The Anti-Oedipus Papers. Notes and journal entries document Guattari and Deleuze's collaboration on their book Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus'. A Thousand Plateaus is the engaging and influential second part of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the remarkable collaborative project written by the philosopher. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Beyond their symmetrical relation with one another, however, the subjects of neurosis and perversion are noteworthy because they illustrate in dramatic or exaggerated form the relation of the third synthesis, the conjunctive synthesis of consumption—consummation, to the interplay of production and anti-production comprising the first two: the subject emerges only as an after-effect of the selections made by desire among various disjunctive and connective syntheses, not as the agent of selection.
Neurotics and perverts are not so by conscious choice; they are not the agents but the results of connections and disjunctions made on the body-without-organs by the interplay of forces of production and anti-production that constitute them as subjects. In the metaphysics of sovereign subjectivity, not only is that part often mistaken for the whole, but it is also attributed to the subject, when in fact the subject does no more than appropriate for itself a relatively meager portion of what has been produced and selected elsewhere.
Here the subject in fact only arises in the consuming appropriation and consummating recognition of the results of desiring-production, yet it tends to construe itself as an autonomous entity capable of taking possession of products of the processes that in fact constitute it. The process of connective synthesis is not just continual: this and then that, and then this, and so on; it is for that very reason equally evanescent. Desiring-production thus registers permanently in the psyche gets stored in memory only when it is attracted by, and its results get recorded on, the body-without-organs.
At this point, what is merely a recording-surface henceforth appears to be the source of what gets recognized in the constitution of the subject in conjunctive syntheses. Finally, the subject in turn claims mastery or ownership of the body-without-organs — or of its products: consummate experience, intensities — when it is in fact merely derivative of them.
The subject as product claims as its own the very process that constitutes it as subject. The neurotic and the pervert, as we saw, both have a fixed personal identity in which desiring-machines are locked in a specific configuration favoring either production the pervert or anti-production the neurotic.
But the forces of production and anti-production also interact in other, less rigid ways to produce mobile personality-structures which remain closer to the continual, open-ended, indefinite nature of the syntheses and therefore enjoy or suffer experience with much greater intensity. The paranoiac experiences the entire panoply of desiring-machines as threatening and wants to repel them, but without losing touch with them altogether as the catatonic does.
Here the forces of repulsion predominate, yet the forces of attraction are still in play: constantly repelling the desiring-machines, with no prospect of ever completely succeeding, is itself a form of intensity, especially compared to the zero-degree intensity of the full body-without-organs. The schizo, by contrast, affirms the forces of both attraction and repulsion, and takes them to the limit. To sum up their view of schizophrenia as a process and of the subject that results from it, Deleuze and Guattari say that the proportions of attraction and repulsion on the body-without-organs produce, starting from zero, a series of states…and the subject is born of each state in the series, is continually reborn of the following state that determines him at a given moment, consuming—consummating all these states that cause him to be born and reborn the lived state coming first, in relation to the subject that lives it.
The five paralogisms of psychoanalysis We are now in a position to contrast the dynamics of schizophrenic subjec-tivity as it emerges from the regime of syntheses comprising the schizoanalytic model of the psyche with the specifics of Oedipal subjectivity as it is constructed in the nuclear family under capitalism and subsequently reinforced by psychoanalysis.
As we shall see, Oedipal subjectivity involves a systematically illegitimate use of the same syntheses as underlie schizophrenic subjectivity and perversion and paranoia, for that matter : the schizoanalytic model of psychodynamics is thus valuable not only for giving psychiatry a materialist foundation in the operations of differential repetition, but for the critique of Oedipus that it enables and performs. In effect, everything revolves around the body-without-organs.
For it is here that the productive connections of desire register as signs. Such signs, being radically polyvocal, do not yet mean anything, but they do introduce into the machinery of desire the potential for variation — and therefore the possibility of error, and even deceit, as well.
Schizoanalysis shows the Freudian Oedipus complex to comprise a set of mistakes about the nature of desire. These mistakes are understandable, inasmuch as they reflect and indeed reinforce the apparent objective movement of reproduction in the nuclear family under capitalism, but they are serious mistakes nonetheless.
The law, however, Deleuze and Guattari insist, is not a natural or mechanical system, but rather a semiotic system, a system of representation. It is therefore comprised not of two terms — such as cause and effect, from the first of which one could deduce something certain about the latter — but of three terms: a signifier, a signified, and a referent, from the first two of which it is impossible to conclude anything directly about the third.
