In order to approach the question ‘What can anxiety do?’, we have explored the possibilities and impossibilities of this encounter with the Real, this excessive affect, in psychoanalytic praxis. And we have done so by naming this encounter a vibration. Anxiety, according to this hypothesis, vibrates through me that which extends beyond me or my grasp. In this book, we arrive at vibration via the work of Lygia Clark and her critique of the ‘limits of the Plane’ and the possibilities of a frontier ‘full-void’, as her understanding of the common bodily unconscious in her ‘Structuring of the Self’ (1976–1988) series.

Vibration is the conceptual artifice we utilise in order to be able to think of affects beyond the individual, beyond the Oedipal frame, beyond Symbolic-Imaginary realms, beyond ego-to-ego relations and a short-circuit of bodily jouissance. As such, Clark’s ‘full-void’ reorients the Real. Vibration, as we learn with Suely Rolnik (2000), is the ethical capacity of affect recombination, creativity and a model of political ontology that is in tune with contemporary epistemological, ecological and political demands—namely, an interdependent, entangled horizon of subjectivity and bio-politics. Vibration is a term I mobilise not only from the artistic practice of Lygia Clark, but also in its roots in Deleuze and Guattari’s rich commentaries on psychoanalysis, which I am bringing to a discussion on the contemporary status of anxiety.

Anxiety as vibration is an understanding of anxiety as not just a matter of a ‘transindividual’ subjectivity (which necessarily depends on recognition vis-à-vis the Other), rather, it allows me to conceptualise an entangled, affected subject. By doing so, I offer a psycho-political frame for the clinic that moves beyond the affective alienation of ‘being’, seeking in the rupture of anxiety not only a ground for a dialectic recognition, rather, working with the rupture of anxiety as compost for a ‘common’ ground. As a theoretical contribution, it is a move that enables me to work within psychoanalytic praxis whilst going beyond the level of ‘critique’ and embarking on the possibilities of ‘creativity’. As Braidotti puts it, in an interview: “Critique ties you to the present (diagnosis, resistance, cartographies) but creativity is the future. Creativity projects you into where we’re going next. Critique and creativity imply different temporal frameworks” (Braidotti, 2013). My psychosocial thinking is situated thus within this double vision of both critique and creativity, a tension I hold on to throughout this cartographic effort. In this sense, Tosquelles’ militant political ‘prophecy’ entails a creative gaining of unconsciousness.

By theorising anxiety as an entangled vibration, this affect assumes a possibility of opening a way into a ‘gaining of unconsciousness’ (Tosquelles, 1991), acting, in this psychosocial cartography, as the threshold between subjective, theoretical and clinical critique and creativity. In sum, I mobilise anxiety as the looking-glass, in order to think through a psychoanalytic praxis beyond the ‘pimping of Life’ (Rolnik, 2017). Anxiety is the affect I work with in the search for a critique of the dividualising residues in psychoanalysis of the Freudian and Lacanian orientations, moving towards a possible creative clinic, inspired by Guattari and Lygia Clark, where rupture is co-assembled, rather than in-dividualised within the psycho-politics of alienation grounded in the orbit of the Oedipal Other. Creativity opens the affect of anxiety, in its clinical and conceptual manifestations, into the germination of new modes of living, into sinthômes.

In other words, this cartography follows the complex path of a formulation of anxiety as a vibration, taking it from estrangement to entanglement. The conclusion lays on a practice that works not with interpretation but with co-poiesis—a poetic, collective, generative construction that departs from affect, resisting domination and moving towards situated ways of existing.

Negativity and Affirmation: Staying with this Trouble

Lacan’s elaboration of the subject through (post-)structuralist lenses has made clear a certain ‘politicisation’ of the psychoanalytic subject, smashing, in the words of Rosi Braidotti, “any illusion of atomized individuality by embedding the subject in the thick materiality of a symbolic system of which language is the most available source. [Allowing] for subtler analyses of the interaction between self and society and among different selves than liberal, ego-based psychology” (Braidotti, 2006a, p. 18). Yet, an integral part of the model of subjectivity proposed by Lacan comes with ‘negativity’, or a ‘lack’ as its anchor. The debate around the centrality of lack in psychoanalysis is not new in feminist theory (see Brennan, 1989); whilst a clear contrast with an ‘affirmative’ model of the subject takes shape through the theoretical influence of Deleuze and Guattari to the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, the arts and humanities in more general terms.

