Throughout my thesis I have been careful to establish parallels (and divergences) between Deleuze and Guattari on the one hand and Romanticism, the counterculture and Surrealism on the other. These three movements have all, as we have seen in Chapter One, been seen as important 'sources' for Carter's narrative. Similarly, Lacan, Freud, Derrida and even Nietzsche have been identified by various critics as prominent 'referees' with respect to Carter's novel in general and the character of Dr Hoffman in particular. I have also, at various points, expanded on the (dis)similarities between these thinkers and Deleuze and Guattari.

That there are certain similarities between the work of these two theorists and Carter's fictional criticism is thus hardly surprising. I believe, nevertheless, that the terminological and thematic echoes of Deleuze and Guattari in Dr Hoffman are not merely the result of the aforementioned correspondences. Rather, I would say, on the basis of the resemblances between Deleuze and Guattari's desiring-machines and Hoffman's/Carter's desire machines, we could conclude that Deleuze and Guattari's work can be seen as a direct 'source' for Carter's narrative. As I have said in Chapter One, however, I do not intend to rest my case on this direct relationship: this thesis is not only about the 'influence question'. What is more important, I think, is the question whether the 'bringing into resonance' of Carter and Deleuze and Guattari is productive. And I believe it is.

The dialogue between Carter's novel and Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisations sheds, to a certain extent, a new light on the novel. No longer do I grope in the dark or am I lost in bewilderment but I have, instead, become convinced that Dr Hoffman contains a consistent and positive message. While the novel airs a sense of melancholy and disillusionment, I do not believe it to be a pessimistic novel. Rather, I would say, it has a thoroughly optimistic tone. The 'acrobats of desire', who 'dismember themselves limb by limb' and 'as the pièce de résistance juggle with their eyes' (which, as we have seen, symbolise the phallus), 'have come' thus the 'void' called 'nebulous time is almost upon us' (pp. 113-114, 165). Similarly, the male philosophers of desire have disintegrated the subject and the nihilistic void of postmodernism is subsequently almost upon us. But the negative, reactive nihilism of people like Baudrillard and Derrida is, as I have argued in Chapter Two, opposed by the positive, active nihilism of people like Deleuze and Guattari. They work towards a new 'ethics' of thought which tries to locate value and meaning within the postmodern void. They seek a middle between a 'fixed' morality and a interminable relativism. They seek for, what Foucault has called, a 'materialist metaphysics' and it is, I believe, exactly this conception that Carter uses to mediate between the British position which--as put forward by influential critics like Kate Millet and Toril Moi--is radically anti-essentialist and anti-psychoanalytic and the French position--represented by, for instance, Irigaray--which remains psychoanalytic and has consequently been accused of essentialism. To bridge the gap between these seemingly mutually exclusive positions, Carter turns to Deleuze and Guattari's redefinition of a psychoanalysis which is nor biologically nor sociologically essentialist; a post-dialectical frame of thought which 'deconstructs' the binary polarity between physics and metaphysics. In Foucault's words:

Psychoanalysis should, thus, be understood as a metaphysical practice since it concerns itself with phantasms. It is this thoroughly revised psychoanalysis, this metaphysics freed from its original profundity (biologism) as well as from a supreme being (Oedipus), this de-essentialised materialist frame of thought that can be useful for women because it, as Foucault writes, concerns the materiality of the simulacrum, and that is exactly what women has become (again) in poststructuralist theory: simulacra of men. Thus Deleuze's theory is useful for feminism, despite of itself: it deals with the materiality, with the bodily roots of subjectivity and thus reconnects the woman to her own gendered body. This is not an essentialised body, however, but rather a body as a surface on which different forces interact, a body as a metaphysical surface of integrated material and symbolic elements. The material and the symbolic are no longer opposites but come together: biological characteristics of the female sex do, undeniably, have social/symbolic implications whereas social/symbolic inscriptions of women certainly have emotional, bodily effects (in Carter's words: 'There is a materiality to symbols'). We can, thus, leave behind binary polarity without doing away with difference altogether as a result of Deleuze's criticism of the categorical image of thought. Indeed, as Foucault writes, after Deleuze, new thought is possible. Deleuze and Guattari open up possibilities for feminist thought, but there is still a long way to go, as Carter's and other feminist's criticism point out.

Carter makes a speculative start towards a post-poststructuralist thought which does attack the nihilistic tendencies of some branches of postmodernism that hail the end of all difference including the sexual difference (think for instance of Baudrillard's notion of the trans-sexual), but does not take (sexual) difference as a ground for a new, politically correct morality which grants minorities a morally superior position. I would say that Dr Hoffman, like Anti-Oedipus, is a book of ethics. It also asks questions about value in these postmodern/poststructuralist times. In my limited reading of the novel I have mainly focused on the questions she poses regarding women and the feminine. What is the value and meaning of women and the feminine--not only of these signifiers but also of their everyday experience. Her speculative answers do not postulate women as the better sex, nor does it scold men for their alleged repression of women throughout history (with history extending into the present). This, in her view, would be a vulnerable (because dialectical) position. Its meaning and value, rather, seems to be political, that is to say, directed at political change. She seems to say that women, too, can have access to places of enunciation and should demand this right to speak as and for themselves. This, I think, is what she achieves in Dr Hoffman. She no longer speaks as a male impersonator, but starts, instead, to speak as herself. She finds her explicitly gendered but nevertheless unique 'voice' which cannot be reduced to and be denounced as a politically correct feminist who, as John Bayley writes, sticks to the 'party line' of a postmodern 'militant orthodoxy'. I refer, again, to the fierce criticism of several important feminists, among which Andrea Dworkin and Susanne Kappeler, on Carter's work but also to my own valuation of Dr Hoffman in order to invalidate Bayley's reproach. Rather, I would say, she produces an 'ex-centric', radical 'fictional criticism' which optimistically/positively affirms the possibilities for difference without dualism, female subjectivity, female desire, feminist enunciation, and political change. As the last line of the novel professes: 'Unbidden she comes' (p. 221). And she's here to stay.