primarily, are not representations—as Deleuze puts it, ‘presentations’ are the material of the Freudian primary repression (Deleuze, 1995)—but what, as we can interpret, is not of the order of representation, therefore affect, then affects constitute the core of such ‘founding’ elements of the unconscious. In a way, this does not take us very far from Freud’s theories of the drive as this encounter of psyche and soma—which is not all psy nor all soma, but a ‘body’ of a ‘different order’ that appears in the drive.

Deleuze follows this line of thought in Logic of Sense, published for the first time in the following year, 1969. One of the most interesting aspects of this piece, in what concerns this research, is his exposition and critique of the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein. The drives and what ‘moves’ this encounter of psyche-soma in her theories of a fragmented body form his central arguments about language, or ‘sense’ as it is ‘written over’ the body. This book tackles a variety of philosophical and literary ideas to explore the genesis of ‘sense’ (and nonsense), arriving at the conditions of sense being, necessarily, outside of what is ‘meant’ by any proposition, “the expressed makes possible the expression” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 186). Meaning, thus, is transcendental and relates to what Lacan calls the Symbolic order, as we can interpret from this part of the book. The second part of the book is more attractive to readers less familiar with analytic philosophy and logic (resources strongly pulled together in the first part) as it will then explore the conditions of the genesis of language from a rather unique interpretation of Klein, sounds, expression and the body. Despite not speaking about ‘vibration’ directly in this book, Deleuze discusses intensities that cross the infant’s body in fragmented and chaotic manners borrowing from Daniel Stern and Melanie Klein as well as Artaud, inaugurating his theorising of the ‘Body without Organs’ here.

In his account, infants are born into bodily noises, sounds and primary affects. These sounds from the ‘depths’ will be mobilised into language and the production of sense/nonsense thereafter. He writes: “When we say that the sound becomes independent, we mean to say that it ceases to be a specific quality attached to bodies, a noise or a cry, and that it begins to designate qualities, manifest bodies, and signify subjects or predicates” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 187). He is interested in the ‘surface’ that is produced as language happens, curious about the “depth-surface distinction [which] is, in every respect, primary in relation to the distinctions nature-convention, nature-custom, or nature-artifice” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 187). Again, there is quite a remarkable departure already from Lacan’s view that even before birth we are already immersed in the Symbolic, even though the subject emerges from a mythic pre-subject represented by the delta at the bottom of the Graph of Desire. Deleuze criticised Klein’s assumption of the two different positions of the unconscious (paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions), “for the very theme of positions implies the idea of the orientations of psychic life and of cardinal points; it also implies the idea of the organization of this life in accordance with variable or shifting coordinates and dimensions, an entire geography and geometry of living dimensions” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 188). The ‘abyss’ of the ‘bottomless depth’ of oral and anal drives does not enter an equilibrium via introjection and projection of ‘good objects’ as Klein suggested; rather, what Deleuze reads as being what the schizoid position opposes is “an organism without parts, a body without organs, with neither mouth nor anus, having given up all introjection or projection, and being complete, at this price” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 188). The ‘abyss’ of bodily depth enters into a relation facing a ‘body’ that is ‘complete’, or of no depth, a body of surface. It is, for Deleuze, at this point in his work, at this moment when “the tension between id and ego is formed. Two depths are opposed: a hollow depth, wherein bits whirl about and explode, and full depth” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 189). The question of a superego, the tensions between ego-id and the question of depth-surfaces are aligned with Deleuze’s understanding of the body and its generative sounds that will be transformed into language. This ‘creative’ delineation that Deleuze offers to Klein’s work, inspired by Stern and his view of infants as ‘full’ of life potency rather than ‘lacking’, also establishes a curious ethics to this ontological model and his genealogy of sense. He writes: “The superego does not begin with the first introjected objects, as Melanie Klein says, but rather with this good object which holds itself aloft. Freud often insisted on the importance of this transference from depth to height, which indicates, between the id and the superego, a total change of orientation and a central reorganization of psychic life” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 189). Between id and superego, as Deleuze reads, there is a difference in mode, since “depth has an internal tension determined by dynamic categories—container-contained, empty-full, massive-meagre, etc.” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 190) all the while “the tension proper to height [meaning the superego here] is verticality, difference in size, the large and the small” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 190). He seems to be talking about different intensities or qualities, one of depth and one of the surface. The superego and the conflict it inaugurates in psychic life are, therefore, of another quality to the conflicts of depths, of the body without organs or, in a simple sense, of the drive.

To Deleuze, there are no such things as ‘good objects’, rather, there is an internalised superego acting as good object which the ego identifies with. Identification is, according to this view, a mechanism of surface. The level of the depressive position would then put into a halt the flux of introjections and projections, of dynamic exchanges, and substitute for it ‘identification’ with both internal objects and with the “object of the heights” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 192). In this sense, the ‘voice from above’ is the basis of ‘morality’, or the ‘compass’ of psychic life that is taken in, as it enters into a surface-depth relation towards the exploding tension of the drives.

For Deleuze, when Freud speaks of erogenous ‘zones’ there is already an external ‘mapping’ onto the body, as such zones are not ‘natural’ to its chaotic nature, but rather, are inscribed and delineated. “The erogenous zones are cut up on the surface of the body, around orifices marked by the presence of mucous membranes. When people note that internal organs are also able to become erogenous zones, it appears that this is conditional upon the spontaneous topology of the body” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 197). What is most important in Logic of Sense, therefore, is Deleuze’s creative alternative to the quality of affects and the drives, interweaving body and language in a more complex, more materialist matrix than in a ‘classic’ Freudian or Lacanian version. Guattari, in Chaosmosis, from 1992, will pick up on such theory of the genesis of sense and the relation of the body, the unconscious and an expanded notion of the possibilities of signification. Guattari, as a clinician, proposes a “movement towards a polyphonic and heterogenetic comprehension of subjectivity” (Guattari, 1995a, p. 6).

Žižek (2004) considers Logic of Sense to be Deleuze’s most important piece of writing, whilst dismissing Anti-Oedipus in his book Organs Without Bodies precisely because in this piece Deleuze works at this limit of tension between materialism and idealism, abandoning the latter altogether in favour of the former in his Capitalism and Schizophrenia series with Guattari. Following these two moments (Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus), Deleuze dives into an ‘abandonment of sense’ and writes about the logic of ‘sensation’.

The piece in which Deleuze’s exposition of sensation and, thus, vibration is more clearly connected to what we are trying to touch in anxiety appears in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, originally published in French in 1981, after meeting Guattari. The book, as the title suggests, goes beyond the tradition of representation in art history and finds an anchor in the work of the English painter, Francis Bacon, on the exploration of sensation. Ideas about the body, the body without organs and of the ‘potency’ of depth rehearsed in the second part of Logic of Sense can be found here again, with additional emphasis. About the body and sensation (and vibration), Deleuze’s poetic, difficult, yet summarised definition is the following:

The body without organs is opposed less to organs than to that organization of organs we call an organism. It is an intense and intensive body. It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the variations of its amplitude. Thus the body does not have organs, but thresholds or levels. Sensation is not qualitative and qualified, but has only an intensive reality, which no longer determines with itself representative elements, but allotropic variations. Sensation is vibration [my emphasis]. […] It is a whole nonorganic life, for the organism is not life, it is what imprisons life. The body is completely living, and yet nonorganic. Likewise sensation, when it acquires a body through the organism, takes on an excessive and spasmodic appearance, exceeding the bounds of organic activity. (Deleuze, 2003, p. 45)