Both ‘negativity’ and ‘affirmation’—or ‘immanence’ of desire—may carry radical politics within themselves as conceptual frames through which we can think subjectivity, the psyche and, as is my concern here, the status and potencies of anxiety. Such radical potential should not be brushed off in search of a ‘neat’ philosophy of psychoanalysis (even if then remaining very faithful to Freudian or Lacanian teachings); that is an approach to knowledge Lacan famously rebuked in his Seminar XVII The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (delivered between 1969–1970), one that he called the discourse of the ‘master’. In this book, my aim has been not to stretch a detailed argument for or against negativity, for or against affirmation of desire as many scholars have done (from David-Menard, 2014 to Schuster, 2016 or Nedoh & Zevnik, 2017). That would be a theoretical exercise of value, especially to philosophy, but one which can turn easily ideological and sour—a way of approaching psychoanalysis that according to Guattari, in The Three Ecologies, from 1989, “tends to the ornamental garden of psychoanalysis”. Rather, I remain faithful to psychoanalysis’ radical potential, which to me means the impossibility of ‘total’ knowledge of either oneself or the other; which can be translated as an ethics of the encounter that is not reliant on ‘intersubjectivity’ in the object relational sense but on the challenges of relations among divided subjects and how this plays out in the clinical setting. Following Frosh (2006), I hold on to the value of the ‘critique’ of totalising models present in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, once “what is preserved in the Lacanian critique of the object relational tendency of most contemporary psychoanalysis is one of the more radical elements of psychoanalytic thought: a pessimism concerning the possibility of positive knowledge as against negative knowledge, or critique” (Frosh, 2006, p. 20). Being truthful to this spirit means to constantly rethink psychoanalytic ideas, theories and practice in light of an always changing—and plural, multiple—world (or worlds). This is an effort Braidotti (2013) has called ‘creativity’; or the production of new systems of reference, opening to the creation of new repertoires of worlds, rather than an attachment to (a stunningly male and white) dialectics of desire as lack in the heart of subjectivity and the notion of ‘critique’.

In the clinic we encounter vibrant examples of negativity: from symptoms that repeat, unhealed losses that act as magnets of pain, traumatic excesses that drain and spin like a washing machine to the nonexistence of a ‘sexual rapport’, imaginary fantasies, a satisfaction that never comes and enigmas of the body that challenge the medical dictionaries but still, for all the suffering these generate, are able to sustain life in some way, resisting domination. A domination such that can stem both from the power of a disciplinary society, as described by Foucault (2008a, 2008b); and from a discreet and pervasive society of control, as elaborated by Deleuze (1992) as well as embodied external perpetrators, internalised super-egoic punishments or even collective disasters. Yet, even at the heart of ‘negativity’ there is something ‘positive’ that keeps going—or some ‘difference’ in ‘repetition’, as Deleuze (1995) would argue in the late 1960s.

Following Lacan’s very early teachings, specially Seminars I and II, and his ‘beef’ with ego-analysts and post-Freudians at the time, we can be convinced to accept the non-adaptability of the subject, which relies on a singular Real that cannot be reduced to any Imaginary delineation nor any Symbolic frame (Ruti, 2012). Identification with the analyst and a strengthening of one’s ego defences towards better ‘adaptability’ to reality was, to Lacan, in these early seminars, an ideological misinterpretation of the Freudian revolution. Insisting, therefore, in the non-adaptability of the subject (Van Haute, 2002), Lacan proposes the divided subject anchored on a ‘negativity’ of desire. This model of ‘negativity’ in Lacanian teachings, especially in the very early ones, as reflected in texts published as part of his Écrits, is heavily influenced by Kojéve’s course on Hegel, which relies on the negativity of Desire as a guarantor of ‘Self-Consciousness’ or an I/Being. Kojéve starts his course on Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of the Spirit with the contentious affirmation:

Man is Self-Consciousness. He is conscious of himself, conscious of his human reality and dignity; and it is in this that he is essentially different from animals, which do not go beyond the level of simple Sentiment of self. Man becomes conscious of himself at the moment when—for the “first” time—he says “I”. To understand man by understanding his “origin”, is, therefore, to understand the origin of the I revealed in speech. (Kojéve, 1969, p. 3)

This ‘Man’ revealed in speech as ‘self-consciousness’ comes through a negativity in desire, for Kojéve and Hegel. Lacan takes this model onboard in his Seminar V Formations of the Unconscious, delivered between 1957 and 1958, where a dialectics of desire gives consistency to subjectivity beyond ‘consciousness’. In Lacan, the ego will essentially be a ‘misrecognition’ or a mirage of the subject; a subject also crossed by discursive/social/political forces and by an excessive Real. It is in this founding ‘negativity’ of desire that ‘action’ and thus transformation of reality can happen (a formative part of Kojéve’s course on Hegel taken in by Lacan). Alenka Zupančič (2012) calls this negativity that founds ‘being’ a ‘gap’ of ‘with-without’. She does this by thinking through Freud’s essay ‘On Negation’ (1925), which famously carries the possibility of a presence in absence in speech. Negativity is not then an empty hole but an airy void, or a ‘gap’ that makes subjectivity possible.