What really gets repressed by the prohibition is thus completely different from the false image of it produced by the prohibition: desire gets displaced onto an erroneous signified belonging to the prohibitive system of representation rather than to desire itself.
The constitutive ambivalence of the body-withoutorgans is such that it lays desire open to distortion and capture by representation at the same time and in the same process — the registration of desire in signs — that opens it to infinite variation.
But the conclusions they draw are very different: as a neo-Heideggerian existentialist, Lacan insists that the advent of semiotics in the unconscious entails the tragic loss of any direct contact between consciousness and bodily drives, as we have seen. Deleuze and Guattari agree that the unconscious is meaningless; indeed, for them, it does not comprise a single sign-system e.
Yet even though the content of representation may be unreliable, its form-of-semiosis constitutes for Deleuze and Guattari a crucial index of the extent to which a given system of representation agrees with or contravenes the dynamics of unconscious desire as understood by schizoanalysis. This criterion makes what I have called the materialist semiotics of Deleuze and Guattari a critical and even a revolutionary semiotics as well. The stance of schizoanalysis is so much more affirmative than Lacanian psychoanalysis largely because of this insistence that criteria do exist by which we can distinguish illegitimate from legitimate usage of the syntheses, and thereby evaluate the formof-semiosis, if not the content, of systems of representation.
And the psychoanalytic Oedipus can be formally distinguished as a specific betrayal of the true schizophrenic unconscious by its systematically illegitimate uses of the syntheses of desire, to which we now turn. The paralogism of application and illegitimate use of the conjunctive synthesis In doing so, however, it is worth noting one further advance Deleuze and Guattari make over Lacan. Like him, they recognize the importance of semiotics for understanding the unconscious.
Everything points in the opposite direction: the subjects of psychoanalysis arrive already Oedipalized, they demand it, they want more All that psychoanaly[sis does] is reinforce the movement, add a last burst of energy to the displacement of the entire unconscious. Yet that in no way legitimates the claims to universality made by psychoanalysis in the name of Oedipus: on the contrary, it points up the historical specificity of the nuclear family as an institution of reproduction and adds urgency to the calls made by schizoanalysis to bring psychoanalysis to the point of self-criticism and to overthrow the Oedipus in both its material and its discursive systems of representation.
Deleuze and Guattari take this argument yet one step further, for schizoanalysis is not just a materialist semiotics: it is an historical-materialist semiotics. Not only is the nuclear family as social institution the basis for Oedipalized subjects and Oedipal representations of desire including psychoanalysis alike, historically speaking it is only the latest in a long line of social institutions responsible for the construction of fixed subjectivities, and it is in some ways the weakest and the most abstract.
Fixed subjects of all kinds arise from an illegitimate use of the conjunctive synthesis that segregates one set of subjectivities from all the others and demands that an otherwise nomadic subjectivity resulting from legitimate conjunctive syntheses identify only with members of that restricted set: whites rather than blacks; men rather than women; Christians rather than Jews, and so forth. What is so striking about the nuclear family as the modern version of such segregative reproduction of subjectivity is the severity of the segregation imposed.
Even compared to pre-modern reproductive institutions, with their animals, ancestors, saints, gods, and so on — not to mention the rich multiplicities of schizophrenic subjectivity — the Oedipal subject occupies a terrain that is remarkably poor in objects of identification.
One result is that the only remaining distinctive feature supporting identification within the family is bare gender: male or female. I shall return to this constriction of possibilities in connection with the illegitimate use of the disjunctive synthesis. For now, we will note that the segregation of the nuclear family from society drastically reduces to only two the range of subject-positions generated within it: prohibited object of desire Mommy , on the one hand, and agent of the prohibition Daddy , on the other.
There is always an uncle from America; a brother who went bad; an aunt who took off with a military man; a cousin out of work, bankrupt, or a victim of the Crash; an anarchist grandfather; a grandmother in the hospital, crazy or senile The family does not engender its own ruptures. The paralogism of the double-bind and illegitimate use of the disjunctive synthesis At the same time, such Oedipalizing interpretation makes illegitimate use of the disjunctive synthesis of recording.
This is the illegitimate — that is, restrictive and exclusive — use of the disjunctive synthesis that depends directly on the segregation of the nuclear family as reproductive institution from the rest of social life and its reduction of the basis for identification to gender alone. But there are additional instances of illegitimate disjunctive synthesis comprising the Oedipus. Indeed, to focus too narrowly on the familial Oedipus and the fixed subjectpositions it constructs via identification with Daddy or Mommy would be to ignore the advances made by Lacan in the form of a linguistic or structural psychoanalysis.
For Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex is concerned only apparently i. Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari argue, the familial and the structural versions of the Oedipus, as well as the Imaginary and Symbolic registers themselves, are indistinguishable.
Or rather, the differences between them remain in force, but instead of being differences between distinct, stable entities, they are differences that define those entities only in relation to one another.
In sickness and in health, it is always Oedipus that wins: one either becomes a differentiated father-substitute and passes it on to the children in a new family, or remains an undifferentiated father-rival fixated on the old family. And neither is schizophrenic subjectivity definable exclusively in terms of Mommy and Daddy, for if a schizo does identify with parental figures, it is only temporarily and as one among many polyvocal substitutes for other figures altogether: some animal, group, god, or planet having nothing to do with the Oedipal family.
No one is really exclusively male or female any more than they are exclusively heterosexual or homosexual; everyone is at the same time neither and both: neither in the sense of remaining irreducible to any single essence, while still entertaining elements of both, yet without combining the two into any kind of synthesis that would eliminate the differences between them.
Such is the form of subjectivity produced by inclusive disjunctive synthesis. As in the case of illegitimate conjunctive syntheses which fail to completely segregate the nuclear family, exclusive gender disjunctions even within the nuclear family ultimately fail to impose binary sexuality.
The family supposedly starts with only two sexes available for identification: male and female. But that illegitimately excludes homosexuality: if we include homosexuality, the number of sexes increases to four in alphabetical order: heterosexual female, heterosexual male, homosexual female, homosexual male. These may include body-hair, bone and muscle mass, breast size, propensity to aggression or passivity, to the emotional or rational, and so forth.
The nuclear family, by contrast, largely because as the principal reproductive institution under capitalism it is segregated from society at large, makes systematic illegitimate use of disjunctive syntheses to impose a restrictive set of ultimately untenable binary oppositions. And psychoanalysis always with the possible exception of Lacan , far from challenging or even accurately diagnosing these double-binds as such, devotes most of the energy it can muster to reinforcing and perpetuating them.
For example, free-association — provided it really remains free — aptly illustrates legitimate forms of connective and disjunctive synthesis: each item in the chain of associations is evaluated, not in and of itself but for the associative connections it can generate or entertain with other items, which are similarly evaluated in terms of the associative connections they entertain with others, and so on. In such illegitimate use of the connective synthesis, one privileged term — the image of the mother, the name of the father, the phallus, or whatever — is detached from the chain of associations and assigned the role of general interpretant for all of them.
Deleuze and Guattari do not deny that the conversion of partial-objects to whole-objects takes place: however, they insist, first of all, that such conversion is an effect of repression and representation on the body-without-organs, a capture of desire in a certain type of signifying chain, which I will examine below.
One involves the illegitimate extrapolation of global persons as complete-objects from partial-object relations; this is the error they diagnose in the work of Melanie Klein. This is precisely the role Lacan grants to the phallus in his linguistic version of the Oedipus complex, and the issue raised by schizoanalysis which may finally be unresolvable is whether the Lacanian account effectively rejects or merely reproduces the illegitimate operation involved.
The paternal signifier or phallus represents the double promise of plenitude of meaning and command of substance the mother—wife , in relation to the castrated— separated subject as well as the forbidden substance from which it is separated, both of which appear lacking by comparison.
One signifier has been selected from and elevated over the rest, to which it assigns meaning and measures of deficiency castration, loss in relation to its own plenitude. Under the aegis of the paternal signifier, the castrated subject translates the search for lost substance into a search for meaningful substitutes through signifying chains fueled by the metonymy of desire and governed by the law of signification. But the law of signification governs what counts as proper court etiquette just as surely as it governs proper courtship behavior, just as it governs what counts as a loyal subject or a capital crime, or what can count as a table or a chair.
Its specific content aside, the form of the incesttaboo for Lacan is none other than the form of the law of signification itself, which governs the permissible substitutions or iterations that endow any and all experience with meaning. This Lacanian account raises two kinds of question for schizoanalysis.
First of all, does signification require the violent separation of castration and the extraction of a privileged transcendent term such as the name of the father or the phallus to make iteration in language possible, or even to make incest-free substitution in interpersonal relations desirable?
Deleuze and Guattari answer no: differential repetition promotes patterns of substitution and iteration that support viable forms of signification which are not provoked by castration or governed by any transcendent law.
Except for the force of that conception, avoidance of incest could be understood to result from manifold changes wrought by differential repetition itself during the active development of the child, rather than from passive submission to castration and prohibitive law.
