Textual Practice

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Hysteria, mimesis and the phenomenological

imaginary

Jan Campbell

To cite this article: Jan Campbell (2005) Hysteria, mimesis and the phenomenological imaginary,
Textual Practice, 19:3, 331-351, DOI: 10.1080/09502360500196318

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Textual Practice 19(3), 2005, 331–351

Jan Campbell
Hysteria, mimesis and the phenomenological imaginary

This article explores a new way of considering hysteria and Oedipal sexual
difference through a phenomenological approach to psychoanalysis and
gender performance. Phenomenology and psychoanalysis have historically
occupied very different territories, with sociological methods of interpret-
ing reality indebted to the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl
set in opposition to psychoanalytic interpretations of an unconscious,
empirically unverifiable psychic world. Yet, psychoanalysis and pheno-
menology have historically been brought together under existential
phenomenology, a psychology influenced principally by Husserl’s assistant
Martin Heidegger. R.D. Laing is probably the most famous psychoanalytic
thinker who based his work on the existential phenomenology of Sartre
and Merleau-Ponty.
There is however, a phenomenological narrative inherent to psycho-
analysis which has been obscured by the historical emphasis on a Freudian,
Oedipal meta-psychology. Against this hierarchical model of the mind is a
more phenomenological understanding of the psyche where processes of
identification and mimesis disrupt a repressive thesis of Oedipal represen-
tation, enabling us to see how divisions between imaginary and real break
down when we consider the mimetic nature of psychic and social identity.1
This article explores a phenomenological approach to hysteria and the sub-
sequent rethinking of Oedipal sexual difference as hysterical, imaginary
mimesis. Implicit in this argument is the view that current readings of
the imaginary are insufficient and need reconceptualizing.
Using a concept of mimesis indebted to Borch-Jacobsen, the first part
of this argument defines and compares the terms ‘hysteria’ and ‘mimesis’ as
they appear in an Oedipal and a phenomenological framework. These
different ways of understanding hysteria and mimesis are then developed
within a debate on sexual difference and the masquerade, using the thinking
of Joan Rivieère, Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan. The second move recon-
ceptualizes hysteria through a more phenomenological imaginary, develop-
ing arguments by Luce Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty. The final movement

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2005 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09502360500196318
Textual Practice

discusses how we can move beyond hysterical mimesis to a more social

imaginary.

Hysteria: a question of representation or affect?

In Freud’s Oedipal theory, or his meta-psychology, hysteria is a condition

of bodily symptoms which have been converted from repressed ideas and
wishes. These repressed wishes relate to the child’s triangular relationship
of incestuous desire and prohibition in relation to its parents. Generational
love and hostility for the mother and father are then at stake. Incestuous
love for the mother must be demolished through the law of the father.
The hysteric fails to repress desire for the mother; ‘she’ fails, therefore,
to internalize the prohibition on paternal incest. In Freud’s famous case
history of Dora, he analyses her hysteria as, essentially, identification
with her father. Dora becomes her father in order to be successful in her
love – with the woman her father loves.2 Freud’s Oedipal explanation
frames hysteria as the conversion into bodily symptoms of a repressed
fantasy or wish. In this model, representation of the repressed, past wish,
and identification with the paternal Oedipal law, become the route out
of hysteria. This emphasis on the Oedipal representational subject is, of
course, central to Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Freud’s Oedipal theory of hysteria is, however, at odds with his original
seduction or ‘trauma’ theory which was indebted to the famous Charcot and
Joseph Breuer. For Charcot, traumatic shock was comparable to hypnosis,
since both were emotional moments where the will became paralysed and
the trauma fixated as auto-suggestion. Whereas shock or trauma in
normal circumstances is expressed or abreacted, in cases of hysteria the
trauma and affect becomes blocked. The cathartic method in Freud and
Breuer’s initial Studies on Hysteria (1895) was to abreact this blocked affect.
Cure for the hysteric was not via representation but through abreac-
tion of affect. Both Freud and Breuer followed Charcot in seeing hysteria
as the result of a disassociation and a profound splitting of consciousness.
Freud gradually abandoned the idea of auto-suggestion caused by trauma,
focusing on a more sophisticated psychological explanation. Freud’s
Oedipal theory singled out his work as unique, whereas an emphasis on
disassociation and phenomenological notions of affect rendered his ideas
far too close to those of his former colleagues. In his early work on hysteria
and psychoanalysis, Carl Jung writes in relation to Freud’s thought:
As you know, by ‘repression’ we mean the mechanism by which a
conscious content is displaced into a sphere outside consciousness.
We call this sphere the unconscious, and we define it as a psychic
element of which we are not conscious.3

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 Jan Campbell ‘Hysteria, mimesis and the imaginary’

In Jung’s view, however, repression was primarily disassociation (tracked

through association tests) where complexes tied to painful feelings were for-
gotten. Hysteria is not a suffering of reminiscences that leads back to the
past, but a staged performance in the present that is in flight from present
reality and which takes refuge in neurotic infantile complexes. He writes:

The fright and the apparently traumatic effect of the childhood

experience are merely staged, but staged in the peculiar way charac-
teristic of hysteria, so that the mise en scène appears almost exactly
like a reality. We know from hundreds of experiences that hysterical
pains are staged in order to reap certain advantages from the environ-
ment. Nevertheless these pains are entirely real. The patients do not
merely think they have pains; from the psychological point of view
the pains are just as real as those due to organic causes, and yet
they are stage managed.4

Hysteria, then, is a staging of affectual emotion – a mise en scène – rooted

in a disassociation and splitting from reality. Repression, here, is not an
internal, hierarchical and intra-psychic split between the body and
language, but fundamentally speaks to the phenomenological (intersubjec-
tive) experience (and splitting) between the self and the world. For Jung,
hysteria is not a return of the repressed from the past, but a regression
of the libido to infantile states in the present.
Freud’s early lecture on hysteria seems to agree with Jung’s pheno-
menological description when he describes hysterical symptoms as mnemic
symbols of past traumatic experiences. Freud links hysterical symptoms to the
mnemic symbols of the past that adorn large cities, such as the Monument of
the Fire of London. The melancholic Londoners, who stop and weep at the
past destruction of London by fire, fail to acknowledge its rebuilt present
glory. In similar vein the hysterics behave like these melodramatic and
‘unpractical Londoners’, in weeping over past traumas.5 What is striking
about Freud’s account, here, is that he attributes hysteria to a double con-
sciousness and to a melancholic dwelling in the past, a melancholia that is
an escape or flight from the present. This model of hysteria accords with
Jung’s early thinking and is quite different from the subsequent moves
Freud makes in formulating an Oedipal meta-psychology.

