Adrián Navigante

GEORGES LAPASSADE’S TRANSVERSALIST DETOUR:A NOTE ON “MACUMBA” AND “MINOR LITERATURE”
To Rafaele Torella, mentor and inspirer of my yoga as a ceaseless festal celebration.

Following the same train of thought as in the previous issue of Transversal Paths, in this essay Adrián Navigante deepens his reflection on “extended transversality”, focusing on Georges Lapassade’s “transversalism” and its transcultural consequences. Lapassade is considered a rather marginal and eclectic intellectual who ventured a bricolage of different disciplines (sociology, anthropology, psychology, religious studies) and at the same time transgressed them all by merging human sciences and literature. This last aspect is something he thought essential to a valuable experience of alterity – as opposed to the “scientific neutrality” prescribed by Western scholarship

THE INCEPTION OF TRANSVERSALITY: GUATTARI AND LAPASSADE

In the previous issue of Transversal Paths, I delved into Félix Guattari’s early experiment in psllective ychiatry (which dates back to 1964) to underline his notion of “transversality”. What interests me most about that notion is both its transdisciplinary consequences and its transcultural potential. Guattari approaches, in his own way, the margins of a system with the aim of reaching the “externality” that looms behind and discloses the – otherwise unseen – subversive force of the margins. When he refers to a “creative potential” in schizophrenia, he is far from romanticizing mental illness. Rather, he opposes a “logic of madness” to an increasingly stagnated (but still naturalized) “system of normalcy” – whose inherently ethnocentric (and sometimes even sociopathic) features constitute the main traits of Western thinking. What should be understood here by “Western thinking”? Mainly a universalist project that emerged in the XVII century and flourished in the XIX century, a project that brought together modern science and technical development, fostered industrial urbanization and cultural secularism, privileged colonial expansion and achieved long-term and worldwide dominance. This project has failed. Not in its entirety, since many people still live in that paradigm and cannot figure out real alternatives (historical periods are much longer than existential frameworks, and their persistence is also a permanent influence on the life of individuals). But it failed in its civilizational convictions and aims. We are barely awakening to that fact and the shock has not yet set in – in spite of the ecological and geopolitical urgency for a rapid change. According to Guattari, generating coefficients of transversality is one of the main social tasks for the future, since it could lead from “subjugated (or oppressed) groups” to “subject (or emancipated) groups”¹ and establish a new horizon for the institutional practice of psychotherapy – far beyond the limited and excessively prescriptive field of psychiatry. Caring about the psyche is not a task to be fulfilled in a doctor’s office, although that is what bourgeois culture imposed as a rule. Psychic life is also somatic, environmental, and social. It has a collective desideratum.

It is important to note that both the notion of “institution”² and the idea of a shift from pre-assigned roles and functions to a “transversal practice” (that is, a practice that breaks with such naturalized roles and is therefore able to generate unexpected changes) surpass a theory of collective action based on phenomenology of consciousness, existentialism, or even dialectical materialism – all three strong referents of the Parisian intelligentsia to which Guattari belonged. This special and in a way undefinable “surplus”, which constitutes the movement of institutional analysis³, deserves special attention, and its consequences become visible mainly in the last period of Guattari’s production, particularly when it comes to themes like “ecosophy” and “chaosmosis”⁴. Paradoxically, the transition from a “localized outline” of transversality to a “general effervescence” in its practice marks an expansion and a concretization of that idea as well as its simultaneous saturation. In this sense, it is not surprising that Guattari referred to the early 1980s as les années d’hiver (“the winter years”)⁵, and that his ecosophical and chaosmotic rebirth (following a personal depression) drew upon ideas that predated the project of Anti-Oedipus (in the 1970s) and were to a large extent independent of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, to which Guattari’s thought is unfairly subordinated. His most significant production does not lie in his collaboration with Deleuze (that is, at the point where transversality became saturated by the very social trends that promised its realization), but rather in all the rest – what he did on the psycho-socio-political battlefield before and after the period between Anti-Oedipus and Mille Plateaux – and even during the composition of those books, in marginal notes and interventions⁶.

The inception of transversality consisted in a new logic of relationships based on parameters of subjectivation that had previously remained imperceptible. From the very beginning, this inception ran the risk of being swallowed up by a phenomenon external to any kind of analytic work aimed at forging a “field” leading to a progressive transformation of relations. This external phenomenon I alluded to in the previous paragraph is no other than May 1968, after which certain ideas that inspired Jean Oury’s and Félix Guattari’s institutional analysis were massively disseminated under the imperative of “liberating desire” – not so much collective desire, but rather the (quite inconsistent) desire of white middle-class students and bourgeois intellectuals with so-called “progressive ideas”. In most cases, this impulse did not lead to concrete experiences of “community”⁷ but rather to an ongoing social fragmentation, directly proportional to the whimsical claims of individualists who considered themselves absolute subjects and models of social change for the rest of the world.

Since the rise of capitalist modernity, the idea of community – usually deemed previous or alien to the modernization process – has been mostly associated with reactionary models (a form of resistance against technical progress and individual liberties). Yet, even the most basic ethnological awareness warns against the mistake of reducing non-Western variants (more valid than ever today) to historically known models. Fieldwork opens the researcher’s view to invisible or unthought-of dimensions, so that levels of experience fully withdrawn from his/her horizon of expectations are suddenly disclosed and become central to the project in question⁸. From this sort of cultural shock, transformative relationships can emerge which end up altering the field of interaction within a given practice, and in that very context the invisible dimension appears as both “object” and “agent” of that change⁹. The question of agency proves in this context to be a key issue to de-configure and re-configure worlds. Convictions can be questioned to the point of crisis, and the solid foundations of a universally valid world may be threatened with collapse under the weight of pluriversed forms of knowledge.

I have mentioned the Guattarian inception of transversality mainly because, despite its sociohistorical pitfalls and anthropological limitations, it remains indispensable to a proper understanding of Georges Lapassade’s transversalist detour. What does Lapassade’s “detour” look like and what should we make of the epithet “transversalist”? Is it worth dealing at length with that train of thought despite its lack of historical visibility? Lapassade’s project, if we take the notion of “transversalism”, was part and parcel of the subjective effervescence that drew a grimace of discontent in Europe’s cultural production, and it seems to have been burnt and reduced to ashes within that tiny sparkle of history called “May 1968”.

Half a century later, some questions impose themselves: does Lapassade add anything truly significant to Guattari’s insights on transversality? What can be extracted from such a marginal attempt which, instead of seeking to gain a solid terrain in the immanence of existing relations, strove to reach an exteriority that put the very logic of those relations at stake? It is probably in the face of those aspects generating contemporary skepticism that one can rediscover and assess the interstitial value of Lapassade’s radical heterodoxy in social anthropology.

The inception of trans-versality (in Guattari’s thought) consisted in a new logic of relationships based on parameters of subjectivation that had previously remained imperceptible

There is no denying that Lapassade is more erratic and less inventive than Guattari. His social anthropology is an aesthetic parody of Lévi-Strauss’s work; his denunciation of the pathological aspects of bourgeois sociality does not amount to any clinical or micropolitical counter-model that might resist the backfiring strategies of the system; his revolutionary impetus is mostly eclipsed by a mixture of exacerbated subjectivism and literary scraps of jouissance. This said, there is something in Lapassade’s errancy that reinserts key aspects of Guattari’s project in a framework that counterweights both the ideological imperatives of his time and received opinion on questions like cultural dignity, mental health, and social exclusion. In his own way, Lapassade reaches the barely receivable and even dangerous terrain of what could be called the material spirituality of foreign entities. The entities he deals with are so “foreign” that their irruption, even indirect and mediated by mythological narratives, threatens to break with the reproduction of human relations prescribed by “Western civilization”. His interstitial oscillation between psychology and sociology, critique and subversion, ethnography and fiction, significantly expands the scope of Guattarian transversality – its functionality, its importance, its paradoxes – to the point of creating an ecosophically anti-Eurocentric and transculturally chaosmotic scenario¹⁰. In that context, fragments of outdated militancy and flows of aestheticized delirium (not delusion!) are rechanneled and reshaped toward a radical experience of literal incorporation of alterity¹¹.

This is how Lapassade takes up the legacy of May 1968 and adds – for the sake of still another “new anthropology” – a colorful twist to it. His transversalist detour enables the actualization of the potential contained in Guattari’s device of transversality beyond the intellectual field and cultural context in which it was conceived. It should be borne in mind that Lapassade himself actively sought to transgress those boundaries by exceeding his own limits – as an intellectual and also as a human being.

As we shall see, the richest aspect of his thinking is focused on the multidisciplinary articulation of the passage from socio-analysis to trans-analysis, and a further disclosure of the latter’s reverse-side: trance-analysis¹². Paradoxically, this passage reveals a point in which the transversalist movement flips into its phantasmatic opposite. In order to account for this “flip”, I will resort to a key concept by Deleuze and Guattari that encapsulates much of Lapassade’s subversive – or rather inversive – impasse: minor literature.

This expression characterizes (without precedent) the existential itinerary that Lapassade tries – with considerable difficulty – to reconstruct through his personal approach to the phenomenon of trance – which in the end proves to be emptied of the socio-religious specificity that had fascinated him in the context of his Afro-Brazilian explorations – to which I will devote part of what follows in this essay.

Let us briefly return to the inception of Guattari’s transversality. To understand it properly, we must bear in mind that, in the first half of the 1960s, Guattari was not the co-author of Anti-Oedipus (published only in 1972), nor the cartographer of schizophrenic desire pleading for and working on its Nietzschean transformation: from reactive to active¹³. At that time, Guattari’s ties with Jacques Lacan were still quite close¹⁴. This is shown already by the vocabulary used in the writings prior to his encounter and collaboration with Gilles Deleuze¹⁵. In those early days too, his dialogue with Freud was intellectually relevant¹⁶, and his attempts to forge alternative spaces to the psychoanalytic orthodoxy did not consist in rejecting the whole Freudian-Lacanian paradigm, but rather in offering an immanent and progressive critique of it¹⁷. The clearest example of this critique appears in a 1966 essay published in the Cahiers de philosophie at the Sorbonne, where Guattari states that the concept of “institutional object” in the context of group psychotherapy is “a notion complementary to the Freudian partial object and to the transitional object as defined (in a derived way) by D. W. Winnicott”¹⁸.

Since psychoanalysis refused to modify its technique with the aim of future interventions in hospitals, Guattari decided to develop a proposal based on a threefold articulation of levels: drive-based, relational, and institutional. This articulation did not follow any linear progression (from the individual drive to the collective institution), nor did it imply a compartmentalized logic (in which each level is presumed to be separated from the others). The very notion of “institutional intervention” presupposed a modification that affected the roots of psychoanalytic theory itself – specifically regarding notions like “drive” and “object relation”.

The most important aspect of Guattari’s proposal is his determination to abandon the “death drive” (elaborated by Freud in his famous essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle¹⁹) and reconsider the constitutive character of the social and collective when it comes to object formation and object choice (two foundational aspects of human desire). In the context of Guattari’s later collaboration with Deleuze, this aspect led to the use of concepts like “multiplicity” and “assemblage” in the light of which the term “object” in the post-Freudian context (whether it comes to Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, or Harry Guntrip) as well as its subjective counterpart (following the heritage of Descartes, Kant, or even Hegel) appear as epistemological archaisms.

