About the Work
Anti-Oedipus is a work of philosophical and political theory written collaboratively by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, originally published in French as L’Anti-Œdipe by Les Éditions de Minuit. The English translation, prepared by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, appeared under the title Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, published by the University of Minnesota Press, with a preface by Michel Foucault and an introduction by Mark Seem. The book is the first volume of the larger project Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and its subtitle signals the double focus that runs through every page: an analysis of the capitalist social machine on the one hand, and an engagement with schizophrenia as both a clinical reality and a theoretical limit-case on the other.
The work belongs to the intellectual ferment of post-1968 French thought, though it resists easy placement within any single school or movement. It is at once a polemic against psychoanalysis, a reworking of Marxist political economy, an engagement with anthropology and the history of social formations, and a philosophical treatise on desire, production, and the unconscious. The library cataloging of the English edition classifies it under social psychiatry, psychoanalysis and its social aspects, the Oedipus complex and its social aspects, capitalism, and schizophrenia and its social aspects—a range that indicates how deliberately the book crosses disciplinary boundaries. The volume includes reference notes and an index, and the acknowledgments credit extracts from Antonin Artaud’s Collected Works and Artaud Anthology, Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” E. R. Leach’s Rethinking Anthropology, Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche ou le Cercle Vicieux, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, and André Green’s L’Affect.
The book is not a conventional academic monograph. It proceeds by bursts, by juxtapositions, by the montage of heterogeneous materials—clinical case histories, anthropological reports, literary texts, economic analyses, philosophical arguments—assembled into a machine that produces effects rather than a system that produces conclusions. Foucault’s preface proposes that it be read not as a new theoretical authority but as an “art,” informed by abstract notions of multiplicities, flows, arrangements, and connections, and yielding answers to concrete questions of how to proceed. This is a book that asks to be used rather than merely understood, and its form is inseparable from its argument.
Context
The intellectual context of Anti-Oedipus is the period Foucault describes in his preface: the years between 1945 and 1965 in Europe, when correct thinking required familiarity with Marx, restraint of dreams from straying far from Freud, and respect for sign-systems and the signifier. Then came what Foucault calls five brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years, marked at the world’s gates by Vietnam and the first major blow to established powers. The question Foucault poses is whether what occurred in those years was an amalgam of revolutionary and antirepressive politics, a war on two fronts against social exploitation and psychic repression, a surge of libido modulated by class struggle—or instead a movement toward political struggles no longer conforming to the Marxist model and toward an experience and technology of desire no longer Freudian.
Anti-Oedipus emerges from this conjuncture. It is a book written in the wake of May 1968 and its aftermath, at a moment when the adequacy of both Marxist and Freudian frameworks was being urgently questioned. Foucault notes that the book discredits old idols—having fun with Freud—and motivates going further. It is not a synthesis of Marx and Freud but a dismantling of both, an attempt to think desire and production together without subordinating either to the other, and without recourse to the transcendent categories—law, lack, castration, the signifier—that both traditions had used to domesticate the unconscious.
The book also belongs to a specifically French intellectual milieu in which psychoanalysis, under the influence of Lacan, had achieved a dominant position in the human sciences. Lacan’s discovery of the code of the unconscious, of signifying chains, is acknowledged in the text as a fertile domain that transformed analysis. But the authors argue that Lacanian psychoanalysis, no less than its Freudian predecessor, subjects desire to the twofold law of structure and lack. Against this, they propose a materialist psychiatry that introduces desire into mechanism and production into desire. The book’s engagement with anthropology—with the work of Meyer Fortes, E. R. Leach, Marcel Griaule, Pierre Clastres, Luc de Heusch, and others—reflects a broader mid-century debate about the universality of the Oedipus complex, a debate in which ethnographers had long noted that the mechanisms of Oedipus (superego, guilt, specific ego identification with global persons) appeared to be absent in the societies they studied.
The political context is equally important. Foucault names three adversaries the book addresses: political ascetics, sad militants, terrorists of theory, bureaucrats of revolution and civil servants of Truth; poor technicians of desire—psychoanalysts and semiologists—who subject desire’s multiplicity to the twofold law of structure and lack; and the major, strategic enemy: fascism, not only the historical fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, which mobilized mass desire, but the fascism in us all, in our heads and everyday behavior, causing us to love power and desire what dominates and exploits us. This third adversary gives the book its ethical urgency. Foucault calls it a book of ethics, the first in France in a long time, an “Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.”
Structure of the Book
The volume opens with Michel Foucault’s preface and Mark Seem’s introduction before proceeding into four major sections. The first section, “The Desiring-Machines,” contains chapters on Desiring-Production; The Body without Organs; The Subject and Enjoyment; A Materialist Psychiatry; The Machines; and The Whole and Its Parts. This section establishes the fundamental concepts of the book: desiring-production as the primary reality of both nature and human life, the body without organs as the surface on which desire records itself, the three syntheses of the unconscious (connective, disjunctive, conjunctive), and the critique of psychoanalytic and psychiatric approaches that reduce the schizophrenic to a “rag” and the neurotic to a creature consuming only daddy-and-mommy.
The second section, “Psychoanalysis and Familialism: The Holy Family,” turns to the critique of psychoanalysis proper. Its chapters cover The Imperialism of Oedipus; Three Texts of Freud; the three syntheses (Connective, Disjunctive, Conjunctive); A Recapitulation of the Three Syntheses; Social Repression and Psychic Repression; Neurosis and Psychosis; and The Process. Here the authors argue that Freud’s discovery of Oedipus sacrificed a domain of free syntheses—endless connections, nonexclusive disjunctions, nonspecific conjunctions, partial objects, and flows—and that psychoanalysis personologizes, imaginarizes, and structuralizes desiring-production, reducing it to fantasy production. The unconscious becomes a theater, a scene and staging, rather than a factory. The schizo is the enemy of this operation.
The third section, “Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men,” is the historical and anthropological heart of the book. Its chapters cover The Inscribing Socius; The Primitive Territorial Machine; The Problem of Oedipus; Psychoanalysis and Ethnology; Territorial Representation; The Barbarian Despotic Machine; Barbarian or Imperial Representation; The Urstaat; The Civilized Capitalist Machine; Capitalist Representation; and Oedipus at Last. This section traces the history of social machines—the primitive territorial machine that codes flows of women, children, herds, seed, sperm, shit, and menstrual blood; the barbarian despotic machine that introduces the transcendent unity of the State and the despot’s full body; and the civilized capitalist machine that decodes flows and deterritorializes the socius, substituting abstract quantity for coded flows and constituting private persons. It is here that the book’s title becomes fully legible: capitalism and schizophrenia are the two poles of a single process, the decoding and deterritorialization that capitalism unleashes and that schizophrenia, as a process, carries to its limit.
The fourth section, “Introduction to Schizoanalysis,” covers The Social Field; The Molecular Unconscious; Psychoanalysis and Capitalism; and the First and Second Positive Tasks of Schizoanalysis. This section draws the practical conclusions of the preceding analysis, defining schizoanalysis as a practice opposed to psychoanalysis, with the task of analyzing the specific nature of libidinal investments in economic and political spheres, showing how desire can be made to desire its own repression, and liberating the revolutionary potential of desire from the segregative and Oedipal applications that capture it.