Mimesis

The idea that hysteria is a staged mise en scène or melodrama of pheno-

menological affect may be tracked beyond Freud’s early work. In fact
this phenomenological narrative as a thesis of identification and mimesis

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may be seen as a presence which never really leaves Freud’s thinking. More
importantly, it may be seen steadily and consistently to undo his more
Oedipal interpretations. In his text Group Psychology, Freud follows Le
Bon’s description of the group mind and argues for it as a primitive, pri-
meval horde bound together through libidinous identifications.6 When
Freud came to analyse the libidinous identification that lay behind
group ties, his theory of the Oedipus complex seriously unravelled. Here
bisexual identifications and group hysteria led Freud to a theorization of
narcissism, the increasing split between ego and ego ideal, and suggestive
hypnosis, as the key components of the group mind.
Although the Oedipal economy in Freud’s work emphasizes the
repression of libidinal desire, there is a primary identification at work in
his more phenomenological texts which disrupts this notion of subjective
desire for an object. Emotional identification or mimesis with the object is
an earlier declaration of love, and is expressed in Freud’s writings in
relation to numerous ideas of imitation, sympathy and mental contagion.
Texts such as ‘Mourning and melancholia’ and Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego posit the ambivalence of this primary emotional identi-
fication. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud states that identification is
‘a preliminary stage of object choice’, where we narcissistically identify with
the other, and where the ego wants to devour the object or other, canniba-
listically taking it into itself.7 Melancholic mimesis involves loss, hate and
love of the other, which is indistinguishable from the loss, hate and love
one feels for oneself. Even, or perhaps especially, in Freud’s late texts we
see this mimesis of phenomenological affect return in papers such as
Beyond The Pleasure Principle. It may be argued that Freud, in such
texts, is talking about instinctual drives, not affects, but as Michel Henry
reiterates we can only know these instincts or neural energies through
our experience of their phenomenological affects.8
Mimesis has been a contested term in the history of ideas. Mimesis
means the imitation of nature and human behaviour. Classical mimesis,
otherwise known as Realism, has, since Plato’s The Republic, constructed
a truthful relation between referent and sign, between the self and the
world, between nature and image. For the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan,
this is the fiction of the paternal phallus, although this does not stop
him setting up this paternal law as an immutable symbolic order. In con-
trast to a platonic reflection of truth and reality, Walter Benjamin has
drawn on Aristotle’s notion of mimesis to describe a more creative imita-
tion or copy of human behaviour and nature. Similarly, Adorno and
Horkheimer have seen mimesis as an adaptive copying of the environment
that becomes perverted by capitalism. These Marxist concepts of mimesis
are arguably indebted to a psychoanalytic understanding of the child’s
identification with the world around him. More recently, the work of

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 Jan Campbell ‘Hysteria, mimesis and the imaginary’

Judith Butler returns the performance of gender to a deconstructive

mimesis operant though language. She cites writings by Lacan and
Derrida to argue for a performative reiteration that is not reduced to volun-
tary agency or the ego. For Butler, it is a mimesis of ideal hegemonic
norms, of heterosexuality, which represses and incorporates disavowed
homosexuality. Rereading Freud’s account of mourning and melancholia,
Butler sees heterosexual difference as a melancholic denial and disavowal of
earlier homosexual loves. Performance allegorizes ‘a loss it cannot grieve’.9
Borch-Jacobsen’s recent re-evaluation of the Freudian project returns to
the early emphasis on hypnosis and affect to show how the Oedipal complex
may be understood not in terms of the representative, desiring subject, but as
a question of mimesis. Rereading Freud’s texts in a way that deconstructs any
opposition between the narcissistic ego and the object, Borch-Jacobsen posits
mimesis and identification as primary and constitutive of the subject. Desire,
then, is an identification that does not aim to possess the object: ‘Its basic
verb is “to be” (to be like), not “to have” (to enjoy)’.10 For Borch-Jacobsen,
then, identification as desire makes no distinction between ego and object.
Desire is from the beginning identificatory mime between ego and object.
This narcissistic mime or mimesis is thus: ‘the matrix of desire and, by
the same token, the matrix of rivalry, hatred, and (in the social order)
violence: “I want what my brother, my model, my idol wants – and I
want it in his place.”11
Borch-Jacobsen therefore replaces Freud’s repressive Oedipal father
with a Kleinian notion of envy. For Borch-Jacobsen, mimetic desire has
no specific object and he illustrates this through Klein’s notion that the
Oedipal father is simply an appendage of the mother, envied by the
little girl.12 At the heart of the Oedipal complex we find hysteria and a
mimetic splitting; a rereading of repressed incestuous desire as jealousy,
envy and rivalry. Mimesis of the other is a relation to someone we do
not wish to have but to be.
This model of mimesis is not only evocative of Kleinian theory but is
also indebted to the work of René Girard. Girard argues that mimetic
rivalry and violence lie at the centre of the modern social order and the
only way of externalizing this internal competitive relation with the
other is a more transcendent identification with Christianity and God.13
The idea, here, is that God can mediate the internal rivalry with the
other, because he is impossible to identify with as an ego-ideal. Borch-
Jacobsen, whilst taking issue with the privileged status of Christianity in
Girard’s text, also shows how the Oedipal complex can never be a transcen-
dental ideal because the paternal function is both a site of identification
and an injunction: ‘Put in more Freudian terms, the law that forbids
identification with the Oedipal rival is uttered by the rival with whom
one is identifying, and thus has no legal authority whatsoever.’14

