Omri Blum and Liran Razinsky

Identity and Representation in Freud and Deleuze

Samah Shihadi, 2018, Charcoal on paper, 64/49cm

Psychoanalytic theory, and Freudian thought in particular, has long been the focus of trenchant criticism from various theoretical directions. This article will present a particular vein of this criticism, derived from Deleuze, along two interrelated axes: a critique of the discourse of representation and identity, and a critique of psychoanalytic interpretation. The article will focus on Gilles Deleuze’s writing on hysteria in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), which serves as an important juncture for the discussion of representation, identity, and interpretation. The article will clarify and develop Freudian concepts through the coordinates established by Deleuze’s critique. This alternative reading of Freud will argue for the primacy of a bodily and vital dimension in the Freudian corpus, which undermines the primary status of the interpretive-representational sphere, and as such embodies a sharp critique of the assumption of the priority and fixity of identity. This reading will thus present aspects of Freudian thought that go hand in hand with Deleuzian thinking, and as such are immune to Deleuze’s criticisms of Freud. Moreover, it will be argued that despite Deleuze’s aspiration to formulate a clinic of hysteria detached from Freud, aspects of Freudian thinking resurface in it as a kind of non-representational return of the repressed.

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Omri Blum is completing his Ph.D. in the Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar Ilan University. He holds a B.Sc. in engineering and an M.A. in clinical psychology. His research focuses on the encounter between the thought of Sigmund Freud and Gilles Deleuze. He has published papers dealing with sexuality, perversion, and interpretation.

Liran Razinsky is an associate professor in the Program for Hermeneutics and Culture at Bar Ilan University, Israel, working on the critique of digital technology, psychoanalysis, literature and critical theory. He has published Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death (Cambridge UP, 2013), co-edited Writing the Holocaust Today (Rodopi, 2012) about Littell’s The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes), and edited a special issue of YFS on Jorge Semprun. He published papers on psychoanalysis and on literature, on topics such as autobiography, death, and digital memory. His current project, The Human Being in the Age of Data, investigates how human subjectivity changes with the rise of data-led algorithmic understanding of individuals, and how algorithmic knowledge interacts with human-centered worlds of meaning.