The expression “trans-versalist detour” should be taken as a permanent subtraction from any tendency to fix, control, or “normalize” the different flows of desire at the service of collective transformation

Guattari’s conceptual shift implies, among other things, a productivist conception of desire in which the notion of “lack” (as negative cause of “desire”) evaporates. Freud’s view of an underground level of human desire rooted in death (as intrapsychic inscription of a metaphysical kind) was further replaced, in the context of Mille Plateaux (1980), by the notion of “rhizome”, its vitalist proliferation and its autopoietic ability (or force) to create collective processes of singularization²⁰.

The more liberated the movement of desire, the more reduced (or molarly codified, as Deleuze and Guattari would say) the social space for its inscription and accomplishment. In this context, the Marxist idea of “world transformation” (with its utopian impulse and messianic overtone) shifts into a micropolitics of subversion with an emphasis on local and barely perceptible transformations. We are faced with a philosophy of becoming with practical inroads of wandering consistency, far away from trade unions, political parties, and combatant cells.

Such “molecular regimes” – an expression that refers to their functional inconsistency – usually escape immediate reabsorption into the (capitalist) system’s coding machine.

As I already pointed out in referring to the term “transversalism”, Georges Lapassade took up the challenge of transversality and attempted to expand that concept by means of a detour. The expression “transversalist detour” should be taken not so much as a deviation or a distortion from the mainstream norm but rather as a permanent subtraction from any tendency to fix, control, or “normalize” the different flows of desire that can be put at the service of collective transformation²¹.

Lapassade carries forth Guattari’s subversion of institutional(ized) codes and amplifies it by means of a somewhat erratic but promising device. He questions, among other things, the dominant coefficient of rationality in the treatment of psychic abnormalities and social disruptions (both of which go together) and the institutional spaces fostering such epistemic and clinic intervention, adding a pedagogical dimension to it.

What if abnormality, or at least some forms of it, indirectly reflected alternative roads to the standardized pathology of normalcy? What if that mirror, seen from the other side, could reveal other systems of thought, other forms of knowledge, and other ways of living (with their respective and hitherto barely seen worlds)?

Guattari had clearly shown that the mechanics of the psychiatric institution (with its politics of neutralization and its perpetual oppression of disruptive forces emerging from “madness”) is effectively regulated by a specific form of “institutional transference”, to which he opposed the idea of “transversality in the group”²².

Creating a space of transversality meant for him modifying naturalized, stereotyped, and meaning-regulating pyramidal structures – which affect not only the patient-analyst relationship but also the roles and functions within institutions more broadly (nurses, interns, doctors, etc.).

If the transferential relationship is narrow, rigid, mechanical, individualizing – “an internalization of bourgeois repression” that reproduces “caste phenomena with their cortege of group phantasms”, transversality can eventually avoid the dead end of vertical rigidity and at the same time its abstract counterpart: simple horizontality. The goal, rather, is to “establish […] a maximum of communication […] between the different levels and, above all, in different directions”²³.

Far from the pseudo-anarchic stereotype encapsulated in the phrase “let desire flow everywhere”, Guattari’s aim was to generate creative twists and turns in a group’s energy that may permeate all its levels of articulation, thereby avoiding prior confinement to the roles assigned by the system.

As an interventionist strategy, the Guattarian device of transversality intends to bring to light and correct what Lapassade would later call “institutional forgetting”²⁴. Bourgeois society (and its postmodern version) has established a system of forgetting – repressing, oppressing – any instance that might stir one’s own desire to change, improve, and expand collective life. It has silenced other voices, and the echoes of alterity that challenge human beings’ miserable isolation in the wasteland of a one-world world.

Let us recall that, for Guattari, industrial society aspires to “an unconscious control of our destiny, satisfying from the perspective of the death drive”, whose result is “a vast mutilated body, reassembled solely according to the requirements of the supreme god of [capitalist] economy”²⁵.

The alternative, writes Guattari, is “a new kind of dialogue, so that delirium and any other unconscious manifestation—in which the patient had until now been enclosed and isolated—might become a collective expression”²⁶. Without the energy of delirium (literally: that which deviates from the norm), nothing is possible, but the impossible, that is, the internal possibility contained in the deviation from the norm, demands taking risks.

It is well known that, in order to block that disruptive potential, our society declares the inception of delirium to be a delusional state or a criminal tendency. Creativity is not only presented as destructiveness but also shaped by the very reactive forces it intends to fight against.

The question is then: how can one give expression to the energy of delirium so that it may re-activate reified spaces of group behavior within an institution and bring them to fruition?

As early as 1955, Guattari ascribed “an anthropological role” to madness. His motivation was clear: “we are beginning to realize that madness is an essential phenomenon, particularly in our contemporary society, and for this reason it is necessary to revise old frameworks of thought”²⁷.

This early statement has striking implications. Guattari did not say that madness needed to be approached anthropologically (as Michel Foucault would later do in 1961²⁸); rather, he claimed that madness deserved to be assigned an anthropological role. We must begin from delirium and seek possible openings in thought and action that could contribute to new forms of subjectivity – while challenging at the same time outdated (i.e. conservative, mainly Eurocentric and colonialist) conceptual frameworks.

In view of this anthropological turn within psychiatry, Lapassade understood quite well that an “anthropologist of madness” does not risk or gain much by merely describing or theorizing an object of study. Instead, he allowed himself to be re-anthropologized by what madness revealed, and the channels to express the new anthropological potential were mainly to be sought in subversive arts and marginal forms of religion.

His transversalist detour consists in carrying the transversal input to a point of saturation, namely the saturation of a culturally (over-)determined desire. I am referring to the desire for “truth” in sociology, history, psychoanalysis, and any other devices of power that perpetuate the geopolitical asymmetry of forces – whether in terms of First World vs. Third World, or in the opposition between developed countries and developing countries.

Lapassade’s detour manages to introduce new instances of subjectivation quite foreign to the modern Western spirit – with its relentless techno-scientific colonialism and its obsession with universal values.

THE TRANSVERSALIST REORIENTATION: LAPASSADE’S “DRIFT”

In 1974, Lapassade published Les chevaux du diable (The Devil’s Horses), subtitled Une dérive transversaliste (A Transversalist Drift). This book, which emerged from his experience with institutional analysis in Brazil between 1972 and 1979, pursues an audacious goal: to map the revolutionary potential of excluded social actors and restore their confiscated language, transforming it into a kind of “magical weapon”.

Read in the light of his earlier novel Le bordel andalou (1971), Lapassade’s work can be said to articulate the anthropological reverse side of delirium and let long-forgotten forces (at least in the European context) re-emerge and take over the scene.

In a way, Lapassade returned to an early intuition of Guattari which can be found in his dialogue with Jean Oury on the anthropological role of madness, but he also attempted to reshape it within the framework of a socio-analysis with a view to reaching a much deeper level of transformation – under the rubric trans-analysis. This term points to a form of analysis operating beyond the established institutional and cultural framework; it even questions the very idea of “analysis” – which for Lapassade revealed a wordy and sterile methodology (what he would later call parolisme).

His focus upon madness was permeated with a special type of anthropology – one carried out to its very point of inversion. The analyst must be able to grasp the other side of his profession through desire (not through analytical procedures); he must experience “the other side of madness” through contact with cultural referents (or rather “entities”) embodying otherness – rather than confine madness to a self-referential desert, preserving thus the clinician’s comfort zone.

This procedure does not mean romanticizing pathologies or giving in to any kind of sterile superstition. Neither of these attitudes could pave the way to that “other side,” because both coexist within the same saturated space: the West, with its modern constitution of truth and normality/normativity.

In fact, Western truth was epistemically purified and universally sanctioned, and it became the most effective support of neo-colonialist strategies dressed in promises of universal progress and emancipation²⁹.

Les chevaux du diable opens with an epigraph from Gilles Deleuze’s book Logique du sens (Logic of Sense). The text reads: “What if analysis and desire finally ended up on the same side? What if it were desire that in the end performs the analysis?”

The word confiscated by analysis, the word from “the other side” (i.e. the “outside” of desire), is that which cannot be verbalized. Lapassade’s writing (even before reaching its thematic referent) attempts to recover that other side through a hybrid passage toward a politics of exteriority – one that begins with a de-neutralization of the body and a transgression of the very ideological parameters composing an individual: “They don’t want to understand. They prefer to beat, expel, exorcize. And yet, I am convinced that the liberation of the body is on the agenda”³⁰.

The process of subversive transformation begins with the inscription of the letter in the body, or the confluence between that written inscription and the spirit of the other side (no less material than the body receiving it) that breaks into that space.

Lapassade’s passionate and even obsessive bent on transgressive modes of subjectivation […] intends not only to render “the Western symptom” ostensible but also to highlight the intrinsic value of a complex panoply of religious prac-tices fitted together under the termi-nological umbrella of macumba

It is easy to notice, in Lapassade’s project, the importance of the struggle for the liberation of new subjectivities that characterized the spirit of May 1968, and the personal failures he faced to consolidate and disseminate that struggle in France and Canada. His narrative brings each local referent to a turning point; its amplification strategies redirect the reader toward a problem that cannot be grasped by means of socio-political clichés of the type “clash between students and police”, “rebellious intellectuals vs. conservative bureaucrats”, “anarchic-desiring militants against reactionary apparatchiks”, or “rigid institutions and subversive analysts”.

The politics of the outside – as disclosure of the other face of desire – requires disposing of all ideological garments inscribed in the foundations of an allegedly universal paradigm, and opening up the fabric (bodily and discursive, without much distinction) to the irruption not just of “difference” and its respective “language games”, but of exteriority itself. This exteriority implies not only a different space, but also a pulsation, a different agential and relational dynamic in the constitution of that vital space.

It is in his quasi-poetic impulse to articulate the outside that Lapassade assumes his own excess, taking his proposal far beyond the parameters of institutional analysis: “That naked group was the counterculture within the counterculture—the black sexual macumba within a white Occitan purity establishing itself as a repressive force”³¹.

In this depiction, Lapassade declares his own (Occitan) ancestry to be contaminated by the same type of repression as the one he personally suffered while trying to carry out his projects in different university contexts – against which he finally decided to react, despite the ostensible lack of counter-referents stemming from his own cultural space. The alternative must therefore entail a high – or rather excessive – coefficient of otherness.

Two years before Les chevaux du diable and one year after Le bordel andalou, that is, in 1972, Lapassade co-authored a book in Portuguese with Brazilian philosopher Marco Aurélio Luz entitled O Segredo da Macumba (The Secret of Macumba). The aim of that book (which in many ways looks like a political manifest) was to approach the subject of Afro-Brazilian religions beyond any “ethnographic paternalism or Catholic appropriation”³² – something quite difficult at that time.

The authors’ argument against ethnographic paternalism (whose most prominent representative at that time was Roger Bastide³³) stresses the error of believing that “macumba is an impoverished or degenerate form of Candomblé”, and the ideological nature of “establishing a scale of values to decide what is pure and what is impure”³⁴.

As for the Catholic appropriation of macumba, its possibility is revealed, according to the authors, in the hierarchical and bureaucratic organization of Umbanda federations. Lapassade refers not only to their material structure but also to their symbolic form, which lent itself to an alliance with the Catholic Church:

“The symbolic social expression of Umbanda—the law of Oxalá, the good, the superior, and the pure, in contrast to the disorder of the Exús, the evil, the inferior, and the impure—adapts to the laws of the center and to the socially expected behaviors. […] Today, Catholic priests are conducting research on Umbanda. Some try to revalorize the cult of the Orixás within the Catholic public sphere”³⁵.

