Although it is not clear that Deleuze was simply and unambiguously a Jungian, he certainly engaged with Jung’s work in both affirmative and critical ways, writing in Difference and Repetition: “Was not one of the most important points of Jung’s theory already to be found here: the force of ‘questioning’ in the unconscious, the conception of the unconscious as an unconscious of ‘problems’ and ‘tasks’? Drawing out the consequences of this led Jung to the discovery of a process of differenciation more profound than the resulting oppositions.”[i] The concern with problems and integrative differenciation is central to Deleuze’s project in what many consider his magnum opus, and it is striking that Deleuze expresses such a strong affinity between his work and that of Jung, as Jung’s influence on Deleuze has not tended to be emphasized by scholars, though as Frida Beckman writes, “Deleuze’s discussions of the unconscious in Différence et répétition may make more sense when we read Jung into the equation.”[ii]
There are several passages in which Deleuze takes Jung’s side against Freud, who nominated Jung his “successor and crown prince”[iii] in 1910, and then excommunicated him around 1913 for his purported psychoanalytic heresies. One of the most revealing of these passages by Deleuze is in L’Abécédaire, recorded in 1988 as part of a long television interview that would only air after his death, in which he discusses “a text that I adore by Jung” concerning Jung’s dream of descent through successive subterranean strata, at the deepest layer of which Jung finds an ossuary, numerous bones that Freud insists on reducing to the unity of a death wish, as a primary example of the concepts of multiplicity and assemblage, “a kind of constructivism”[iv] which “keeps very heterogeneous elements together.”[v] Deleuze portrays Jung as understanding these concepts, contrary to Freud’s egregious misunderstanding, an instance that also finds brief mention in A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari write that “Jung is in any event profounder than Freud.”[vi] Although Derrida, in a 2004 lecture, suggests that “Deleuze laughs at psychoanalysis, to me, sometimes, a little too quickly,” and he jokes that part of Deleuze’s “absolute originality in French” is “admiring Jung more than Freud,”[vii] it is Derrida himself who perhaps laughs too quickly in this case given the admiration for Jung expressed by Bergson, Bachelard, and Simondon. Deleuze also makes affirmative references to Jung in “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism,”[viii] Nietzsche and Philosophy,[ix] and Dialogues II,[x] and with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus.[xi] It even seems possible that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome is at least partially derived from Jung’s discussion of this concept in several texts,[xii] a possibility which Slavoj Žižek states as fact, but for which the evidence is not definitive, though it is highly suggestive. Žižek also writes that “there is a direct lineage from Jung to Anti-Oedipus,”[xiii] an insightful observation which he marshals as a criticism of both Deleuze and Jung in favor of Freud, though those of us who deeply admire all of these theorists may reframe it as an endorsement of what Barbara Jenkins describes as “a nascent ‘Jungian turn’ in Deleuzean and cultural studies.”[xiv]
In 1956’s “Bergson’s Concept of Difference,” Deleuze writes that “there are no accidents in the life of the psyche,”[xv] perhaps implicitly correlating the nuances of Bergsonian duration with Jungian synchronicity, a subtle correlation which finds further elaboration in 1966’s Bergsonism and 1983’s Cinema 1. In 1969’s The Logic of Sense, Deleuze explicitly employs the term “synchronicity,” and significant portions of that book seem to be explorations of something very much like Jungian archetypes, a term which Deleuze affirmatively employs in 1964’s Proust and Signs,[xvi] as well as the subtle kind of formal causation characteristic of the late Jungian conception of synchronicity in other terms. Deleuze indirectly defines synchronicity as a form of resonant correspondence that is not merely a linear logical series operating in terms of the causes and effects of efficient causation, while Jung, in the subtitle of Synchronicity, defines it as “an acausal connecting principle,” having two decades earlier explicitly equated synchronicity with transversality,[xvii] a concept employed by Deleuze and Guattari in both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deleuze takes up these definitions later in The Logic of Sense, in relation to the Stoics and Leibniz, in his discussion of “alogical incompatibilities and noncausal correspondences,” of which he writes that “astrology was perhaps the first important attempt to establish a theory,” as this ancient mode of thought posits a persistent formal, as opposed to efficient, causal (or perhaps quasi-causal, or even acausal) correspondence between the movements of the heavens and events in the human domain. And similarly, as he writes in a 1970 essay: “In a sense, humankind renews its ties with a destiny that can be read in the planets and stars. Planetary thought is not unifying: it implies hidden depths in space, an extension of deep universes, incommensurate distances and proximities, non-exact numbers, an essential opening of our system, a whole fiction-philosophy.”[xviii]