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The paternal model has no real authority to forbid identification,

since his authority only stems from being an ego ideal in the first place.
And of course this analysis also destroys the distinction so loved by psycho-
analysts between the ego ideal and the super-ego. To put it bluntly, there is
no way out of Oedipal identification or rivalry.
If the Oedipal complex is hysterical mimesis and the imaginary, then
it cannot be incorporated into linguistic theories of the representational
subject, and returns the psychoanalytic project not to questions of language
but to questions of affect and a radical phenomenology. Indeed, much of
Borch-Jacobsen’s discussion of hysterical mimesis in his book The
Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis and Affect is indebted to Michel
Henry’s evaluation of the unconscious as phenomenological affect.
Following Borch-Jacobsen, this article argues for mimesis as the affec-
tual and imitative behaviour between ego and object, self and other.
Revealing the hypnotic and hysterical mimesis at work in relation to the
Oedipal father and the father of the primal horde, Borch-Jacobsen outlines
no alternative to this deathly and hysterical rivalry. However, if we under-
stand the hysterical mimesis that Borch-Jacobsen describes in phenomen-
ological terms, we can see it as a retreat into ideal fantasies, a defence
against a more fluid affectual existence in the present. The Oedipal
complex as hysterical mimesis is a flight of identification, as a defence
against time, into the idealized model of the family romance.
To argue that sexual difference is imaginary is nothing new, Jacques
Lacan, Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler in different ways would all agree.
But these thinkers all want to resolve the question of either sexual differ-
ence or gender identity by arguing for its symbolic representation within
language. I want to put the question a different way and ask: What
would it mean to explore Oedipal sexual difference first and foremost as
imaginary and hysterical?
I want to suggest that sexual difference and the ‘ideal’ mimesis of het-
erosexuality that Butler describes may be seen as a hysterical mimesis and
performance.The hysteric performs the body, but this performance mas-
querades to cover over a fundamental psychic disembodiment or disasso-
ciation. Hysteria is not some pre-Oedipal excessive relation to the
mother’s body as presumed in classical psychoanalytical accounts; rather
it is a disassociated retreat into Oedipal sexual difference and childhood
fantasy; a regressive flight into femininity and masculinity and away
from reality. Symbiotic, hysterical mimesis is an imaginary defence and
retreat into the magical world of the family (not just the mother) as a
way of avoiding the loss and conflict that the world of reality brings. Hys-
teria in this analysis becomes a disembodied masquerade of femininity and
masculinity; an ideal mimesis which performs and disavows a more vari-
able affectual world.

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 Jan Campbell ‘Hysteria, mimesis and the imaginary’

Masquerade

The debate on the hysterical or feminine masquerade within the work of

Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler can help further elucidate the question
of hysterical mimesis. For Lacan, symbolic desire is separate from imagin-
ary demand, and so symbolic desire is something quite different from the
sexual needs between a man and a woman. Heterosexuality, in Lacan’s
eyes, is a comedy and a masquerade. Lacan sees femininity as a masquerade
within language which is constructed in relation to the phallic sign; femi-
ninity masquerades at being the phallus. Lacan writes that ‘it is in order to
be the phallus, that is, the signifier of desire of the Other, that the woman
will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes
through masquerade’.15
In discussing this quotation Judith Butler argues that it offers two
possible readings. Either masquerade is a performance of sexual ontology,
or masquerade is a denial of feminine desire ‘that presupposes some prior
ontological femininity regularly unrepresented by the phallic economy’.16
Butler stays with the issue of performance and develops Lacan’s argument
to suggest that the masquerade or ‘mask is part of the incorporative strategy
of melancholy, the taking on of attributes of the object/Other that is lost,
where loss is the consequence of a refusal of love’.17 Butler’s development
of this idea through describing the melancholic incorporation of gender is
now well established. As stated above, the lost object of same-sex love
becomes incorporated as a melancholic other. Thus femininity and mascu-
linity are founded on the disavowal of lost homosexual loves.
We can understand this performance of ontological gender as the hys-
teric’s mimesis; a feminine and masculine masquerade enacted by women
and men alike. However, instead of seeing hysteria in classical Freudian
terms as the conversion symptoms of repressed thoughts or wishes, I
want the reader to consider hysteria as a crisis in ontological being.18 Hys-
terics, in this narrative, are not in crisis about their sexuality in the Lacanian
sense. They are not, as Gregorio Kohon characterizes them as being, in a
state of indecision, of being unable to choose between mother and
father, or between being a man and a woman.19 Instead, the hysterical
performance or mimesis, within the analytic session or outside of it, may
be seen as a masquerade of idealized heterosexuality; for example, feminin-
ity at its extreme: childish and full of narcissistic longing. Or a masculinity
that is macho: a performance of the hero. These are romantic performances
that are transcendental, eschewing bodily desire in favour of a symbiotic
relating within the imaginary of the Other. This hysterical masquerade is
neurotic, but it is also a splitting of sexed identity which defends against
ontological experience that has become disassociated. So Lacan says that
the woman, in order to be ‘the signifier of the desire of the other’, masquer-

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ades and rejects an essential part of her femininity. Perhaps it would be

more correct to say that the feminine masquerade is a flight not from auth-
entic sexuality, but from a sexuality that is psychically embodied. Such an
embodied imaginary is where affect is not split off or petrified, but can
enable fluid identifications that are not invested/constructed in relation
to a singular Other imaginary.
Butler’s discussion of the masquerade draws on Joan Rivière’s famous
analysis. In ‘Womanliness as masquerade’, Rivière suggests that the
feminine masquerade masks more rivalrous masculine identifications.20
Taking up Rivière’s assertion that she cannot draw a line between
‘genuine womanliness and the “masquerade”’, Butler approves of the defi-
nition of the feminine masquerade as a disavowal of more masculine
‘homosexual’ identifications. However, she is critical of the homophobic
way in which Rivière refuses to accord this disavowed female homosexu-
ality with the status of desire. Following the accepted, traditional psycho-
analytic view that homosexuality is an immature developmental stage ruled
not by desire but by hate, Rivière accords the woman in her account a
narcissistic masculine identification that cannot actually accede to full
sexual desire for another woman. Butler writes:

And yet, there is no clear way to read this description of a female

homosexuality that is not about a sexual desire for women. Rivière
would have us believe that this curious typological anomaly cannot
be reduced to a repressed female homosexuality or heterosexuality.
What is hidden is not sexuality, but rage.21

Although Butler’s criticism of the way psychoanalysis refuses desire to

lesbian women is apt, I want to consider what Rivière is saying about
the sexual masquerade as a defence. What if there is not the distance
between rage and sexuality, between identification and desire, that seems
necessary to distinguish mature ‘Oedipal’ desire from immature regressive
identification and hate? What if all sexual love and desire, not just lesbian
desire, is actually just one step away from rivalrous hate? Sexual masquer-
ade, femininity and masculinity, then become a hysterical defence which
seems to signal a crisis of sexuality, but actually points to a deeper crisis
of ontological being.
Fixed sexual identity, most obviously observed in extreme heterosexu-
ality, but also present, I would argue, in very fixed homosexual identities, is
therefore a hysterical masquerade and disassociation which performs the
body. This masquerade defends against the loss of ontological certainty,
but may be replayed within the analytic session to elaborate a more
plural affectual world. Such a sense of being is not a return to a naturalistic,
essential subject. It represents just the opposite: an acknowledgement of

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 Jan Campbell ‘Hysteria, mimesis and the imaginary’

multiple identifications and desires. Merleau-Ponty has always character-

ized phenomenological being as historically constructed, and Judith
Butler, in turn, has also proposed that gender performance may be under-
stood as a series of phenomenological acts.
Interestingly, Merleau-Ponty wanted to rescue Freud from a theory of
sexual instincts, and in his book The Phenomenology of Perception he rereads
Freudian psychoanalysis in a phenomenological mode:

For Freud himself the sexual is not the genital, sexual life is not a
mere effect of the processes having their seat in the genital organs,
the libido is not an instinct, that is an activity directed towards defi-
nite ends, it is the general power, which the psychosomatic subject
enjoys, of taking root in different settings, of establishing himself
through different experiences . . .22

Judith Butler takes issue with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the Freudian
libido is not an “instinct”. For her, Freud’s theory of psychosexual devel-
opment relies precisely on the naturalistic account of drives that
Merleau-Ponty seeks to reject. Moreover, in Butler’s view, Merleau-
Ponty’s own theory of sexual desire collapses into a naturalistic account,
contradicting his more historical, phenomenological emphasis. In particu-
lar she flags up how Merleau-Ponty ‘attributes the emergence of sexuality
to the purely organic function of the body’.23 Perhaps Butler misses the
point here, made by Henry and implicitly understood by Merleau-
Ponty, that instinctual drives can only be known through their phenomen-
ological expression: the psychical and physical are inextricably woven
together.
In Butler’s view, both Merleau-Ponty and Freud posit a sexuality that
emerges before the historical influence of culture and, as Foucault has
shown, all sexuality is culturally and historically constructed. Butler also
criticizes Merleau-Ponty on feminist grounds for avoiding gender and
positing a phenomenological lived experience based purely on a male mor-
phology. Of course, this critique chimes with Luce Irigaray’s challenge to
Merleau-Ponty’s reliance on a universal male subject. However, before I
turn to Irigaray’s work, I want to highlight how Butler does not jettison
a phenomenological model completely, how she is, in fact, aware of the
importance of a historical phenomenology which refuses the trap of
either humanism or sexual difference.
Arguing that it is not the paradigm of gender that she is primarily
interested in revising, Butler argues cogently for the category of woman
to be seen as an historical construction. The problem, of course, with fem-
inists who advocate sexual difference as a primary factor, whether they
follow Lacan or Irigaray, is that they immediately reify sexual difference

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as a founding moment of the subject and culture, whether that moment is

seen in terms of the real or the symbolic. Butler writes:

Although some feminist literary critics suggest that the presupposi-

tion of sexual difference is necessary for all discourse, that position
reifies sexual difference as the founding moment of culture and pre-
cludes an analysis not only of how sexual difference is constituted to
begin with but how it is continuously constituted.24

She goes on to state the importance of developing a critical genealogy of

gender which will:

rely on a phenomenological set of suppositions, most important

among them the expanded conception of an ‘act’ which is both
socially shared and historically constituted, and which is performa-
tive in the sense I previously described.25

Butler is critical of phenomenological and feminist theories that posit an

essential self or femininity prior to the historical performance of gender
acts, so she challenges Erving Goffman’s assumption that the self contains
some kind of intrinsic, psychological interiority. For her, the self is an
‘irretrievable “outside” constituted in social discourse’.26 Of course, this
is also Foucault’s criticism of Freudian meta-psychology, and a hierarchical
Oedipal unconscious governed by repression, but psychoanalysis has
always, as I have argued, incorporated an alternative phenomenolo-
gical narrative, emphasizing mimetic identification rather than Oedipal
repression. Such mimetic identification is not before or outside culture;
neither does it occupy a physical place that is unmediated by the psyche.
This phenomenological narrative of psychoanalysis exists in the early dia-
logue between Freud and Jung, and in Freud’s early work on hysteria.
More recently, the analytic thinking of Luce Irigaray and R.D. Laing,
influenced by Merleau-Ponty, reveals the phenomenological and inter-
subjective nature of the unconscious; a theory which completely explodes
the idea of psychic interiority.
The unconscious, as R.D. Laing spelt out so forcefully in Self and
Others, does not reside inside us as a psychic internal world; it is an act
of communication.27 Of course, Lacan also subscribed to the notion of
an intersubjective transference but in his work emphasis on the scopic
gaze ultimately returns the transference to a Hegelian master/slave dialectic
where subject and object, imaginary and symbolic are oppositionally posi-
tioned. Merleau-Ponty’s earlier work also subscribes to a social ontology of
the look, but his later work The Visible and The Invisible exchanges this
emphasis on the gaze for a more sensual description of the transference

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 Jan Campbell ‘Hysteria, mimesis and the imaginary’

where the fleshy, tactile interaction of bodies deconstructs any delineation

of subject and object.