In view of their rather Manichaean distinction, it becomes clear that, for the authors of O Segredo da Macumba, the term macumba is essentially tied to quimbanda.

If the European counterculture of the 1960s proposed new subjectivities, Lapassade saw in that opposition cult (which contained not only repressed aspects of African religious practices partially eliminated and domesticated in Umbanda but also iconographical and cultic additions from modern European demonology and witchcraft) a counterculture of the counterculture, a more radical form of contestation leading toward new subjectivity parameters that are not only external to but also inaccessible to even the most radically libertarian doctrines in the West³⁶.

Lapassade’s passionate and even obsessive bent on transgressive modes of subjectivation emanating from a social tissue that very often haunts the good (= white) European sensibility intends not only to render “the Western symptom” ostensible but also to highlight the intrinsic value of a complex panoply of religious practices fitted together under the terminological umbrella of macumba.

For Lapassade, such practices constitute “a threat to psychoanalysts”, partly due to their oppositional nature as a socio-religious phenomenon, but also because their concretion in terreiros involves “a therapy of immense technical richness – and, even more important, a popular therapy”³⁷.

This stands in utter contrast to the white elitism of the psychoanalytic therapy and the cultural snobbery resulting from it.

Lapassade’s socio-analysis (later further developed and renamed trans-analysis) attempts to articulate the intrinsic value of macumba as “therapy” through an art that demands a production of desire liberated from the naturalized access to culture by means of the mainstream coupling “oppression–repression”³⁸.

In Les chevaux du diable, he wields the term macumba – practically exiled from ethnographic vocabulary (contrary to its widespread use among practitioners in Brazil) – as a battle horse, precisely because of the socio-critical discharge it triggers.

Macumba appears in his eyes as a necessary disorder to restore the dimension of collective Black desire – an instance that has been confiscated, enslaved, and subjected to the laws of the “individualist white” order.

Despite its unstable constitution as well as its complex political and cultural spectrum, the racialization of the term macumba should be regarded as a geopolitical and sociological fact³⁹.

For this reason, even today, it is difficult to embrace fully the terminological sanitization procedures often carried out in academia to keep it out of sight. Blackness is the dark, the rejected, the buried, or what is relegated to “hell”. Whiteness is purification at multiple levels (ethnic, social, psychological, spiritual), with its consolidation of “well-being” led back to culturally foundational – i.e. ontological – principles.

The devil is associated with the figure of Exú in quimbanda. As an oppositional entity, Exú made its appearance in writings prior to O Segredo da Macumba⁴⁰, but Lapassade’s socio-analytical essay seeks to explore the meaning of a concrete interaction with him.

What does it mean to become a horse of that “devil”? What cultural consequences could the work of a French writer have if he were literally mounted by an entity (to the point of experiencing a form of possession)? Some writers flirted with the figure of Exú; some others might have ventured some invocation for the sake of Gothic taste – or rather Satanic bad taste. Lapassade, on his part, wanted to implement a trickster figure whose destiny in mainstream Western culture is rejection and condemnation as a catalyzer to pass from “analysis” to “synthesis” (i.e. from an addictive rambling to a healing act) in a therapeutic context.

In a way, his writing can be read as an effort to incorporate the entities of quimbanda that emanate from the two-headed (and virtually multiple) trunk of Exú-Pombagira, and to put forward a project of individual and collective transformation essentially linked to popular healing techniques.

For Lapassade, those techniques are valuable remnants of foreign traditions being perpetually re-created and therefore deserving anthropological attention. His first aim is to transform the analytic space and its attempt at intra-psychic purification; the second is to change the theatrical scene inherited from representational traditions; and lastly he intends to subvert the social structure of Eurocentric history in its very foundations – the taken-for-granted opposition between “white (good)” and “black (bad/evil).”

The entities of quimbanda reveal in this sense the secret of the macumba⁴¹: they are the bearers of a “theater of cruelty”42 that performs – in the occurrence of each local ritual – a civilizational subversion.

Lapassade offers both a bodily and a scriptural gesture: direct participation in rituals with aesthetic elaboration. He takes that gesture as a sacrificial revelation that can effect massive changes within already established parameters.

Before assessing the scope of Lapassade’s “theater of cruelty” and attempting to determine its simultaneously utopian and aporetic character⁴³, let us first consider how the anthropological inversion functions in the thought of the French socio-analyst. Les chevaux du diable contains clearly disruptive elements related to the human sciences it draws upon (from psychoanalytic treatises to ethno-sociological research). The essay’s style is hybrid – part diary, part novel, part manifesto.

This formal trait reveals a subjective turn in the analyst’s gaze. He descends not only into the Acheron of his own desire, but into that of a collective desire that resists any strategy of assimilation. As a “European analyst”, Lapassade can only assume the (subversive, homosexual, anti-ethnocentric) difference that his analytic theater compels him to conceal.

His attempt to enact that difference leads him, over the course of the novel, through various experiences of exclusion and failure – which can be read as a preliminary stage to the true irruption of otherness. This scheme was already present in his novel Le bordel andalou, where the subjective overtones are even more pronounced, and the geographical shifts in the narrative compose both a transgressive and initiatory journey⁴⁴.

In Les chevaux du diable, the reader witnesses a construction of place articulated as a public project: the establishment of “institutional analysis” on Brazilian soil⁴⁵. At the same time, Lapassade does not hide his subjective conflict. Once settled in Belo Horizonte, he openly regrets that his public life is that of a timidly rebellious professor. Protest can be expressed – up to a point – on the level of learned political discussions, but certainly not through sexuality⁴⁶ or self-management, not as a transformative impulse within educational institutions⁴⁷.

The most desired methodological revolution in the therapeutic field escapes him and seems to flicker far away from any possible concretion. The last two aspects compel us to approach not only Lapassade’s confrontation with his own conflict (the reduction of social rebellion to alternative ideas as well as the concealment of sexual desire beneath the mask of a respectable professor) but also the way he conceives a possible transformation of all (other) social actors – that is, the activity of analysts and educators within public institutions subjected to a dictatorial regime⁴⁸.

In Les chevaux du diable, institutional intervention – in the legacy of Lapassade’s and René Lourau’s subversive spirit – stands as a trend of thought radically opposed to the social analysis founded by Elliott Jaques⁴⁹, which puts forward quite another model of socio-analysis. Lapassade criticizes the Anglo-Saxon version of socio-analytical consultancy for its purely contractual character – according to which client and consultant must remain totally dissociated. This requirement reveals an instrumentalization of the most parasitic aspects of psychoanalysis (developed by Elliott Jaques in the context of organizational consultancy⁵⁰), a capitulation – typical of bourgeois intellectuals – before the institutionalized imperatives of a bureaucratic state or a corporate structure. Lapassade compares the distinction between “client” and “consultant” in classical social analysis with the dissociation between “patient” and “specialist” according to the biomedical model⁵¹.

The conviction of possessing “neutral knowledge” — that is, knowledge detached from any point of view — is the main aspect of the biomedical ideology that Lapassade aims to dismantle by invoking the macumba as a therapeutic option. Since the “neutrality” of such a method sets it apart from any other form of knowledge (ethnic, local, communal, magical-religious, etc.), the central objective of modern epistemology coincides — as Bruno Latour points out — with its very ideological tool: to purify its object of sociopolitical hybridity, to erase the collective subjectivity that constitutes it, as well as the ideological conditions of possibility inherently tied to its “neutral value”⁵².

In this way, a single, immovable, absolute point of view is consolidated — to the detriment of all other possible approaches. Scientific knowledge elevated to the rank of universal prescription implies an epistemic (counter-)mystification whose ambition is to abolish the plurality (and hybridity) of world configurations. The same method that sanctions a plurality of worlds dismisses all other forms of knowledge as either primitive stages of humanity or cultural products of underdeveloped societies.

For Lapassade, by contrast, there is no knowledge without desire, no desire without subjectivity, and the subjective sphere — process-related and therefore impossible to essentialize — cannot be reduced to the individual, the family, or the most immediate exogamic group. It cannot even be reduced to a specificity of the human species, nor can the human be taken as the exclusive bearer of affective and intellectual intentionality exercising a complex influence over its environment. It is rather the social, human and non-human environment that calls for analysis — due to its hitherto disguised complexity.

In Lapassade’s thought, macumba emerges as a counter-model of sociability and as an opening to intersubjective (human and non-human) configurations where desire flows through different channels and toward different destinations, generating not only other forms of knowledge but also other (therapeutic) mechanisms of influence.

At the Catholic University of Belo Horizonte, Lapassade proposed a self-management experiment involving “the introduction of active work methods […] with guitars, cigarettes, and cachaça, a popular spirit widely used […] in macumba rituals”53. Unsurprisingly, his proposal was not received with enthusiasm by his Brazilian colleagues. They were part of a national “white” culture which is — still today — a magnified version of European values. His attempt to introduce a marginalized form of Brazilian counterculture into an institution ruled by the dominant values of the Nation ended in repeated failure.

The accumulation of failures was subjectively compensated by Lapassade’s increasing frequentation of quimbanda terreiros, especially in favela areas⁵⁴. It is this specifically marginal character of macumba becomes conspicuous in his writings, turning his social anthropology into an insurgent form of ethnographic fiction. At the same time, his identification with marginal groups led to increasing social and intellectual isolation. It is precisely from that position that a selective (and partially biased) reading of the ritual distinction between Umbanda and Quimbanda emerged in his writings, along with an unnuanced condemnation of Candomblé in the Brazilian Northeast – mainly in Bahia. Lapassade condemns ideals of Black-African purity in Candomblé almost as much as the white elites that incessantly work to de-Africanize Umbanda: “It is not fashionable, when one is a white Brazilian with intellectual status, to attend vulgar rituals [of macumba]. In Bahia, the intelligentsia has for a long time valorized the Candomblé of Salvador, thus distancing itself from macumba – especially from its most popular and vulgar aspects.” In O Segredo da Macumba, Lapassade’s movement from the oppositional construction “white culture vs. Black counterculture” to a subversive, hybrid, and marginal position is glaringly evident. According to him, the true resistance to white (Eurocentric and capitalist) domination is not located in the “pre-capitalist” cults of African origin (i.e., in the land of slaves) but rather in the urban subproletariat of the favelas in Rio and São Paulo. Both the ideal of (Catholic and Umbandist) white purity and the ideal of (Yoruba and Fon) Black purity appear as forms of oppressive reaction against the true dark or shadowy counterculture, the impure and transgressive macumba. For Lapassade, the world of quimbanda is “a specific and original cultural fact” which cannot be explained merely by its origins in Congolese or Angolan ancestor worship and its link to healing practices, but rather by specific innovations that occurred in Brazilian terreiros. These include the transformation of Exú from an orixá (nature spirit) into an egun (spirit of the dead), the presumed feminization of the Bantu god Bombogira into Pomba Gira, and the incorporation of caboclos (indigenous spirits) and pretos velhos (spirits of enslaved Black Africans) into the pantheon of marginal and popular entities. It is in the underworld of quimbanda that Lapassade finds the key to his own version of counterculture: a religious and socio-political power counterbalancing an oppressive system disseminated throughout the urban social fabric under labels such as progress, development, legality, and universal values. In this sense, Lapassade’s transversalism consists in an immersion into the subterranean world of excluded sociality, where the existential void of a European who renounces his “collective burden” (the Freudian “death drive” diverted from its implosive negativity into channels of social destruction and dominance like racism and colonialism) can be filled by the power of antinomic entities – and restructured into a new existential and collective mode of resistance.

