Preface, Michel Foucault
"It would be a mistake to read Anti-Oedipus as the new theoretical reference (you know, that much-heralded theory that finally encompasses everything, that finally totalizes and reassures, the one we are told we "need so badly" in our age of dispersion and specialization where "hope" is lacking). One must not look for a "philosophy' amid the extraordinary profusion of new notions and surprise concepts: Anti-Oedipus is not a flashy Hegel" (xii)
"[whom the book combats] (1) ... Bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of Truth. (2) The poor technicians of desire - psychoanalysts and semiologists of every sign and symptom - who would subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack. (3) ... the strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us" (xiii)
"a book of ethics" (xiii)
"Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life" (xiii)
"a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:
"The traps of Anti-Oedipus are those of humor: to many invitations to let oneself be put out, to take one's leave of the text and slam the door shut. The book often leads one to believe it is all fun and games, when something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives" (xiv)
Chapter 1: The Desiring-Machines
1 - Desiring Production
"Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines" (3)
"For the real truth of the matter - the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium - is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process (enregisterment), without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself" (4)
"This is the first meaning of process as we use the term: incorporating recording and consumption within production itself, thus making them the productions of one and the same process" (4)
"Second, we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species" (4)
"This is the second meaning of process as we use the term: man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other - not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather, they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product" (5)
"This will be the case, however, only on one condition, which in fact constitutes the third meaning of process as we use the term: it must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself, nor must it be confused with an infinite perpetuation of itself. Putting an end to the process or prolonging it indefinitely - which, strictly speaking, is tantamount to ending it abruptly and prematurely - is what creates the artificial schizophrenic found in mental institutions: a limp rag forced into autistic behavior, produced as an entirely separate and independent entity" (5)
"schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature." Desiring-machines are binary machines, obeying a binary law or set of rules governing associations: one machine is always coupled with another" (5)
"Every "object" presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object" (6)
"Producing is always something "grafted onto" the product; and for that reason desiring-production is production of production, just as every machine is a machine connected to another machine" (6)
"When Claude Levi-Strauss defines bricolage, he does so in terms of a set of closely related characteristics: the possession of a stock of materials or of rules of thumb that are fairly extensive, though more or less a hodgepodge - multiple and at the same time limited; the ability to rearrange fragments continually in new and different patterns or configurations; and as a consequence, an indifference toward the act of producing and toward the product, toward the set of instruments to be used and toward the over-all result to be achieved" (7)
"The art of making do with what's at hand" (7)
"Desiring-machines make us an organism; but at the very heart of this production, within the very production of this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all" (8)
"For desire desires death also, because the full body of death is its motor, just as it desires life, because the organs of life are the working machine. We shall not inquire how all this fits together so that the machine will run: the question itself is the result of a process of abstraction" (8)
2 - The Body Without Organs
Translators note: "We have likewise chosen to translate investir as "to invest" instead of "to cathect"" (9)
"In a word, the socius as a full body forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface. Society constructs its own delirium by recording the process of production; but it is not a conscious delirium, or rather is a true consciousness of a false movement, a true perception of an apparent objective movement, a true perception of the movement that is produced on the recording surface. Capital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being. But as such, it is not only the fluid and petrified substance of money, for it will give to the sterility of money the form whereby money produces money" (10)
"As Marx observes, in the beginning capitalists are necessarily conscious of the opposition between capital and labor, and of the use of capital as a means of extorting surplus labor. But a perverted, bewitched world quickly comes into being, as capital increasingly plays the role of a recording surface that falls back on (se rabat sur) all of production" (11)
