The Schizoanalysis of Sex

Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic project has been understood to be antithetical, or at best indifferent, to any project of sexual ontology. Against these dominant views, I argue for an interpretation of the schizo-analytic project that does justice to the differentiation of beings—particularly the human being—according to distinct forms of sexuate morphology. I claim that, although it is largely absent in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings, we can read this kind of determinate sexual difference into their project at both the organic stratum of the organism and the alloplastic stratum of human signification and meaning. Given its importance in structuring bodies and organizing generational reproduction, I consider how sexual difference is the historical condition of possibility for alloplastic subjectivity. Nevertheless, I argue that the innovative features of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic project emerge from their recognition that neither the organismic structure of sexual difference nor its social and personal representation is static. As such, reading sexual difference into the schizoanalytic project not only supplements Deleuze and Guattari’s work but also opens possibilities for developing a sexual ontology that recognizes the dynamic embodiment of individuals without denying the structural reality of sexual difference (particularly, for the human being, as male/female)

Aesthetics · Deleuze and Guattari · Epistemology · Linguistics · Ontology · Psychoanalysis · Sexual difference · Sociology · Subjectivity · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology