CRITICAL HORIZONS, 2018

VOL. 19, NO. 2, 173–185

https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2018.1453299

Tricking Posthumanism: From Deleuze to (Lacan) to Haraway

Jacob W. Glazier
Department of Psychology, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
A lineage has been drawn between the immanent philosophy Posthumanism; Donna
articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the work of Haraway; immanent
Donna Haraway, most notably by the nomadic feminist and philosophy; trickster theory;
psychoanalysis
immanentist Rosi Braidotti. However, while containing certain
parallels via the process nature of their ontologies, upon further
inspection, such an equivocation is unwarranted on the grounds
that it fails to remain nuanced in distinguishing the precise
‘mechanism’ or midwife that gives birth to the continued
proliferation of the flux of becoming. This disparity is exposed
through the erection of a homology using Lacanian
psychoanalysis that eases the passing from immanentism to
Haraway by showing that the latter inscribes the obverse of
L’Autre (the big Other) into the field of becoming unravelling
privileged channels of desire. This results in an ingenuity that can
never be pinned down by the signifier and, further, actively works
to subvert it through ploy.

All of my writing is committed to swerving and tripping over [Western] bipartite, dualist
traps rather than trying to reverse them or resolve them into supposedly larger wholes.
These papers are full of tropes … tropes swerve; they defer the literal, forever, if we are
lucky; they make plain that to make sense we must always be ready to trip.1
Tripping into a steaming pile of excrement may not sound like the most appetising
course of action for most. Repulsive as that may be, Donna Haraway shows us how to
get enjoyment out of such a clumsy, blunderous movement. To be honest, as she tells
us, the trickster probably receives the most pleasure out of such a bungle. An eminent
anecdote about coyote, the trickster avatar of the Native American tradition, perhaps illus-
trates this best. It is said that when he needs advice and inspiration, coyote conjures up his
own scat, only after much grunting and straining, of course.2 That which is produced acts
as a creative impetus for further dialogue and invention. In a manner, this is how
Haraway’s ontology can be read: as that wily coyote that never ceases to produce
myriad forms, shapes, and configurations out of its own flux of becoming.
Such a reading has become sanitised, unfortunately, by some scholars in the field
through their virtually total equivocation of it with the immanentism of Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari.3 On the one hand, Haraway and immanentism share many affinities
including the process nature of their ontologies, the anti-identitarianism embedded
within such a position, and the rejection of anthropocentrism, to name a few. However,

CONTACT Jacob W. Glazier jacob.w.glazier@gmail.com

© Critical Horizons Pty Ltd 2018
174 J. W. GLAZIER

there is a very precise distinction in the theoretical framing of these respective ontologies
that I will attempt to demonstrate in the following pages. This difference shows up in the
divergent implementation of the structural ‘mechanism’ that pushes into becoming the
plenum as such.
The thesis of this essay aims to illuminate such a nuance, which can be captured in the
following terms: the aleatory nodal connections that precipitate machinic-assemblages in
immanentism are categorically distinct from the monstrous midwife’s proliferation of the
subterfuge-assemblage in Haraway insofar as the latter circumvents pure chance through
artifice. Thus, one way to illustratively parse this difference may be to reinscribe the
banner of Deleuze’s “philosophy of the Same”4 with Haraway’s inscription rendered as
“the philosophy of the Trickster”.
This disparity is exposed through the erection of a homology using Lacanian psycho-
analysis that eases the passing from immanentism to Haraway by showing that Haraway
inscribes the exact obverse of L’Autre (the big Other) into the field of becoming as opposed
to its originary usage as the phantasmatic construction that begets subjectivity. That is,
instead of crystallising signification around privileged channels of desire adjourned
through the master-signifier as is the case in the Lacanian reading of the big Other,
Haraway flips this and installs it within the flux of becoming such that it always already
unravels these very “privileged channels of desire” constructed through signification.
Haraway’s trickster ontology can never really be pinned down by the signifier and,
further, actually works to subvert it through ploy, by replacing necessary-contingency
with a wily kind of necessity.