Thus, as discussed by Frosh (2006), in light of Rustin (1995), thinking of ‘negativity’ and ‘positivity’ (as well as affirmation, immanence and nomadism) as markers of psychoanalytic approaches and politics is one of many forms of politicising psychoanalysis. Frosh writes: “Differentiating between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ traditions in psychoanalysis is only, of course, one possible take on the variety of ways in which the psychoanalytic field can be divided up” (Frosh, 2006, p. 21). And completes: “Nevertheless, it is a powerful one, reflecting the complexity of the critical positions taken up by psychoanalysis and the alternative possibilities of different attitudes towards therapeutic, political or cultural change” (Frosh, 2006, p. 21). In such a non-adaptability of the subject (Van Haute, 2002), which is the cornerstone of Lacanian psychoanalysis, ‘negativity’ and ‘positivity’, or rather, ‘affirmation’ and immanence, meet and we stay with this trouble by thinking of the Real as an ‘excess’, or a beyond-the-subject that is affective, entangled and collective, as proposed by Guattari (1989; Guattari & Rolnik, 2007). It is in one’s excess beyond oneself that affirmation insists, according to feminist post-humanist critiques, such as that of Braidotti (2006a, 2006b, 2017), as she unpacks the modern humanist (and colonial-patriarchal) logic behind the constitution of a relation to reality, knowledge and being that German Idealism (Hegel and Kant, as her critique goes) produced and psychoanalysis still reproduces. Following this logic and when situating psychoanalysis epistemologically, historically and politically, such a ‘lack’ doesn’t hold. Rather, negativity becomes the mark of a situated neurotic (European, male, etc.) ontological delineation (Ettinger, 2019).Footnote 1 Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, from 1972 and 1980, addresses exactly this problem, offering an explosion of psychoanalysis from within (from the triangular Oedipus to rhizomatic thousand plateaus). Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, can be considered an extension of the Lacanian endeavour, taking his critiques to mainstream psychiatry and psychoanalysis even further (Dosse, 2010).

If we consider Canguilhem’s critiques of psychology, touching both on the theoretical ‘idea of Man’—the philosophy and anthropology of any psychology—and the matter of ‘what it hopes to achieve’, which extends beyond an ontological question and engages with enquiring about the therapeutic direction of the treatment, ideas of normality and pathology and cure, we may think of this riddle of affirmation versus negativity differently. Whilst the ontological grounds between negativity and affirmation can be contrasted vividly, in the praxis, especially if we follow Freud, Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari from beginning to end, through their journeys, exploring potentialities of radical non-normative elements of their traditions, there is more opportunity of encounters, convergences and a possible thinking-with rather than a tired thinking-against. Neither Freud, Lacan nor Deleuze and Guattari were interested in maintaining paradigms of normality or corresponding with psychiatric dogma. In their own way, the singularity of their encounters in the clinic was their main compass. Psychoanalysis reinvents itself in each new session, yet, as Guattari argues in Chaosmosis, the “Freudian Unconscious has itself evolved in the course of its history: it has lost the seething richness and disquieting atheism of its origins and, in its structuralist version, has been recentered on the analysis of the self, its adaptation to society, and its conformity with a signifying order” (Guattari, 1995, p. 10). In this sense, holding on to the conceptual framework that anxiety is a vibration beyond the sheer subjective knotting that can act as indicator of possible new references or worlds adheres to the reality of repetitions and the possibilities of multiplicity in the clinic (Guattari & Rolnik, 2007). When asking what does psychoanalysis hope to achieve, the creative production of new possibilities of living is what brings together these theoretical and clinical approaches that have been thought-with each other and not just thought-against each other.

It is fundamental to acknowledge Lacan’s rejection of ‘adaptation’; and I see the project Deleuze and Guattari began—one carried further by feminist, post/decolonial thinkers and contemporary philosophers such as Suely Rolnik, Rosi Braidotti—as ethically attuned to the Lacanian spirit. At the end of the day, Lacan subverted mainstream psychoanalysis and revised his own understandings of it from the late 1930s until the late 1970s. When ‘negativity’ in its Hegelian sense is criticised by Braidotti (2011, 2019) or Deleuze and Guattari, what is being proposed is not an ‘affirmative’ version of psychoanalysis that is based on adaptability and the ego (thus a ‘non-antagonistic’ model as Žižek (2010) loves to point out in his rejection of Deleuzean ideas). Quite the contrary, the immanence of desire and an ethics of affirmation—when accounting for the unconscious, the realities of the clinic and suffering as well as for the modern humanist onto-epistemic foundations of Freud and Lacan—is a ‘non-adaptability’ of a constantly creative potency taken to its possible limits (Perci Schiavon, 2019).