Inside the Book
The Apparatus and the Book’s Architecture
The University of Minnesota Press edition of Anti-Oedipus arrives wrapped in the usual scholarly scaffolding: a translation by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, a preface by Michel Foucault, copyright dates reaching back to the French original of 1972, and cataloguing that files the whole enterprise under social psychiatry, the social aspects of psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex, capitalism, and schizophrenia. The acknowledgments gesture toward the strange company the book keeps—Artaud, Ginsberg, Leach, Klossowski, Foucault, André Green. The table of contents lays out the journey to come: the desiring-machines, the body without organs, the subject and enjoyment, a materialist psychiatry; then psychoanalysis and familialism with its holy family, the imperialism of Oedipus, the three syntheses, neurosis and psychosis; then savages, barbarians, and civilized men, the territorial machine, the despotic machine, the Urstaat, the capitalist machine, Oedipus at last; and finally the introduction to schizoanalysis with its social field, molecular unconscious, and positive tasks.
Foucault’s Preface: An Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life
Foucault opens by recalling the intellectual climate of postwar Europe, when correct thinking demanded Marx, a Freud kept on a short leash, and reverence for the signifier—until five brief, impassioned, jubilant years arrived, marked by Vietnam and the first great blows against established power. He asks whether what happened was a fusion of revolutionary and antirepressive politics, a war on two fronts against exploitation and psychic repression, or something that no longer fit the Marxist model or the Freudian technology of desire. Anti-Oedipus, he says, shows how far the ground has shifted, discredits old idols, and urges us onward. It should not be read as a new theoretical master-key or a flashy Hegel, but as an “art,” informed by multiplicities, flows, arrangements, and connections, answering the concrete question of how to proceed: how to bring desire into thought, discourse, and action. Foucault names three adversaries—the sad militants and bureaucrats of revolution, the technicians of desire who subject its multiplicity to structure and lack, and the strategic enemy, fascism, not only the historical kind but the fascism in our heads that makes us love power and desire our own domination. The book, he concludes, is a book of ethics, an introduction to the non-fascist life: free action from paranoia, proliferate rather than hierarchize, withdraw allegiance from the Negative, prefer the positive and multiple, believe the productive is nomadic, connect desire to reality, and de-individualize through multiplication.
Oedipus Presupposed, and the Question of the Machine
The main text begins by refusing to treat Oedipus as an obvious given. Oedipus, it insists, presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines, and the real questions are why those machines are repressed, to what end, whether the repression is necessary, and by what means the Oedipal triangle is constructed. A bicycle horn and the mother’s arse do not suffice. The text asks, given an effect, what machine produces it; given a machine, what is it used for? A knife rest cannot be guessed from geometry alone. It describes a machine of stones distributed among pockets—source, transmission, receiving—with the mouth as a stone-sucking machine, and asks where in this circuit pleasure is produced. At the end of Malone Dies, Lady Pedal takes the schizophrenics for a van ride, a rowboat trip, a picnic: an infernal machine is being assembled. Under the skin, the body is an over-heated factory.
Production as Process: Everything Is Production
Nature is not made a pole of schizophrenia; the schizophrenic experiences nature as a process of production. At one level nature and industry are distinct, and society divides into production, distribution, and consumption—but this presupposes capital, the division of labor, and the false consciousness of the capitalist. The truth residing in delirium is that there are no independent spheres: production is immediately consumption and recording, and recording and consumption determine production within production itself. Everything is production—of productions, of recording processes, of consumptions. This is the first meaning of process. Second, no distinction is made between man and nature: man plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole, eternal custodian of the machines of the universe. Man and nature are one essential reality, the producer-product, and desiring-production is the concern of a materialist psychiatry that conceives the schizo as Homo natura. Third, process must not be made a goal; ending it or prolonging it indefinitely produces the artificial schizophrenic, the limp rag of the institution. Schizophrenia is like love: no specific entity, but the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines.
The Connective Synthesis: And Then, And Then
Desiring-machines are binary: one machine is always coupled with another. The productive synthesis is connective—“and,” “and then.” There is always a flow-producing machine and another that interrupts or draws off part of the flow, breast to mouth. The binary series is linear in every direction; desire couples continuous flows and fragmentary partial objects, causes current to flow, flows itself, breaks flows. Amniotic fluid, kidney stones, hair, spittle, sperm, shit, urine are produced by partial objects and cut off by others. Every object presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow, the fragmentation of the object. Each organ-machine interprets the world from its own flux, but connection is established along a transverse path. Producing is grafted onto the product: desiring-production is production of production. The idealist category of expression is rejected. Henri Michaux’s schizophrenic table goes about its own business, desimplified, overstuffed, finished only when nothing more can be added, more an accumulation than a table, denying itself to service and communication, perhaps suggesting a stalled engine. The schizophrenic is the universal producer; the pure “thisness” of the product is carried into a new act of producing.
The Schizo, the Neurotic, and the Subject on the Periphery
Psychiatry reduced the schizophrenic to a rag, a dead body without organs, when the schizo sought to remain at the unbearable point where mind touches matter. Psychoanalysis reduces the neurotic to a creature consuming only daddy-and-mommy. The conjunctive synthesis “So that’s what it was!” and “So it’s me!” is contrasted with the dreary Oedipal discovery “So it’s my father, my mother.” Tracing the shortest path: points of disjunction on the body without organs form circles converging on desiring-machines, and the subject, produced as a residuum alongside the machine, passes through all degrees of the circle. The subject is not at the center but on the periphery, decentered, defined by the states it passes through—Beckett’s Unnamable, a succession of irregular loops, with Murphy and Watt as states, without family involvement.
Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Celibate Machine
Via the paranoiac and miraculating machines, attraction and repulsion on the body without organs produce a series of states in the celibate machine; the subject is born of each state, reborn of the following, consuming all states. Klossowski’
The Loss of Free Syntheses Under Oedipus
Freud’s discovery of Oedipus, the argument runs, sacrificed something far greater than mere biological realism. What Freud and the first analysts actually uncovered was a domain of free syntheses—endless connections, nonexclusive disjunctions, nonspecific conjunctions, partial objects, and flows. Desiring-machines throb in the unconscious depths: Irma’s injection, the Wolf Man’s ticktock, Anna’s coughing machine, Freud’s own neurobiologico-desiring-machines. This discovery had two correlates: the direct confrontation between desiring-production and social production, and the repression social machines exercise on desiring-machines, linking psychic repression to social repression. All of this is lost with a sovereign Oedipus. Free association becomes a univocal impasse; unconscious chains are biunivocalized, linearized, suspended from a despotic signifier. Desiring-production is crushed under representation, and the productive unconscious becomes one that merely expresses itself—in myth, tragedy, dream.
Groddeck remained more faithful to the autoproduction of the unconscious in the coextension of man and Nature. Freud drew back from wild production, restoring classical order from ancient Greek theater. In his self-analysis he found something resembling Oedipus, initially treating it as a variant of the familial romance, a paranoiac recording causing familial determinations to explode. Little by little he made familial romance dependent on Oedipus, neuroticizing and oedipalizing everything, closing the familial triangle over the unconscious. The schizo is the enemy. Desiring-production is personologized, imaginarized, structuralized—reduced to fantasy production. The unconscious becomes a theater, a scene and staging—not avant-garde but classical representation. The psychoanalyst becomes a director for a private theater rather than an engineer of production units.