Processing Process Ontologies

Haraway5 is adamant about the inherent cleverness embedded within her conception of
ontology such that the wellspring of being, its surging forth, is ambiguous in the strictest
sense of the word. That is, the subject is always already ‘outwitted’ by the wily and agential
nature of the world. In contrast, immanentism presupposes a certain forthrightness
wherein, in the dice throw, convergent lines of libidinal power meet and form novel
and interesting patterns of assembly that are predictable even in their necessity. Even
though this position presupposes the most general sense of arbitrariness in the blossoming
forth of particular instantiations, it lacks, nevertheless, that which sets the process in
motion: i.e. the radical possibility of becoming-a-dupe6 or, to say it differently, the con-
struction of a kind of subterfuge-assemblage, parsing this in the terms of Deleuze and
Guattari.7
To sketch this argument cursorily for the moment, Haraway’s ontology can be charac-
terised by a certain kind of impossibility built into the ontological edifice wherein the
“faith in chance” in the immanentist position becomes scrambled. It is exactly this agential
“one can never know if one will be tricked” that gets things going and sets them into flux
within the plenum. Conversely, an immanentist ontology neglects ambiguity, in the sense
being employed here, and instead places faith in a specific form of absolute arbitrariness.8
This is a faith that says to wander on, to push forward because the novel and accidental
configurations that come into being from such a wandering will, in and of themselves,
produce peculiar and new assemblages. However, such a wandering evoked by the imma-
nentist position produces exactly and only difference, tout court, by presupposing the
 CRITICAL HORIZONS 175

necessary aleatory linkages among configurations and assemblages – oppose this to Har-
away’s contingency understood as a ruse. In this way, one thing and one thing only can be
assured: the unwavering certainty in the dice throw.
Constellating the divergences of these signifiers, arbitrariness, and ambiguity, and
therefore the dialogical foil being erected between immanentism and Haraway are the
causal agents embedded within each theorist’s ontological position. Of particular impor-
tance here is the plenum’s midwife or, to state it differently, that which sets in motion
the topological proliferation of the infinitude of possible assembled concretisations.
Importantly, the search for such a midwife does not lead back to the First Mover in the
Aristotelian sense nor, perhaps even more adamantly, does not lead forward to a final
causal and, therefore, teleological explanation thereby opening certain fascistic reterritor-
ialisations. This kind of midwife also does not produce a plenum that can be channelled
and routed to some traditional notion of Hegelian9 dialectical progression vis-à-vis
Aufheben (sublation) towards the Absolute.
Indeed, any process ontology of this likeness must account for the very “mechanism”
that sets it into motion, that is both becoming and not-becoming thereby causing,
not in the efficient sense but in a self-generative and recursive sense, its incessant dyna-
mism. Such an agent must be strictly equivalent to the process of begetting itself, to the
propagation of the plenum as such. Teasing this refinement apart, between immanentism
and Haraway, will help reveal the ways in which their theorising deviates from one
another.

The Philosophy of the Same

One avenue Deleuze explores in order to get a hold of this slippery variable, one might
even be tempted to use the adjective tricky here, is explicated in Logic of Sense and
termed the quasi-cause. That is, the quasi-cause is the doubling back of “traditional” caus-
ality such that its spectre, the quasi-cause, haunts its doppelgänger into further incitation.
In less illustrative words, the quasi-cause is specifically the generative after-effects of caus-
ality wherein nonsense is rendered sensible; concisely stated, the aleatory point that links
assemblages.
Williams puts this nicely: “the ‘quasi-cause’ does not change actual measurable things
but their relation to sense. This means that actual measurable changes are incomplete
and make no sense independent of this relation”.10 In this way, the quasi-cause acts as
a kind of grease that lubes-up the interchangeable parts of sense and measurability
insofar as this lube contains a property of stimulation, or as Deleuze says in technical ver-
biage, the virtuality of the actual.11 Without such stimulation, the machine locks-up and
becomes not only unamenable to any further excitation but plays out the trope of entropy
through an irrevocable deadening gridlock.
The very fine distinction, here, between that of corporeal causes amid and among
bodies and genetic power which is derivative of quasi-causality belies a certain internal
tension. Deleuze admits to this when he rhetorically asks, “how can we maintain both
that sense produces even the states of affairs in which it is embodied, and that it is
itself produced by these states of affairs or the actions and passions of bodies (an imma-
culate conception)?”.12 That is to say that there seems to be a circular logic employed to
account for the plenum’s plenuming such that the cause of its coming-forth is also, strictly
176 J. W. GLAZIER

