Deleuze, Lacan, and the Becoming of Sexuation

Matt Lovett is a Teaching Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, and a Candidate Analyst with the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis.

“Have you despaired of ever reconciling your frenzy for Deleuze’s mille-feuille texts with your fatal attraction to Lacan’s desert of the real? Matt Lovett, a practicing Lacanian philosopher and a close philosophical reader of Deleuze, is here to manifest the obscure object of your desire. This text moves addition and subtraction out of theoretical stalemate, unfolding a whole new arithmetics of the subject.”- Tavia Nyong'o, William Lampson Professor of American Studies; Black Studies; Performance Studies; and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Yale University“Generally the thought of Deleuze and Lacan are opposed, but Lovett shows that they are in deep dialogue with one another, demonstrating that Deleuze cannot properly be understood outside of the framework of Lacan and psychoanalysis, and changing the way we think about Lacan through Deleuze’s contributions particularly with respect to Ideas and the three syntheses he explores. Lovett writes with exceptional clarity, explaining a number of very difficult Lacanian and Deleuzian concepts in ways that render them approachable to those who aren’t scholars of these thinkers. He also synthesizes their thought in a highly original way that is likely to lead to a lot of productive debate. I know of no analogous books. Outstanding."- Levi Bryant, Professor of Philosophy, Collin College"In this stereoscopic depiction of the psychoanalyst and the schizoanalyst, Matt Lovett offers an ambitious case for reading Lacan and Deleuze together. That necessity, Lovett postulates, derives from the two authors’ virtual convergence on the topic of sexual difference––that endlessly necessary and unfeelable premise that, we hope against hope, will sew our minds into our bodies. As this book persuasively shows, the radical confrontations with sexual difference staged in the bodies of queer and trans people remediate, implicitly and explicitly, precisely those philosophical contentions Lacan and Deleuze tendered in defiance of that unitary model of the embodied subject. Among other things, this book is therefore a stylish and timely argument advocating the kind of subtle, patient, and precise analysis of continental philosophy, to those of us trying to live in the face of mounting phobic repression, internal and external."- Grace Lavery, Associate Professor of English, UC Berkeley, UC Berkeley, author of Personal Demons: Possession Narratives of Late Liberalis"Are we done with the problem of sexual difference, what Irigaray once called the problem of our time? This dazzling book answers that question with a resounding No! Bringing together Deleuze’s description of the always sexed, material genesis of thought with a Lacanian account of thought as immanently engendered castration, Lovett beautiful negotiates the ontological-epistemological divide that has dogged philosophies of sexual difference for decades. Going beyond both an Irigarayan ontology of sexual difference and Butler’s philosophy of performative gender, Lovett brings forth the castrated phallus as the key to a new conception of sexuation that is actually generated from difference rather than identity. This book is a tour de force."- Lynne Huffer, Emory University

• Introduction: Paralipsis, Tension, Plot Chapter 1: The Problem of Sexual Difference: Irigaray, Butler, Deleuze Chapter 2: The Sexual Genesis of Thought: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis Chapter 3: Ungrounding Grounds: The Deleuzian Idea and the Lacanian Sinthome Chapter 4: Deleuzian Sexuation, via Lacan Chapter 5: The Becoming of Sexuation & the Problem of Sexual Difference Afterword: To Speak Ontologically References