The notion of the ‘bWo’ as we can see in the above quote, by this point, is affirmative and sensorial. It is contrasted with the organism, marking a ‘body’ that is not of the order of the Symbolic but it also has trouble fitting into the Imaginary, aligned more with resonances of the Real. If we rescue the ‘vibrational moments’ in Freud and Lacan’s work on anxiety, namely the excessive, the libidinal, the Id-perceptions and the Real that is not anchored in the Symbolic resonate with the ‘bWo’. Deleuze, in his collaboration with Guattari, will, in fact, twist the unconscious from the perspective of the Real (Sauvagnargues, 2016), delineating possibilities for subjectivity and political life accordingly. The shared plane in which the unconscious is open to an immanent and ethical positioning along others is named an ‘assemblage’, a mode of togetherness in which “objects constitute themselves in a transversal, vibratory position, conferring on them a soul, a becoming ancestral, animal, vegetal, cosmic” (Guattari, 1995a, p. 102). Their ontological and ethical proposition, therefore, accounts for the possibilities of the unconscious beyond not only an individualist or family-centred model, but also beyond a human-exceptionalism framework. Vibration assumes the function of an ethical and political utopia in Guattari’s ‘To Have done with the Massacre of the Body’, from 1973: “We want to open our bodies to the bodies of other people, to other people in general. We want to let vibrations pass among us, let energies circulate, allow desires to merge” (Guattari, 2009, p. 212).

Deleuze and Guattari: Vibrating Together

Rather than focusing on the ‘castrations’ Oedipal models perceive as structural in the unconscious, Deleuze and Guattari, working together in the difficult and experimental Capitalism and Schizophrenia titles, published between 1972 and 1980, see the unconscious as a space of positive desire production, a space for expansion rather than a place for lack and neurotic limitations. Instead of the Mirror Stage and the realms of the Symbolic and the Imaginary—which give rise to a desire anchored in the Other and aiming at recognition, as proposed by Lacan—they see the unconscious as ‘rhizomatic’ and desire as a creative force. Rejecting the ‘arborescent’ structure defended by psychoanalysis (a vertical, centralised, one-way model) they put forward the opposite to it: the rhizome, which undermined the very notion of structure, proposing an unconscious which is not fixed, instead multiple and fluid (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The rhizome is defined in a passage at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus, which reads: “unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21). Rhizomes are also ‘acentered’, not coming from one specific point neither going to any single direction. This multiple nature allows rhizomes to ceaselessly establish “connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7), an idea that seems to expand the Lacanian premises of the Imaginary and the Symbolic as having to work with their delineating limitations, granting one another the capacity to fulfil itself. Rhizomatic subjects engage with all the potentiality that ‘vibrates’ around them (also in them, through them, and so on), in a way “that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of ‘becomings’” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21). Desire, emerging from ‘desiring-machines’ through desire-production, “is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 1). For them, the meeting of desiring-machines (which derive from a non-distinctive classification between humans, nature, etc.) allows for a ‘coupling’ from which the interruption of one flow of desire generates another flow, in another direction, forming a rhizomatic cartography which is, inherently, multi-directional (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). When flows of desire are interrupted, a Body without Organs emerges, presenting its “smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 8), subverting any notion of bodies being ‘hermetically’ organised. The BwO is an all-encompassing version of the organism, comprising the ‘virtual’ affective potentialities that a body carries with it—in a sense similar to what Lacan suggests with the Real towards the late phase of his writings (as a register which is ‘unbound’)—only by the engagement with this ‘machine’ of desire-production. A ‘becoming’, as described in Anti-Oedipus, happens when this realm of virtual potentiality is activated, in the meeting of “the process of production of the desiring-machines and the nonproductive stasis of the body without organs” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 8). Without veering away from this archival tracing of ‘vibration’, it is worth mentioning that such proposition of becoming in relation to the BwO takes us back to Lygia Clark’s vibrational body and its openness to co-poiesis in her practice.

