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Rethinking Critique: Becoming Clinician

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Abstract

Today, capitalism functions as a very complex tool of colonisation capturing our desires, dreams, and putting life itself at risk. Its effects lead us all to times of extreme anxiety increasing the number of people with mental health problems. This paper is concerned with the question of ‘critique’ within this context. How can critical legal scholarship engage with a theoretical mode that allows us to confront the politics of law with today’s capitalism? This analysis shows that contemporary capitalism, which operates as an immanent desiring-machine, is investing in our unconscious. In this sense, we aim to rethink the idea of ‘critique’ as an opportunity to make it creative and effective. As such, this paper argues that the Deleuzian concept Critical and Clinical is particularly useful, as it opens new roots for the critical movement. Taking the literary strategy of Masochism and the experience of the Institutional Psychotherapy movement in France, the clinical–critical practice contributes to push and expand critical scholarship into new terrains of thought and practice.

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Change history

  • 05 November 2019

    The article Rethinking Critique: Becoming Clinician, written by Leticia Da Costa Paes, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 24 September 2019 with open access.

Notes

  1. According to Rolnik, a characteristic of the finance capitalism that established itself across the planet from the mid-1970s onward.

  2. ‘Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church (…) It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy’ (Deleuze 2006, p. 106).

  3. Contrary to psychoanalytical interpretation, the unconscious in Guattari and Deleuze functions not through representation, but rather as a factory. See Lazzarato (2014, p. 31).

  4. Understood as the practice of not imposing on us a form established a priori.

  5. I have been greatly inspired in this undertaking by the work of Tosel (2016, pp. 195–204).

  6. This makes sense if one understands the Guatarri–Deleuzean claim that Oedipus is not a truth of the unconscious, but a mystification of the unconscious that has triumphed from elements of the previous social formations (Deleuze and Guattari 1986).

  7. In his work with Guattari in What is Philosophy, Deleuze argues that creating concepts is the main task of philosophy, and indeed their work is marked by an extraordinary inventiveness.

  8. This is a direct reference to the clinical practice of the psychiatrist; however, the idea of critique as clinic can be understood in the same sense if the psychiatrist/psychoanalytical/medical clinic becomes a practice of resistance and de-territorialisation.

  9. For more on Fanon’s work at Saint-Alban, see: Mbembe and Fanon-Mendès-France (2012).

  10. La Borde in the Loire Valley of France was created by Jean Oury in the 1950s, which Guattari later joined.

  11. This argument is repeated throughout What is Philosophy? (1994) written with Gilles Deleuze.

  12. Reference to Deleuze’s 'The Exhausted' in Essays Critical and Clinical (1998).

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Acknowledgements

With thanks to Serene Richards and Nathan Moore. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES).

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  1. School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX, UK

    Leticia Da Costa Paes

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Da Costa Paes, L. Rethinking Critique: Becoming Clinician. Law Critique 30, 265–289 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-019-09249-4

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