A phenomenological bodily imaginary

How can we conceptualize a more phenomenological imaginary? And how

would such an imaginary enable us to reconceptualize the bodily perform-
ance of the hysteric? Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray have both challenged
and displaced Lacan’s mental and linguistic imaginary with a more embo-
died account. Lacan’s theory of the imaginary is synonymous with the
ego. He depicts this imaginary in his account of ‘the mirror stage’ as a devel-
opmental stage where the small unintegrated infant sees his bodily image
reflected in a mirror, and then misrecognizes that reflection, seeing itself
as unitary and whole, rather than fragmented.28 For Lacan, the imaginary
is an illusory whole or projective spatial identification, where phantasy is
elaborated from ‘a fragmented body-image to a form of totality that I
shall call orthopaedic’.29 Merleau-Ponty sees this mirror stage differently.
Instead of the total Gestalt body image in the mirror being a fiction, he
sees it as a necessary stage for the child in working out a spatial intersubjec-
tivity. Whereas, for Lacan, the mirror stage is a process of imaginary narcis-
sistic misrecognition, and this imaginary is a mental counterpart of a
linguistic symbolic separated from the bodily real, for Merleau-Ponty the
imaginary is embodied. Merleau-Ponty, unlike Lacan, sees the subject as
present in a primordial, perceptive, sensual being, before the reflective self
appears. The imaginary is not an illusion covering primary fragmentation,
but a stage where the perceptual relations between self and other, or self and
object are dialectically put into play. In Merleau-Ponty’s view the image in
the mirror is other. The child knows that what he sees is not where he experi-
ences himself introceptively. But at the same time he is aware that he can be
seen, by an external other at the place where he feels himself to be, but with
the same visual appearance of the image in the mirror. This means that the
child must ‘displace the mirror image, bringing it from the apparent and
virtual place it occupies in the depth of the mirror back to himself, whom
he identifies at a distance with his introceptive body.’30
In Lacan’s account, the perceptual ‘I’ becomes social through the
rupture and lack of the phallic symbolic. Merleau-Ponty’s primary and
embodied self– other relations, as Vivian Sobchack points out, are not
necessarily rivalrous, but can be ‘co-operative figures constituted against
the ground of the primordial experience of the body-being-in-the-
world’.31 The young infant is therefore centred but continously inter-
twined with objects in the world; there is no integrated subject that is
boundaried from the social. Luce Irigaray is much influenced by

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Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity, but she takes issue with what

she sees as its masculine imaginary. For although Merleau-Ponty argues for
an embodied intersubjective imaginary, in Irigaray’s view he subsumes the
question of flesh and embodiment between two to sight, making vision
complete the body.32 He thus makes the intersubjective relationship
between the infant and mother reversible through vision, a relation
between self and mother/world that locates itself as a pre-Oedipal and
masculine imaginary because it does not acknowledge the subject, symbolic
and sexually differentiate status of the mother’s body.33 Irigaray’s argument
for a more embodied imaginary questions the complicity between
language, knowledge and a metaphysical privileging of sight and vision.
She questions the Freudian and Oedipal analytic practice for its continual
desire to know and deconstruct, where light is always subordinated to
sound and bodily flesh colours have to make way for interpretive rules
and linguistic language. A language, then, that in its voyeuristic urge to
know will decentre and fragment the subject but will do little to give
back to the client the necessary powers of imagination to resynthesize, to
psychically explore and integrate a ‘sense’ of self. She asks, ‘why is there
such a desire to know? Knowledge alone cannot constitute the unity of
the subject; in fact it tends to splinter the subject, or even force its obedi-
ence to some absolute cause’.34
Instead of an interminable analysis where the subject is continually
deconstructed by language, but in the process suffers sensory deprivation,
Irigaray suggests a form of analysis that can give the subject back his or her
perceptual balance within space-time. Her proposal is to take painting as
an example of a practice that promises to restore perceptual balance. She
writes:

The point about painting is to spatialize perception and make time

simultaneous, to quote Klee. This is also the point about dreaming.
The analyst should direct his or her attention not only to the rep-
etition of former images and their possible interpretation, but also
to the subject’s ability to paint, to make time simultaneous, to
build bridges, establish perspectives between present-past-future.35

This notion of unconscious creativity and painting is very different from an

Oedipal scenario, where the voyeuristic gaze of the other represses the
body. In this Oedipal framework the imaginary goes to war with the real
and we are left with the symptoms: hysteria, obsession, psychosis. But
within a more embodied imaginary, the imagination works in harmony
with the senses, enabling creative work for the subject and providing
them with not only a harmonious relation to space and time, but also a
situated and embodied perception and identity within history. Irigaray dis-

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cusses how this creative bodily imaginary is a crucial tool in working ana-
lytically with the hysteric. She writes:

Hysteria has been and is still the source of energy that has not been
coded – the flesh, the seed of analysis. Hysteria stands between
woman and mother, women and mothers. It is in tension between
them. Hysteria must not be destroyed but allowed access to the
imagination and creativeness. For the hysteric access to such an iden-
tity is effected through a sexualised art, a coloured and sonorous art,
an art whose libidinal resources blossom in duality and reconciliation,
within one woman, between mother and wife, and among women.36

Now Irigaray names this creative bodily imaginary as vital in giving back
the hysteric her gender and her sexually specific subjectivity. In other
words, cure for the hysteric is through some imaginary and symbolic
rendering of feminine sexual difference.
Like Butler, I reject sexual difference as the primary founding moment
of culture. Irigaray’s project, in proposing feminine sexual specificity, is
trying to find an alternative feminine subjectivity that will not be
reduced to a projection or abject ground for a male, Oedipal imaginary.
Nevertheless, to make feminine, sexed specificity the imaginary and sym-
bolic alternative to the Oedipal complex is to ignore how sexual difference
operates in fantasy as a regression to the privatized family and a defence
against time. Oedipal femininity is the hysterical masquerade and an
alternative cannot be found through some kind of reification of sexual
difference. So what Irigaray is saying about a creative phenomenological
imaginary and the hysteric is important. But this is not, I suggest,
because a phenomenological imaginary elaborates a needed modality of
feminine subjectivity for the woman, but because it offers an explanation
of how the hysteric performs the body, as ideal heterosexuality, in a
defence against inhabiting a more embodied sense of time.
Although Irigaray criticizes Merleau-Ponty for subsuming the embo-
died nature of the imaginary to a ‘masculine’ privilege of vision, her work is
obviously indebted to the way Merleau-Ponty counters the Lacanian ima-
ginary by bringing the body back into the reversable, intersubjective gaze
of the mirror. Thus whereas an Oedipal account splits symbolic language
from the imaginary body, a phenomenological narrative negotiates a more
fluid relationship between real and imaginary.
A phenomenological imaginary thus reverses the perception, between
embodiment and the social, that exists within Oedipal psychoanalysis.
Whereas in the latter account of a phallic unconscious, pre-Oedipal experi-
ence and the unconscious are predicated in terms of a symbiotic, instinc-
tual excess of the body, within a phenomenological imaginary the infant

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is seen as disembodied and disassociated when merged symbiotically with

the mother because it participates only in terms of the Other’s dominant
imaginary.37 A more embodied subjectivity is then attained when the
child finds a more transitional and creative imaginary where multiple
identifications may be socially and symbolically claimed. Hysteria is a
good example of this distinction between an Oedipal and a phenomenolo-
gical imaginary. In an Oedipal scenario, hysteria becomes an excessive
bodily and symbiotic relating, often characterizing a mother– daughter
relationship that has failed to achieve symbolic, paternal triangulation
and mediation. If we understand the hysteric’s dilemma in phenomenolo-
gical terms, her symbiotic connection to the mother renders her disembo-
died, restricting her relation to one, unmediated, imaginary world which is
hard for her to own or inhabit. The hysteric then performs and masquer-
ades the body, precisely because she cannot psychically integrate its affects.
Oedipal psychoanalysis polarizes the pre-Oedipal maternal body to a
phallic, linguistic symbolic. Within phenomenological psychoanalysis you
are always within language and culture, there is no prior organic sexuality.
Libidinal experiences are on a continuum of being psychically embodied
and hence performed and brought to life within language, or they are dis-
associated. Here, bodily symptoms perform and ‘speak’ precisely because
parts of the psychic experiential world have become lost and split off. In
terms of the analytic session this means that the imaginary is not simply
an unconscious negativity of murderous maternal identification that has
to be escaped/repressed through a privileged phallic symbolic. Instead,
the imaginary is a world of embodied or disembodied objects and images
which can be creatively elaborated on within an intersubjective trans-
ference; to become, as Merleau-Ponty would put it, a gestural sense or
language.

Moving beyond hysterical mimesis

Following Borch-Jacobsen, we can argue that desire and identification are

an indissoluble mimesis from the beginning. We are born into a world of
desire, and it is our present Oedipal and family arrangements that person-
alize desire in relation to oppositional, heterosexual relations between a
mother and father. Desire becomes socialized as sexual difference, but as
Deleuze and Guattari argue this is a perversion and a privatization of the
real social and political nature of desire. It is this privatization of the ima-
ginary that we can see as both Oedipal and hysterical. The Oedipal is a hys-
terical and privatized imaginary that masquerades as symbolic law.
Borch-Jacobsen and Irigaray have both in differing ways tried to
rethink Oedipal desire as mimetic. For Borch-Jacobsen, it becomes the

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deathly and hysterical rivalry and imaginary that lies between father and
son. In Irigaray’s view, it is the masquerade and exchange that women
are forced to enter into as commodities on the market. Irigaray also sees
this mimesis as a doubling, a more subversive feminist mimicry of the
male principle of realist mimesis: the Oedipal symbolic order. Mimesis,
for Irigaray, is therefore not just unconscious; it is also a conscious and
playful strategy for revealing the place of the feminine within language.
Butler also suggests that mimesis is a strategy. However, for Butler there
is no subject, feminine or otherwise, that is revealed through mimesis.
Instead, gender is a performative cultural fiction, constructed through a
Foucauldian law. It is only the reiteration of this law as a mimesis
within language that can produce alterity or the possibility of miming dif-
ferently.38
But is social mimesis simply a question of reiteration within language?
Freud places the Oedipal complex and the art of repression as the resol-
ution of our rivalrous mimetic death drives, and yet when he comes to
discuss group psychology, his thesis of identification as a mimesis steadily
undoes his more Oedipal interpretations.
René Girard and Jean-Michel Oughourlian profess the need to
move beyond mimesis as repression, rivalry or obstacle and submit to
the mimetic process.39 For Girard and Oughourlain, only peaceful sub-
mission to the mimetic model enables the route out of hysterical rivalry
and neurosis. However, in Freud’s discussion of the social group we see
mimesis as a rivalry that will brook no such acceptance. We must remem-
ber that Freud is talking about neurosis and that for him no real difference
exists between analysis of the individual or the group. We can understand
the early emotional mimesis between mother and child in a phenomeno-
logical sense; as a mimesis where the mother is understood not as pre-
Oedipal but as an extension of the world. From this viewpoint, the differ-
ence between mimetic identification for the child or the group becomes a
question or rather a description of that affectual world. In Freud’s account
of Oedipal neurosis as desire, the neurotic cannot accept paternal prohibi-
tion and law. But in a phenomenological sense the neurotic is simply
trapped in a restricted, repetitive mimesis with the mother/world. The
relation to the father here is merely another repetition of that hysterical
tie. Overcoming this rivalry means accepting identifications that are
more flexible, and open to change and difference.
It is perhaps the ultimate myth of Freudian and Lacanian discourse
that the Oedipal complex is a reflexive sublimation of the hysteric’s
mimetic rivalry within language and culture. Freud abandoned hypnosis
and developed his fundamental rule of analysis: the free association with
words as the key to returning repressed affects to their proper represen-
tation. In much the same way, Lacan saw language as the route out of