Deleuze and Guattari’s 1975 book, Kafka, differs not only with the Jungian conception of archetypes, and with Jung’s early method of free association, at least in relation to Kafka’s work, but with other concepts Deleuze asserts in both earlier and later texts[xix] (the symbolic, mythology, the imagination, phantasms[xx]), so that one must recall that Deleuze, perhaps especially with the impish Guattari, eschewed consistency in favor of attempts to think in new ways, Deleuze commenting in 1973 that “neither Guattari nor myself are very attached to the pursuit or even the coherence of what we write.”[xxi] But it is significant that these attempts are enacted in relation to Jung, not in a mere rejection, but in the guise of multiply affirmed admirers of Jung who critique the precursor that they nevertheless deem more profound than Freud. This critique is not a mere denouncement, but rather takes seriously Jung’s concepts, even when Deleuze and Guattari seem to portray them too narrowly, seeking to go beyond a classic archetypal conception (a project also undertaken by James Hillman, based on Jung’s later work) by building upon the differentiations this conception affords, much as Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, enacts an overturning of Plato through the appropriation of certain moments in Plato’s own texts. In fact, it might be suggested that Deleuze’s primary philosophical allegiance is ultimately to Nietzsche because, more than any other figure before Deleuze, Nietzsche was always forging beyond existing categories of thought to create novel conceptions exceeding any systematizing enclosures, though neither Nietzsche nor Deleuze can be understood as simply rejecting the past, but rather as pushing the concepts and language of the past to their limits, willfully transgressing and dissolving existing boundaries in order to open space for novel conceptions. But this transgressive dissolution does not require us to reject all previous categories in favor of the ones that Deleuze, both with and without Guattari, cavalierly constructs and then often carelessly casts aside in the very next book, but rather allows us to employ existing categories and concepts, including those constructed by Deleuze, with a light, even ironic touch as pragmatic tools for novel creation, tools whose refinement and extension these transgressions afford, enabling their employment in the fabrication of new conceptual tools allowing further creation. The irreverence that Deleuze directs toward his precursors, undoubtedly including Jung, cuts both ways, as this irreverence can be directed toward Deleuze himself, whom one can profoundly admire while cavalierly—though still rigorously—selecting among his sometimes conflicting and even incoherent conceptions to achieve the greatest possible efficacy in further attempted creations.
In A Thousand Plateaus, composed over the subsequent decade, the figure of Professor Challenger—who is apparently an embodiment of the assemblage of Deleuze and Guattari based on a character by Arthur Conan Doyle—is giving an obscure and difficult lecture which seems partially designed to prune back the audience (and perhaps those reading about this oddly hallucinatory presentation) to the few steadfast die-hards willing to expend the extraordinary effort required to comprehend these esoteric domains, so that “the only ones left were the mathematicians, accustomed to other follies, along with a few astrologers, archaeologists, and scattered individuals.” In the same book, Deleuze and Guattari describe Jung’s approach as “integrating” any given animal image found in dream or myth “into its archetypal series,” though they express dissatisfaction with this construction, seeking further to deterritorialize Jung’s theory, which they clearly find great value in along with the Jungian approach of Bachelard in Lautréamont (about which Hillman also wrote), and of Simondon in Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. “We sorcerers,” they write, can discern that “there is still room for something else, something more secret, more subterranean” constituted in a becoming beyond the “progress or regress along a series,” an overcoming which they associate with “the whole structuralist critique of the series.” However, later in the same text, they quote H.P. Lovecraft’s evocation of an ascendance through n-dimensions “up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity” in their description of the “plane of consistency” (as opposed to the “plane of development”) which is the locus of becomings “written like sorcerers’ drawings” on that immanent plane, “the ultimate Door providing a way out” or, alternately, “the gates of the Cosmos.”[xxii]
Deleuze and Guattari critique the archetypes as “processes of spiritual reterritorialization”[xxiii] or “intrinsic qualities,” instead advocating a conception in which “cosmic forces” or “expressive qualities” (which are concretely symbolic,[xxiv] and “fictional” like the infinitesimal) are real but nonactual formal causes characterized by their function in specific assemblages of becoming, nomadic paths enacting a vital autonomy for which particular effectuations are derivative points, so that the trajectory is primary and the series derived from it secondary. However, this conception is already prefigured in the later work of Jung, where he tends to express the archetypes as cosmic dynamisms rather than as merely intrinsic psychological categories, as he tended to define them in his earlier work, though he remained ambivalent about their ontological status.[xxv] Rather than merely rejecting Jung’s archetypal theory, Deleuze and Guattari, like many Jungians, can be conceived as having refined that theory, rendering it more subtle and general by suggesting that the locus of becoming is not found primarily in the linear, sedentary series of chronological development, but in temporally nonlinear “transformational series” across orders ascending through increasing degrees of freedom. They suggest that the integration of differentiated n-dimensional archetypal series is the conceptual construction characteristic of the infinitesimal version of the integral calculus, and thus that the differentiating metaphysical integration correlated with the calculus specifically integrates these nonlinear and nonlocal archetypal series of diachronic and synchronic resonances, an expression intimately coextensive with the mode of relation characteristic of Jung’s late expression of synchronicity, approaching the always-receding transcendental archetypal potencies in their multiplicitous singularity.[xxvi]
