Contemporary critical interpretation teaches us to become more
aware of the subtle information in language that influences and
affects our everyday lives and through it, we learn to perceive
ourselves as subjects staging our lives in the register of
language. The affect of seeing the world through the
perspectives of these subjects is liberating in that it offers a
peaceable end to physical violence and exclusion. It allows us
to regard ourselves as interconnected to others through language
and to simulate our desires through symbolic expression. The
human mind has the capabilities to represent our aggression,
compassion, love, and anguish through aesthetic means, and human
societies have ways to convey and promote this knowledge among
themselves. Despite knowing these possibilities exist for us,
human beings are still representing these emotions through acts
of war, genocide, and terrorism.
This thesis employs a psychoanalytic reading practice to restage
this alternative means of expressing symbolic violence and
exclusion through language. It is a demonstration and narration
of literary schizophrenia that if pursued to its end can become
a personal technique capable of making us stronger and more
compassionate human beings. The subjective reading of symbolic
violence and isolation upon the texts of two writers, Catherine
Lim and Margaret Gibson, allows me to create a narrative that
describes, as it performs, a physical investment of desire upon
a text and draws liberally and seemingly hastily, at times, on
the work of the psychoanalytic theorists, Jacques Lacan and
Julia Kristeva.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the inspiration behind this
literary schizophrenic experience, allow us to get beyond the
dependency on our corporeal existence more directly. For a
reader familiar with schizoanalysis, the question he or she
should be asking is : Why go through the trouble of bringing up
psychoanalysis, exploiting other texts, and not begin from
Deleuze and Guattari more directly?
As psychoanalysis constantly reiterates to us, the difficulty
lies in the fact that the human mind does not proceed directly.
It does not respond well to radical and immediate change, but
repeatedly circumnavigates and exhausts every alternative it
already knows until it is satisfied that it is sufficiently
bored.
Deleuze and Guattari describe unconscious desire as flowing
between two poles: the schizophrenic and the paranoiac. In
bodies whose flow is towards the schizophrenic pole, there is a
desire to deterritorialize. In bodies where the flow of desire
is towards the paranoiac, there is a desire to territorialize.
Schizoanalysis asks us to deterritorialize the Oedipal structure
(the paranoiac). This task cannot be performed unless we
initially know how deeply embedded the Oedipal structure is in
our lives as individuals.
This dissertation attempts a personal schizoanalytic
interpretation of the paranoiac flow of desire. In an attempt to
be a true schizoanalytic interpretation, it contains scant
reference to Deleuze and Guattari or critical evidence of the
schizophrenic flow of desire they have inspired. It purports to
be nothing more than a true psychoanalytic reading that,
hopefully, leads its reader to recognize his or her
schizoanalytic potential.
