The Trail of Vibration: © The Author(s) 2024 A. C. Minozzo, Anxiety As Vibration, Studies in The Psychosocial

8
The Trail of Vibration
After mapping ‘vibrational moments’ in both Freud and Lacan as possi-

ble entries into ‘becomings’ versus a dividualising ‘being’ as the clinical
paradigm of anxiety, we will dive deeper into the concept of vibration
and its genealogy in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. We will cross their
theories of affect and subjectivity in order to find grounds for a ‘vibra-
tional clinic’. Building on the co-poietic method of the artist Lygia Clark
in her later works, and especially Structuring of the Self series, I will map
a possible model of clinical assemblage in Guattari’s ‘transversal’ take on
anxiety. The difficulty and at times contradictions of Deleuze and
Guattari’s varied and rich work and their Anti-Oedipal approach anchor
our alliance with Lygia Clark: here as a horizon-beyond a view of anxiety
that is reduced to an abyss-within (or an enigma of the body of the order
of sexuality as organised under the phallic paradigm).
Deleuze and Guattari have offered important critiques of psychoanaly-
sis in the second half of the twentieth century as part of their philosophi-
cal, political and clinical enterprise. Together and separately, they have
questioned the model of repression and negative repetition in symptoms,
the centrality of a subjective organisation structured under the Oedipal
model and the form of an ‘ego’, as well as the clinical relationship frame-
work based on a dual transference that, to them, “modelled itself after the
© The Author(s) 2024 183

A. C. Minozzo, Anxiety as Vibration, Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62856-6_8
184 A. C. Minozzo
contractual relationship of the most traditional bourgeois medicine: the

feigned exclusion of a third party; the hypocritical role of money, to
which psychoanalysis brought farcical new justifications” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1983, p. 84). The psychoanalytic frame perpetuated and prac-
ticed by the establishment also relied on “the pretended time limitation
that contradicts itself by reproducing a debt to infinity, by feeding an
inexhaustible transference, and by always nursing new ‘conflicts’”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 84). To use Deleuze’s (1992) own word,
psychoanalysis wished to propose a life in touch with the unconscious
but remained ‘dividualising’ or alienating and modulating subjectivity
through a stiff ideological mechanism and onto-epistemic foundation.
Their work has been influential in the field of critical theories, new
philosophical interventions and the arts. However, within the clinical
landscape (from psychoanalytic training programmes to institutional
practices in mental health care), their concepts have been largely ignored
or swiftly brushed off in defensive accusations of mis-reading Freud and
Lacan—for example, in their famous critique to the psychoanalytic privi-
leging of a neurotic subject (David-Menard, 2014). Save for a very lim-
ited array of attempts to question the potentialities of the body, affect and
the limits of language as a tool of interpretation and punctuation (Suely
Rolnik and Monique David-Menard being two important examples, in
Latin America and in Europe), their ‘schizoanalysis’ is mostly discussed in
theoretical works that dispute the concept of ‘desire’ (Schuster, 2016) and
the discrepancies between the philosophical approaches of Hegel and
Spinoza (Moder, 2017). In this cartographic exercise, I do not wish to
pursue an in-depth investigation on the possibilities of ‘correcting’ psy-
choanalysis with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas. Neither do I wish to call in
a psychoanalytic ‘authority’ over Deleuze and Guattari’s writings (Felman,
1982), which would be to denounce their naiveté facing ‘real’ suffering or
even their theoretical alliance to a kind of postmodern neoliberal affirma-
tion without necessary antagonism (Žižek, 2010, 2017). Rather, my aim
is to find in their theory and practice, respectively, points that can illumi-
nate the knots on Freudian-Lacanian conceptions of anxiety in an attempt
to establish a common ground between these two theoretical approaches
and clinical practices that bring about an eco-feminist ethics in light of
the contemporary psychosocial context—namely, the possibilities for
interdependence rather than domination as the matrix of relation to
8 The Trail of Vibration 185
others instead of with the Other—which I do so by following Rosi

Braidotti (1994, 2006a, 2006b, 2011, 2013, 2017, 2019).1 My way into
this complex endeavour is via the formulation of the concept of ‘anxiety
as vibration’ and the guiding compass is the search for affirmative and
differential nuances in the psychosomatic (or psychic and somatic) expe-
rience of the affect of anxiety. Informed by the clinical and conceptual
‘dividualisations’ reproduced in psychoanalysis and by the potency of its
critique in Lygia Clark’s ‘full-void’ vibrational body, in what follows, I
trace the ‘trail’ of vibration in Deleuze and Guattari’s work in relation to
affect, possibility and the friction between ‘being’ and ‘becomings’, as a
ground that moves the rupture of the affect of anxiety from an abyss-
within into a horizon-beyond.
Vibration between Ontology and Ethics

Deleuze’s ontology is centred on difference. His thinking is heavily influ-
enced by his original reading of Nietzsche, Bergson and Spinoza, as well
as Leibniz and Simondon, all of whom had been extremely unfashionable
during the 1950s and 1960s in France, where the ‘three Hs’ (Hegel,
Heidegger and Husserl) reigned in Philosophy departments, according to
Dosse (2010). Deleuze takes from Spinoza the idea that an ontology that
works against the notion of the transcendent in favour of immanence (in
general terms, accepting that there is just one substance, God and nature
being this same substance) is the basis of an ethics. It is with shy irony
that Deleuze points out in his course on Spinoza, delivered in Vincennes,
that Spinoza did not call his seventeenth century monograph ‘Ontology’,
rather, he named it his ‘Ethics’. In what touches Deleuze’s critique of
psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis and the absorption of
1
By holding on to vibration, I am also stressing the unconscious factor of such ‘commons’, agreeing
with and complementing Stacey Alaimo’s posthumanist concept of transcorporeality. Alaimo
(2014) proposes that “we are entangled with multiple material agencies, flows and processes that
connect human bodies, animal bodies, ecosystems, technologies, and the wider world. As the mate-
rial self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously environmental, economic,
political, cultural, scientific, technological, and substantial, what was once the ostensibly bounded
human subject finds herself in a swirling landscape of uncertainty where practices and actions that
were once not even remotely ethical or political matters suddenly become so” (Alaimo, 2014, p. 17).
186 A. C. Minozzo
the Freudian concepts of the resolution of the Oedipus Complex into a