speaking, its effect and vice versa – the effect of the bodies within the mixture engenders
their infinitude of topologies.13 The “immaculate conception” that Deleuze is so ready to
put under parenthetical erasure as though to flippantly dismiss it brings to the fore pre-
cisely this antagonism; figurally, the triangulation between Jesus-Mary-God14 wherein,
in Deleuze’s reading, the assemblage that brought the three together – i.e. the immaculate
conception – is dissolved and dissipated into the ontological field insofar its inscription as
a provenance becomes impossible.
That is to say that, for Deleuze, the aforesaid contradiction becomes resolvable through
the “idea itself of a static genesis”15 wherein the “immaculate conception” only becomes an
issue insofar as it presupposes an originary starting point, a perhaps temporal object that
“starts” the plenum under way.16 Somewhat paradoxically, this “object of the static
genesis” necessarily “partake[s] of the quasi-cause attached to it” thereby acting as the
absolutely non-originary, primordial “this is where it all began” but exclusively on the
basis of its participation with the quasi-cause.17
Therefore, it is precisely the quasi-cause that subverts the commitment to any imma-
culate moment in which the plenum springs-forth because of, in the foregoing reading,
the absolute randomness that the cause brings to the table, which is the utterly unpredict-
able slippage between bodies and parts. Yet, does not such a strict faith in chance precipi-
tate a certain “effect” within the immanentist position such that only difference as such can
structurally exist within the ontological field as opposed to deception or artifice? That is to
say, does not the immanentism manoeuver to thwart more modernist and essentialist
models, while not foreclosing the ontological possibility of ploy or deception, relegate
this configuration to a kind of “special case” – i.e., simply to that of what I have named
within Haraway’s work as the subterfuge-assemblage? This immanentist “faith in
chance” presupposes utter unpredictability as its next encounter, as the veiled One prin-
ciple that undergirds the casual/quasi-causal power matrix as such. In this way, although
prima facie counterintuitive, upon further inspection, immanentism sneaks in a transcen-
dental and quasi-axiomatic “first principle” even though this principle is the aleatory itself.
One can be sure of one thing: the dice throw is next and next and next … ad infinitum.18
Granted, Deleuze is very clear and insistent about the lack of “absolute necessity” struc-
tural to the thinking of concepts in general and, resultantly, its presupposed ontology. As
he states in Difference and Repetition,
do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count
upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and
educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think.19

Clearly evident here is his linkage of affects and concepts when he uses Spinoza as an
agreeable interlocutor. However, what is salient is the importunity of the “contingency
of the encounter” insofar as contingency is understood as the next random chance for
bodies and beings to come together. While this renders clear that Deleuze does not reca-
pitulate a kind of modernist “absolute necessity” between and among events, does it not
still foreclose the possibility that the aleatory nodal yokes necessarily betray the other term-
inals in the network? In other words, is there not a certain sense in which the forthright-
ness of the auto-poetic coming together restricts immanentist ontology from being able to
render as ontological primacy that of becoming-a-dupe or the processual reconstruction of
the subterfuge-assemblage, which is structural for Haraway?
 CRITICAL HORIZONS 177

Perhaps the figurehead for a similar line of argument aimed at flushing out that which is
implicit within the “dice throw” of immanentism is Alain Badiou who has commandeered
the Deleuzian banner of “the philosopher of difference” and reinscribed it as “the philo-
sopher of the Same”. It is worth quoting Badiou at some length here,
For were there (really, ontologically) several throws, the statistical revenge of the Same would
be ineluctable. This is, no doubt, the point at which Deleuze’s philosophy of the One is at its
most concentrated. For, if there is only one throw of the dice … then one has to uphold
that the plurality of events is purely formal, and that there is only one event, which is, as
it were, the event of the One. And we have seen that Deleuze does not, in fact, draw back
from this consequence.20

