Rolnik-Deleuze, Schizoanalyst.pdf

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Suely Rolnik

Deleuze,Schizoanalyst

First scene: 1973.1 I begin a friendship withGilles Deleuze, whose seminars I have beenattending over the past two years or so. With hismischievous humor, he insists on saying that he,and not Flix Guattari (with whom I amundergoing analysis at the time) is myschizoanalyst. He proposes that we worktogether, offering me a gift and a theme: an LPwith Alban Bergs opera Lulu and a suggestion to

compare the death cries of Lulu, its leadcharacter, with those of Maria, a character inWozzeck, another opera by the same composer.Bergs Lulu already impregnated by theimage of Louise Brooks, who played theprotagonist in G.W. Pabsts beautiful film is anexuberant and seductive woman whoseattraction to many kinds of worlds sets her off ona life of experimental drift. On one suchadventure, her vitality suffers the impact ofreactive forces that cause her to leave hercountry. In the miserable cold of a Christmas

night in her town of exile, Lulu hits the streets tomake some money. In the anonymity of hustling,she meets none other than Jack the Ripper, whoinevitably attempts to kill her. Foreseeing herdeath in the image of her face reflected on theblade pointed in her direction, she lets out apiercing cry. The timbre of her voice has astrange force that startles the Ripper to the pointthat, for a few seconds, he hesitates. We too arehit by this strange force, transported by it thepain of a vigorous life that does not want to betaken resonates in our bodies. On the other hand,Maria, the woman from Bergs opera Wozzeck, isthe gray wife of a soldier. Her death cry is almostinaudible, it blurs with the aural landscape. Thetimbre of her voice conveys the pale pain of aninane life, as if to die were the same as to live.Lulus cry vitalizes us, despite, and paradoxicallybecause of, the intensity of her pain. Marias crydrags us into a kind of melancholy that tinges theworld with monotonous dullness.Second scene: 1978. The setting is one ofthe Saturday afternoon singing lessons I havebeen taking along with two friends. The teacheris Tamia, whose repertoire is contemporary

music and free jazz, an effervescent currentwithin the Parisian 1970s. On this particular day,to our surprise, she asks each of us to choose asong to work with.The song that occurs to me is one of themany Tropicalismo songs I learned in Brazil.2 Asmusical expressions of the intense movement ofcultural and existential creation Brazil had seenat the end of the 1960s, the movement marked aperiod whose brutal interruption by the militaryregime had been the reason for my exile in Paris.3

Cantar como um passarinho as Gal Costa

sang it, with the soft and tender timbre of herinterpretations.4

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Hlio Oiticica, B14 Box Blide 11, 1962. Oil with polyvinyl acetate emulsion on plywood and nylon mesh, plastic sheeting.

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As I sing, a similar vibration takes over myown voice; hesitant at first, the timbre slowlybuilds up and gains body, becoming more andmore crystalline. I am overcome by a feeling ofestrangement: a sensation that this timbre hasalways belonged to me, as if it had never ceasedto exist in the corporeal memory of my voice,even if silenced for so long. Soft as it is, itsvibration steadily perforates a tiny point in my

body and takes over the space of the room. Theact of perforation makes me discover, on thewhite surface of the T-shirt and overalls I amwearing, a compact skin that covers my body likea thick layer of plaster; what is more, it seems tome that this envelope has been there for a longtime, without my ever noticing it. The curiousthing is that the body reveals its petrification atthe same moment when the delicate stream ofvoice punctures it, as if skin and voice weresomehow interlocked. Could it be that my bodyhad become rigid just as that timbre had

disappeared? Whatever the answer, the plasterbecame a constraint: it was urgent to get rid ofthat carapace. I decide, there and then, to returnto Brazil, even if I had never considered leavingParis until then. I went back, and never for amoment doubted the wisdom of that decision.It took me a few years to understand whathad happened in that singing lesson, and then afew more to realize how that could, in turn, berelated to the work that Deleuze had proposed tome. What the singing announced that Saturdayafternoon through the reawakened memory ofmy body was that the the military dictatorshiphad caused a wound in desire, and that woundhad healed enough for me to return to Brazil, if Iso wished.But what is it that I am referring to when Isay desire? In a few words, I refer to threeprocesses. First: the impulse of attraction, whichdraws us towards certain universes, and theimpulse of repulsion, which pushes us away fromothers without us knowing exactly why, blindlyguided by the affects that each of theseencounters generates in our body. Second: theforms of expression that we create in order to