Both in Anti-Oedipus and in A Thousand Plateaus, ‘vibration’ appears as part of Deleuze and Guattari’s lexicon, often-times relating to their writings on art, music and literature and their potency in engendering new worlds and new aesthetic paradigms. In a passage of Anti-Oedipus where they critically engage with the Freudian understanding of love, sexuality and libido, vibration operates as a non-situated, collective and connecting quality of libido. To hold onto this, I will fragment this specific passage in more detail. They start by positioning psychoanalysis within a specific modern tradition that is particularly conservative, claiming, with humour, that “psychoanalysis has not made its pictorial revolution” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 352), thus, is still attached to an ‘old’ aesthetic reference. The Freudian framework of Oedipus therefore modulates libido and the body within a specific political economy:

There is a hypothesis dear to Freud: the libido does not invest the social field as such except on condition that it be desexualized and sublimated. If he holds so closely to this hypothesis, it is because he wants above all to keep sexuality in the limited framework of Narcissus and Oedipus, the ego and the family. Consequently, every sexual libidinal investment having a social dimension seems to him to testify to a pathogenic state, a “fixation” in narcissism, or a “regression” to Oedipus and to the pre-oedipal stages, by means of which homosexuality will be explained as a reinforced drive, and paranoia as a means of defense. We have seen on the contrary that what the libido invested, through its loves and sexuality, was the social field itself in its economic, political, historical, racial, and cultural determinations: in delirium the libido is continually re-creating History, continents, kingdoms, races, and cultures. Not that it is advisable to put historical representations in the place of the familial representations of the Freudian unconscious, or even the archetypes of a collective unconscious. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 352)

Collectivising this modulation by extending its symbolic “essentialism”, in a Jungian manner, alternatively, is not the solution either, as they hint above. Rather, they argue, libido is a matter of encounters with others, indexing social relations that cannot be reduced to ‘history’ (or a transcendental connecting illusion), but harnessed into a ‘geohistory’ (or a cartography of relations). Opening libido to the level of vibration would thus do away with the necessity of a subjectivity that is modulated within the political economy of the modern and Oedipal family, organised by its binary and phallic sexual difference. For them, “our choices in matters of love are at the crossroads of ‘vibrations’, which is to say that they express connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions of flows that cross through a society, entering and leaving it, linking it up with other societies, ancient or contemporary, remote or vanished, dead or yet to be born” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 353). Libido, through the perspective of a vibrational body, thus, has an affective character and it is harnessed in the socius in a way of encounters that extend beyond the limits of a historical (and Symbolic) delineation of reality. In Anti-Oedipus, therefore, we can find the path contrary to the modulation of desire; or a rescuing of the early-Freud libido as harnessed to the collective rather than the socius. They write:

But flows and codes of socius that do not portray anything, that merely designate zones of libidinal intensity on the body without organs, and that are emitted, captured, intercepted by the being that we are then determined to love, like a point-sign, a singular point in the entire network of the intensive body that responds to History, that vibrates with it. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 353)

In A Thousand Plateaus, vibration appears as synonymous to ‘becomings’ in the ‘plane of consistency’. We can move beyond the early-Freud libidinal excess theory into finding here resonances to what Lacan hints without theorising in his later conceptualisation of the Real. Instead of operating in a logic of ‘two’ (as the planes made possible by, for example, the modulating libidinal economy of psychoanalysis), multiplicities are kept alive in what they call a ‘plane of consistency’, defining that:

Far from reducing the multiplicities’ number of dimensions to two, the plane of consistency cuts across them all, intersects them in order to bring into coexistence any number of multiplicities, with any number of dimensions. The plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete forms. Therefore all becomings are written like sorcerers’ drawings on this plane of consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for them. This is the only criterion to prevent them from bogging down, or veering into the void. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 251)

It is at this level, of the plane of consistency, that the ‘imperceptible’ can be ‘seen and heard’, that vibrations are located. Vibration, therefore, is a quality of affect. If we return to earlier pages and to Deleuze’s course on Spinoza and affect, the collective and non-representational aspects of affect are again rescued in ‘vibration’. Vibration, accordingly, resonates affectively, opening up to what is not known, which is not divided in two, keeping multiplicity alive. It is also “where the imperceptible is seen and heard”, when the body is open to sensation, even the most subtle ones.