PASSAGE À L’ACTE: ON WRITING (AND) TRANCE

In Le bordel andalou, the spectacular downfall of Georges Labalue – Lapassade’s alter ego – within the institutional environment of “white Brazil” culminates in his expulsion from the Merding Théâtre group⁶⁰, whose gatherings take place at a luxurious hotel in Copacabana. More than a mere instance of discrimination, the exclusion scene looks like a court-proceeding in which the prosecutor is also the jury: the artists involved take on features of inquisitorial agents; Labalue is accused of manipulating the group’s dynamics, poisoning relationships, and destroying the project. The outcome of that trial confines Labalue to the underworld of the favelas. His incursion progresses and becomes more intensive until one night, at the entrance to the terreiro of Dona Rosa (a mãe de santo mentioned in O Segredo da Macumba and Les chevaux du diable), his marijuana dealer transforms himself into Exú Caveira, lord of cemeteries. The world of non-human entities breaks into the human scene, and Labalue⁶¹ – though intellectually bent to resist that irruption – is seized by the “powers of the outside” before he can even realize what is happening. That night, the entrance does not lead to the terreiro as a physical enclosure, but to the field of forces where the quimbanda entities take over. Labalue literally crosses the line and dwells on “the other side”. Upon his return, he begins to die to the white world: his body barely manages to crawl, almost out of inertia, from the favela back to the “civilized space” (the city, the hotel room, the shower, the bed), but his soul remains tied to the quimbanda inferno. Several times, Labalue asks himself – oscillating between depression and paranoid reactions – whether what is happening to him may not be a drug overdose, a favela disease, or some other type of organic trouble. Yet his misadventure on the other side continues and reaches a point of no return: “I entered Rio’s macumba to the point of living immersed in apprehension and terror. I have no faith, but I am fascinated and dominated by the cult of death and the Satanic side of macumba”⁶². Labalue’s transition from daytime and conventional drama (that of the Merding Théâtre) to the popular and terrifying scenario of macumba (in the favela terreiros) disfigures and transfigures not only his experience but also his writing. Lapassade’s novel weaves itself into a mixture of field notes, intimate diary entries, surrealist verse, fragments of conversations, and records of possession experiences. Disorder or reconfiguration? “This senseless imposture that I now feel authorized to call writing”. Those were words Labalue pronounced in a room of an Andalusian brothel, as he listened to someone outside speaking about Abaluaé. This orixá of fever and heat was in fact the guardian at the entrance of the Brazilian terreiro, embodied in the criminal from the favela who hid marijuana under a pile of garbage. As Exú-Abaluaé, this figure is immune to filth. He belongs to the infernal entities, and through his feats of sorcery he grants Labalue the power to die to the white world and be reborn in the dark energy of the realm he feels attracted to. How is Labalue reborn? By annihilating all his representations, the culturally inherited contents introjected through “decent” modes of life – realizing that behind the decency of good life there is always the hypocritical instrumentalization of power and the cowardly attitude of choosing “measure” even if one craves “excess”. Labalue’s process of transformation is a sort of communion with Abaluaé, in which he experiences the torments of sickness and the shackles of madness, but also a healing power rooted in the very source of affliction. The graphic homology “Abaluaé-Labalue” in Le bordel andalou should attract the reader’s attention. Far from accidental, it is the very inscription of Labalue’s communion with the forces of the other side. We could ask ourselves what kind of human being can emerge from that transformation process. However, the most immediate evidence for readers is the style of writing. Labalue(-Lapassade)’s writing literally becomes the language of macumba. In the midst of his intoxication, he writes in verse: “It’s as if I, forced to write, always forced to write, what could only be in macumba, reproduced, I don’t know why, I write it and they go together MACUMBA MACONHA”⁶³. In a way, these verses summarize Lapassade’s utopia: to make the secret of macumba into his own language and disseminate it to infect the others. A language that is not field notes, or lecture annotations, or pedagogical remarks, or strategic outlines for institutional intervention, or timid first-person asides in an essay, or rebellious speeches that die on the page, or wishful thinking that will never become act or attitude. This language emerges when the logos of conquest (along with all its “lofty values”) is inverted and subverted by the infernal intensities that survived that conquest. But this does not simply come down to a therapeutic need for a passage (of the body) to action⁶⁴; rather, it involves a new constellation of relationships that emerge from perceptual and sensory contact with alterity. Such relationships are articulated in a space incommensurable with the codes of the dominant culture (European or Western, Christian or secular, conventional or scholarly). For Lapassade, these alterities are no other than the entities of quimbanda, who create new forms of socialization at the terreiro. It is precisely in that piece of empowered land that the entities materialize – primarily through nodes, outbursts, fluids, and ecstatic surges – quite irrespectively of whether their personifications are judged to be “real”, “mental”, or “conceptual” by the perpetrators of our social myth of normalcy. But how can these entities – the non-human pole of communication and transformation – be articulated, if not by lending one’s own (human) body to their irruption? For Lapassade, writing must, at a certain point, become a record of the influence of entities on human creativity, that is, it must flourish as a poetics of effects⁶⁵. Poetics of effects is the inscription of that alien influence in the written word, and its subsequent amplification from the reverse side. It is in this way that Lapassade expands the Guattarian notion of transversality with the aim of experientially confirming and re-affirming macumba against all racial, religious, political and social prejudices. Macumba is not to be taken as a metaphor for the rebellion of marginal, excluded or repressed desire, or as a denominator of marginalized social classes, or even as the violence of the system internalized in their structural victims, but rather as a field and horizon of (much broader and qualitatively different) socialization.

For Lapassade, writing must, at a certain point, become a record of the influence of entities on human creativity, that is, it must flourish as a poetics of effects.

If the social (human and non-human) actors of macumba, with their disruptive force capable of resisting social repression and even replacing Western forms of therapy⁶⁶, are reduced to occasional outbursts of desire and a collateral gesture of exteriority here or there, then the force of writing can be confined to the conventionalized space of “marginal expressions (of mere subjectivity)”. This is a risk in Lapassade’s proposal, precisely because of its explosive and erratic character. Like all endeavors combining an excessive individual yearning for transgression and a deficient and/or biased exploration of the field in which such attempts should reach a collective level, his gesture runs the risk of vanishing upon contact with concrete life and its relentless intricacies. Marco Aurélio Luz, co-author of O Segredo da Macumba and Lapassade’s guide during his marginal excursions in Rio de Janeiro, rendered that scriptural trace of alterity much more fruitful by including a singular and progressive articulation of what he termed “Black counterculture.” His work bears witness to the other side, before which Lapassade stands in awe – or freezes in terror and rapture. Luz’s titanic effort to articulate the counterculture of the excluded is contained primarily in his book Agadá: Dinâmica da Civilização Africano-Brasileira (Agadá: The Dynamics of Afro-Brazilian Civilization), which began as a doctoral thesis in 1988 and saw several editions (with revisions and expansions) between 1995 and 202067. That work seeks to reconstruct, affirm, and articulate a continuity (usually denied by orthodox scholarship) in the transmission of Black cultural values in Brazil, with special attention to their complexity and plurality. Luz attempts to do justice to the dual foundation of the trans-Atlantic cultural complex that permeates Brazilian religiosity: the cult of the dead (nkisis) and of natural forces (orixás). Lapassade, by contrast, embarks on a proliferation of fragments of writing and attempts to generate a dizzying oscillation between quimbanda intensities (as factors of subversive therapy and sociocultural torsion) and literary techniques that serve as aesthetic bridges but at the same time act as a cultural barrier. His “writing of exclusion” undermines the kind of articulation and expansion we find in Marco Aurélio Luz’s work (not only in essays but also in his film documentaries), since it rejects – after the fashion of all minor literature⁶⁸ – any possibility of reinforcing itself through attachments to external configurations (in this case, local religious and cultic traditions) that could provide coefficients of ancestry, performative meaning, or counter-identity. The “exteriority” of minor literature provides a permanent exile in a nearly inhospitable (non-)place. Lapassade’s novel Joyeux tropiques, which can be read as an attempt at inverted ethnography⁶⁹, contains multiple layers where the impasse of writing as “a hope that always coincides with the deepest despair”70 becomes ostensible. Faithful to the notion of minor literature as a form of writing stripped of everything and converted into pure intensity of desire, Lapassade’s hybrid and feverishly nomadic traces span from Tunis to Dakar, from Paris to Naples, and from Tipasa to Rio. They are carried along two thematic threads, both tied to the night: possession rituals and sexual encounters. In this context, the “Black element” is not a political-religious counter-identity (as it would later appear in Marco Aurélio Luz’s work) opposing colonialism and ethnocultural oppression. It is rather the mark of an institutional exclusion on the body: “Because the Blacks were discredited, I was too […]. Lost for lost, I felt obliged to carry out my immediate desires”⁷¹. Throughout Joyeux tropiques, Labalue’s wandering connects references that could never be linked within a professional ethnographic study: the Stambali music-therapeutic ritual in Tunisia, the procession of the Madonna dell’Arco in the Neapolitan suburbs, the Candomblé Nagô of Bahia and its popular variants, until finally returning – once again – to the terrain of macumba: “One has to shake up the rigidity of ethnology, puncture the overly serious discourse of sociologists, and learn to see trance with new eyes instead of locking it up in the knowledge of specialists”72. What does Lapassade see in the phenomenon of trance with those “new eyes” bestowed by his literary alter ego (Georges Labalue)? In the entities of macumba, he sees “earth, life, sex”; in the orixás, “sublimation and castration”⁷³. This opposition would dissolve if so-called possession cults were no longer considered the case of an individual outside of himself, but rather that of an interaction between a human being and another social agent (culturally inscribed in the invisible reverse-side of the same environment). This would imply a relational opening to a concrete (both intrapsychic and bodily) inscription of the cultural entities involved in the situation – whether it be the Exú of Brazilian quimbanda, the Erzulie of Haitian Vodou, or the Madonna dell’Arco of Catholic-pagan Italy. Such an expansion of the observer’s gaze renders his/her cultural participation fundamentally relational, but it requires not only decentering oneself from the status of “individual” and making room for other voices; it also implies reconfiguring an entire universe of meaning hitherto inaccessible, and integrating it into a collective level of experience to organically reinforce social relations⁷⁴. The transversality proposed by Guattari, namely a device whose aim was to inject vital intensity into rigid and sterile forms of socialization, is considerably extended, in Lapassade’s work, toward modes of singularization not limited to the human factor. Natural forces, the dead, gods and demons, ancestral webs, mythical cartographies and their corresponding ritual enactments are all part of his subversive assemblages⁷⁵. This complex, multiple, and interconnected constellation provides a new (and very peculiar) version of Guattari’s transition from subjected (or oppressed) to subjectified (or emancipated) groups. However, Lapassade’s writing morbidly rejoices in an existential minimalism constantly challenged by irruptions of alterity but unable to establish a stable relationship with the spaces of subjectivation articulated by the forces of alterity. After all, the good news that Lapassade proclaims in Joyeux tropiques is the following: there is no longer any need to travel to exotic cultures to encounter trance. This ecstatic phenomenon also exists on European soil. It is preserved in “the miraculously retained memory of what once formed the foundation of our Mediterranean culture”76. This explains, he argues, “why young Italian workers and peasants can enter the same type of trance as the faithful of Vodou or Macumba, only without the ritual and cultural support provided by Afro-American religions”⁷⁷. In this key statement of Joyeux tropiques, the utopia of a transcultural macumba converges with the aporetic attempt to empty the latter’s inherent cultural references and preserve its subversive power. This is the core of Lapassade’s practice of minor literature. A “symbolic and emotional space”78 proves to be sufficient to provoke trance and shift existential parameters. This space, once called psycho-socio-analytical, is now re-founded emptied of all belief – and thus stripped of any concrete and tangible alterity⁷⁹. In fact, the term “belief” is already a sign that the performative qualities stemming from and characterizing the socio-religious life of “the others” have been reinserted into conventional value-judgements inherited from the time of colonial expansion, like the opposition between “belief” and “knowledge”.

