De-/Reterritorialization in Ezekiel: Eschatology, Prophecy, and the ‘Schizophrenic Physician’

Abstract

The Biblical prophet Ezekiel has received spurious diagnoses of schizophrenia. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus invert the category, recasting schizophrenia not as a clinical diagnosis but as a process of ‘deterritorialization’ (always paired with ‘reterritorialization’) which may produce liberative ways of life. Reading Ezekiel such, the first chapter depicts a delirious deterritorialization of Israel’s religious life as a result of the trauma of the Babylonian Exile, while the last chapters contain a reterritorialization of these features in the novel eschatological key of the New Jerusalem. Thus, Ezekiel is an example of what I call the ‘schizophrenic physician,’ in that he participates in deterritorialization and creatively senses and discerns new reterritorialized constellations of elements, actively enabling new forms of life. Ezekiel is therefore read into Deleuze’s ‘clinical-critical project’, which both deliriously affirms life and engages in ‘symptomatology,’ a discernment of signs and events common both to medicine and literature. Contemporary clinical–political examples of sensitive world-diagnosis creating the possibility for healing are discussed via two examples: the discovery of the relationship of childhood trauma to poor medical outcomes, and in the literature around the concept of global ‘syndemics’ tying together forces as diverse as climate change and ecology, capitalism, and metabolic dysfunction.

1. Introduction

In 1947, the psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers explained the bewildering book of Ezekiel by labeling him a paranoid schizophrenic, explaining away his ecstatic writings and strange actions through a psychological diagnosis (Halperin 1993, pp. 32–38; Jaspers [1947] 1968).1 Even if this were well-intentioned, it would perhaps be an inauspicious place to start for anyone except the philosopher–therapist–activist writing pair Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for whom schizophrenia is famously not the end of discussion but an opening of possibility—schizophrenia understood as a creative mode of experimentation instead of a medical label for an individual. It is, of course, impossible to diagnose Ezekiel, but let us assume Ezekiel was “schizophrenic” in a Deleuzoguattarian sense (despite writing as a psychiatrist, I will hew to their provocative and even playful usage of clinical terms instead of their contemporary medical definitions). By reading Ezekiel through this lens, we are witness to an example of deterritorialization and reterritorialization—key philosophical terms for Deleuze and Guattari—of Ezekiel’s entire priestly religious world, and a dynamic that is especially evident in the uprooting of religious imagery in light of Jerusalem’s destruction by the Babylonians and in the eschatological Temple, the New Jerusalem, found at the end of the book of Ezekiel. Thus, this paper argues that deterritorialization and reterritorialization allows for a new reading of the book of Ezekiel, placing Deleuze and Guattari in a long tradition of theological and social interpretation of this important text in the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh. Exploring the figure of Ezekiel anew, we find this prophet a skilled ‘symptomatologist’ of signs, symbols, and events, a role explored in Deleuze’s writings on the ‘clinical and critical’ project where literature and psychiatry meet. As such, he creatively identifies a novel constellation of symptoms or signs in the chaos of happenings, just as writers like Kafka and Sacher-Masoch, or the physicians Drs. Alzheimer or Parkinson, have done. I thus conclude with an example of this prophetic and ‘schizophrenic’ role that is applicable to contemporary clinical-political challenges, where new constellations of emerging threats to flourishing must be identified.

2. Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization in the Book of Ezekiel

After describing Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of de- and reterritorialization, two major related terms in Deleuze and Guattari’s seminal A Thousand Plateaus, we proceed with a textual and conceptual exploration of the book of Ezekiel. It is my contention that Ezekiel can be read as an experience in de- and reterritorialization, with the beginning chapter of Ezekiel as an experience of deterritorialization of previously fixed religious elements, and the concluding chapters as a reterritorialization of these features in an eschatological light.