Interestingly, the body in its materiality and capacity for sensation versus a cognitive self-consciousness will again be linked with vibration in their last co-authored book—risking slight dualistic undertones, they still extrapolate the complex entanglement between concept and matter, echoing Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s theory of affects as still relational, as mentioned. The final account of the pair Deleuze and Guattari on vibration appears in What is Philosophy?, first published in 1991. In this piece, again, vibration is utilised in relation to music, philosophy and art, but there is one specific passage that connects vibration with the materiality of the ‘I’, the brain and nervous system and the field of the ‘other’. They write:

It is the brain that says I, but I is an other. It is not the same brain as the brain of connections and secondary integrations, although there is no transcendence here. And this I is not only the “I conceive” of the brain as philosophy, it is also the “I feel” of the brain as art. Sensation is no less brain than the concept. If we consider the nervous connections of excitation-reaction and the integrations of perception action, we need not ask at what stage on the path or at what level sensation appears, for it is presupposed and withdrawn. The withdrawal is not the opposite but a correlate of the survey. Sensation is excitation itself, not insofar as it is gradually prolonged and passes into the reaction but insofar as it is preserved or preserves its vibrations. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 211)

It is clear that the I, or the subject of consciousness and enunciation, speaks to that level of subjectivity which is not only conscious but which is actualised through language. What I find particular compelling about their addition to vibration and sensation here is how it echoes yet again what Freud hinted at in his ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’, from 1938, namely the quality of the Id as being capable of perceptions that extend beyond the ego and consciousness. Here, then, it becomes clear how vibration is an unconscious sensation.

For Deleuze and Guattari, as this genealogy of the notion of vibration makes very clear, subjectivity extends to the level of ‘sensation’, or the level of ‘vibration’. Their final definition of vibration addresses precisely this almost ‘materiality’ of the unconscious; or, as contemporary Lacanians would express it, how the unconscious is the speaking-body:

Sensation contracts the vibrations of the stimulant on a nervous surface or in a cerebral volume: what comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears. This is its way or responding to chaos. Sensation itself vibrates because it contracts vibrations. It preserves itself because it preserves vibrations: it is Monument. It resonates because it makes its harmonics resonate. Sensation is the contracted vibration that has become quality, variety. That is why the brain-subject is here called soul or force, since only the soul preserves by contracting that which matter dissipates, or radiates, furthers, reflects, refracts, or converts. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 211)

In their complex cosmologic assemblage, vibrations of the world are constant, captured by ‘sensation’, which is a capacity of the I that goes beyond ‘knowledge’ and beyond ‘feeling’. If we add a Lacanian layer to this, we can place ‘sensation’ at the level of an affective Real, rather than the Symbolic (knowledge) or the Imaginary (feelings).

Vibrating the Clinic

Guattari’s solo meditations and theoretical production were as ambitious and consistent as those he imparted with Deleuze in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. His writings reflect the onto-epistemic twists proposed by Deleuze, and focus on what he calls ‘schizoanalytic cartographies’ and a ‘diagrammatic’ mode of thought. The kernel of his contributions relates to the possibilities of a ‘vibrational’ Real.

The Real in Guattari is not confined to the margins of representation, as a negative of the ‘phenomenological’ Thing, as a structuralist-minded understanding of early to mid-life Lacan insists on, and late-Lacan perhaps leaves open ended (Guattari, 1995b). Guattari worked on a detailed transdisciplinary project of semiotics, metamodeling and expression in his solo writing before, during and after his encounter with Deleuze. He sought inspiration in the linguistic theory of ‘Glossematics’, from the Danish linguist Hjelmslev and his semiotic matrix of polyvocality, which, differently to the Saussurean model of linguistics that inspired Lacan, offers scope for the expression of a-signifying ruptures, rather than confining them as a negative to the ‘bivocality’ of representation. To Guattari, “the subjectivity produced in the world of signification is a shut-in, a semiological shipwreck” (Genosko, 2002, p. 168), in which “polyvocity becomes bi[uni]vocity” (Genosko, 2002, p. 169). In his published personal notebooks The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2006) and in A Thousand Plateaus, co-authored with Deleuze, several references to the question of expression beyond the possibilities of representation are made. Guattari’s model of the subject also expands Hjelmslev’s linguistic ideas to ‘matter’/’substance’, including not only the social and the political as well as the ecological and the biological into a common matrix of affectability, or into a metamodeling of the ‘machine’. Janell Watson, a scholar of Guattari’s complex diagrammatic thinking, writes that “the political potential of Guattari’s semiotic matrix lies in its refusal to let go of the real, as does Lacan by focusing on a signifier which cannot possibly even ‘represent’ the real. Guattari’s matrix can include the real because it does not confine itself to the domain of representation—in other words, the small ellipsis of language” (Watson, 2008, para.44). Such ‘diagrammatic’ thought, moving beyond the possibilities of representation and non-representation, shakes completely the Lacanian primacy of the Symbolic for subjective formation, which is implied in Lacanian topological models (until the 1970s, at least). As such, “forging a path of access to the real opens up political possibilities, whereas blocking out the real shuts down politics. The capitalist and psychoanalytic politics of signification which upholds the tyranny of the signifier in turn preserves the domination of the ruling classes” (Watson, 2008, para.44). This dense theoretical twist has powerful clinical implications—it opens space for a ‘nomadic ethics’ (Braidotti, 2006a), or for ‘becomings’ rather than ‘beings’ in the psychoanalytic clinic.

The clinical model practiced by Guattari on the back of his collaboration with Deleuze and his connection with the Institutional Psychotherapy movement in France (known as schizoanalysis) is thus a practice of ‘becomings’ (Robcis, 2021). For them, when dealing with the unconscious, “it is not the lines of pressure that matter, but on the contrary the lines of escape” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 338), lines of flight, of movement. Instead of a clinic focused on the power of repression (and foreclosure and disavowal, as the psychotic and perverse core mechanisms in the Lacanian clinic), schizoanalysis works with the power of the ‘lines of flight’. For them “the unconscious does not apply pressure to consciousness; rather, consciousness applies pressure and strait-jackets the unconscious, to prevent its escape” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 338). Thus being, the lines of flight, the moments of inventiveness and creativity not only in the symptom but in the sinthôme, is what keeps one alive and is the key to a clinic of becoming (Biehl & Locke, 2017). As a clinical practitioner, ‘thinking-with’ (rather than ‘against’) these theorists enables me to move beyond discursivity in what concerns the ‘grammar of suffering’ in the case of anxiety (Dunker, 2015), thinking of the materiality of the body, and life, in light of the ontological turn in medical anthropology (Mol, 2002; Biehl, 2005). Unconscious ‘lines of flight’ meet a ‘common’ (Federici, 2019, 2020) ‘nomadic affectivity’ (Braidotti, 2006b).

For this reason, the influence of Deleuze and Guattari in the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform, for example, is notorious. Aside from the historical fact that Guattari visited Brazil during the period of re-democratisation after the Military Dictatorship relinquished in the early 1980s, taking part in critical psychiatric meetings, the schizoanalytic model finds, to this day resonances in the public mental health care system (Amarante & Nunes, 2018). As asylums started to be closed, following an international trend of psychiatric reform in the 1980s, outpatient ‘psychosocial support centres’ (CAPS) were established nationally after the year 2000. The centrality of music and art therapy, as well as the importance of community care and psychosocial work in ‘territories’ in Brazilian public mental health, is frequently justified ‘schizoanalytically’. Arriscado Nunes and Siqueira-Silva (2016) argue that this schizoanalytic appropriation in the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform confers a decolonial quality to its practices, once suffering, ruptures and the production of meaning are bound to the community and to a local temporality, rather than enclosed within hegemonic (and colonial) psychiatric frames or psychoanalytic models. Accordingly, the clinical reverberations of schizoanalysis are also present in the ontological turn observed within medical anthropology (Mol, 2002), challenging universalising dominant health epistemologies that offer little or no space for the multiple performances and experiences of illness, suffering, health and the body.Footnote 9