Whilst repetition, suffering and a general sense of being stuck as well as paralysed by anxiety are often the reasons why people seek psychoanalysis—confirming the pull and gravity of the death drive—difference, production or affirmation lace the creativity of being, or the ‘becomings’ present in post-Deleuzean thinking. The creativity of living, the creativity of symptoms, the creativity of the enigmas of the body and, ultimately, the creativity to keep-on-living at times against many odds cannot but be witnesses to a plane of immanence, a desire that is production and affirmation that post-Deleuzian and Guattarian thinkers call ‘Life’ (Biehl & Locke, 2017). This juxtaposition of life and death, affirmation and negativity, critique and creativity, and the potency of engaging with this trouble is what I rescue in this formulation of anxiety, following the non-adaptability of the subject, the mistrust in the mirage of the ego and the Imaginary that are so fundamental to Lacanian psychoanalysis, but also keeping the ‘Life Against Death’—to use Norman Brown’s 1959 book title on Freud and Spinoza (Brown, 1959)—character of the affect of anxiety.

Freud’s description of Eros and Thanatos, or the libidinal ‘life’ of affirmation and the repetitive, destructive Death Drive are paradoxes that follow his own complex journey of establishing a theory of the psyche with clinical preoccupations, cultural and political endeavours, and an ‘ontologising’ of suffering (one of his accomplishments but also pitfalls—Deleuze and Guattari (1983) view Freud’s ontology as one of the neurotic European man, trapped in the Oedipal drama). For Freud, “only by the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two primal instincts—Eros and the death-instinct—never by one or the other alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life” (Freud, 1937, p. 243). The Freudian writings on anxiety accompany his journey of making sense of this libidinal excess—of life, death, this beyond ‘me’—as both connected to negativity and to affirmation. From his early letters to Fliess in the late nineteenth century, to the 1930s ‘New Introductory Lectures’, with his last theory of anxiety, this paradoxical version of the subject vis-à-vis libido, the body, affect and the conflict of the drives remains operative. Alenka Zupančič, arguing that both Deleuze and Lacan were in a sense very faithful to Freud’s discovery, notices that “for both Lacan and Deleuze repetition is essentially related to the death drive as the fundamental matrix of the drive” (Zupančič, 2017, p. 166). Looking at Deleuze’s writings in Difference and Repetition, from 1968, and comparing his reading of Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ with that of Lacan, Zupančič (2017) also aligns them from the angle of an ‘excess’ that articulates or is articulated through repetition and one, as she reads it, that mobilises the affect of anxiety. She writes:

Both Lacan and Deleuze insist that the excess (of excitation) does not exist somewhere independently of repetition, but only and precisely in repetition itself and through it. In other words, the thing in defence against which repetition mobilises anxiety exists only through the repetition itself. Repetition is to be found on both sides of this movement: repetition is what brings in the excess ‘bound’ by anxiety through repetition. The death drive already involves repetition, so that the repetition itself could be seen as split, or two-sided. (Zupančič, 2017, p. 167)

Anxiety situates the subject precisely in the failure of this repetition, the ‘failure’ or the mirage of the Imaginary-Symbolic knotting that we call the subject, which keeps the Real at bay. Anxiety, therefore, not only comes through in the defence against such excess as it is, even in strict Lacanian terms, an encounter with the Real, or an encounter with an excess. Lacan, in his radical project of re-reading Freud against the mirage of the ego, gives more emphasis to death, calling all drives a ‘death drive’.Footnote 2 Whilst Lacan follows Hegel and Kojéve to the letter by assigning to negativity the condition of Being, it is in affirmation that one finds the possibilities of ‘becomings’, or of living and creating new repertoires of worlds, new Imaginaries that don’t need to cross the structure of the Symbolic, rather, new Imaginaries that stem off the Real.Footnote 3 Guattari reverses Lacanian psychoanalysis from the logic of the Real (Sauvagnargues, 2016). Yet, still in Lacan, towards his later teachings, we can find if not open doors, at least some windows ajar for the possibilities of ‘becoming’.

Being and Becomings

Lacan’s most complicated concepts such as the Real, the objet a and jouissance are wrapped in his theories of anxiety, leaving the possibilities of ‘affirmation’ hidden in the corner. Interestingly, towards his later teachings, when Lacan was working with what is known as the ‘Borromean’ Clinic or a Clinic of the Real, a Real that is no longer situated within the constraints of the Symbolic starts to appear. This later stage of his work, contradictory and complicated as all that preceded it, articulates the logic of ‘Lack’, which was the question of the Symbolic as not foundational to the subject anymore, whilst the body comes to the fore.