While deterritorialization is a complex concept which shifts and evolves across Deleuze and Guattari’s work, fundamentally it is the disconnection of previously associated elements. These associated elements can be physical, symbolic, personal, cultural, psychic, linguistic, and so on, and create a specific world of meanings and identities. Any settled and stable network—where each thing has its meaning, person their role, and desire its appropriate target—can be deterritorialized by forces as diverse as capitalism, war, artistic innovation, nature or cosmic processes, and so on. Thus, the process can be described as “the decoding of flows”, the “reverse side of territorialities” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, p. 382), or drawing a “line of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, p. 508). Referencing an earlier deterritorializing moment, they report that a “force fractured the codes, undid the signifiers, passed under the structures, set the flows in motion, and effected breaks at the limit of desire: a breakthrough” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, p. 369). While deterritorialization has liberatory connotations (in both the dynamism and the freedom from old forms), disconnected elements can be reconnected in good or bad ways. Thus, one risks “archaic, residual, … restricted”, “neurotic,” or even “perverse reterritorializations” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, pp. 363, 382).

Returning to the biblical context, the history Ezekiel takes up is the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and the siege of the inviolable city of Jerusalem. From the beginning of Ezekiel’s life, Judah had been a minor player among the powers of the Ancient Near East, but the truly world-shattering moments came in 597 and 586 BCE, which brought that inconceivable event, the destruction of the Temple, and two waves of forced migration to Babylon (Blenkinsopp 1990, p. 10). Ezekiel was in the first wave of exiles, and thus Ch. 1 opens “in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar” (1:3 NRSV).

It is difficult to overstate the complete dislocation which accompanied these events. After all, God had promised Israel the land and that the house of David would be established forever, and by this point the monarchy had been established for centuries (cf. 2 Sam 7, Ex 29:45–46). One people, one history, one God, one temple, one land… and now this? Blenkinsopp (1990, p. 12) puts it this way:

With the temple destroyed, the sacrificial system brought to an end, and an entire segment of the population relocated outside the territorial jurisdiction of their God, the very possibility of their worship was called into question. We may be sure that the question asked by the psalmist, how it was possible to sing hymns to Yahweh in a foreign land, arose out of a real dilemma.

(Ps. 137:4)

Moreover, Ezekiel himself was a hereditary Zadokite priest trained at the center of cultic life at the Jerusalem temple. Thus, prior to the deportation, we can imagine Ezekiel’s life with the temple (in the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari) as a settled, striated, territorialized, Majoritarian regime. A Thousand Plateaus takes up this event directly:

The whole history of the Temple … has meaning only in relation to renewed proceedings of destruction, the two supreme moments of which came with Nebuchadnezzar and Titus … Let misfortune befall us: this formula punctuates Jewish history. It is we who must follow the most deterritorialized line, the line of the scapegoat, but we will change its sign, we will turn it into the positive line of our subjectivity, our Passion, our proceeding or grievance.

(Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, p. 122)

This is foreshadowing, perhaps, of how a certain Jewish deterritorialization of religious imagery opens up new possibilities for charting this “positive line.” In any case, deterritorialization, as described above, is that desedimenting process which removes an element from its prior situation or relationships—be they geologic, biologic, cultural–linguistic, psychological, spiritual, etc.—and brings it into new situations and connections; it is allied with the Deleuzoguattarian concepts of the War Machine, the line of flight, the nomad, and the minor use of the major language. Anti-Oedipus, the predecessor volume to A Thousand Plateaus, is sanguine about the potential for liberation through deterritorialization and schizophrenia, hence the infamous ‘accelerationist fragment’: “But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? … For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough…” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, pp. 239–40).

But leaving home is risky and deterritorialization also can be a death or exile; there are many ways to botch the procedure. Thus, by the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari have grown more cautious, a reaction, perhaps, to the unsuccess of the soixante-huitards and an instance of the recalibration of the French left in following decades (Holland 1991, p. 55). “Staying stratified,” A Thousand Plateaus reminds us, “is not the worst that can happen”:

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don’t reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying.

(Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, pp. 160–61)

The experience of exile is an experience of deterritorialization—a moment when previous connections, correlations, or understandings between parts are thrown up in the air—yet there is a possibility for this to lead to death or to new life.