structuralist model, this detail assumes particular relevance.
To start the examination of the concept of vibration, we could con-
sider this ethical and ontological dispute as follows. Culturally specific,
and perhaps culturally hegemonic, language/Symbolic structures take the
transcendental ‘One’ (the phallic father inscribed in the Oedipal myth) as
a necessity or even a ‘given fact’ in ‘reality’, informing thus several aspects
of our subjective inscription, such as the potential and possibilities for life
under or outside the ‘Law’. In this sense, here we situate Lacan’s Other
and the Law-of-the-Father as anchors of the Symbolic register and
towards which a subjective structure is directed, revealing a particular
inscription of transcendentalism in Lacan—seeing that the fundamental
structuring of the subject relies on preconditions external to it, a defini-
tion of ‘transcendental’ offered by Jean Wahl (1944 [2016]).2 Neurosis,
perversion or psychosis are then seen as the only possible outcomes of this
necessary relation. Under the ethical and ontological approach proposed
by Deleuze and by Guattari, there is something more primordial to the
‘subject’ as framed in ‘culture’ as such that pertains to the relation of the
unique ‘substance’ that appears in the world only in different intensities,
as Spinoza posits in his Ethics. These intensities, in Spinoza, and as res-
cued by Deleuze in his first book on the Dutch philosopher from 1968
(Spinoza et le problème de l’expression), the second from 1981 (Spinoza—
Philosophie pratique) and the Vincennes lectures, compose what is called
‘affect’. An interesting definition of affect from Deleuze’s lecture in
Vincennes on the 24th of January 1978 reads: “Every mode of thought
insofar as it is non-representational will be termed affect” (Deleuze,
1978).3 This relation between affect and thought and their logical, intrin-
sic and extrinsic differences is unpacked in this particular lecture of his
Sur Spinoza course, a crucial difference, as we will see in what follows.
Not only the non-representability of affect, but its collectivity, the point
that it does not feature in the Symbolic and the connection it holds with
the body are the basis for the ‘vibrating’ ability of such intensities that
2
In Human Existence and Transcendence (1944) Jean Wahl defines the transcendent as in one side
what transcends the human (the divine in religious terms) and in another side the movement of the
human reaching beyond itself.
3
My translation of the French original “on appellera affect tout mode de pensée qui ne représente rien”.
cross bodies, which constantly affect each other. Affect, in this model,
also resists the need for a transcendental ‘third’ or ‘power’ anchoring it, it
does not need an ‘Other’ with capital ‘O’.4 Affect is, for Spinoza, “the
power to affect and be affected” (Massumi, 2015, p. ix), rather than a
‘substance’ or ethereal potion travelling through bodies like electricity as
other affect theorists will mistakenly interpret.5 Affect, for Deleuze, is
more of an ethical capacity beyond universal frames of representation
than an ‘electric current’ behaving like a contaminating virus across bodies.
In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, first published in 1981,
Deleuze famously affirms that “sensation is vibration” (Deleuze, 2003,
p. 45). In this piece, Deleuze writes about how Bacon was trying to paint
‘sensations’ rather than figurative representations when painting bodies. I
find this a useful analogy to approach this question of language and of the
‘representability’ of things, taking us on a journey to think how words are
charged with affect but also to meet, in clear psychoanalytic terms, the
limits of identification (Imaginary identification being the frame of anxi-
ety, as per Lacan in Seminar X; and it is based on the principle of
‘Sameness’ grounded over the idea of the ‘One’, as proposed by Braidotti,
2006a). Deleuze’s work on sensation presents us with a view of a body
that is ‘beyond’ language, is vibrating, and is also in movement as it
affects and is affected by other bodies. We must, however, be careful to
see in this non-representability an ethical stance rather than a mystical
‘feeling’, ‘emotion’, ‘electric current’ or a production of the body beyond
words that gets transmitted through bodies. Honing into the matter of
affect and exploring this ethical ontological project, started by Deleuze
and carried on through his encounter with Félix Guattari and scholars
influenced by them since, will take us to a questioning of what is repre-
sentable according to Freud and Lacan and how have both psychoana-
lytic models accounted for what is not. The Lacanian Real, which is
4
Whilst I reference Brian Massumi, I am not necessarily aligning myself with his thought, once it
is relevant to mention that feminist theories of affect such as that of Sara Ahmed (2004) or Emily
Martin (2013) have found his work to be problematic for it ignores the social sphere completely.
Ahmed’s (2004) claim for emotion and affect to be grounded in relationality is not too dissimilar
in its ethics to what Guattari goes on to elaborate in his actual clinical practice of transversality.
5
Silvan Tomkins’ interpretation of Deleuze would lead into Paul Ekman’s extremely controversial
theories of affect and feelings beyond cognition which, not surprisingly, led him to collaborate with
the CIA and the FBI (Tomkins & Smith, 1995).
188 A. C. Minozzo
carefully sculpted through the decades of his teachings, is the central con-
trast with the model of ‘sensation’ that we find in Deleuze. As we will
rescue, across their work and very clearly in Guattari’s sole writings, the
matter of ‘representability’ versus ‘non-representability’ is diffracted fur-
ther into the notion of ‘polyvocity’ (Genosko, 2002) that is central to
what I identify here as Guattari’s theory of anxiety.
A longer definition of ‘affect’ in Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza invites us
to consider ‘variation’ and ‘possibility’ as elements of affect that resonate
a further excursion into Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘vibration’.
Deleuze’s lesson on Spinoza in Vincennes in late January 1978 elicits the
ethical and ‘relational’ character of affect in its detailed difference from an
‘idea/thought’. Relational here, is not as a relation between similar
‘objects’, in a traditional psychoanalytic sense as per the British Tradition,
for example, but of all ‘bodies’, thus nature as ‘all there is’, following
Spinoza. Deleuze unpacks affect, first saying that we can differentiate an
‘idea’ and an affect by considering that an idea is a mode of thought that
represents something, whilst an affect is a mode of thought that repre-
sents nothing. This is a technical and nominal differentiation based on
‘external and extrinsic’ factors. The second layer of this differentiation
Deleuze reads in Spinoza is more complicated: whilst an idea has an
intrinsic reality, “affect is the continuous variation or the passage from
one degree of reality to another” (Deleuze, January 24, 1978).6 Beyond
the nominal difference, we have now also a ‘real difference’, which opens
up the ‘possibilities’ of a thing and not just its description. Affect, he
continues, “it is the continuous variation of the force of existing of any-
one” (Deleuze, January 24, 1978).7 The force of existing, as Spinoza out-
lines in his ethics, is named ‘conatus’; thus, affect would be this continuous
variation of conatus. He completes: “insofar as this variation is deter-
mined by the ideas one has” (Deleuze, January 24, 1978).8 This ‘determi-
nation’ of affect by ideas and yet the irreducibility of affect to ideas is the
conundrum Deleuze explores in the differentiation of Spinoza’s terms
6
My translation of French original: “l’affect, c’est la variation continue ou le passage d’un degré de
réalité à un autre”.
7
My translation of French original: “c’est donc la variation continue de la force d’exister de quelqu’un”.
8
My translation of French original: “en tant que cette variation est déterminée par les idées qu’il a”.
‘affectio’ and ‘affectus’, Latin terms he claims were all mistranslated from
the Ethics as ‘affect’, but which still carry a difference, and one interesting
to psychoanalysis. Affectus would be ‘affect’, and what we have described
so far, whilst ‘affectio’ is ‘affection’, defined as the ‘mixing’ (mélange) of
bodies and the changes or consequences that entail the effects over the
nature of these bodies. Being in the world and the mélange of bodies
resonate—affectio—on ideas (representational), which, in their turn,
determine affectus, the non-representational kinds of thoughts. Affect,
thus, seems to be not just transindividual but collective or ‘collaborative’
in essence, an ethical disposition.
To summarise and clarify, Deleuze’s take on Spinoza’s theory of affect
has it that affect is not of the order of representation, it escapes it; affect
has to do with the variations of one’s force of existing; and these varia-
tions will be determined by the effects of our encounter with other bod-
ies—determined, not reduced to, neither represented by—which can
only be grasped by our ideas of the consequences of such encounters (e.g.
the sun on my skin, meeting someone on the street, etc.). The difficulty
of these abstract lectures may be why Deleuze’s (as well as Guattarri’s)
ideas have been so misinterpreted as it is easy to read affect as something
quite ‘magical’ and beyond words that happens when we meet others in
the world. Deleuze here reminds us of another layer of Spinoza’s oeuvre
that is essential to keep in mind: his view of the limitations of our reper-
toire of ‘ideas’, our experience of grasping reality through ideas one after
another vis-à-vis the passages of one degree of reality to another, which is
the character of affect, as we have just seen. Drawing on Spinoza’s Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus (published posthumously in 1677), Deleuze points
out that to him we are fabricated as spiritual automatons, with ideas suc-
ceeding one another all the time in us, determining our potentiality of
acting or our force of existing in a continuous line. Spinoza sees the ‘soul’
as a machine of ideas, immanent and self-determined. Catherine Malabou
(2016) in fact adds to the Deleuzean reading of the Ethics, by arguing
that Spinoza’s Treatise functions between the duality of transcendence
and immanence, proposing a theory of the origin of the Symbolic (in the
Spinozean monist version of God/the sacred) with no reference outside
of itself. Here we reach a paradox in relation to psychoanalysis, for, if
anything, words and ideas are in Lacan necessarily crossed by the field of
190 A. C. Minozzo
the Other, or Symbolically arranged, and a rupture in this crossing would

indicate the side of psychosis. What Deleuze draws from Spinoza and
what goes on to influence so much of his work with Guattari and the
thinkers influenced by them to present day (such as Rolnik and Braidotti,
as I we engage with closely across this cartography of anxiety)—the
notion of desire as immanent and of affect as an excess to representation
that travels in encounters—disputes the central Structuralist and Post-
Structuralist tenets of Lacanian psychoanalysis that see in a Symbolic
arrangement the net in which subjectivity is constructed, either through
meaning or gaps in meaning, nonetheless determined by symbolisation.
Here, again, we find an interesting alignment with what I called Freud
and Lacan’s ‘vibrational moments’ as well as with Lygia Clark’s vibrational
‘full-void’: there is scope for an immanent production of affect which
does not cross or is not reduced by its relation to the Oedipal Other and
the Symbolic as such. Rather, we find here sustenance for a view of the
sinthôme as an articulation of the Real into novel Imaginaries—as Lacan
(1975) proposes in his Seminar XXIII, being a creative solution that does
not call for interpretation; rather, as Lygia Clark proposes and I hold onto
here, calling for a communal, collective construction, a co-poiesis.
Deleuze and Guattari work through this ethical-ontological muddle
throughout their lives. In what concerns psychoanalysis their quest could
be translated, as I read it, in simple terms, by asking “how much of me is
left beyond representational ideas?”; “what are the qualities of what is
left?”; and “can we think of an ethical and political landscape of these
excesses?”. In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus they try, in more
direct psychoanalytic terms, to meditate through libido, the Real, the
drive, the body and language. They go beyond the sources that founded
psychoanalysis and of psychoanalysis itself to think through these ethical
possibilities, contextualising the psychoanalytic discourse as pertaining to
a context of capitalism and repression, binarism and patriarchy. An ethi-
cal capacity beyond the dualism of representation would open the way
for the invention of new worlds and novel forms of living—or a sprout/
seedling of the world that lives in us, ‘gérmens de mundo’ (Rolnik, 2019),
an opening of the ‘paradoxical body’ (Gil, 1998) would be mobilised in
this affective turn. Such co-poietic processes of reinvention would start
with the body (in affects, symptoms, ruptures) and create new words and
worlds, invoking a collectivity without crossing the field of the Other as