Indeed, as has been argued, the unremitting principle of pure chance implicit in the
quasi-causal relationality is “the point at which Deleuze’s philosophy of the One is at
its most concentrated” insofar as upon colliding with each other, the lines of production,
jettison off in an absolutely assured contingent manner even though, and this is impor-
tant here, those lines have very specific genealogical histories. The social, historical, and
symbolic particularity of the conduits channelling these bodies does not, on principle,
absolve the fact that, after impact, the aleatory trajectory is assured, even if this trajectory
is constrained by the very socio-symbolic conditions leading up to the collision. Put dif-
ferently, immanentism is unequivocally not the same as the kind relativism inherent in
social constructionism or of a liberal reading of postmodernism precisely because the
shoots of libidinal-power spring from a real tree, situated in a specific set of time and
space coordinates.
However, Badiou argues that, for Deleuze, “that which insists in, and returns eternally
to, all the immanent events of the power of the one is chance as the chance of the One
itself.”21 To state it differently, the One, in and of itself, pushes-forth, always attempting
to manifest itself, and just itself as a first principle, within the ontological plentitude.22
That is to say that the midwife that mediates the coming-together of the bodies in imma-
nentism does so in a way that bars deception such that only the contingent-necessity of
difference in becoming as such is assured. Does not a circumscription hedge the potential
radicality of the immanentism position in a way that makes it more “impotent” than Har-
away’s insofar as she fixes this exact possibility in the place of the aleatory point – i.e., the
wile-necessity that may be said to beget the subterfuge-assemblage?

The (Lacanian) Interlocutor

The midwife “mechanism” that is structurally built into process ontology, for Haraway, is
more sweeping than that found in immanentist ontology inasmuch it thwarts any and all
attempts to render it as predictable even if this predictability is necessary contingency
itself. Moving away from an immanentist ontology and towards an ontological schema
that does not result a collapse into the Same, that can explain the flux of becoming
without any reification of the aleatory principle, Rosi Braidotti23 helps create a bridge
between such a theorising and the work of Haraway. In her quest to formulate a
theory of nomadic subjectivity, Braidotti relies on the work of fellow feminist and
colleague Haraway, who builds her ontological edifice, as alluded to earlier, on the
foundation of the trickster as especially depicted in the coyote myths of the Native
American tradition.
178 J. W. GLAZIER

Braidotti is one of the key scholars in the posthumanist movement, along with
Haraway, even though the latter has qualms about adopting such a label. This school of
thought seeks to explore “subjectivities” and singularities beyond any concept of an inter-
iorised, essential self. As Braidotti states, “this philosophical post-humanism does not,
therefore, result in antifoundationalism. It rather stresses the need for process ontology”.24
All three of the main interlocutors introduced so far, Deleuze, Braidotti, and Haraway, are
allied in their motivation to develop such a process ontology that is thoroughly non-mod-
ernistic while circumventing the relativistic leanings of certain strands of postmodernism.
The theories of Haraway and Braidotti differ, in terms discussed early, in that the
former holds open the necessary possibility of becoming-a-dupe while also providing a
kind of ur-randomness, one that suffuses ambiguity, uncanniness, and artifice. As a
case in point, Haraway reveals that when looking back on her past scholarship, “nature
emerges from this exercise as ‘coyote’. This potent trickster can show us that historically
specific human relations with ‘nature’ must somehow … be imagined as genuinely social
and actively relational; and yet the partners remain utterly inhomogeneous.”25 Indeed, this
kind of “inhomogeneity” – the prospect of being tricked by the world – is precisely that
which an immanentist position is unable to attain fully26 and only becomes possible for
Haraway due to her allegiance to the trickster. Trickster, here, is not meant to signify a
particular figural instantiation such that it is merely a metaphor that stands in for some-
thing else or that it is a certain illustrative “way of thinking about” the world. Haraway’s
point is much stronger. She is arguing that “nature” is the manifestation of the trickster at
play, that the ontological plenum is strictly equivalent to a kind of agential wiliness.
How, exactly, does this trickster ontology circumvent the problematics pointed-out in
the immanentist position? Or, to state it differently, how is it that Haraway’s trickster
ontology unlocks certain crafty configurations of assemblages that are foreclosed by
immanentism, those that are more capable of not only accounting for the proliferation
of the ontological field, but also for how the dialectic is always already subverted before-
hand? The difficulty of answering these questions in purely formal terms may be resultant
from Haraway’s neglect (or purposeful refusal) to systematise her work in a way that
would make it amenable to philosophical analysis.
Nonetheless, one fruitful interlocutor here is psychoanalysis as it is conceived of by
Jacques Lacan.27 Even though this may be somewhat shocking to some feminists such
as Braidotti28 who have accused psychoanalysis of phallogocentrism, I would suggest
that there is a certain parallelism going on between Haraway’s trickster ontology and
the Lacanian concept of L’Autre (the big Other). Along key interstices, the two converge:
particularly, in the absolute alterity held upon by the big Other, which structurally allows
the opening-up of the subject to becoming-a-dupe.
It should be prefaced, too, that Haraway shares a similar aversion to psychoanalysis,
with its Oedipal metaphors, when she expresses her preference for her mother discipline
over psychoanalysis, “biology is an endless resource. That’s why I have always preferred
biology to psychoanalysis because it throws up so many more possibilities for stories
that seem to get at some of our historical, psychological, political existence”.29 Haraway
seems to be under the sway of Foucault30 when she expresses her preference for historical
genealogies of the biological kind as opposed to the story of psychoanalysis.31 Yet, it is
worth pointing out that Lacan’s appropriation of psychoanalysis is not necessarily
 CRITICAL HORIZONS 179