Let us turn towards the text itself, beginning with the first chapter of Ezekiel. Ezekiel’s bewilderment seems to take the form of religious images and elements swirling around him. On that day, “among the exiles by the river Chebar,” (1:1) the hand of the Lord comes upon him and he, in a trance-like state, experiences a stormy wind and thunderous sounds. He sees a semblance of four living creatures of human form, but with four faces and four wings, with feet like a calf which “sparkled like burnished bronze” (1:7). They each had a face of a human, lion, ox, and eagle, and “Each moved straight ahead; wherever the spirit would go, they went, without turning as they went” (1:12). Each of these were above a corresponding “wheel on the earth,” with their “construction being something like a wheel within a wheel,” with eyes on the rims and the spirits of the living creatures in the wheels.2 Lightning flashes, torches and burning coals are glimpsed in the “living creatures dart[ing] to and fro” (1:14). Overhead was “something like a [crystal] dome,” (1:22) and the creatures’ wings moved with the sound of an army. Above the dome was a “likeness” of a sapphire throne, and on this was “something that seemed like a human form” (1:26), which Ezekiel identifies as the Lord, hedging his language multiple times over: “this was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord” (1:28).

This ecstatic or trance-like state—which we may call ‘delirium’ (Smith 1997, p. xxxix)3—draws from multiple sources: earlier forms of prophecy, priestly lore, and ancient poetry. Yet biblical commentator Joseph Blenkinsopp observes that this is “quite unique and different from anything found in the literature up to this point” (Blenkinsopp 1990, p. 20). From this mystical and ecstatic mélange, it is possible to pull out traceable elements. Blenkinsopp alone mentions resonances with sources as diverse as Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, the Psalms, Habakkuk, 1st and 2nd Kings, and Isaiah (Blenkinsopp 1990, pp. 20–22).4 The four angelic figures are intimidating cherubim familiar to ancient Near Eastern iconography, and upon which Yahweh was said to be enthroned in 1st Samuel (Blenkinsopp 1990, p. 21, cf. 1 Sam 4:4). Likewise, the firmament Ezekiel glimpses echoes with part of the vision Moses saw on Sinai in the book of Exodus (Blenkinsopp 1990, p. 22, cf. Ex 24:9–10). The wheels reference wheels found in the temple in 1st Kings 7:27–39, and even the here-and-now presence of God at the meeting place of heaven and earth is like the centrality of Jerusalem and the temple. Even the halting description of God reminds us of Genesis; there, humanity is created in the likeness of God, and now, God is presented in the likeness of humanity, using a similar Hebrew phrasing (Blenkinsopp 1990, p. 22).5 Even the general structure is reminiscent of God’s chariot, or the arc of the covenant, and that former era when God’s presence was more mobile.

Yet, these familiar elements do not mean that this is familiar territory. The entire event is the deterritorialization of the many forms of Israel’s religious life. These swirled in a social and personal context in which they have no longer had any settled meaning. In light of the forced exile and the incomprehensibility that was the exile and destruction of the temple, we must read Ezekiel 1 as the deterritorialization of Israel’s priestly religious life.6

Before analyzing Ezekiel’s specific role as the ‘schizophrenic’ prophet, it will be helpful to examine the concluding chapters of Ezekiel, chapters 40–48, to understand the eschatological vision presented there, which may be described as a eschatological or utopian reterritorialization. Ezekiel’s first vision is given at the traditional date of priestly ordination, and this last vision is given at the traditional date of priestly retirement.7 Ezekiel is given a vision of a restored Temple and land, with God’s presence and people in harmony. This vision of the temple in the promised land is the holy reterritorialization of Israel’s priestly imagery in an eschatological key; it offers the taste of shalom that speaks of the goodness of God.