"The body without organs, the unproductive, the unconsumable, serves as a surface for the recording of the entire process of production of desire, so that desiring-machines seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement that establishes a relationship between the machines and the body without organs" (11)
"So true is it that the schizo practices political economy, and that all sexuality is a matter of economy" (12)
"In fact, we have passed imperceptibly into a domain of the production of recording, whose law is not the same as that of the production of production. The law governing the latter was connective synthesis or coupling. But when the productive connections pass from machines to the body without organs (as from labor to capital), it would seem that they then come under another law that expresses a distribution in relation to the nonproductive element as a "natural or divine presupposition" (the disjunctions of capital)" (12)
"The process as process of production extends into the method as method of inscription. Or rather, if what we term libido is the connective "labor" of desiring-production, it should be said that a part of this energy is transformed into the energy of disjunctive inscription (Numen). A transformation of energy. But why call this new form of energy divine, why label it Numen, in view of all the ambiguities caused by a problem of the unconscious that is only apparently religious? The body without organs is not God, quite the contrary. But the energy that sweeps through it is divine, when it attracts to itself the entire process of production and sever as its miraculate, enchanted surface, inscribing it in each and every one of its disjunctions" (13)
"does the recording of desire go by way of the various stages in the formation of the Oedipus complex? Disjunctions are the form that the genealogy of desire assumes; but is this genealogy Oedipal is it recorded in the Oedipal triangulation? Is it not more likely that Oedipus is a requirement or a consequence of social reproduction, insofar as this latter aims at domesticating a genealogical form and content that are in every way intractable?" (13)
"Desiring-production forms a binary-linear system. The full body is introduced as a third term in the series, without destroying, however, the essential binary-linear nature of this series: 2, 1, 2, 1.... The series is completely refractory to a transcription that would transform and mold it into a specifically ternary and triangular schema such as Oedipus" (15)
using poetry, literature, music, painting, art as evidence
"It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way. When he is more or less forced into it and is not in a touchy mood, he may even accept the banal Oedipal Code, so long as he can stuff it full of all the disjunctions that this code was designed to eliminate" (15)
3- The Subject and Enjoyment
"Conforming to the meaning of the word "process," re-recording falls back on (se rabat sur) production, but the production of recording itself is produced by the production of production. Similarly, recording is followed by consumption, but the production of consumption is produced in and through the production of recording. This is because something on the order of a subject can be discerned on the recording surface. It is a strange subject, however, with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines, being defined by the share of the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward in the form of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state. "It's me, and so it's mine..." Even suffering, as Marx says, is a form of self-enjoyment" (16)
"the celibate machine first of all reveals the existence of a much older paranoiac machine, with its tortures, its dark shadows, its ancient Law. The celibate machine itself is not a paranoiac machine, however. Everything about it is different: its cogs, its sliding carriage, its shears, needles, magnets, rays. Even when it tortures or kills, it manifests something new and different, a solar force. In the second place, this transfiguration cannot be explained by the "miraculating" powers the machine possessses due to the inscription hidden inside it, though it in fact contains within itself the most impressive sort of inscriptions (cf. the recording supplied by Edison for Eve future). A genuine consummation is achieved by the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces" (18)
"what produced by means of [the celibate machine]? ... intensive quantities. ... These are often described as hallucinations and delirium, but the basic phenomenon of hallucination (I see, I hear) and the basic phenomenon of delirium (I think...) presuppose an I feel at an even deeper level, which gives hallucinations their object and thought delirium its content - an "I feel that I am becoming a woman," "that I am becoming a god," and so on, which is neither delirious nor hallucinatory but will project the hallucination or internalize the delirium. Delirium and hallucination are secondary in relation to the really primary emotion, which in the beginning only experiences intensities, becomings, transitions. [W.R. Bion is the first to have stressed this importance of the I feel... Elements of Psycho-analysis]" (19)