Oedipal in the traditional psychoanalytic sense insofar as he reconfigures it within the

aegis of structural anthropology and his own theory of desire.
As Borch-Jacobsen details, “Lacan was the first to know that [the Oedipus complex]
hardly conforms to that sort of symbolic initiation to desire. On the contrary, the crisis of
the symbolic is spread all over.”32 That is to say that when the subject becomes inducted
into the Symbolic order vis-à-vis the castration of language, it experiences injunctions
against its desire from every angle, barraged by prescriptive rules that bar what it
wants. Thus, far from holding the father’s embargo as the embargo par excellence
Lacan disperses Oedipus into the Symbolic order. This becomes perceptible to the
subject through various social and symbolic mandates that, as a speaking being, it
must necessarily encounter and navigate. All this is to say that using Lacanian theory
as a sounding-board for interfacing and parsing Deleuze and Haraway should not be
dismissed outright because Lacan does not recapitulate the principal failings of the
Oedipus complex, in part, due to the high complexity he reworks it within his own
theoretical project.

Monstrous Midwifery and the Philosophy of the Trickster

The little Oedipal monsters found within the Symbolic order, as alluded to previously, help
constitute the big Other of the subject, the gaze for which the subject performs, consciously
or not. The “performance” here should be foregrounded in the strongest sense in that the
big Other is what channels desire into the subject’s symptomatic way of being in the world.
According to Ruti, “the symptom is a coded message addressed to the Other in the sense
that it is motivated by the subject’s (misguided) conviction that someone in the external
world can decipher the meaning of its suffering”.33 The symptom in the Lacanian sense is,
as a result, structurally addressed to the big Other and is not addressed to embodied sub-
jects or beings that may be encountered in the world.
In reality, however, the big Other is always an imposter, a kind of mocking clown34 that
tricks the subject into desiring particular objects over others or, to hear it straight from the
horse’s mouth: “when the Legislator (he who claims to lay down the Law) [i.e., the big
Other] comes forward to make up for this, he does so as an impostor”.35 One of the
most general and widely known examples of this is late capitalism’s injunction to
“Enjoy!” which is always qualified with a detached safety so as to say “Enjoy! But, mitigate
as much risk as possible” – this kind of interpellation of the subject into Utilitarian tracks
of desire was called by Lacan, as Ruti notes, the service of goods. In a broad punitive sense,
the big Other ossifies the subject’s desire, à la the service of goods, into prescriptive ways of
being adjourned through various master-signifiers to use Lacanian terms or order-words
in Deleuzian parlance. Thus, it seeks to hypostatise a certain metonymic chain of signifiers
over others that may give rise to racism, homophobia, sexism or, more broadly,
phallogocentrism.
Is this not exactly the opposite sense in which Haraway positions her trickster ontology,
as that charlatan qua world that “intentionally” thwarts any attempt to hypostatise a sig-
nifier into a set of prearranged power alignments, that always outwits all double bind
bifurcations? Is not Haraway recapitulating the exact obverse of the Lacanian big Other
insofar as she inscribes it into ontology as opposed to the structural phantom of subjectiv-
ity?36 In this sense, these two constitute a kind of Janus head wherein the big Other and
180 J. W. GLAZIER