The rigorous order—architectural designs given cubit by cubit—and square dimensions are symbolic of cosmic, transcendent, and holy order, but are not identical to the dimensions of Solomon’s temple.8 Even the distribution of the tribes and the land is idealized in geometric precision and differs somewhat from the descriptions given previously, and resident aliens will be given allotments among the tribes even if the hierarchical Zadokite imagination cannot imagine them approach the center of the temple (Cook 2018, pp. 1235, 1241, 1245). All social life will be done in honesty, and even housing evictions will cease (Ezek 45:9). There will be a river flowing from below the threshold of the temple towards the southeast—a queer direction with respect to the orthogonal blueprints—causing trees to fruit and fish to multiply and flowing directly towards the Dead Sea to fructify it.9 Even the direction of the entrance of the temple is the same as the direction of the entrance to the Garden of Eden. Referring to Israel’s religious concepts of covenant-fidelity and blessing, rabbi and biblical scholar Moshe Greenberg writes that “In terms unmistakably related to this priestly ideal, Ezekiel first proclaims God’s resolve to reestablish his presence again in Israel, then sets out his blueprint for so doing” (Greenberg 1984, p. 183).

Other scholarship supports the use of Ezekiel’s temple imagery as a sort of creative reimagination of prior forms. Landscape architect and biblical scholar I-Chun Kuo understands Ezekiel’s proleptic temple city through historical landscapes, town planning, and land use patterns. This idealized, self-sufficient, and lush city was resilient, well-defended against war and famine, and one which indeed embodied the “covenant of well-being” (Kuo 2018).

The contributions of these other scholars, while not operating in a Deleuzian key, nonetheless fit well within the present Deleuzian conceptual structure. Thus, I propose we understand this leafy temple-city, this New Jerusalem, as creative advancement and as a reterritorialization of Israel’s religious imagination in an eschatological key. In fact, the advancement could even be the conceptual creation of eschatology itself—at least in the Abrahamic traditions—with Ezekiel’s New Jerusalem as its archetype. To use another of A Thousand Plateaus’ conceptual contrasts, while the temple is admittedly an ‘arborescent’ image, we can see that this eschatological vision goes on to connect ‘rhizomatically’ to the other eschatological scriptural texts or visions of shalom, including Eden and even the Christian New Testament’s Book of Revelation.10 Perhaps we may identify the (re)territorialized with the priestly, and the deterritorializing with the prophetic; their necessary interrelation perhaps explains the simultaneous prophetic mysticism and priestly imagery in Biblical eschatology. In any case, Ezekiel’s reterritorialization of deterritorialized religious imagery, the New Jerusalem, first emerges in these final chapters of Ezekiel and is a creative advance in Israel’s religious life, a thick vision of shalom in an eschatological key. This enabled new life for the Jewish receivers of Ezekiel even in the diaspora, and beautiful eschatology still serves as a motivation for life-affirming action in the world today. God may be the God of Israel, but God is with God’s people, wherever they are and whoever they may be.

Before proceeding, we must address the tension in merging this account with Deleuze and Guattari’s eschatology. In A Thousand Plateaus, what may be deemed their eschatological vision is not affiliated with reterritorialization but rather absolute and positive deterritorialization, a deterritorialization that fundamentally exceeds all reterritorializations (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, pp. 508–10). I believe we can best understand this tension by realizing that, qua text, any attempt to manifest de- and reterritorialization must be within the limits of text itself, a challenge attested to by the introductory chapter of A Thousand Plateaus itself. Absolute deterritorialization, of course, is apophatically beyond words altogether, yet it is the eschatological horizon which “brings about the creation of a new earth,” where it is “the earth consolidated, connected with the Cosmos, brought into the Cosmos following lines of creation that cut across it as so many becomings” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, p. 510). If it is truly liberatory potential, it is also the inbreaking of flourishing and right-relationship (shalom). Thus, since we are constrained to words and the original ‘territory’ is no place to stay, this paper claims that Ezekiel describes or prophesies a moment of absolute deterritorialization hesitantly yet necessarily put into words, a dynamic familiar to other mystical experiences. Thus, the destination at the end of the book—perhaps the best Ezekiel is able to do—is a vision of shalom that is a utopian reterritorialization of Israel’s deterritorialized religious elements.