"How is it possible that the schizo was conceived of as the autistic rag - separated from the real and cut off from life - that he is so often thought to be? Worse still: how can psychiatric practice have made him this sort of rag, how can it have reduced him to this state of a body without organs that has become a dead thing - this schizo who sought to remain at that unbearable point where the mind touches matter and lives its every intensity, consumes it? And shouldn't this question immediately compel us to raise another one, which at first glance seems quite different: how does psychoanalysis go about reducing a person, who this time is not a schizophrenic but a neurotic, to a pitiful creature who eternally consumes daddy-and-mommy and nothing else whatsoever?" (20)
"How could the conjunctive synthesis of "So that's that it was!" and "So it's me!" have been reduced to the endless, dreary discovery of Oedipus: "So it's my father, my mother"? We cannot answer these two questions at this point" (20)
"There is no Nietzsche-the-self, professor of philology, who suddenly loses his mind and supposedly identifies with all sorts of strange people; rather, there is the Nietzschean subject who passes through a series of states, and who identifies these states with the names of history: "every name in history is I..." The subject spreads itself out along the entire circumference of the circle, the center of which has been abandoned by the ego. At the center is the desiring-machine, the celibate machine of the Eternal Return. A residual subject of the machine, Nietzsche-as-subject garners a euphoric reward (Voluptas) from everything that this machine turns out, a product that the reader had thought to be no more than the fragmented oeuvre by Nietzsche. "Nietzsche believes that he is now pursuing, not the realization of a system, but the application of a program... in the form of residues of the Nietzschean discourse, which have no become the repertory, so to speak, of his histrionicism." It is not a matter of identifying with various historical personages, but rather identifying the names of history with zones of intensity on the body without organs; and each time Nietzsche-as-subject exclaims: "They're me! So it's me!" No one has ever been as deeply involved in history as the schizo, or dealt with it in this way. He consumes all of universal history history in one fell swoop. We began by defining him as Homo natura, and lo and behold, he has turned out to be Homo historia" (21)
is semiotics only about recognition?
4 - A Materialist Psychiatry
"A truly materialist psychiatry can be defined, on the contrary, by the twofold task it sets itself: introducing desire into the mechanism, and introducing production into desire" (22)
"The theory of schizophrenia is formulated in terms of three concepts that constitute its trinary schema: dissociation (Kraepelin), autism (Bleuler), and space-time or being-in-the-world (Binswanger). The first of these is an explanatory concept that supposedly locates the specific dysfunction or primary deficiency. The second is an ideational concept indicating the specific nature of the effect of the disorder: the delirium itself or the complete withdrawal from the outside world, "the detachment from reality, accompanied by a relative or an absolute predominance of [the schizophrenic's] inner life." The third concept is a descriptive one, discovering or rediscovering the delirious person in his own specific world. What is common to these three concepts is the fact that they all relate the problem of schizophrenia to the ego through the intermediary of the "body image" - the final avatar of the soul, a vague conjoining of the requirements of spiritualism and positivism" (22-23)
"The ego, however, is like daddy-mommy: the schizo has long since ceased to believe in it. He is somewhere else, beyond or behind or below these problems, rather than immersed in them. And wherever he is, there are problems, insurmountable sufferings, unbearable needs" (23)
"Even Freud never went beyond this narrow and limited conception of the ego. And what prevented him from doing so was his own tripartite formula - the Oedipal, neurotic one: daddy-mommy-me. We may well ponder the possibility that the analytic imperialism of the Oedipus complex led Freud to rediscover, and to lend all the weight of his authority to, the unfortunate misapplication of the concept of autism to schizophrenia. For we must not delude ourselves: Freud doesn't like schizophrenics. He doesn't like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says. They are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off from reality, incapable of achieving transference; they resemble philosophers - "an undesirable resemblance"" (23)
"The fact is, from the moment that we are placed within the framework of Oedipus - from the moment that we are measured in terms of Oedipus - the cards are stacked against us, and the only real relationship, that of production, has been done away with. The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the productions of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon buried beneath a new brand of idealism: a classical theater was substituted for the unconscious as a factory; representation was substituted for the units of production of the unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself - in myth, tragedy, dreams - was substituted for the productive unconscious" (24)
