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Few rifts in contemporary Continental thought can appear as insurmountable as that between Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze: the former a psychoanalyst and self-professed ‘anti-philosopher’, the latter a strident critic of the psychoanalytic clinic and major philosophical figure. Although there have been attempts to counteract this reductive interpretation, it retains its power and influence through the work of some of Deleuze’s and Lacan’s most renowned present-day disciples. Alain Badiou and Slavoi Žižek have each in their own way seen it necessary to take on Deleuze, Hegelianising him, declawing him, and bringing him into their respective orbits. On the obverse side, few Deleuzian scholars have sought to engage seriously with Lacanian texts and psychoanalysis. After all, hadn’t the polemic of Anti-Oedipus (1972/2000) killed psychoanalysis once and for all? Is not Lacan the thinker of lack and castration? And are not psychoanalysts little more than priests in new get-up? Misunderstandings on both sides have led, at least until recently, to an uneasy standoff.
Fortunately, current research is beginning to question these parochialisms. Although Lacan and Deleuze are undeniably opposed in important respects, it now appears that they may have more to say to each other than was previously thought. Enter Lacan and Deleuze: A Disjunctive Synthesis, edited by Boštjan Nedoh and Andreja Zevnik. Nedoh and Zevnik have assembled an impressive collection of essays with the intent of staging an encounter between Deleuze and Lacan, or, as the collection’s subtitle has it, of creating a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ between the two. Despite taking this complicated Deleuzian concept as the book’s subtitle, however, Nedoh and Zevnik do not treat us to a definition or an explanation of how it was perhaps used in the process of selecting contributions. Briefly stated, a disjunctive synthesis is Deleuze’s attempt to develop a logic beyond, or more precisely before, the Hegelian dialectic. It