This chapter critically reevaluates the Surrealist technique of splitting up and rearranging figures and dolls into mythopoetic concoctions, often featuring androgynous and machinic bodies. This tendency continues in contemporary art. At the root of these artistic experiments is a desiring imagination that reaches beyond “normal” bodies. This complements queer theories that aim to deconstruct, and see beyond, everyday heteronormativity. Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalysis” also suggests that this process of splitting up is fundamentally creative and life affirming. Against traditional psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis looks to the example of the schizophrenic, who initiates a spontaneous creativity, splitting and reassembling normative codes and conventions. From the Greek, skhizein (“split”) and phrēn (“mind”), schizophrenia features the splitting of social and mental cohesion. The chapter suggests how it is possible to analyze this Surrealist process of ‘splitting’ using different levels of description: queer, schizoanalytical, and politico-aesthetic.

The work of Guy Hocquenghem is at the beginning of modern theorization of sexuality: it is part of the wave of theory that emerges in France after May 1968; and it is republished as the second title in the first year of Duke UP’s ‘Series Q’ in 1993. This chapter considers the affective charge of his writing, as it is located in his style and its mannered affectedness, and in its historical context within the French left as it attempts to articulate class, race, and gender in 1970s France. His queerness inheres less in a particular kind of affect, such as a particular relation to shame, than in the division between feeling mutually with others and feeling ‘in relation’. Feeling back into the affective intensity of Hocquenghem’s moment may offer resources for contemporary queer thought, in ways that thinking about queer theory does not.