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

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.