Gilles Deleuze/Gherasim Luca: The Paradoxal Encounter between “Anti-Oedipus” and “Non-Oedipus”

Any reader in the least familiar with Gilles Deleuze's philosophical work will be able to list some writers whose literary production was the focus of his thinking over the years: Kafka, Proust, Artaud, Beckett, and so many others. Among all the names that may be evoked, that of the poet Gherasim Luca would probably not be the first to come to mind. This, despite the philosopher’s own pronouncements, in which he claimed, not without some intended provocation, to consider Luca “le plus grand poete de langue francaise vivant” (Abecedaire) ‘the greatest Frenchspeaking poet alive.’ A member of the Bucharest surrealist group in the 1940s who settled in Paris in the early fifties, Gherasim Luca published poetry collections and tracts, often working in collaboration with painters, and created visual works and poetic performances. He seems to have engendered in Deleuze a genuine fascination, which is reflected in their correspondence as well as in Deleuze’s writings and public speeches. The objective of this article is to examine a warm, intellectual exchange between the two, born of a shared fantasy, that of redefining desire outside of the oedipean model. Around 1972, at the time he was about to publish the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia with Felix Guattari, Deleuze learned of the poetic work of a certain Gherasim Luca whose “non-oedipean” meditations captured his attention. From that point on, and until the end of his life1, he never stopped reading Luca’s work, following the course of his artistic activity or engaging the poet in dialogue. Very quickly, exchanges between Deleuze and Luca moved beyond the framework of key concepts in Freudian psychoanalysis, as the philosopher became increasingly fascinated with Luca's poetry, which he would frequently praise. In fact, it is this unconditional admiration for Luca's poetic work