While these discussions of Jung’s work are profound, they require a Sherlock Holmesian reading of subtle clues to decipher, a recognition that Deleuze implicitly sanctions, writing that “a book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel,” with hints leading the reader to revelations of ultimately complex networks of intertwined relations that were formerly occluded.[xxvii] Deleuze, with and without Guattari, often only evokes these realms of thought, teasing the reader with references to Jung and his work in ways that cannot easily be pinned down, that remain elusive. One suspects the reason for this coyness is that, although Deleuze clearly found great value in Jung’s work, he also understood that Jungian thought has enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the main streams of academia, as Jung brilliantly and profoundly explored domains that were often “beyond the scientific pale,”[xxviii] as Anthony Stevens writes, for the dominant spheres of the twentieth century academy. Additionally, as Jon Mills observes, the fact that Jung has been studied much less by philosophers than Freud “may be in part due to the fact that while Freud was intent on systematizing his theories, Jung was not,” and that “Jung often disparaged philosophy in his writing while exalting religion, despite the fact that much of his corpus involves direct engagement with ancient, Gnostic, medieval, modern, Continental, and Eastern philosophical texts.”[xxix] However, this situation currently bears signs of a rapid shift, and the increased recognition of Deleuze’s extended, though complex, engagement with Jung may help to carry the Swiss psychologist from the liminal frontiers of thought, where he remains the undisputed king, into the central nodes of academic discourse where Freud has long presided, at least in the humanities. In fact, Deleuze explores most of the same uncharted domains as Jung, though Deleuze’s writing is so obscure, while still extremely distinct, that only those who are paying very close attention, and in many cases who are already familiar with Jungian thought, will discern the deep resonances between these theorists. One suspects that this was a subtle and purposive strategy by Deleuze, which has been extraordinarily efficacious in allowing his work to occupy a central place in continental thought, while also allowing him to engage with relatively marginal Jungian concepts, winking at the Jungian cognoscenti while this aspect of his work generally escapes the notice of those who unquestioningly accept the overly hasty dismissal of Jung largely instigated by Freud. Furthermore, Deleuze seems implicitly to have understood Hillman’s admonition that “Freud and Jung are psychological masters, not that we may follow them in becoming Freudian and Jungian, but that we may follow them in becoming psychological,”[xxx] though of course the same can also be said about following Deleuze and Guattari as philosophical and psychological masters.
[i] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 317n17.
[ii] Frida Beckman, Gilles Deleuze (London: Reaktion Books, 2017) 23; Christian McMillan, “Jung and Deleuze: Enchanted Openings to the Other: A Philosophical Contribution,” International Journal of Jungian Studies 10 no. 3 (2018): 185.
[iii] Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, The Freud/Jung Letters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) 104.
[iv] Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec Claire Parnet, 1996. https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/lectures/en/ABCMsRevised-NotesComplete051120_1.pdf 47-48 21.
[v] Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007) 179.
[vi] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 241.
[vii] Jacques Derrida, “Gilles Deleuze: On Forgiveness,” European Graduate School Video Lectures 2/11, 2004. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_r-gr3ccik&list=PLDD498CDE04B51C2D
[viii] Gilles Deleuze, “From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism.” Angelaki 9, no. 1 (2004): 128-30, 132-33.
[ix] Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) 116, 212n8.
[x] Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 80.
[xi] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 46, 162, 278.
[xii] C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956) xxiv; Alchemical Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967) 90, 195; Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) 4; Roderick Main, Christian McMillan, and David Henderson, eds. Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole (New York: Routledge, 2020) 4.
[xiii] Slavoj Žižek, “Notes on a Debate ‘From Within the People,’” Criticism 46 no. 4 (2004): 662-63.
[xiv] Barbara Jenkins, Eros and Economy (New York: Routledge, 2017) 5.
[xv] Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2004) 36.
[xvi] Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) 47, 67.
[xvii] C. G. Jung, Visions (London: Routledge, 1998) 340.
[xviii] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Athalone Press, 1990) 120, 170-71; McMillan, “Jung,” 190, 193; Deleuze, Desert, 157; Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 202.
[xix] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 7.
[xx] See for example Deleuze, Difference, 17, 61, 76, 126.
[xxi] Deleuze, Desert, 278.
[xxii] Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand, 43, 57, 235, 237, 250-51, 333.
[xxiii] Deleuze, Kafka, 13.
[xxiv] Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 48.
[xxv] Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche (New York: Viking, 2006) 57.
[xxvi] Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand, 306, 322-23, 380, 398, 420, 507.
[xxvii] Deleuze, Difference, xx.
[xxviii] Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 1.
[xxix] Jon Mills, ed. Jung and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2019) 1.
[xxx] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) xii.
Grant Maxwell 