a subordinate. In other words, it is from affects that ‘being’ can be
extended into ‘becomings’.
For Brian Massumi, “the concept of affect is politically oriented from
the get go” (Massumi, 2015, p. viii). Massumi is part of a generation of
theorists dedicated to ‘affect’, an early-2000s theoretical trend known as
the ‘affective turn’, which counts with diverse names such as Rosi
Braidotti, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Silvan Tomkins and Elizabeth Grosz.
Ideas proposing that affects vibrate, especially in relation to the body,
which is an archaic, pre-linguistic, transindividual body, and of the level
of a ‘body knowledge’ (Massumi, 2015, p. 210), are relevant to my delin-
eation of ‘anxiety as vibration’, and require that we go through Deleuze
and Guattari’s work in more detail, stressing Guattari’s realm of ‘chaos’
rather than the paradigm of a ‘repository’ as Massumi (2015) seems to
propose. The confusion and the danger of thinking of what is not of the
order of representation—or what is beyond the Plane, in Clark’s words—
and that leaves traces on the body as a kind of ‘magical substance’ have
been pointed out by several critics of the affect theorists for the risk of a
lack of ethical possibilities when focusing on states beyond cognition/
consciousness (Hemmings, 2005; Leys, 2017). We could think of this as
simply the ethical possibilities of the unconscious, and, more precisely, as
the ethical possibilities of the ‘body whilst unconscious trace’, much as
contemporary Lacanians work with the idea that the speaking-body is the
twenty-first century unconscious (Miller, 2014), or the ethics of the Real
(Brousse, 2007). I take this question as central to the psychopolitics of
the clinic, once it is necessary to account for the process of ‘dividualisa-
tion’ and estrangement from anxiety. Being able to mobilise possibilities
that further the subject reduced to a dividual would be the ethical and
political necessity of a contemporary ‘couch revolution’ that is truly faith-
ful to Freud’s project in light of contemporary epistemological demands
(Preciado, 2020)—namely, ecological, social, political changes and
urgencies that challenge the epistemology of alienation found in the psy-
choanalytic dividualising Oedipal abyss-within.
Deleuze’s philosophical project, which starts with the 1953 publica-
tion of Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume
and ends with the 1993 publication of Critique et Clinique, can be
192 A. C. Minozzo
understood in the context of his engagement with a particular version of

empiricism and a critique of transcendentalism in philosophy, from
which he will thus enter the field of psychoanalysis along the way, alone
and with Félix Guattari. For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy,
published in English in 1994, philosophy was an empirical project inso-
far as it involved ‘conceptual creations’. They write: “philosophy is the art
of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1994, p. 2) and this creation is done without appeal to a transcendental
illusion. Deleuze writes in the preface to the English edition of Dialogues
that he always considered himself to be an empiricist thinker, by which
he means he is a ‘pluralist’. In this rich short introduction to his dialogue
with Claire Parnet, he explains that, for him at least, empiricism involved
accounting for multiplicity without resorting to a universal or eternal in
order to explain the “conditions under which something new is produced
(creativeness)” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. vii), without abstracting the
totalities of the One, the Whole or the Subject, rationalist traps that, as
he sees it, psychoanalysis has fallen into. Empiricism, or his philosophical
endeavour, starts by “analysing the states of things, in such a way that
non-pre-existent concepts can be extracted from them. States of things
are neither unities nor totalities, but multiplicities” (Deleuze & Parnet,
1987, p. vii). This idea of multiplicity is important to comprehend; it:
Designates a set of lines or dimensions which are irreducible to one another.

Every ‘thing’ is made up in this way. Of course a multiplicity includes
focuses of unification, centres of totalization, points of subjectivation, but
as factors which can prevent its growth and stop its lines.[…] In a multi-
plicity what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what there is
‘between’, the between, as set of relations which are not separable from
each other. Every multiplicity grows from the middle, like the blade of
grass or the rhizome. We constantly oppose the rhizome to the tree, like
two conceptions and even two very different ways of thinking. (Deleuze &
Parnet, 1987, pp. vii–viii)
Psychoanalysis, under this logic, is at first ‘empiricist’ enough, but it

surrenders to the rationalist (and typically modern, colonial and patriar-
chal) illusion of totalities and loses its political potency. Freud, for
Deleuze, at first sees the multiplicities in the polymorphous perversion of

the “skin as a collection of pores, the slipper, the field of stitches” (Deleuze
& Parnet, 1987, p. viii), yet he “constantly fell back on the calmer vision
of a neurotic unconscious which plays with eternal abstractions” (Deleuze
& Parnet, 1987, p. viii). Klein, “even Melanie Klein” he writes, granting
her special respect, also succumbs to the same logic for her “partial objects
still refer to a unity, even if it is lost, to a totality, even if it is to come, to
a subject, even if it is split” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. ix). What Deleuze
strives with his philosophical project, and the collaboration with Guattari,
is to create concepts that engage with multiplicity, as a means to imagine
novel possibilities of being. He writes: “It seemed to us [him and Guattari]
that politics is at stake as well and that in a social field rhizome spread out
everywhere under the arborescent apparatuses” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987,
p. ix). The conditions for the emergence of such novelty is the kernel of a
possible “couch revolution”, that a feminist and Deleuzian-Guattarian
critique of psychoanalysis calls for (Preciado, 2018).
The way Deleuze starts engaging with such multiplicities is by his read-
ing, interpretation and creation of concepts from the works of Spinoza
and Bergson (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), mainly, as they allow him to
consider a ‘radical empiricism’ through the idea of a ‘plane of imma-
nence’. Such a plane, Deleuze and Guattari write, “does not present a flux
of the lived that is immanent to a subject and individualised in that which
belongs to a self. It presents only events, that is, possible worlds as con-
cepts, and other people as expressions of possible worlds or conceptual
personae” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, pp. 47–48). This ‘plane of imma-
nence’ is, as they write, “surrounded by illusions” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1994, p. 49): the illusion of transcendence, the illusion of universals, the
illusion of the eternal and the illusion of discursiveness (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1994). These illusions lock possibilities and erase multiplicity
condemning it into a relation to a referential and transcendental One
(interestingly resonating Lygia Clark’s Nostalgia of the Body essay). Here
we can see their resistance to tracing concepts by a traditional genealogy
that stays firmly closed to a tradition of history of philosophy, as the his-
torical is a taming of the potentiality of multiplicity and invention of new
modes of being—which they call an ‘event’. They write:
194 A. C. Minozzo
Philosophy cannot be reduced to its own history, because it continually

wrests itself from this history in order to create new concepts that fall back
into history but do not come from it. How could something come from
history? Without history, becoming would remain indeterminate and
unconditioned, but becoming is not historical. Psychosocial types belong
to history, but conceptual personae belong to becoming. (Deleuze
&Guattari, 1994, p. 96)
In this sense, we cannot reduce an ontology (conceptual personae) to