In some Lacanian psychoanalytic circles, an idea that “the speaking body is the 21st century unconscious” has been debated in recent years. This concept, or expression, ‘speaking body’, can be found in Lacan’s later seminars and has been made popular especially after Jacques-Alain Miller referred to it in the speech and texts of the 2016 World Association of Psychoanalysis congress, that took place in Rio de Janeiro (Miller, 2014). The ‘speaking body’ is an elusive term that does not refer exactly to the fleshy body, nor to an imaginary body, rather, it points at a body through which the subject can come into being and, therefore, produce symptoms and a sinthôme. In this spirit, in the presentation of the Scilicet tome issued prior to this congress in Brazil, in October 2015, in which various interpretations and possible meanings of the term ‘speaking body’ can be found, an interesting definition of the potency of psychoanalysis is offered. It reads: “Psychoanalysis tends to make possible for each, according to one’s singularity, the invention of an alliance between one’s body and the resources of speech against the worst” (NLS, 2015). Whilst anxiety is not specifically reformulated by Lacan in his later teachings, considering his reformulation of the Real and the move beyond the Oedipal paradigm, there is scope for rethinking the Lacanian theory of anxiety through these ‘vibrational moments’.Footnote 4

The body, according to these late-Lacanian teachings, becomes an affective site in which the Real and possible new ‘repertoires of worlds’ (an expression I borrow from Rolnik, 2019) can be articulated. Jouissance, this ambiguous Lacanian term that is akin to Freud’s libido but that translates from French as ‘enjoyment’, is central to such possible novel articulations. Miller (2000) has identified six different paradigms of jouissance throughout Lacan’s teachings. The first ones still see jouissance as wrapped around language and the subject departing from language as such. The last of these paradigms appears in Seminar XX Encore, delivered between 1972 and 1973, where jouissance gains some autonomy, and from there onwards it is the jouissance of the living body that reorients the access to the Real—not the Symbolic, anymore—opening through lalangue the possibilities of an Imaginary. In the lesson on jouissance that opens Encore, Lacan says: “The habit loves the monk [alluding to a French idiom], as they are but one thereby. In other words, what lies under the habit, what we call the body, is perhaps but the remainder (reste) I call object a. What holds the image together is a remainder” (Lacan, 1998, p. 6). In this passage, the ‘rest’, or the excess from the subject’s idea of oneself that is the ‘body’, is the anchor of the ‘image’.

Miller (2001) writes in his essay ‘Lacanian Biology’ of a movement in Lacanian teachings that establishes the relation between body and language as one of satisfaction, signification and back to satisfaction—the jouissance of the signifier on the body beyond signification—in the later works. This movement is crucial to the matter of negativity and lack, as well as the riddle of affect and the body in and beyond Lacanian psychoanalysis. The question of signification, more specifically, led to the ‘classic’ Lacanian clinic, where interpretation was a principal tool of intervention. By shifting its focus away from meaning and towards the Real inscribed in the body, technique changes towards the ‘cut’ (stopping the session precisely when the unconscious stems off, protecting it from being wrapped by further Imaginary ‘empty speech’ once more in the session), or towards a skilled use of punctuation, where adding meanings (or stretching the Imaginary through the Symbolic) is substituted by producing, together, new verses, new poems that bridge this Real of the body into an inventive use of words—what I call a co-poiesis, inspired by Lygia Clark and Guattari. From Seminar XX onwards, the end of analysis changes path, once interpretations “by introducing more signifying material in the treatment, in fact encourage meaning-making by bringing yet more water to the mill of the unconscious. By contrast, the cut isolates jouissance in speech and prevents the proliferation of meaning that makes analysis interminable” (Voruz & Wolf, 2007, p. xi). In late Lacan, or from Seminar XX onwards, “Lacan downplays the Oedipus complex, seen as a mythical—and so imaginarised—version of unconscious organisation. And it is with the des-imaginarisation of the Oedipus that the deciphering of the unconscious becomes less central in the analytic treatment” (Voruz & Wolf, 2007, p. x).Footnote 5 Analysis, thus, becomes less of a matter of ‘finding out’ and adding meaning to a puzzle and more of a creative production of something else, of a new form of living, together. Through a rhythmic, poetic succession of constructions, a common ground is established. Again, analysis becomes a locus of co-poiesis, of sprouting new worlds. Here is the possibility for thinking and treating ‘rupture’ in the clinic differently—rather than inscribing it into pre-defined frames based on Oedipal identification, castration and domination, there is a communing, there is creativity in a creation of new ways of speaking, similarly to what Guattari (1998) proposed and what Lygia Clark realised in her practice.

In this shift towards the Real in Lacan’s work, a similarity emerges with the ‘affirmation’, the multiplicity and the creativity that Deleuze and Guattari assign to a ‘becoming’. With the move beyond Oedipus, beyond the Symbolic and the Phallic Law and beyond interpretation, “the relation to meaning and truth is less valued, and for the Lacan of the later period the analytic treatment is oriented on a reduction of the symptom. The symptom has to be emptied of the jouissance procured through its articulation with the fantasy so that the subject can make use of his sinthôme to love, work, and desire” (Voruz & Wolf, 2007, p. x). The symptom, which is what Miller (2001) rescues as a Lacanian ‘biology’, is the bodily, affective, excessive repetition, and to work through it in analysis, following such logic, is to find a poetic way out of the entrapments of such repetition that produces no difference into the horizon of difference and immanence.