3. Prophecy, the ‘Clinical and Critical’ Project, and the ‘Schizophrenic Physician’

We have discussed how the opening and closing sections of the book of Ezekiel are examples of deterritorialization and reterritorialization; let us now turn to the prophet Ezekiel himself. As mentioned, Ezekiel was raised a priest, not a prophet: the trauma of exile and religious–political mystical experience can be said to have made him a prophet. More specifically, at the beginning of the ‘schizophrenic’ experience of Ezekiel 1, when the “hand of the Lord [came upon] him,” (1:3) he was still described as “the priest Ezekiel son of Buzi”. By the end it, he is a prophet of God to the people (2:5).

Exile is God’s betrayal of God’s promises, turning away from the people in response to the people’s betrayal. The deterritorialization event of Ezekiel 1 is a betrayal, too, of everything known and understood, but in the name of a deeper fidelity. Deleuze and Guattari describe it this way: “It is this double turning away that draws the positive line of flight. The prophet is the main figure in this assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, p. 123). They announce that

It is the regime of betrayal, universal betrayal, in which the true man never ceases to betray God just as God betrays man, with the wrath of God defining the new positivity … Even the prophet, unlike the seer-priest, is fundamentally a traitor and thus fulfills God’s order better than anyone who remained faithful could.

(Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, p. 123)

Almost as if speaking about Ezekiel, Deleuze and Guattari say “The prophet does not know how to talk, God puts the words in this mouth: word-ingestion, a new form of semiophagy … he anticipates and detects the powers (puissance) of the future rather than applying past and present powers (pouvoirs)” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, p. 124; cf. Ezek 3:1–3).11 Betrayal and fidelity, detecting the powers of the future out of the present wrath of God, drawing the positive line of flight: this is the schizophrenic prophet and author Ezekiel. He even embodies ‘catatonia,’ the other pole of the schizophrenic, through his strange muteness and agonizing postures (Smith 1997, p. xxxviii and Ezek 3:22–27, 4:4–8).

Let us examine Deleuze’s clinical and critical project, for it is the intersection of the literary and medical perspectives and offers the aperture towards ethical implications. Deleuze’s book Essays Critical and Clinical (Deleuze 1997) is the key text for this, but as Smith’s excellent introduction shows, this is a project which began in the 1960s and which is threaded through his other writings wherever there is a proximity between literature and psychiatry. This is to say that much of Deleuze’s writing, including the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, are part of this project.12 There are two poles of this clinical–critical project: the first is using writing schizophrenically to create new possibilities of life, for “[t]he aim of writing,” for Deleuze, “is to carry life to the state of a non-personal power” (Smith 1997, p. lii, citing Deleuze and Parnet 1987, p. 50). This is a minoritarian becoming, a swirl of affects, percepts, and delirium, whose non-Oedipal contents concern races, nations, and world-historical events, with the schizophrenic passing through zones of intensity (Smith 1997, pp. xxxvii–xxxix). Ezekiel exemplifies this task and this role.

The second part of the clinical-critical project is symptomatology. These are named syndromes, a certain recognizable constellation of signs and symptoms, seen, for example, in Alzheimer’s Disease, or Kafka-esque literature. Dr. Alzheimer invented the disease by ‘isolating’ a group of free-floating and disconnected symptoms, conceptually weaving them into a new clinical syndrome. This is the creation of a clinical concept, an important advance. Like a constellation, once seen, it cannot be unseen. Charles Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837), depicted a corpulent character’s drowsy behavior in such detail that what is now called Obesity Hypoventilation Syndrome was for many years simply called Pickwickian Syndrome (Burwell et al. 1956)—the first description of this condition ‘in the literature,’ as it were. The clinical and critical are revealed to be unexpectedly proximate. There are Deleuze’s examples, too, especially sadism and masochism, both of which are psychological descriptors but whose names are derived from the authors de Sade and Sacher-Masoch. The trend of diagnosing authors with psychological conditions is misplaced. Rather, Deleuze says in the Logic of Sense that “[a]uthors, if they are great, are more like doctors than patients,” which is to say that they are themselves astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists:

There is always a great deal of art involved in the grouping of symptoms [… forming] the new figure of a disorder or illness. Clinicians who are able to renew a symptomatologic picture produce a work of art; conversely, artists are clinicians, not with respect to their own case, nor even with respect to a case in general; rather, they are clinicians of civilization.