bring into the visible and utterable the sensiblestates that such connections and disconnectionsprogressively produce in our subjectivity. Third:the metamorphoses of ourselves and of ourterritories of existence, which are fabricated inthis process.After all, totalitarian regimes do not impingeonly upon concrete reality, but also upon thisintangible reality of desire. It is an invisible, butno less relentless, violence. From themicropolitical point of view, regimes of this kindtend to establish themselves in the life of a

society when the connections with newuniverses in the general alchemy of subjectivities

multiply beyond a threshold, causing veritableconvulsions. These are privileged moments inwhich the movement of individual and collectivecreation becomes intensified, but which alsoharbor the risk of unleashing microfascisms oncea certain threshold of destabilization is crossed.When the boundaries of a certain stability arebroken there is a danger that baser subjectivitiestied to common sense will infer the risk of an

irreversible collapse, and will begin to panic. Dueto a weak will to power that limits their force ofcreation, subjectivities of this kind considerthemselves to be constituted once and for all,and have no means of understanding suchruptures as inherent to the delineation of theirown limits, which are always being redrawn asthe function of a desire for new connections. It iscommon to explain those ruptures as works ofevil and, in the name of safety and stability, toconfine them to the unknown universes that haveentered the existential landscape. The solution is

easy to deduce: these universes, personified bytheir bearers, must be eliminated. Suchelimination can go from the pure and simpledisqualification of these inconvenient others,weakening them through humiliation, to theirconcrete, physical destruction. One expects thatthis will relieve, at least for some time, theunease produced by the process ofdifferentiation unleashed by the living presenceof others.The proliferation of this kind of politics ofdesire develops a fertile ground for forms ofleadership that embody it and provide a focalpoint for it: this is when totalitarian regimes ofall kinds rear their heads. Althoughmicrofascisms do not take place only intotalitarian contexts, such contexts are the mainsupport for this kind of regime within the realmof the subject. Anything that deviates fromcommon sense is considered a mistake,irresponsible, or worse, an act of treason. Ascommon sense blurs into the very idea of thenation, to differ is to betray the motherland.It is in these moments that the conservativeforces of common sense triumph over the forces

of invention. Thought is intimidated and retreatsfrom the threat of punishment, which can fallupon the social image of oneself in the form of astigma, or upon ones body, with varying degreesof brutality ranging from prison and torture todeath. Humiliated and disowned, desirescreative dynamic becomes paralyzed by fear,often combined with guilt; even if thisinterruption is welcomed in the name of life, theexperience of it can become similar to death. Thetrauma of these experiences leaves behind thepoisonous stain of disaffection with life and the

impossibility of thought a wound in desire thatcan contaminate everything, halting movements

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of connection and the invention that theymobilize.

1964 poster for Wozzeck designed by Jan Lenica.

One of the strategies for protecting fromthis poison consists of anesthetizing the marksof trauma in the affective circuit. By isolatingthem under the cover of forgetfulness, oneprevents their poison from spreading, making itpossible to keep on living. But the syndrome offorgetfulness tends to encompass much morethan just these wounds; the affective circuit isnot a fixed map but a continuously made and

remade cartography upon which individualpoints can be associated with any other at anymoment. A large part of the bodys capacity toresonate is then anesthetized. One of the darkesteffects of this narcosis is a separation betweenspeech and the sensible its corporeal reality,the site of a living relation to the world thatnurtures its poetic density. My exile in Paris hadthis sense of protecting me from the seismicshock that the experience of the dictatorship andimprisonment had inflicted. It was not only anobjective and concrete protection, given my

geographic displacement, but also, and aboveall, a subjective and desiring protection, given

the linguistic displacement. I entirely disinvestedPortuguese, and with it the poisonous marks ofthe fear that froze my movements of desire. Toavoid contact with that language I avoidedBrazilians entirely. I settled into French as myadoptive tongue, accentless to such a degreethat people would often take me for a nativespeaker. French became like a plaster that bothcontained and cohered an agonizing affective

body: a clandestine shelter where the woundedpieces of my corporeal memory found refuge,allowing me to make new connections and toexperiment certain affects that had becomefrightening in my mother tongue. In that singinglesson, nine years after my arrival in Paris,something in me realized, before I myself did,that the poison had sufficiently receded for thereto be no more risk of contamination. The softtimbre of a joy of living resurfaced and broughtme back to Portuguese, less frightened thanbefore. But what actually happened on that day?