It may well be that Lacan never wholeheartedly endorses this interpretation of desire as necessary, but merely diagnoses it as what actually prevails. But it is not clear that this is what Lacan meant to do though he has been read this way, to great effect This brings us to the second kind of question schizoanalysis raises about the Lacanian account, having shown that transcendent law is not psycho- logically necessary: to what extent is it historically true?
What historical conditions are necessary for, or indeed themselves require, the extraction of a privileged term and the imposition of a transcendent law? Conversely, and more importantly, what historical conditions make it possible to diagnose transcendent law as necessary — or unnecessary?
The answers Deleuze and Guattari provide to these questions are complicated, and will occupy most of the next chapter. First, in relation to the past, the father-figure of the nuclear family merely substitutes as the transcendent term governing iteration for earlier figures whose authority was, however, fully social if not cosmic in scope: kings, despots, gods. Second, in the present, the nuclear father-figure can finally be identified by Lacan as merely a metaphor because even his diminished role has been eclipsed in contemporary society by capital, which governs substitutions of a very different kind: those of economic exchange.
What Deleuze and Guattari are able to show, as the next chapter will indicate, is that by segregating reproduction from production at large, capitalism is able both to provide an apparently transcendent term governing social relations that is completely abstract — money — and to continue to produce global persons as concrete, apparently unified, egos in the intimate space of the nuclear family.
And it is not only the ego that attains illusory unity and wholeness in the mirror-stage but the experience of things: the transition from partial-objects to whole-objects affects ego and things reciprocally, as it were, with things appearing increasingly complete in themselves and distinct from one another detachable from the flux of experience at the same time that they appear increasingly separate, as whole-objects, from the integral self.
The infant assumes or is captured by this specular whole-image of itself, even though it actually lacks the self-mastery the image seems to possess. From the start, the subject is thus lacking with respect to the unified ego-image it has of itself, and the gap between subject and ego, Lacan insists, never completely closes: investing in an illusory self-identity only magnifies the distance between them.
Investing in an illusory plenitude of meaning only renders that inability more acute. S initially represents indeterminate subjectivity entertaining polyvocal relations with partial-objects, designated by a objets petit-a.
This is a first reason for bisecting the Lacanian schema: nothing is lacking at the start of the process, in the top half of the schema, where indeterminate subjectivity entertains polyvocal relations with partial-objects in accordance with the legitimate use of connective syntheses. These determinations then react back on the original top half of the schema, transforming partial-objects into whole-objects, and subjects as well as objects of desire into global persons.
Once again, though, it is important to recall that Deleuze and Guattari do not construe lack as an effect of psychoanalytic mis interpretation alone, however much Lacanian discourse may have contributed to reinforcing its apparent inevitability. On the contrary, lack is a real after-effect of very real forces, and it arises not from the universal nature of human psychology but because certain forms of social organization actively deprive subjects of their objects of desire, their means of life, their objective being.
I will examine a variety of forms of such deprivation in Chapter 3, in order to compare them with the properly Oedipal form of deprivation whose internal structure and dynamics concern us here. As we have already seen, desire is deprived of its objective being under capitalism partly by being segregated from the rest of society and confined to the nuclear family, where the only available objects are precisely those — parents, siblings — forbidden by the incest-taboo.
And it is the segregated nuclear family, of all reproductive institutions, that does the most to cut its subjects off from all the non-personal flows traversing society at large and to focus desire exclusively and precisely on those whom the prohibition constitutes as global persons — which is why, Deleuze and Guattari maintain, the Oedipus is lived as a complex only under capitalism, even though the incest-taboo itself is in a sense universal.
But the Real can be impossible only from the perspective of consciousness. Insofar as consciousness is defined linguistically, as purely differential, and the Real is defined correlatively as pure substantiality, the Real is indeed impossible — for consciousness. But it cannot be impossible for life. From the perspective of living beings, the Real is not only not impossible, it is in fact absolutely necessary.
This is the fundamental difference separating Deleuze and Guattari from Lacan: he for perfectly understandable pragmatic reasons: as a training analyst takes the perspective of consciousness, and the talking cure; they, following Marx and Nietzsche, take the perspective of life, and the production of life.
It is the productive—constitutive relation of desire to the Real that always forms the point of departure for schizoanalysis, against which to measure the superimposition of lack by social forces. And these social forces do not always amount to the Oedipus but rather vary historically, as we shall see in the next chapter. Several important consequences follow. The productive relations linking desire with the Real are not impossible or lacking: it is rather consciousness that is incomplete or lacking or impossible with respect to them.