"The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends. The schizophrenic appears all the more specific and recognizable as a distinct personality if the process is halted, or if it is made an end and a goal in itself, or if it is allowed to go on and on endlessly in a void, so as to provoke that "horror of... extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately perish" (the autist)" (24) semiotics
"Before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines" (24)
"To a certain degree, the traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset: from the very first step that the Platonic logic of desire forces us to take, making us choose between production and acquisition. From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of the real object" (25)
"Desire thus conceived of as production, though merely the production of fantasies, has been explained perfectly by psychoanalysis. On the very lowest level of interpretation, this means that the real object that desire lacks is related to an extrinsic natural or social production, whereas desire intrinsically produces an imaginary object that functions as a double of reality, as though there were a "dreamed-of object behind every real object," or a mental production behind all real productions" (26)
"In a word, when the theoretician reduces desiring-production to a production of fantasy, he is content to exploit to the fullest the idealist principle that defines desire as a lack, rather than a process of production, of "industrial" production" (26)
"If desire produces, its product is real... The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire in another machine connected to it" (26)
"The real is not impossible; on the contrary, within the real everything is possible, everything becomes possible. Desire does not express a molar lack within the subject; rather, the molar organization deprives desire of its objective being. Revolutionaries, artists, and seers are content to the be objective, merely objective: they know that desire clasps life in its powerfully productive embrace, and reproduces it in a way that is all the more intense because it has few needs" (27)
"Lack (manque) is created, planned, and organized in and through social production. It is counterproduced as a result of the pressure of antiproduction; the latter falls back on (se rabat sur) the forces of production and appropriates them. It is never primary; production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack (manque). It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propagates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs (manque) amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one's needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy" (28)
"There is no such thing as the social production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring-production that is mere fantasy on the other. The only connections that could be established between these two productions would be secondary ones of introjection and projection, as though all social practices, or as though mental practices were projected upon social systems, without either of the two sets of practices ever having any real or concrete effect upon the other" (28)
"The Marx-Freud parallelism between the two remains utterly sterile and insignificant as long as it is expressed in terms that make them introjections or projections of each other without ceasing to be utterly alien to each other, as in the famous equation money = shit. The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else" (28-29)
"That is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" how can people possibly reach the point of shouting: "More taxes! Less bread?!" As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for" (29)
"desire produces reality, or stated another way, desiring-production is one and the same thing as social production. It is not possible to attribute a special form of existence to desire, a mental or psychic reality that is presumably different from the material reality of social production. Desiring-machines are not fantasy-machines or dream-machines, which supposedly can be distinguished from technical and social machines. Rather, fantasies are secondary expressions, deriving from the identical nature of the two sorts of machines in any given set of circumstances. Thus fantasy is never individual: it is group fantasy - as institutional analysis has successfully demonstrated. And if there is such a thing as two sorts of group fantasy, it is because two different readings of this identity are possible, depending upon whether the desiring-machines are regarded from the point of view of the great gregarious masses that they form, or whether social machines are considered from the point of view of the elementary forces of desire that serve as the basis for them" (30)
"revolutionary desire is plugged into the existing social field as a source of energy. (The great socialist utopias of the nineteenth century function, for example, not as ideal models but as group fantasies - that is, as agents of the real productivity of desire, making it possible to disinvest the current social field, to "deinstitutionalize" it, to further the revolutionary institution of desire itself)" (31)
"schizo" --> Povinelli v. Luhrmann; "cybernetic model"; how do anthropologists take up Deleuze and Guattari?
