the problem of abandoning the self without care

BwO is in many ways an elusive concept for me. Mainly, at this point I am having difficulty reconciling D&G's desire with Lacan's. For D&G, desire does not approach lack and pleasure in the same way that these three inform one another in Lacanian theory. I cannot help but feel that there is a gloss to this, something that avoids the actualities of the workings of our minds for a means; the means being (as usual with D&G), a shift away from the trappings of impossibility, of death or the death drive that they often speak against in this chapter.

For Lacan, experience is structured around the extraordinary moments, the possible moments of rupture into an opening up. In order for a rupture to occur, something shocks us with the way it makes us feel, something unexplainable is felt in the body, an overwhelming unspeakable rush that seems to have no accessible cause. This vascillation causes the "I" the ego, the subject to collapse. This "I" is the "I" who knows. This "I" desires in the hopes of attaining a certain pleasure. This pleasure, in turn, is ultimately unattainable, it is intrinsically linked to a fundamental lack, that which can never be filled. Desire exists in the gap between need and recognition, the request for pleasure and the answer or delivery of pleasure. However it is in that space, in desire, that we become most deeply human.

Similarly, D&G advocate a motion away from subjection, performed by the self or otherwise. Pleasure is in no way something that can be attained only by a detour through suffering: it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the continuous process of positive desire.(ATP, 155) What I am missing perhaps, is how desire functions positively with a BwO. D&G are innacurate perhaps in their slaying of psychoanalysis with such a long sword. Both Lacan and D&G find that desire is the point of access, the point that opens and allows for difference. In Lacan that difference is in the form of the unconscious which must be built as a language, through signifiers, limited as they are, because the signifier is what has enslaved us in the subjected selves. As with Heidegger's notion of language as the "house of being", language in Lacan is a neccessary entry point to allowing ultimate freedom from its constraints.

Further, D&G also seem to miss the very vital aspect of Lacanian analysis that is the map. Psychoanalysis is not so much a history or uncovering of childhood as it is "a structure of all these points of collapse" (A. Rogers), the points where the ego is ruptured by an uncanny experience, or even, I would go so far as to say, where the ego (conceived self) encounters speeds that attack or disrupt the narrative it has come to be enslaved in. In this sense, the intersection of Lacan and D&G is much more extreme then D&G intended. However, there is still the conflict of the body or the BwO.

I find in this chapter only what it may be. The BwO in that way, fails me in the limits of my thought currently. There is no acknowledgement of trauma, of pain and of the power imposed on our own lives as they have been written on us by the worlds of pain that preceeded us. Therefore there is no practical way for a person, any and all people who are trapped in these pervasive constructs without even knowing, to even have access to this notion of a BwO. The examples of the masochist and drugged bodies, while helpful, do not truly broach the difficulties of uncovering the structures of thought that our bodies have relied upon in the same way our minds have relied on other structures.

How can we relinquish signification before we understand that things have signified us? The signified is simply an illusion for Lacan, a flawed totality. I feel as though they are objecting to the same limits but as D&G tell us, The important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a sudden. You have to diminish it, shrink it, clean it, and that only at certain moments. You have to keep it in order to survive...(ATP, 162). In this chapter, I sometimes felt that we have destroyed the tonal for an inaccessible (at this moment) becoming.

So I've basically hit a wall with this, look forward to hearing what you all have to say.