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the hysterical imaginary and the key to intersubjective relating. But the
hysteric’s mimesis/transference is not resolved primarily through represen-
tation. The hysteric does not stage herself as Lacan thought in order to
narrate herself for the other, for she mimes and exists as the other.40 It
is not language per se that rescues the hysteric, but a language attached
to a more affectual or embodied imaginary, where ‘she’ can own not
just one, but many desires. A focus on language and representation
misses the fundamental meaning of the hysteric’s mimesis which is a
staged performance for the other, but it is a peculiar narration in the sense
that it is one-sided. Hysteria is, as Jung says, a staged performance that
communicates a disassociated and restricted way of being in the world.
Hysteria is thus conceived as disassociation and reminiscences of the
past which tell only one part of the hysteric’s experiential subjectivity.
For hysteria is melodrama, and whereas in optimum health we have
access to multiple selves, the hysteric has lost the ability to have dialogue
with or representation of important parts or characters in her psychic
world. She is like a soap opera star forced to play the same role, over
and over again.
In much the same way, our Oedipal identifications as heterosexual
femininity and masculinity become such binary, hysterical melodramas.
If the Oedipal complex is not a repression of pre-Oedipal bodily instincts,
but is instead inherently hysterical and mimetic, then we still need to add
to this an account of how mimesis moves beyond rivalry and disassociation
to encompass embodied, psychic and social difference. One way of under-
standing this is to see mimesis as a series of phenomenological iden-
tifications and acts which can travel beyond fixed, hysterical sexual
difference and be acknowledged in their multiplicity. In this latter
account we move from hysterical, disassociated heterosexuality to a more
fluid performance where lost homosexual loves can also be acknowledged.
Butler’s account of the performative mimesis of gender eschews
phenomenological models of identification that position a sealed and
interior subject. If mimesis is the performative basis of gender identifi-
cation, how do we mobilize a more embodied identification and desire
which is not rooted in the imaginary of the other? The answer, it
seems, for Butler is a mimesis within language which will reiterate and
thereby produce difference within the hegemonic norm. But linguistic
representation, as Irigaray and Borch-Jacobsen have in different ways
argued, is not the key to releasing the hysteric into more intersubjective
relating. A more embodied performance or mimesis entails a meaningful
communication where disassociated selves can find elaboration within a
creative transference. Language is not causal in this scenario; it is just
part of a wider relational and communicative mimesis within the
transference.

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Irigaray has described this embodied mimesis in a phenomenological

sense, as a painting of the world within a creative imaginary and the trans-
ference. Now, for Irigaray, this intersubjective painting leads optimally for
the hysteric to a sexually specified ‘feminine’ subject. But what if it
doesn’t? What if, instead of the creation of the subject of sexual difference,
this embodied imaginary actually dissolves the fixed and hysterical perform-
ance of our gendered identities? In this latter account the imaginary leads not
to sexed, symbolic desire but to creative, social desires; a collective desire
more like that envisioned by Deleuze and Guattarri which both precedes
and outlives the ‘subject’ and develops the many identities at our disposal.
In order to develop this phenomenological imaginary we have to abandon
the masculine ‘subject’ adhered to by Merleau-Ponty and the ‘feminine’
subject proposed by Irigaray. Instead we can understand this imaginary as
a mimesis; a mimesis which cannot be reduced to notions of a conscious
‘role’ and therefore retains the notion of an ‘unconscious’.41 But this uncon-
scious is not understood in terms of castration or the Lacanian, Hegelian dia-
lectic which opposes imaginary life to the symbolic. As Freud realized in his
more phenomenological moments, there is no cut between real and imagin-
ary; the unconscious traverses both. Castration is a myth that locks the
unconscious inside the patient, and the patient on the analyst’s couch,
instead of opening both to a more social transience of time.
We can therefore understand gender performance, as Butler herself
has done, as a series of phenomenological acts. In this scenario, gender
mimesis is an act performed in the imaginary, which moves between
language and experience, between the imaginary and the symbolic and
in so doing conflates their distinction. Such mimetic phenomenological
acts do not constitute a subject, except as a fiction. But this fiction is not
simply a function of language and the law; it is experiential, the movement
of a phenomenological imaginary that moves hysterically out of time and,
in more embodied acts, within it.
Social desire and mimesis, then, mean occupying a larger world
and not restricting oneself to parents, child or couple. The difficulty, as
Freud showed in Group Psychology, in moving beyond hysterical mimesis
and rivalry, is how we live with the pain of being excluded. In a conversa-
tion with Judith Butler, Adam Phillips suggests that sexual difference is not
something we can transcend, for it explains how the child has to accept that
there is no third sex, no position beyond exclusion. Phillips seems, then, to
accept some sort of sexual difference as constitutive. He argues that there is
logic in the opposition Freud places between identification and desire:
‘In Freud’s view we become what we cannot have, and we desire (and
punish) what we are compelled to disown’.42 Butler is not so sure, and
whilet accepting that there is no place beyond exclusion asks, ‘But why
is sexual difference the primary guarantor of loss in our psychic lives?’43

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I suggest that sexual difference is not the primary guarantor of loss

for us psychically.44 In fact desire, as Deleuze and Guattarri note,
cannot be reduced to desire between persons. They argue that the
incest taboo and the first primary bond between mother and child are cul-
tural fictions which personalize desire as Oedipal, thus removing it from
its proper collective and political function.45 One of the great myths of
personal desire, whether between lovers, or between parents and children,
is that the other is knowable, that the beloved is who we think they are,
when in fact elsewhere they are many other things. Freud never really
worked out what leads melancholia to mourning, or how the Oedipal
complex is ever really given up. We are given Oedipus as the solution,
but far from being the solution it is actually only the hysterical
dilemma of our disassociated Oedipal relations which leads us to the
analyst’s couch.