(Deleuze 1990, p. 237 quoted in Smith 1997, p. xvii)

To continue the metaphor of the constellation, if the stars are deterritorialized or produced elements, the function of the diagnostician is to identify and name, and hence to coin, the emerging assemblage/constellation, a moment of reterritorializing the stars. Once this new concept is crafted—reminding readers of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptually creative role for philosophers, scientists, and artists in What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 1994, pp. 2, 5)13—it can be shared with others and discussed or addressed. Kafka’s work provided a symptomatologic diagnosis of the ‘diabolical powers’ of the future (capitalism, bureaucracy, fascism, Stalinism) that were knocking at the door in his time (Smith 1997, p. xix, paraphrasing Deleuze and Parnet 1987, p. 123). Obviously, the author themself is not especially important; rather, Deleuze says the function of the proper name is to refer “to one or several assemblages; the proper name brings about an individuation by ‘hecceity’, not at all by subjectivity… Charlotte Brontë designates a state of the winds more than a person” (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, p. 120). The success of this process is determined not by transcendent criteria, Good and Evil, but by immanent criteria, good and bad. “Put differently, the question that links literature and life, in both its ontological and its ethical aspects, is the question of health” (Smith 1997, p. xv). Authors (or philosophers and artists) themselves may often be of ill health, but this is because an even greater force of vitality bears down upon them and uses them as its channel.

This frailty, however, does not simply stem from their illnesses or neuroses, says Deleuze, but from having seen or felt something in life that is too great for them, something unbearable ‘that has put on them the quiet mark of death.’ But this is also what Nietzsche called the ‘great health,’ the vitality that supports them through the illnesses of the lived (Smith 1997, p. xv).

The question to be asked, then, and the success or genius of the diagnostician, is if their work invents “a possibility of life, a way of existing” (Smith 1997, p. xv, quoting Deleuze 1995, p. 100). This certainly seems necessary for Ezekiel, whose entire world of meaning and survival was shaken. No way to go home, yet no way to stay.

We have to see creation as tracing a path between impossibilities … A creator who isn’t grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator … Without a set of impossibilities, you won’t have a line of flight, the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth.

(Smith 1997, p. xlvii, quoting Deleuze 1995, p. 133)