"The artist is the master of objects; he puts before us shattered, burned, broken-down objects, converting them to the regime of desiring-machines, breaking down is part of the very functioning of desiring-machines; the artist presents paranoiac machines, miraculating-machines, and celibate machines as so many technical machines, so as to cause desiring-machines to undermine technical machines. Even more important, the work of art is itself a desiring-machine. The artist stores up his treasures so as to create an immediate explosion, and that is why, to his way of thinking, destructions can never take place as rapidly as they ought to" (32)
"A technical machine is therefore not a cause but merely an index of a general form of social production: thus there are manual machines and primitive societies, hydraulic machines and "Asiatic" forms of society, industrial machines and capitalism. Hence when we posited the socius as the analogue of a full body without organs, there was nonetheless one important difference" (32)
"The body without organs is not an original primordial entity that later projects itself into different sorts of socius, as though it were a racing paranoiac, the chieftain of the primitive horde, who was initially responsible for social organization" (33)
"the body without organs is the ultimate residuum of a deterritorialized socius. The prime function incumbent upon the socius, has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated. When the primitive territorial machine proved inadequate to the task, the despotic machine set up a kind of overcoding system. But the capitalist machine, insofar as it was built on the ruins of a despotic State more or less far removed in time, finds itself in a totally new situation: it is faced with the task of decoding and deterritorializing the flows" (33)
"Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labor in the form of the "free worker." Hence, unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field. by substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialized field. It is correct to say that in this sense schizophrenia is the product of the capitalist machine, as manic-depression and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine, and hysteria the product of the territorial machine?" (33)
"There is no doubt that at this point in history the neurotic, the pervert, and the psychotic cannot be adequately defined in terms of drives, for drives are simply the desiring-machines themselves. They must be defined in terms of modern territorialities. The neurotic is trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society, and reduces all of them (les rabat toutes) to Oedipus as the ultimate territoriality - as reconstructed in the analyst's office and projected upon the full body of the psychoanalyst (yes, my boss is my father, and so is the Chief of State, and so are you, Doctor). The pervert is someone who takes the artifice seriously and plays the game to the hilt: if you want them, you can have them - territorialities infinitely more artifical than the ones that society offers us, totally artificial new families, secret lunar societies. As for the schizo, continually wandering bout, migrating here, there, and everywhere as best he can, he plunges further and further into the realm of deterriotrialization, reaching the furthest limits of the decomposition of the socius on the surface of his own body without organs. It may well be that these peregrinations are the schizo's own particular way of rediscovering the earth" (35)
"He scrambles all the codes and is the transmitter of the decoded flows of desire" (35)
"And if materialist psychiatry may be defined as the psychiatry that introduces the concept of production into consideration of the problem of desire, it cannot avoid posing in eschatological terms the problem of the ultimate relationship between the analytic machine, the revolutionary machine, and desiring-machines" (35)
5 - The Machines
"A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures)" (36)
"In a word, every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it. This is the law of the production of production" (36)
"Also we must not think that the machines themselves are proof of the loss or repression of desire (which Bettelheim translates in terms of autism). We find ourselves confronted with the same problem once again: How has the process of production of desire, how have the child's desiring-machines begun to turn endlessly round and round in a total vacuum, so as to produce the child-machine? How has the process turned into an end in itself? Or how has the child become the victim of a premature interruption of a terrible frustration? It is only by means of the body without organs (eyes closed tight, nostrils pinched shut, ears stopped up) that something is produced, counterproduced, something that diverts or frustrates the entire process of production, of which it is nonetheless still a part. But the machine remains desire, an investment of desire whose history unfolds, by way of the primary repression and the return of the repressed, in the succession of the states of paranoiac machines, miraculating machines, and celibate machines through which little Joey passes as Bettelheim's therapy progresses" (38)
"every machine has a sort of code built into it, stored up inside it" (38)
