interesting if only for living as an example of what sustained Deleuzian attention to psychoanalysis would look like— Logic of Sense fits this bill as well, but all writings afterwards consisting in the tearing up of said bill. Can’t help but feel like this wants to be a 20 page chapter of ATP, for there are some points that sustain themselves in the light of C&S’s attention, like that the s&m perversions both consist in a narrativization of egotism, or the interplay of legal form (law, contract) in those perversions. These are very C&S points! The perverted nightmare seems to consist in these limit points of the attempted rationalization on the body without organs, the construction of superegotic machines with the necessary force to destroy experience, or lock experience in affective loops even if the key affect is pain.

I picked this book up mostly because I saw there was a death instinct chapter, nevertheless one that begins with Deleuze himself praising the philosophical nature of Freud’s inquiry in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Today I finally read that chapter and, well, predictably[!], I feel that I can fairly say that Deleuze makes the death instinct fall back on the pleasure instinct, at least insofar as the pleasure overwhelms the affective experience wherever the death instinct might guide experience. But if points like that are dry, or if I’m constructing said point where it isn’t definitive, it’s my fault for reading this book after Anti-Oedipus. I’m crazy