Lapassade’s writing wants to become macumba without realizing the whole spectrum of that pluri-di-mensional cultural complex involving cultic practices, social service, collective re-education, and another – specifically local – way of thinking and living.

With regard to the last aspect, one should avoid falling into the assumption that the irruption of alterity depends on belief. It is rather the opposite: the intensity and scope of the experience irreversibly break open the belief-knowledge opposition and awaken the eyes of the participant-observer to multiple agents and entangled threads that permanently reconfigure the world and frustrate every attempt to fix absolute parameters (whether through science, evolutionism, or religious fanaticism). The observer no longer observes, and participation is as much internal as external. This is the closest Lapassade comes to the realization of a counter-cultural utopia mainly situated in his own subjective reaction to “oppressive convention”, but there is an aporetic aspect in his project. His writing wants to become macumba without realizing the whole spectrum of that pluri-dimensional cultural complex involving cultic practices, social service, collective re-education, and another – specifically local – way of thinking and living. It is a writing whose loyalty to the logic of his desire is at the same time a barrier to producing and perceiving communal effects. I would venture to say that, in Lapassade’s work, writing is the very gap that hinders macumba from becoming more than “a specific desire for macumba”, that is, macumba tangentially experienced through marijuana intoxication, street sex, adrenaline shocks in favelas, and flirtation with lumpen proletarians. Lapassade’s obsessive search for such black alleys paradoxically keeps at a distance the very entities whom he feels attached to, since their realization consists in a progressive recontextualization of the individual life (always narrow-minded and insignificant) for the sake of the (animistically expanded) agency felt and nurtured in traditional rituals – however “fragmentary” and “popular” they appear to be in the eyes of cultural tourists. Even though Lapassade – despite his initial Brazilian fervor – tended to empty macumba of its cultural referents in favor of a minor literature, his movement took a third – unexpected – direction after his return to Europe, which consisted in re-territorializing minor literature. He worked on a reconfiguration of the internal logic of his ethno-literary motives with an eye to refilling his “desire of macumba” with concrete and socially valid elements⁸⁰. This is the level of what he termed trans-analysis, a concept explored in the final part of his book Socianalyse et potentiel humain (1975) and further elaborated in Essai sur la transe (1976). In fact, his Essai sur la transe can be read as a historical development of the project he introduced not only in his work on socio-analysis but mainly throughout his broader engagement with the question of institutional subversion. The subtitle of that book is worthy of note: Hysterical Materialism⁸¹. In the context of that book, “hysteria” is no cultural endpoint of trance imposed by Western models (or more precisely: the shift from the broad spectrum of trance to the very limited and fully medicalized arena of “conversion disorders”) but rather a materialist foundation enabling Lapassade to sketch a physiological theory of delirium (not delusion!) and anchor it in the somatic realm without resorting to any negative etiology. Trance, then, is seen as “a bodily behavior […] shaped by culture”; “a complex, over-codified [type of] behavior”⁸² that, in the past, took the following hyper-relational forms: Shamanism (communication with animal and plant spirits); possession cults (communication with supernatural entities); prophecy (speech and/or behavior inspired by divinity); and Satanic trance (alliance with the shadow side of divinity)83. In the case of hysteria, all external cultural referents – affirms Lapassade – disappear, and the energetic discharge is focused on the individualized and suffering body. From this perspective, hysteria appears as a secularized type of satanic trance, a phenomenon adapted to the cultural referents of capitalism—out of which no emancipatory instance can arise. In this context, what kind of ecstatic behavior might serve as the basis and reference point for Lapassade’s trans-analysis? Just as Marx suggested that capitalism—as a mode of production and a conflict-laden social formation—would eventually lead to its own overcoming in communism, Lapassade claims that hysteria is the historical culmination of trance and at the same time a new horizon to envisage “the trance of the future” – that is, a form of ecstatic behavior freed from any historical and socio-cultural enslavement⁸⁴. This “future” form of irruption, distilled over millennia and proliferating in the secular world, corresponds, according to Lapassade, to its primordial form. It is a kind of “naked trance” stripped of automatically imposed codes, which alludes “not exactly to full animality, but to a dissolving animality and an emerging humanity, to a transitional state at the dawn of culture, not yet fully detached from the state of nature”⁸⁵. Guided by a materialist mythology that repeatedly echoes the main ideological motif of secularized colonial Western thought, namely the universal truth of modern episteme against the socio-mythical narratives of the past and of distant cultures, Lapassade assumes that hysteria is referentially minimalist. This assumption overlooks Freud’s entire narrative construction of the topic⁸⁶, which, in fact, contains just as many cultural referents as indigenous shamanism, macumba, candomblé, or satanism. The minimalist character of hysteria is not referential but relational, and the analysts’ narrative may be seen as compensating for the bodily implosion experienced by the patients when confronting the intensities of their energetic field—and the cultural poverty (which amounts to the naturalization of the phenomenon) that hinders them from using those experiences constructively. Once again, Lapassade’s intuitions are much more fruitful than his further development, in which he unfortunately falls back on prejudiced and outdated models. When he universalizes trance by detaching it from any framework of traditional institutionalization and its associated cultural referents, he seems to make progress with a general theory but in fact he is losing focus and privileging Western prejudices disguised in scientific truths. But not everything is ruined and lost. He proposes at the same time to overcome hysteria by means of new references that de-pathologize symptoms and transform them into expressions of subversive desire (desire as movement of rupture with the status quo). Bioenergetic trance, whose origins lie in Wilhelm Reich’s thought, and which gained traction in the Californian human potential movement, is the path that Essai sur la transe offers as a way out of pathological negativism—toward the construction of a true desiring machine, free of phantoms and destructive drives⁸⁷. Lapassade’s vitalist inversion of Freudian auto-eroticism presupposes a blind mysticism with absolute validity, a return to a primordial fusion – not that of child and mother, but that of culture and nature in the intensity of an impossible (and yet transversally conjured) jouissance⁸⁸. In fact, his idea of human potential—not as a theoretical category but as the structural truth of our condition—is essentially linked to a recovery of the farthest meaning of trance. What are transversalists, after all, but conjurers of the most outlandish forms of transversality? Applying them to trance, an impossible “essence” of it should be peeled off from the marasmus of its cultural ebbs and flows. No symmetrically oppositional model to post-industrial society and the progressive virtualization of capital accumulation, but rather the emergence of antinomic flows at the interstices of a global deployment and reconfiguration of values. Lapassade’s transversalism, which seeks to open the doors to a new conception of ánthropos based on unusual parameters of subjectivation, reveals itself at the same time trapped in an inverted mirror – or a discarded shell – of itself. Its expiatory trace, fascinating as it may be (especially in our time of conformist and mediocre commonplaces) is like blood stemming from a sacrificer’s mouth when he bites off his own tongue.

