Abstract

Foucault's adjuration, which is to be found in the essay in which he notoriously announced that the century will be ‘Deleuzian’, would seem to have fallen on deaf ears to the extent that the notion of the phantasm and the place it occupies in Deleuze's thinking has received astonishingly little attention. One scours the indices of the enormous body of work dedicated to the exposition of Deleuze's thought in vain to find any mention of the phantasm or of the text that lies behind his use of the concept, namely Laplanche and Pontalis's 1964 paper, ‘Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origine du fantasme’. By way, in part, of remedying this situation I propose to examine what a ‘Deleuzian’ or a ‘phantasmatic’ reading might make of Coleridge's Kubla Khan.