history as we will then be simply describing what exists under the agreed
universal conditions—or illusions—rather than opening up possibilities
of the order of the plane of immanence. In other words, “psychosocial
types are historical, but conceptual personae are events” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1994, p. 110). The question of their relation to the plane of
immanence and a critique to the transcendental takes us back to the
question of ‘affect’ and how affects cannot be reduced to ‘opinions’ or
pre-arranged set-ups; rather, they should be allowed to be recombined,
coupled, to vibrate and to ‘create’ or ‘become’. Discussing literature, art
and psychoanalysis, they point at the limiting of ‘opinion’ or ‘ideas’ over
affects, of imposing ‘knowledge’ over an affect and thus classifying it and
mapping preconditioned futures to such affective possibilities and
‘becomings’.
Psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature and art should engage with such
immanence instead of being limited to the transcendental ‘tree’ of univer-
sal referential conditions such as the ‘Other’ and the ‘Law’. Psychoanalysis
should then, according to this logic, account for the possibility of vibra-
tions—of affect recombination, creation and a political ontology that is
in tune with contemporary epistemological, ecological and political
demands that stem off the epistemology of alienation and the logic domi-
nation—rather than map and reproduce psychosocial historical subjects.
With this motivation in mind, I embark on a search for vibration.
In order to dive fully into what Deleuze and Guattari mean by ‘vibra-
tion’, and to prepare the ground to my thinking of ‘anxiety as vibration’,
I follow below with a cartographic genealogy of the concept of vibration,
discussing how it is crucial to the understanding of notion of ‘sensation’
and of ‘affect’ within this tradition of thinking. My reading method is
cartographic-rhizomatic, meaning that I follow the word ‘vibration’

across key texts from Deleuze and Guattari, opening up into their con-
ceptualisations of the body, affect and an ontology in the dynamic genesis
of language and its relation to the limits of the Symbolic (not to forget, a
Symbolic that is, for them, Oedipally framed and thus charged with the
Eurocentric colonialist patriarchal and capitalist subjective mode within
the epistemology of alienation and domination), pausing and digressing
as ‘vibration’ leads.
The Trail of Vibration

When discussing the oeuvre of Bergson, who will, along with Spinoza,
prove to be a fundamental influence in Deleuze and Guattari’s ontologi-
cal model, in the book Bergsonism, first published in 1966 in French,
Deleuze delineates the materialist monism of Bergson in relation to per-
ception, time (duration) and what extends ‘beyond us’ or our experience
beyond the individual as per Bergson’s monograph Matter and Memory.
He writes:
At each instant, our perception contracts “an incalculable multitude of

rememorized elements”; at each instant, our present infinitely contracts
our past: “The two terms which had been separated to begin with cohere
closely together… What, in fact, is a sensation? It is the operation of contract-
ing trillions of vibrations onto a receptive surface [my emphasis]. Quality
emerges from this, quality that is nothing other than contracted quantity”.
(Deleuze, 1991, p. 74)
Perception and memory, or recollection, become ‘one’ in Bergson

under this energetic metaphor of quantity of vibrations from the ‘out-
side’, or beyond the body, into a sensation where it can turn into a ‘qual-
ity’, in what I read to be similar to what in Spinoza and in Deleuze will
be called affect. As Deleuze writes, “Matter and Memory recognizes inten-
sities, degrees or vibrations in the qualities that we live as such outside
ourselves and that, as such, belong to matter” (Deleuze, 1991, p. 92).
According to Elizabeth Grosz (2007), Bergson’s influence on Deleuze
196 A. C. Minozzo
allows him to think not in terms of vitalism (even though Bergson speaks
of an élan vital) that would presuppose finality or a total, rather in terms
of life as a process, or affirmation since for Bergson “life assumes a con-
tinuous, never ceasing relation of change” (Grosz, 2007, p. 294). To
think in terms of intensities that vibrate takes Deleuze away from other
dominant modes of thinking about life and the body, moving away from
organicism and from phenomenology once “each places the functional or
experiencing body as a given rather than as the effect of processes of con-
tinual creation, movement or individuation” (Grosz, 2007, p. 289). For
Grosz this ecological ontology that we see in Deleuze’s collaboration with
Guattari—and very clearly in Guattari’s solo work such as The Three
Ecologies, from 1989—can be traced to the influence of Bergson, since, as
she writes it is Bergsonism that contributes with “an understanding of
individuality as a kind of dynamic integrative absorption of an outside
that is always too much, too large, to be ordered and contained within
life alone, but which extends life beyond itself into the very reaches of the
inorganic” (Grosz, 2007, pp. 288–289).
In Difference and Repetition, first published in French in 1968, Deleuze
speaks to psychoanalysis very closely as he offers a unique reading of
Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The question of primary repression
and of the origins of the unconscious is tackled by invoking terms from
philosophy and literature to think of ‘habit’, ‘memory’ and what is it that
makes repetition repeat. Deleuze, already in this piece, forces a reading of
repetition against the model of repression: “I do not repeat because I
repress. I repress because I repeat, I forget because I repeat. I repress,
because I can live certain things or certain experiences only in the mode
of repetition. I am determined to repress whatever would prevent me
from living them thus: in particular, the representation which mediates
the lived by relating it to the form of a similar or identical object”
(Deleuze, 1995, p. 18). Repetition is seen as a positivity, it is akin to a
rupture, or a gap, that is central to the conflict of the drives (Eros and
Thanatos, as he takes from Freud). Rather than being a characteristic of a
‘glitch’ of the conscious system, it entails difference or new qualities each
time we repeat. In this book, on the first page, Deleuze uses the word
vibration for the first time in relation to the unconscious. He does not
develop this idea in the book at all, but the meaning it bears here, of a
reverberation of a conative (in Spinoza’s terms) character of the body,

remains important. Deleuze writes: “To repeat is to behave in a certain
manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no
equal or equivalent. And perhaps this repetition at the level of external
conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates
it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular” (Deleuze,
1995, p. 1). The positive and differential unconscious emerges through
the movement of the drive, it vibrates in repetition. If what is repressed,
primarily, are not representations—as Deleuze puts it, ‘presentations’ are
the material of the Freudian primary repression (Deleuze, 1995)—but
what, as we can interpret, is not of the order of representation, therefore
affect, then affects constitute the core of such ‘founding’ elements of the
unconscious. In a way, this does not take us very far from Freud’s theories
of the drive as this encounter of psyche and soma—which is not all psy
nor all soma, but a ‘body’ of a ‘different order’ that appears in the drive.
Deleuze follows this line of thought in Logic of Sense, published for the
first time in the following year, 1969. One of the most interesting aspects
of this piece, in what concerns this research, is his exposition and critique
of the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein. The drives and what
‘moves’ this encounter of psyche-soma in her theories of a fragmented
body form his central arguments about language, or ‘sense’ as it is ‘written
over’ the body. This book tackles a variety of philosophical and literary
ideas to explore the genesis of ‘sense’ (and nonsense), arriving at the con-
ditions of sense being, necessarily, outside of what is ‘meant’ by any prop-
osition, “the expressed makes possible the expression” (Deleuze, 1990,
p. 186). Meaning, thus, is transcendental and relates to what Lacan calls
the Symbolic order, as we can interpret from this part of the book. The
second part of the book is more attractive to readers less familiar with
analytic philosophy and logic (resources strongly pulled together in the
first part) as it will then explore the conditions of the genesis of language
from a rather unique interpretation of Klein, sounds, expression and the
body. Despite not speaking about ‘vibration’ directly in this book, Deleuze
discusses intensities that cross the infant’s body in fragmented and cha-
otic manners borrowing from Daniel Stern and Melanie Klein as well as
Artaud, inaugurating his theorising of the ‘Body without Organs’ here.
198 A. C. Minozzo
In his account, infants are born into bodily noises, sounds and primary
affects. These sounds from the ‘depths’ will be mobilised into language
and the production of sense/nonsense thereafter. He writes: “When we
say that the sound becomes independent, we mean to say that it ceases to
be a specific quality attached to bodies, a noise or a cry, and that it begins
to designate qualities, manifest bodies, and signify subjects or predicates”
(Deleuze, 1990, p. 187). He is interested in the ‘surface’ that is produced
as language happens, curious about the “depth-surface distinction [which]
is, in every respect, primary in relation to the distinctions nature-
convention, nature-custom, or nature-artifice” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 187).
Again, there is quite a remarkable departure already from Lacan’s view
that even before birth we are already immersed in the Symbolic, even
though the subject emerges from a mythic pre-subject represented by the
delta at the bottom of the Graph of Desire. Deleuze criticised Klein’s
assumption of the two different positions of the unconscious (paranoid-
schizoid and depressive positions), “for the very theme of positions
implies the idea of the orientations of psychic life and of cardinal points;
it also implies the idea of the organization of this life in accordance with
variable or shifting coordinates and dimensions, an entire geography and
geometry of living dimensions” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 188). The ‘abyss’ of
the ‘bottomless depth’ of oral and anal drives does not enter an equilib-
rium via introjection and projection of ‘good objects’ as Klein suggested;
rather, what Deleuze reads as being what the schizoid position opposes is
“an organism without parts, a body without organs, with neither mouth
nor anus, having given up all introjection or projection, and being com-
plete, at this price” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 188). The ‘abyss’ of bodily depth
enters into a relation facing a ‘body’ that is ‘complete’, or of no depth, a
body of surface. It is, for Deleuze, at this point in his work, at this moment
when “the tension between id and ego is formed. Two depths are opposed:
a hollow depth, wherein bits whirl about and explode, and full depth”
(Deleuze, 1990, p. 189). The question of a superego, the tensions between
ego-id and the question of depth-surfaces are aligned with Deleuze’s
understanding of the body and its generative sounds that will be trans-
formed into language. This ‘creative’ delineation that Deleuze offers to
Klein’s work, inspired by Stern and his view of infants as ‘full’ of life
potency rather than ‘lacking’, also establishes a curious ethics to this
ontological model and his genealogy of sense. He writes: “The superego

does not begin with the first introjected objects, as Melanie Klein says,
but rather with this good object which holds itself aloft. Freud often
insisted on the importance of this transference from depth to height,
which indicates, between the id and the superego, a total change of ori-
entation and a central reorganization of psychic life” (Deleuze, 1990,
p. 189). Between id and superego, as Deleuze reads, there is a difference
in mode, since “depth has an internal tension determined by dynamic
categories—container-contained, empty-full, massive-meagre, etc.”
(Deleuze, 1990, p. 190) all the while “the tension proper to height [mean-
ing the superego here] is verticality, difference in size, the large and the
small” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 190). He seems to be talking about different
intensities or qualities, one of depth and one of the surface. The superego
and the conflict it inaugurates in psychic life are, therefore, of another
quality to the conflicts of depths, of the body without organs or, in a
simple sense, of the drive.
To Deleuze, there are no such things as ‘good objects’, rather, there is
an internalised superego acting as good object which the ego identifies
with. Identification is, according to this view, a mechanism of surface.
The level of the depressive position would then put into a halt the flux of
introjections and projections, of dynamic exchanges, and substitute for it
‘identification’ with both internal objects and with the “object of the
heights” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 192). In this sense, the ‘voice from above’ is
the basis of ‘morality’, or the ‘compass’ of psychic life that is taken in, as
it enters into a surface-depth relation towards the exploding tension of
the drives.
For Deleuze, when Freud speaks of erogenous ‘zones’ there is already
an external ‘mapping’ onto the body, as such zones are not ‘natural’ to its
chaotic nature, but rather, are inscribed and delineated. “The erogenous
zones are cut up on the surface of the body, around orifices marked by the
presence of mucous membranes. When people note that internal organs
are also able to become erogenous zones, it appears that this is condi-
tional upon the spontaneous topology of the body” (Deleuze, 1990,
p. 197). What is most important in Logic of Sense, therefore, is Deleuze’s
creative alternative to the quality of affects and the drives, interweaving
body and language in a more complex, more materialist matrix than in a
200 A. C. Minozzo
‘classic’ Freudian or Lacanian version. Guattari, in Chaosmosis, from

1992, will pick up on such theory of the genesis of sense and the relation
of the body, the unconscious and an expanded notion of the possibilities
of signification. Guattari, as a clinician, proposes a “movement towards a
polyphonic and heterogenetic comprehension of subjectivity” (Guattari,
1995a, p. 6).
Žižek (2004) considers Logic of Sense to be Deleuze’s most important
piece of writing, whilst dismissing Anti-Oedipus in his book Organs
Without Bodies precisely because in this piece Deleuze works at this limit
of tension between materialism and idealism, abandoning the latter alto-
gether in favour of the former in his Capitalism and Schizophrenia series
with Guattari. Following these two moments (Logic of Sense and Anti-
Oedipus), Deleuze dives into an ‘abandonment of sense’ and writes about
the logic of ‘sensation’.
The piece in which Deleuze’s exposition of sensation and, thus, vibra-
tion is more clearly connected to what we are trying to touch in anxiety
appears in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, originally published in
French in 1981, after meeting Guattari. The book, as the title suggests,
goes beyond the tradition of representation in art history and finds an
anchor in the work of the English painter, Francis Bacon, on the explora-
tion of sensation. Ideas about the body, the body without organs and of
the ‘potency’ of depth rehearsed in the second part of Logic of Sense can
be found here again, with additional emphasis. About the body and sen-
sation (and vibration), Deleuze’s poetic, difficult, yet summarised defini-
tion is the following:
The body without organs is opposed less to organs than to that organiza-
tion of organs we call an organism. It is an intense and intensive body. It is
traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to
the variations of its amplitude. Thus the body does not have organs, but
thresholds or levels. Sensation is not qualitative and qualified, but has only
an intensive reality, which no longer determines with itself representative
elements, but allotropic variations. Sensation is vibration [my emphasis].
[…] It is a whole nonorganic life, for the organism is not life, it is what
imprisons life. The body is completely living, and yet nonorganic. Likewise
sensation, when it acquires a body through the organism, takes on an
excessive and spasmodic appearance, exceeding the bounds of organic

activity. (Deleuze, 2003, p. 45)
The notion of the ‘bWo’ as we can see in the above quote, by this
point, is affirmative and sensorial. It is contrasted with the organism,
marking a ‘body’ that is not of the order of the Symbolic but it also has
trouble fitting into the Imaginary, aligned more with resonances of the
Real. If we rescue the ‘vibrational moments’ in Freud and Lacan’s work on
anxiety, namely the excessive, the libidinal, the Id-perceptions and the
Real that is not anchored in the Symbolic resonate with the ‘bWo’.
Deleuze, in his collaboration with Guattari, will, in fact, twist the uncon-
scious from the perspective of the Real (Sauvagnargues, 2016), delineat-
ing possibilities for subjectivity and political life accordingly. The shared
plane in which the unconscious is open to an immanent and ethical posi-
tioning along others is named an ‘assemblage’, a mode of togetherness in
which “objects constitute themselves in a transversal, vibratory position,
conferring on them a soul, a becoming ancestral, animal, vegetal, cosmic”
(Guattari, 1995a, p. 102). Their ontological and ethical proposition,
therefore, accounts for the possibilities of the unconscious beyond not
only an individualist or family-centred model, but also beyond a human-
exceptionalism framework. Vibration assumes the function of an ethical
and political utopia in Guattari’s ‘To Have done with the Massacre of the
Body’, from 1973: “We want to open our bodies to the bodies of other
people, to other people in general. We want to let vibrations pass among
us, let energies circulate, allow desires to merge” (Guattari, 2009, p. 212).
Deleuze and Guattari: Vibrating Together

Rather than focusing on the ‘castrations’ Oedipal models perceive as
structural in the unconscious, Deleuze and Guattari, working together in
the difficult and experimental Capitalism and Schizophrenia titles, pub-
lished between 1972 and 1980, see the unconscious as a space of positive
desire production, a space for expansion rather than a place for lack and
neurotic limitations. Instead of the Mirror Stage and the realms of the
Symbolic and the Imaginary—which give rise to a desire anchored in the
202 A. C. Minozzo
Other and aiming at recognition, as proposed by Lacan—they see the

unconscious as ‘rhizomatic’ and desire as a creative force. Rejecting the
‘arborescent’ structure defended by psychoanalysis (a vertical, centralised,
one-way model) they put forward the opposite to it: the rhizome, which
undermined the very notion of structure, proposing an unconscious
which is not fixed, instead multiple and fluid (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987). The rhizome is defined in a passage at the beginning of A Thousand
Plateaus, which reads: “unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects
any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to
traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of
signs, and even nonsign states” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21).
Rhizomes are also ‘acentered’, not coming from one specific point neither
going to any single direction. This multiple nature allows rhizomes to
ceaselessly establish “connections between semiotic chains, organisations
of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social strug-
gles” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7), an idea that seems to expand the
Lacanian premises of the Imaginary and the Symbolic as having to work
with their delineating limitations, granting one another the capacity to
fulfil itself. Rhizomatic subjects engage with all the potentiality that
‘vibrates’ around them (also in them, through them, and so on), in a way
“that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of
‘becomings’” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21). Desire, emerging from
‘desiring-machines’ through desire-production, “is at work everywhere,
functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts” (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1983, p. 1). For them, the meeting of desiring-machines
(which derive from a non-distinctive classification between humans,
nature, etc.) allows for a ‘coupling’ from which the interruption of one
flow of desire generates another flow, in another direction, forming a
rhizomatic cartography which is, inherently, multi-directional (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1983). When flows of desire are interrupted, a Body without
Organs emerges, presenting its “smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as
a barrier” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 8), subverting any notion of
bodies being ‘hermetically’ organised. The BwO is an all-encompassing
version of the organism, comprising the ‘virtual’ affective potentialities
that a body carries with it—in a sense similar to what Lacan suggests with
the Real towards the late phase of his writings (as a register which is
‘unbound’)—only by the engagement with this ‘machine’ of desire-

