Significante e dispotismo. Deleuze critico della linguistica

Abstract

Saussure’s linguistics framed a theory about Sign in which the main part is carried out by the significant, included in a system and removed from each initiative of individual. This theory was continued by the structuralist analysis of sign systems, especially by Lacan and by his interpretation of the unconscious as a language, as the place of a word which inhabits Man. Deleuze’s criticism points just at this prominence of the significant, which Deleuze accuses of reproducing the metaphysical mechanism of representation and through it a despotism form meant to codify the free flowing of desire energetic streams which are characteristic of the structure of the unconscious as a machine which he suggested in his most famous works. This operation, on which Oedipus complex is based, crosses the whole history of civilization with different hints from the primitive societies to the modern capitalism and fixes the problem of the unconscious as a political problem. Deleuze opposes to it an asignificant semiotics the pattern of which is found by him in the linguistic delirium of schizophrenics and in some characters of contemporary literature, where word, ripped out of each signification connection, turns to an object of investment of desire which gets rid in it of each despotism. By this way Deleuze shows us a theory where his criticisms against psychoanalysis, linguistics and more generally structuralism converge.