Contemporary Lacanians, mostly the groups of psychoanalysts connected with the World Association of Psychoanalysis (vulgarly known as ‘Millerians’, which is not always a compliment), have been directing their studies, events and practice towards the later Lacanian teachings, where the Real and affects gain another dimension beyond the constraints of the Symbolic. The focus on the ‘signifier’ as cutting the body up and marking enjoyment/jouissance without any signification/meaning brings language back to its materiality. For Miller and contemporary Lacanians, the Borromean clinic was Lacan’s attempt to formulate an Other for when there is no more Other, or what is the subject of the world like at the end of analysis (Chiesa, 2007). The Borromean knot was introduced in Lacan’s teachings apropos of Joyce and his ‘creative solution’ in psychosis. Such theoretical interventions from the mid-1970s onwards see Lacan ceasing “to take his bearings solely from the differential clinic and introduces the perspective of the Borromean knots, with the consequent production of new statements on the symptom” (Brousse, 2007, p. 83). This means that thinking through the symptom solely through the differential diagnosis—the possibilities of structure of neurosis (hysteria, obsession and phobia), psychosis (paranoia, melancholia, schizophrenia) and perversion (sadism, masochism and fetishism)—crumbles, giving rise to a more ‘singular’ arrangement of the symptom.Footnote 6 As Marie-Hélène Brousse writes, “Lacan even reverts to an ancient spelling, that of ‘sinthôme,’ to conceptualize what of the symptom cannot be reduced to structural determination” (Brousse, 2007, p. 83). The materiality of language, the Real of the symptom on the body and jouissance operate, as I argue, as indicators towards new ‘becomings’, where the Imaginary ‘is the body’ (Soler, 2014). Collete Soler (2014) writes about accessing such an Imaginary that does not rely on the structure of the Symbolic as a form of ‘knowledge’:

In contrast with science, in psychoanalysis we are dealing with the horror of the knowledge at play, which, for everyone, is nothing other than knowledge—acquired with great difficulty—about his own unconscious, as real, and its consequences. Since Freud, the main consequence has a name: castration. This name is as suggestive as it is deceptive with its connotations of mutilation, which says—though not very well and invoking too much imaginary—that for the analysand this knowledge can only be approached at the price of passing through anxiety. (Soler, 2014, p. 204)

Going through anxiety opens the possibility of creatively forging one’s sinthôme, or a new form of writing, speaking, dancing, a poiesis of Life. It is in this ambiguity of the affect of anxiety, which vacillates between ‘being’ and ‘becomings’.

Whilst psychoanalysis—Freudian and Lacanian—is inscribed within an epistemological, ethical and scientific discourse of modern humanism (following Zaretsky, 2004; Foucault, 2008a, 2008b; Makari, 2008), it also destabilises philosophical and psychological/psychiatric assumptions and ideological dogmas about subjectivity, experience and suffering.Footnote 7 One of its most radical features is that it accounts for the subject and their symptom in singularity, with an unconscious activity that is enigmatic and irreducible. Another factor of its radical and non-ideological potential is that “it is a constant feature of the analytic clinic that it rapidly encounters the limits of its theoretical framework: a case of the real catching up” (Voruz & Wolf, 2007, p. vii). In this cartography, we locate the riddle of anxiety in the psychoanalytic clinic as situated between models of negativity and of affirmation in psychoanalytic, psychosocial and philosophical literature. This discussion was contextualised in the field of critical psychiatry and psychology, tacking the psychoanalytic usefulness to the clinic of anxiety. In order to address the ‘estrangement’ of the affect of anxiety in the dividualising dynamics of diagnosis and treatment of hegemonic practices in the field of psy through the last century, I asked whether psychoanalysis can bring anxiety from estrangement into entanglement. My answer is that it not only can but that it needs to.

Aberrant Psychoanalysis

Thinking of the possibilities of ruptures and excesses within psychoanalysis, I propose to move beyond the realm of the abyss-within into the horizon-beyond. In doing so, I argue that anxiety (by being conceptualised as a vibration) must not be interpreted, rather it is to be worked through in the clinic by holding on to the situatedness of affective clues, identifying unconscious movements that collectivise and creatively travel beyond a structural and Oedipal circumscription of desire. This is the destiny of the Real, of rupture, that my creative clinic proposes; an aberrant psychoanalysis, a vibrational and urgent psycho-political intervention in the clinic.