production. A ‘becoming’, as described in Anti-Oedipus, happens when
this realm of virtual potentiality is activated, in the meeting of “the pro-
cess of production of the desiring-machines and the nonproductive stasis
of the body without organs” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 8). Without
veering away from this archival tracing of ‘vibration’, it is worth mention-
ing that such proposition of becoming in relation to the BwO takes us
back to Lygia Clark’s vibrational body and its openness to co-poiesis in her
practice.
Both in Anti-Oedipus and in A Thousand Plateaus, ‘vibration’ appears
as part of Deleuze and Guattari’s lexicon, often-times relating to their
writings on art, music and literature and their potency in engendering
new worlds and new aesthetic paradigms. In a passage of Anti-Oedipus
where they critically engage with the Freudian understanding of love,
sexuality and libido, vibration operates as a non-situated, collective and
connecting quality of libido. To hold onto this, I will fragment this spe-
cific passage in more detail. They start by positioning psychoanalysis
within a specific modern tradition that is particularly conservative, claim-
ing, with humour, that “psychoanalysis has not made its pictorial revolu-
tion” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 352), thus, is still attached to an ‘old’
aesthetic reference. The Freudian framework of Oedipus therefore modu-
lates libido and the body within a specific political economy:
There is a hypothesis dear to Freud: the libido does not invest the social
field as such except on condition that it be desexualized and sublimated. If
he holds so closely to this hypothesis, it is because he wants above all to
keep sexuality in the limited framework of Narcissus and Oedipus, the ego
and the family. Consequently, every sexual libidinal investment having a
social dimension seems to him to testify to a pathogenic state, a “fixation”
in narcissism, or a “regression” to Oedipus and to the pre-oedipal stages, by
means of which homosexuality will be explained as a reinforced drive, and
paranoia as a means of defense. We have seen on the contrary that what the
libido invested, through its loves and sexuality, was the social field itself in
its economic, political, historical, racial, and cultural determinations: in
delirium the libido is continually re-creating History, continents, king-
doms, races, and cultures. Not that it is advisable to put historical represen-
tations in the place of the familial representations of the Freudian
204 A. C. Minozzo
unconscious, or even the archetypes of a collective unconscious. (Deleuze

& Guattari, 1983, p. 352)
Collectivising this modulation by extending its symbolic “essential-

ism”, in a Jungian manner, alternatively, is not the solution either, as they
hint above. Rather, they argue, libido is a matter of encounters with oth-
ers, indexing social relations that cannot be reduced to ‘history’ (or a
transcendental connecting illusion), but harnessed into a ‘geohistory’ (or
a cartography of relations). Opening libido to the level of vibration would
thus do away with the necessity of a subjectivity that is modulated within
the political economy of the modern and Oedipal family, organised by its
binary and phallic sexual difference. For them, “our choices in matters of
love are at the crossroads of ‘vibrations’, which is to say that they express
connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions of flows that cross through a
society, entering and leaving it, linking it up with other societies, ancient
or contemporary, remote or vanished, dead or yet to be born” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1983, p. 353). Libido, through the perspective of a vibrational
body, thus, has an affective character and it is harnessed in the socius in a
way of encounters that extend beyond the limits of a historical (and
Symbolic) delineation of reality. In Anti-Oedipus, therefore, we can find
the path contrary to the modulation of desire; or a rescuing of the early-
Freud libido as harnessed to the collective rather than the socius.
They write:
But flows and codes of socius that do not portray anything, that merely
designate zones of libidinal intensity on the body without organs, and that
are emitted, captured, intercepted by the being that we are then deter-
mined to love, like a point-sign, a singular point in the entire network of
the intensive body that responds to History, that vibrates with it. (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1983, p. 353)
In A Thousand Plateaus, vibration appears as synonymous to ‘becom-

ings’ in the ‘plane of consistency’. We can move beyond the early-Freud
libidinal excess theory into finding here resonances to what Lacan hints
without theorising in his later conceptualisation of the Real. Instead of
operating in a logic of ‘two’ (as the planes made possible by, for example,
the modulating libidinal economy of psychoanalysis), multiplicities are

kept alive in what they call a ‘plane of consistency’, defining that:
Far from reducing the multiplicities’ number of dimensions to two, the

plane of consistency cuts across them all, intersects them in order to bring
into coexistence any number of multiplicities, with any number of dimen-
sions. The plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete forms.
Therefore all becomings are written like sorcerers’ drawings on this plane of
consistency, which is the ultimate Door providing a way out for them. This
is the only criterion to prevent them from bogging down, or veering into
the void. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 251)
It is at this level, of the plane of consistency, that the ‘imperceptible’

can be ‘seen and heard’, that vibrations are located. Vibration, therefore,
is a quality of affect. If we return to earlier pages and to Deleuze’s course
on Spinoza and affect, the collective and non-representational aspects of
affect are again rescued in ‘vibration’. Vibration, accordingly, resonates
affectively, opening up to what is not known, which is not divided in two,
keeping multiplicity alive. It is also “where the imperceptible is seen and
heard”, when the body is open to sensation, even the most subtle ones.
Interestingly, the body in its materiality and capacity for sensation ver-
sus a cognitive self-consciousness will again be linked with vibration in
their last co-authored book—risking slight dualistic undertones, they still
extrapolate the complex entanglement between concept and matter,
echoing Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s theory of affects as still relational,
as mentioned. The final account of the pair Deleuze and Guattari on
vibration appears in What is Philosophy?, first published in 1991. In this
piece, again, vibration is utilised in relation to music, philosophy and art,
but there is one specific passage that connects vibration with the materi-
ality of the ‘I’, the brain and nervous system and the field of the ‘other’.
They write:
It is the brain that says I, but I is an other. It is not the same brain as the
brain of connections and secondary integrations, although there is no tran-
scendence here. And this I is not only the “I conceive” of the brain as phi-
losophy, it is also the “I feel” of the brain as art. Sensation is no less brain
206 A. C. Minozzo
than the concept. If we consider the nervous connections of excitation-

reaction and the integrations of perception action, we need not ask at what
stage on the path or at what level sensation appears, for it is presupposed
and withdrawn. The withdrawal is not the opposite but a correlate of the
survey. Sensation is excitation itself, not insofar as it is gradually prolonged
and passes into the reaction but insofar as it is preserved or preserves its
vibrations. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 211)
It is clear that the I, or the subject of consciousness and enunciation,

speaks to that level of subjectivity which is not only conscious but which
is actualised through language. What I find particular compelling about
their addition to vibration and sensation here is how it echoes yet again
what Freud hinted at in his ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’, from 1938,
namely the quality of the Id as being capable of perceptions that extend
beyond the ego and consciousness. Here, then, it becomes clear how
vibration is an unconscious sensation.
For Deleuze and Guattari, as this genealogy of the notion of vibration
makes very clear, subjectivity extends to the level of ‘sensation’, or the
level of ‘vibration’. Their final definition of vibration addresses precisely
this almost ‘materiality’ of the unconscious; or, as contemporary Lacanians
would express it, how the unconscious is the speaking-body:
Sensation contracts the vibrations of the stimulant on a nervous surface or

in a cerebral volume: what comes before has not yet disappeared when
what follows appears. This is its way or responding to chaos. Sensation
itself vibrates because it contracts vibrations. It preserves itself because it
preserves vibrations: it is Monument. It resonates because it makes its har-
monics resonate. Sensation is the contracted vibration that has become
quality, variety. That is why the brain-subject is here called soul or force,
since only the soul preserves by contracting that which matter dissipates, or
radiates, furthers, reflects, refracts, or converts. (Deleuze & Guattari,
1994, p. 211)
In their complex cosmologic assemblage, vibrations of the world are

constant, captured by ‘sensation’, which is a capacity of the I that goes
beyond ‘knowledge’ and beyond ‘feeling’. If we add a Lacanian layer to
this, we can place ‘sensation’ at the level of an affective Real, rather than
the Symbolic (knowledge) or the Imaginary (feelings).
Vibrating the Clinic