Haraway’s trickster ontology are both imposters, impervious to discharge yet necessary to
face: the difference being the induration of the latter is liquidated by the former.37
A reprieve, however, exists here insofar as it is important to remember Lacan’s famous
declaration that “there is no Other of the Other”.38 What he means is that the big Other is
fraught with faults and fissures and exposed to the exact same signifying induced cas-
tration and anxiety as the subject such that its hegemony can never be foreclosed and ren-
dered sovereign. Luckily, this allows for spaces of subversion and production whereby the
“aphanisis” of the subject39 can never structurally occur except, of course, upon death.
Lacan is really clear in his insistence that the big Other is the necessary framework that
structures subjectivity even though this construction is, on principle, phantasmatic. This
point is underscored because of the well-known immanentist hang-up on lack, the swal-
lowing of the word, to use clinical language.40 Skott-Myhre seems to express this preoccu-
pation quite nicely: “[Deleuze and Guattari] propose [desire] as having two poles, one
positing desire as the small object a as machinic desire without any trace of lack or
need and without reference to fantasy”41 that Žižek42 explains is strictly equivalent to
the quasi-cause detailed earlier – “the other pole they suggest is comprised of the ‘great
Other’ which as signifier ‘reintroduces a certain notion of lack’”.43 The latter part of the
quotation on the big Other fails to clarify that this very specific form of lack in Lacan’s
theory is necessarily foregrounded by the fact that it is ultimately illusory such that “the
big Other doesn’t exist”.44 In other words, the appeal to the necessity of phantasy does
not produce a “lack” in the sense of deficiency but rather the exact opposite! It entices
the objet petit a so as to prevent a collapse of the ontological field. Therefore, far from
being caught in a Hegelian bifurcation, it is the very fact that the lacuna of the big
Other calls-forth the desire that eddies the object petit a, yet remains principally illusory,
which explains how the dialectic is foiled. This resolution is enacted through becoming-a-
dupe of the discourse of the Other as opposed to the assurance that les non-dupes errent.45
Concomitantly, Haraway’s project is aimed at unlocking and inducing these very points
of production and exploiting these gaps in the service of political and ethical ends through
a somewhat homologous becoming-a-dupe. As a case in point, such a methodology can be
understood using the invocation of “grammar is politics by other means”.46 Haraway
writes, in other words, in such a way as to “keep up with” and outfox the referents of
her significations because they always threaten to unravel the structural semantics she
puts in place and betray her intention. This failure is not unlike what poststructuralism
has brought to the fore. However, the ultimate slyness of language, for Haraway, does
not result in a breakdown germane and exclusive to the discursive field. Rather, its
aetiology is ontological, not epistemological.
Here is the precise difference between Haraway’s (quasi)foundationalism and post-
structuralist thinkers’ insistence on the hegemony of the signifier. Judith Butler47 may rep-
resent the latter approach most paradigmatically. According to Haraway, semioticity is
intertwined with materiality such that signification is more akin to the physicality of
the world than to abstract formalisation. As she says, “the first thing I’d say is that
words are intensely physical for me. I find words and language more closely related to
flesh than to ideas”.48 This helps bring into relief the differences between Haraway and
poststructuralist thinkers, or posthumanists to use a word employed by Braidotti, in
that Haraway is actively engaged in scrapping with her under(lying) trickster ontology
using a kind of methodology that relies on the formula of “grammar is politics”.
 CRITICAL HORIZONS 181