Whereas the earlier Lacanian teachings focus on the process of subject formation as ‘transindividual’, or crossed by a shared Symbolic, organised by the Name-of-the-Father (his renaming of the psychologised and allegoric Oedipus), guaranteeing a cut that institutes desire as a lack, his later teachings will move away from such a structured engine. In Lacan’s critique of the ‘unitary’ (or ‘positive’ instead of affirmative) subject of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, I have argued that it is not the Symbolic that extends beyond oneself, but the Real, a resisting excess that grants the subject a non-adaptive quality. Guattari’s version of the Real encompasses affirmation rather than negativity or lack. The transcendent position of the Lacanian Law is put into context through the unveiling of its means of production.

Poiesis would come about for Guattari through possibilities of expression of ruptures, or, what is done to the Real (the jouissance of the Symptom, Anxiety, the Real of the body) in the clinical encounter. Is the Real compost for novel germinations or is it displaced in pre-existing narratives of a subjective drama? In other words, what do we do with anxiety—this appearance of the Real—in the clinic? Do we expand the possibilities of expression, supporting poiesis, or do we trim it with interpretations so that they fit into a pre-arranged composition?

According to Guattari, in The Three Ecologies, an ‘a-signifying rupture’ catalyses poiesis beyond the barriers of what the subject can grasp, or beyond our repertoire of worlds, as Suely Rolnik (2019) puts it. These ruptures need however to be offered a platform of expression. Psychopathological repetitions and anxiety are, for Guattari, rooted in the danger of such ruptures losing consistency and remaining passive to these moulds of repertoire of worlds (2000, p. 45). What Rolnik (2019) calls a ‘repertoire of worlds’, is an Imaginary-Symbolic arrangement that gets reproduced through pre-existing narratives, structures and psychoanalytic interpretation—the focus of Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms towards psychoanalysis. In his Dialogues with Claire Parnet, from 1977, Deleuze summarises his and Guattari’s objections towards psychoanalysis in one sentence: “we only said two things against psychoanalysis: that it breaks up all productions of desire and crushes all formations of utterances” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. 77). Interpretations that fit or dissolve such ruptures, the Real, this excess, into a pre-existing Imaginary-Symbolic frame are, therefore, the counter-poietic element of psychoanalysis, according to them, neutralising, normalising, reducing or stopping any poiesis of new repertoires of the world, of situating the subject as part of a common of multiple others. Such interpretations operate instead by insisting on totalising universals that echo the humanist, modern, patriarchal and colonial roots of the Imaginary-Symbolic knot that situates psychoanalysis within an epistemology of a world in decline, or an ‘anthropo-phallus-ego-logo-centric’ [antropo-falo-ego-logocêntrica] (Rolnik, 2019) anchor of the capitalist colonial unconscious. Such a process has been called by Rolnik (2017) “the pimping of life”.

Whilst I agree with Guattari and Deleuze in their critique of psychoanalysis, it sounds to me that they were talking to the most conservative side of psychoanalysis, omitting especially within Freudian and Lacanian teachings, the potentiality for a radical poiesis, or a practice of transformation.Footnote 8 I see it differently. To me, it is clear that in Lacan’s later Seminars there is a shift away from the ‘totality’ of an Other, away from the Name-of-the-Father and away from structuralism.Footnote 9 The changes brought by his Borromean clinic or clinic of the Real address much of the critiques of Deleuze and Guattari: we find a clinic that works with punctuation and even some poetry, promoting the sinthôme. The sinthôme is poiesis.

My argument of ‘anxiety as vibration’ consists in first having mapped the vibrational possibilities in Freud and Lacan, taking in Guattari’s ecosophical ethico-aesthetic demands towards a possible co-poietic practice of psychoanalysis. In the affect of anxiety, an affective Real that extends beyond the subject and which is always in flux, produced at every encounter with humans and non-human forms, touches the limits of the Imaginary-Symbolic arrangement or of the repertoires of world that delineate the subject. This intensity, this excess, vibrates beyond the subject, calling for a germination of new worlds (Rolnik, 2019). Such an intensity is experienced as anxiety; it signals dangers to the subjective mirage, it dissolves Imaginary anchors, whilst it also pushes for things not to change. Anxiety vibrates the intensities of what is beyond the grasp of the subject, it destabilizes, overwhelms, paralyses. In analysis, the production of the sinthôme, when it is not self-referential but affective (or ‘nomadic’ in Braidotti’s sense), is a provisional delineation of the subject, a new Imaginary-Symbolic knot that is pushed by the affective Real, lasting just long enough. The co-poietic, affective sinthôme lasts until it is subtly re-created in light of the intensities from the world in common. If the sinthôme is stiff, it will be no more than a neurotic symptom; if it is not there, life with others, creativity and connection are impossible. This ‘aberrant’ version of the sinthôme as co-poietic crystallises my formulation of anxiety as vibration.