Psychoanalysis resembles the Russian Revolution: we don’t know when it went bad. Oedipus is the idealist turning point. Economic notions remain but are subordinated to expressive forms. Desiring-machines function only behind consulting-room walls, making a hellish racket, while the analyst maintains denial: all of that is surely true, but it is still daddy-mommy. The consulting-room door reads: leave your desiring-machines, enter and be oedipalized. Everything follows: unreliable cure, interminable contractual nature, speech flows exchanged for money flows. A psychotic episode—bringing a tape recorder into the office—reverses everything, breaking the contract’s exclusion of a third party. The analyst became carrier of Oedipus, great agent of antiproduction in desire—the same history as Capital.
Three Texts of Freud: Schreber
The problem is practical, concerning cure practice. Schreber’s analysis was not in vivo but exemplary. Freud encounters the question: how dare one reduce to the paternal theme a delirium so rich as the Judge’s, since Schreber makes only brief references to his father? Freud marks difficulty assigning as cause an outburst of homosexual libido toward Dr. Flechsig. Replacing doctor with father, commissioning father to explain delirium’s God, we take liberties. Freud’s double response: it’s not his fault psychoanalysis encounters the father everywhere—it’s sexuality’s stubborn symbolism; and the father returns constantly in delusions, religions, ancient myths. Schreber was posthumously oedipalized by Freud. From the enormous political, social, historical content of Schreber’s delirium, not one word is retained. Freud invokes a sexual argument and a mythological argument—the adequation of unconscious productive force and the edifying forces of myths and religions.
This mythological argument is important: Freud agrees with Jung here, and this agreement subsists after their break. Both postulate measuring the unconscious against myth, substituting expressive forms for productive formations. The basic question is never asked: why return to myth? The adequation can be read anagogically or analytically, but drives are transferred from myth. From the same postulate, Jung restores diffuse religiosity while Freud confirms rigorous atheism. Freud needs to deny God as much as Jung needs to affirm the divine. To render religion unconscious or the unconscious religious still injects something religious. Freud held to atheism heroically, but around him others prepared reconciliation of churches and psychoanalysis. Marx declared he who denies God does only a secondary thing, denying God to posit man in God’s place. But one who knows man’s place is entirely elsewhere no longer needs myth’s mediation—attaining regions of autoproduction where the unconscious is immediately atheist, immediately orphan.
In “A Child Is Being Beaten,” Oedipus is the nuclear complex. The reader feels disquieting strangeness: never was the paternal theme less visible, yet never affirmed with more passion. Oedipus’s imperialism is founded on an absence. Of three phases of the girl’s fantasy, the father doesn’t appear in the first, no longer appears in the third—leaving the second where father shines clearly without doubt, but this second phase has never had a real existence. It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account.
Oedipalizing the Unconscious
The passage distinguishes two uses of the connective syntheses: a global and specific use versus a partial and nonspecific use. In the first, desire receives a fixed subject and complete objects defined as global persons. The synthesis of recording situates a definable ego on its surface of inscription under Oedipal conditions, in relation to parental images serving as coordinates. This triangulation implies a constituent prohibition: incest with the mother and taking the father’s place. The text rejects the reasoning that since it is forbidden, it was desired, arguing global persons do not exist prior to the prohibitions and triangulation that constitute them; desire receives its complete objects and is forbidden them simultaneously. The same Oedipal operation grounds both its resolution and its failure.
The prohibition displaces itself: the Oedipal inscription reacts on the synthesis of production, introducing new global persons—the sister and the spouse, after father and mother. The prohibition has two forms: negative, concerning the mother, imposing differentiation; and positive, concerning the sister, requiring exchange. The first step elaborates the triangle’s form; only the second ensures its transmission. One takes a woman other than one’s sister to constitute a new triangle whose inverted vertex is one’s child—surmounting Oedipus but reproducing and transmitting it. The parental use of recording extends into a conjugal use of the connective syntheses of production: a pairing of people replaces connection of partial objects. Partial objects become possessions of persons. Kant defines marriage as the tie making a person owner of another’s sexual organs. No biunivocal process or triangulation appears at the level of desiring-production; the only subject is desire itself on the body without organs.
The triangle forms in parental use, reproduces in conjugal use. Partial objects are said to be caught in an intuition of precocious totality; the ego in an intuition of unity. This totality-unity is posited in terms of absence, as what partial objects lack. Melanie Klein is cited: the schizoid partial object relates to a whole preparing the complete object in the depressive phase. Freud is cited for Oedipus, castration, the fantasy “A Child Is Being Beaten,” and the latency period. This absent something is called phallus or law—the signifier. Oedipus’s formula is 3 + 1, the One of the transcendent phallus.
Oedipus Everywhere and Nowhere
Oedipus, the authors insist, is nothing within desiring-production itself, yet it turns up everywhere in the enterprise of domesticating the unconscious. Psychoanalysis did not invent it; subjects arrive already oedipalized and actively demand it. Stravinsky on his deathbed blamed his misfortune on his father’s distance and his mother’s coldness—proof that even artists submit. The analysts invent nothing, merely reinforcing a movement already underway, making the unconscious speak through transcendent syntheses: Global Persons, the Complete Object, the Great Phallus, the undifferentiated Imaginary, Symbolic Differentiations, Segregation. Their one genuine invention is transference—a consulting-room Oedipus, noxious and virulent, in which the subject sucks at his Oedipus on the analyst’s body. Oedipus takes shape in the family, not the office, which is merely the last territoriality. Oedipalization names forces far more subterranean than psychoanalysis, family, or ideology: the forces of social production, reproduction, and repression. Oedipus is an application; the family a delegated agent. A child living as “an angle” is difficult, as Artaud writes of the child who is but an angle, sustained by “the most somber organization.”
Neurosis, Psychosis, and the Interrupted Journey
In 1924 Freud distinguished neurosis, where the ego obeys reality and represses the id, from psychosis, where the ego falls under the id’s sway and breaks with reality. That same year Capgras and Carrette presented a schizophrenia case involving a delusion of doubles: the patient hated her mother and desired her father incestuously, yet lived her parents as false doubles. In neurosis the object function of reality is preserved while the causal complex is repressed; in psychosis the complex invades consciousness at the price of repressing reality itself. Following Lacan, it is surprising that Oedipus is discovered latently in neurosis rather than patently in psychosis. In psychosis the familial complex acts as an indifferent stimulus, a mere inductor, while intensive investments bear on social, historical, and cultural fields. Perhaps the loss of reality is not the effect of the schizophrenic process but of its forced oedipalization—its interruption. The schizo is ill because of oedipalization, which he cannot tolerate, he who has gone on a distant journey; he suffers from being brought back. A drop in intensity to the body without organs equals zero, autism. As Laing says, they are interrupted in their journey.
