Regression, Nekyia , and Involution in the Thought of Jung and Deleuze

In his 2007 work Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake writes that ‘[t]he notion of a “second birth”, rebirth or renaissance is fundamental to [the work of Gilles] Deleuze from the beginning’. He adds that ‘large tracts of Jung’s Transformations and Symbols [of the Libido, CW. Vol. 5, 1912] (the work to which Deleuze most frequently refers) are devoted to the myth of rebirth which Jung discovers in the background to the mythologies handed down by history’ (p. 81). The myth of the hero who enters on a ‘night sea journey’ (Nekyia – the Journey into Hades) is one that preoccupied the work of Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari. In this paper I consider the extent to which Deleuze differs from Jung in his positive appraisal of the role of modern art in the Nekyia journey, paying particular attention to James Joyce’s novel Ulysses on which Deleuze and Jung commented at some length whilst reaching quite different conclusions about the nature of what it is to be ‘whole’. ‘Wholeness’, another theme that is evident in all of Jung’s writings, is a central philosophical concern of Deleuze’s post-structuralist thought. Deleuze’s frequent celebrations of the fragmentation of wholes seem to be at odds with Jung’s positive elaboration of therapy as tending towards healing as a whole-making enterprise. Even at his most ‘metaphysical’, Jung sometimes advocates a vision of reality as an organic ‘whole’ in which, borrowing from the Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370bc): ‘There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy. The whole organism and each one of its parts are working in conjunction for the same purpose and each of its parts are working in conjunction for the same purpose’ (cf. Jung, 1952, para. 925). This organicist, holistic vision of the cosmos (and the psyche) might explain why Jung is reticent when dealing with modern artworks such as Ulysses (cf. Jung, 1932), whose vision of wholeness gestures to a notion of individuation which is fundamentally critical of this kind of organicism.