Guattari’s solo meditations and theoretical production were as ambitious
and consistent as those he imparted with Deleuze in Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. His writings reflect the onto-epistemic twists proposed by
Deleuze, and focus on what he calls ‘schizoanalytic cartographies’ and a
‘diagrammatic’ mode of thought. The kernel of his contributions relates
to the possibilities of a ‘vibrational’ Real.
The Real in Guattari is not confined to the margins of representation, as
a negative of the ‘phenomenological’ Thing, as a structuralist-minded
understanding of early to mid-life Lacan insists on, and late-Lacan perhaps
leaves open ended (Guattari, 1995b). Guattari worked on a detailed trans-
disciplinary project of semiotics, metamodeling and expression in his solo
writing before, during and after his encounter with Deleuze. He sought
inspiration in the linguistic theory of ‘Glossematics’, from the Danish lin-
guist Hjelmslev and his semiotic matrix of polyvocality, which, differently
to the Saussurean model of linguistics that inspired Lacan, offers scope for
the expression of a-signifying ruptures, rather than confining them as a
negative to the ‘bivocality’ of representation. To Guattari, “the subjectivity
produced in the world of signification is a shut-in, a semiological ship-
wreck” (Genosko, 2002, p. 168), in which “polyvocity becomes bi[uni]voc-
ity” (Genosko, 2002, p. 169). In his published personal notebooks The
Anti-Oedipus Papers (2006) and in A Thousand Plateaus, co-authored with
Deleuze, several references to the question of expression beyond the possi-
bilities of representation are made. Guattari’s model of the subject also
expands Hjelmslev’s linguistic ideas to ‘matter’/’substance’, including not
only the social and the political as well as the ecological and the biological
into a common matrix of affectability, or into a metamodeling of the
‘machine’. Janell Watson, a scholar of Guattari’s complex diagrammatic
thinking, writes that “the political potential of Guattari’s semiotic matrix
lies in its refusal to let go of the real, as does Lacan by focusing on a signifier
which cannot possibly even ‘represent’ the real. Guattari’s matrix can
208 A. C. Minozzo
include the real because it does not confine itself to the domain of represen-
tation—in other words, the small ellipsis of language” (Watson, 2008,
para.44). Such ‘diagrammatic’ thought, moving beyond the possibilities of
representation and non-representation, shakes completely the Lacanian
primacy of the Symbolic for subjective formation, which is implied in
Lacanian topological models (until the 1970s, at least). As such, “forging a
path of access to the real opens up political possibilities, whereas blocking
out the real shuts down politics. The capitalist and psychoanalytic politics
of signification which upholds the tyranny of the signifier in turn preserves
the domination of the ruling classes” (Watson, 2008, para.44). This dense
theoretical twist has powerful clinical implications—it opens space for a
‘nomadic ethics’ (Braidotti, 2006a), or for ‘becomings’ rather than ‘beings’
in the psychoanalytic clinic.
The clinical model practiced by Guattari on the back of his collabora-
tion with Deleuze and his connection with the Institutional Psychotherapy
movement in France (known as schizoanalysis) is thus a practice of
‘becomings’ (Robcis, 2021). For them, when dealing with the uncon-
scious, “it is not the lines of pressure that matter, but on the contrary the
lines of escape” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 338), lines of flight, of
movement. Instead of a clinic focused on the power of repression (and
foreclosure and disavowal, as the psychotic and perverse core mechanisms
in the Lacanian clinic), schizoanalysis works with the power of the ‘lines
of flight’. For them “the unconscious does not apply pressure to con-
sciousness; rather, consciousness applies pressure and strait-jackets the
unconscious, to prevent its escape” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 338).
Thus being, the lines of flight, the moments of inventiveness and creativ-
ity not only in the symptom but in the sinthôme, is what keeps one alive
and is the key to a clinic of becoming (Biehl & Locke, 2017). As a clinical
practitioner, ‘thinking-with’ (rather than ‘against’) these theorists enables
me to move beyond discursivity in what concerns the ‘grammar of suffer-
ing’ in the case of anxiety (Dunker, 2015), thinking of the materiality of
the body, and life, in light of the ontological turn in medical anthropol-
ogy (Mol, 2002; Biehl, 2005). Unconscious ‘lines of flight’ meet a ‘com-
mon’ (Federici, 2019, 2020) ‘nomadic affectivity’ (Braidotti, 2006b).
For this reason, the influence of Deleuze and Guattari in the Brazilian
Psychiatric Reform, for example, is notorious. Aside from the historical
fact that Guattari visited Brazil during the period of re-democratisation

after the Military Dictatorship relinquished in the early 1980s, taking
part in critical psychiatric meetings, the schizoanalytic model finds, to
this day resonances in the public mental health care system (Amarante &
Nunes, 2018). As asylums started to be closed, following an international
trend of psychiatric reform in the 1980s, outpatient ‘psychosocial sup-
port centres’ (CAPS) were established nationally after the year 2000. The
centrality of music and art therapy, as well as the importance of commu-
nity care and psychosocial work in ‘territories’ in Brazilian public mental
health, is frequently justified ‘schizoanalytically’. Arriscado Nunes and
Siqueira-Silva (2016) argue that this schizoanalytic appropriation in the
Brazilian Psychiatric Reform confers a decolonial quality to its practices,
once suffering, ruptures and the production of meaning are bound to the
community and to a local temporality, rather than enclosed within hege-
monic (and colonial) psychiatric frames or psychoanalytic models.
Accordingly, the clinical reverberations of schizoanalysis are also present
in the ontological turn observed within medical anthropology (Mol,
2002), challenging universalising dominant health epistemologies that
offer little or no space for the multiple performances and experiences of
illness, suffering, health and the body.9
The ruptures characteristic of psychic suffering and ‘madness’ (psycho-
ses, more often) need, according to the schizoanalytic model, to be sup-
ported with grounds of expression that are not enclosed to individual
psychotherapy and psychiatric care (in other words, not forced into the
limits of being, but open to multiple becomings). Rather, the expression
of such unconscious ruptures needs to be collective and territorialised in
the community, crossing aesthetic, sensorial and political zones of affect
(Lancetti, 2015). That is what Guattari (2015) called a clinical model of
‘transversality’. The transversal moves the centre of the axis of enuncia-
tion from the subject and their triangular relation with the Other and the
9
The Brazilian CAPS model of community mental health care features in a very recent report on
Global Mental Health issued by the World Health Organization in June 2021 that is the result of
an effort to promote person-centred and rights-based approaches in the heavily over-medicalised
and still violent field of mental health care (WHO, 2021). This model, albeit precarious in reality,
is anchored in co-production, active participation of service users in all decision-making, the right
to choose and negotiate a treatment alongside a multidisciplinary team and a strong local com-
munity support system of networks of care.
210 A. C. Minozzo
analyst, challenging the power structure (or colonising violence) sus-

tained by the classic transferential relation in psychoanalysis. Instead of
relying on the fixity of psychic structures (neurosis, psychosis and perver-
sion)—which stems off Lacan’s linguistic logic (and the representation
versus non-representation binary of this linguistic model)—or on the
function of interpretations that are Oedipally inscribed (with sexual dif-
ference, the family drama and castration at its core)—a plural and situ-
ated clinic is proposed. Whilst there is significant literature on the
influence of Deleuze and Guattari in the Brazilian Psychiatric reform in
relation to psychosis (similarly to the legacy of French Institutional
Psychotherapy, see Robcis, 2021), little is offered in relation to the poten-
tial of the schizoanalytic model in the clinic of anxiety. What the archival
mobilisation allows us to do is to extend the clinical value of unconscious
‘lines of flight’ into the clinic of anxiety.
In Guattari’s practice, the commitment to the ‘lines of flight’ is appar-
ent in the institutional mobilisation of what we can call now the ‘full-
void’ into co-poiesis. Guattari (1998) has offered a rich account of how
such power relations were challenged in practice at the clinic of La Borde
in his essay ‘La Grille’. The ‘grid’ of activities and function was funda-
mental to the emergency of ‘deregulation frames’ (cadrer le dérèglements)
that would act as a system of articulation of all the patients, staff and
space, allowing for the “invention of a [new] language”. The set of rela-
tions and their non-hierarchical arrangements of the clinic were funda-
mental to the treatment to mostly cases of psychoses at La Borde. In
defending this model of clinical practice psychosocially, the question to
be worked out is not just of the macropolitical effects of the ‘pimping of
life’ (Rolnik, 2019), but of its ‘molecular’ dynamics, as Guattari (2000)
argues in The Three Ecologies. Following Denise Ferreira da Silva (2016),
who proposes that such an ethico-political project does not entail simply
tracing ‘differences’ and the effects of difference for what they are (a strat-
egy of thinking she calls ‘critique’), even when providing an intersectional
feminist critique; rather, it is matter of moving beyond ‘separating’
estrangements and proposing ‘entanglements’ instead.10 In other words,