Once again, creation and betrayal are experimentation towards life in the face of the powers of death. It is my contention therefore that we can read Ezekiel not only as the schizophrenic grasping producer of texts, experimenting towards life, but also as the diagnostician, attempting to isolate constellations—new connections among otherwise disorganized parts—and thereby pull new meanings out of the whirlwind of events and signs. Thus, Ezekiel is the model of the ‘schizophrenic physician.’14 We should ask what exactly Ezekiel discerns, then, and if it is productive of life. What Ezekiel discovers is the rich eschatological vision, that mouth-watering lure whose appeal is full of divine beauty and goodness. The final chapters of Ezekiel are a shalom-filled reterritorialization of the deterritorialized elements of Jewish religious life, taken up and recast into an eschatological key which was no less powerful for being intangible. Indeed, there was an increase in the life it made possible, for it should go without saying that eschatology has profoundly motivated human action and human history. Ezekiel 40–48 is the first mention of the New Jerusalem—and this concept is expanded upon in Zechariah, Isaiah, and the Christian book of Revelation, as well as other minor works. Thus, New Jerusalem eschatology was a creative achievement, an achievement which has motivated loving action towards life and flourishing in light of the beauty of the kingdom of shalom. This creative achievement was made possible through the fidelity of betrayal and the beautiful reterritorialization of deterritorialized religious imagery. Ezekiel discerned an eschatological vision, a reterritorialization of Israel’s religious life that manifests shalom and that makes life thinkable again after exile. Ezekiel was able to creatively discover what is really happening or really arriving: a new pattern, perhaps, among the many things that are taking place. By doing so, Ezekiel changes the possibilities of Israel’s future. If a community can see a future of redemption, if a “new … poet” can be found who “could take up the … past and—rather than use it for nostalgia or ersatz mimesis—project it into vibrant new ways … to live and be” (Lear 2008, p. 51), the community can live into that promise.15 At its best, this is what it means to prophetically sense and to live into theologian Jürgen Moltmann’s anagogical (even eschatological) future as adventus—the anticipated arrival of the other, a truly new event which arrives from the future into the present—instead of the future as futurum, which is merely the predictable continuation of the present.16 For Levinas, “To conceive the future is to fore-stall” (Levinas 1979, p. 166). We are always in some sense in mitzrayim/maitzar, waiting for what we do not know: a new person, a new people, a new way to live and to be.

4. Diagnosing the World, Coining Constellations

As a healthcare worker and physician, I would like to end these reflections via a coda of a pair of tangible ethical applications. We may do so by following Ezekiel the ‘diagnostician.’ By this, following the argument above, I mean creative diagnosis in the midst of a chaotic world, conceptual innovation that leads to the possibility of new life. We are in a moment of deterritorialization, when the toy ‘Ant Farms’ of our personal and collective lives are increasingly technologically, ecologically, socially, and politically shaken; in the midst of the reterritorialization which follows, discernment and correct diagnosis of the moment help to sustain deterritorialization’s liberative effects in the new context. Thus, I raise two examples of sensitive world-diagnosis which create or isolate new syndromes: new constellations of symptoms and signs. Pulling together the example of Ezekiel and those described in Deleuze and Guattari’s clinical-critical project, the role of what I call the ‘schizophrenic physician’ becomes more clear, as one who both experiences or channels deterritorialization and diagnoses the times while undergoing strange combinations of illness and vitality. While being disjointed from their context, these figures also open up new ways of surviving and thriving. These creative accomplishments allow us to describe, and hopefully respond, to our present moment and to sense and move towards flourishing.

The first of the practical examples is that of Adverse Childhood Events, the so-called ACE scores that quantify various forms of childhood trauma and which have strong predictive value for adult physical and mental health. Vincent Felitti was a California physician working with a medical weight loss program in the 1980s who was mystified why successful participants were leaving the program early or regaining their weight (Stevens 2012). His curiosity and sensitivity led him to conducting interviews and discovering, to his surprise, and tragically, that many of these participants had histories of childhood abuse; for some, extreme weight gain had been a form of unconscious coping or shielding themselves from unwanted attention. Through the keyhole of this specific moment in time, group of people, and set of experiences, this was the initial identification of a constellation of diverse signs and symptoms—‘failing’ a program despite early success, difficult to manage obesity, and childhood trauma—which was the symptomatological or diagnostic moment of insight that Felitti shared with Ezekiel and the clinical-critical project discussed above. This finding was at first dismissed, and these stories must never be ‘just so’ stories that attempt to explain everything and everyone. Yet, ever since that first identification, the influence of early trauma on physical and mental health has spawned many therapeutic approaches and become a vast field of research., including a renewed interest in theological understandings of trauma and healing, as well as the interrelationships between body, society, and mind.17 Beyond the public health impact, this work also greatly impacted individual patients, who reported relief in freedom from the silence and turned their pain into catharsis, connection, and purpose. Far from destabilizing patients, systematically asking and studying the topic led to a reduction in symptoms and health care needs. One elderly patient was able to speak to the National Press Club about the connection between their early abuse and adult challenges, while “One [comment], from an elderly woman, summarized the others: ‘Thank you for asking. I feared I would die and no one would ever know what had happened’” (Felitti 2019). By understanding the connections between trauma and health and being attentive to deeper realities, Felitti’s story shows a way to better understand one’s patients and the world; to be faithful to that work, one sometimes has to betray the diagnostic categories and procedures one was first taught. Thus, the identification and naming of the constellation creates new possibilities for understanding and response. Further, the passion behind the patients’ metabolization of the “unbearable ‘…the quiet mark of death’,” and the purpose Felitti and colleagues themselves found in the work, may represent a contemporary illuminative example of Nietzsche’s “‘great health’ … the vitality that supports them” (Smith 1997, p. xv).