The plaster that had until then been theguarantee of my survival, to the point where itcould be mistaken for my own skin, lost itspurpose the moment the soft, tender timbrerecovered the courage to manifest itself. Whathad been a remedy for wounded desire began,paradoxically, to have the effect of arresting thatdesire. It is probably because of this shift that,during that particular class, everythinghappened at once the return of the timbre, thediscovery of the hard shell that had beencovering me, and the feeling of asphyxiation ithad come to give me. Like every defensivestrategy, the plaster made of the Frenchlanguage which had functioned as the territorywithin which, for a time, my life was able toexpand had also produced the side effect ofbeing a limitation. But the restrictive vectorcould only be problematized when defensebecame unnecessary; the various connectionsthat I had already made in my adoptive tonguehad reactivated the experimental process ofdesire, creating conditions for it to be resumed inthe wounded tongue. I was cured, not of themarks of pain left by the fury of despotism, as

these are indelible, but of their toxic effects. It isin singing as an expression of the body oflanguage, of the reserve of affective memory that the metabolization of the traumas effectsexpressed itself. And with it, the syndrome offorgetfulness that I had developed in order not todie, dissolved.What does this have to do with DeleuzesLulu? I arrived in Paris carrying a sort ofcollapsed desire in my body, branded by theBrazilian dictatorship, dragging a correspondingcollapse of the will to live and of the creative

gesture which has that will as its origin andprimary condition of existence. Listening to

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Deleuze in his seminars had, in and of itself, themysterious power of moving me further awayfrom Brazil. This did not necessarily depend onthe content of his speech since, in thebeginning, I hardly spoke any French but on thepoetic quality of his presence and particularlyhis voice. His timbre conveyed the wealth ofsensible states that populated his body; thewords and the rhythm of cadences seemed to

emerge from such states, delicately sculpted bythe movements of desire. An imperceptibletransmission that contaminated whoeverlistened to him.Deleuzes proposal that I should investigatethe death cries of the two women in Bergsoperas sprang from this. The strange forcecommunicated by Lulus cry is that of anenergetic reaction to death. This is the potencywe feel resonating in our body, and her cryvitalizes it, in spite and because of the intensityof her pain. Marias cry, on the other hand,

transmits a melancholy resignation that saddensand devitalizes its listeners. Arising from thiscomparison are distinct degrees of theaffirmation of life, even and above all in the faceof death. It is a recognition that, even in the mostadverse situations, it is possible to resist theterrorism against life, against its desiring andinventive potency, and to stubbornly go on living.Together, Lulus and Marias cries convey thislesson and contaminate us.Of course, I could not arrive at any of thiswhen Deleuze made his suggestion to me.Perhaps it was because his figure intimidatedthe fragility of my twenty-four years, even ifnothing in his attitude justified any kind ofreverence or inhibition. It is probably more likelythat my wound was too fresh for me to let go ofthe defense strategy I had created to protect mefrom the intoxication of desire caused by thedictatorships cruelty. However, the direction hehad pointed me in with Lulu and Maria installeditself imperceptibly in my body and operated insilence, slowly oxygenating the fibers of desire,reactivating their drifts and the vital work ofthought that normally accompanies them. Six

years later, my Tropicalist birdsong announcedthat Lulus affirmative timbre against brutalityhad, over and against Marias negative timbre,returned to my voice. I could once morereconnect my body and speak through thesinging of its sensible stages in voice, song, andspeech. By launching a liberating movementthrough a sung cry, Deleuze had, in fact, been myschizonanalyst even if such movement wouldonly bear fruit years later.A few months after Guattaris death, I wrotea letter to Deleuze evoking the time he called