Methodology and the Subterfuge-Assemblage

The two, ontology and methodology, mirror each other through a playful dance, on this
account, whereby the kind of tricksterism of both prevents any kind of dialectical foreclo-
sure and, instead, actually works to create a surplus49 – a space of always being able to say
more and, yet, having said more than what was already said. This is accomplished through
not an ex-citation, which would presume some kind of inherent liveliness to language, but
an in-citation, in the sense of agitating and provoking the signifier. Indeed, it seems poss-
ible to read Haraway herself as a kind of provocateur, keeping in line with the commit-
ments of her ontological edifice, such that she writes as though the task is a “fight for
survival” at the hands of the “informatics of domination”.50 Keeping with the distinction
between ex and in, Haraway is able to in-habit the discourse itself as opposed to standing
outside and talking about it as an ex-habitant.
Such a move is accomplished, to bring this style back around to the distinction between
immanentism and the trickster ontology, through the deployment and construction of
different kinds of subterfuge-assemblages by Haraway herself in relation to the unfolding
of her theory of ontology. In other words, could Haraway be writing in such a way as to con-
struct a structural semantics, syntax, and grammar that aims to in-duce the very affect her
trickster ontology presupposes? The distinction that is traditionally made between ontology
and epistemology disappears whereby the effects produced by the various topological con-
figurations and machinic structures (e.g. specifically, the subterfuge-assemblage) induces
the reader to that of becoming-a-dupe of the discourse and signification collapses.51
For Haraway, the semantic collapse or the grasp of the network between overlaid exis-
tential cartographies is foregrounded strictly by the agential and wily nature of the world.
Put concisely, the affective production is one of betrayal, of not only having had to give up
one’s egoic deployments around various crystallisations of signification, such as order
words, master signifiers and so on, but of also having been deceived precisely by those
very ways of being at home that have become so commonplace and intimate. In this
sense, Haraway differs from immanentism in the sense that the rupture is induced or
christened by trickster strategies as opposed to a broader conception of a plenum under-
girded by the aleatory.

Conclusion
The main thrust of the argument set-forth has been to distinguish, ontologically, imma-
nentism and Haraway’s project, partially due to their continued conflation.52 The distinc-
tion between the two ontologies that has been developed in this essay demonstrates that, at
their most fundamental level, the approaches diverge insofar as immanentism installs the
aleatory point as the arbiter of the coming-together and expulsion of bodies in the plenum
whereas Haraway ensconces the trickster as its first principle, which is, of course, an ironic
manoeuver.53 While this difference prevents Haraway from being read as a strict imma-
nentist in the Deleuzian sense, there are many similarities between the two philosophies.
Braidotti may be the best-known scholar to capitalise on these parallels. However, further
dialogue could be helpful to construct what precisely these philosophies may be deployed
to do. That is, are there instances in which Haraway’s theorising may be more useful to
work on certain problematics? For example, her work could help conceptualise the
182 J. W. GLAZIER

tricky nature of gender and sexuality since many trickster anecdotes are about shapeshift-
ing genders and engaging in non-normative or even vulgar sexual practices.54
In closing, Deleuze’s trope of the “immaculate conception” in The Logic of Sense raises
the question of how does the plenum get underway? According to Haraway, it is not the
contingent-necessity of the aleatory terminal but, rather, the wile-necessity of her mon-
strous midwife that generates the continued proliferation of becoming. Further, though,
the immaculate moment ceases to be immaculate, stops being miraculous, unreachable,
and impassable, when, in Haraway’s case, a Judas kiss of betrayal is applied thereby punc-
turing the very allegorical and signifying processes that crafted the originary birth as
immaculate in the first place. Read as such, Haraway theorises a stricter kind of process
ontology than immanentism in the sense that she constrains it to a function of the trick-
ster. Yet, at the same time, the world is conceived of as broader in that the midwife “mech-
anism” is more ambiguous insofar as, instead of pure chance, wile-necessity could, on
principle, roll snake eyes over and over again, ad infinitum.55

Notes
1. Haraway, “Introduction: A Kinship,” 2, emphasis added.
2. Hyde, Trickster Makes this World.
3. Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology”.
4. Badiou, Deleuze.
5. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse.
6. Another way to say this could be circumscribed as God qua trickster whereby a resistance to
becoming-a-dupe is cathected in the signifier such that, as speaking beings, we always already
cover over the abyss of our existence.
7. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
8. Even if this arbitrariness is foregrounded by the necessity of the socio-symbolic-historical
composition.
9. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit.
10. Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, 130, emphasis added.
11. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense.
12. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 124.
13. The key, here, is that the topological configurations are necessarily grounded by utter
randomness.
14. Readers should note the Three here is never invoked by Deleuze, per se, but is used
demonstratively.
15. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense.
16. Casting this into language can betray precisely what is being pointed to. Namely, it is not so
much that the flux is casually initiated temporally since both space and time are singular or
idiographic instantiations within the immanent field. Rather, it is always already underway
even though it is contingent upon a ‘mechanism’ of continued genesis.
17. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 126, 125, respectively.
18. Contingent-necessity of immanentism contra wile-necessity of Haraway.
19. Deleuze, Repetition and Difference, 139.
20. Badiou, Deleuze, 73–74, emphasis added.
21. Badiou, Deleuze, 75, emphasis in original.
22. Even though this is an extension of Bodiou’s main argument, it is useful for its pragmatic and
evocative purposes.
23. See Braidotti, Nomadic Theory. While it is well-known that Braidotti is a key appropriator of
Deleuze and Guattari vis-à-vis her articulation of nomadic subjectivity, deploying her as a
connector between Haraway and immanentism does not neutralise her philosophical
 CRITICAL HORIZONS 183