Desire actively produces the Real; consciousness merely reconstructs it in representations, and it is these representations that are lacking with respect to the activity of desiring-production. Nature comprises nothing less than the natural body of humankind, on this view, while humankind consists of nothing more than an exceptionally productive and for better or for worse prolific element of nature. Sexuality is not a means in the service of generation; rather, the generation of bodies is in the service of sexuality as an autoproduction of the unconscious Succeeding chapters will expand on this view of history, examining different social formations to show, among other things, how schizophrenia finally emerges under capitalism as the potential for freeing desire from capture in and by systems of representation of all kinds.
It should be clear that this last paralogism incorporates elements of the previous four, while making systematic illegitimate use of all three syntheses. But the family is not separate, not an autonomous and self-contained microcosm.
And to it is delegated the function of reproduction under capitalism as an apparently separate institution so that social-production can develop and continually revolutionize itself without regard for the reproduction of subjects and the direct management of their desire.
For what they learn in the nuclear family is simply to submit, as good docile subjects, to prohibitive authority — the father, the boss, capital in general — and relinquish until later, as good ascetic subjects, their access to the objects of desire and their objective being — the mother, the goods they produce, the natural environment as a whole.
What the Oedipal family-machine produces is just enough: obedient ascetic subjects programmed to accept the mediation of capital between their productive life-activity and their own enjoyment of it, who will work for an internalized prohibitive authority and defer gratification until the day they die, the day after retiring.
The Oedipal machine, to the extent that it works, effectively straight-jackets desire. Hence the importance of the critique of representation to the schizoanalytic critique of Oedipus: in delegating the formation of desire to the nuclear family as system of reproduction-representation, capitalism manages to trap desiringproduction in a deceptive and misleading image of itself, the familial content of which is mostly irrelevant, even while the form of that desiring-production ultimately echoes and reinforces precisely the kind of repression exercised by capitalist socialproduction itself, as we have just seen.
It is in one and the same movement that the repressive social-production is replaced by the repressing family, and that the latter offers a displaced image of desiring-production that represents the repressed as incestuous familial drives. For as long as we are imprisoned in the Oedipal triangle, no true liberation is possible. The father will morph into the teacher, the boss, the doctor, the therapist and the priest, and there will never be any way of escaping, with the desire intact.
Like R. The extreme inequalities of a capitalist society are mirrored in the extreme mood swings, paranoid breakdowns and euphoric highs of the psychotic patient. By rejecting the universality of Oedipus and the notion of individual pathology in the private sphere, Deleuze and Guattari are inquiring after the social and cultural values of madness considered a form of social critique.
Foucault, who wrote the preface to Anti-Oedipus, has already shown that madness has a history. Deleuze and Guattari are taking the next step by showing that the dis organisation of madness and the organisation of capitalism share common principles and structures.
As can be seen from the quotation that opens this review, their charge against Freudian psychoanalysis is that the id is not private and individual, rather it is the very ground of the social constitution of subjects.
In other words, psychoanalysis sees the neurotic individual as pathological while absolving society from any responsibility in the construction of the unconscious. The Hegelian dialectic that lies at the basis of Marxist theory of class struggle is repeated in the Oedipal dialectic. Schizoanalysis Freud conceived of Oedipus as the transition from autoeroticism to desiring the other, as the nadir of repression and sexual identity that is the entry ticket to civilisation, language, subjectivity and law.
Freudian psychoanalysis established the family as a theatrical setup where subjectivity is being produced through the repression of desire. The Oedipal triangle takes up the dramatic tension of the dialectical theatre, the abyss between the audience and the performance on the stage, between the real and the imaginary, and discovers it in the nuclear family of Mommy, Daddy, and me.
The abyssal divide between the audience and the actors returns as castration anxiety. In the Freudian family, the tedious drama of Oedipus is grimly repeated night after night. According to Freud, Oedipus is a threshold and a limit, a threshold between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. It is a limit at which subjectivity is produced through the repression of desire. Deleuze and Guattari aimed to overturn the Oedipal model of psychoanalysis characterised by excessive reliance on the scientific-therapeutic model that sees the client as someone who must be fixed, with an approach that makes room for ethical and aesthetic considerations.
To do that, they take the Marxist notion of false consciousness and extend it to our own bodies. On their account, capitalism initiates a process of privatisation that extends to all aspects of life, starting with the anus hidden in plain sight and up to, and including, the psyche.
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