himself my schizoanalyst, and telling him wherethose opera cries had led. He replied

immediately, with his habitual generosity andelegant writing in which there are neither toomany nor too few words to say the unsayable andnothing more. Among other things, hecommented on the void that Guattaris passingaway had left in him, and ended the letter saying,Never lose your grace, that is, the power of asong.What he was certainly saying between these

words was that, in order to resurrect the will tolive and the pleasure of thinking, it is alwayspossible to bring desire back after it breaksdown. And, what is more, that this gift appearswhere one least expects it in a simple popsong. However, if we want to sense the situationsthat carry such powers, it becomes necessary toremove the hierarchy of cultural values in theestablished imaginary cartography and, aboveall, to tune our hearing to the effects that eachencounter mobilizes these effects should bethe privileged criterion for orienting our choices.

This allowing oneself to be contaminated by themysterious power of regeneration of the vitalforce, wherever it is is it not what Deleuzewould have called grace?In any case, here is the unexpected figure ofthe schizoanalyst Deleuze. Although he ispersonally present in this small tale, the potencydistilled from this narrative for combatting theintolerable transcends his person and, obviously,the hangover of the military regime. It belongs tohis thought and pulsates invisibly throughout hisoeuvre, offering itself to whoever may wish totake it.Translated from the Portuguese by Rodrigo Nunes

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Suely Rolnik, psychoanalyst, curator and culturalcritic, is a professor at the Catholic University of SoPaulo, where she founded the Subjectivity StudiesCentre in the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program.Since 2008, she is guest professor of the Programa deEstudios Independientes, MACBA. With Flix Guattari,she is author of Micropoltica. Cartografias do desejo(1986), published in five languages. She has publishednumerous essays in books, journals, and art catalogsin Europe and the Americas, and has lectured widely.

1This text was written on theoccasion of Deleuzes death in1995.

2Tropicalism was a culturalmovement of the late 1960s,which revolutionized popularBrazilian music, then dominatedby the aesthetics of Bossa Nova,by making use of derision,irreverence, and improvisation.Spearheaded by musicians such

as Caetano Veloso and GilbertoGil (the current Minister ofCulture in Lulas government),Tropicalism reactivated theideas found in Oswald deAndrades AnthropophagicManifesto particularly theway in which elements of foreignculture are included and fusedwith Brazilian culture, mixingfragments of erudite, popular,and mass culture, without anyreverence for dominanthierarchies. Tropicalismmanifested itself in otherartistic realms as well, such asthe Oficina Theatre, directed byJos Celso Martinez Corra,which staged Oswald de

Andrades play O Rei da Vela(1967), among others. Indeed thevery name of the movementcomes from visual artist HlioOiticicas 1965 installationTropiclia. The movement wasbrutally interrupted in December1968, when the FifthInstitutional Act (AI-5) wasdecreed by Brazils militarydictatorship, allowing for anyaction or attitude consideredsubversive to be punished withimprisonment without recourseto habeas corpus. Caetano andGil were sent to prison andsubsequently freed only on thecondition that they leave thecountry. They went into exile in

England in 1969.

3A dictatorship came to power inBrazil in 1964 by means of amilitary coup. The regimebecame much more rigid andviolent from 1968 onwards. Asuccession of generals remainedin power until 1985, and the firstdirect presidential electionswere held in 1989.

4Tuz de Abreu, Passarinho,recorded by Gal Costa in India(Phonogram, 1973). The lyricsare Cantar como um passarinho

de manh cedinho... l na galhado arvoredo, na beira do rio abre as asas passarinho que euquero voar me leva na janelada menina que eu querocantar (To sing like a littlebird early in the morning up inthe branches of the trees by theriver bank open your wings,little bird, cause I want to fly take me to the girls window,cause I want to sing .). TheBrazilian singer Gal Costa waspart of a group of friends fromSanto Amaro (Bahia, in theNortheast of Brazil) thatincluded Caetano Veloso andMaria Bethnia. In the 1960s,they formed an important

element of the Tropicalistmovements driving forces.

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Rolnik-Deleuze, Schizoanalyst.pdf

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