Conclusion

I have argued for sexual difference as a gender performance which is both

Oedipal and hysterical. While Butler locates gender performativity within
a reiteration of linguistic law, I have explored it as part of a phenomeno-
logical imaginary, not as some sealed subject, but as a mimesis of phenom-
enological acts. If hysteria and our fixed gender performances are a mimetic
defence against a more transient relation to time and the social, and if fem-
ininity and masculinity are masquerades that do not have to be upheld and
subscribed to within the symbolic, then perhaps we can also recognize the
myth and fiction of castration and Oedipus – a myth which is not a necess-
ary representative function of language, but a myth of the imaginary, that
has been historically produced, and can be just as creatively lost. This view
is of course indebted to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. However, I
suggest that an alternative to the Lacanian symbolic does not rest in the
destruction of the imaginary and a reification of a schizoid desiring
‘real’. Contrary to the desiring machines advocated in Anti-Oedipus, pro-
ductive desire is not just real and its realization depends on the imaginative
production of a more social and phenomenological imaginary. Such an
imaginary is not reliant on the hysterical sexual ‘subject’. In fact, a more
phenomenological reading of the unconscious can perhaps allow us to
see that there is no place beyond exclusion; but also that exclusion is not
based on sexual difference. On the contrary, exclusion can lead us away
from the hysterical rivalry of sexual difference to a social performativity
of our many transient desires.
University of Birmingham

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Notes

1 The argument that a phenomenological reading negates the idea of the uncon-
scious need not jettison the psychoanalytic project. As Carl Jung has famously
said, the unconscious is simply a negative borderline concept.
2 Sigmund Freud, ‘A fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria’ (1895), The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–74),
vol 7. Further references will be given to SE.
3 Carl, G. Jung, ‘The theory of psychoanalysis’ (1913), trans R.F.C. Hull, ed. Sir
Herbert Read, Dr Michael Fordham and Dr Gerhard Adler, Collected Works of
C.G. Jung (London: Routledge, 1954), 4: 92.
4 Carl G. Jung, ‘The theory of psychoanalysis’, pp. 161–2.
5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Five lectures on psychoanalysis’, trans. James Strachey, Two
Short Accounts of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 40.
6 Sigmund Freud, ‘Group psychology and the analysis of the ego’ (1921), SE, 18.
7 Sigmund Freud, ‘Melancholia and mourning’ (1917), SE, 14.
8 Michel Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 309.
9 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 146.
10 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 28.
11 Ibid., p. 27.
12 Ibid., p. 27.
13 René Girard, Deceit, Desire and The Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure,
trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1976).
14 Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, pp. 217–18.
15 Jacques Lacan, ‘The meaning of the phallus’, in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques
Lacan and the école freudienne, trans. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose
(London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), p. 84.
16 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 60.
17 Ibid., p. 62.
18 Freud understood hysteria as the conversion symptoms of repressed wishes.
Later more object relations accounts such as those by Fairburn focus on a
more ontological and narcissistic aetiology. See W.R.D. Fairburn, ‘A revised
psychopathology of the psychoses and psychoneuroses’, in Psychoanalytic
Studies of the Personality (London: Tavistock, 1952).
19 Gregorio Kohon, No Lost Certainties to be Recovered (London: Karnac, 1999).
20 Joan Rivierè, ‘Womanliness as masquerade’ (1929), in Victor Burgin, James
Donald and Cora Kaplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy. (London: Methuen,
1986).
21 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 67.

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22 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith

(New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 158.
23 Judith Butler, ‘Sexual ideology and phenomenological description: a feminist
critique of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception’, in ed. J. Allen and
I.M. Young (eds). The Thinking Muse (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1989), p. 91.
24 Judith Butler, ‘Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in pheno-
menology and feminist theory’, in S.E. Case (ed.) Performing Feminisms:
Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore, MD, and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 281.
25 Ibid., p. 281.
26 Ibid., p. 279.
27 Ronald D. Laing, Self and Others (London: Penguin, 1969).
28 Jacques Lacan, ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I’, trans.
Alan Sheridan, in Ecrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977).
29 Ibid., p. 4.
30 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The child’s relation with others’, in J.M. Edie (ed.),
The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: North Western University Press, 1964),
pp. 135– 6.
31 Vivien Sobchack, ‘Being with one’s own eyes’, in The Address of The Eye: The
Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1990), p. 121.
32 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of SexualDifference., trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian
C. Gill (London: Athlone Press, 1993), p. 174.
33 See my ‘Postlacanian feminism: reading the symbolic, imaginary and real’, in
Arguing With The Phallus, Feminist, Queer and Postcolonial Theory (London:
Zed Books, 2000), where I discuss Irigaray’s ‘feminine’ in terms of a sexually
symbolic, and an embodied imaginary.
34 Luce Irigaray, ‘Fleshcolours’, in Female Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 164.
35 Ibid., p. 155.
36 Ibid., p. 164.
37 Symbiosis in my clinical experience is not an early developmental state, but a
fantasy of oneness that is used as a defence against anxiety, pain and difference.
38 Butler, Gender Trouble and The Psychic Life of Power.
39 René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans S. Bann
(London: Athlone Press, 1987) and Jean Oughourlian, The Puppet of Desire:
The Psychology of Hysteria, Possession and Hypnosis, trans. Eugene Webb
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
40 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, ‘Hypnosis in psychoanalysis’, trans. A. Brewer and
X.P. Callahan, in The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis and Affect
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1993).
41 Erving Goffman’s phenomenology and the early work of Merleau-
Ponty emphasize a conscious subject and ‘role’, a delimited subject and
object, at the expense of an unconscious that would seek to dissolve these
distinctions.

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42 Adam Phillips, ‘Keeping it moving: commentary on Judith Butler’s “Melan-

choly gender/refused identification” ’, in The Psychic Life of Power, p. 155.
43 Judith Butler, ‘Reply to Adam Phillip’s commentary on Melancholy gender/
refused identification’, in The Psychic Life of Power, p. 165.
44 An alternative to castration and sexual difference means rethinking the notion
of the primary maternal object, not as prohibited through paternal law, but as a
phenomenological arena of identification and difference. Why can’t there be all
sorts of different identifications and losses that we have to negotiate in terms of
moving into a more social identification with the world?
45 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone Press,
1984).

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