1. Cf. Félix Guattari: La transversalité, in: Psychanalyse et transversalité, Paris, François Maspero, 1974, pp. 72–85, especially p. 76. In his introduction to this volume, Gilles Deleuze refers to the meaning of the expression “subjugated group (groupe assujeti)” in the following terms: “subjugated groups include both the masters that the oppressed assign to themselves and the subjugated masses. The hierarchy, the pyramidal organization that char-acterizes them, is designed to banish all possible inscription of nonsense, death, or dismemberment, to prevent the development of creative ruptures, and to ensure mechanisms of self-preservation based on the exclusion of other groups.” (Psychanalyse et transversalité, p. vi). Subject-groups (groupes-sujets) are constituted at the moment when “delirium” takes on a dialogical, communal, and creative quality – shifting from exclusion to the infusion of a collective space (cf. Psychanalyse et transversalité, p. 82).
2. By “institution”, paraphrasing René Lourau, we mean a system of roles or positions linked to cultural mechanisms that define and manage (i.e., order and normalize) group relationships (cf. René Lourau: L’analyse institutionnelle, Paris, Minuit, 1970, p. 171). It is in this sense that Guattari and Lapassade understand and use the term.
3. As René Lourau points out, the movement of institutional analysis – which was systematically approached in an early article by Cornelius Castoriadis (Marxisme et théorie révolutionnaire, 1964) – is fed by a variety of historical sources. The first is Freud’s collective psychology as it appears in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), where Freud systematically connects notions like (social) organization and ideology to the question of libido (cf. René Lourau: L’analyse institutionnelle, p. 168). The second is Wilhelm Reich’s work, which not only exposes the (non-)knowledge hidden in the patient during analysis but also proposes a radical form of dissidence within the analytic device itself – revealing the indissoluble link between two worlds (patient and analyst) ideologically held apart (see in this respect Remi Hess & Jean-Yves Authier: L’analyse institutionnelle, Paris, PUF, 1981, pp. 30–31). As a result of a theoretical elaboration that socio-critically exploits those Freudian and Reichian aspects, the notion of “institution” loses a layer of meaning usually attached to it: that of an oppres-sive device that deprives individuals of their freedom. Instead, the term acquires quite a different connota-tion and should be taken as a space in which both the barriers of (bourgeois) individualism and the collective constraints (imposed by the state) are transformed by means of a singular group-practice.
4. See in this regard Guattari’s last three books: Les trois écologies (1989), Cartographies schizoanalytiques (1989), and Chaosmose (1992), all published by Éditions Galilée in Paris.
5. Regarding this expression Guattari writes the following: “I am one of those who experienced the 1960s as a springtime that promised to be endless, so it is quite dicult for me to get used to this long winter of the 1980s” (Félix Guattari: Les années d’hiver 1980–1985, Paris, Barrault, 1986, p. 7). Although Les années d’hiver reflects Guattari’s disappointment with the “left in power” (after the 1981 election and the first term of François Mitter-rand), at a deeper level it elaborates on the diculties linked to his proposal from the late 1970s: the “molecular revolution” (see La révolution moléculaire, pp. 9–12, and the second part of Les années d’hiver, titled “Moléculaire”, pp. 123–232). A central point to consider in doing justice to the “molecular revolution” is the distinction between the dissemination of singularities as a new politics of desire and the saturation of the molecular opening of desire by the “subjective obfuscation” (Les années d’hiver, p. 65) of the very actors who proclaim their liberation.
6. For example his Écrits pour l’Anti-Œdipe, published only in 2012, showing Guattari’s internal work on the chef-d’oeuvre he wrote together with Gilles Deleuze, or Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie ?, also posthumously published (in 2013), which can be read as a necessary detour (and therefore a paradoxical accomplishment) of the project of Mille Plateaux. One should not forget the volume De Leros à la Borde, inspired by Guattari’s visit to one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in Europe in 1989, in which he brings the exercise of psychiatry the closest possible to an artistic practice.
7. Here the word “community” is taken in the sense of an emergent social group bound together by quasi organic ties of solidarity, as opposed to the contrary opposites “individual” (susceptible to isolation and denial of group-relations) and “society” (prone to collective measures denying the singularity of individuals).
8. Ethnology needed the radical contribution of Pierre Clastres to finally question – not from outside, but from within an alternative paradigm (linked to societies demarcating an external limit to “Western civilizational development”) – certain ideas treated as universal desiderata. These include the assumption that the constitution of the state is a necessary stage in the organization and management of human groups (cf. Pierre Clastres: La société contre l’État, Paris, Minuit, 1974), as well as certain European communitarian fantasies that were under-pinned by the same bourgeois individualism they claimed to oppose – only in a more theatrical and unrestrained fashion. Clastres’s work laid the foundation for a realistic reflection on social organization processes previously ignored or denied, opening a third path between Thomas Hobbes (whose work is focused on a logic of general-ized conflict) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (as a thinker of universalized exchange). This third path is different from and resistant to the type of ultra-individualist reappropriation that characterized the student revolts – and their manifold drifts – during the 1960s and 1970s
9. In their book on institutional analysis, Remi Hess and Jean-Yves Authier offer a definition concerning a symptom that can be found in every mechanism of institutional organization (including the mechanism of knowledge production): “The first object of institutional analysis is the invisible” (L’analyse institutionnelle, p. 76, my emphasis).
10. The Guattarian notion of “ecosophy” points to new assemblages of connectivity involving aesthetics, ethics, and (micro- and geo-)politics. Such assemblages, which introduce for the first time the question of “alterity” in Western thought form a point of view that is not a priori invalidated by colonial prejudices, can be said to re-define the practice of “philosophy” beyond its naturalized Eurocentric framework, the “purest” version of which can be found in Heidegger’s construction of a Greek-German axis of self-armation and self-delimita-tion in his rector’s address (Rektoratsrede) of May 27, 1933. Many Western philosophers who have vehemently reacted against such a position and delimitation (mainly due to strategies of “political correctness” in the public sphere) still exercise a form of (fully conscious but also unconsciously introjected) “colonialism of thought” which in my opinion presents a clear continuity with Heidegger’s line (though with much less argumentative and stylistic talent). As to the transcultural aspect and relevance of chaosmosis, I think the very assemblages implied by it, for example what Guattari calls “incorporeals”, lend themselves to new forms of conceiving relations and their corresponding ontological schemes. In a chaosmotic scenario, there is not much sense in distinguishing “facts” and “fiction”, “matter” and “spirit”, or “science” and “arts” as two well-delimited spheres – one of which is in possession of an empirical truth. The study of certain non-Western societies has shown new paradigms which are better understood with Guattarian categories than with the usual epistemic delimitations of scholars who insist on the validity of one-world (that of epistemology) over all other ways of living.
11. This term should be understood in the sense of the Portuguese word incorporação, used in Afro-Bra-zilian possession cults. In that context, the devotees not only receive spiritual entities in their bodies (and are therefore compared with a horse when ridden, only with the head – not the back – as their mount) but are also instructed in their behavior for the benefit of the entire community (both human and non-human). This process of learning how to socialize with other-than-human entities marks the transition from incorporation as a first (ecstatic) rupture to a regular interaction engaging forms of otherness for both individual and collective benefit.
12. The phonetic and graphic support for this reading is stronger in French, where transanalyse and transe-analyse are homophones and nearly homographs (given the fact that the French word “transe” is spelled with an “s”).
13. If reactive schizophrenia is an individual pathology, the active becoming of schizophrenic desire is, for Guattari, a revolutionary becoming. This idea is clearly stated in Anti-Oedipus: “Schizophrenic escape does not merely consist in withdrawing from the social, in living on the margins. It causes the social to flow through the multiplicity of holes that corrode and penetrate it, always coupled directly to it, spreading everywhere the molec-ular charges that will explode what must explode, make fall what must fall, make escape what must escape, consolidating at every point the transformation of schizophrenia as process into an effectively revolutionary force.” (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: L’Anti-Œdipe: capitalisme et schizophrénie 1, Paris, Minuit, 2018, p. 412
14. Already in 1953, during the establishment of the experimental clinic La Borde in the South of Paris, Guattari developed a close relationship with Jean Oury (whom he had met as a teenager), a Lacanian-trained analyst with broader, distinctly anti-psychiatric horizons, who became his mentor. In 1962, Guattari began analytic training with Jacques Lacan. This Lacanian period, which lasted seven years, left an indelible mark on his thought. In fact, Guattari always retained a deep respect for Lacan’s thought, even during the wildest (and most popular) anti-Freudian years – those of his iconoclastic collaboration with Gilles Deleuze. See, for instance, the indirect praise of Lacan in Chapter 2 of Anti-Oedipus: from the reference to Lacan’s resis-tance to Oedipal triangulation to the suggestion that he anticipated inclusive disjunctions that invalidate the (abstract) division between “imaginary pathways” and “symbolic values” (cf. L’Anti-Œdipe, pp. 65, 102, 122, and 126 respectively)
15. In developing his theory of the liberation of desire (from individual implosion to group circula-tion), Guattari uses the expression “signifying logic” to highlight the passage from symbolic stagnation (with a neurotic tendency) to a new specificity that emerges through a subversive and amplifying recomposition of the space previously defined as “transferential” (cf. Félix Guattari: Psychanalyse et transversalité, p. 74). Guattari and Deleuze first met in 1969.
16. Referring to the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), Guattari claims that Freud was not unaware of the impact of social relations on individual and family problems. From the perspective of a post-Lacanian reformulation, Guattari sees in Freud a direct relationship between the social machinery of signi-fiers, castration, and guilt. This, on one hand, defines the field of application for the Freudian theory, and on the other hand points to a broader potential of Freud’s insights – something that Guattari reinterprets through a Lacanian lens for further amplification and enhancement of psychoanalytic motives (cf. Psychanalyse et trans-versalité, pp. 73–74).
17. In this regard, it is essential to mention the influence (on Guattari) of Wilhelm Reich, an undeniable bridge between Freud and Marx, to whom Georges Lapassade dedicated a 1974 essay titled La bioénergie. Reich’s rejection of the death drive (or more precisely: of its intrapsychic dimension and its role as determinant of all human behavior) is an unmistakable sign of his presence in Guattari’s early thought. Cf. Wilhelm Reich: Char-acter Analysis (Third, enlarged Edition), Main, WRM Press, 1988, pp. 225–236. On this aspect of Reich’s thinking and its influence in France, see Elisabeth Roudinesco: Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, Volume 2: 1925–1985, Paris, Fayard, 1994, pp. 58–59.
18. Félix Guattari: Réflexions pour des philosophes à propos de la psychothérapie institutionnelle, in: Psychana-lyse et transversalité, pp. 86–97, especially pp. 87–88, note 2. This essay first appeared in Cahiers de philosophie, no. 1 (journal of the Philosophy Group of the Sorbonne) and was later republished in the journal Recherches (1966)
19. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud himself acknowledges the quasi-metaphysical nature of his reasoning. In the fourth chapter, he explicitly announces his departure from the empirical foundation that had served as the basis for the elaboration of his notion of “repetition compulsion” and accepts the risks implied by such a step: “What follows now is speculation – sometimes of a far-reaching kind – which each person will evaluate or reject according to their own perspective.” (Sigmund Freud: Jenseits des Lustprinzips, in: Studienaus gabe, Volume III: Philosophie des Unbewußten, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1997, pp. 213–272, quote p. 234).
20. “A multiplicity has neither subject nor object. […] Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are not tied to the supposedly unified will of an artist or puppeteer, but to the multiplicity of nerve fibers that form another puppet following other dimensions connected to the first […]. The nerve fibers, in turn, form a weave and fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated.” (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Mille Plateaux: capitalisme et schizophrénie 2, Paris, Minuit, 1980, pp. 14–15)