clinically engaging at the molecular level means not only speaking of the
‘effects’ of the logic of the Same/One across human multiplicities; nor
does it involve thinking radically through a psychoanalytic archive whilst
still succumbing the Real, ruptures, a-signification and affects, such as
anxiety, to the limits of universalist signifiers and a corresponding
Symbolic structure.
As such, going back to Guattari’s polyvocal Real, we can trace what I
am gathering as Guattari’s ‘theory of anxiety’. The ruptures of a vibra-
tional Real add a particular nuance to Guattari’s understanding of anxi-
ety, a conceptualisation he does not develop in detail but that he insinuates
in various moments. Guattari places ‘anguish’ within the domain of the
ruptures—beyond the limits of bivocality—which, in his critique of psy-
choanalysis and ‘Integrated World Capitalism’—his own vocabulary for
neoliberal capitalism—is prevented from operating its ‘surprise’.
He writes:
Everything that pertains to the domain of rupture, surprise, and anguish,

but also desire, the will to love and to create, somehow has to fit into the
registers of dominant references. There is always an arrangement ready to
prevent anything that might be of a dissident nature in thought and desire.
There is an attempt to eliminate what I call the processes of singularization.
Everything that surprises, however mildly, has to be classifiable in some
area of framing or reference. (Guattari & Rolnik, 2007, pp. 58–59)
The psychoanalytic (and, we can add, the psychodiagnosis that

extended through the twentieth century) modus operadi is, to Guattari,
one of such frames that modulates anguish and its ruptures under the
Modern shadow of subjectivity. Affects and anguish are contextually
modulated and our relation to them is indicative of our cartographical
10
Denise Ferreira da Silva writes: “Why not assume that beyond their physical (bodily and geo-
graphic) conditions of existence, in their fundamental constitutions, at the subatomic level, humans
exist entangled with everything else (animate and in-animate) in the universe). Why not conceive
of human differences—the ones nineteenth and twentieth century anthropologists and sociologists
selected as fundamental human descriptors—as effects of both spacetime conditions and a knowl-
edge program modelled after Newtonian (nineteenth century anthropology) and Einsteinian
(twentieth century social scientific knowledge) physics, in which separability is the privileged onto-
logical principal. Without separability, difference among human groups and between human and
nonhuman entities, has a very limited explanatory purchase and ethical significance” (Ferreira da
Silva, 2016, pp. 64–65).
212 A. C. Minozzo
positioning, Guattari writes: “every individual and social group conveys

its own system of modelising subjectivity; that is, a certain cartography—
composed of cognitive references as well as mythical, ritual and symp-
tomatological references—with which it positions itself in relation to its
affects and anguishes, and attempts to manage its inhibitions and drives”
(Guattari, 1995a, p. 11). Anguish, or anxiety, by being situated within
the domain of a-signifying ruptures are not reduceable to the binary (rep-
resentability versus non-representability) logic of the Symbolic as
anchored over the paradigm of ‘lack’.
Guattari makes this argument clearer in a note entitled ‘Of Anxiety,
the Phallic Object and Interpretation’, published as part of his Anti-
Oedipus Papers. There Guattari places anxiety as “the intermixture of two
intersecting drives—Faithfulness to polyvocal remainders (the mother)
(adhesion to the remainders, adherence to the Lacanian ‘a’)—Desire for
bi-univocal oedipal normality” (Guattari, 2006, p. 103). In a diagram I
am nicknaming ‘Guattari’s Graph of Anxiety’, Guattari maps ‘eros’ (or
affect, jouissance, libido, for him) as extending beyond the death-drive
that anchors attachment to bi-univocality. He proposes a small circle of
‘bi-univocality’ is anchored by the death drive; a larger circle wraps it in
its middle, this larger one anchored by polyvocality and headed by eros.
The unconscious (Eros) is thus moored by polyvocality—or multiple
possibilities of enunciation, expression or representation that do not fit
into any Symbolic structure or arrangement. What this implies is that the
affect of anxiety is not reducible to interpretation, nor indexed to a rela-
tion to the Phallic Law-of-the-Father, Oedipus and the Other that anchor
the Symbolic. What this diagram, followed by this study on vibration,
enables us to map is that Guattari offers a complementing theory of anxi-
ety that Freud and Lacan only hinted at but were not able to clearly
delineate. What we see here is the potency of anxiety in a clinic that
encounters the subject anxious, at the edge of their being, but not yet
open to novel becomings.
Following the trail of ‘vibration’ through the oeuvre of Deleuze and
Guattari, affect is an ethical disposition that is collectively produced.
Affect vibrates beyond the confines of an individual and the Symbolic
frame that modulates one’s experience of such affects. We have arrived at
this ethical framing of the subject in Deleuze and Guattari by pursuing a
cartographic genealogy of the concept of vibration, discussing how it is

crucial to the understanding of notions of ‘sensation’ and of ‘affect’ within
this tradition of thinking. Anxiety, as an affect of rupture, exceeds the
modulation of the bivocality of possibilities assumed by the psychoana-
lytic model and, as such, is inscribed in the plane of the ‘commons’, fol-
lowing Federici (2019, 2020); or of a nomadic ethics (Braidotti, 2006a)
instead of a logic of ‘difference with separability’ and domination (Ferreira
da Silva, 2016). In other words, possibilities for ‘becomings’ rather than
‘beings’ in the psychoanalytic clinic.
Returning to the critique presented earlier in the book—which point
at a process of ‘dividualisation’ (Deleuze, 1992) in the process of diagno-
sis and treatment of anxiety, extending such alienation to a psychoana-
lytic orientation that is restricted to the possibilities of ‘being’, rather
than of ‘becoming’—what proves necessary is an encounter between the
common, the affective, collective, ethical disposition rescued in the con-
cept of ‘vibration’, and psychoanalytic possibilities. How can we conceive
an understanding of anxiety in psychoanalysis that is not dividualising?
Can psychoanalysis work with an unconscious that vibrates? This is what
I move into arguing, shifting from anxiety and its estrangement, as we
have set out in the beginning, to a possible entanglement, as we will
conclude.
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8

The Trail of Vibration

After mapping ‘vibrational moments’ in both Freud and Lacan as possi-

© The Author(s) 2024 183

contractual relationship of the most traditional bourgeois medicine: the

others instead of with the Other—which I do so by following Rosi

Vibration between Ontology and Ethics

the Freudian concepts of the resolution of the Oedipus Complex into a

the Other, or Symbolically arranged, and a rupture in this crossing would

worlds, invoking a collectivity without crossing the field of the Other as

understood in the context of his engagement with a particular version of

Designates a set of lines or dimensions which are irreducible to one another.

Psychoanalysis, under this logic, is at first ‘empiricist’ enough, but it

Deleuze, at first sees the multiplicities in the polymorphous perversion of

Philosophy cannot be reduced to its own history, because it continually

In this sense, we cannot reduce an ontology (conceptual personae) to

cartographic-rhizomatic, meaning that I follow the word ‘vibration’

The Trail of Vibration

At each instant, our perception contracts “an incalculable multitude of

Perception and memory, or recollection, become ‘one’ in Bergson

reverberation of a conative (in Spinoza’s terms) character of the body,

ontological model and his genealogy of sense. He writes: “The superego

‘classic’ Freudian or Lacanian version. Guattari, in Chaosmosis, from

excessive and spasmodic appearance, exceeding the bounds of organic

Deleuze and Guattari: Vibrating Together

Other and aiming at recognition, as proposed by Lacan—they see the

‘unbound’)—only by the engagement with this ‘machine’ of desire-­

unconscious, or even the archetypes of a collective unconscious. (Deleuze

Collectivising this modulation by extending its symbolic “essential-

In A Thousand Plateaus, vibration appears as synonymous to ‘becom-

the modulating libidinal economy of psychoanalysis), multiplicities are

Far from reducing the multiplicities’ number of dimensions to two, the

It is at this level, of the plane of consistency, that the ‘imperceptible’

than the concept. If we consider the nervous connections of excitation-­

It is clear that the I, or the subject of consciousness and enunciation,

Sensation contracts the vibrations of the stimulant on a nervous surface or

In their complex cosmologic assemblage, vibrations of the world are

Vibrating the Clinic

fact that Guattari visited Brazil during the period of re-democratisation

analyst, challenging the power structure (or colonising violence) sus-

estrangements and proposing ‘entanglements’ instead.10 In other words,

Everything that pertains to the domain of rupture, surprise, and anguish,

The psychoanalytic (and, we can add, the psychodiagnosis that

positioning, Guattari writes: “every individual and social group conveys

cartographic genealogy of the concept of vibration, discussing how it is

Biehl, J. (2005). Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. University of

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