"(The basic text in this connection is [Lacan's] La lettre volee [The Purloined Letter]). But how very strange this domain seems, simply because of its multiplicity - a multiplicity so complex that we can scarcely speak of one chain or even one code of desire. The chains are called "signifying chains" (chaînes signifcantes) because they are made up of signs, but these signs are not themselves signifying. The code resembles not so much a language as a jargo, an open-ended, polyvocal formation. The nature of the signs within it is insignificant, as these signs have little or nothing to do with what supports them. Or rather, isn't the support completely immaterial to these signs? The support is the body without organs. These indifferent signs follow no plan, they function at all levels and enter into any and every sort of connection; each one speaks its own language, and establishes syntheses with others that are quite direct along transverse vectors, whereas the vectors between the basic elements that constitute them are quite indirect" (38)
"Each chain captures fragments of other chains from which it "extracts" a surplus value, just as the orchid code "attracts" the figure of a wasp: both phenomena demonstrate the surplus value of a code. It is an entire system of shuntings along certain tracks and of selections by lot, that bring about partially dependent, aleatory phenomena bearing a close resemblance to a Markov chain. The recordings and transmissions that have come from the internal codes, from the outside world, from one region to another of the organism, all intersect, following the endlessly ramified paths of the great disjunctive synthesis. If this constitutes a system of writing, it is a writing inscribed on the very surface of the Real: a strangely polyvocal kind of writing, never a biunivocalized, linearized one; a transcursive system of writing, never a discursive one; a writing that constitutes the entire domain of the "real inorganization" of the passive syntheses, where we would search in vain for something that might be labeled the Signifier - writing that ceaselessly composes and decomposes the chains into signs that have nothing that impels them to become signifying. The one vocation of the sign is to produce desire, engineering it in every direction" (39)
"breaks that are a detachment (coupures-detachements), which must not be confused with breaks that are a slicing off (coupures-prelevements)" (39)
"When we noted a moment ago that the schizo is at the very limit of the decoded flows of desire, we meant that he was at the very limit of the social codes, where a despotic Signifier destroys all the chains, linearizes them, biunivocalizes them, and uses the bricks as so many immobile units for hte construction of an imperial Great Wall of China. But the schizo continually detaches them, continually works them loose and carries them off in every direction in order to create a new polyvocity that is the code of desire" (40)
"Like all the other breaks, the subjective break is not at all an indication of a lack or need (manque), but on the contrary a share that falls to the subject as a part of a whole, income that comes its way as something left over. (Here again, how bad a model the Oedipal model of castration is!) That is because breaks or interruptions are not the result of an analysis; rather, in and of themselves, they are syntheses. Syntheses produce divisions" (41)
"The desiring-machine is not a metaphor; it is what interrupts and is interrupted in accordance with these three modes. The first mode has to do with the connective syntehsis, and mobilizes libido as withdrawal energy (energie de prelevement). The second has to do with the dijunctive synthesis, and mobilizes the Numen as detachment energy (energie de detachemenet). The third has to do with the conjunctive synthesis, and mobilizes Voluptas as residual energy (energie residuelle). It is these three aspects that make the process of desiring-production at once the production of production, the production of recording, and the production of consumption. To withdraw a part from the whole, to detach, to "have something left over," is to produce, and to carry out real operations of desire in the material world" (41)
6 - The Whole and Its Parts
"Maurice Blanchot has found a way to pose the problem in the most rigorous terms, at the level of the literary machine: how to produce, how to think about fragments whose sole relationship is sheer difference - fragments that are related to one another only in that each of them is different - without having recourse either to any sort of original totality (not even one that has been lost), or to a subsequent totality that may not yet have come about? It is only the category of multiplicity, used as a substantive and going beyond both the One and the many, beyond the predicative relation of the One and the many, that can account for desiring-production: desiring-production is pure multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity" (42)
"Hence Proust maintained that the Whole itself is a product, produced as nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which it neither unifies nor totalizes, though it has an effect on these other parts simply because it establishes aberrant paths of communication between noncommunicating vessels, transverse unities between elements that retain all their differences within their own particular boundaries" (43)
"This drawing together, this reweaving is what Joyce called re-embodying. The body without organs is produced as a whole, but in its own particular place within the process of production, alongside the parts that it neither unifies nor totalizes" (43)