Two Groups, Two Syntheses
Two groups emerge: those who do not tolerate oedipalization and those who do. One is cast off with forces for practical explosion into paternalistic deviation; the other consists of loners deprived of individual success, engaged in innate science. The recording of desire on the increate body without organs opposes familial recording on the socius: innate science in psychosis against neurotic experimental sciences, the schizoid excentric circle against the neurosis triangle. Two kinds of synthesis stand opposed—desiring-machines versus the Oedipal-narcissistic machine. The family operates on desiring-production, appropriating its forces and reorganizing connections and hiatuses along lines of universal castration, “a dead rat’s ass,” said Artaud, “suspended from the ceiling of the sky.” Its inscription follows its triangle, distinguishing inside from outside along lines of global persons. Retention is its primary function, directing elements toward undifferentiated miasma or contagious differentiation; resonance is its second, the triangle vibrating under pressure of what it retains and thrusts aside. The family is an anus that retains, a voice that resounds, a mouth that consumes, while desiring-machines rattle at the door.
The Undecidability of Oedipus
The simple opposition between the two groups proves inadequate, since it is hard to discriminate the pressure familial reproduction exerts on desiring-production from the reverse. A familial romance expresses both an effort to save Oedipal genealogy and a free thrust of non-oedipal genealogy; fantasies are border phenomena. Oedipus is strictly undecidable and strictly good for nothing. Gérard de Nerval wants Aurélie to be the same as Adrienne, both being his mother—is this perceptual identity a sign of psychosis? He seeks the point where the triangle’s vibration reaches its limit. “You are simply seeking for drama,” Aurélie tells him. Identifications are names with regions of intensity, stimuli setting in motion another journey where the mother is no longer encountered but the Virgin and God: “And twice I have crossed and conquered the Acheron.” The schizo accepts reduction to the mother since it is of no importance.
The Territorial Machine and the Coding of Flows
Marx’s Grundrisse, cited alongside Godelier, holds that the West’s development line is universal not because it recurs everywhere but because it recurs nowhere else, its authenticity lying in its singularity. The Earth is the great unengendered stasis, quasi cause of production and object of desire; the territorial machine is the first form of socius, a megamachine covering a social field, distinct from technical machines. Technical machines imply a nonhuman acting element; social machines have men as their parts, fashioning a memory that enables synergy. Capitalism alone develops semiautonomous technical production, presupposing the dismantling of prior great social machines. A clock can be both technical and social. Mumford’s megamachine is literally correct, though he limits it to barbarian despotism. The social machine exhibits an immobile motor: flows are set apart, elements detached, tasks distributed—coding flows of women, children, herds, seed, sperm, shit, menstrual blood, while the full body of the goddess Earth gathers cultivable species, implements, and human organs. Fortes insists a woman circulates of herself; the authors reject exchangist postulates, since society is a socius of inscription where marking matters. The primitive machine collectively invests organs—masks, initiations, prohibitions, mythologies of partial objects. Modern societies undertake a vast privatization of organs corresponding to the decoding of abstract flows; the anus was first privatized, coinciding with money expressing abstraction, which is why psychoanalytic remarks on the anal monetary economy hold relative truth. Oedipus implies individual overinvestment compensating collective disinvestment.
Cruelty, Alliance, and Filiation
The primitive machine codes flows, invests organs, marks bodies—tattooing, excising, incising, scarifying, mutilating, initiating—Nietzsche’s morality of mores, the prehistoric labor of man upon himself. Cruelty is the movement of culture realized in bodies, injecting production into desire and vice versa; death, punishment, and torture are desired and productive. Territorial signs plant flags in bodies; speech presupposes writing. The primitive machine is not territorial in the residential sense—only the State is, subdividing territory rather than people. The savage socius was the only strictly territorial machine, declining alliance and filiation on the earth’s body before the State. Alliance cannot be deduced from filiation; it produces generalized distinguishability. Leach on matrimonial regimes, Fortes on complementary filiation, agnation and cognation, debt relationships maintaining affinal ties: filiation is administrative and hierarchical, alliance political and economic—two forms of primitive capital, fixed filiative stock and circulating mobile debts, two memories, biofiliative and of alliance. Economy goes by way of alliance. Kinship is practice, praxis, strategy, not structure, as Berthe and de Heusch argue.
Nietzsche Against Mauss: Debt, Not Exchange
The book opens this stretch by proposing that the true founding text of modern ethnology is not Marcel Mauss’s The Gift but Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche’s second essay, they argue, interprets the primitive economy through debt and the debtor-creditor relation, with no trace of exchange or interest “à l’anglaise.” Where Mauss wavered between exchange and debt, Nietzsche did not hesitate; Bataille, following the same Nietzschean inspiration, likewise did not.
The Primitive Socius and the Breeding of Man
The fundamental problem of the primitive socius—inscription, coding, marking—has never been posed so sharply. Man must constitute himself by repressing the intense germinal influx, the great biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge every attempt at collectivity, and a new collective memory must be created in its place: a memory of the spoken word and of alliances, which declines alliances with extended filiations and endows him with faculties of resonance, retention, selection, and detachment. The answer is debt—open, mobile, finite blocks of debt, a composite of the speaking voice, the marked body, and the enjoying eye. All the stupidity of laws, the pain of initiations, the red-hot irons and atrocious procedures have only this meaning: to breed man, mark him in his flesh, render him capable of alliance, form him within the debtor-creditor relation—a memory straining toward the future.
Debt as the Immediate Effect of Inscription
Far from being an appearance assumed by exchange, debt is the immediate effect or direct means of the territorial and corporal inscription process. No ressentiment is invoked here; innocent men suffer marks on their bodies through the respective autonomy of the voice and graphic action, and through the autonomous eye extracting pleasure from the event. The bad debtor is not one everyone suspects in advance, but one on whom the marks have not sufficiently “taken”—as if he were unmarked, having widened beyond allowed limits the gap between the voice of alliance and the body of filiation, so that equilibrium must be re-established through increased pain.
The Terrible Equation: Injury = Pain
Nietzsche encounters the terrible equation of debt: injury done equals pain to be suffered. How can the criminal’s pain serve as an “equivalent” of the harm done? An eye must be invoked that extracts pleasure from the event—not vengeance, but the evaluating eye, the eye of the gods who enjoy cruel spectacles, “and in punishment there is so much that is festive!” The equation has nothing exchangist about it, proving that debt itself had nothing to do with exchange. The eye extracts from contemplated pain a surplus value of code compensating the broken relationship between the wronged voice of alliance and the mark that had not sufficiently penetrated the criminal’s body. The crime, a rupture of the phonographic connection, is re-established by the spectacle of punishment: primitive justice, territorial representation, has foreseen everything.
The Founding of the State
Coding pain and death, primitive justice has foreseen everything—except how its own death would come from without. Nietzsche’s quoted passage describes beings who come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext, appearing as lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden, too different even to be hated. Their work is the instinctive creation and imposition of forms; they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists—wherever they appear, something new arises, a ruling structure in which parts and functions are delimited and coordinated. They know nothing of guilt, responsibility, or consideration; they exemplify a terrible artist’s egoism with the look of bronze, knowing itself justified to all eternity in its work, like a mother in her child. Bad conscience did not develop in them—but it would not have developed at all if a tremendous quantity of freedom had not been expelled from the world, made latent under their hammer blows.
