What Deleuze found in Guattari was arguably the existential refrain (a term from Chaosmosis): an asignifying repetition that is either beyond signification or is the self-limitation of signification. This existential refrain truly puts the sing in the singularity of their philosophical collaboration.

Both Deleuze and Guattari were against Hegelian absolute knowing and they passionately loved the existential refrain precisely because it was unsublatable and it defied the dialectical grasp of reason. They called this asignifying border-domain semiotics to distinguish it from the usual semiology.

For Žižek, on the other hand, Guattari was a “bad influence” on Deleuze (Organs without Bodies), he was a will-o-the-wisp who dragged Deleuze’s “logic of sense” into the swamp of this muddy unsublatable existential refrain, which can guarantee nothing other than a lack of guarantee.

But it nonetheless does guarantee the lack of guarantee, which means that the refrain is not as asignifying as it looks. In fact, the existential refrain is the signifier of the lack in the Other, S(Ⱥ), just like Sygne de Coûfontaine’s compulsive tic that Žižek mentions in The Indivisible Remainder. Isn’t it then better to spell semiotics semio-tics?

Remember that the analyst illuminates nothing:

The analyst is the will-o-the-wisp… The only advantage that I find in this will-o-the-wisp is that it does not amount to fiat lux (“let there be light”). The will-o-the-wisp does not illuminate anything, it emerges even ordinarily from some pestilence. That is its strength. (Jacques Lacan, Seminar 21)

In his self-plagiaristic style Žižek performs varying combinations of multiple refrains throughout his work. Perhaps what he rejected in Guattari was uncannily close to his own method of thinking. It also overlaps with what Žižek identifies as Hegel’s blind spot:

Hegel does think repetition, but not a pure non-productive one, not a “mechanical” repetition which just strives for more of the same: his notion of repetition always involves sublation. (Less Than Nothing)

But there is a crucial difference (which is why “mechanical” has stress quotes [1]): Žižek’s refrains aren’t unsublatable (they don’t “just strive for more of the same”) like that of Deleuze & Guattari; on the contrary, Žižek’s refrains always sublate themselves and manifest a novel aspect of themselves in their every recurrence.

So it’s not beyond reason to say that Žižek invented the self-sublating ex-sistential refrain as a philosophical method. And this was precisely what I learned to practice from his work.

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Scare Quotes and Stress Quotes: Ego, Superego, Symptom of Words”

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