lineage. Rather, as a fellow third-wave feminist, the foil helps accentuate the differences
between immanentism and Haraway.
24. Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human”, 199.
25. Haraway, “Introduction”, 3.
26. To be fair, the aleatory as conceptualised by Deleuze may allow for a configuration that is
subterfuge in nature. However, it would only be merely one possible effect whereas, in
Haraway, the subterfuge remains preeminent.
27. See Lacan, Écrits.
28. And, more originarily, by Derrida.
29. Haraway and Thyrza, “More than Metaphor”, 82.
30. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
31. In their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari famously attempted to dismantled
and reconfigure the Oedipal myth so central for most psychoanalytic theory. There is ambi-
guity, however, surrounding how much of Lacanian theory remained unscathed (see
Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus).
32. Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, 226.
33. Ruti, The Singularity of Being, 61.
34. To apply images such as these to the big Other would delimit it to a function of the Imaginary
register when, in reality, it is (can be) a function of all three.
35. Lacan, Écrits, 688, emphasis added.
36. Žižek, “The Real of Sexual Difference”.
37. Janus was the Roman god of transitions and beginnings installed, typically, in liminal spaces
(e.g., doors, thresholds, gates, and so forth) to connote a kind of crossing-over.
38. Lacan, Écrits, 668.
39. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
40. Lacanian symptomology can be read precisely in the way – i.e., symptoms as inability to
signify.
41. Skott-Myhre, “Deleuzian Perspectives”, 312.
42. Žižek, “Organs Without Bodies”.
43. Skott-Myhre, “Deleuzian Perspectives”, 312.
44. Žižek, “The Big Other Doesn’t Exist”.
45. Lacan, Les Non-Dupes Rrrent.
46. Haraway, “Introduction”, 3.
47. See Butler, Bodies That Matter and Butler, Gender Trouble.
48. Haraway and Thyrza, “More than Metaphor”, 83.
49. Immanentism and Haraway converge here.
50. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”.
51. A strict Lacanian interpretation of this phenomenon is complex and intricate, being outside of
the scope of the current project. Suffice it to say that part of the analytic cure for Lacan is for the
analysand to release into becoming-a-dupe of L’Autre. An excellent introduction to Lacan’s
approach to psychoanalysis is Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
52. Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human”.
53. It should be noted for the record that Haraway sometimes insinuates that parts if not her
whole project can be interpreted as a kind of joke.
54. Hyde, Trickster Makes this World.
55. Deferral of the inevitable rolling of difference for the dice throw is impossible for immanent-
ism. Does it not foreclose achievable, eternal homogeneity in order to ensure the difference of
the n-1? The trickster, on the other hand, may as ontological potentiality ‘roll’ (remember,
the game is fixed) the same combination processually forever, if and only if, it wants.

Notes on contributor
Jacob W. Glazier, PhD has a doctorate degree in Psychology: Consciousness and Society from the
University of West Georgia. He has his Master of Science in Education degree in Clinical Mental
184 J. W. GLAZIER

Health Counselling from Western Illinois University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Augustana
College. Jake’s research tends towards a transdisciplinary approach via theoretical and philosophi-
cal models and includes subjects like critical theory, embodiment, and desire as well as their relation
to praxis and clinical practice. His work has been published in academic journals that include
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Mortality, Rhizomes, Journal for Cultural Research, and others.

ORCID
Jacob W. Glazier http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1036-4022

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