The Blond Beasts of Prey
Nietzsche speaks of a break, a rupture, a leap. Who are these beings who come like fate? “Some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless.” Even the most ancient African myths speak of these blond men. They are the founders of the State. Nietzsche will establish other breaks—the Greek city-state, Christianity, democratic and bourgeois humanism, industrial society, capitalism, socialism—but all of these may presuppose this first great hiatus, even as they claim to repel and fill it. Spiritual or temporal, tyrannical or democratic, capitalist or socialist, there has never been but a single State, the State-as-dog that “speaks with flaming roars.”
The New Socius and Infinite Debt
Nietzsche suggests how this new socius proceeds: a terror without precedent, compared to which the ancient system of cruelty and primitive regimentation are nothing. A concerted destruction of all primitive codings, or their derisory preservation as secondary parts in the new machine, and a new apparatus of repression—these mark the despotic State’s arrival. The passage then turns to language and the signifier, arguing that comparing language to exchange and money cannot prevent the signifier from reintroducing its transcendence and bearing witness to a vanished despot still functioning in modern imperialism. Even when it speaks Swiss or American, linguistics manipulates the shadow of Oriental despotism. Saussure is said to emphasize that the arbitrariness of language establishes its sovereignty as a generalized slavery visited on the masses. Two dimensions coexist in Saussure: a horizontal one, where the signified is reduced to the value of coexisting minimal terms into which the signifier decomposes, and a vertical one, where the signifier is elevated to the concept corresponding to the acoustic image—the voice in its maximum extension, which recomposes the signifier. The signifier thus appears twice: once in the chain of elements, where the signified is always a signifier for another signifier, and again in the detached object on which the whole chain depends, spreading signification effects over it. No phonological code operates on the signifier in the first sense without an overcoding effected by the signifier itself in the second sense. The passage finds it curious that one can show the servitude of the masses with respect to minimal sign elements within language’s immanence, without showing how domination is exercised through the transcendence of the signifier.
Pautrat, Conquest, and the Two Languages of Writing
A footnote notes that Bernard Pautrat tries to establish a rapprochement between Nietzsche and Saussure, starting from problems of domination and servitude. Pautrat remarks that Nietzsche, unlike Hegel, makes the master-slave relationship pass through language rather than labor; but when he compares with Saussure, he retains language as a system to which the masses are enslaved, consigning to fiction the Nietzschean idea of a language of masters. An irreducible exteriority of conquest then asserts itself. If language itself does not presuppose conquest, the leveling operations constituting written language presuppose two inscriptions not speaking the same language: one of masters, one of slaves. Jean Nougayrol describes the Sumerians reading a sign a meaning water; an Akkadian asks his Sumerian master what the sign is, is told “that’s a,” and takes the sign for a, severing the relation between sign and water.
The Leninist Break and the Limits of Class Consciousness
The Leninist break, these pages argue, forged a class consciousness that matched the class’s objective interest and forced capitalist countries to recognize class bipolarity. Yet it could not prevent State capitalism from reviving inside socialism, nor could classical capitalism be evaded through “mole work”—integrating recognized class sections into its axiomatic while pushing uncontrolled revolutionary elements to the periphery or into enclaves. The only choice becomes the socialist State’s rigid, quickly saturated axiomatic versus the capitalist State’s cynical, flexible, never-saturated one. The real question is not whether industrial society can dispense with surplus, a planner State, or a bourgeoisie—evidently it cannot—nor whether class consciousness embodied in party or State betrays objective class interest. Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique is judged profoundly correct in concluding there is no class spontaneity, only “group” spontaneity, hence the need to distinguish “groups-in-fusion” from the class, which remains “serial,” represented by party or State, on a different scale. Class interest defines a collective preconscious represented in a distinct consciousness that cannot be judged as betraying or deforming; the problem lies between unconscious group desires and preconscious class interests.
Reich returns with innocent standards demanding a prior distinction between desire and interest, urging leadership to understand progressive desires latent in various strata and the “traditional bonds” blocking them—leadership tends to reply that on hearing “desire” it pulls out a gun. Desire can never be deceived; interests can. Hence Reich’s cry: the masses were not deceived, they desired fascism—one desires against one’s own interests, profiting capitalism, socialism, party, and leadership. “Traditional bonds” belong to the historical process and modern State functions. Modern societies decode and deterritorialize, then reterritorialize: artificial, residual, archaic neoterritorialities—Edgar Morin’s “neoarchaisms”—some folkloric yet politically potent (domino players, home brewers, Veterans of Foreign Wars), others enclaves nourishing fascism or revolutionary charge (ethnic minorities, the Basque problem, Irish Catholics, Indian reservations), some spontaneous (neighborhoods, gangs), others State-organized (regionalism, nationalism). The fascist State was capitalism’s most fantastic reterritorialization attempt; the socialist State has its own minorities and territorialities (Russian nationalism, party territoriality). Personalization of power accompanies deterritorialization of the machine. The State regulates decoded flows by reterritorializing—central banks, peripheral self-centering. Marx showed political economy’s foundation: the abstract subjective essence of wealth in labor/production (Adam Smith’s immense step), a decoding movement rectified by new territorialization, new fetishism. Mercantilists tied wealth to a money-creating despotic machine; physiocrats to landed property; Smith reterritorialized it in private ownership. Capital shows capitalism develops production for its own sake yet only within “production of capital,” surpassing limits while reproducing them on a wider scale—hence the falling tendency’s corollary: simultaneity of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Modern societies oscillate between the Urstaat and unfettered flows, paranoia and schizophrenia, recoding while decoding. Suzanne de Brunhoff’s note on credit’s bastard character is cited. Two conclusions: the modern State is a genuine advance over the despotic State, yet there has never been but one State, the Urstaat—Duvalier’s police chief was named Desyr. Three social machines: territorial (coding on the earth), despotic (overcoding on the despot, first deterritorialization), capitalist (decoding on capital-money, second deterritorialization, reterritorializing anew). Representation types: connotation-connection, subordination-disjunction, co-ordination-conjunction. The general theory of society is a generalized theory of flows. In territorial/despotic machines, economic reproduction passes through kinship; in capitalism the socius becomes capital-money, the family is privatized, placed outside the field, countersected by classes—segregation the origin of equality. Private persons are simulacra, images of images; Oedipus is born as the displaced, internalized limit where desire is caught—empty in primitive formations, symbolically occupied in despotic ones, inhabited and lived only under capitalism. Freud, like Luther and Smith, discovered an abstract subjective essence (libido) but reterritorialized it in the family; Foucault shown to crown psychiatry with familialism. Schizoanalysis must overturn the theater of representation into desiring-production.
Social Investment Precedes Familial Investment
Social investments precede and determine familial investments. The father is “first” only because the social field is invested first; father and child are simultaneously immersed in that field. Using Kardiner’s analysis of the Marquesans, the text distinguishes adult alimentary anxiety (endemic famine) from infantile alimentary anxiety (deficient maternal care), arguing neither derives from the other, and that the social determination (rarity of women, making adults and children alike “wary of them”) is already invested in the infantile experience. What the child invests—the mother’s breast, the familial structure—is already the state of breaks and flows of the social field (flows of women and food, recordings, distributions). The adult is never an “afterward” of the child.