A second, communal, example can be found in the emerging concept of syndemics. A syndemic is a synergistic combination of disease processes, each of which potentiates the other and have common roots; there are many examples in various times and places, with the first formal use of the term exploring the synergy of social exclusion, violence, AIDS, and drug use in specific urban communities through the lens of a critical medical anthropologist actively involved in addressing these realities (Singer 1994). Beyond the specific constellation Singer highlighted, there was also conceptual innovation in the idea of a syndemic itself, a concept which has gone on to make possible to think anew the history and enmeshment of a variety of interlocking challenges. In one recent example, a Lancet Commission report described a global syndemic of three entities: metabolic disease, undernutrition, and climate change. While their initial remit was only the study of global metabolic disease, they found they could not speak of this in isolation.

These three pandemics…represent The Global Syndemic that affects most people in every country and region worldwide. They constitute a syndemic, or synergy of epidemics, because they co-occur in time and place, interact with each other to produce complex sequelae, and share common underlying societal drivers.

(Swinburn et al. 2019)

While this is a collective and scientific document, by perceptively connecting the dots between climate, food, and physical health, they too are able to name an emerging constellation that threatens health. In naming and identifying through a variety of methods, they also give the possibility to act on it, as others have done for other ‘syndemics’ and pandemics past and present.18 Both the identification of specific syndemics among the intensifying flows of modernity, as well as the creation of the syndemic concept itself out of the flux, highlights the power of the clinical-critical project as applied to practical modern difficulties.

This, then, returning to our philosophical framing, is the role of the prophet: to stand askance to one’s own time and ways of thought, like a blacksmith, the hammer of attention forging a future on the anvil of the present. Like Moses before the Amalakites, God raises the arms of God’s prophets to bring life to God’s people. Each rise of the blacksmith’s arm is a betrayal as it unsettles and touches the Plane of Consistency; each blow on the anvil is an articulation of the organism or the creation of a concept, a faithful evolution towards a new possibility for life.19 New conceptual creations or diagnostic realizations—be they with individual patients or finding connections among the largest patterns—are examples illuminating the dynamics that Ezekiel and Deleuze and Guattari have charted.

5. Conclusions

We have seen how the book of Ezekiel allows us access to profound moments of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of Israel’s religious imagery in the eschatological key. In Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical (not clinical) use of the term, Ezekiel understood as a ‘schizophrenic’ guide helps to make sense of his strange and chaotic thoughts. Deleuze and Guattari’s thought allows us to invert the negativity of that label, finding that his fidelity and betrayal opens up new forms of life. This is not only in the deterritorialized line of flight he charts himself, nor even in his writing, which enacts the Deleuzoguattarian description of the book in rhizomatic contact with the world, where “the book assures the deterritorialization of the world” (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983, p. 11). Ezekiel is a model of the ‘schizophrenic physician’ in that he holds together deterritorialization and reterritorialization, isolating an emerging and life-giving constellation of signs and symbols: in his case the rich Biblical eschatology of the New Jerusalem, which creates an opening to new understandings, new actions, new communities, and new possibilities in life. Just as the practical clinical examples of the trauma ACE studies and syndemics show, there is an ethical opportunity in practicing attentive symptomatology in a complex world. Ezekiel and Deleuze and Guattari call their listeners to mint a few new constellations.