29th Series – Good Intentions Are Inevitably Punished

The 29th Series continues looking at the process of the dynamic genesis. It continues directly from where the 28th Series leaves off speaking of Oedipus as the hero of the surface. The good intentions concerns Oedipus restoring the image of the mother from the depths and evoking the father image of the heights to produce the surface. The surface is where the development of the ego mostly occurs. These intentions inevitably go wrong due to the fragility of the surface. Deleuze references Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle chapter 4 for the development of the ego which he says is essential to the bio-psychic theory of surfaces. The whole book is here, scroll down for chapter 4.

There is a look at what is meant by the image of the phallus and castration. Deleuze looks at what is meant by intention which he says is the moral notion par excellence. He compares intention, willed action, with accomplished action. He also looks at what he means by Image which eventually designates action in general or the pure event. Another concept of Freud's, desexualization, is examined. Freud thought this desexualization nourished he death instinct and conditioned thought. Deleuze cites chapter 4 from The Ego and the Id by Freud. Again, the whole book is here, scroll down to chapter 4:  Deleuze calls the two aspects of desexualization, sublimation and symbolization. 

28th Series of Sexuality

This series continues the dynamic genesis looking at infant psychology in the first year of life. Sexuality is Melanie Klein's third position after the paranoid/schizoid position of the depths and the manic-depressive position of the heights. The sexual position produces the surface, the meeting place of bodies and language. The sexual position gets formed by libidinal energy getting freed from the two drives of conservation and destruction in the depths of bodies and having that energy projected onto an erogenous zone on the surface. The phallus - a projected "image", not the organ, unites the various erogenous zones to produce the surface. Deleuze also compares the coordination of the erogenous zones with Lacan's mirror stage.  

He closes this series with by beginning a discussion of the Oedipus Complex which continues in Series 29. Oedipus brings up the fragmented bad penis of the depths to unite with the whole good penis of the heights on the surface. Thus "Oedipus is a pacifying hero of the Herculean type."