Three conclusions follow. First, from regression’s hypothetical viewpoint, the father is first: the paranoiac father Oedipalizes the son; guilt is projected by the father before felt by the son. Psychoanalysis errs in beginning with the child, producing an absurd theory of fantasy (Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theme). Second, regression in an absolute sense is inadequate because it encloses us in simple reproduction/generation and attains only the object of reproduction. Only the cycle is categorical and absolute, attaining production as subject of reproduction—the autoproduction of the unconscious (unity of history and nature, Homo natura to Homo historia). Generation serves sexuality as a cyclical movement, not vice versa. Psychoanalysis’s second error: remaining captive to familialism, confined to regression/progression (even its conception of repetition). Third, the community viewpoint is disjunctive. Transmission is second to information/communication; the genetic revolution showed there is no transmission of flows but communication of a code or axiomatic, a combinative apparatus. In the social field, coding/axiomatic determines communication of unconsciouses—a norm Freud touched on only marginally (occultism), backgrounding the hereditary transmission animating the Freud-Jung controversy. The son first represses the unconscious of the father and mother; failure of that repression grounds neuroses. This communication’s principle is the commonalty of the social field, not the family. The family is never determining but always determined: stimulus of departure, aggregate of destination, intermediary/interception of communication.
The Two Poles of Delirium
Delirium is the general matrix of every unconscious social investment, mobilizing disinvestments, counterinvestments, overinvestments. Two major types: a paranoiac fascisizing pole investing central sovereignty, overinvesting it as final eternal cause, counterinvesting enclaves/periphery, disinvesting free “figures” of desire (“I am your kind, I belong to the superior race and class”); and a schizorevolutionary pole following lines of escape, breaching the wall, causing flows to move, assembling machines and groups-in-fusion in enclaves/periphery (“
Passive Syntheses and the Body Without Organs
The argument turns to the strange ways desiring-machines connect. When flows from two partial objects partially overlap, their production remains distinct in the objects that emit them, yet the fields of presence attached to those objects become indiscernible—the mouth and anus of the anorexic blur into a single mouth-anus. Having exchanged function in the mixed region, they can no longer be told apart by exclusion where the flows stop overlapping, yielding a new passive synthesis in which the two terms stand in a paradoxical relation of included disjunction. Alternatively, the emitting objects themselves may be permuted rather than their flows overlapped, producing fringes of interference on the edge of each field of presence—a remainder of one flow lodged in the other, forming residual conjunctive syntheses that guide passage or becoming from one to the other. Such permutation can involve two, three, or n organs, deformable abstract polygons that undo the figurative Oedipal triangle. Through binarity, overlapping, or permutation, these indirect passive syntheses constitute one engineering of desire. Who could catalogue each subject’s desiring-machines? Mozart’s own machine is invoked, along with a scatological letter cited by Marcel More showing the scatological machine working beneath and against the Oedipal “cage.”
These syntheses necessarily imply a body without organs, which is not the opposite of organs-partial objects. It is produced in the first passive synthesis of connection, neutralizing or setting in motion the two activities, the two heads of desire. It may appear as the amorphous fluid of antiproduction or as the support appropriating flow production; it can repel or attract organs-objects. In both repulsion and attraction, the body without organs opposes not the organs-objects but ensures its own opposition, and theirs, to an organism. Body without organs and organs-partial objects are opposed conjointly to the organism. The body without organs is produced as a whole alongside the parts—a whole that does not unify or totalize but is added as a new, really distinct part.
When it repels organs, in the paranoiac machine, it marks the external limit of the pure multiplicity of organs as a nonorganic, nonorganized multiplicity. When it attracts them, in the miraculating fetishistic machine, it still does not totalize them; organs-partial objects cling to it and enter new syntheses of included disjunction and nomadic conjunction, of overlapping and permutation, repudiating the organism. Desire passes through the body and organs, but not the organism. Partial objects are not expressions of a fragmented organism, nor is the body without organs a “de-differentiated” organism stuck back together. The two are one and the same multiplicity, conceived as such by schizoanalysis: partial objects are the direct powers of the body without organs, and the body without organs the raw material of partial objects. Pierre Bonnafe’s study is cited to show the inadequacy of the notion of a fragmented body, recognizing in the magic object the three desiring syntheses: connective, included disjunctive, and conjunctive.
The body without organs is the matter filling space to given degrees of intensity; partial objects are these intensive parts producing the real in space from matter as intensity=0. It is the immanent substance in the Spinozist sense; partial objects are its ultimate attributes, really distinct yet not excluding or opposing one another. They are the two material elements of schizophrenic desiring-machines: immobile motor and working parts, giant molecule and micromolecules, in continuity along the molecular chain of desire.
The chain is the apparatus of transmission or reproduction in the desiring-machine, inseparable from the distribution of partial objects on the body without organs and from the leveling effect resulting in appropriation. It implies a different synthesis than flows: not lines of connection but a network of disjunction on the recording surface. Though presented logically with disjunctive recording following connective production, from the machine’s standpoint there is no succession—only strict coexistence of chains and flows, body without organs and partial objects. The conversion of energy is a preliminary and constant condition. The chain is the network of included disjunctions resecting productive connections, channeling or “codifying” flows. The question is whether one can speak of a code at the molecular level. A code implied either the specific determination of the full body as territoriality of support, or the erection of a despotic signifier. The axiomatic, working on decoded flows, cannot proceed except by reterritorializations and reviving signifying unity. Code and axiomatic seem valid only for molar aggregates, where the signifying chain forms a determinate configuration on a specifically determined support, in terms of a detached signifier—conditions fulfilled only with exclusions in the disjunctive network.
With the properly molecular chain, the body without organs is a nonspecific support marking the molecular limit of molar aggregates; the chain’s function is no longer coding flows on a full body of earth, despot, or capital, but decoding them on the full body without organs. It is a chain of escape, not a code—a chain of decoding and deterritorialization, apprehended as the reverse of codes and territorialities. It is still signifying, composed of signs of desire, but no longer signifying, since under included disjunctions everything is possible. These signs are indifferent points, abstract machinic figures playing freely on the body without organs, forming no structured configuration—or no longer forming one. Jacques Monod is cited on conceiving a machine such by functional properties but not structure, “where nothing but the play” remains.
Every Investment Is Social
The first thesis of schizoanalysis holds that every investment is social and bears on a sociohistorical field. Molar formations or gregariousness—herd instinct—effect a unification and totalization of molecular forces through statistical accumulation obeying the laws of large numbers; this unity can be the biological unity of a species or the structural unity of a socius, composed as a whole or global object. In relation to this new order, partial objects of a molecular order appear as a lack, while the whole is said to be lacked by the partial objects; thus desire is fused to lack. Myriad breaks-flows determining positive dispersion in a molecular multiplicity are fitted over vacuoles of lack performing this fusion in a statistical constellation of molar order. Freud is cited as demonstrating the passage from psychotic multiplicities of dispersion founded on breaks or schizzes to large vacuoles of the neurosis and castration type: the neurotic needs a global object in relation to which partial objects can be determined as a lack, and inversely. The statistical transformation of molecular multiplicity into a molar constellation organizes lack on a large scale, belonging essentially to the biological or social organism—species or socius. No society fails to arrange lack in its midst by variable means peculiar to it; these means differ in a despotic society versus a capitalist society, where the market economy raises them to a degree of perfection unknown before capitalism. This welding of desire to lack gives desire collective and personal ends, goals, or intentions, instead of desire taken in the real order of its production, behaving as a molecular phenomenon devoid of goal or intention.