"The whole not only coexists with all the parts; it is contiguous to them, it exists as a product that is produced apart from them and yet at the same time is related to them" (44)
"Melanie Klein was responsible for the marvelous discovery of partial objects, that world of explosions, rotations, vibrations. But how can we explain the fact that she has nonetheless failed to grasp the logic of these objects? It is doubtless because, first of all, she conceives of them as fantasies and judges them from the point of view of consumption, rather than regarding them as genuine production. She explains them in terms of causal mechanisms (introjection and projection, for instance), of mechanisms that produce certain effects (gratification and frustration), and of mechanisms of expression (good or bad) - an approach that forces her to adopt an idealist conception of the partial object" (44)
"In the second place, she cannot rid herself of the notion that schizoparanoid partial objects are related to a whole, either to an original whole that has existed earlier in a primary phase, or to a whole that will eventually appear in a final depressive stage (the complete Object)" (44)
"Partial objects unquestionably have a sufficient charge in and of themselves to blow up all of Oedipus and totally demolish its ridiculous claim to represent the unconscious, to triangulate the unconscious, to encompass the entire production of desire" (44)
"The psychoanalyst no longer says to the patient: "Tell me a little bit about your desiring-machines, won't you?" Instead he screams: "Answer daddy-and-mommy when I speak to you!" Even Melanie Klein" (45)
"Oedipus thus becomes at this point the crucial premise in the logic of psychoanalysis" (46)
"The unconscious is totally unaware of persons as such. Partial objects are not representations of parental figures or of the basic patterns of family relations; they are parts of desiring-machines, having to do with a process and with relations of production that are both irreducible and prior to anything that may be made to conform to the Oedipal figure" (46)
"The problem has to do with the sexual nature of desiring-machines, but with the family nature of this sexuality" (46)
"It is not a question of denying the vital importance of parents or the love attachment of children to their mothers and fathers. It is a question of knowing what the place and the function of parents are within desiring-production, rather than doing the opposite and forcing the entire interplay of desiring-machines to fit within (rabattre tout le jeu des machines desirantes dans) the restricted code of Oedipus" (47)
"It is in this sense and this sense only that the child relates the breast as a partial object to the person of his mother, and constantly waters the expression on his mother's face. The word "relate" in this case does not designate a natural productive relationship, but rather a relation in the sense of a report or an account, an inscription within the over-all process of inscription, within the Numen" (48)
"By boxing the life of the child up within the Oedipus complex, by making familial relations the universal mediation of childhood, we cannot help but fail to understand the production of the unconscious itself, and the collective mechanisms that have an immediate bearing on teh unconscious: in particular, the entire interplay between primal psychic repression, the desiring-machines, and the body without organs. For the unconscious is an orphan, and produces itself within the identity of nature and man" (48-49)
"We have seen how a confusion arose between the two meanings of "process"; process as the metaphysical production of the demoniacal within nature, and process as social production of desiring-machines within history. Neither social relations nor metaphysical relations constitute an "afterward" or a "beyond"" (49)
"Let us keep D.H. Lawrence's reaction to psychoanalysis in mind, and never forget it. In Lawrence's case, at least, his reservations with regard to psychoanalysis did not stem from terror at having discovered what real sexuality was. But he had the impression - the purely instinctive impression - that psychoanalysis was shutting sexuality up in a bizarre sort of box painted with bourgeois motifs, in a kind of rather repugnant artificial triangle, thereby stifling the whole of sexuality as production of desire so as to recast it along entirely different lines, making of it a "dirty little secret," the dirty little family secret, a private theater rather than the fantastic factory of Nature and Production. Lawrence had the impression that sexuality possessed more power or more potentiality than that" (49)
"Insofar as psychoanalysis cloaks insanity in the mantle of a "parental complex," and regards the patterns of self-punishment resulting from Oedipus as a confession of guilt, its theories are not at all radical or innovative. On the contrary: it is completing the task begun by nineteenth-century psychology, namely, to develop a moralized, familial discourse of mental pathology, linking madness to the "half-real, half-imaginary dialectic of the Family," deciphering within it "the unending attempt to murder the father," "the dull thud of instincts hammering at the solidity of the family as an institution and at its most archaic symbols." Hence, instead of participating in an undertaking that will bring about genuine liberation, psychoanalysis is taking part in the work of bourgeois repression at its most far-reaching level, that is to say, keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy and making no effort to do away with this problem once and for all"" (50)
