![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper draws from resources in the work of Deleuze to critically examine the notion of organicism and holistic relations that appear in historical forerunners that Jung identifies in his work on synchronicity. I interpret evidence in Jung's comments on synchronicity that resonate with Deleuze's interpretation of repetition and time and which challenge any straightforward foundationalist critique of Jung's thought. A contention of the paper is that Jung and Deleuze envisage enchanted openings onto relations which are not constrained by the presupposition of a bounded whole, whether at the level of the macrocosm or the microcosm. Openings to these relations entail the potential for experimental transformation beyond sedentary habits of thought which are blocked by a disenchanting ‘image of thought’ that stands in need of critique. Other examples of enchanted openings in Jung's work are signposted in an effort to counter their marginalisation in some post-Jungian critiques and to signal their potential value from a Deleuzian perspective.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Christian McMillan, PhD, is Senior Research Officer on a research project titled ‘‘One world’: logical and ethical implications of holism’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. His forthcoming publications include: ‘The ‘image of thought’ and the State-form in Jung's ‘The Undiscovered Self’ and Deleuze and Guattari's ‘Treatise on Nomadology’ in Jung, Deleuze and the Problematic Whole (eds. Roderick Main, David Henderson and Christian McMillan, 2019); ‘Kant's influence on Jung's vitalism in the Zofingia Lectures’ in Holism: Possibilities and Problems (eds. Christian McMillan, Roderick Main, and David Henderson).
Notes
1. Lambert cautions that the term ‘vitality’ has led to many mistaken assumptions that Deleuze was addressing a traditional notion of philosophical vitalism (Lebensphilosophie), but Deleuze was referring to something else when he speaks about ‘vitality’ in relation to the ‘uncovering of a world of pre-individual, impersonal singularities’ in place of a world occupied by Individuals and Persons’ (Citation2012, p. 7).
2. In a 1988 interview Deleuze remarked: ‘Everything I’ve written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is’ (Citation1995, p. 143).
3. The influence of Bergson's notion of intuition on Jung's use of this term has been examined in the literature. See Gunter, Citation1982, pp. 635–652; Shamdasani, Citation2003, pp. 207–210; Kerslake, Citation2007, pp. 49–100; Pilard, Citation2015, pp.155–168; Addison, Citation2016, p. 567–587.
4. An essay which complemented the themes of organicism that this paper seeks to address might situate Jung's complicated relationship with Joyce's Ulysses (1919) in relation to the same theme from an aesthetic perspective. It might also consider in detail possible resonances between Jung's description of himself as an ‘empiricist’ and Deleuze's philosophical approach which he characterised as ‘transcendental empiricism’.
5. It may appear perplexing that a ‘recent’ continental philosopher like Deleuze, often labelled as a ‘post-structuralist’ and ‘post-modernist’ thinker, would take an interest in these themes at all.
6. In various ways the following Deleuzian scholars have demonstrated that Deleuze can be regarded as a thinker of enchantment; Bennett, Kerslake (Citation2007), Colebrook (Citation2010), Brent Adkins and Paul Hinlicky (Citation2013) and Joshua Ramey (Citation2012).
7. This term makes its most frequent appearance in the eleventh ‘plateau’, ‘1837: Of the Refrain’ of A Thousand Plateaus (Citation1980/1987, pp. 310 – 350).
8. It might be worth recalling that Bateson (1904–1980) was influenced by Jung, particularly his deployment of Pleroma and Creatura from Septum Sermones as Mortuos (Seven Sermons for the Dead) which Jung wrote between 1913 and 1916. For Bateson it is the interface (interaction) between pleroma and creatura that is significant as this enables a system to utilise difference.
9. Most of these ‘becomings’ are detailed in the tenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus: ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible’ (1987, pp. 232–309).
10. Deleuze and Guattari borrow this phrase from a play by Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), ‘To Have done with the Judgement of God,’ (1947). They discuss this in the sixth ‘plateau’ of A Thousand Plateaus ‘How do you Make yourself a Body without Organs’ (Citation1980/1987, p. 150).
11. I am not entirely convinced by this given Jung's keen awareness that ‘[p]ersonal and theoretical prejudices are the most serious obstacles in the way of psychological judgement’ (Citation1934, para. 237, cf. pars. 318, 319, 342)
12. Deleuze's ‘immanent ethics’, largely inspired by Spinoza and Nietzsche, is incompatible with Levinas' stress on the absolute transcendence of the Other. Daniel Smith writes that the ‘ethical themes one finds in transcendent philosophies like those of Levinas and Derrida – an absolute responsibility for the Other that I can never assume, or an infinite call to justice that I can never satisfy – are, from the Deleuzian point of view of immanence, imperatives whose effect is to separate me from my capacity to act. From the viewpoint of immanence, in other words, transcendence, far from being our salvation, represents our slavery and impotence reduced to its lowest point … for Deleuze transcendence is the fundamental problem of ethics, what prevents ethics from taking place, so to speak’ (Citation2012, p. 177).
13. Deleuzian critiques of the conception of the ‘organism’ in the school of ‘autopoiesis’ developed by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela are presented in the work of Colebrook (Citation2010, pp. 29–30, 49–50, 141–144, 155–157) and Alberto Toscano, (Citation2006 pp. 55–60).