The passage denies that statistical accumulation results from chance or is random; it is the fruit of a selection exerting force on elements of chance. Nietzsche is invoked: selection is most often exerted in favor of the large number, inaugurating a fundamental intuition inspiring modern thought. Large numbers or aggregates do not exist prior to a selective pressure that might elicit singular lines from them; rather, these large numbers and aggregates are born of this selective pressure that crushes, eliminates, or regularizes singularities.
Main Arguments
The central argument of Anti-Oedipus is that desiring-production is the primary reality of both nature and human life, and that psychoanalysis, by reducing desire to the Oedipal triangle, has domesticated and repressed the revolutionary potential of the unconscious. The book opens by arguing that Oedipus is wrongly assumed to be an obvious, given starting point; in fact, Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines. The question the authors pose is why desiring-machines are repressed, to what end, whether such repression is necessary or desirable, and by what means it is accomplished—what must go inside the Oedipal triangle to construct it.
Against the psychoanalytic reduction, the authors argue that there are no relatively independent spheres or circuits of production, distribution, and consumption. Production is immediately consumption and a recording process without mediation, and recording and consumption directly determine production within the production process itself. Everything is production: productions of productions, of recording processes, of consumptions. This is the first meaning of “process.” Second, no distinction is made between man and nature: the human essence of nature and natural essence of man become one in production, in industry viewed not from utility but from fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man. Man is not king of creation but in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms, plugging an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole. Desiring-production is thus the principal concern of a materialist psychiatry, which conceives the schizo as Homo natura.
The book argues that desiring-machines are binary machines: one machine is always coupled with another. The productive synthesis (production of production) is connective: “and…” “and then…” There is always a flow-producing machine and another connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of the flow. Desire couples continuous flows and partial objects that are fragmentary. Every “object” presupposes continuity of a flow; every flow, fragmentation of the object. The schizophrenic is the universal producer; no need to distinguish producing from its product. The pure “thisness” of the object produced is carried into a new act of producing.
A second major argument concerns the nature of the body without organs. Only by means of the body without organs—eyes closed tight, nostrils pinched shut, ears stopped up—is something produced, counterproduced, diverting or frustrating the entire process of production, of which it is nonetheless still a part. The machine remains desire, an investment of desire whose history unfolds through primary repression and the return of the repressed, in the succession of paranoiac machines, miraculating machines, and celibate machines. The body without organs is the surface on which desiring-production records itself, the support of the signs that form the code of the unconscious.
The book further argues that the family operates on desiring-production, appropriating productive forces, reorganizing connections and hiatuses along lines of universal castration. The family’s inscription follows its triangle, distinguishing inside from outside, cutting along lines of global persons. Retention is its primary function: rejecting, retaining, directing elements toward undifferentiated miasma or contagious differentiation. Resonance is its second function: the triangle vibrates under pressure of what it retains and thrusts aside. The family is “an anus that retains, a voice that resounds, and a mouth that consumes.” Desiring-machines are at the door, making everything shake.
The historical argument of the third section is that the primitive territorial machine codes flows, invests organs, and marks bodies through tattooing, excising, incising, carving, scarifying, mutilating, encircling, and initiating. Cruelty is the movement of culture realized in bodies, injecting production into desire and vice versa. The barbarian despotic machine introduces the transcendent unity of the State, the despot’s full body, and a new form of representation. The civilized capitalist machine decodes flows and deterritorializes the socius, substituting abstract quantity for coded flows, constituting private persons, and privatizing organs. The anus was first privatized, coinciding with money expressing abstraction—hence the relative truth of psychoanalytic remarks on anal monetary economy. Oedipus implies individual overinvestment compensating collective disinvestment.
The book’s political argument is that unconscious libidinal investment of the social field coexists with, but does not necessarily coincide with, preconscious investments. When subjects or groups act counter to their class interests—rallying to the interests and ideals of an opposing class—it is insufficient to say they were fooled. It is not an ideological problem of misrecognition or illusion but a problem of desire; desire is part of the infrastructure. A form of social production and reproduction—with its economic, financial, and political mechanisms—can be desired as such, independently of the desiring-subject’s interests. Hitler sexually aroused fascists not via metaphor; banking or stock-market transactions, claims, coupons, credits arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. Money that grows and produces more money has effects. Socioeconomic “complexes” are veritable complexes of the unconscious, communicating a voluptuous wave from top to bottom of their hierarchy.
The goal of schizoanalysis, then, is to analyze the specific nature of libidinal investments in economic and political spheres, showing how desire can be made to desire its own repression—hence the death instinct’s role in the circuit connecting desire to the social sphere. This happens beneath ideology. A fascist or reactionary unconscious investment can coexist with a conscious revolutionary investment; rarely, a revolutionary investment on the level of desire coexists with a reactionary conscious interest. Reactionary unconscious investment conforms to the dominant class’s interest but operates on its own account through the segregative use of conjunctive syntheses from which Oedipus derives: “I am of the superior race.” Revolutionary unconscious investment cuts across the interest of dominated, exploited classes, causing flows that break apart segregations and their Oedipal applications—flows capable of hallucinating history, reanimating races in delirium, setting continents ablaze.
Key Concepts
Desiring-production is the fundamental concept of the book. It designates production as process, without distinction between man and nature, and without the idealist categories of expression or representation. Desiring-production is production of production, production of recording processes, production of consumptions. It is the essential reality of man and nature, and the principal concern of a materialist psychiatry.
The body without organs is the surface on which desiring-production records itself. It is the unproductive, the unengendered, the sterile, the uncoded, the unconsumable. It is the support of the signs that form the code of the unconscious, the surface on which the recording of desire takes place. The body without organs is opposed to the organism, to organization, to the socius as a surface of inscription.
The three syntheses of the unconscious are the connective synthesis (production of production), the disjunctive synthesis (production of recording), and the conjunctive synthesis (production of consumption). The connective synthesis is “and…” “and then…” The disjunctive synthesis is “either… or… or…” The conjunctive synthesis is “So that’s what it was!” and “So it’s me!” These syntheses are free and anoedipal in desiring-production, but are captured and restricted by Oedipus.
The paranoiac machine, the miraculating machine, and the celibate machine are the three machines through which the subject passes on the body without organs. The paranoiac machine is the machine of attraction and repulsion, the machine of the body without organs as full body. The miraculating machine is the machine of the recording process, the machine of the signifier. The celibate machine is the machine of the Eternal Return, the machine of the subject’s consumption of intensive states.
Oedipus is the central target of the book’s critique. Oedipus is not a universal structure of the unconscious but a specific application, a mechanism of repression, a way of domesticating desiring-production. Oedipus is “strictly undecidable” and “strictly good for nothing.” The Oedipal triangle—daddy, mommy, me—is a machine of antiproduction in desire, the same history as Capital.