21. The notion of dérive (drift, detour) refers to a movement that diverts the focus of signification precisely to nurture a subtractive flow parallel to dominant signifiers and discursive traps (mechanization of polemics, instrumentalization of concepts, and rigidification of initiatives and practices). In this regard, we should remember Jean-François Lyotard’s book Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (1975), in which the term “drift” appears in the title as an example of a type of writing and a reflective practice fully aligned with the subtractive movement which proves impervious to mainstream ideological retrieval. One can recognize in Lyotard a trajec-tory very attentive to the notion of dérive, from Économie libidinale (1974, which can be read as an experiment in active writing that conjures the intensities of machinic desire) to Heidegger et “les juifs” (1988), where Lyotard offers a differential approach to the primal repression (Urverdrängung) of Western thought – beyond its most radical but still selective gesture of “difference” embodied in Heidegger’s philosophy – and its genocidal conse-quences.
22. Félix Guattari: Psychanalyse et transversalité, p. 79.
23. Félix Guattari: Psychanalyse et transversalité, p. 79.
24. Georges Lapassade: Socianalyse et potentiel humain, Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1975, p. 97. Lapassade’s observation emerges from the analysis of the psychoanalytic treatment. According to him, the consolidation of this type of cure depends on a repression of the problems involved in the course of its very institutionalization. Clearly, the Freudian model serves as a basis for a critical analysis of the dynamics of any institution in modern Western society, insofar as its functioning is symptomatically selective.
25. Félix Guattari: Psychanalyse et transversalité, p. 82.
26. Félix Guattari: Psychanalyse et transversalité, p. 82.
27. Félix Guattari: Sur les rapports infirmiers-médecins, in: Psychanalyse et transversalité, pp. 7–17, quote p. 9. This text consists in a report of a discussion that took place between Guattari and Jean Oury at the clinic La Borde.
28. Michel Foucault: Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Paris, Plon, 1961. Foucault’s archaeological method leads to the practice of a singular anthropology, as it uncovers hidden aspects of social dynamics by transforming the gaze and shifting the usually accepted codes of intelligibility. This is what happens (or rather what should happen) in anthropology when one attempts to extract the structural meaning of phenomena and behaviors from civilizations considered distant from and even incommensurable with Western culture.
29. Cf. Bruno Latour and his critique of the modern constitution, which “invents a separation between the scientific power responsible for representing things and the political power responsible for representing subjects” (Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, Paris, Seuil, 1989, p. 46). This separation, which leads to an epistemic split between “nature” and “culture”, and to a purification or erasure of the socio-historical inscription of scien-tific procedures, makes it possible to write history and construct anthropology based on an absolute distinction between truth and error, science and belief, culture and primitivism – all this, of course, with eminently political consequences. Latour’s proposal consists in critically interrogating, in the context of modern Western society, the mechanisms that conceal the (constitutively) hybrid nature of each cultural formation with respect to the consti-tution of its objects (of desire, daily practice, and knowledge). This critique reveals the ideological selectivity of “scientific objects” and their essential relation to the politics of expansion and domination that characterized European modernity and the extended Western paradigm.
30. Georges Lapassade: Les chevaux du diable: une dérive transversaliste, Paris, Éditions universitaires, 1974, p. 8.
31. Georges Lapassade, Les chevaux du diable, p. 8.
32. Georges Lapassade, Marco Aurélio Luz: O segredo da macumba, Rio de Janeiro, Paz e Terra, 1972, p. xii.
33. In Bastide’s book Les religions africaines du Brésil (1960), the term macumba is related to the Brazilian subproletariat and considered part of the “practices of disaggregation”. In contrast to the Candomblé of Bahia, such practices lack traditional values (all of which has been massively destroyed by industrialization and urban-ization) and are therefore unable to unite their practices with adequate social bonds (cf. Roger Bastide: Les religions africaines du Brésil, Paris, PUF, 1995, pp. 409–412).
34. Georges Lapassade, Marco Aurélio Luz: O segredo da macumba, p. xiv.
35. Georges Lapassade, Marco Aurélio Luz: O segredo da macumba, p. xix.
36. Examples of such libertarian doctrines are the ones adopted by the Human Potential Movement in California, which dates back to the 1960s: Gestalt therapy, bioenergy, and encounter groups. In 1973, Lapassade discovered the possibility of transforming the socio-analytic device through his encounter with these new thera-peutic initiatives (cf. Remi Hess, preface to Georges Lapassade: Socianalyse et potentiel humain, p. xvi).
37. Georges Lapassade, Marco Aurélio Luz: O segredo da macumba, p. xix.
38. A critique of this lexical pair was formulated by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, when they refer to Wilhelm Reich’s great insight: “showing how intrapsychic repression (refoulement) depends on social repres-sion (répression) […] since social repression precisely needs intrapsychic repression to produce docile subjects and ensure the reproduction of the dominant social formation” (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: L’Anti-Œdipe, p. 143). Deleuze and Guattari refer to Reich’s bold distinction between Verdrängung (translated into French as refoulement) and Unterdrückung (which they translate as répression), cf. Wilhelm Reich: Die sexuelle Revolution, Frankfurt, Fischer, 1974. The basis for this book, originally written in English in 1945, derives from an earlier German text published in 1936 titled Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf, from which the terminological issue is drawn
39. In this regard, the following observations by Vânia Zikàn Cardoso are especially relevant: “Macumba is both the ambiguity and the practices grouped under this disturbing (dis-ordering) designation, an ambiguity saturated with racialized meanings, a space of in-betweenness that feeds the mixture of desire and rejection of macumba found in Brazilian society” (Vânia Zikàn Cardoso: “Spirits and Stories in the Crossroads,” in: Ruy Blanes, Diana Espírito Santo [eds.]: The Social Life of Spirits, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2014, pp. 92–107, quote p. 94).
40. In his novel Le bordel andalou, Georges Labalue (Lapassade’s alter ego) refers to his own metamor-phosis in the following terms: “They say that I’m possessed by Exú, the black god. It’s true. My life here [in Rio de Janeiro] is like a continuous trance” (Georges Lapassade: Le bordel andalou, Paris, L’Herne, 1971, p. 138).
41. “The goal […] is to show that quimbanda is the most important aspect of macumba. At the same time […] the meaning of macumba is hidden, it is secret. […] Within macumba, all the libertarian aspirations of a particular social formation are present” (Georges Lapassade, Marco Aurélio Luz: O segredo da macumba, p. xv).
42. To have an adequate idea of the scope of the term “theater of cruelty” as the only possible real theater (and the transformative project contained in it), it is best to let its inventor, the poet Antonin Artaud, speak for himself: “I declare that the current social state is infamous and must be destroyed. It is the task of the theater – or rather the task of the machine gun – to do so. Our theater is not even capable of posing the question correctly, with passion and effectiveness. It would be capable if it managed to go beyond the sphere of its own object, which for me is majestic and secret. […] The object of theater seems to me to be directly related to that kind of poetry that accomplishes, the one that takes place when one knows how to draw effects in a concrete way and on all levels” (Antonin Artaud: Le théâtre et son double, in: Œuvres Complètes IV, Paris, Gallimard, 1978, pp. 40 and 288).
43. As we will see, every discourse embodying “difference” (with its numerous phonetic, lexical, gram-matical, and rhetorical variations) collapses or is dissolved in the ritual performativity of macumba which Lapassade relentlessly seeks. However, differences persist between the sexualized/written body proposed by Lapassade and the semantics of incorporation in ritual coupling with entities. In Le bordel andalou, Lapassade acknowledges this discrepancy: “I discovered the connection between these solitary, disappointing experiences [of liberated writing] and the collective experience of mediums.” (Le bordel andalou, p. 7)
44. The first part of Le bordel andalou takes place in an underground Spanish setting (which in turn opens a channel to the Maghrebian underworld); the second contains an episode in Tunisia that marks the African irruption into Labalue’s life (as well as his definitive exclusion from the “white world”); and the third part, which takes place in Brazil, is a descent to hell and an existential turning point—since the protagonist becomes traumatically bound to Exú.
45. Institutional analysis, as it was developed in France by René Lourau, is in fact the matrix of Lapa-ssade’s socioanalysis. Before his sojourn in the Brazil of the 1970s, Lapassade attempted to expand Lourau’s project in Montreal, but such maneuver appeared as a contribution to the spirit of October ’68 in Quebec (cf. Georges Lapassade: Le livre fou, Paris, Epi, 1971, p. 133).
46. Cf. Georges Lapassade: Les chevaux du diable, p. 19.
47. On the different institutional levels of self-management, cf. Georges Lapassade: Socianalyse et poten-tiel humain, pp. 67–70. The experience of self-management in educational institutions is a project Lapassade began as early as in 1962 within the framework of the UNEF (Union nationale des étudiants en France).
48. Lapassade’s experience in Les chevaux du diable unfolds in the context of the Federative Republic of Brazil under the presidency of Emílio Garrastazu Médici. As a European, his “dissident activity” was monitored but notably more tolerated than that of Brazilian intellectuals who opposed the regime, allowing him to create a short-lived oasis of pedagogical self-management – for instance, at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Although he perceived this situation not only as socially promising but also as “profoundly erotic”, Lapassade returned to concrete reality by means of the following reflection: “In this country without freedom, where orga-nizing and speaking about organizing society is ocially forbidden, this brief moment of democracy took on an emotional and at times pathetic character” (Georges Lapassade, Les chevaux du diable, p. 27).
49. This method was first developed in 1965, but its origins go back to 1947, when Elliott Jaques was working at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.
50. See Elliott Jaques’s 1982 article, where he summarizes his project of social analysis and explains his appropriations of the Freudian method: The Method of Social Analysis and Social Change in Social Research, in: Clinical Sociology Review, Vol. 1, 1982, pp. 50–58, especially p. 51.
51. “In the clinical act, the client’s goal is to regain health, but the physician does not get involved in the client’s illness. On the contrary, he avoids contamination. […] This [classical] model of the socioanalytic consul-tation is very similar to the biomedical model.” (Georges Lapassade: Les chevaux du diable, p. 25). Along this very line, the “physiological” conception of trance that Lapassade would later elaborate – after his experiences with macumba – can be seen as a regression toward Eurocentric parameters. This will be explored in the final part of this essay.
52. Particularly on the notion of “scientific object” and its ideological purification, see Bruno Latour: Notes sur certains objets chevelus, in: Nouvelle revue d’ethnopsychiatrie No. 27. Pouvoir de sorcier, pouvoir de médecin (1), Paris, La Pensée Sauvage, 1994, pp. 21–36.
53. Georges Lapassade: Les chevaux du diable, p. 39.
54. Descriptions of these adventures into the underworld of quimbanda in the favelas are found especially in the third and sixth chapters of Le bordel andalou, whose titles deserve to be mentioned due to the symbolic relevance of their proper names: “Exú” and “Abaluaé”, respectively.
55. Georges Lapassade: Les chevaux du diable, p. 39.
56. Georges Lapassade, Marco Aurélio Luz: O segredo da macumba, pp. xiv–xv.
57. Georges Lapassade, Marco Aurélio Luz: O segredo da macumba, p. xv.
58. Renato Ortiz refers to the explanations of Oscar Ribas, José Quintão, and Heli Chatelain regarding the term kimbanda to dissociate it from any identification with witchcraft in the Congo-Angolan context (cf. Renato Ortiz: A morte branca do feiticeiro negro: Umbanda e sociedade brasileira, São Paulo, Brasiliense, 2011, pp. 132–133). The opposition between kimbanda (a priest who conducts spirit worship) and onganga (a master of black magic), as well as the meaning of the Kimbundu root mbanda (faculty or art of divination and healing through natural remedies and supernatural cults), provide evidence that the dichotomy between umbanda and quimbanda, as programmatically asserted by authors like Aluizio Fontenelle (O Espiritismo no conceito das religiões e a lei de Umbanda, 1950) or Lourenço Braga (Umbanda [white magic] and Quimbanda [black magic], 1961), results from a reinterpretation developed by just one (Eurocentric and evoutionist) trend of the Umbanda religion. This trend is marked, among other things, by a dualist conception of “good and evil” that not only clashes with the previous African substrate but also distorts part of the Kardecist heritage – whose evolutionism, although useful for constructing pseudo-racial arguments, intends to balance out such radical dualism when it comes to the vicissitudes of the spiritual world.
59. On the reorganization of sacred space within the Umbanda–Candomblé complex and the role of “spirits of darkness” in that context, see among others Stefania Capone: La quête de l’Afrique dans le candomblé : pouvoir et tradition au Brésil, Sesto San Giovanni, Mimesis, 2017, especially Chapter 4 (pp. 169–193).