The ruptures characteristic of psychic suffering and ‘madness’ (psychoses, more often) need, according to the schizoanalytic model, to be supported with grounds of expression that are not enclosed to individual psychotherapy and psychiatric care (in other words, not forced into the limits of being, but open to multiple becomings). Rather, the expression of such unconscious ruptures needs to be collective and territorialised in the community, crossing aesthetic, sensorial and political zones of affect (Lancetti, 2015). That is what Guattari (2015) called a clinical model of ‘transversality’. The transversal moves the centre of the axis of enunciation from the subject and their triangular relation with the Other and the analyst, challenging the power structure (or colonising violence) sustained by the classic transferential relation in psychoanalysis. Instead of relying on the fixity of psychic structures (neurosis, psychosis and perversion)—which stems off Lacan’s linguistic logic (and the representation versus non-representation binary of this linguistic model)—or on the function of interpretations that are Oedipally inscribed (with sexual difference, the family drama and castration at its core)—a plural and situated clinic is proposed. Whilst there is significant literature on the influence of Deleuze and Guattari in the Brazilian Psychiatric reform in relation to psychosis (similarly to the legacy of French Institutional Psychotherapy, see Robcis, 2021), little is offered in relation to the potential of the schizoanalytic model in the clinic of anxiety. What the archival mobilisation allows us to do is to extend the clinical value of unconscious ‘lines of flight’ into the clinic of anxiety.

In Guattari’s practice, the commitment to the ‘lines of flight’ is apparent in the institutional mobilisation of what we can call now the ‘full-void’ into co-poiesis. Guattari (1998) has offered a rich account of how such power relations were challenged in practice at the clinic of La Borde in his essay ‘La Grille’. The ‘grid’ of activities and function was fundamental to the emergency of ‘deregulation frames’ (cadrer le dérèglements) that would act as a system of articulation of all the patients, staff and space, allowing for the “invention of a [new] language”. The set of relations and their non-hierarchical arrangements of the clinic were fundamental to the treatment to mostly cases of psychoses at La Borde. In defending this model of clinical practice psychosocially, the question to be worked out is not just of the macropolitical effects of the ‘pimping of life’ (Rolnik, 2019), but of its ‘molecular’ dynamics, as Guattari (2000) argues in The Three Ecologies. Following Denise Ferreira da Silva (2016), who proposes that such an ethico-political project does not entail simply tracing ‘differences’ and the effects of difference for what they are (a strategy of thinking she calls ‘critique’), even when providing an intersectional feminist critique; rather, it is matter of moving beyond ‘separating’ estrangements and proposing ‘entanglements’ instead.Footnote 10 In other words, clinically engaging at the molecular level means not only speaking of the ‘effects’ of the logic of the Same/One across human multiplicities; nor does it involve thinking radically through a psychoanalytic archive whilst still succumbing the Real, ruptures, a-signification and affects, such as anxiety, to the limits of universalist signifiers and a corresponding Symbolic structure.

As such, going back to Guattari’s polyvocal Real, we can trace what I am gathering as Guattari’s ‘theory of anxiety’. The ruptures of a vibrational Real add a particular nuance to Guattari’s understanding of anxiety, a conceptualisation he does not develop in detail but that he insinuates in various moments. Guattari places ‘anguish’ within the domain of the ruptures—beyond the limits of bivocality—which, in his critique of psychoanalysis and ‘Integrated World Capitalism’—his own vocabulary for neoliberal capitalism—is prevented from operating its ‘surprise’. He writes:

Everything that pertains to the domain of rupture, surprise, and anguish, but also desire, the will to love and to create, somehow has to fit into the registers of dominant references. There is always an arrangement ready to prevent anything that might be of a dissident nature in thought and desire. There is an attempt to eliminate what I call the processes of singularization. Everything that surprises, however mildly, has to be classifiable in some area of framing or reference. (Guattari & Rolnik, 2007, pp. 58–59)