Schizoanalysis is the practice opposed to psychoanalysis. Its first positive task is to analyze the specific nature of libidinal investments in economic and political spheres. Its second positive task is to liberate the revolutionary potential of desire from the segregative and Oedipal applications that capture it. Schizoanalysis is not a theory but a practice, a way of using the unconscious rather than interpreting it.
The socius is the social body on which desiring-production is inscribed. The primitive territorial machine is the first form of socius, the Earth as the great unengendered stasis. The barbarian despotic machine is the second form, the body of the despot. The civilized capitalist machine is the third form, capital as the body without organs of the capitalist.
Territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization are the processes by which social machines code and decode flows. The primitive machine codes flows; the despotic machine overcodes them; the capitalist machine decodes them and deterritorializes the socius, substituting abstract quantity for coded flows.
The Urstaat is the idea that the State is not a historical development but a transcendent unity that appears from the beginning, the despot’s full body, the model of all States.
The molecular unconscious is the unconscious as a field of multiplicities, flows, arrangements, and connections, as opposed to the molar unconscious of persons, egos, and structures.
Themes
The most pervasive theme of Anti-Oedipus is the opposition between production and representation. The book argues that psychoanalysis reduces the productive unconscious to a theater of representation, where desire is expressed in myth, tragedy, and dream rather than produced in the real. Against this, the authors insist that the unconscious is a factory, not a theater; it produces, it does not express. The productive unconscious is immediately atheist, immediately orphan; it has no need of myth’s mediation. This theme runs through the critique of Freud’s retreat from wild production, the analysis of Schreber’s delirium, and the argument that the unconscious is not a structure but a machine.
A second theme is the relationship between desire and social repression. The book argues that social machines exercise a repression on desiring-machines, linking psychic repression to social repression. The family is the delegated agent of this repression, the application of Oedipus to desiring-production. But the book also argues that desire can be made to desire its own repression, that unconscious libidinal investment can ensure general submission to a dominant class by making cuts and segregations pass into a social field invested by desire rather than interests. This is the theme that gives the book its political urgency and its ethical dimension.
A third theme is the history of social formations. The book traces the transition from the primitive territorial machine to the barbarian despotic machine to the civilized capitalist machine, arguing that each social machine has its own regime of coding and decoding, its own form of representation, its own way of inscribing desiring-production on the socius. The primitive machine codes flows and invests organs; the despotic machine overcodes them and introduces the transcendent unity of the State; the capitalist machine decodes them and deterritorializes the socius, substituting abstract quantity for coded flows. This historical narrative is not a linear progression but a series of breaks and transformations, each of which produces new forms of desire and new forms of repression.
A fourth theme is the nature of schizophrenia. The book argues that schizophrenia is not a clinical entity but a process, the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as the essential reality of man and nature. The schizophrenic is the universal producer, the Homo natura and Homo historia, the one who is closest to the beating heart of reality. But the schizophrenic is also the one who is reduced to an autistic, hospitalized profile by the interruption of the process, by the forced oedipalization that brings him back from his journey. The schizo is ill because of oedipalization, “the most somber organization,” which he cannot tolerate—he who has gone on a distant journey. He suffers from being brought back.
A fifth theme is the relationship between desire and history. The book argues that all delirium has world-historical, political, racial content, mixing races, cultures, continents, kingdoms. The schizophrenic is most deeply involved in history, consuming all universal history at once. Schreber’s delirium uses races and history; he becomes a pupil of Jesuits, burgomaster of a city where Germans fight Slavs, a girl defending Alsace against the French, then crosses the Aryan threshold to become a Mongol prince. The error would be concluding fascists are mere paranoiacs; the more disturbing fact is that this enormous content disappears completely from Freud’s analysis, ground and squashed and triangulated into Oedipus. The book argues that Oedipus depends on nationalistic, religious, and racist sentiment, not the reverse. The segregative use is a precondition of Oedipus, insofar as the social field is reduced to the familial tie only by presupposing an enormous archaism—an incarnation of the race in person or spirit.
A sixth theme is the nature of reading and interpretation. The book argues that reading a text is never a scholarly search for what is signified, nor a textual search for a signifier, but a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring-machines, a schizoid exercise extracting the text’s revolutionary force. This theme is inseparable from the book’s form, which is itself a machine for producing effects rather than a system for producing conclusions.
The Author’s Conclusions
The book concludes with the definition of schizoanalysis and its two positive tasks. The first positive task is to analyze the specific nature of libidinal investments in economic and political spheres, showing how desire can be made to desire its own repression. This task requires the analysis of the death instinct’s role in the circuit connecting desire to the social sphere, and the analysis of the socioeconomic complexes that communicate a voluptuous wave from top to bottom of their hierarchy. The second positive task is to liberate the revolutionary potential of desire from the segregative and Oedipal applications that capture it. This task requires the dismantling of Oedipus, the critique of psychoanalysis, and the affirmation of an anoedipal sexuality, anoedipal heterosexuality and homosexuality, anoedipal castration.
The book’s final argument is that Oedipus disintegrates because its conditions have disintegrated. The nomadic and polyvocal use of conjunctive syntheses opposes the segregative and biunivocal use. Delirium has two poles: racist and racial, paranoiac-segregative and schizo-nomadic, with subtle shiftings between reactionary charge and revolutionary potential. Schreber finds himself the Great Mongol when breaking through Aryan segregation. Schizoanalysis must unravel the thread in ambiguous texts of great authors on race.
The book ends with the recapitulation of the three syntheses and the figure of Nietzsche. The passage mocks the claim that the father died “over a period of thousands of years” and that internalization of the paternal image occurred from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic “approximately 8,000 years ago.” Nietzsche is not the type to ruminate over the father’s death or spend his Paleolithic internalizing him; he is tired of stories about the death of the father and God, wanting to end interminable discourses already in vogue in his Hegelian epoch. He gives twelve or thirteen versions of the death of God to render the event comical, explaining that this event has no importance whatever, concerning only the latest Pope: God dead or not, father dead or not, it amounts to the same thing, since the same psychic repression and social repression continue—here in the name of God or a living father, there in the name of man or the dead father. Nietzsche says what matters is not the news that God is dead but the news that has not yet reached us: that the death of God is not an event but a structure, and that the same repression continues in the name of man or the dead father. The book concludes on this note: the task is not to mourn the father or to celebrate his death, but to dismantle the Oedipal machine that makes us desire our own repression, and to liberate the flows of desire that capitalism has decoded but not yet liberated.
Significance
Anti-Oedipus is one of the most influential works of late twentieth-century thought. Its significance lies in its radical rethinking of the relationship between desire, production, and social repression, and in its sustained critique of psychoanalysis as a mechanism of social control. The book’s argument that desire is part of the infrastructure, not the superstructure, and that unconscious libidinal investment can ensure general submission to a dominant class, has been widely taken up in political theory, cultural studies, and philosophy. Its concept of schizoanalysis has been influential in literary criticism, film theory, and art practice, where it has been used to develop methods of reading that are productive rather than interpretive.
The book’s engagement with anthropology and history has been influential in the critique of the universality of the Oedipus complex, and in the development of a materialist approach to the history of social formations. Its argument that the primitive territorial machine, the barbarian despotic machine, and the civilized capitalist machine are three distinct regimes of coding and decoding has been widely discussed and debated.