60. It is impossible not to connect the phonetics of the name Merding Théâtre with Lapassade’s character-ization of the group (and the entire project in question) as “crap theater.” In the Tunisian interlude of the novel’s first part, the excremental metaphor threatens to engulf the entire environment around Labalue, to the point of his remarking the following: “From then on, I had to be careful. If I didn’t pay extreme attention, I risked sinking definitively into a tide of crap.” (Georges Lapassade: Le bordel andalou, p. 42).
61. Perhaps it would be more adequate to use the compound proper-noun “Labalue-Lapassade” to refer to that complex character. In fact, Lapassade’s novels featuring Georges Labalue include an internal replication of this character which offers a mirror of the author from within the universe of the novel. In Le bordel andalou, for example, Lapassade makes the construction of the literary character “Labalue” explicit – not as a conven-tional meta-discourse but from Labalue’s own world. During the latter’s confrontation with his fellow actors, one member of the theater says: “I’m surprised that in a moment like this, you’re taking notes about a guy named Georges Labalue who would be someone else.” (Le bordel andalou, p. 71). This is a double rupture with the dichotomy between “fact” and “fiction”. In Joyeux Tropiques (1978), Labalue recounts a violent confrontation he had with Michel Foucault, which instantly transforms him into “Lapassade”. When Foucault accuses him of being responsible for his dismissal [a real-life expulsion Lapassade experienced in Tunisia], Labalue—now as the author Lapassade—responds: “No, I didn’t say that. But maybe it’s a distorted echo of what I wrote in Le bordel andalou”. Also, in Joyeux Tropiques, the Tunisia episode is told from the perspective of Georges Labalue, with Georges Lapassade as one of the characters: “They say the strike is over, and that French professors must return to work. Only one of them, Mr. Lapassade, allowed himself to interrupt his colleague Michel Foucault in the middle of a class.” (Georges Lapassade: Joyeux Tropiques, Paris, Stock, 1978, p. 53).
62. Georges Lapassade: Le bordel andalou, p. 60
63. Georges Lapassade: Le bordel andalou, p. 84.
64. In his book on Wilhelm Reich, Lapassade emphasizes the opposition between the psychoanalytic “acting out” (passage à l’acte) and the “working through the act” (passage par l’acte)—or technical intervention on the body—in Reich’s bioenergetic conception, attributing to the latter a considerable advantage over Freud’s verbal therapy (cf. Georges Lapassade: La bioénergie: essai sur l’oeuvre de Wilhelm Reich, Paris, Éditions universitaires, 1974, p. 46).
65. This poetics is what Lapassade saw in Marco Aurélio Luz when he began to work with him in 1970. Luz’s Marxist orientation – with all the political, critical, and cultural selectivity it entails – did not prevent him from regularly attending the terreiro of Maria Batuca (to the point of receiving an Exú quite different from the one conjured and partly fantasized by Lapassade), producing documentary films about macumba, and enhancing his relationships not only with religious authorities of the Afro-Brasilian world but also with the entities of Candomblé as well as with those of the Umbanda-Quimbanda complex (cf. Georges Lapassade: Les chevaux du diable, pp. 107–108). Unlike Lapassade, Marco Aurélio Luz saw the opposition between Umbanda and Quimbanda, as presented in O segredo da macumba, as specific to a particular context. Brazil under a dictatorial regime certainly privileged Eurocentric, racist, and classist cultural policy, although that tendency did not begin with dictatorial governments but with the very constitution of a certain “Umbanda integrity” that intended to free itself from any influence stemming from African traditions and align itself with European (evolutionary) models (cf. Luiz Antonio Simas: Umbandas: Uma História do Brasil, Civilização Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro, 2024, p. 16). In the same year in which Lapassade published his book on Wilhelm Reich, Luz began to relativize the insti-tutional opposition between Umbanda and Quimbanda and openly recognized the value of Candomblé nagô in the anti-colonialist and anti-racist struggle in Brazil, as well as the links between Candomblé and Umbanda (cf. Jean-Claude Bernardet: Os babalaôs resistem aos sociólogos, in: Opinião, 28 February 1974, p. 24). This shows that every dichotomy consisting of two poles “good-evil” – even when inverted (as in Lapassade’s countercultural project) to address sociopolitical and cultural injustices – can never do justice to the complex and intricate rela-tionship of Afro-Brazilian religions with their respective sources of inspiration. Such relationship, when depicted by the tension between Umbanda and Quimbanda, can be better expressed through a complementary (instead of an oppositional) dualism. Umbanda and Quimbanda practices should be situated along a pluridimensional religious continuum, and a possible approach could consist in describing the practitioners’ relationship with enti-ties in terms of a right-hand path (Umbanda) and a left-hand path (Quimbanda), both of them being variants of a single cult (cf. Juliana Barros Brant Carvalho, José Francisco Miguel Henriques Bairrão: Umbanda and quimbanda: black alternative to white morality, in: Psicologia USP, Vol. 30, 2019, pp. 1–11, especially p. 9).
66. Cf. Georges Lapassade: Les chevaux du diable, p. 56.
67. When we say “corrections,” we refer not only to textual errors but also to a shift in position – or rather, in the author’s motivation – from an academic interest to an existential engagement related to the politically chal-lenging treatment of the topic. Marco Aurélio Luz’s existential commitment to what he calls “Black values” results from a personal struggle against the education he received in the context of Rio de Janeiro’s “white” (Eurocentric, positivist, liberal) elite and a lucid, attentive, and sensitive awareness of the importance of enslaved, marginalized, and obliterated or exterminated traditions in the construction of Brazilian identity with all its historical vicissitudes. (cf. Marco Aurélio Luz: Agadá: Dinâmica da Civilização Africano-Brasileira, Salvador, EDUFBA, 2020, pp. 20–21). At the same time, because of his own study and practice of Afro-Brazilian religions, Luz adopts a position contrary to that of ethnologists who engage in the cults for merely “scientific purposes” (cf. Stefania Capone: La quête de l’Afrique dans le candomblé, pp. 57–58). His work emerges from existential, cultural, and religious involvement, and its goal is to get rid of two masks: the “scientific” and the purely “individual”. The former attacks the cults’ vitality through analytical vivisection, while the latter magnifies a single perspective through a one-sided consid-eration of individual processes and realities (cf. Marco Aurélio Luz, Agadá, especially pp. 363–364)
68. With this term, we return to Guattari and Deleuze, who in their book on Kafka (1975) emphasize the “strong coecient of deterritorialization” that affects language and drives the writer to “become the nomad, the immigrant, the gypsy of his own language” (Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Kafka: pour une littérature mineure, Paris, Minuit, 1975, pp. 29 and 35, respectively).
69. The radical opposition to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques is obvious, not only in the title (joyeux vs. tristes), but also in Lapassade’s travel motive. Lévi-Strauss’s book opens with a declaration of hatred toward travels and explorers, whose adventurous character represents the opposite of the ethnographer’s disci-pline (cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss: Tristes tropiques, Paris, Plon, 1993, p. 13); Lapassade, by contrast, writes: “Each of my journeys has reasons that are not ethnographic; I make these trips as an amateur” (Georges Lapassade: Joyeux tropiques, p. 71).
70. Maurice Blanchot: L’espace littéraire, Paris, Gallimard, 2007, p. 71. Blanchot’s pages on Kafka, which make up the second chapter of his book (written in 1955), in many ways anticipate – and in a certain sense surpass – several aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature.
71. Georges Lapassade: Joyeux tropiques, p. 50.
72. Georges Lapassade: Joyeux tropiques, p. 141.
73. Georges Lapassade, Joyeux tropiques, p. 140.
74. It is a mistake to believe that cultural entities exist only in history or ethnology books when there is clear evidence of their concrete manifestations in places of power, consecrated objects, ecstatic bodies, devotional songs and dances, or techniques of influence. The ethnocentric and reductionist idea that equates “religion” with “belief” (as opposed to “science” and “knowledge”) results from a conceptual abstraction that emerged from a struggle against a previous abstraction: the theological notion of “religion” as “revealed knowledge” within the framework of Christianity. This superimposed concept hides the rich and complex reality of religious phenomena, which can never be reduced to any theoretical or dogmatic schema. As Graham Harvey notes, if the study of religions could resist the tendency toward alienating conceptual mediation (greatly intensified by the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the modern state), the religious world would appear as an “everyday reality” lived by “people who eat, make love, host guests, and care for strangers” (Graham Harvey: Food, Sex & Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life, New York, Routledge, 2014, p. 3) – a reality as far removed from the radical transcendence of monotheism as it is from the laboratory abstraction of modern science, two instances historically linked by their exclusive claims to “reality.
75. If transversality expresses, as Guattari states, “a nomadism of fronts” (Félix Guattari: Révolution moléculaire, p. 17), this implies not only a certain link between analysis, revolutionary movement, madness, and art, but also “a multitude of singular entities, flows, territories, and incorporeal universes that articulate themselves into functional assemblages” (Félix Guattari: Les années d’hiver, p. 130). Here, Guattari refers to modes and agents of experience that are not codifiable by pre-established norms, that is, they are not to be declared “universal”. For this reason, they are capable of collapsing quasi-naturalized oppositions rooted in the Western cultural heritage – such as the distinction between reality and fantasy (or delusion).
76. Georges Lapassade: Joyeux tropiques, p. 71.
77. Georges Lapassade: Joyeux tropiques, p. 79.
78. Georges Lapassade: Joyeux tropiques, p. 80
79. The terminological shift from “possession” to “trance,” which Lapassade frames around Franz-Anton Mesmer’s notes on the exorcist Johann Joseph Gassner, signals his belief in the “progress” represented by the erasure of alterity. This is a regrettable instance of regression in his work in relation to the results of his experien-tial endeavors in Brazil. In his later reasoning, two distinct cultural entities – the devil and hysteria (both closely linked to particular techniques of intervention and, in the cases of Mesmer and Gassner, mutually incommensu-rable) – are to be placed along a historical continuum, in spite of not having any reliable scale to venture such confluence. By way of argumentative compensation, a transition is constructed from a mystical-religious phase (Gassner and traditional Christian exorcism) to a cosmo-scientific one (Mesmer and his theory of animal magne-tism), which is supposed to include Lapassade’s de-mystified orientation (cf. Georges Lapassade: La découverte de la dissociation, Paris, Loris Talmart, 1998, p. 13). But Lapassade candidly overlooks that cultural entities do not disappear simply because scientific concepts emerge with the sole aim of replacing them. Rather, they vanish when the world-configuration from which that specific kind of knowledge and understanding of the world emerges ceases to sustain collective modes of existence and behavior. In this sense, the possession symptom is not just a disguised hysterical symptom. It has its own structure, actors, and techniques of intervention, regard-less of how these may be judged externally. Tobie Nathan is right in saying that the symptom is “a culturally coded message” (Tobie Nathan: La folie des autres: traité d’ethnopsychiatrie clinique, Paris, Dunod, 2001, p. 39), and Philippe Descola situates this clinical observation within a broader anthropological framework when he refers to the problem of cultural plurality grounded in a diversity of natures: “Our cosmology [i.e., the naturalist cosmology of modern Western thought] made science possible, but one must understand that this cosmology is not itself the product of scientific activity. It is rather a mode of distributing the entities of a world that emerged in a specific period and allowed science to develop” (Philippe Descola: Diversité des natures, diversité des cultures, Montrouge, Bayard, 2010, p. 69).
80. In their book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari oppose the Czech writer’s minor literature as an artifi-cial enrichment that relies on external resources (symbolism, oneirism, esotericism, etc.) to save narrative from its own referential void. In this sense, the anti-Kafka in the Austro-Hungarian context of the early 20th century is Gustav Meyrink (cf. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Kafka: pour une littérature mineure, p. 34).
81. Georges Lapassade: Essai sur la trance : Le matérialisme hystérique, Paris, Delarge, 1976.
82. Georges Lapassade: Essai sur la trance : Le matérialisme hystérique, p. 15.
83. Cf. Georges Lapassade: Essai sur la trance : Le matérialisme hystérique, pp. 17-19.
84. Georges Lapassade: Essai sur la trance : Le matérialisme hystérique, p. 22.
85. Georges Lapassade: Essai sur la trance : Le matérialisme hystérique, p. 211.
86. On the importance of this literary aspect of Freud’s work (in contrast to the dry psychiatric reports of his contemporaries), see Irvin Yalom’s commentary in his preface to the English edition of Studies on Hysteria: Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud: Studies on Hysteria, New York, Basic Books, 2000, pp. xii–xiii.
87. “After trance as energetic discharge, we are perhaps discovering – or rediscovering – the path that liberates an unconscious that is not a reservoir of phantoms, but a source of desires and projects” (Georges Lapassade: Essai sur la trance: Le matérialisme hystérique, p. 19).
88. This jouissance coincides with what Lapassade calls “the fusional body of a consciousness in explo-sion” (Georges Lapassade: Essai sur la trance: Le matérialisme hystérique, p. 212)