The Creative Clinic and Anxiety as Vibration

Psychoanalysis, at its best, is a practice of ‘staying with troubles’. Conversely, at its worse, it is a practice that modulates collective horizons into an abyss within. The psychoanalytic landscape explored in this cartographic book entails developing a capacity of being able to stay with anxious troubles, crossing them, rather than brushing them off, resorting to quick-fixes. ‘Working-through’ in the treatment involves paying attention to symptoms, fantasies, excesses, repetitions but also possibilities, creativities and new arrangements that germinate in the analytic journey. In the case of the clinic of anxiety, in particular, moving from the edge of what gives consistency to the ego and exploring what ‘gaining unconsciousness’ (Tosquelles, 1991) can be like, without relying onto structural or Oedipally wrapped frames of interpretation, is the premise of creative clinic. In other words: Wo Es War, Soll Ich Werden. Where the vibrational unconscious is, there must I carry on becoming.

The unconscious, writes Lacan, in his very last seminar—Seminar XXV ‘Le Moment de Conclure’—“it is that: it is the face of the Real—perhaps you have an idea, after having heard me numerous times, perhaps you have an idea of what I call the Real—it is the face of the Real of that in which one is entangled” (Lacan, January 10, 1978).Footnote 10 In this book, anxiety has been studied in and out of the clinic, considering its double-edge, as a paralysing and at the same time mobilising affect that exceeds a subjective delineation and its Symbolic-Imaginary anchors. Envisaging an alternative to what has been called the ‘dividualising’ politics of affect observed within hegemonic psy discourses and practices over the last century, an affirmative take on anxiety has been composed. In this book, but also in my clinical practice, I am inspired by Braidotti, Guattari and Rolnik, into committing to an eco-feminist approach, which means taking seriously the ethical demands of the twenty-first century (crossing feminist, decolonial, environmental, medical and epistemological debates) and the limits of psychoanalytic classic theories of Freud and Lacan when it comes to possibilities of an ethics of the Real, or of what extends beyond the subject. The challenge was to think about this excess characteristic of anxiety on the threshold of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, not losing sight of the clinical application of psychoanalytic ideas.

Working with texts as puzzling archives, from Freud and Lacan, travelling through Lygia Clark and Deleuze and Guattari, the grounds and possibilities of affect have been unpacked. Affects (such as anxiety) are not reducible to Imaginary ‘feelings’, rather, encompass an ethical disposition to be produced by the affecting relations to others in a complex matrix that extends beyond (1) consciousness, (2) an Imaginary-Symbolic subjective delineation, (3) the Symbolic realm and (4) the binary of representation/non-representation and of sexual difference. By twisting the clinic of anxiety from the point of an affective Real, a subject of entanglement is welcomed into the couch.

Instead of insisting on a dividualising onto-epistemic frame of interpretation, a creative clinic of anxiety (one that does not ‘dividualise’) operates as a platform for the production of relations, situatedness and a sinthôme that vibrates through such an eco-psycho-social matrix. By conceptualising anxiety as vibration, the possibility of a creative clinic unfolds. It is not just a matter of finding what anxiety is signalling, its cause; rather, what else can be constructed from such rupturing affect.

When encountering a patient or analysand suffering with anxiety, the expected path of the psychoanalytic treatment is to place this anxiety and what it is signalling as the compass for the direction of the treatment. As a compass, anxiety takes us to the edge of failed fantasy. In doing so, as we have navigated in this book, considering anxiety as a vibration adds a subtle and yet powerful ethical nuance to this direction. Instead of relying on interpretation, the function of identifications or of lack and castration; a technique of co-poietic constructions and punctuations will hold on to the ‘lines of flight’, or the ‘creativity’ in becoming that is the rhizomatic unconscious. Affective assemblage, rather than the dialectics of enunciation, anchors this approach to ‘rupture’. Instead of gluing together shattered pieces into a wonky old piece, this approach entails assembling fragments into a new montage. Commoning, collectivising, situating, rather than individualising, privatising and universalising. What I have attempted to demonstrate is, to put it differently, the eco-feminist ethical impossibility of re/producing an estrangement of anxiety and the urgency of affective entanglement.

What Berardi (2018) calls the ‘reactivation of the erotic body’ through the tune of the vibrations of the world is what the direction of co-poietic sinthôme in the clinic can unfold. Anxiety is an affect, an affect that does not deceive, an encounter with the Real. As such, anxiety sits on the edge of being (as a signal) and possible ‘becomings’—accordingly, operating as a theoretical and clinical riddle that re-orients Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis from a psychosocial perspective, acting, thus, between critique and creativity. What can anxiety do, and what can we, as clinicians, do with it? Anxiety is like a ‘bird tapping on the window’ (Guattari & Rolnik, 2007, p. 328) and the work of psychoanalysis is to find in these birds, and their wings, “indicators of new universes of references” (Guattari & Rolnik, 2007, p. 328)—or else, it will simply be a ‘dividualising’ practice.