The psychoanalytic (and, we can add, the psychodiagnosis that extended through the twentieth century) modus operadi is, to Guattari, one of such frames that modulates anguish and its ruptures under the Modern shadow of subjectivity. Affects and anguish are contextually modulated and our relation to them is indicative of our cartographical positioning, Guattari writes: “every individual and social group conveys its own system of modelising subjectivity; that is, a certain cartography—composed of cognitive references as well as mythical, ritual and symptomatological references—with which it positions itself in relation to its affects and anguishes, and attempts to manage its inhibitions and drives” (Guattari, 1995a, p. 11). Anguish, or anxiety, by being situated within the domain of a-signifying ruptures are not reduceable to the binary (representability versus non-representability) logic of the Symbolic as anchored over the paradigm of ‘lack’.

Guattari makes this argument clearer in a note entitled ‘Of Anxiety, the Phallic Object and Interpretation’, published as part of his Anti-Oedipus Papers. There Guattari places anxiety as “the intermixture of two intersecting drives—Faithfulness to polyvocal remainders (the mother) (adhesion to the remainders, adherence to the Lacanian ‘a’)—Desire for bi-univocal oedipal normality” (Guattari, 2006, p. 103). In a diagram I am nicknaming ‘Guattari’s Graph of Anxiety’, Guattari maps ‘eros’ (or affect, jouissance, libido, for him) as extending beyond the death-drive that anchors attachment to bi-univocality. He proposes a small circle of ‘bi-univocality’ is anchored by the death drive; a larger circle wraps it in its middle, this larger one anchored by polyvocality and headed by eros. The unconscious (Eros) is thus moored by polyvocality—or multiple possibilities of enunciation, expression or representation that do not fit into any Symbolic structure or arrangement. What this implies is that the affect of anxiety is not reducible to interpretation, nor indexed to a relation to the Phallic Law-of-the-Father, Oedipus and the Other that anchor the Symbolic. What this diagram, followed by this study on vibration, enables us to map is that Guattari offers a complementing theory of anxiety that Freud and Lacan only hinted at but were not able to clearly delineate. What we see here is the potency of anxiety in a clinic that encounters the subject anxious, at the edge of their being, but not yet open to novel becomings.

Following the trail of ‘vibration’ through the oeuvre of Deleuze and Guattari, affect is an ethical disposition that is collectively produced. Affect vibrates beyond the confines of an individual and the Symbolic frame that modulates one’s experience of such affects. We have arrived at this ethical framing of the subject in Deleuze and Guattari by pursuing a cartographic genealogy of the concept of vibration, discussing how it is crucial to the understanding of notions of ‘sensation’ and of ‘affect’ within this tradition of thinking. Anxiety, as an affect of rupture, exceeds the modulation of the bivocality of possibilities assumed by the psychoanalytic model and, as such, is inscribed in the plane of the ‘commons’, following Federici (2019, 2020); or of a nomadic ethics (Braidotti, 2006a) instead of a logic of ‘difference with separability’ and domination (Ferreira da Silva, 2016). In other words, possibilities for ‘becomings’ rather than ‘beings’ in the psychoanalytic clinic.

Returning to the critique presented earlier in the book—which point at a process of ‘dividualisation’ (Deleuze, 1992) in the process of diagnosis and treatment of anxiety, extending such alienation to a psychoanalytic orientation that is restricted to the possibilities of ‘being’, rather than of ‘becoming’—what proves necessary is an encounter between the common, the affective, collective, ethical disposition rescued in the concept of ‘vibration’, and psychoanalytic possibilities. How can we conceive an understanding of anxiety in psychoanalysis that is not dividualising? Can psychoanalysis work with an unconscious that vibrates? This is what I move into arguing, shifting from anxiety and its estrangement, as we have set out in the beginning, to a possible entanglement, as we will conclude.