The Schizoanalytic Clinic – Call For Papers
- The schizoanalysis created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is critical-clinical. It is critical as it conjugates various knowledge and practices by freeing against all reductionism the transversality of the flows that trace a problematic. Clinical since it bears against any a priori and aporia on the ways in which these flows are declined in this same problematic. Schizoanalysis thus focuses on the production of subjectivity in a given situation not in terms of identity and meaning, but in terms of becoming and encounters; it does not try to judge and prescribe, but invites experimentation and liberation. It is firmly focused on practice. Taking as a point of departure the conceptualization of a social and historical unconscious makes it possible to define clinical-critical as a micropolitical practice which, from the analysis of the relationship between desire and social, historical and economic production, finds its formulation in the question: How do we want to live?
By engaging in a mapping of conjugations and declensions of flows contributing to the production of subjectivity, today still too often mired in normopathy and fundamentalism, schizoanalysis aims to transmute and put subjectivity back into motion. The purpose of this call for papers is to begin a presentation of current practices that claim such schizoanalytic engagement. Moreover, it is an invitation to mobilize the power of the conceptual tools of schizoanalysis to grasp the complexity of clinical situations and the transversality of the issues of everyday life.
- Schizoanalysis has profoundly influenced the practice of some important reference points in the social psychology of Argentina and Uruguay, and later in Brazil, particularly members of Grupo Plataforma (dissidents of the International Psychoanalytical Association). Among these is Gregorio Baremblitt who was instrumental in its widespread dissemination throughout Latin America in 1973, and who invested himself in the training of schizoanalysts with the help, in Brazil, of Osvaldo Saidón. The most important contribution of Baremblitt is undoubtedly the invention of the clinical method of schizodrama. Resonating with it, Eduardo Pavlovsky and Hernan Kesselman developed their dramatic multiplication method and reformulated the group clinic accordingly. “We were Deleuzians without knowing it”, they affirmed, thus accounting for the practical union with the schizoanalytic affinities that their method already bore. Then Armando Bauleo and Juan Carlos De Brasi echoed with through the Grupo Operativo created by Enrique Pichón Riviere. We can feel the creativity of this collective assemblage of enunciation in the saga called “Lo Grupal”, a book-magazine edited by Pavlovsky that was published throughout the ‘80s and that paved the way, in this region of the globe, for deploying the power of a schizoanalytic clinic to come.
- However, this stimulating and favourable reception of schizoanalysis in South America is quite exceptional. Not only do we find nowhere else analysts who claim to be schizoanalysts, but even today it is largely ignored in clinical circles. Moreover, considering that Anti-Oedipus is indisputably the most mobilized reference along with, to a lesser extent, A Thousand Plateaus, is it not surprising that the work of Guattari who explicitly theorizes and practises schizoanalysis remains marginal? Recall that he worked all his life at the clinic of La Borde and that he wrote among others The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis and Schizoanalytic Cartographies, then Chaosmosis where he clearly states the importance of schizoanalysis in his ecosophy. It was also Guattari who was involved in the Institutional Psychotherapy movement with François Tosquelles and Jean Oury and in the International Network of Alternative to Psychiatry which brought together people like Mony Elkaïm, Franco Basaglia, David Cooper and Ronald Laing. What place should today be accorded to Guattari’s clinical practice and his activism for alternatives? Which actuality, what force to recognize to his ecosophy and to his metamodelisation of the collective assemblages of enunciation while cognitivism has married the behaviourism and that the psychoanalysis does not seem to have been disturbed?
- In Montevideo, Uruguay, the Centro Félix Guattari has been dedicated since 2000 to researching and producing schizoanalytic knowledge and practices in different clinical, institutional and community contexts, guided by an ecosophical perspective and an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. It is obviously in the individual and collective registers that it implanted its practices to develop an extended conception of the clinic, understood as cartographies and deviations (clinamen) of the recomposition of subjectivity. “What interests me,” said Guattari in 1992, “is to see exactly how, from the ritornellos of everyday life, aesthetic ritornellos, we can find a point of bifurcation that generates a process of regularization.” (Guattari, Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie?, p.316) It is in this perspective that this call for papers wishes to engage a presentation of the different theoretical and practical developments of schizoanalysis that currently affect the exercise of psychotherapy, although in reality this aspect is constantly overwhelmed. The aim is to identify the clinical perspectives that have proliferated in the wake of schizoanalysis to map emerging clinical practices.
Deadlines: Send the full text (20,000 – 50,000 characters, spaces included) before January 15, 2019.
Send to: redazione@ladeleuziana.org
Please look at our author’s guidelines and evaluation policy.
Languages accepted: French, Italian, Spanish, English.
Calendar:
– 15 January 2019: deadline for sending proposals
– 1 March 2019: results of blind peer review
– 1 April 2019: deadline for sending revised proposals
– 1 May 2019: approval of the definitive versions
– 15 May 2019: online publication
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